Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Subodei set the conquest of the Volga River, occupied by the Bulgars, as his initial objective. In 1236, the Year of the Monkey, the main army set out. They moved with a party of about two hundred scouts in front and with a rear guard of another two hundred warriors. Once they reached the Volga, the real invasion began. At this point, the Mongols enacted their unusual but, for them, tried-and-true strategy of dividing their army and invading on at least two fronts at once. In this way, the enemy could not tell which city or prince would be the main target. If any prince took his army from his home city to help another prince, then the other Mongol army could attack the undefended one. With such uncertainty and danger to his home base, every prince kept his army at home to guard his own territory, and none came to the aid of the others.

Subodei led his forces north up the Volga toward the homeland of the Bulgars, while Mongke, the eldest son of the deceased Tolui, led another force south toward the Kipchak Turks. Some of the Kipchak fled from him, but others agreed to join the Mongols in attacking the Russian cities. After the quick routing of the Volga Bulgars, the Mongols used their territory for the base camp and a reserve of millions of animals pastured on the steppes for hundreds of miles to the east. Some of the nomadic tribes already living in the eastern European plains joined with the Mongols, while others fled from them and spread fear and panic ahead of the invaders.

From the Volga, they began a three-year campaign across what would later become Russia and Ukraine. In their probes, they found the city-states and principalities still as divided and antagonistic toward one another as they had been when the Mongols invaded nearly two decades earlier. The Mongols followed the same protocols in every case. They began the campaign in each territory by sending official envoys to request the capital city to surrender, join the Mongol family, and become the vassals of the Great Khan. If they agreed, the envoy offered protection to the new vassals from their enemies and allowed them to keep their ruling family and their religion. In return for such protections, the people had to agree to commit tribute of 10 percent of all wealth and goods to the Mongols. Few cities took the offer.

The Mongols made the city of Riazan one of the first targets. The Chronicle of Novgorod for 1238 recorded that “Tartars came in countless numbers, like locusts.” First, small units of Mongol warriors divided to scourge the countryside. Each Mongol warrior seized a set number of civilians for the jobs ahead, such as digging fortifications, cutting trees, and hauling supplies. They then burned the villages and sent the remaining peasants scrambling toward safety within the city’s wooden walls. When the Mongol army finally reached the city, they sent, much to the consternation and horror of the people gathered inside, a woman ambassador to deliver their terms and demand surrender. Fearing that she was a witch, the city officials refused to admit her for any negotiation, and the Mongols prepared for attack.

Everything about the invading Mongols must have seemed horrifying to the Russians. “They have hard and robust breasts,” wrote an observer, “lean and pale faces, stiff high shoulders, and short distorted noses; their chins are sharp and prominent, the upper jaw low and deep, the teeth long and few, their eyebrows stretch from the hair to the nose, their eyes are black and restless, their countenances long and grim, their extremities bony and nervous, their legs thick but short below the knee.” When attacking, the Mongol warriors wore a light leather armor that was thick in the front but thin at the back so “that they might not be tempted to run away.” In battle, “they use darts, clubs, battle-axes, and swords . . . and fight bravely and unyieldingly, but their chief prerogative is their use of the bow.” If captured, “they never ask for mercy, and themselves never spare the vanquished.” It is their “intention and fixed purpose of reducing all the world under their dominion.”

Instead of attacking the walls of Riazan, the Mongols used their massive number of conscripted laborers in a project that confused and terrified the citizens even more. The workers cut down trees, hauled them to the Mongol lines outside the city, and rapidly began building a wall completely surrounding the already walled city. The Mongol wall formed a strong stockade that surrounded the city completely, sealed off the gates, and prevented the city’s defenders from sending out forays of troops to attack the Mongols or to destroy their siege machines. The wall was a wooden form of the traditional line, the nerge, used to enclose the animals in a group hunt. The Mongol wall cut off routes for reinforcements to arrive in the city or to bring food or supplies. Probably the most psychologically horrifying effect of the wall was that it sealed the people into their own city without hope of escape. Behind their wall, the Mongols remained out of range of the bows fired from the city wall, and they could set up their siege engines and other equipment without being seen.

From the safety of catwalks behind their own newly built wall, the Mongol warriors now looked down upon the city of Riazan exactly as generations of Mongol hunters had looked down at their tightly bunched hunting prey from behind the safety of their ropes strung from trees and hung with felt blankets. Already accustomed to attackers using catapults and battering rams, the city dwellers had not experienced the innovations in bombardment that the Mongols had developed into a new form of warfare. Their catapults rained down rocks, chunks of wood, flaming pots of naphtha, gunpowder, and other unknown substances. The Mongols used these as incendiaries to spread fires, but also as smoke bombs and to create terrible smells, which, at that time in Europe, were thought to be both acts of evil magic and the source of disease. In addition to shooting fire, the firelances could launch a small incendiary rocket or hurl exploding grenades over enemy walls. The mysterious devices provoked such terror that the victims later reported that the Mongols traveled not only with horses but with trained attack dragons as well.

In the bombardment of the city, the fire, smoke, and confusion caused by these unknown substances from an unseen invader demoralized the people as much as it destroyed their defenses. After five terrorizing and highly destructive days of bombardment, the Mongols finally emerged from behind their wall and attacked the damaged city walls with scaling ladders and battering rams. Within the day, they had taken the city. The civilians sought refuge in their church, where many of them died in the conflagration ignited by the Mongol attack. The victors rounded up the ruling aristocrats and executed them all. As a contemporary Russian chronicler wrote of the carnage, after the Mongol army passed “no eye remained open to cry for the dead.” The Mongols culled the captives to be kept for labor and forced large numbers of people to flee on to the next city. Not only did the refugees carry gory details of the attack to terrify the residents of the next city, but the increasing number of refugees would, once again, strain the capacity of that city before the Mongols arrived to attack it as well.

While the new prisoners dismantled the stockade wall and began transporting the logs on toward the next targeted city, a cadre of Mongol census takers followed the army to record the number of people, animals, and products seized. They divided the goods and the captives into lots according to the laws of shares for everyone from orphans and widows to the Golden Family. Then they sent thousands of prisoners to transport the goods back to Karakorum.

The refugees spread information about the Mongols across Europe, as can be seen from the chronicle written by Matthew Paris, a monk of the Benedictine abbey at St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England. In 1240 he recorded the oldest known mention of the Mongols in western Europe, calling them “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan” and “like demons loosed from Tartarus.” He wrote, incorrectly, that “they are called Tartars, from a river called Tartar, which runs through their mountains.” Tartarus was the Greek name for Hell, the lowest cavern beneath Hades, where the Titans had been condemned after creating a war among the gods.

Paris wrote that the Mongols “ravaged the eastern countries with lamentable destruction, spreading fire and slaughter wherever they went.” He then described in specific detail the horror of these invaders who “razed cities to the ground, burnt woods, pulled down castles, tore up the vine-trees, destroyed gardens, and massacred the citizens and husbandmen; if by chance they did spare any who begged their lives, they compelled them, as slaves of the lowest condition, to fight in front of them against their own kindred. And if they merely pretended to fight, or perhaps warned their countrymen to flee, the Tartars following in their rear, slew them; and if they fought bravely and conquered, they gained no thanks by way of recompense, and thus these savages ill-treated their captives as though they were horses.”

Matthew Paris’s diatribe against the Mongol invaders escalated from frenzied alarm to hysterical loathing: “The men are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings.” Interspersed in the contemptuous vitriol, he did relay some important and accurate information: “They clothe themselves in the skins of bulls, and are armed with iron lances; they are short in stature and thickset, compact in their bodies, and of great strength; invincible in battle, indefatigable in labour; they wear no armour on the back part of their bodies, but are protected by it in front; they drink the blood which flows from their flocks, and consider it a delicacy; they have large powerful horses, which eat leaves and even the trees themselves, and which owing to the shortness of their legs, they mount by three steps instead of stirrups.” Other parts of his description have a kernel of truth mixed with some odd misperceptions: “They have no human laws, know no mercy, and are more cruel than lions or bears; they have boats made of the hides of oxen, ten or twelve having one amongst them; they are skilful in sailing or swimming, hence they cross the largest and most rapid rivers without any delay or trouble; and when they have no blood, they greedily drink disturbed and even muddy water.”

