The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (23 page)

Why didn’t the whole world field armies trained and equipped along the Mongol model? Since archery and horsemanship take years of training to master, it took years to replace each lost soldier on the Mongol side. Also, campaigning exhausted and killed horses faster than most societies could replace them.
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In addition, the food surplus of farming societies was useful for producing huge, expendable infantry regiments armed with easy weapons like pikes, axes, and crossbows. To these solid lines of infantry, a sedentary, civilized nation could add a mobile strike force of armored knights on heavy warhorses, who might not have been as fast or as numerous as a nomadic horde but could usually chase them out of the
neighborhood before they did too much damage.

China

China at this time was split in half. The southern part was still under the Song dynasty, a purely Chinese manifestation renowned for its art, poetry, and justice. It didn’t get conquered until the onslaught of Chinggis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, so it doesn’t concern us here.
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Northern China was under the relatively benign rule of alien conquerors from the north, Jurchen warlords ruling from Beijing as the Jin dynasty.

In 1211, about 100,000 Mongols with 300,000 horses crossed the Gobi desert and overwhelmed the Jin cavalry at the pa
ss known as Badger’s Mouth on the northern edge of Chinese territory. One Mongol column swept down quickly enough to take the secondary Jin capital at Mukden (now Shenyang), but the primary capital at Beijing held against their first attack and subsequent siege. While waiting for the city to surrender, the Mongols devastated the countryside. Although Chinggis Khan had no siege machines, he discovered another way to take some of the other walled cities scattered across northern China. He rounded up every civilian he could find and herded them ahead of his assault teams as human shields while the Mongols advanced safely behind them. Either the defenders wasted all of their arrows killing noncombatants, or they refused to shoot and surrendered instead—a win-win for Chinggis Khan.

After a year, the Jin paid him off, and Ch
inggis Khan abandoned his siege of Beijing. Feeling dangerously exposed to the frontier, the Jin emperor moved the court south from Beijing to Kaifeng, behind the Yellow River. Some Chinese army units, however, took this as a sign of weakness and betrayal and then defected to the Mongols, bringing many alien but useful military skills into the Mongol camp, such as siegecraft for taking fortifications. Now that the Mongols had the ability to take Beijing, they resumed the attack. The city was taken, looted, and burned in May 1215, but Chinggis Khan was so indifferent to the value of cities that he didn’t even attend the capture, leaving it
to a turncoat Chinese general instead.

Reportedly, 60,000 women flung themselves from the walls of Beijing to avoid rape. That number is probably an exaggeration, but the full extent of the devastation was obvious. A year later, a scout from Khwarezm, the next land on Chinggis Khan’s to-do list, investigated the site to confirm the horrible fate of this great city. “He reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat, that some of his entourage died from the diseases spread by rotting bodies.”
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The Mongol attempts to conquer the remnant of the Jin empire beyond the Yellow River failed as Mongol resources were stretched thin and Jin resources were
easily concentrated, but this bothered Chinggis Khan not at all. For the next several years, he regarded northern China more as a no-man’s-land to be ruthlessly plundered rather than as a conquered province to be administered and taxed. He hadn’t quite learned to appreciate the value of urban economies.
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Death of Khwarezm

Long ago the barren desert region now covered by all of the ’stans of Central Asia hosted a string of oasis cities along the caravan routes between Persia and China. Supported by irrigated orchards and gardens, this was the thriving cultural center of Islam known as Khwarezm. The city of Bukhara is said to have had a population of 300,000 and a library of 45,000 volumes, among them 200 written by a native son, Ibn Sina, the greatest scientist of medieval Islam.
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Merv, the hometown of poet Omar Khayyam, had ten libraries containing a total of 150,000 handwritten volumes.
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Today, if you look on a map, you won’t see Khwarezm anymore. Here’s why.

For a few years after the fall of northern China, Chinggis Khan and Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm played diplomatic games, exchanging gifts, en
voys, embassies, and pleasant letters in order to shame one another with their own unsurpassed magnificence. Certain gifts or forms of address would imply superiority, which meant the other had to reply with more splendor or admit defeat. Finally, in 1219, the sultan tired of this one-upmanship. When a splendid caravan of Mongol envoys and merchants arrived at the Khwarezmi city of Utrar, the local governor, with the connivance of the sultan, accused them of being spies and had them all killed. When Chinggis Khan sent ambassadors to the court of the sultan of Khwarezm in the city of Bukhara to demand compensation and
punishment, the sultan killed one ambassador and plucked out the beards of the other two,
which was even more insulting in central Asian culture.
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Chinggis Khan then rode west with an army numbering between 100,000 and 150,000. The forward scouting units were traveling at sixty miles per day.

In the first clash of armies, the Khwarezmians were routed, leaving a reported 160,000 dead on the field. Utrar, site of the first insult, was besieged for five months. Finally, one of the besieged commanders tried to flee through a side gate. The Mongols caught him and executed him for treachery, but this opened the gate for the Mongol army to rush in. The governor barricaded himself in the inner fortress, which held for a further month. When he was captured, Chinggis Khan had molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.
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The city was looted and burned. The eradication of the city was so complete that archaeologists did not discover its exact location until very recently.

