From the Silk Road to the Mughal Empire: Part 1-Genghis Khan and His Descendants

Listening to the BetterAngels of Our Nature:Ethnicity, Self-Determination,And the American Empire

Chapter ThirteenFrom the Silk Road to the Mughal Empire:Part 1--Genghis Khan and His Descendants

David Steven CohenChapel Hill, NC

In 1253 two brothers, Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, left Venice on a trading journey to Constantinople. Venice had prospered during the Crusades. Venetians were both money lenders and transporters of crusader armies to the Middle East. Venetian gold was the international currency of the Middle Ages. The Crusade in 1204 resulted in the European conquest of the Byzantine Empire, and the Doge of Venice wasacknowledged as the Lord of three-eighths of the Constantinople including its port. There was a Venetian quarter on the west bank of the Golden Horn. Two annual convoys brought silk, dyes, cotton, peacock feathers, slavesand timber to Venice, where they were sent to Europe. Venicealso had special privileges in Constantinople where it was exempt from taxes and custom duties. Neither Genoa or Pisa had such advantages. The Polo family had a trading post in Constantinople. But now the Greek King Michael VIII Paleologue, who had an alliance with Venice’s rival, Genoa, attempted to displace Venice from Constantinople. The Polo brothers decided to move across the Black Sea to the city ofSoldaia (Sudak, today) on the Crimean Peninsula. There they established a trading post and traded in furs from northern

Russia, wheat from Ukraine, salted fish from the Sea of Azov, silks and spices from Asia. The Russians brought amber, honey, wax, furs, and Tartar, Bulgar, and Caucasian slaves to this port. The slaves were sold to the Muslim rulers in Alexandria.

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In 1260 Nicolò and Maffeo left Soldaia with jewels on atrading expedition to the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde. In 1261 the Genoese in alliance with the Greeks of Nicea captured Constantinople and established the Greek Paleologue dynasty that ruled Byzantium until 1453. Now the Genoese had the trade advantage formerly possessed by Venice. Anticipating this development may have prompted Nicolò and Marco Polo in 1260 to travel east to engage in trade with the khan of the Golden Horde inhabiting the VolgaRiver region. The Polo brothers traveled along a northern branch of the Silk Road into what is today Iraq, where they entered into the part of the Mongol Empire. At the time of the Polo brothers first trip Barka Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, Barka had become involved in a civil war

against Hülegü, another of Genghis’s grandsons who controlled the eastern part of the empire. So the Polo brothers returned by way of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan. Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan was a crossroads on the Silk Road for the trade in silk, porcelain, spices, ivory, and rugs. There they met an ambassador from Hülegü, who was on his way to meet with Kublai Khan, who was the grandson of Genghis Khan. He accompanied them along the Silk Road to the Mongol capital of Cambulac. They finally reached Kublai Khan, the emperor of China and founder of the Yuan dynasty about 1265.

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The Polos left Cambulac as Kublai Khan’s emissaries forHangzhou, the largest and wealthiest city in China and the seat of the Song dynasty. The two cities were connected by the 1,000 mile long Grand Canal. They had a golden tablet known as a paiza (the forerunner of the modern passport) guaranteeing them safe passage. Along the route the Polos witnessed silk cultivation from worms raised on mulberry

trees. The worms spin protective cocoons. When immersed in boiling water the silk filaments unravel and are gathered onto spools. In 1269 the Polo brothers arrived in Acre (Akko) on what is today the northern coast of Israel. PhilipII of France and Richard the Lion-Hearted of England in 1191conquered this ancient city from the Muslim sultan Saladin. It became the capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem under the Crusaders. The fortress city was divided into quarters for trading rivals states, such as Venice and Genoa. The Polo brothers returned to Venice in 1291. Some of the wonders that the Polos brought back to Europe were paper money, coalas a source of heat, ground lenses for eyeglasses (which enabled the development of the telescope), gunpowder (which had been used by the Chinese for the previous three centuries), and passports.

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In 1261 Berke Khan of the Golden Horde and Hülegü of the Ikhan of Persia went to war against each other, and the Polo brothers needed to find another way to return. They traveled to the commercial center of Bukhara. From there

they traveled further east to the kingdom of Khubilai Khan, who reigned between 1260 and 1294. The Great Khan agave themsafe conduct home in return for returning with a hundred scholars skilled in the seven liberal arts and some oil fromthe lamp that burns in the Church of the Sepulchre of Christin Jerusalem. In 1269 they made their way back to the Mediterranean port of Layas in the Kingdom of Little Armenia. Here they learned that Pope Clement IV had died andno successor was as yet elected. From Layas they traveled toAcre where they consulted the Archdeacon Tedaldo Visconti before returning to Venice to await the election of the new pope.

After two years they decided to return to Kublai Khan to explain the situation. This time they took with them Nicolò’s son Marco, who was then seventeen years old. They started out from Acre where they consulted again with Archdeacon Visconti who gave them letters explaining the situation with the election of the pope, and then they went on to Jerusalem. Once they obtained the holy oil, they returned to Layas to begin their journey inland. Here they learned that their friend Visconti had been elected as Pope Gregory X and they quickly went back to Acre where the newlyelected pope gave them new credentials, but instead of 100 scholars he assigned two Dominican monks to accompany them. The party seems to have left from Acre in November 1271, butthe two monks decided not to proceed. After three and a halfyears the Polos reached the Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Shangdu (Xanadu), northern China. They spent the next seventeen years in China, during which Kublai Khan conqueredsouthern China and united north and south China under a single rule.

The Great Khan decided to offer a Mongol princess to bethe bride of the Ilkhan Arghun of Persia, and the Mongol nobles who were asked to escort her asked the Polos to accompany them. They departed by sea on thirteen ships and traveled by way of Sumatra and the Indian Ocean to Persia ina voyage that took 21 months. When they arrived in Persia

they learned that Arghun had died and that his brother Geikhatu was now Ilkhan. According to Mongol custom, Geikhatu asked the Polos to escort the princess to Arghun’s son who would marry her. After staying in Persia for anothernine months the Polos departed for Trebizond on the Black Sea, where they were forced to pay a ransom before returningto Venice in 1295 by way of Constantinople and Negroponte.

In 1291 Al-Ashraf Khalil, the sultan of Egypt, attackedAcre and killed most of its residents. No longer having access to the Middle East, Venice turned its attention to trade with Amsterdam, London, and Marseilles. But here they were at a disadvantage in the competition with Genoa. Veniceallied itself with Pisa, which also was a rival of Genoa. Marco Polo commanded a galley on the Venetian side against the Genoese in the naval battles in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. He was taken captive, and while in prisonin Genoa Marco made the acquaintance of a fellow prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, who happened to be a writer of romances. Rustichello helped Marco write an account of his travels. In May 1299 Genoa and Venice made peace with each other, and three months later Marco Polo was released and returned to Venice. Marco Polo died in January 1324.

Professor Emeritus of History at Glasgow University John Larnernotes that there are many details in the account seem to have been untrue or at least unbelievable. “The routes whichour historical atlases so confidently mark out have been constructed simply on the order in which Marco speaks of thevarious regions.” Larner argues that the book is not an adventure story, nor a travel account, nor a merchant’s account of commerce. “If we reject these interpretation of the Book, what we are left with is simply and essentially a work of geography.” In addition, the book contains what Larner describes as “marvelous things” which are characteristic of so-called “taveller’s tales” of the time. Larner concludes that the Book, as he calls it, “though in some ways a sport, is still a landmark in the history of

geography and as such an enlargement of the human spirit, a merveille.”1

Marco Polo’s book was one of the inspirations for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream”:

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round:And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;And here were forests ancient as the hills,Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!A savage place! as holy and enchantedAs e’er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burstHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and everIt flung up momently the sacred river.Five miles meandering with a mazy motionThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,Then reached the caverns measureless to man,And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from farAncestral voices prophesying war! . . .2

Coleridge claimed that he wrote the poem inspired by a dream he had under the influence of opium. Xanadu, also known as Shang-tu, was Kublai Khan’s summer place. Accordingto Marco Polo, his palace was made of bamboo canes, which could be disassembled and moved.Among Europeans Xanadu had become synonymous with oriental opulence and splendor. The River Alph, however, is probably a reference to the Alpheus River in Greece that rises from aspring, then goes underground, and rises to the surface again as fountains. Thus, this is another example of what the Palestinian-American literary critic, Edward Said, has termed “Orientalism,” that is a European stereotype of the Middle East and Central Asia. John Darwin, a university lecturer and a fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, argues that the idea of what he calls “the Occidental breakout” (which might be viewed as beginning with Marco Polo’s “discovery” the Silk Road) is a Eurocentric view of globalization. “The centre of gravity in modern world history lies in Eurasia—in the troubled, conflicted, connected and intimate relations of its great cultures and states, strung out in a line from the European ‘Far West’ tothe Asian ‘Far East.’’3

The term Silk Road was first used by the German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen in 1877 who coined the term Seidenstrasse. In fact, it was not a single route, but a network of trails and mountain passes across Central Asia and China. The route was traveled for centuries before the Polos by Mongols, Turks, and Arabs. Kublai Khan already was receiving foreigners, including Genoese, Jews, Muslims, Uighurs, Russians and Persians. The caravans along were SilkRoad consisted of Bactrian camels (with two humps rather than the single humps of the dromedaries common in North Africa). They can go for days without water. The Silk Road is considered the World’s longest, overland, trade route, stretching 7,500 miles from China to Europe and the Near East.

