[Temujin, later Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227), must have gathered to his bosom many conquered enemies’ wives and daughters: a 2003 genetic study revealed that 1 in 200 of the world’s population is descended from him – about 38 million people. He founded the Mongol Empire, the world’s largest contiguous empire, and was likely the most terrifying figure to emerge from the Steppe. His conquests were frequently accompanied by huge massacres, even genocide. The estimated 40 million deaths toll of the Mongol conquests initiated by him, viewed as a percentage of global population, would be equivalent to 278 million deaths if adjusted for the 20th century.]
By Khalid Elhassan
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Mongols, Huns, Tatars and Turks: some of the
nomadic inhabitants of the Eurasian Steppe who, for millennia, terrorized the
civilized lands on their periphery with frequent raids, or, when unified under
powerful warlords, devastating invasions that could extinguish empires. Steppe
nomads had a strategic mobility that allowed them to raid settled lands at
will, departing with their booty before the locals could mobilize a response,
and to choose when, where, and whether to fight the forces sent by the
civilized lands to bring them to heel.
Strategic mobility was complemented by three
tactical advantages. First, their horses gave them battlefield mobility, making
it difficult to force them to fight to the death. If things weren’t going well,
the nomads could retreat, living to fight another day.
Second, their preferred weapon, the recurved
bow, led to tactical mismatches that afforded a standoff distance from which to
kill in relative safety. They could thus attrit less mobile armies with arrows
until they were weakened and demoralized, before swooping in to finish them
off.
Third, an upbringing in the harsh Steppe,
with much of their lives spent on horseback, created a deep pool of hardy
warriors. In the settled lands, only a minority could be mobilized as fighters
because the majority were needed in the fields and workshops. The Steppe nomads
had no fields and little manufacture, while their food source, their animal
flocks and herds, could be tended to by children and women. That left nearly
the entire adult male population of fighting age available as warriors.
The one saving grace was the difficulty of
bringing together the fractious nomads in sufficiently large numbers to
overwhelm their civilized neighbors. While small scale raids on settled lands
were a near constant, leaders of Genghis Khan’s or Attila’s caliber, who could
realize the Steppe’s full and horrific potential, were few and far in between.
Idanthyrsus
King Idanthyrsus was a 6th century Scythian,
a nomadic Iranian speaking tribal confederacy that inhabited the Steppe between
the Carpathians and central China, controlled an overland trade network that
connected the Greeks, Chinese, Persians, and Indians, and created the first of
the Steppe empires that terrified the adjacent settled lands for millennia.
Starting in the 7th century BC, the Scythian began raiding into the Middle
East, and their first major disruptive role was a leading part in 612 BC in the
destruction of the Assyrian Empire, forever extinguishing a nation that had
existed for over a millennium and had dominated the Middle East for centuries.
In 513 BC Darius I of Persia sought to end Scythian
raids on his empire by conquering the Scythians. Assembling a huge army, he
launched an invasion along the western Black Sea coast, and into today’s
southern Ukraine and Russia. The Scythians simply retreated into the vastness
of the Steppe, taking their families and herds with them. Avoiding the decisive
pitched battle Darius sought, Idanthyrsus laid waste the countryside, blocking
wells and destroying pastures, while attriting the invaders with skirmishes and
hit and run attacks.
A frustrated Darius challenged Idanthyrsus to
stop fleeing and either fight, or admit his weakness and submit, recognizing
the Persians as his lords. The Scythian’s response, as recorded by Herodutus,
highlights the difficulty in bringing turbulent nomads to heel by forcing them
to fight if they did not want to: “This is my way, O Persian. I have never fled
in fear from any man and I do not flee from you now … We have neither cities
nor cultivated land for which we might be willing to fight with you, fearing
that they might be taken or ravaged … As for lords, I recognize only my
ancestors Zeus and Hestia … As to you calling yourself my lord, I tell thee to
‘Go weep’“.
Darius had to give up and turn back, his
invasion amounting to little more than an expensive and fruitless
demonstration. Scythians were still raiding the Persian Empire centuries later
until its destruction by Alexander the Great, and continued to raid the former
Persian lands for centuries beyond that.