At the same time in 1240 that Matthew Paris recorded these observations, the Mongols had finished capturing most of the regional cities of Russia and were preparing to capture the largest and most important political and religious center in the Slavic world—Kiev. Taking advantage of early ice to cross the rivers in November 1240, the Year of the Rat, Mongol envoys arrived at the gates of Kiev. Not unexpectedly, the city authorities murdered them and arrogantly pinioned the bodies above the city gate.

Under the leadership of Mongke, the Mongol army amassed around the city in the early winter in what the Russian priests recorded as “clouds of Tatars.” The noise of the Mongols was said to be so loud that people inside the city could not hear one another talk. As the soldiers fought to hold the walls, the civilians sought refuge in the magnificent Church of the Virgin. When no room remained to take in anyone else, the people closed the doors. Still hoping to find protective proximity to the virgin’s shrine, many other terrified refugees clambered up the church walls seeking sanctuary on the roof. The number grew so large that their weight caused the entire building to collapse, crushing the throngs inside.

When the Mongol forces took the city on December 6, 1240, they looted and burned it to the ground. The Kievan commander Dmitri had fought so hard, even after being abandoned by many of the city’s aristocrats, that Batu, with great appreciation of his military talent and tenaciousness, released him and let him live. The Russian phase of the Mongol invasion was coming to a successful close. Only a little more than one year later, in the entry for 1242, the Novgorod Chronicle began referring to the new ruler not only as Khan Batu of the Mongols, but also as Tsar Batu, a title that literally meant Caesar Batu, signifying a newly united rule over the many warring princely families of Russia. As Prince Michael said on being presented before Batu Khan, “To thee, Tsar, I bow, since God hath granted thee the sovereignty of this world.”

With the fall of Kiev, the Mongol conquest of the European east was complete. The Mongols evicted more refugees to flee toward the west and begin terrorizing central Europe with their tales before the Mongols arrived. The refugees barely had time to get away before Subodei sent out new scouting squads in February 1241, while the rivers were still frozen and the riders could more easily and quickly reach the plains of Hungary. On the battlefields of Europe, future control of the Mongol Empire and the world was being fought over—not in the battles themselves, which proved relatively easy for the Mongols to win, but in the political skirmishing behind the scene among the grandsons of Genghis Khan. The compromised selection of Ogodei as the Great Khan after the death of his father had not settled the issue of succession; it had merely postponed it for a generation, and that generation was now in command of the Mongol armies across Europe and already vying for leadership.

Subodei was accompanied by representatives from the family of each of Genghis Khan’s four sons. After the death of Ogodei’s favorite son, one of these young men would become the next Great Khan, but which one? Under Mongol law, the person would have to be elected at a khuriltai, and the campaign in Europe was the proving ground and the election campaign for each of them. The grandsons jockeyed for leadership and for precedence in the emerging hierarchy, and part of this involved seizing credit for the military victories. As with many Mongol political processes, they reach a climactic expression in a fight over who took precedence. At a victory banquet, Batu stood and offered the opening toast. By drinking first, he demonstrated his position as the eldest and the highest ranking of the grandsons, tantamount to publicly proclaiming that he expected be the next Great Khan. Guyuk objected vehemently, claiming that he should be served before Batu because his father was the Great Khan. Another, named Buri, who was “headstrong and brave” but who “uttered harsh words when he drank,” resurrected the oldest and most painful issue in the family when he angrily denounced Batu as not really a member of the family because his father was a Merkid bastard.

According to a report that later made its way back to the Great Khan, the three princes spent a long time shouting and screaming at one another. “You are nothing more than an old woman with a beard,” Buri screamed at Batu. “Batu is just an old woman with a quiver,” echoed Guyuk. Outraged at their treatment by the rest of the family, Guyuk and Buri stormed out of the banquet, mounted their horses, and rode away swearing and cursing. When word reached Ogodei Khan of the incident, he was livid. Ogodei summoned the young men back to court. He initially refused to see them and threatened to have his son Guyuk executed. “May he rot like an egg!” Ogodei said of his ill-behaved son.

When he calmed down and finally admitted Guyuk into his ger, he reprimanded him harshly for fighting within the family and for mistreating his soldiers. “You broke the spirit of every man in your army,” he charged. In insightful questioning into the proper way to treat one’s own troops, Ogodei Khan asked his son, “Do you think that the Russians surrendered because of how mean you were to your own men? Do you think that they surrendered because they were afraid of you?” he added mockingly. “Because you captured one or two warriors, you think that you won the war. But you did not capture even a single kid goat.”

Ogodei continue his tirade against his son: “This was your first time out of the ger, and so you try to flaunt your manhood. You act as though you achieved everything. You shout and scream at people as though they were animals.” He finally calmed down with soothing words from the sons of his other brothers. He quoted a saying of his father’s about the need to let army matters be settled out on the steppe, then sent all the boys back to continue the conquest of Europe.

Europe had heard little of the earlier conquests of Genghis Khan in Asia and had only the faintest glimmer of information about his destruction of the Khwarizm empire—but suddenly, with the fall of Kiev, a mass of refugees and stories came pouring out of eastern Europe. Right behind them came the feared Mongol horsemen, seemingly from every direction. Matthew Paris wrote that the Mongols invaded the West “with the force of lightning into the territories of the Christians, laying waste the country, committing great slaughter, and striking inexpressible terror and alarm into every one.” This reference to “lightning” warfare was possibly the first mention of the style that later acquired the German name Blitzkrieg.

Subodei dispatched a three-pronged army of fifty thousand toward Hungary in the south and a smaller, diversionary force of twenty thousand across Poland toward Germany in the north. The Mongol armies swept across some four thousand miles from their home base in Mongolia, on across the plains of eastern Europe, and into Poland and Hungary—right up to the walls of Vienna and the German cities of the Teutonic Knights and the Hanseatic League. In the north, they jumped across Poland like a stone skipping across an icy pond. One city after another fell as the Mongols ripped through the country. Duke Henry II of Silesia assembled an army of thirty thousand, including knights from throughout Germany, France, and Poland; in his panicked conscription of all potential soldiers, he even drafted a contingent of gold miners to fight the invaders. On April 9, 1241, the two armies met at Liegnitz, near the modern German-Polish border. The Mongols chose an open area for the fighting about six miles from the city, and the battlefield became thereafter known in German as Wahlstatt, the Chosen Place.

Duke Henry ordered his cavalry to charge the Mongol ranks. The Mongols repulsed the first wave, but they seemed to yield to the second and then suddenly turned in flight. With cries of victory, the European knights broke ranks and began chasing the Mongols, who retreated slowly, only a short distance beyond the weapons of the knights. Then, precisely when the European horses began to tire under the heavy armor of their riders, thundering explosive noises erupted around them and heavy smoke engulfed them, causing great confusion. As described by chronicler Jan Dlugosz, the Mongols used on the battlefield a device resembling a “great head, from which there suddenly bursts a cloud with a foul smell that envelops the Poles and makes them all but faint, so that they are incapable of fighting.” The smoke and noise cut off the European knights from the archers and infantry far behind them. Once again, the Mongols had made their enemies overconfident and then lured them into a fatal trap. Spread out, disorganized, confused, and tiring quickly, the knights and their horses posed easy targets for the Mongols, who turned and began shooting them down.