One route originated in Xian, the ancient capital of China, skirted north and south of the Taklamakan Desert in Xingjiang Province of China, passed through the Ferghana Valley to the caravan cities of Samarkand and Bukhara (in Uzbekistan today, and veered south of the Caspian Sea through Tehran. From there it proceeds to the north to crossthe Caucausus through present-day Georgia and its capital, Tbilisi. In eastern Turkey the road crossed the Dogubeyazit Plain, which is a corridor between Iran and Turkey and entered the Tahir Pass near Mount Arafat. Another route crossed the Pamir Mountains and continued through Afghanistan and Iran to the eastern Mediterranean. A third route went from the Great Wall of China into Mongolia and across the steppes of Kazakstan and southern Russia to Europe. Subsidiary routes branched out to the Middle East, Russia, and India. Caravan cities along the routes charged tolls and taxes along the way.

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Not only was it not a single route, but more than just silk was transported on it. Silk produced in China was the initial commodity traded for gold in markets in Rome and Byzantium. There the silk was used for women’s garments in the Roman and Byzantine Empires. In addition to silk, tea,

porcelain, and lacquer ware from the East were traded for amber, silver, and gold in the west. Also indigo dyes, glassware, and frankincense from the Middle East; pepper, cotton, and sandalwood from India; furs from Siberia, and horse from Central Asia were traded along the routes. Pearlswere much in demand in Rome and throughout Asia. Many came from oysters harvested in the Indian Ocean and exported fromCeylon (Sri Lanka, today). Coins from India, Rome, SassanianPersia, and China have been found in Ceylon, attesting to its importance in trade. Cinnamon from the inner bark of thecinnamon tree, which grew on the Horn of Africa, China, and Southeast Asia, was in demand both for religious and medicinal purposes, as an oil used for anointing among the Jews and as perfume for the Parthian kings. The chief textiles of the Mediterranean were wool and linen. Cotton from India and silk from China were much in demand. Jewish, Syrian, and Greek merchants traveled by way of the Red Sea or in caravans across the Middle East to ports in India and Central Asia. Demand for purple dye came about as the color became linked with power and status. Shells that produce thepurple dye came from the Canary Island, Greece, the Peloponnese as well as the port of Basra on the Persian Gulf. Coral from the Mediterranean was another precious material especially prized by Buddhists who considered them one of the Seven Treasures of Buddhism. The others were gold, silver, pearls, lapis lazuli (a royal blue crystal gemstone), rock crystal, and what was known as “red pearls” (which was an as yet undetermined red stone). Pearls and coral came from the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. Lapis lazuli came from Badakhshan province in northeastern Afghanistan. These materials were all transported by various land and sea traderoutes. Colored glass made in the Mediterranean was another Western product in demand in China during the Han period.

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Over the centuries control of the Silk Road changed as empires rose and fell. During the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) silk production had become widespread in China. Iteven became a form of currency. By 200 B.C. silk production had spread to Korea, and by 500 A.D. it spread to India. TheChinese Emperor Qin Shihuangdi built the Great Wall to guardagainst Xiongnu (thought to be the ancestors of the Huns, but now doubted by some) and Mongol nomads to the west. The Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (who ruled from 141 B.C. to 87B.C.) expanded his empire into Central Asia. An officer in the palace guard named Zhang Qian was sent to the West to establish military alliances against the Xiongnu. He made his first journey from 138 to 126 B.C. reaching as far west as present-day Turmenistan. While the military alliances didn’t materialize, it did open the region of Central Asia and Persia to China. This was the beginning of the exchange of goods, such as Chinese silk. On one of Zhan Qian’s later missions, he brought back horses from the Ferghana Valley, which were to help the Chinese cavalry to expand China’s influence.

Silk produced in China was the initial commodity tradedfor gold in markets in Rome and Byzantium. There the silk

was used for women’s garments in the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Silk was known in Rome as early as the 4th century B.C. Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the consul-triumvirate of Rome (along with Julius Caesar and Pompey) and governor of Syria. In 54 B.C. he led seven Roman legionseast across the Euphrates River against the Parthians. In the ensuing battle of Carrhae (in present-day Turkey near the Syrian border), Crassus was killed, 20,000 Roman soldiers as well, and 10,000 taken captive.4 It was during this conflict that the Romans came in contact with Parthian standards flying gold-embroidered silk cloth. The Parthian troops also had helmets and weapons made from a high qualityiron, probably made in China.

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By the time of the Battle of Carrhae, Persia and China had been trading for about half a century. According to LuceBoulois, the initial exchange of goods was considered gifts,but at some point they became trade once the value of the exchange is calculated in currency. Gradually, the gifts sent by the Central Asian people to the Chinese Emperor was called “tribute’ and their lands became protectorates of China under the tribute system.5 Unlike the Roman tribute

system in which conquered people made one-way payments to Rome, under the Chinese system the emperor offered presents of equal value in return.

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The Kushan Empire, founded circa 78 A.D, conquered Kabul in Afghanistan, Kashmir and northern India. The KushanDynasty flourished for about three centuries. The empire resulted from a merging of Iranian and Greek elements under a single Persian satrapy. It eventually was conquered by Alexander the Greek and later became part of Seleucid Persia. The Kushans converted to Buddhism which was importedfrom India and engaged in trade with China. At one point in its history it became a protectorate of China’s Western Territories. Between 105 A.D. and 107 A.D. the Western Territories rebelled against China.

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Bactria or Balkh in present-day Afghanistan was the home of the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) believed to havebeen born circa 628 B. C. Zoroastrianism involved elements of fire worship, the belief in the occult, and numerous deities. Bactria was a one-time Persian satrapy (province) conquered by Alexander the Great. It was located in present-day northern Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. After Alexander’sdeath, it became part of the Persian Seleucid dynasty’s eastern empire.

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Parthia had been a satrapy in the northeast of the Seleucid Empire. Mithridates I of Parthia (who reigned from about 171 B. C. to 138 B.C.) expanded the Parthian Empire byconquering Media and Mesopotamia from the Seleucids. Besidesfighting the Seleucids to the west, their enemies were also the Scythians to the east. As they continued to expand to the west, the Parthians fought with the Romans over control of the Kingdom of Armenia. In 53 B.C. they defeated the Romans under Marcus Licinius Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae, and from 40 B.C. to 39 B.C. they took from the Romans the entire Levant except Tyre. The Roman-Parthian Warcontinued until 217 A.D.

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But it was the Persian Sassanid Empire under Ardashir Iof Estakhr in Fars that conquered the Parthians in 224 A.D. Ardashir’s son, Shapur I expanded the empire by conquering Bactria and the western part of the Kushan Empire. He then invaded Roman Mesopotamia. In 256 A.D. the Persians took control of and plundered the port city of Antioch on the Mediterranean coast in Syria, an important terminus of the Silk Road. After the Roman Emperor Valerian retook the city from the Persians the following year, he was captured by Shapur at Edessa and kept a prisoner for the rest of his life. Shapur proceeded to invade Anatolia, but suffered defeat there at the hands of the Romans.

