Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (5 page)

Genghis Khan recognized that warfare was not a sporting contest or a mere match between rivals; it was a total commitment of one people against another. Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy. Triumph could not be partial. It was complete, total, and undeniable—or it was nothing. In battle, this meant the unbridled use of terror and surprise. In peace, it meant the steadfast adherence to a few basic but unwavering principles that created loyalty among the common people. Resistance would be met with death, loyalty with security.

His attack on Bukhara ranked as a success, not merely because the people of that city surrendered, but because when word of the Mongol campaign reached the capital of Samarkand, that army surrendered as well. The sultan fled his kingdom, and the Mongol juggernaut pushed onward. Genghis Khan himself took the main part of the army across the mountains of Afghanistan and on to the Indus River, while another detachment circled around the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus Mountains, and onto the plains of Russia. For precisely seven hundred years, from that day in 1220 until 1920, when the Soviets moved in, Genghis Khan’s descendants ruled as khans and emirs over the city of Bukhara in one of the longest family dynasties in history.

Genghis Khan’s ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will. His fighting career began long before most of his warriors at Bukhara had been born, and in every battle he learned something new. In every skirmish, he acquired more followers and additional fighting techniques. In each struggle, he combined the new ideas into a constantly changing set of military tactics, strategies, and weapons. He never fought the same war twice.

The story of the boy who was destined to become the world’s greatest conqueror began six decades before the Mongol conquest of Bukhara in one of the most remote places in the inner expanse of Eurasia, near the border of modern Mongolia and Siberia. According to legend, the Mongols originated in the mountain forest when Blue-Gray Wolf mated with Beautiful Red Doe on the shores of a great lake. Because the Mongols permanently closed this homeland to outsiders when Genghis Khan died, we have no historical descriptions of it. The names of its rivers and mountains are virtually unknown in the historical literature, and even modern maps give conflicting names to its features, in a great variety of spellings.

This territory of the Mongol clans occupied only a small part in the northeast of the country now known as Mongolia. Most of the country now spreads across a high plateau in north-central Asia, beyond the range of the Pacific Ocean’s moisture-bearing winds that water the lush coastal plains of Asia’s agricultural civilizations. By contrast, the winds that reach the Mongolian plateau mostly blow from the Arctic in the northwest. These winds release what little moisture they carry onto the northern mountains and leave the southern part of the country dry, a terrain known as
govi,
or to foreigners as the Gobi. Between the harsh Gobi and the moderately watered mountains to the north lie vast stretches of steppe that turn green in the summer if they get rain. It is along these steppes that the herders move in the summer, searching for grass.

Although reaching only about ten thousand feet above sea level, Mongolia’s Khentii Mountain Range consists of some of the oldest mountains on the planet. Unlike the jagged, youthful Himalayas, which can only be ascended with climbing gear, the ancient Khentii Mountains have been smoothed by millions of years of erosion so that, with only moderate difficulty, a horse and rider can reach all but a few of the peaks in summer. Marshes dot their sides; in the long winter, these freeze into a solid mass. The deeper indentations in the mountainsides collect snow and water that freeze into what looks like glaciers in the winter, but in the brief summer, they turn into beautiful lakes of cobalt blue. The spring thaw of ice and snow overflows the lakes and spills off the mountains to form a series of small rivers that flow out onto the steppe that in the best of summers shimmers with grass as green as emeralds, but in the worst of times can remain a burned brown for several consecutive years.

The rivers that flow out of the Khentii Mountains are small and remain frozen for much of the year—even in May, when the ice is usually thick enough to support a team of mounted horses and sometimes even a loaded jeep. The long, broad steppes that stretch out along these small rivers served as the highways for the Mongols toward the various regions of Eurasia. Spurs of this grassland reach west all the way into Hungary and Bulgaria in eastern Europe. To the east, they reach Manchuria and would touch the Pacific Ocean if not barred by a thin ridge of coastal mountains that cut off the Korean Peninsula. On the southern side of the Gobi, the grasslands slowly pick up again and join the heart of the Asian continent, connecting with the extensive agricultural plains of the Yellow River.