The Mongols crushed the Germans. European records document the deaths of twenty-five thousand of Duke Henry’s thirty thousand men, but Mongols took many of those captive, particularly the miners, an occupation little understood but much appreciated by the Mongols, who constantly sought out people with novel skills and talents. The victors marched thousands of the miners east to begin mining the rich mineral deposits in Dzungaria, the western Mongolian area that was the personal property of Ogodei.

The entire campaign from Kiev to Germany had been merely a Mongol diversion to keep the Europeans from sending soldiers to fend off the real Mongol objective: invading the grassy plains of Hungary. Having succeeded in killing off most of the northern army and in scattering and neutralizing the rest, the Mongol force withdrew from the Polish and German cities; in time, the local people convinced themselves that they actually had won the battle and repulsed the invaders. The fallen Duke Henry II became a martyr as Henry the Devout, and a Benedictine monastery was built with the altar over the exact spot where, according to Christian mythology, his mother, Saint Hedwig, found his headless, naked corpse, identifying it by the six toes on his left foot. Much later, in the nineteenth century, the Prussian government turned the abbey into a military school, where they trained the future German officers with special emphasis on the tactics of the battle that took place there.

Within days, the Mongol tactics used to defeat and massacre the German knights were replayed in Hungary on a larger field with many times more casualties. After Subodei’s army of fifty thousand had pillaged much of Hungary, they began to retreat when King Bela and his army came after them. Subodei retreated for several days until he arrived at the topography best suited to Mongol victory on the Plain of Mohi. There, the Hungarians gathered into a densely packed camp that was fortified with a circle of wagons and heavy iron chains where the king kept them cooped up for several days. For Batu, accustomed to having his men spread out to sleep in small groups, the Hungarian decision to mass in such a tight formation with a chain around them was identical to the circle of rope and felt blankets with which the Mongols engulfed their prey on large group hunts. The Mongols pulled up catapults and began hurling their mysterious assortment of naphtha, gunpowder, flaming oil, and other substances.

Unable to tolerate the smoke and fire, the Hungarians moved out of their camp. They found themselves virtually surrounded by the Mongols, but in one area, it seemed that the Mongols had forgotten to station their horsemen. In what must have seemed a near miracle to the Christian Hungarians, the gap lay precisely in the direction of their capital of Pest, three days flight away. The Hungarians moved out toward home. As the Hungarians fled, their panic grew. They raced on foot and on horseback, broke ranks, spread out, and dropped their equipment in order to flee more quickly. Of course, the Mongols had not left the gap open by accident; they already had stationed horsemen to wait for the fleeing, frightened Hungarians. The Mongols chased many of the men into bogs and marshes to drown them. The chronicler Thomas of Spalato, archdeacon of what is now the city of Split in Croatia, described the Mongols as de Peste Tartorum, the Tartar Plague, and he wrote the most vivid account of their slaughter of the Hungarians: “The dead fell to the right and to left; like leaves in winter, the slain bodies of these miserable men were strewn along the whole route; blood flowed like torrents of rain.”

Their knights having failed to defeat the Mongols on the battlefield, the clergy now tried to subdue them through supernatural devices. Perhaps in the knowledge that many of the Mongols were Christian, but not knowing how much the Mongols detested and feared exposure to the remains of the dead, Christian priests attempted to keep the Mongols out of Pest by parading the bones and other relics of their saints before the approaching army. The exposure to pieces of dead bodies enraged the Mongols, for whom such acts were ritually contaminating as well as disgusting. The fearful and angry Mongols not only slew the clerics, but burned the relics and the churches as well to purify themselves from the pollution. For Europe, the encounter had proven as much a religious setback as a military loss, for in addition to the soldiers and king killed, Hungary lost a bishop, two archbishops, and many religious knights of the Templars.

The Mongols had destroyed the knighthood of the country and chased King Bela IV south to the Adriatic. Several texts survived to describe the tremendous psychological and emotional impact of the Mongol invasion, including the Carmen Miserabile super Destructione Regni Hungariae per Tartaros, or Sad Song of the Destruction of Hungary by the Tartars, by Roger of Torre Maggiore. European knighthood never recovered from the blow of losing nearly one hundred thousand soldiers in Hungary and Poland, what the Europeans mourned as “the flower” of their knighthood and aristocracy. Walled cities and heavily armored knights were finished, and in the smoke and gunpowder of that Easter season of 1241, the Mongol triumph portended the coming total destruction of European feudalism and the Middle Ages.

Later in 1241, only a few months after the Mongol victories, alarm turned to panic when an eclipse blotted out the sun on Sunday, October 6. People across Europe interpreted the solar eclipse on the sacred day as a certain sign of yet more suffering to come at the hands of the Mongols. The panic was fed by the ignorance of the identity of the attackers. In a widely circulated letter filled with erroneous information, a cleric reported to the archbishop of Bordeaux that the Mongols were “cannibals from Hell who eat the dead after a battle and leave only bones, which even the vultures are too noble to peck.” According to this detailed and purposefully incendiary account, the Mongols enjoyed eating old women, and they celebrated their victories by gang raping Christian virgins until they died of exhaustion. Then “their breasts were cut off to be kept as dainties for their chiefs, and their bodies furnished a jovial banquet to the savages.”

The sequence of consecutive Mongol victories over the Bulgars, the Russians, the Hungarians, the Germans, and the Poles caused widespread alarm and near panic in some quarters. Who were these people and what did they want? As Matthew Paris lamented, no European knew their language: “For never till this time has there been any mode of access to them, nor have they themselves come forth, so as to allow any knowledge of their customs or persons to be gained through common intercourse with other men.”

With no other source of helpful information, the Christian clerics looked to the Bible for an answer. The name Tartar sounded to them like Tarshish, whose king “shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” The psalm also stated: “They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents.”

For the clerics, the mention of bringing presents connected the king of Tarshish with the three kings of the East who brought gifts to the Christ child, and suddenly they saw an explanation to connect these passages with the Mongols. In 1164, German Crusaders returning from foreign campaigns brought home bones that they claimed were from the Three Kings; in 1181, the Germans began construction of an elaborate reliquary of golden enamel to hold the remains in their marvelous new cathedral of Cologne. Consequently, because of this episode and what everyone realized was the theft of sacred relics, the Christians feared that the Tartars were invading Europe in order to reclaim the bones of their ancestors. In that case, the Mongols would likely cut straight through the heart of Europe to reach their goal at Cologne.

When the Mongols veered south from Hungary toward the Balkans and thereby failed to ride on Cologne, the clerics deduced that if the Mongols were not searching for the bones of the Three Kings, perhaps the invaders were exiled Jews who had failed to return home from the Babylonian captivity. They had been shut up and sealed off by a river that ran beyond Persia. Christian chroniclers reported that the year 1241 corresponded to the year 5000 in the Jewish calendar, and that year, many Jews were expecting the coming of the Messiah or a reappearance of King David.

Matthew Paris initially seemed skeptical of this claim since the Mongols did not speak Hebrew and had no law, which clearly contradicted the biblical account of God’s giving the law to Moses. With no other better explanation, however, Paris soon found a way to justify the link between the Mongols and the Jews and the parallels between the time of Moses and his own era. These new people could be missing Hebrew tribes since “in the time of the government of Moses their rebellious hearts were perverted to an evil way of thinking, so that they followed after strange gods and unknown customs, so now in a more wonderful manner, owing to the vengeance of God, they were unknown to every other nation, and their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational wild beast.”