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In 651 A.D. the Sassanian dynasty of Persia was overthrown by Arab Muslims and Persia became a caliphate under the Abbasid Dynasty. In 705 A.D. the Arab general Qutaiba ibn Muslim invaded Central Asia. He took control of Samarkand in 711. In 751 A.D. with the aid of Qarluq Turks, the Arabs defeated the Chinese at the Battle of Talas over control of Central Asia. The Arabs dominated the region for the next 200 years. The Arabs introduced the Islam and Arabic script to the region. The first independent Muslim state in Central Asia was that of the Samanids which emergedin the ninth century A.D. with its capital at Bukhara. Eleven caravan routes crossed at Bukhara. At its peak the Samanid Empire reached from Afghanistan to Iran. The policy of blocking Western access to China continued under the Sassanid Dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. This “blockade” continued until 1497, when the Portuguese explored a sea route around Africa.6

In the thirteenth century A.D., the Mongols brought theentire Silk Road under one rule. The Mongols were a horse-riding, nomadic people, who drank mare’s milk known as kumis. They spoke a language in the Altaic linguistic familynamed after the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia. Also,

in this linguistic family are Korean and Japanese. The Mongols were divided into small bands headed by a chief or khan. They are thought to be descended from the Huns, who occupied the steppes in the third century, but distinct fromeither the Turks or the Tatars who were also steppes nomads.Hun is the Mongolian word for “human being.” The Mongol calendar was based on a twelve-year cycle with each year named for a particular animal with particular characteristics: mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog, and pig.

The typical Mongol camp consisted a group of gers (or yurts in the West), round tents made of thick layers of felt wool pressed into blankets, arranged in a row with the doorsfacing south. The gers were owned by the women. In the center of the ger was an open fire fueled by animal dung, and the smoke exited from a single hole above the fire. The place of honor within the ger was on the northern side opposite the door. Among the nomads of the steppe related lineages formed a clan, and several clans constituted a tribe (such as the Tatars or the Kereyid) or a confederacy (such as the Naiman). “The Mongols were not so much a tribe,writes Weatherford, “as a roving set of fractious clans sharing the same language and culture, but often fighting one another.”7 Mongol men and women both wore large leather boot that came up to their knees and a large tunic coats known as the deels. Women wore their hair gathered high on their heads, while men shaved their heads except for bangs on their foreheads and two large clumps above each ear.

Most of Mongolia is located on a high plateau in north-central Asia. The region is separated from the Pacific coastby a range of mountains that creates a dry terrain known as govi or Gobi. Between the Gobi desert and the mountains to the north are flat, tree-less grasslands known as steppes. The steppes are a tree-less grassland in central Asia. They extend from Hungary through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria. The Altai Mountains in present-day Mongolia divided the steppes into east and west regions. The western

steppes stretch from the mouth of the Danube River, along the northern shore of the Black Sea, through southern Russiaand Kazakstan to the Altai, and the eastern steppes from theAltai through most of Mongolia. Mongolia has been called the“land of yak, yurk, and yoghurt.” The yak is a draft animal related to bison that is used throughout the highlands of Mongolia and Tibet. The hide of the yak is used to cover thetent-like dwelling known as the yurk. Yoghurt (from the old Turkish word yog meaning “condensed”) is a curdled milk product made from yak milk.

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The earliest nomad state dates back to the fourth century B.C., when the Scythian King Ateas united the nomadic tribes in the steppes north of the Black Sea. They conquered the Assyrian Empire and sacked Nineveh. “Unlike the other steppe tribes that had embraced the scriptural andpriestly traditions of Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity,” writes Weatherford, “the Mongols remained animists, praying to the spirits around them. The worshipped the Eternal Blue Sky, the Golden Light of the Sun, and the myriad spiritual forces of nature. The Mongols divided the natural world intotwo parts, the earth and the sky. Just as the human soul was

contained not in the stationary parts of the body but in themoving essences of blood, breath, and aroma, so, too, the soul of the earth was contained in its moving water. The rivers flowed through the earth like the blood through the body, and three of those rivers began here on this mountain.The three rivers were the Kherlen River flowing from BurkhanKhaldun to the southeast and the steppe, the Onon River flowing to the northeast, and the Tuul River flowing to the southwest. As the tallest mountain, Burkhan Khaldun, literally ‘God Mountain,’ was the khan of the area, and it was the earthly place closest to the Eternal Blue Sky. And as the source of the three rivers, Burkhan Khaldun was also the sacred heart of the Mongol world.”8

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Genghis Khan was born in 1162 to an outcast family in the Mongolian steppes. His mother was a young married woman from the Merkid tribe of herders, who was kidnapped by a member of the Borijin clan, which later became known as the Mongols. The Mongols were not herders, but hunters who stoleboth animals and women from the herders on the steppes. Genghis Khan’s tribe have been known by various names throughout history—Tartar, Tatar, Mughal, Moghul, Moal, and

Mongol. Genghis Khan’s given name was Temujin after a Tatar warrior killed by his father. His father was later poisoned by the Tatars in revenge. After this his mother and her seven young children became outcasts from both the Borijin clan and the Tayichiuds to whom they were subservient.

After the death of their father Temujin fell under the dominance of his older half-brother, Begter, according to Mongol tradition. Also, according to Mongol tradition Begterhad the right to marry any widow of his father, providing she was not his biological mother. This would make him the new head of the family. Temujin and one of his other brothers, named Khasar, resented this and together they killed Begter. Temujin then fled to the mountains, but the Tarychiud pursued and captured him. But Temujin managed to escape while his Tayichiud guards were drunk. In 1178 at theage of sixteen, Temujin married an older woman who was seventeen or eighteen. But the rival Merkid clan attacked Temujin’s ger (portable house made of a frame covered by animal felt) and kidnapped Temujin’s wife in retaliation forthe kidnapping of Temujin’s mother, Temjuin fled to Mount Burkhan Khaldun. After fasting and praying, Temjujin decidedto form an alliance with Ong Khan of the Kereyid tribe (withwhom the Mongols were considered as having a vassal status) and his boyhood friend, Jamuka of the Jadaran clan, and together they defeated the Merkid and freed Temujin’s young wife.

“Over the coming years,” says Weatherford, “Jamuka and Temujin each acquired a following of families and clans among the Mongol people in a constantly shifting set of ephemeral alliances and pragmatic loyalties; yet neither proved able to unite all the lineages into a single tribe like the more powerful Kereyid, Tatars, and Naiman.”9 Jamukademonstrated extreme cruelty by cutting off the head of one of his captives and tying it to the tail of his horse (thus defiling the dead man’s soul by tying what was believed to be the most sacred part of the human body to the most obscene part of the horse) and boiling 70 male captives

alive in cauldrons (seven being considered an unlucky number). In 1181 Temujin and Jamuka split over who should be superior to the other resulting into two decades of warfare between them. Temujin in 1189 at the age of 27 assumed the title of khan (the chief of the Mongols). He broke with Mongol tradition in appointing to his ordu, or horde (i.e., chiefly council), men who showed ability and loyalty rather than blood relatives.

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In 1195 the Jurched rulers of Cathay to the south of the Gobi desert sought an alliance with Ong Khan against theTatars. Ong Khan in turn sought the aid of Temujin. Weatherford notes: “Temujin saw clearly how the powerful Jurched kingdom used one border tribe to fight another. One year, they might ally with the Tatars against the Kereyid, but the next year with the Kereyid and Mongols agains the Tatars. . . . This lesson would eventually have a profound effect on the new world Temujin would fashion out of this havoc. . .” After the defeat of the Tatars, Temujin turned against his former allies, Jurkin clan, in 1197 to avenge aninsult to Termjuin’s half-brother at a feast to which the Jukin had been invited. After defeating the Jukin, Termjin occupied their land and adopted the remaining members of theJukin into his own clan. “Whether these adoptions began for

sentimental reasons or for political ones, Termujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through this usage of fictive kinship.”10

Temujin then moved his capital to Avarga at the confluence of the Kherlen and Tsenker rivers, which remainedhis base of operation for the rest of his life. “While keeping his main camp at Avarga on the Kherlen River, he decided to create a closed territory as the homeland of the Mongol tribe at the headwater of the Onon, Kherlen, and TuulRivers around the holy mountain Burkkhan Khaldun, where he found refuge from the Merkid,” Weatherford states. “With that order, the Mongol homeland was closed to all outsiders except for the Mongol royal family, who buried their dead there for the next two centuries and who returned there for familial ceremonies and closed family meetings without outsiders.”11