Despite the gentle roll of the landscape, the weather can be fierce, and changes abruptly. This is a land of marked extremes, where humans and their animals face constant challenges from the weather. The Mongols say that you can experience all four seasons in a single day in the Khentii. Even in May, a horse might sink into snowbanks so deep that it could barely keep its head up.

On this, the land by the side of the Onon River, the boy destined to become known as Genghis Khan was born. In contrast to the natural beauty of the place, its human history was already one of constant strife and hardship long before he was born in the spring of 1162, the Year of the Horse by the Asian calendar. On an isolated and bald hillock overlooking the remote Onon River, Hoelun, a young, kidnapped girl, struggled to give birth to him, her first child. Surrounded by strangers, Hoelun labored far away from the family that had raised her and the world she knew. This place was not her home, and the man who now claimed her as his wife was not the man whom she had married.

Only a short time before, her destiny had seemed so different; she had been the wife of another young warrior, Chiledu of the Merkid tribe. He had traveled to the eastern steppe to find and woo her from the Olkhunuud, a tribe noted for the beauty of its women. According to steppe tradition, he would have given her parents gifts and worked for them, perhaps for several years, before taking their daughter back to his tribe as his bride. Once married, the two had set out alone for the trek of many weeks back to his homeland. According to the
Secret History,
she rode in a small black cart pulled by an ox or a yak, and her proud husband rode beside the cart on his dun horse. Hoelun was probably no more than sixteen years old.

They traveled easily over the steppe, following the course of the Onon River, and then prepared to enter the mountainous range that divided them from the Merkid lands. Only a few hard days of travel through the isolated mountain valleys lay ahead of them before they would drop down into the fertile grassland of the Merkid’s herds. The young bride sat in the front of her small black cart unaware of the horsemen about to swoop down upon her, a violent assault that would not only forever change her life, but alter the course of world history.

A solitary horseman out hunting with his falcon looked down on Hoelun and Chiledu from his unobserved perch at the top of a nearby cliff. Hoelun and her cart promised greater game than he could capture with his bird.

Without letting the newlyweds see him, the hunter rode back to his camp to find his two brothers. Too poor to afford the presents necessary to make a marriage with a wife such as Hoelun, and perhaps unwilling to perform the traditional bride-service for her parents, the hunter chose the second most common way of obtaining a wife on the steppes: kidnapping. The three brothers set out in pursuit of their unsuspecting prey. As they swooped down toward the couple, Chiledu immediately galloped off to draw the attackers away from the cart, and, as expected, they chased after him. He tried in vain to lose them by circling around the base of the mountain to return to his bride, but even then Hoelun knew that her husband had not fooled the attackers, not on their own land, and that they would soon be back. Although only a teenage girl, she decided that in order to give her husband a chance to live, she must stay and surrender to her kidnappers. If she fled with Chiledu on one horse, they would be captured and he would be killed. But if he fled alone, only she would be captured.

The
Secret History
recounts that to convince her husband to cooperate with her plan, she told him, “If you but live, there will be maidens for you on every front and in every cart. You can find another woman to be your bride, and you can call her
Hoelun
in place of me.” Hoelun then quickly slipped out of her blouse and commanded her new husband to “flee quickly.” She thrust her blouse into his face as a parting gesture and said, “Take this with you so that you may have the smell of me with you as you go.”

Smell holds a deep, important place within steppe culture. Where people in other cultures might hug or kiss at meeting or departing, the steppe nomads sniff one another in a gesture much like a kiss on the cheek. Smelling carries deeply emotional meanings on different levels that vary from the familial sniff between parent and child to the erotic sniff between lovers. Each person’s breath and unique body aroma is thought to constitute a part of that person’s soul. By thrusting her blouse at her husband, Hoelun offered him a deeply important reminder of her love.