Modu
Chanyu
Modu Chanyu (234 – 174 BC), a formidable Steppe
warrior and chieftain who was in the habit of turning his defeated enemies’
skulls into cups from which he drank blood, unified the nomadic tribes of the
eastern Steppe and founded the Xiongnu Empire. Spanning the eastern Steppe from
Central Asia to Manchuria, the Xiongnu menaced the Chinese to their south for
centuries, forging a complex relationship that alternated between trade and
raid, marriage treaties and tribute and war.
In 200 BC, the Chinese emperor Gaozu, founder
of the Han dynasty, attempted to bring the Xiongnu to heel, but fared even
worse than the Persian Darius had with the Scythians. Modu Chanyu led the
Chinese invaders on a merry chase through the Steppe, while harrying their
supply lines and keeping them on constant edge with frequent skirmishes. When
the Chinese were exhausted, Modu ambushed and trapped them in a disadvantageous
locale, cutoff from resupply and reinforcement.
Surrounded, the Chinese emperor bought his
life with an appeasement treaty known as the Heqin, that recognized Modu and
the Xiongnu Empire as equals, defined The Great Wall as the mutual border, sent
the Xiongnu leaders Chinese princesses as brides, and sought to buy them off
with regular tribute payments, face-savingly referred to as “gifts”.
After Gaozu’s death, Modu sent a rude and
mocking marriage proposal to his widow, the dowager empress, in 194 BC.
Incensed, the empress and court were all for declaring war, with generals
urging the extermination of the Xiongnu, until calmer voices reminded everybody
of Modu’s victory just a few years earlier, and that the Xiongnu army was more
powerful than the Chinese. Reconsidering, the empress wrote back, humbly
declining, and sent a gift of imperial carriages and horses.
So badly had Modu beaten the Han emperor, and
so memorable was the defeat, that Chinese attempts at a military solution were
abandoned, and the Heqin system of buying off the nomads with princesses and
tribute became the bedrock of Chinese diplomacy for centuries. The appeasement
continued even after the Xiongnu Empire collapsed and the Xiongnu disappeared
from the annals of history. Chinese princesses and Chinese “gifts” continued to
be sent regularly to Steppe chieftains for over a thousand years, with the last
recorded instance of Heqin occurring in 883 AD.
Attila
the Hun
Attila (406 – 453) ruled a multi-tribal
empire dominated by the Huns, that spanned Eastern and Central Europe. During
his reign, 434 – 453, he earned the moniker “The Scourge of God”, as he
terrified the civilized world, invaded Persia, terrorized the Eastern and
Western Roman Empires, plundered the Balkans, extorted vast sums of gold from
Constantinople, invaded Gaul and was beaten back, recoiled, then struck into
Italy the following year, before drinking himself to death on his wedding
night.
He was born in the Hungarian Steppe in 406
into the Hun royal family, and inherited the crown jointly with his brother
Bleda in 434. The brothers were challenged early on, but crushed the
opposition. When their surviving enemies fled to the Roman Empire, the brothers
invaded and forced the Romans to surrender the fugitives and agree to an annual
tribute of 230 kilograms of gold. Attila and Bleda then turned their attention
to the Persian Empire, which they invaded and plundered for years before they
were beaten, at which point they returned their attention to Europe.
Crossing the Danube in 440, the brothers
plundered the Balkans and destroyed two Roman armies. The Roman emperor
admitted defeat, and the brothers extorted from him a new treaty that paid 2000
gold kilograms up front, plus an annual tribute of 700 gold kgs. Soon
thereafter, Attila consolidated power by murdering his brother and becoming
sole ruler. In 447, Attila returned to the Balkans, which he ravaged until he
reached the walls of Constantinople, before recoiling.
In 450, the Western Roman Emperor’s sister
sought to escape a betrothal by begging Attila’s help, and sent him her
engagement ring. He interpreted that as a marriage proposal, accepted, and
asked for half of the Western Roman Empire as dowry. When the Romans balked,
Attila invaded, visiting his customary devastation, before he was finally
stopped at Chalons in 451.