Temujin sought to solidify the union of the Mongols andthe Kereyid by proposing a marriage between his oldest son and Ong Khan’s daughter. Ong Khan was suspicious of Temujin’s motives and invited him to the wedding ceremony with the intention of killed him. Temujin had only a small contingent of men with him and they initially fled from Ong Khan’s army. His small party of 19 men, hungry and thirsty, reached the shores of the muddy Lake Baljuna. But wild horseappeared from the north, and Temjuin’s brother killed it, skinned it and cooked it, thus preventing starvation. They then swore eternal loyalty to Termujin with a toast of the muddy water. The men came from 9 different tribes, includingthe Merkid, Khitan, and Kereyid, and three different religions, including Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. “The oaths sworn at Baljuna created a type of brotherhood, and in transcending kinship, ethnicity, and religion, it came close to being a type of modern civic citizenship basedupon personal choice and commitment,” according to Weatherford. “This connection became a metaphor for the new type of community among Temujin’s followers that would

eventually dominate as the basis of unity within the Mongol Empire.”12

After taking this oath, Temujin reorganized his army and attacked the Kereyid. Alone Ong Khan sought refuge amongthe Naiman tribe, but he was killed by a border guard who didn’t believe that the solitary old man was the leader of Khan of the Kereyid. Temujin then attacked the Naiman with whom Jamuka had joined forces. In 1204 in what Weatherford calls “the final battle for control of Mongolia” Temujin’s Mongol forces decidedly defeated the Naiman, and Jamuka escaped to live as an outcast bandit. The following year he was turned over to Temujin by his own men and was forced to witness the execution of the men who betrayed him. Then, according to legend, Jamuka asked Temujin to execute him as an aristocrat without shedding his blood on the earth or exposing it to the sun and sky.

“Living so far to the north, the Mongols were essentially out of range of the trade routes that later became known as the Silk Route, which ran south of the Gobi,tenuously and sporadically connecting Chinese and Muslim societies. Yet enough trade filtered to the north to make the Mongols aware of the treasures that lay in the south,” Weatherford notes. “Expansion into the north offered little attraction beyond furs and feathers. It was the south that captured Genghis Khan’s greatest attention with its far greater variety of manufactured goods—metal, textiles, and novelties. He received the first infusion of goods from the Uighur people who farmed the oases of the great deserts of the Taklimakan and surrounding areas in what is now XinjiangAutonomous Region in China.”13

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The Uighur kingdom of Khocho had its capital in Gaochang on the Silk Road in the Turpan Oasis south of the Tian Shan Mountains. In 762 the khan of the Uighurs converted to the Manichaean faith, which originated in Mesopotamia in the third century A.D. and contains elements of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. But the Uighurmasses remained Buddhist until the beginning of the tenth century, when the entire population converted to Islam. The Uighur language uses the Syriac alphabet which was used by the monks who brought Christianity to the steppes. Unlike Chinese it was made from letters rather than characters, butlike Chinese it was read vertically in columns down the page. In 840 the Kirgiz drove the Uighurs southwest into Xingjiang province, where they live today. Xinjiang is strategically located on the border between China and Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, and Pakistan as well as the former Soviet republics of Kazakstan, Kirgizia, and Tajikstan.

While the Muslim Uighurs on the desert oases supported the Mongols, and the Uighurs living further west in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains (in what is today Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) wanted to overthrow their Buddhist rulers, the so-called Black Khitans, and join the Mongols. The Black Khitans were ruled by Guchlug, the son of

the Tayang Khan of the Naiman, who were formerly enemies of the Mongols. While Guchlug was a Christian and the Black Khitans were Buddhists, both were opposed to the Uighurs whowere Muslims. Guchlug began to persecute the Uighurs, and Genghis Khan sent one of his generals to defeat Guchlug, whowas beheaded for his crimes. “More important than acquiring new subjects or building his reputation as the defender of persecuted religions,’ writes Weatherford, “the victory overthe Black Khitan gave Genghis Khan complete control over theSilk Route between the Chinese and the Muslims.”14

Genghis Khan married his daughter to the Uighur khan. “In the extension of kinship to the Siberian tribes and the Uighur, Genghis Khan was not merely making alliances betweenhis family and their ruling families. He was accepting the entire tribe or nation into his empire as familial members, since, in the political idiom of the tribes, granting kinship to the khan was tantamount to recognizing family ties with the whole nation,” writes Weatherford. “When the Uighur khan came to the Mongol court for his wedding in approximately 1209, he arrived laden with a camel caravan oflavish gifts, including gold, silver, and pearls of many sizes, shapes, and colors. Without the craft of weaving, theMongols had only leather, fur, and felt made from pressed wool, so the most important gifts to them were the incredible woven textiles, including silk, brocade, damask, and satin.”15

In 1210 a delegation from the new Golden Khan in China demanded submission of the Mongols as a vassal nation to theJurched throne with its capital in the city of Zhongdu (the present site of Beijing, China). The Jurched dynasty was founded in 1135 and ruled Manchuria and much of present-day Inner Mongolia. Their power rested on control of goods transported to the steppes from the cities in China. The Mongols had a closer ethnic and linguistic tie to the Khitan, who had fled from the Jurched territory to seek refuge among the Mongols. But Genghis Khan refused to kowtowto the Golden Khan.

Genghis Khan in alliance with the Uighur and Tangut then crossed the Gobi desert and invaded China. Between 1207 and 1209 Genghis Khan had subdued the Tangut, who were a Tibetanpeople who lived along the upper Yellow River in what is today Gansu Province. The Jurched kingdom was the second largest kingdom in China after the Sung dynasty based in Hangzhou. By 1214 the Mongols besieged the capital of the Jurched in Zhongdu. Rather than endure a prolonged siege, the Golden Khan agreed to become a vassal of the Mongols. The Khitan returned to the land they left, and their royal family restored to power. But the Golden Khan reneged on hisagreement and with his court evacuated Zhongdu for Kaifeng to the south. Genghis Khan allowed his Khitan allies to retake Zhongdu and loot the city.

During the Jurched campaign, the Siberian tribes, who had submitted to Mongol rule in 1207 under their queen namedBotohui-tarhun (meaning, “Big and Fierce”), stopped sending their tribute of furs, forest products, and young women to the Mongols. In 1219 Genghis Khan sent a detachment into Siberia, but unused to traveling in dense forest were ambushed by Botohui-tarhun’s forces. Genghis Khan sent another army that secretly cut a run through the forest and succeeded in defeating the Siberians.

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In 1219 Genghis Khan sent a delegation to form a trading partnership with the Turkish sultan Muhammad II of the Khwarizm Empire. But when a caravan made up of Muslim and Hindu merchants entered the Khwarizm northwest province of Otrar (now in southern Kazakhstan) the provincial governor killed the merchants and seized the trade goods. Genghis Khan sent envoys to the sultan to seek redress, the sultan killed and mutilated the faces of the envoys. GenghisKhan withdrew to the Burkhan Khaldun Mountain and after three days of meditation returned to take revenge. In 1008 the Turkish Ghaznavids had crossed the Khyber Pass and defeated an alliance of Hindu rulers at Peshawar. They annexed the Punjab and extended Muslim influence to Lahore in present-day Pakistan. At the end of the eleventh century the Ghurids expanded Muslim control over most of northern India, including Delhi and Ajmer in 1192 and Bihar and Bengal in 1194. Qutb al-Din Aybak became the first Sultan ofDelhi in 1206.

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In March 1220 Genghis Khan conquered the city of Bukhara (in Uzbekistan today). During the reign of the Turkish sultan of Khwarizm Bukhara was considered in the

Muslim world as “the center of religious piety known by the epithet ‘the ornament and delight to all Islam.’”16 Genghis entered in a triumphal procession, and he proceeded to the great mosque in the center of the city and made the richest men of the city come to the mosque and reveal where their treasures were hidden. He then ordered an attack on the Turkish soldiers who held out inside the citadel of the city. They attacked the citadel with such weapons as catapults that hurled stones and fire, pots of burning liquids, and exploding devices. At the same time his miners dug underneath the walls of the citadel. News of the brutal tactics used by Genghis Khan’s troops was carried to the capital of Samarkand which surrendered without a fight. NextGenghis Khan led the main part of his army across the mountains of Afghanistan and into the Indus River valley. Another detachment proceeded around the Caspian Sea, throughthe Caucasus, and into the steppes of Russia.