Because of “the enormous wickedness of the Jews,” the Christians accused them of bringing the wrath of the Mongols on innocent Christians. According to Paris’s highly unlikely report, the European Jewish leaders “assembled on a general summons in a secret place.” The “wisest and most influential amongst them” spoke, explaining that their “brethren of the tribes of Israel, who were formerly shut up, have gone forth to bring the whole world to subjection to them and to us. And the more severe and the more lasting that our former suffering has been, the greater will be the glory that will ensue to us.” The speaker supposedly wanted the other Jews to greet the Mongols “with valuable gifts, and receive them with the highest honour: they are in need of corn, wine, and arms.” Accordingly, the Jews collected “all the swords, daggers, and armour, they could find for sale anywhere, and, in order to conceal their treachery, securely, stowed them away in casks.” With no better explanation forthcoming, the Christians accepted this story as proof of “the hidden treachery and extraordinary deceit of the Jews.” They were therefore at once handed over to the executioners, to be either consigned to perpetual imprisonment, or to be slain with their own swords.

No matter how absurd the details and no matter the lack of evidence, the stories evoked terribly real and disastrous consequences across Europe. Unable to defeat the Mongols, their enemy menacing the boundaries of their civilization, the Europeans could defeat the Jews, their imagined enemies at home. In one city after another from York to Rome, angry Christian crowds attacked the Jewish quarters of their cities. The Christians attempted to punish the Jews with the same treatment that they had heard the Mongols had used in their campaigns. The Christians set fire to Jewish homes and massacred the residents. Those Jews who managed to escape the cities fled from place to place in search of refuge, but in almost all communities, they found more persecution. To clearly identify which refugees were Jewish refugees and to prevent their entering new Christian communities, the church ordered that Jews had to wear distinctive clothes and emblems to mark them for all to see.

With the destruction of the Hungarian army, the route lay open to Vienna, and within weeks, terrified locals saw the Mongol scouting parties prowling around the outlying districts of the city. In a skirmish with one of these advance guards, the Hapsburg troops captured a Mongol officer, who, to the surprise and consternation of the Christians, turned out to be a middle-aged literate Englishman who had made his way through the Holy Land, where he seemed to have developed a talent for learning languages and transcribing them. There is some speculation that with his level of education and his flight from England, he may have been involved in the effort to force King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. After fleeing England and facing excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, he ended up in the service of the more tolerant Mongols. The presence of a European, and a former Christian, among the Mongol army made it clear that the Mongols really were humans and not a horde of demons, but the terrified Christians killed the English apostate before they could get a good accounting of the Mongols’ mysterious mission outside Vienna.

The capture of the unnamed Englishman coincided with the end of Mongol penetration into Europe. They had followed the grass steppes across central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary; but where the pastures ended, the Mongols stopped. With five horses per warrior, they needed that pasture to function. Their marked advantages of speed, mobility, and surprise were all lost when they had to pick their way through forests, rivers, and plowed fields with crops and ditches, hedges, and wooden fences. The soft furrows of the peasant’s field offered an insecure foothold for the horses. The place where fields began also marked the transition from the dry steppe to the humid climate of the coastal zones, where the dampness caused the Mongol bows to lose strength and accuracy.

Despite their probes across the Danube, the full-scale Mongol invasion of western Europe failed to materialize. On December 11, 1241, Ogodei, reportedly in a drunken stupor, died. News of the death reached the Mongol forces in Europe, four thousand miles from Karakorum, within four to six weeks. Chaghatai died at about the same time, and thus in the mere fourteen years since the death of Genghis Khan, all four of his sons had died, and now the princes, Genghis Khan’s grandsons, raced home to continue their battles against each other in the quest to become the next Great Khan. The struggle among the lineages would last another ten years—and for at least this decade, the rest of the world would be safe from Mongol invasion.

Over the early months of 1242, the Year of the Tiger, the Mongols withdrew from western Europe back to their stronghold in Russia. The European cities produced little loot, and the armies the Mongols routed had been poorly supplied. The most valuable asset the Mongols took with them were the tents and furnishing of the Hungarian king’s camp, which Batu used for his base camp on the Volga River. Despite the lack of goods, the Mongols had found a variety of craftsmen such as the miners from Saxony, scribes and translators, and, from their raids around Belgrade and the Balkans, a contingent of French prisoners that included at least one Parisian goldsmith.

Disappointed with the material reward of their invasion and eager to show some profit, the Mongol officers struck a deal with the Italian merchants stationed in the Crimea. In exchange for large amounts of trade goods, the Mongols allowed the Italians to take many of their European prisoners, especially the young ones, to sell as slaves around the Mediterranean. This began a long and lucrative relationship between the Mongols and the merchants of Venice and Genoa, who set up trading posts in the Black Sea to tap this new market. The Italians supplied the Mongols with manufactured goods in return for the right to sell the Slavs in the Mediterranean markets.

This decision to sell the young people would create a major future problem for the Mongols, because the Italians sold most of their slaves to the sultan of Egypt, who used them in his slave army. In another twenty years, the Mongols were destined to meet this army composed mostly of Slavs and Kipchaks who had plenty of experience fighting the Mongols, and in many cases had even learned the Mongol language before being transported away. That future meeting along the Sea of Galilee in modern Israel would prove to have a far different outcome than the first meeting on the plains of Russia.

7

Warring Queens

Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has

He given different ways to men.

M

ONGKE

K

HAN

WHILE THE MONGOL men stayed busy on the battlefield conquering foreign countries, women managed the empire. Among the herding tribes, women traditionally managed the affairs at home while men went off to herd, hunt, or fight, and although the war campaigns now lasted for years rather than months and the home consisted of not merely a collection of ger camps but a vast empire, women continued to rule. Aside from Russia and eastern Europe, where the fighting continued the heaviest during Ogodei’s reign, women assumed administration of all remaining parts of the Mongol Empire. Despite the rivalry with Ogodei Khan, Sorkhokhtani, the widow of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui, ruled northern China and eastern Mongolia, including the family homeland where Genghis Khan grew up. Ebuskun, the widow of Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai, ruled Central Asia or Turkestan.

While Ogodei reigned as Great Khan, for long periods of time he was too drunk to lead the empire, and he gradually conveyed administrative power to Toregene, the most capable, although not the senior, wife. At his death in 1241, she became the official regent. For the next ten years, until 1251, she and a small group of other women controlled the largest empire in world history. None of the women had been born a Mongol but had instead been married into the family from a conquered steppe tribe, and most of the women were Christians. Neither their gender nor religion hindered their rise to power nor the struggle against one another as each vied to place the whole of the empire in the hands of her own son.

The struggle for power, no matter how fiercely fought, proved relatively peaceful except when it came to the ultimate treatment of the women themselves, who suffered horrendous fates upon losing a battle. Outside of the court struggles, the era brought a needed decade of peace through the empire, an opportunity to consolidate some of the holdings, and a time to recover from the four decades of the First Mongol World War of 1212–1241 and prepare for the next one.

The oldest surviving record of Toregene’s power and prominence in the Mongol court appears in an order to print Taoist texts issued by her as Yeke Khatun, Great Empress, under her own name as well as the seal of Ogodei on April 10, 1240. The text shows clearly not only that she was operating the empire but that while the men fought, she pursued an entirely different line of activities, supporting religion and education and working to build buildings and important social structures on an imperial scale.

Having lost his favorite son and other close relatives in the only marginally successful China campaign, Ogodei generally lost interest in political life, but he nominated one of his grandsons to follow him. Toregene, however, wanted to push the candidacy of her quarrelsome and arrogant son Guyuk, who had been so strongly chastised and apparently disliked by his father. Soon after Ogodei’s death, Toregene summoned a khuriltai to elect Guyuk instead of the grandson nominated by Ogodei, but she could not get a quorum of the Golden Family, which meant that not enough people favored his election. Toregene continued as regent and began five years of meticulous political work to build the support she needed for Guyuk’s election. To pursue her goal, she dismissed her late husband’s ministers and replaced them with her own, the most important of whom was another woman, Fatima, a Tajik or Persian captive from the Khwarizm campaign who had been brought to work in Karakorum. The chronicler Ata-Malik Juvaini, who disliked her, and seemingly all women involved in politics, wrote that Fatima enjoyed constant access to Toregene’s tent, and she “became the sharer of intimate confidences and the depository of hidden secrets.” Fatima played a political role while the older “ministers were debarred from executing business, and she was free to issue commands and prohibitions.”