The following year, he invaded Italy, sacking
and burning as he advanced down the peninsula, before he was persuaded by the
Pope to withdraw. He planned to attack Constantinople again in 453, but his
rampage finally ended that year, when he drank himself into a stupor while
celebrating his wedding to a new wife, suffered a nosebleed, and choked to
death on his own blood.
Genghis
Khan
“The greatest happiness is to scatter your
enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see
those who love him shrouded and in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives
and daughters” – Genghis Khan.
Temujin,
later Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227), must have gathered to his bosom many
conquered enemies’ wives and daughters: a 2003 genetic study revealed that 1 in
200 of the world’s population is descended from him – about 38 million people.
He founded the Mongol Empire, the world’s largest contiguous empire, and was
likely the most terrifying figure to emerge from the Steppe. His conquests were
frequently accompanied by huge massacres, even genocide. The estimated 40
million deaths toll of the Mongol conquests initiated by him, viewed as a
percentage of global population, would be equivalent to 278 million deaths if
adjusted for the 20th century.
When Temujin was nine, his father, a minor
Mongol chieftain, was poisoned. Rivals in the tribe then expelled the widow and
her family to fend for themselves on the harsh Steppe. Temujin endured extreme
poverty and want alongside his family for years, during which he killed one of
his brothers for refusing to share a rodent. Growing up hard, Temujin grew into
a hard man.
And a charismatic one. By the time he was a
young man, he had amassed a small and devoted following, which he parlayed into
bringing the Mongol tribes under his sway, one after another. He erased
intra-tribal distinctions by exterminating each tribe’s nobility, and combined
the commoners into a unified entity henceforth known as the Mongols, united by
their personal allegiance to Temujin.
Having united the Mongols, he took on the
formidable rival Tatar tribe, defeated them, and executed all males taller than
a wagon’s axle. By 1206, Temujin had destroyed all Steppe rivals, and the
formerly squabbling tribes had been united into a Mongol nation. So a grand
assembly was held that year, where he revealed a vision, endorsed by shamans,
in which the heavens had ordained that he rule all under the sky, and the
Mongols proclaimed him “Genghis Khan”, meaning Universal Ruler.
Genghis organized the Mongols for war. He was
a good judge of men and an excellent talent spotter, and his system was a
meritocracy where the talented could rise, regardless of origins. He imposed
strict discipline in a military structure based on decimals, from squads of 10,
to companies of 100, to minghans of 1000, and tumans of 10,000. Then he set out
to conquer world, beginning with China, which was fragmented at the time into
various dynasties. He started with the Western Xia, and reduced them to
vassalage, before turning to the more powerful Jin in 1211, capturing and
sacking their capital in 1215 after a victory in which hundreds of thousands of
Jin troops were massacred.
That forced the Jin emperor to abandon the
northern half of his empire. Genghis, who found himself ruling a domain that
included tens of millions of Chinese peasants, at first planned to simply kill
them all and transform the land into pasturage suitable for Mongol herds, until
taxation was explained to him, and he was persuaded that many live peasants
translate into a steady stream of income and wealth.
Genghis interrupted his campaign against the
Jin after a city governor in the powerful Khwarezmian Empire to the west
executed Mongol envoys sent by Genghis to its emir. The emir’s refusal to
surrender the offending governor was one of history’s direst errors. Genghis
launched a brilliant invasion of Khwarezim in 1218 that overwhelmed the empire
and extinguished it by 1221, while its fleeing emir was relentlessly chased
across his domain to his death, abandoned and exhausted, on a small Caspian
island as his pursuers closed in. It was in this war that the Mongols gained
their reputation for savagery. Millions of Khwarzmians died, as Genghis ordered
the massacre of entire cities that offered the least resistance, and sent
thousands of captives ahead of his armies as human shields.
By the time Genghis was done, Khwarezm had
been reduced from a thriving and wealthy empire to an impoverished and
depopulated wasteland. At the grand mosque in the once thriving but now
smoldering city of Bukhara, Genghis told the survivors that he was the Flail of
God, and that: “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a
punishment like me upon you“.
Genghis died in 1227, after falling from his
horse while campaigning in western China.