After that day, Hoelun would have a long and eventful life ahead of her, but she was indeed destined never again to see her first love. As he fled his wife’s kidnappers, Chiledu clutched her blouse to his face and turned back to look at her so many times that his long black braids beat like whips back and forth from his chest to his shoulders. As she saw her husband ride over the pass and slip forever from her sight, Hoelun gave vent to the full emotion of her heart. She screamed out so loudly, according to the
Secret History,
that “she stirred up the Onon River” and “shook the woods and valley.”

Her captor and the man destined to be her new husband was Yesugei of the small and insignificant band that would one day be known as the Mongols, but at this time he was simply a member of the Borijin clan, subservient to its more powerful Tayichiud relatives. Even more troubling for Hoelun than the status of her captor was that he already had a wife or concubine, Sochigel, and a son with her. Hoelun would have to struggle for her position within the family. If she was lucky the two women probably lived in separate
gers,
the domed tent homes made of felt blankets tied around a lattice framework, but they would have been in close daily proximity even if not in the same
ger
.

Hoelun grew up on the wide, open grassland where one could see over vast expanses in any direction and where great herds of horses, cows, sheep, and goats grazed and grew fat during the summer. She was accustomed to the abundant and rich diet of meat and milk offered by the life of the steppe. By contrast, the small tribe of her new husband subsisted on the northern edge of the herding world, where the steppes pushed up against the wooded mountains, without enough grassland to feed large herds. She would now have to eat harsher hunter’s foods: marmots, rats, birds, fish, and the occasional deer or antelope. The Mongols claim no ancient and glorious history among the steppe tribes. They were considered scavengers who competed with the wolves to hunt down the small animals, and, when the opportunity arose, steal animals and women from the herders of the steppe. Hoelun would rank as little more than captured chattel by them.

According to an often repeated account, Hoelun’s first baby supposedly struggled into the world tightly clutching something mysterious and ominous in the fingers of his right hand. Gently, but nervously, his young mother pried back his fingers one by one to find a large, black blood clot the size of a knucklebone. From somewhere in his mother’s warm womb, this boy had grasped the blood clot and brought it with him from that world into this one. What could an inexperienced, illiterate, and terribly lonely young girl make of this strange sign in her son’s hand? More than eight centuries later, we still struggle to answer the same questions that she had about her son. Did the blood clot represent a prophecy or a curse? Did it foretell good fortune or evil? Should she be proud or alarmed? Hopeful or fearful?

In the twelfth century, dozens of tribes and clans lived on the steppe in, as is characteristic of nomadic people, shifting combinations. Of all the steppe tribes, the Mongols’ closest relatives were Tatars and Khitan to the east, the Manchus yet farther to the east, and the Turkic tribes of central Asia to the west. These three ethnic groups shared a common cultural and linguistic heritage with some of the tribes of Siberia, where they possibly all originated. Located between the Tatars and the Turkic tribes with whom outsiders often confused them, the Mongols were sometimes known as Blue Turks or as Black Tatars. As speakers of Altaic languages, named for the Altai Mountain range in western Mongolia, their languages bore a distant similarity with Korean and Japanese, but none with Chinese or the other tonal languages of Asia.

Although the Turkic tribes and Tatars had coalesced into several tribal confederacies, the Mongols were divided into many small bands headed by a chief, or
khan,
and loosely based on kinship ties. The Mongols themselves claim a distinct identity from the Turkic and Tatar groups. They asserted, then and now, a direct descent from the Huns, who founded the first empire on the high steppe in the third century.
Hun
is the Mongolian word for human being, and they called their Hun ancestors
Hun-nu,
the people of the sun. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the Huns spread out from the Mongolian steppes to conquer countries from India to Rome, but they were unable to sustain contact among the various clans and were quickly assimilated into the cultures they conquered.