By 1246, Toregene had tightened her control of the empire and felt confident that she could orchestrate her son’s election. The deliberations and election of Guyuk transpired in private, limited to members of the Golden Family and important functionaries, but Toregene organized his installation as a major affair for foreign dignitaries as well as the Mongol people. Throughout the summer until the ceremony in August, foreign delegates arrived from the distant corners of the empire. Emirs, governors, and grandees jostled along the same roads beside princes and kings. The Seljuk sultan came from Turkey; representatives of the caliph of Baghdad also arrived, as well as two claimants to the throne of Georgia: David, the legitimate son of the late king, and David, the illegitimate son of the same king. The highest-ranking European delegate was Alexander Nevsky’s father, Grand Prince Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich of Vladimir and Suzdal, who died suspiciously just after dining with Toregene Khatun.

By happenstance, on July 22, 1246, in the midst of the massive gathering, the first envoy arrived at the Mongol court from western Europe. Friar Giovanni of Plano Carpini, a sixty-five-year-old cleric, who had been one of the disciples of Saint Francis of Assisi, arrived as the agent and spy for Pope Innocent IV, commissioned to find out as much as possible about these strange people who had threatened Europe. After leaving Lyons, France, at Easter of 1245, Carpini required nearly a year to cross Europe to the Mongol lines at Batu’s camp in Russia. Once in the Mongol transport system, however, Carpini covered approximately three thousand miles in a mere 106 days—an average of more than twenty-five miles on horseback each day for nearly three and a half months.

Because of the success of their military campaigns in Europe, the Mongols eagerly received Carpini in the mistaken belief that he was bringing the submission of the pope and all the people of western Europe, but his letter carried quite a different message. Pope Innocent IV offered the khan a pedantic synopsis of the life of Jesus and the main tenets of Christianity, all of which was probably well known to the khan through his Christian mother and his frequent attendance of religious services with her. Guyuk was likely a Christian himself; if not, he was certainly well disposed toward Christianity and relied heavily on Christian Mongols in his administration. The pope’s letter chastised the Mongols for invading Europe, ordering the khan to “desist entirely from assaults of this kind and especially from the persecution of Christians.” He demanded an explanation from the khan “to make fully known to us . . . what moved you to destroy other nations and what your intentions are for the future.” The letter informed the khan that God had delegated all earthly power to the pope in Rome, who was the only person authorized by God to speak for Him.

After the Mongol officials found out that Carpini brought no tribute and offered no submission, they mostly ignored him, but in a letter of November 1246 that still survives, Guyuk asked Innocent IV the obvious questions: How do you know whom God absolves and to whom He shows mercy? How do you know that God sanctions the words you speak? Guyuk pointed out that God had given the Mongols, not the pope, control of the world from the rising sun to the setting sun. God intended for the Mongols to spread his commandments and his laws through Genghis Khan’s Great Law. He then advised the pope to come to Karakorum with all of his princes in order to pay homage to the Mongol khan.

The first direct diplomatic contact between Europe and the Far East had degenerated into an exchange of comparative theology mixed with religious insults. Despite the extensive spiritual beliefs that the Mongols and Europeans shared in common, the opening relationship had been so negative and misguided that in future years, the entire base of shared religion would eventually erode. The Mongols continued for another generation to foster closer relations with Christian Europe, but in the end, they would have to abandon all such hope, and with it they would, in time, abandon Christianity entirely in favor of Buddhism and Islam.

In the fall of 1246, when Carpini and the other foreign dignitaries departed the royal camp to head home, Guyuk turned attention from public pomp and ceremony to the important political task of solidifying power and making himself the khan in fact, as well as in title. To assert his newly conferred powers, he first attacked Fatima, his mother’s trusted adviser. Using an accusation of witchcraft against her as a pretext, he summoned Fatima from his mother’s court to his own. His mother refused to let her go: “He sent again several times, and each time she refused him in a different way. As a result his relations with his mother became very bad, and he sent [a] man . . . with instruction to bring Fatima by force if his mother should still delay.”

The vague records of what happened next raise more questions than answers. Guyuk won control of Fatima Khatun, and his mother died. Was his mother ill? Killed? Did she die of anger or grief? Most records fall silent. The Persian historian Juzjani wrote that Toregene was sent to join her husband, Ogodei. Since her husband had been dead for six years, the statement appears to be a euphemism for her death, but Juzjani seemed unsure, for he added, “but God knows the truth.” All we know is that Guyuk’s men seized Fatima Khatun and Toregene Khatun was dead.

Instead of quietly disposing of Fatima, Guyuk submitted her to a gruesome public ordeal. At a time when the Mongols ruled an empire across two continents and still had numerous opportunities to expand it even farther, the court seemed fixated not on the empire but on this one woman, what she had done, and what should be done to her. Guyuk ordered his guards to bring Fatima, stripped naked and tightly bound in ropes, before him in open court. There she was kept publicly, “hungry and thirsty for many days and nights; she was plied with all manner of violence, severity, harshness and intimidation.” They beat her and then flogged her with some kind of heated metal rods. Such a public torture may have been appropriate for the treatment of a witch in European society or for a heretic at the hands of the Christian Church, but it violated totally the practices of Genghis Khan, who slew his enemies and ruled with harsh strictness but steadfastly without torture or the infliction of unnecessary pain. It seemed particularly contrary to Mongol tradition since it was directed against a woman; no precedent was known in Mongol history for any comparable spectacle.

The torture of Fatima was perhaps technically legal under the existing code because she was not a Mongol nor married to one, but was instead a war captive of uncertain but unprotected status. When at last the tortured woman confessed to a list of evils, including bewitching Toregene Khatun and other members of the Golden Family, Guyuk imposed on her a punishment of unique cruelty and symbolism. He ordered that all the orifices of her upper and lower body be sewn shut, thereby not permitting any of the essences of her soul to escape from her body, and that she be rolled up inside a felt blanket and drowned in the river. And thus ended the life of Fatima, his mother’s adviser, and one of the most powerful women of the thirteenth century.

In keeping with the tone set by the public torture and execution of Fatima, Guyuk’s short reign was one of horrible revenge. He unleashed a crude campaign to consolidate power and eliminate rivals. He ordered his soldiers to hunt down and kill everyone connected with Fatima. He began legal proceedings against his uncle Temuge Otchigen, the last surviving full brother of Genghis Khan and thus a legal claimant to the throne, who, shortly before Guyuk’s election, had pressed his claim in an abortive attempt to raise an army and invade the lands of Toregene Khatun. Temuge Otchigen had survived his encounter with the shaman Teb Tengeri when he was younger, but he did not survive this confrontation with his grandnephew. In a secret trial closely supervised by Guyuk in a closed ger, the male members of the family condemned him to death for attempting to seize the office of Great Khan by military force rather than election.

Guyuk turned attention to the other women in charge of the imperial Mongol lands. He removed the regent widow ruling over the lands of Chaghatai’s family, and he ordered an inquiry into the affairs of Tolui’s estate, then under the regency of Sorkhokhtani, who had refused to marry Guyuk after her husband’s death. During the investigation, he ordered the surrender of all the warriors assigned to her and her sons. With his eastern front thus secured and under his tight control, he assembled his army to move west on what he claimed was to be a massive hunt. In fact, the move was a pretext for a surprise attack on Batu Khan in Russia. He not only wanted revenge against his cousin for prior insults at the victory dinner in Russia, but of all the khans, Guyuk seemed most convinced of the importance of Europe. He wanted to complete that conquest and add Europe to his own personal territory within the Mongol Empire.