Jebe
“They are the Four Dogs of Temujin. They have
foreheads of brass, their jaws are like scissors, their tongues like piercing
awls, their heads are iron, their whipping tails swords . . . In the day of
battle, they devour enemy flesh. Behold, they are now unleashed, and they
slobber at the mouth with glee. These four dogs are Jebe, and Kublai, Jelme,
and Subotai.” — The Secret History of the Mongols
Jebe, born Zurgudai (d. 1225), was one of
Genghis Khan’s leading generals, who started his military career in his
enemies’ ranks. During a battle in 1201, Zurgudai shot Genghis in the neck with
an arrow. After winning the battle, a wounded Genghis asked his captives who
had had shot him. Zurgudai confessed, and Genghis, impressed by his honesty and
courage, took him in his service, and named him “Jebe”, meaning arrow – the
name by which he is known to history.
Jebe quickly rose through the ranks, and
within a few years had become one of Genghis’ most capable generals, entrusted
with independent commands such as the assignment to defeat Kuchlug, one of
Genghis’ last remaining Steppe enemies, and the subjugation of his Kara Khitai
state. Jebe accomplished the mission in quick order, capping off the conquest
by beheading Kuchlug. He then rejoined Genghis, and took part in the conquest
of the Khwarezmian Empire.
Once Khwarezm was subdued, Genghis gave Jebe
and Subutai permission to lead a great cavalry raid westward through northern
Persia, then up through the Caucasus, around the Caspian Sea, before turning
east to return to Mongolia. Jebe’s masterpiece occurred during that raid, at
the Battle of Kalka River in 1222, when he and Subutai conducted a feigned
retreat before a numerically superior army of Kievan Rus and Cumans, luring
them into following him for nine days, before turning on the pursuers and
slaughtering them nearly to a man.
That raid set the stage for a Mongol return
fifteen years later, this time in a full force invasion that conquered Kievan
Rus and overran Eastern Europe. Jebe, however, died in 1225, soon after his
return from that raid, and did not live to harvest what he had planted or see
the fruits of his work.
Subutai
Subutai (1175 – 1248), known as “Bagatur”
(The Valiant), was the Mongols’ most brilliant and successful general, and the
main military strategist of both Genghis Khan and his successor, Ogedei.
Hailing from a humble background, he rose through the ranks, and eventually
directed over 20 campaigns, conquered or overran 32 nations, and won 65
battles. He holds the distinction of having conquered more territory than any
other commander in history.
Subutai left home at age 14 to join the
Mongol army. Genghis Khan liked him and appointed him his door attendant, and
it from that close proximity to the Khan, Subutai learned the basics of
strategy and the Mongol art of war. In his first assignment, he convinced an enemy
garrison that he was a deserter from the Mongol army, won their confidence and
lulled them into letting down their guard, then signaled the Mongols to attack.
Deception would be a hallmark of his military success, as he would exhibit, on
a larger scale, in 1211 when he secured a major victory for Genghis over the
Jin by a timely appearance to surprise the enemy with a flank attack, after
convincing them that he was hundreds of miles away.
He also led the Mongol vanguard in the
conquest of Khwarezm, chased its emir to his death, and after that campaign,
led a reconnaissance in force on a circular route around the Caspian to the
north en route back to Mongolia, while Genghis returned via a circular southern
route that would brush against India.
Subutai’s route led through the Caucasus,
where he twice defeated the Georgians, then subjugated the Cumans. That brought
him into conflict with the Cumans’ Rus allies, so he and Jebe led them a merry
chase for days in a feigned retreat, before destroying them at the Battle of
Kalka River. They then returned to the east, where Subutai conducted successful
campaigns against the Chinese for the next decade, before returning to the west
and subjugating the Rus in the late 1230.
After reducing the Rus to vassalage, Subutai
invaded Eastern Europe in 1241, overseeing the operations of Mongol armies
separated by hundreds of miles, and bringing them to victory over their
respective opponents, in Poland and Hungary, within one day of each other.
Subutai was in command of the Mongols at the second victory, the Battle of
Mohi, which destroyed the Hungarian army and left Central Europe open. Subutai
was drawing plans to advance along the Danube to Vienna, then subjugate the
Holy Roman Empire, when news arrived of Khan Ogedei’s death.