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After his four year campaign, Genghis Khan called together his four sons for a family khuriltai (conference). Atthis conference he raised the issue of succession. Accordingto Mongol tradition, the oldest son (in this case, Jochi) would become the likely leader, but his next oldest son (Chaghatai) challenged this by arguing that Jochi may have been conceived before their mother was kidnapped from the Merkid tribe, thereby, accusing Jochi of being a bastard. This angered Genghis Khan, who then insisted that they agreeto a compromise in which his third son, Ogodei, became the next Great Khan. However, he was prone to getting drunk on fermented horse mare milk. Then, Genghis Khan decided to divide the empire into four separate regions each ruled by one of his sons. In summer 1222 the Mongols conquered the city of Multan in what is today central Pakistan. But instead of proceeding into northern India, Genghis Khan decided to return to Mongolia, leaving his son Jochi in the newly conquered territory in which Jochi died under suspicious circumstances.

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Once he returned home, Genghis Khan launched the final

campaign of his life against the Tangut, whom he had

conquered in 1207 but whose khan refused to send troops in the invasions of Khwarizm. However, en route across the Gobito engage with the Tangut Genghis Khan was thrown from his horse in a hunt for wild horses from which he never fully recovered. Six month later in the summer of 1227, he died from his injuries a few days before the victory over the Tangut.

Ogodei proceeded to squander his father’s treasury. Hisfamily took on the name of the Golden Lineage. “Gold symbolized royalty for the steppe people, but it could just have easily represented the vast wealth that the family heldand that they quickly began to use up,” writes Weatherford.17 Ogodei sent armies into conquered territoriesthat refused to pay their tribute, but unlike his father he did not accompany his troops. Also, unlike Genghis Khan who was always on the move, Ogodei decided to build a permanent capital city for his empire at the place that became known as Karkorum. Ogodei and his brothers all married Christian wives, but the city had houses for worship for Buddhist, Muslim Taoist, and Christians. According to Weatherford, “Thereby began a process of co-optation that over the next four decades transformed the Mongols from a nation of mounted warriors to a sedentary court with all the trapping of civilized decadence that was so contrary to Genghis Khan’s legacy.”18

Ogodei’s main general, the elderly Subodei, who had been on the campaign with another Mongol commander named Jebe in 1221 that encircled the Caspian Sea in pursuit of the Khwarizm sultan, suggested that rather than expanding the Mongol empire further into China, India, or the Muslim countries, it should expand to the west into Europe. He had been on the military campaign against the Christian kingdom of Georgia, ruled by Giorgi III the Brilliant, in which Georgia was made a vassal state of the Mongols. Subodei thenmoved into the land across the Caucasus Mountains and made an alliance with the Turkic tribes known as the Kipchak. Subodei and Jebe proceeded across the Russian steppes, and

in April 1223 they arrived on the banks of the Dnieper River north of the Black Sea.

There they were met by an army sent by the Slavic Prince Mstislav Romanovitch of Kiev. The Mongols dispatched a delegation to negotiate either a surrender or an alliance,but the Russians executed the envoys. In the battle that followed the Mongols and Kipchak at first retreated to the Kalka River that flows into the Sea of Azov, where they Mongols turned and engaged with the Russians. While the Russian forces outnumbered the Mongols two to one, the Russian troops were primarily peasants armed with makeshift swords, spears, mace, and a few archers all of which were infantry. The Mongol calvary of mounted archers attacked outside the range of the Russian weapons. “The mounted princes of Russia sat astride their massive warhorses with their shiny javelins, glistening swords, colorful flags and banners, and boastful coasts of arms,” says Weatherford. “Their European warhorses had been bred for a massive show of strength—to carry the weight of their noble rider’s armoron the parade ground—but they had not been bred for speed oragility on the battleground.”19 After their victory the Mongol army wrapped Prince Mstislav and his two sons in feltrugs and placed them under the floorboards of their ger, where they were crushed to death by the celebrating Mongols.Jebe and Subodei then returned to Mongolia.

After his death, the family of Jochi inherited the lands along the Volga River. He was succeeded as khan by hisson Batu. Batu Khan wanted to undertake the campaign againstEurope, but Ogodei Khan wanted a campaign against the Sung dynasty in China. When his younger brother Tolui died in a fall he suffered in a drunken stupor, Ogodei wanted to arrange a marriage between Tolui’s widow and Ogodei’s son, Guyuk. He coveted his late brother’s lands which included the ancestral homeland and Mount Burkhan Khaldun. But the Tolui’s widow refused the offer. The family was divided on which direction to conquer next, and finally in 1235 they reached the conclusion to open two fronts: one on Europe and

the other on China, which Weatherford compares to the UnitedStates during World War II fighting simultaneously in the Pacific and in Europe.

Ogodei Khan sent three armies to attack the Sung from three different directions, and Batu Khan with the help of Subodei would move against Europe. Guyuk would accompany Batu in the west. It took four decades for the Mongols to conquer the Sung Empire. The European campaign lasted only five years. In 1236 Subodei led an attack on the Bulgars on the Volga River to the north, while Tolui’s eldest son, Mongke, attacked the Kipchak Turks to the south. From the Volga River they launched a three-year campaign against Russia and Ukraine. They laid siege to the city of Riazan bybuilding a wooden stockade around the walled city preventingthe city from either escaping or receiving supplies. From there they used catapults to send rocks, flaming pots of naptha, gunpowder, and other projectiles over the city walls. After five days they scaled the damaged walls of the city and took control.

In 1240 under the leadership of Mongke the Mongol army besieged Kiev, “the largest and most important political andreligious center in the Slavic world,” according to Weatherford.20 They took control of the city in December 1240 and plundered and set fire to it. Batu then took on thetitle of Tsar. Subodei then launched a major attack of 50,000 troops on Hungary with a smaller diversion attack of 20,000 across Poland towards Germany in the north. Duke Henry II of Silesia assembled an army of 30,000 knights fromGermany, France, and Poland and confronted the Mongols at Liegnitz, near the present German-Polish border, in April 1241. Again, the Mongols initially retreated and the knightsbroke ranks in pursuit, becoming separated from the archers and the infantry. Then, with the horses of the Europeans tired from the pursuit, the Mongols counterattacked with theloss of two-thirds of the European forces. Henry II was killed, decapitated, and stripped naked during the battle.

Then, the Mongols withdrew from the Polish and German cities since this was merely a diversion while the main force invaded the plains of Hungary. Here King Bela IV confronted the Mongol army under Subodei on the Plain of Mohi. Here the Mongols surrounded the Hungarians, who managed to escape towards their capital of Pest. The Mongolshad intentionally left the escape route open so they could hunt down and killed the fleeing Hungarians. As the Mongols approached the city of Pest, the Christian priests in desperation brought out the relics of their dead saints. This only inflamed the Mongols who considered this a sacrilege. To purify themselves, they killed the priests andburned the relics and the churches. King Bela was forced to flee to the Adriatic Sea. Rather than proceeding west to Colgne, they Mongols turned to the south toward the Balkans.

A few months after the Mongol victories, in October 1241 there occurred an eclipse of the sun that Europeans believed was a sign that the Mongols were sent from Hell. Others accused the Jews of bringing the wrath of the Mongolson innocent Christians. As a result, there followed a seriesof pogroms against Jews in cities from England to Italy. In December 1241 Ogodei died in a drunken stupor, and Chaghataidied at about the same time. With all four of Genghis Khan’ssons dead, his grandsons returned home to begin a struggle for succession that lasted ten years. In 1242 the Mongols withdrew from Western Europe to their stronghold in Russia.

While the Mongol armies fought in Europe, Sorkhokhstani, the widow of Tolui, ruled northern China and eastern Mongolia, and Ebuskun, the widow of Chaghatai, ruledCentral Asia and Turkestan. While Ogodei was still the GreatKhan, he was often drunk, and Toregene, one of his wives, was the effective ruler. When he died in 1241, she became the regent. “For the next ten years, until 1251, she and a small group of other women controlled the largest empire in world history,” writes Weatherford.21 Toregene maneuvered tomake her son, Guyuk, the next khan. To do so, she dismissed her deceased husband’s minister and replaced them with a

Tajik or Persian captive woman named Fatima. In August 1246 she held an elaborate ceremony for the installation of Guyuk. Pope Innocent IV sent Friar Giovanni of Plan Carpini to represent him in Karakorum. But rather than bringing tribute, he brought a letter chastising the Mongols for invading Europe. Eventually, the Mongols abandoned Christianity totally and embraced Buddhism and Islam.