The city of Balkh surrendered without a fight, but Chinggis Khan slaughtered the inhabitants anyway so his troops wouldn’t have to watch their backs when they moved on to the next town.
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Then Bukhara fell. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir described it as “a day of horror. There was nothing to be heard but the sobbing of men, women, and children torn apart forever, the Mongol troops sharing out the population. The barbarians did violence to the modesty of the women under the eyes of all their unfortunate menfolk, who in their powerlessness could only weep.”
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Gurganj withstood a five-month siege, beginning in 1220. Finally, prisoners taken in previous conquests were forced to fill the moats with dirt and debris and undermine the walls. After the walls crashed down, the city was overrun quarter by quarter, street by street, in slow, desperate combat. The defenders threw buckets of flaming petroleum onto the buildings in the path of the invaders. Three thousand Mongols tried to cross the river, but Muslim soldiers on the bridge held against them, and the Mongols were killed to a man. When the city finally fell in April 1221, the river was diverted through broken dikes to erase every trace of the city.
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The women and children were sold into slavery, and 100,000 captives with useful skills were sent back to China. Everyone else was herded out onto the plain and killed. According to the historian Juvaini, 50,000 soldiers killed twenty-four people apiece, for a total of 1.2 million dead.

At city after city, rather than face defenders on the walls directly, Chinggis Khan herded captive men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside and suburbs ahead of his armies, where they took direct hits from the defenders’ arrows.

One woman hoped to save herself by crying out while being attacked that she had swallowed a pearl to hide it from looters. It didn’t work. She was quickly gutted and her entrails were searched. All of the other corpses from that day forward were opened up and inspected.
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At another town, the Mongol general heard that the living hid among the dead so he ordered all of the native corpses beheaded and the heads stacked up just to be sure.

Nishapur fell to another colum
n of Mongols in April. Its people were killed, and the town was demolished and plowed over. According to the medieval historian Sayfi, 1,747,000 people were killed at Nishapur. This is probably far more people than lived in the city, but it suggests the scale of the massacre. If a million is the medieval way for of saying “the highest number you can possibly imagine,” then the number who died at Nishapur was clearly much more than what you can possibly imagine.

When the Mongols sent a messenger to demand the surrender of Herat, the leaders of the city had him killed, which is usually considered an unwise move when dealing with Mongols. Fortunately, the city’s governor was killed early in the subsequent siege, and the towns
folk immediately surrendered and blamed the misunderstanding on him. The people were spared, but the Mongols executed the Turkish garrison of 12,000. Unfortunately, the people of Herat pushed their luck too far. After Chinggis Khan moved on to new conquests, the Heratis rose up against the Mongol garrison, so Chinggis Khan returned and wiped them out.

The first Mongol scouting party to reach Merv was driven off, and the prisoners taken in the skirmish were p
araded through the streets and publicly executed. Then the main Mongol force arrived and camped outside the city walls. The city was swollen with refugees from the countryside, with many times its normal population of 70,000. After six days, the town surrendered, and the Mongol commander ordered the citizens to assemble outside the walls. The wealthiest were tortured into revealing the whereabouts of all their hidden treasure. Four hundred artisans and some children were kept for future use. The rest of the population was wiped out. Afterward, a cleric explored the ruins and counted the bodies, calculating the total number of dead at 1.3 million. The Mongols destroyed the dam that supplied the irrigation for the area. No city was ever rebuilt on that site.
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Further Expansions

Chinggis Khan returned to China to clean up the annoying enclaves that had survived his earlier conquest. He spent a brief period trying to resolve his ongoing war against the reduced Jin empire, but that came to nothing, so he turned instead against the Tanguts—Tibetans who had moved down from the Himalayas and founded caravan cities in the oases between China and Khwarezm. City after city fell to his hordes, and no mercy was recorded for the captives. Tanguts tried to flee to the mountains and hide in caves, but few succeeded. Bonefields littered the desert for many years afterward.

As the king of the Tanguts tried to negotiate the safe surrender of his besieged capital, Ningxia, in 1227, the aged Chinggis Khan felt his own death approach. His l
ast orders saw to it that the Tanguts would not outlast him. Ningxia was taken and the population exterminated.

Meanwhile, two of Chinggis Khan’s most trusted generals, Subotai and Jebe, had chased the refugee Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm deep into Persia, but he died before they caught him. So the expedition wouldn’t be a total waste, the Mongols took the Persian city of Qazwin while they were in the neighborhood. “The inhabitants fought back in the streets, knife in hand, killing many Mongols, but their desperate resistance could not fend off a general massacre in which there perished more than forty thousand people.”
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Then the Mongols pushed northward into Azerbaijan and Georgia, destroying countless towns, and crossed the Caucasus into the steppe of Russia and Ukraine. The advance columns were closing in on Poland when word came that Chinggis Khan had died, so the attack was halted as the leaders returned to decide the succession.

Chinggis Khan was buried in a secret tomb, somewhere deep in the Mongol homeland. Any witnesses who happened across his funeral procession were seized and killed to prevent them from reporting the location. After the body was buried with his accumulated wealth, the slaves who carried him
were ambushed and slaughtered to hide the location forever. His grave has never been found, but it haunts archaeology as one of the world’s greatest career-boosting possibilities.

Was It Even Possible?

For now let’s forget the incredible body counts reported for individual atrocities and focus instead on overall estimates from modern demographers. By all accounts, the population of Asia crashed during Chinggis Khan’s wars of conquest. China had the most to lose, so China lost the most—anywhere from 30 to 60 million. The Jin dynasty ruling northern China recorded 7.6 million households in the early thirteenth century. In 1234 the first census under the Mongols recorded 1.7 million households in the same area. In his biography of Chinggis Khan, John Man interprets these two data points as a population decline from 60 million to 10 million. In
The Atlas of World Population History
, Colin McEvedy estimates that the population of China declined by 35 million as the Mongols subjugated the country during the thirteenth century. In
The Mongols
, historian David Morgan estimates the Chinese population (in both the north and the south) as 100 million before the conquest and 70 million after.
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