Although he wanted to press on into Europe,
politics necessitated the return of Subutai and his forces to Mongolia to
participate in the selection of a new Khan. Subutai never returned, and spent
his final years campaigning against the Song Dynasty in southern China – and
thus Europe was spared the Mongol yoke that Russia would endure for centuries.
Muqali
Muqali (1170 – 1223) was born into a clan of
hereditary serfs, whom Genghis Khan freed after conquering their tribe and
absorbing it into his nascent Mongol nation. From his humble origins, Muqali
rose to become one of Genghis’ main generals, and played a leading role in
defeating the Jin Dynasty and conquering northern China.
Muqali had a major part in the Battle of
Yehuling in 1211, a multi-staged months long campaign that pitted 80,000 Mongol
invaders against a combined defensive force of 950,000 guarding mountain passes
and fortifications along a 300 km frontier. It culminated in a decisive victory
over the Jin, with over half the defenders killed, followed by the Jin
emperor’s assassination by one of his generals, and paved the way for the
dynasty’s demise and the Mongols’ conquest of northern China. During the
battle, Muqali distinguished himself and cemented his place in Genghis’ favor
by successfully leading a cavalry charge over mountainous terrain to seize a
vital pass.
When war broke out with the Khwarezmian
Empire in 1218, Genghis took most of the Mongols as he headed west to conquer
Khwarezm. He named Muqali his viceroy in China, gave him a royal title,
showered him with more lavish praise and gifts than he had given any of his
other generals, and left him behind with 20,000 men to keep the Jin in check
until Genghis’ return.
In the Khan’s absence, Muqali exceeded
expectations, and not only held off the Jin whose armies still numbered in the
hundreds of thousands, but went on the offensive against an enemy that
outnumbered him by more than 10:1. He repeatedly wrong footed the Jin and keept
them off balance by feints, rapidity of action and aggressiveness, and attacks
from unexpected directions. By the time Genghis returned in 1222, Muqali had
conquered most of northern China. He died of illness the following year, while
besieging a Jin fortress.
Ogedei
Ogedei (1185 – 1241) was Genghis Khan’s third
son and unexpected successor. His two older brothers, Jochi and Chagatai, were
ahead of him in the line of succession but had developed a bitter enmity. Jochi
claimed the right to inherit as eldest, but Chagatai countered that Jochi,
whose parentage was questionable because their mother had been kidnapped by an
enemy of Genghis in the year before Jochi’s birth, was a bastard, making
Chagatai the eldest true born son. When it became clear that the empire would
descend into civil war if either inherited, Ogedei was selected as a compromise
heir.
Realizing that he was not Genghis’ military
equal, Ogedei was open to wise counsel and, relying on capable subordinates,
greatly expanded the frontiers of the Mongol Empire to its greatest southward
and westward extents. From his capital in Mongolis, he directed simultaneous
campaigns on multiple fronts separated by thousands of miles, relying on field
generals acting independently within their theaters, but subject to Ogedei’s
orders, relayed via a swift horse relay courier network.
In the east, the Mongols continued the
campaign against the Jin, in alliance with the Song Dynasty in southern China.
Ogedei commanded in person until 1232, then returned to Mongolia, entrusting to
subordinates the final mopping up operations, which terminated with the
extinguishment of the Jin Dynasty in 1234. The Mongols then fell out with their
Song allies, and a new campaign began against southern China. Simultaneously,
Ogedei’s Mongols invaded the Korean Peninsula and asserted Mongol suzerainty.
In the south, Ogedei’s armies invaded India,
marching into the Indus Valley and on to the Delhi Sultanate, occupying parts
of today’s Pakistan and the Punjab. Simultaneously, another Mongol army marched
into and subdued Kashmir.
In the west, Ogedei’s armies marched out of
the recently conquered Khwarezm to subdue the remainder of today’s Central
Asia, overruninguing Khorasan, Afghanistan, Persia, and reaching Mespotomia.
From there, they turned northward and conquered Armenia, Georgia, and the
Caucasus region, then continued to reduce Russia to centuries of vassalage.