Once in power, Guyuk accused Fatima of witchcraft, but his mother tried to protect her trusted adviser. After his mother either died or was killed, Guyuk ordered that Fatima be tortured. The she was rolled up inside a felt blanket anddrowned in the river. Guyuk also tried to remove the other women in charge of Mongol lands. But before he was able, he suddenly died from mysterious causes after only eighteen months in power. Guyuk’s widow, Oghul Ghaimish, then attempted to take control of the empire, but Batu Khan with the aid of Sorkhokhtani in 1250 convened a khuriltai near LakeIssykul in the Tian Shan Mountains, far from Karakorum, which elected Sorkhokhtani’s eldest son, Mongke, as the new Grand Khan of the Mongol Empire. The Ogodei family claimed that the election was not legitimate, because it took place outside Mongolia. So Sorkhokhtani held another election and installation in July 1251, not in Karakorum, but in the ancient family homeland, where Genghis Khan was buried.

Mongke resumed the expansion of the Mongol Empire against the Sung dynasty and the Arab of the Middle East. InMay 1253 Mongke assigned his brother Hulegu to lead the Armyof the Right to attack Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, and hisother brother Khubilai to lead the Army of the Left to attack China. Mongke and his youngest brother, Arik Boke, remained in Mongolia. At that time Baghdad was the Arab cultural and financial capital. First, Hulega had to subdue the Nizari Ismailis, a Shi’ite sect, known in the West as the Assassins. Their territory stretched in the mountains from Afghanistan to Syria, with their main fortress known asAlamut in northern Persia. The sect was founded in 1090 by Hasan ibn al-Sabbah. His followers who were Shi’ite Muslims

became known as Nizaris or Ismai’ilis. “Supposedly, because of the importance of narcotics for the Ismailis, the people around them called them hashshashin, meaning ‘the hashish users.’ Over time, this name became modified into the word assassin,” says Weatherford.22 The sect spread from Persia into Syria, and it was divided into classes, with martyrs and assassins as the highest class. In November 1256 the Mongol warriors attacked fortress at Alamut in the Persian Mountains, and the Grand Master, or Imam, of the Assassins surrendered. Hulegu used the Imam to go from castle to castle to order his followers to surrender, and then in 1257, when the Imam requested an audience with the Great Khan Mongke, Hulegu sent him to Mongolia, where he and partywere taken out into the mountains outside Karkorum and stomped to death.

The conquest of the Assassins opened the door to Hulegu’s army to attack Baghdad, which was ruled by the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs. Hulegu first sent a delegation to the Caliph, accusing him of not helping to suppress the Ismaili Assassin sect. The Caliph as the head of the entire Muslim World refused to accede to Hulegu’s demands that he surrendered to Mongol rule. In November 1257 Hulegu began his march on Baghdad supplemented by armies of the vassal states of Armenia and Georgia and several Turkic tribes. In January 1258 they encircled the city. Hulegu had made contact with the Christians within the city, who acted as spies. The Mongols destroyed the dams on the Tigris River, which flooded the Caliph’s army camps outside the city. In February they breeched the walls of the city and the city surrendered. Hulegu summoned the Caliph and his male heirs to his camp outside the city, where they were killed within honor in the traditional Mongol method (without bloodshed) by either being wrapped in carpets or sewn into sacks and kicked to death. After conquering Baghdad the Mongols proceeded west toward Damascus. There the Crusader knight Bohemond of Antioch came from his base on the Mediterranean coast to join in the attack on Baghdad. Baghdad decided to surrender without a fight.

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“Unlike his brothers who had fought in Europe and the Middle East, Khubilai had spent most of his life in the Mongol lands south of the Gobi, where he maintained a personal court that was larger and more luxurious than the imperial court at Karakorum in the Mongol heartland. He enjoyed feasting more than fighting,” writes Weatherford.23 Khublai moved very slowly toward China, initially having some success against the border kingdoms to the west of the Sung kingdom. His mother was a Nestorian Christian, and one of his four wives was a Tibetan Buddhist. In 1240 Kublai Khan invaded central Tibet. The Mongols considered Tibet an autonomous region which was not integrated into the Chinese empire. During the sixth and seventh centuries Tibet had ruled over parts of China, India, Nepal, central Asia and the Middle East. Tibet has “one of the most eclectic populations on earth,” writes Lee Feigon, Chairman of the East Asian Studies Department at Colby College.24 In easternTibet there are the Khampas people, in what is now the Chinese administered Qinghai province are the Golok people, and in southeastern Tibet there are Sherpas, Mongols, and Muslims. The Tibetan language is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and is closely related to Burmese. However,

the written script is adapted from Indian writing. The country is united by its religion, which combines the animism and shamanism of the Tibetan Bon religion with iconography from India Hinayana Buddhism and doctrines of Chinese Mahayan Buddhism. The religious and political leaderof Tibetans is the Dalai Lama. All Tibetans make pilgrimagesto Lhasa, the Tibetan capital to show their devolution to him. Tibetan Buddhists believe in reincarnation and that dogs are part of the cycle of rebirth. Therefore, no one canharm dogs, which roam freely.

Around 570 A.D. Namri Songtsen, who was known as Tibet’s warrior-king, united the people along the Yarlong Valley into a military dominion. His son Songtsen Gampo in 635 with the help of the Chinese Tang dynasty attacked the Mongols occupying Amdo on the northern part of the Tibetan plain near where the Mongolia, Turkestan, China, and Tibet come together and the Silk Road begins. Today Amdo is part of China’s Qinghai province, but the Amdowas think of themselves as neither part of Tibet nor China. Songtsen Gampo married a Chinese bride and the Tibetans sent a tributary mission to China. “The Chinese have long claimed that Songtsen Gampo’s acceptance of this bride proves that Tibet became a Chinese tributary state. What most Chinese accounts fail to mention is that Songtsen Gampo took a number of different wives in his efforts to reinforce his position and create new political alliances.” Also, Feigon writes, the Chinese don’t mention that tributary missions were often just “trading missions between equal powers.”25 Songtsen Gampo was also noted for introducing Buddhism to Tibet.

In 670 Tibet defeated the Tang dynasty in what is now Xingjiang Province or Chinese Turkestan, thereby extending Tibet control over the Silk Road. The Tibetan King Trisong Detsen conquered most of Sichuan province in 760 and forced the Chinese to send Tibet a tribute. He extended Tibetan control over large parts of central Asia, China, and Burma as well as all of Nepal Bhutan, and Sikkim, and most of

Bangladesh, Pakistan, and northern India. Trisong Detsen made Buddhism the official state religion of Tibet. By 800 the Tibetan Empire expanded across the Pamir Mountains into Tadzhikistan and the border of Persia. In 801 the Arab leader Harun ar-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, joined forceswith China against Tibet. In 838 members of the Bon nobilityassassinated the Tibetan King Lang Darma, which led to the division of the Tibetan empire into small principalities.

Kublai Klan had many excuses for moving reluctantly andhis administration was plagued by corruption and strife between Taoist and Buddhist clerics. Mongke ordered Khublai to come to Karakorum to explain his lack of military success, but he forgave his brother for his failures. Mongkethen took personal charge of the military campaign. He firstattacked the lands of Sichuan to the west and Yunnan to the southwest of the Sung kingdom. In May 1258 he led his army across the Yellow River, but in August 1259, Mongke suddenlydied, and the invasion was ended. His brothers decided to rule their own lands apart from the others. Hulegu retained control of the Middle East; Jochi’s descendants, who became known as the Golden Horde, retained Russia; Khublai the lands where Chinese culture was dominant; and Arik Boke ruled in the steppes of Mongolia. When Kublai’s younger brother Arigh Böke based in Karakorum vied for the position of the Great China, Kublai made an alliance with the Song dynasty in China that agreed to pay an annual tribute to theKhan. In 1260 Khublai Khan attacked Karakorum in an attempt to remove his brother Arik Boke from power. It was animal famine resulting from a drought and especially cold temperatures that force Arik Boke to surrender to his brother in 1264.