Unwilling to defy him publicly in any way, Sorkhokhtani cautiously moved to ensure that he failed in his surprise attack. She secretly dispatched messengers to warn Batu of Guyuk’s plan. She quite possibly took direct action against Guyuk himself because once he left his family stronghold in the central Mongolian steppe, the forty-three-year-old, seemingly healthy Guyuk suddenly died of mysterious causes after only eighteen months in office. Someone had probably killed him, but the list of suspects who had cause to do so is too long to analyze. No surviving Mongol document records the details of his death, and the suddenly laconic Persian chronicles report merely that “his predestined hour arrived.”

In the continuing political struggles at the center of the empire, the fringes began to unravel. With his great love of metaphors, Juvaini wrote that “the affairs of the world had been diverted from the path of rectitude and the reins of commerce and fair dealing turned aside from the highway of righteousness.” He described the land as being in darkness, “and the cup of the world was filled to the brim with the drink of iniquity.” The Mongol people and their subjects, “dragged now this way, now that, were at their wits’ end, for they had neither the endurance to stay nor did they know of a place to which they might flee.”

After the brief respite of Guyuk’s rule, the battle of the surviving queens resumed, even more intensely, as Guyuk’s widow Oghul Ghaimish stepped forward to take control of the empire just as her mother-in-law Toregene had done when Ogodei died. Oghul Ghaimish lacked the skills of her mother-in-law, and the hour would not belong to her, in great part because her own sons set up rival courts to challenge her right to rule as regent. Sorkhokhtani, with the full support of her four capable sons and a lifetime of preparation and waiting, finally made her move. Rather than wait for Guyuk’s widow to call the khuriltai at the capital of Karakorum, Batu Khan, at the instigation of his secret ally Sorkhokhtani, called it in 1250 for an area near Lake Issykul in the Tian Shan Mountains, outside of Mongolia and more convenient for him to reach. The khuriltai elected Sorkhokhtani’s eldest son Mongke, but the Ogodei family boycotted the election on grounds that a legitimate election had to be held in Mongolia proper, in particular in the capital of Karakorum, which their family controlled.

Undaunted, Sorkhokhtani devised a brilliant plan. She lacked access to the imperial capital, but as the widow of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, she controlled the ancient family homeland where Genghis Khan had been born, elected, and buried. No one could refuse to attend a khuriltai held on this sacred ground. Her ally Batu Khan could not make the long trip from Russia, but he sent her a bodyguard of thirty thousand troops under his brother Berke to protect her and her family through this election and installation process. She organized a second election for this hallowed spot, and on July 1, 1251, the assembled throng proclaimed the forty-three-year-old Mongke Grand Khan of the Mongol Empire. This time, no one could object to the venue.

To celebrate the occasion of his election, Mongke issued an order that for that day each person should rest, and the animals should not be made to work or carry burdens. The earth should not be pierced with tent pegs and water should not be polluted. No one could hunt wild animals, and those animals that were to be killed for feasting should be killed without shedding blood on the sacred earth. After the sacred day, a week of feasting followed. Each day of the festivities, the assembled guests consumed three hundred horses or oxen, three thousand sheep, and two thousand wagons filled with airak, the beloved alcoholic drink made from fermented mare’s milk.

The celebration marked the culmination of Sorkhokhtani’s lifework, and, in one sense, the celebration was more of an honor for her than anyone else. Whereas Genghis Khan himself had produced sons who were relatively weak, prone to drink, and self-centered, she had produced and trained four sons destined to make a major mark in history. Each of her sons was a khan. In the coming years Mongke, Arik Boke, and Khubilai would all carry the title of Great Khan for various lengths of time, and her other son, Hulegu, would become the Il Khan of Persia and the founder of his own dynasty there. Her sons would push the empire to its maximum size by conquering all of Persia, Baghdad, Syria, and Turkey. They would conquer the Chinese Sung dynasty in the south and push into Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. They would destroy the dreaded sect of the Assassins and execute the Muslim caliph.

The family of Ogodei and Guyuk arrived late at the khuriltai, after the election itself but in the middle of the celebration. The three important princes of Ogodei’s family suddenly strode into the tent to announce that they wished to pay obeisance to the new khan. The new khan had them all arrested and put in chains because his spies already reported that their arrival was a ruse to distract the court while other members of the family gathered nearby to prepare a sneak attack on the celebrating, and therefore inebriated, throng. Mongke easily captured the would-be attackers and began another round of trials. He could not torture or shed the blood of any descendant of Genghis Khan, but he had their advisers, mostly Muslims and Chinese, brought in for a torturous whipping with canes until they confessed against their masters. At the end of the trial, the new khan found his cousins guilty of various crimes. Two of the princes had their mouths stuffed with stones and dirt until they died. Some of the advisers committed suicide. In all, Mongke executed seventy-seven people within or close to Ogodei’s lineage.

While Mongke oversaw the trials of the men, his mother tried the women in her court. Sorkhokhtani ordered the arrest of the hapless regent Oghul Ghaimish Khatun, and in an only slightly milder replay of the trial of Fatima, her captors sewed rawhide around her hands and stripped her naked for public ridicule before wrapping her in felt and drowning her and another senior woman from the family. A third woman from their family was wrapped in a blanket and kicked to death.

From his court, Mongke Khan expanded the trials to a grand purge by sending out bands of inquisitors throughout the empire to question, convict, and punish anyone suspected of disloyalty to his branch of the family. The trials took place on a global scale from China and Mongolia in the east to Afghanistan in the south and Persia and Iraq in the west. Even the highest officials, such as the ruler of the Uighurs, were put to death, but the greatest damage was inflicted on the Golden Family itself. Mongke seemed determined to root out all the supporters from the families of his deceased uncles Chaghatai and Ogodei. Mongke seized the city of Karakorum and surrounding territory from Ogodei’s descendants. Across the empire, rulers and high officials lucky enough to escape punishment by the ad hoc tribunals still had to travel to Karakorum and present themselves to the new khan, have their record of loyalty examined, and then face the possible threat of punishment. Those officials who survived the test were then reinstated in their old position by the new khan. After the extensive and bloody purge of the Ogodei lineage, Mongke Khan ordered a general amnesty for other types of nonpolitical prisoners and captives.

Power had clearly passed into the lineage of Tolui. Sorkhokhtani had smashed the last obstacles to power for her sons, and she died knowing that her four sons faced no further threat from any branch of the Golden Family. The best description made of her accomplishment came from the writer Bar Hebraeus, who wrote that “if I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to men.” No one in the history of the world had been given so large and rich an empire as Sokhokhtani gave to her sons, but within a few years of her death, her four sons would begin to tear it apart.

Sometime near the Mongol New Year festival in February 1252, either in the final days of the Year of the Pig or the first days of the Year of the Rat, Sorkhokhtani died. With her death, the decade of the ruling women that had begun in 1241 ended. Even as they competed against one another, the women had brought much needed outside talent into the inner circle of Mongol rule, and had given the empire a new foundation with their support of monasteries and schools, the printing of books, and the exchange of ideas and knowledge. After the resumption of the Mongol World War by the men, it would, in the end, be the new institutions begun by these women that would have the greatest impact on the world within and beyond the Mongol Empire. But the full flowering of that would have to await one more round of war.

Mongke’s accession to the office of Great Khan of the Mongol Empire in 1251 came nearly a quarter of a century after the death of his grandfather, Genghis Khan, in 1227. In a statement that summarizes his administration and his sober personality as instilled in him by his mother Sorkhokhtani, he said of himself, “I follow the laws of my ancestors; I do not imitate other countries’ ways.” He was a serious man who showed neither the frivolity of Ogodei nor the recklessness of Guyuk and who, almost alone among members of the Golden Family, avoided the destructive bind of alcoholism.