Afterwards, they penetrated into Eastern Europe, capturing Poland, Bulgaria,
Hungary, and reaching the Adriatic Sea. The Mongol forces in Europe under
Subutai were drawing plans to continue the advance into Italy and Central
Europe, when news arrived of Ogedei’s death, which necessitated a halt to the
campaign and a return to Mongolia for the selection of a new Khan.
Batu
Khan
Batu (1207 – 1255) was a grandson of Genghis
who accompanied and, as a member of the Mongol royal family, was in nominal
command of, Subatai’s campaign that conquered Russia and penetrated Europe to
the Adriatic Sea and the walls of Vienna. He went on to found the Golden Horde
– an independent Mongol state on the western Steppe that dominated Russia and
the Caucasus for two and a half centuries, and that included at its peak most
of Eastern Europe, with a territory extending from the Danube to Siberia.
Batu’s father, Jochi, had been entrusted by
Genghis Khan to administer the Mongolian Empire’s west, comprised during
Genghis’ days of Central Asia and Siberia. After Jochi’s death in 1227, the
task fell to Batu. In 1237, with Subutai as his military commander, Batu
initiated the Mongol conquest of Russia, which was completed by 1241. The
Mongols then launched a multi pronged invasion of Eastern Europe, with one army
in Poland defeating a coalition of Germans and Poles, while another Mongol army
defeated a larger Hungarian force hundreds of miles to the south.
Batu and Subutai then crossed the Carpathians
and concentrated in Hungary for a campaign against Central and Western Europe,
when news arrived of the Great Khan Ogedei’s death. Subutai wanted to continue,
but Batu had ambitions of becoming the next Great Khan and, as a member of the
royal family, outranked Subutai. He insisted that all return to Mongolia to
participate in the selection of the new Mongol ruler, and thus, in 1242, with
all of Europe within their reach and at their mercy, the Mongols decamped from
Hungary and rode back to Mongolia.
Batu failed in his bid to get selected the
next Great Khan, and returned to administer his own domain from his new
capital, Sarai, on the Volga. In 1251, the Great Khan in Mongolia recognized
the independence and complete autonomy of Batu’s domain, which was known
thereafter as the Golden Horde. It lasted into the 16th century before breaking
up, with the last fragment surviving until 1847.
Hulagu
Hulagu (1217 – 1265) was a grandson of
Genghis Khan and younger brother of the Grand Khans Mongke and Kublai, who
expanded the Mongol domain into Western Asia with a savagery that remains in
the region’s memory to this day. He destroyed Baghdad and extinguished the
Abbasid Caliphate, conquered Syria, menaced Egypt and the surviving Crusader
states, and while destroying medieval Persian culture, founded the Ilkhanate in
Persia, a precursor of modern Iran.
In 1251, Hulagu was recognized by his brother
Mongke as ruler of the Ilkhanate in Persia, and tasked to extend Mongol power
into the Islamic world. As a preliminary, Hulagu attacked and exterminated the
Assassins cult, a militant Islamic sect that had terrorized the Middle East for
generations. He then turned to the Abbasid Caliphate, and when the Caliph
refused to submit, Hulagu invaded and besieged him in Baghdad, captured the
city in 1258 and destroyed it along with all its treasures, such as the Grand
Library of Baghdad, and massacred between 200,000 to a million inhabitants. To
avoid a Mongol taboo against spilling royal blood, the captured Caliph was
executed by being rolled into a carpet, which was then trampled by Mongols
riding over it. That ended the Abbasids, and the Islamic institution of the
Caliphate.
Hulagu then conquered Syria, bringing to an
end the Ayubbid dynasty founded by Saladin. He then set his eyes on Egypt, but
on the eve of invasion he received word that his brother Mongke had died. As a
potential successor, Hulagu returned to Mongolia, and in his absence, the
Mongols he left behind under a trusted subordinate were wiped out by the
Egyptian Mamluks at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 – the first major defeat of
a Mongol army, and one that broke the spell of Mongol invincibility.
Hulagu was not selected to succeed his
brother as Great Khan, so he returned west to avenge the defeat at Ain Jalut,
but ended up warring with a cousin, Batu Khan’s brother Berke, who had
succeeded to leadership of the Golden Horde, converted to Islam, and was
enraged by Hulagu’s rampage in the Muslim world. The war with Berke was
Hulagu’s main focus for the remainder of his life, until his death in 1265.