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In 1276 the Mongols finally captured the Sung capital of Hangzhou, but with a break in Mongol tradition Kublai allowed the dowager empress and most of the royal family to remain in their palace. He also expanded the Mongol trade routes by sea to the spice island, Java, Ceylon, and the northern islands of Japan. He started a shipbuilding and naval and military base on the Korean Peninsula from which he attempted to conquer Japan. In 1274 he sent an armada of about 900 ships with an army of 23,000 infantry and horsemento Tsushima Island, then to Ika Island, and finally on to Kyushu Island, the most southwest of the four main islands of Japan. There they were confronted the Japanese samurai warriors, but the Mongols forced them to retreat to a fortress. They then withdrew to their ships, but a terrible typhoon known as the Kamikaze (literally, “Divine Wind”) destroyed the Mongol armada and put an end to the invasion.

In 1281 the Mongols attempted another invasion of Japanfrom Korea, which also failed. The Mongol army had more success on land, where they conquered Burma, Annam (northern

Vietnam), and Laos. The rulers of Champa in southern Vietnamand Malabar on the coast of India voluntarily submitted to Mongol vassalage. Weatherford notes: “Prior to the Mongol era, the area that today composes the countries of Thailand,Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia had been decisively Indian in culture and followed the architectural styles, religious practices, and mythology of Hindu India. The Mongols and theChinese immigrants whom they brought created a new hybrid culture that thereafter became known as Indo-Chinese.”26 In 1289 Khublai sent an envoy to Java (in what is today Indonesia), but the Javanese rule fearing that the Mongols were trying to take control of the spice trade from the Molucca Island, branded the face of the envoy and sent him back to China. So Khublai in 1292 sent an armada of 1,000 ships and 20,000 soldiers to attack Java. They succeeded in killing the king, but then they were lured into an ambush byhis successor and were forced to retreat.

“Like Genghis Khan two generations earlier, Khubilai Khan began the arduous process of state building around a core ethnic identity, but for Khubilai that core cultural identity would be Chinese, not Mongol,” says Weatherford.27 Shangdu (Xanadu) in Inner Mongolia today was his summer home. In 1272 he built another capital on the site of the former Jurched capital of Zhongdu (Beijing, today) connectedby a canal with the Yellow River. He designated separate neighborhoods within the city for Middle Easterners, Mongols, and people from all over China. Merchants came fromas far away as Italy, India, and North Africa. He also created the Forbidden City within the city for the royal family and court guarded by Mongol warriors. According to Weatherford, “Mindful of overdependence on any single nationality or ethnic group and inclined to play one off against another, however, Khubilai constantly mixed Chinese and foreigners in a diverse of set of administrators that included Tibetans, Armenians, Khitan, Arabs, Tajiks, Uighurs, Tangut, Turks, Persians and European. The Mongols staffed each office with an ethnic quota of the three major groups of northern Chinese, southern Chinese, and foreigners

so that each official was surrounded by men of different culture or religion.”28 Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism were all tolerated, but a particular form of Tibetan Buddhism was the dominant faith.

Khublai Khan could not trust his own people to protect him, so he recruited European Ossetians from the Caucasus Mountains to protect the Forbidden City in Beijing and Turkic Kipchak tribes from the steppes of southeastern Russia to fight Qaidu Khan. He over-reached his empire when he unsuccessfully tried three times to conquer Japan between1281 A.D. and 1286 A.D. In 1292 A.D. he attempted to invade Java, but this too failed. Kublai Khan died in February 1294at the age of eighty. Rather than following Khublai Khan’s lesson of becoming more Chinese than the Chinese, his successors isolated themselves from the Chinese population, forbidding them from using horses and suppressing their culture. “In their new effort to be as un-Chinese as possible,” says Weatherford, “the Mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to the Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese. Unable to criticize their Mongol ruler directly, the Chinese people turned much of their hatred toward the foreigners who helpedthe Mongols administer their empire. The Tibetan Buddhist monks in particular became the object of hatred, since localpeople along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligation not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for themas well.”29

“Instead of a string of khanates around the central onein Mongolia, three miniature empires emerged,” writes Weatherford.30 Kublai ruled Tibet, Manchuria, Korea, and eastern Mongolia and established the Yuan Dynasty in China. His brother Hulegu created what was to become the Ilkhanate extending from Afghanistan to Turkey. And the family of their brother Jochi founded what was to become known as the

Golden Horde in Russia. “The Il-Khanate of Persia, the Golden Horde of Russia, and the Yuan Dynasty of China formedthree points on a large triangle,” says Weatherford, “and although they tried, none of them could control the middle of the continent.”31

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Ogodei’s grandson, Kaidu Khan, ruled Moghulistan from his capital in Bukhara. It extended from Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north to Turkistan in central Asia to Afghanistan in the south. Kaidu’s daughter was named Khutulun (ca. 1260 – ca. 1306). She was mentioned by Marco Polo as a fierce warrior, who fought in the war between her father and his brother and her cousin, Kublai Khan of the Yuan Dynasty. “The ability of women to fight successfully in steppe society when they failed to do so in most civilizations derived, however, from the unique confluence of the horse with the bow and arrow,” says Weatherford. “In armies that relied on infantry and heavy weapons such as swords, lances, pikes, or clubs, men enjoyed major physical advantages over women. Mounted on a horse and armed with a bow and arrows, a trained and experienced woman warrior could hold her own against men.”32 According to legend, she said that the only man she would marry is one who could defeat her in a wrestling match. If he lost, he would have

to forfeit their horses to her. Khutulun became the model for the figure of Turandot (meaning “Turkish daughter”) madefamous in the opera composed by Giacomo Puccini. The opera was based on a play written in 1761 by Carlo Gozzi which premiered in Marco Polo’s hometown of Venice. The play was translated into German by Friedrich von Schiller and directed in Weimar in 1802 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Inthe play Turandot is the daughter of the emperor of China who is wooed by Calaf. She tells him that she would marry him only if he answered three riddles. If he couldn’t he would lose his life. “Khutulun was the last of the wild Mongol women,” writes Weatherford. “In Russia, Persia, and China, they began to disappear into the ranks of civilized women, who lived according to the standards of the local culture.”33

In 1331 the plague known as the Black Death caused by fleas living on rats spread from south China with Mongol warriors and traders to north China across Central Asia to Europe by 1345 to North Africa by 1400. “The plague not onlyisolated Europe, but it also cut off the Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia,” writes Weatherford. In China “the plague had devastated the country, demoralized the living, and, but cutting off trade and tribute, deprivedthe Mongol Golden Family of its primary source of support.”34 There are different theories about the cause of the gradual decline of the Mongol Empire, such as the outbreak of the plague in the 14th century or the triumph of the Ming rebelsin China in 1368. By 1368 the Mongols had lost most of theirlands and retreated back to the steppes of Mongolia, where they resumed feuding among themselves for the next century.

In the late fifteenth century there arose a new Mongol Queen named Manduhai the Wise. She was members of the Chorosclan that included members of the Kara Kitai, Uighur, Oirat (Siberian), and Uriyanghai ethnic groups. Her father had been allied with the conspiracy to overthrow the Borijin clan. Warlords had taken over the oases of the Silk Road to

the west of the Gansu Corridor. In 1464 Manduul married Manduhai, who then was only about sixteen years old. Manduulhad been named the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. “This title,” writes Weatherford, “represented a claim to be not merely the ruler of the Mongols, but also the legitimate ruler of China, Korea, Manchuria, and Central Asia, albeit in exile—though in truth he did not even rule his own household.”35 Manduhuul brought his nephew Bayan Mongke intohis household as the son he never had. Bayan was Manduul Khan’s half-brother on his father’s side. When Manduul died in 1467, his widow, Manduhai adopted Bayan Mongke, who was then only four years old. Once he became a teenager Manduhaimarried the young Bayan Mongke in accordance with Mongol tradition. In 1479 she made him the Dayan Khan (the Great Khan).