To increase his legitimacy as the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire and to rewrite history to make it more accommodating to his needs, in 1252 he retroactively awarded his father the title of Great Khan. This was given on the legal claim that as the youngest son, and therefore the Otchigen, or Prince of the Hearth, Tolui had been entitled to inherit his deceased father’s titles as well as his homeland.

In staking out his territory, Mongke turned attention to his newly claimed capital city of Karakorum, which for twenty years had served as the center and symbol of the power of Ogodei’s family. Mongke, however, intended to transform the modest city from the family seat of Ogodei’s lineage into an imperial capital of the Mongol Empire. Before Ogodei built Karakorum, the area had belonged to the Kereyid, and in particular to Ong Khan and his family, including Sorkhokhtani, Mongke’s mother and the niece of Ong Khan.

He needed to make his own mark on the capital, and since Ogodei had already used Chinese and Persian architects, Mongke turned to the Christian craftsmen captured in his part of the European campaign. Although he showed no appreciation for European architecture, the technical ability of the metalworkers had impressed him. When his army took the city of Belgrade, they had captured Guillaume Boucher, a Parisian goldsmith. Because of his ability to make Christian religious objects, Boucher had been given to Sorkhokhtani, and on her death he passed to Mongke’s younger brother Arik Boke. Mongke selected Boucher, together with a team of fifty assistant craftsmen, to add an exotic European flair to the Mongol capital, and he did so in an overwhelming but idiosyncratic style that amazed visitors to his courts.

Envoys to Mongke’s court at Karakorum reported the working of an unusual contraption in his palace. A large tree sculpted of silver and other precious metals rose up from the middle of his courtyard and loomed over his palace, with the branches of the tree extending into the building and along the rafters. Silver fruit hung from the limbs, and it had four golden serpents braided around the trunk. At the top of the tree, rose a triumphant angel, also cast in silver, holding a trumpet at his side. An intricate series of pneumatic tubes inside the tree allowed unseen servants to blow into them and manipulate them to produce what seemed to be acts of magic. When the khan wanted to summon drinks for his guests, the mechanical angel raised the trumpet to his lips and sounded the horn, whereupon the mouths of the serpents began to gush out a fountain of alcoholic beverages into large silver basins arranged at the base of the tree. Each pipe discharged a different drink—wine, black airak, rice wine, and mead.

The four serpents on the Silver Tree of Karakorum symbolized the four directions in which the Mongol Empire extended, as did the four alcoholic drinks derived from crops of distant and exotic civilizations: grapes, milk, rice, and honey. Trees were rare on the steppe, but they had a more important role in the homeland and origin of the Mongol family of Genghis Khan. In their oral history, the first ancestor to try to unite the Mongol tribes had been made khan under a tree on the Khorkhonag steppe, and it was in this same area that Temujin and Jamuka had taken the oath as andas after the Merkid battle. The whole contraption offered a spectacular and pungent reminder of the Mongol origins and of their mission to conquer the entire world in all four directions. Mongke accepted the obligation to bring everything under the rule of the Mongol state that stood like one massive tree at the center of the universe. Mongke Khan took that command as the literal destiny of his nation and as his responsibility to achieve.

As part of his more Western orientation, Christianity temporarily resumed its ascendancy in Mongke’s court, a trend reinforced by the large number of Christian wives in the Golden Family and by the steadfast loyalty shown by Christian nations such as Georgia and Armenia. Near the end of 1253, the Year of the Ox, William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk, came to the Mongol court as an envoy from the French king. From his writings, an intriguing, although not always detailed, description emerged of the rivalries among the Christians and other religions in the Mongol court. Rubruck had the opportunity to see how the Mongol court celebrated Christmas, although he himself had little role to play other than singing “Veni Sancte Spiritus” for them. Mongke Khan and his wife celebrated mass in church, with the two of them seated on a golden couch across from the altar. In keeping with Assyrian Christian tradition, the inside was void of excessive decoration and imagery, but the rafters of the church were draped with silk to give the building the feeling and appearance of a Mongol ger. After mass, the khan talked about religion for a short while with the priests. When he left, his wife stayed behind to distribute Christmas presents to everyone. She offered gifts of textiles to Rubruck, but he refused to accept them. Apparently the khatun did not notice the intended slight since Rubruck’s interpreter accepted the cloth for himself and later sold it back in Cyprus.

After the distribution of gifts, the Christmas celebration began with goblets of red wine, rice ale, and the ubiquitous Mongol airak. The French envoys had to sing once again for the khatun. Finally, after several more rounds of drinks, the Christmas dinner arrived in the form of large platters of mutton and carp that Rubruck contemptuously noted was served without salt or bread. “I ate a little. In this way they passed the time until evening.” The Christmas mass and celebration ended when “the lady, now drunk, got into a cart, while the priests sang and howled, and she went her way.”

The Mongol Christians emphasized the association of God with light, particularly the Golden Light that was sacred in their mythology, and they associated Jesus with healing and triumph of life over death. Despite the common religion, Rubruck greatly resented the Assyrian, Armenian, and Orthodox Christians at the Mongol court. Since he considered all non-Catholics to be heretics, he contemptuously designated the Mongol congregants of the Assyrian Church as Nestorians in reference to Nestorius, the fifth-century Patriarch of Constantinople who was condemned as a heretic by the Council of Ephesus in 431. Among the Assyrian beliefs that Rubruck held to be heretical was that the Virgin Mary was the mother of Christ, but not the mother of God. They also differed from the Catholics in their steadfast refusal to portray Christ on the cross as a violation of the Mongol taboos on depicting death or blood. Even when they admitted to being Christians, Mongols did not consider their religion as their primary identification. As one of the Mongol generals who was a follower of Christianity explained, he was no Christian—he was a Mongol.

After making the French envoy wait for many months, Mongke finally received him officially in court on May 24, 1254. Rubruck informed the officials that he knew the word of God and had come to spread it. In front of the assembled representatives of the various religions, the khan asked Rubruck to explain to them the word of God. Rubruck stumbled over a few phrases and stressed the importance to Christians of the commandment to love God, whereupon one of the Muslim clerics asked him incredulously, “Is there any man who does not love God?”

Rubruck responded, “Those who do not keep His commandments, do not love Him.”

Another cleric then asked Rubruck, “Have you been in heaven that you know the commandments of God?” He seized upon the implication of what Rubruck was saying to them about God’s commandments and challenged him directly: “By this you mean that Mongke Khan does not observe God’s commandments?”

The discussion continued for some time, and according to Rubruck’s own account, it was obvious that he did not fare well in the sometimes acrimonious arguments. He was unaccustomed to debating with people who did not share his basic assumptions of Catholic Christianity. Evidently, Mongke Khan recognized the problems he was having and suggested that all the scholars present take time to write out their thoughts more clearly and then return for a fuller discussion and debate of the issues.

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.”

Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade.

In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck.

Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match.

No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

While the clerics debated at Karakorum, their religious brethren were hacking at each other and burning one another alive in other parts of the world outside the Mongol Empire. At almost the same time of Rubruck’s debate in Mongolia, his sponsor, King Louis IX, was busy rounding up all Talmudic texts and other books of the Jews. The devout king had the Hebrew manuscripts heaped into great piles and set afire. During Rubruck’s absence from France, his fellow countrymen burned some twelve thousand handwritten and illuminated Jewish books. For these and other great services to the furtherance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his church canonized him as Saint Louis, thereby making him a figure of veneration that good Christians could emulate and to whom they could pray as an intermediary between humans and God.

During the same time in both the Muslim and Christian kingdoms, the rulers made religious intolerance an official policy of the state. Frustrated in the attempts to conquer the Holy Land or to expand into eastern Europe, the Catholic Church moved into a phase of growing intolerance for religious variation at home. In 1255 the church sanctioned the torturing of people suspected of heretical beliefs, and priests, mostly Dominicans, began traveling from city to city to find and torture suspects. Until this time civil authorities used torture to interrogate suspected criminals, traitors, and war prisoners, but priests did not inflict torture for religious purposes.