Kublai
Khan
Kublai Khan (1215 – 1294) was a grandson of
Genghis Khan and brother of the Great Khan, Mongke, whom he succeeded in 1260.
He conquered the Song Dynasty of southern China and founded the Yuan Dynasty,
thus reuniting China for the first time in centuries. He was the nominal
overlord of all other Mongol domains, from the Pacific to the Carpathians, but
his writ and attention were focused on the territory he personally ruled in
China and its periphery, which was wealthier and more populous than all the
remaining Mongol khanates put together.
Kublai heeded the advice that “one can
conquer an empire on horseback, but cannot rule it on horseback“. After
conquering the Song in a campaign that he largely led in person, he spent the
bulk of his remaining years in governance rather than military affairs. He
ordered expansions along the periphery of his domain that met with mixed
success, or ended in disaster such as two attempted invasions of Japan that
were wrecked by typhoons, but domestic politics and governance interested him
more than war.
His reign and founding of the Yuan Dynasty
marked the transition that successful nomadic conquerors eventually underwent,
eschewing the roughneck ways of the Steppe as they came to appreciate the
benefits of settled life, and getting absorbed into the civilization which they
had conquered. Kublai encountered fierce resistance from Mongol traditionalists
who preferred the old ways and their felt tents to the courtly life in Chinese
palaces, but he prevailed in the end.
Kublai’s conquest of the Song Dynasty
reunified China after centuries of fragmentation, and the borders of the Yuan
Dynasty, encompassing Manchuria, Tibet, and Mongolia, established the broad
outline of Chinese territorial suzerainty that survives to this day.
Tamerlane
Tamerlane (1336 – 1405) was the last of the
great Eurasian Steppe conquerors to terrify the civilized world widespread
devastation and butchery. He is chiefly remembered for his savagery, and his
wide ranging rampage, from India to Russia and the Mediterranean and points in
between, is estimated to have killed about 17 million people, amounting to 5
percent of the world’s population at the time.
Tamerlane, a Muslim Turko-Mongol who claimed
descent from Genghis Khan, was born in the Chagatai Khanate, ruled by Genghis’
descendants, in today’s Uzbekistan. His rise began in 1360, when he led Turkic
tribesmen on behalf of the Chagatai Khan, but following the Khan’s murder, a
struggle for power ensued, at the end of which Tamerlane emerged as the power
behind a throne occupied by a figurehead Chagatai puppet through whom Tamerlane
ruled. While his claimed descent from Genghis is dubious, Tamerlane justified
his conquests as a restoration of the Mongol Empire and re-imposition of
legitimate Mongol rule over lands seized by usurpers.
He then spent 35 years earning a reputation
for savagery while bringing fire and sword to the lands between the Indus and
the Volga, the Himalayas and the Mediterranean. Among the cities he left
depopulated and in ruins were Damascus and Aleppo in Syria; Baghdad in Iraq;
Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, and Ryazan, both in Russia; India’s Delhi,
outside whose walls he massacred over 100,000 captives; and Isfahan in Iran,
where he massacred 200,000. Tamerlane was also in the habit of piling up
pyramids of severed heads, cementing live prisoners into the walls of captured
cities, and erecting towers of his victims’ skulls as object lessons and to
terrorize would-be opponents.
His most impressive victory came at the
expense of the Ottoman Turks, a rising power in their own right, as exuberantly
confident in their prowess as was Tamerlane. For years, insulting letters were
exchanged between Tamerlane and the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid, until Tamerlane
finally showed up and defeated him in 1402, took him captive, and humiliated
him by keeping him in a cage at court, while Bayazid’s favorite wife was made
to serve Tamerlane and his courtiers, naked.
His decades-long rampage finally came to an
end in 1405 as he was preparing to invade China, but he took ill while encamped
and died before launching the campaign.
@ History Collection
Related posts : a) History Genghis Khan b) 10 Brutal Moments In The Conquests Of Genghis Khan
Related posts : a) History Genghis Khan b) 10 Brutal Moments In The Conquests Of Genghis Khan