Manduhai and Dayan Khan proceeded to reorganized Mongolsociety. Under the new system everyone living with Mongol-controlled territory would be consider a Mongol, no matter what their previous ethnicity (Ossetian, Kipchak, Onggud, Tangut, Uighur, etc.). In place of these ethnic divisions, they divided the Mongol Empire into Left and Right Wings, each with three geographically defined tribes or tumen. The new Mongol Empire was renamed The Six Tumen. Weatherford states that “This new Mongol nation, or Six Tumen, included Buddhists and Muslims with a mixture of the earlier Christian groups who had long since lost all contact with the outside Christian world. Manduhai and Dayan Khan did notchoose among these religions, and they let their people follow any that they wanted. The government and ruling family, however, maintained a spiritual focus on a state cult formed around Genghis Khan and his shrine.”36 In the sixteenth century, the Mongols converted to Buddhism. Altan Khan and Queen Noyanchu Junggen, both descendants of Queen Manduhai and Dayuan Khan conferred on the Tibetan monk Snam Gyatso, the Mongolian title of Dalai Lama, meaning “sea” or “ocean.”

China at the time was ruled by the Ming Dynasty emperor, Chenghua, who was just a teenager. The real power behind the throne was his nursemaid, Lady Wan. Bayan Mongke and Manuhai made an alliance with the Onggud, and in an effort to re-unite the Mongols north of the Gobi with ones under Chinese, in 1500 they launched a major China. Their initial effort failed, and they were force to retreat back to Mongolia. The Mongols invaded China again in 1514 and 1517 and in this second invasion almost took control of Beijing. But the Ming Emperor Chenghua again managed to repulse him again. Finally, 1542 just before his death, Dayan Khan was able to defeat the Chinese army. When he diedshortly after, Dayan Khan and Mandukhai’s empire extended from the forests of Manchuria to the Altai Mountains and onto the steppes of Central Asia. When in 1492 Columbus sailed west in an attempt to reach the East, he carried a letter for the khan of the Mongols, but the Europeans didn’tknow the name of the khan nor did Columbus ever reach the East. Weatherford notes that “when Columbus died in 1506, hestill had come no closer to finding the court of the Mongolsor even the names of the rulers. Throughout all the years ofColumbus’ search, it was Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan for whom he was searching.”37

In the West the Mongols have been depicted “savage hordes lusting after gold, women, and blood.” “When nineteenth-century scientists wanted to show the inferiorityof the Asian and American Indian populations,” says Weatherford, “they classified them as Mongoloid.”38 The tactic that Genghis Khan used to conquer cities was to offerleniency to those communities in the countryside that surrendered without a fight, but those who fight would be pushed to the front lines in the next attack. Weatherford says that the Mongols invented new forms of warfare. “Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units. Rather than relying on defensive fortifications, he made brilliant use of speed and surprise

on the battlefield, as well as perfecting siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities. Genghis Khan taught his people not only to fight across incredible distances but to sustain their campaign over years, decades, and eventually, more than three generations of constant fighting.”39 In addition, they introduced new foods (such as yogurt), new clothing (pants and jackets rather than tunics and robes), new musical instruments (stringed instruments played with the “steppe bow” rather than being plucked with the fingers), and even the cry of hurray (to express bravado and encouragement). As a ruler, Genghis Khan instituted his Great Law. He abolished the kidnapping of women. He also ended the enslavement of any Mongol. The stealing of another’s animals was made a capitaloffense. It was made unlawful to hunt animals between Marchand October, their breeding time, and how many animals couldbe hunted. “In probably the first law of its kind anywhere in the world, Genghis Khan decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone,” says Weatherford.40 He exempted religious leaders and their property from all typesof taxes.

In conclusion, Central Asia is in the United States perhaps the least understood region of the world. Most of usknow it only from the writings of the late-comer to the region, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who traveled alongthe Silk Road (a series of trade routes connecting East Asiawith the Mediterranean) en route to make contact with the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, who established the Yuan Dynastyin China. This ethno-European approach to the “discovery” ofCentral Asia has resulted in what the Columbia University literary scholar Edward Said has termed “Orientalism.” The best know example is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream.”

The region’s strategic location as the middle segment of the Silk Road has been known since ancient times, and itsimportance has been recognized and fought over by the Roman,Persian, Parthian, Seleucid, Kushan, Sassanian, and Samarid

empires. But the empire that had the most lasting impact on the region was the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan. The Mongols were originally from the steppes -- the tree-less grasslands of central Asia. They were a horse-riding, nomadic people. Genghis Khan was born in 1162 to an outcast family, who became the khan (leader) of empire that unified control over the entire Silk Road. The Mongols under GenghisKhan were fierce warriors, but despite their fearsome reputation, if the people they conquered surrendered withouta fight, they would show compassion and toleration for othercultures and other religions. For those who defied them, they would show no mercy, destroying and looting their cities. Genghis Khan also allocated power to females in his family to rule the conquered territories, while the men leftto conquer additional land. Late in life Genghis Khan divided his empire between his four sons: Jochi, Chaghatai, Ogodei, and Tolui. His son Ogodei expanded the Mongol Empireinto Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. But Ogodeidid not follow the nomadic, tolerant pattern set by his father. Under his grandson, Kublai Khan, the Mongols finallysucceeded in fulfilling Genghis Khan’s aim to conquer China.

Nevertheless, the descendants of Genghis Khan fought against each other, most notably Kublai Khan against his brother Kaidu, who ruled a vast empire in central Asia. Kaidu’s daughter, Khutulun, was a fierce warrior and the inspiration for Giacomo Puccini’s 1926 opera, Turondat, basedon a play written in 1761 by Carlo Gozzi. This internal feuding and the Black Plague that spread across Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa between 1345and 1400 contributed to the decline of the Silk Road trade, which was the economic base of the Mongol Empire. In the fifteenth century, the Mongol Empire had a brief revitalization under Mongol Queen named Manduhai the Wise and her husband Dayan Khan. They proceeded to reorganize theMongol Empire into six geographical units, rather than the previous ethnic divisions. Also, they continued the Mongol tradition of tolerating different religions (such as Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism),

although they themselves converted to Buddhism and conferredthe hereditary title of Dalai Lama on a Tibetan monk.

This chapter on the Mongol Empire in Central Asia has special relevance to understanding the world today. The ethnic groups of the region (the Uighurs, the Tibetans, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Tatars, the Ossetians, the Armenians, etc.) and the diverse religions (Islam, Buddhism,Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Judaism) date far back in history. While the Mongols imposed by force their rule of the various ethnic groups within their empire, at least theywere willing to extend religious and cultural autonomy to them. Today many of these peoples reside within national boundaries that do not reflect principle of self-determination, especially in China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia. Yet the ancient trade route of the Silk Road has taken on new importance in the twenty-first century as the pathway of oil and gas pipelines connecting the region’s rich natural resources with markets in Europe and America.

1 John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 69, 66, 80-91, 182.

2 http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blcoleridgekubla.htm

3 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000. (New York, Berlin, and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), p. 19.

4 Luce Boulnois. Silk Road: Monks, Warriors, and Merchants on the Silk Road, translated by Helen Loveday (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004),p. 35.

5 Ibid., p. 69.

6 Ibid., p. 143.

7 Jack Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (E-book edition, New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), p. 18 in Chapter 1.

8 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York:Crown Publishers, 2004), pp. 32-33.

9 Ibid., p. 39.

10 Ibid., pp. 42-43, 45.

11 Ibid., p. 53.

12 Ibid., p. 58.

13 Ibid., p. 15.

14 Ibid., pp. 104-105.

15 Ibid., pp. 76, 77.

16 Ibid., p. 3.

17 Ibid., p. 133.

18 Ibid., p. 137.

19 Ibid., p. 141.

20 Ibid., p. 249.

21 Ibid., p. 161.

22 Ibid., p. 178.

23 Ibid., p. 186.

24 Lee Feigon, Demystifying Tibet: Unlocking the Secrets of the Land of the Snows (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 10.

25 Ibid., pp. 32-33.

26 Weatherford, Genghis Khan, p. 213.

27 Ibid., p. 196.

28 Ibid., p. 203.

29 Ibid., p. 249.

30 Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, p. 18 in Chapter 1. p.2 in Chapter 6.

31 Ibid., p. 2 in Chapter 6.

32 Ibid., p. 13 in Chapter 6.

33 Ibid., pp. 22, 23 in Chapter 6.

34 Weatherford, Genghis Khan, p. 247.

35 Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, p. 13 in Chapter 8.

36 Ibid., p. 31 in Chapter 13.

37 Ibid., p. 2 of the Epilogue.

38 Weatherford, Genghis Khan, pp. xxiv, xxvi.

39 Ibid., p. xvii.

40 Ibid., p. 69.