A few days after the debate at Karakorum, Mongke Khan summoned Rubruck to discharge him and send him back to his home country. He took this occasion to explain to the priest, and through him to the rulers of Europe, that he himself belonged to no single religion, and he lectured Rubruck on Mongol beliefs about tolerance and goodness: “We Mongols believe in one God, by Whom we live and Whom we die and toward Him we have an upright heart.” He then explained, “Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men. To you God has given the Scriptures and you Christians do not observe them.” He cited as evidence that the Christians eagerly placed money ahead of justice. He then explained that instead of the Scriptures, God had given the Mongols holy men, their shamans. In daily life, “we do what they tell us, and live in peace” with one another.

Mongke Khan then sent a letter to the French king Louis IX. It had a simple message: In heaven there is but one Eternal God, and on earth there is but one lord Genghis Khan, the Son of God, and his descendants who ruled the Mongol Empire. Aside from this messianic rhetoric, added after Genghis Khan’s death, the main message remained the same as articulated by the founder of the Mongol Empire in his latter years. Once all people submit to the tolerant rule of the Mongols, then “by the power of the eternal God the whole world from the rising of the sun to going down thereof shall be at one in joy and peace.” But Mongke warned the French and all Christians that “if, when you hear and understand the decree of the eternal God, you are unwilling to pay attention and believe it, saying, ‘Our country is far away, our mountains are might, our sea is vast’, and in this confidence you bring an army against us—we know what we can do.”

Despite his theological interrogation of Rubruck, Mongke’s interest in him was primarily diplomatic and commercial, not religious. Under Mongke, the entire energy of the state and the Golden Family was redirected toward the original enterprises that Genghis Khan had left unfinished—the conquest of the Sung dynasty and the Arab states of the Middle East. To get the empire back on track, Mongke ordered a series of censuses to record the number of people and animals as well as the orchards and farms and other assets of the empire. Local officials forwarded the information to Karakorum in great registers that supplied Mongke with a detailed demographic and economic portrait of his massive realm. He used this information to plan his policies, organize taxes, and recruit soldiers and laborers. His centralized control of information gave him heightened power over local areas and provided him with more oversight of local officials.

To renew the war campaigns, Mongke needed to stabilize the economy, control government spending, and confront the massive debts accumulated by Guyuk and other administrators over the prior decade. In his short and disastrous reign, Guyuk had purchased vast amounts of goods and paid for them with paper drafts on the promise that the paper could be converted into gold or silver by the merchant when needed. With Guyuk dead, many local officials and advisers no longer wanted to pay off these bills issued by the late khan. Mongke, however, astutely recognized that if he did not meet the financial obligations of Guyuk, it would make merchants and other foreigners reluctant to continue business with the Mongols. Mongke Khan’s decision to pay those debts prompted Juvaini to ask, “And from what book of history has it been read or heard . . . that a king paid the debt of another king?”

In a commercial world not yet accustomed to dealing with paper currency, Mongke grasped the importance of sustaining faith and purity in the monetary system. Genghis Khan had authorized the use of paper money backed by precious metals and silk shortly before his death in 1227. The practice grew erratically in the coming years, but by the time of Mongke Khan’s reign, it became necessary to limit the paper money supply in ways that it was not necessary to do with gold and silver coins. Mongke recognized the dangers incurred by earlier administrations that issued paper money and debt on an ad hoc basis, and in 1253 he created a Department of Monetary Affairs to control and standardize the issuance of paper money. The superintendent of the agency centralized control to prevent the overissue of paper money and the erosion of its value through inflation.

The Mongols allowed each nation under its control to continue minting coins in the denominations and weight they had traditionally used, but they established a universal measure based on the sukhe, a silver ingot divided into five hundred parts, to which each of the local currencies was tied. This standardization of varied currencies relative to the sukhe eased problems in accounting and currency exchange for both merchants and government administrators. Thus, standardization of currency allowed Mongke Khan to monetize taxes, rather then accepting payment in local goods. In turn, the monetization allowed for standardized budgeting procedures for his imperial administration, since instead of accepting taxes in goods, the Mongols increasingly accepted them in money. Rather than relying on government officials to collect and reallocate tribute of grain, arrows, silk, fur, oil, and other commodities, the government increasingly moved money rather than goods. For the first time, a standardized unit of account could be used from China to Persia. So long as the Mongols maintained control of money, they could let merchants assume responsibility for the movement of goods without any loss of government power.

In Karakorum in the spring of 1253, with the finances of the empire on solid footing, Mongke summoned his siblings and close family to a small khuriltai to plan their new policies and undertakings. Now that they exercised firm control over the core of the Mongol Empire, what should they do with it? The families of two of Genghis Khan’s sons, Ogodei and Chaghatai, had been crushed and deprived of most of their holdings. The third branch, the descendants of Jochi, with whom Sorkhokhtani had made her effective alliance, had been in effect granted their independence to rule over Russia and the European territories as they saw fit. Mongke Khan was ready to resume the expansion of the Mongol Empire, but he sought to do so in a way that primarily benefited himself and his brothers rather than the many cousins, the other grandchildren of Genghis Khan.

Despite his fondness for European contraptions and design, Mongke showed no interest in launching another campaign in that direction. He returned to the dual campaigns of Genghis Khan against the Sung dynasty of South China and the Muslim civilization of the Arabs and Persians. Mongke assigned Hulegu, the brother with the best military training, to take the Army of the Right with the plan to attack the Arab cities of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. Mongke assigned Khubilai, who despite his lack of military experience had a deep knowledge of Chinese culture, to lead the Army of the Left to conquer the Sung dynasty. As Great Khan, Mongke remained at the center in Mongolia, while Arik Boke, their youngest brother and therefore the Prince of the Hearth for their family, stayed behind to assist him in managing the empire. In May 1253, Hulegu and Khubilai headed off to complete the two conquests ordered by their grandfather and now reaffirmed by their eldest brother.

In the customary Mongol preparation for invasion, Hulegu had already dispatched advance troops across central Asia to clear the path of all herds in order to ensure a good supply of pasture when the main army passed through the area. Hulegu allowed his vanguard to probe enemy forces and initiate diplomatic negotiations with potential allies before the threat of his massive army appeared. The main army gathered in the summer to fatten their horses, and in traditional Mongol style would campaign only in winter. Unlike Genghis Khan’s warriors, who moved with lightning speed and approached the Muslim cities from several directions at once, Hulegu deliberately advanced more slowly and ostentatiously. Hulegu moved not just with a nomadic army, but with a nomadic empire. Hulegu had a much larger engineering corps of Chinese, and expanded it with European craftsmen to build bridges, catapults, and other machines of war. He also carried a larger medical corps and many more scribes and clerks to administer the larger army. In contrast to his grandfather’s warriors, who fed themselves as they crossed the land, Hulegu’s caravans included carts laden with wheat, rice, and wine to feed the many different kinds of military men now in his command.

For Hulegu, the ultimate prize was to conquer the Arab cultural and financial capital of Baghdad, but to get there, he had to reassert Mongol authority over several rebellious areas en route. The most difficult of these was to conquer the strongholds of the Nizari Ismailis, a heretical Muslim sect of Shiites more commonly known in the West as the Assassins. They were holed up in perhaps as many as a hundred unconquered mountain fortresses stretching from Afghanistan to Syria, the most important of which was Alamut, the Eagle’s Nest, in northern Persia. Members followed without question the orders of their hereditary leader, who was known by many titles, such as Imam, the Grand Master, or Old Man of the Mountain. Because they believed that God chose the Imam, he was therefore infallible; he needed no education since everything he did, no matter how odd it might appear to mortals, was considered divinely inspired. His followers accepted seemingly irrational acts, frequent changes of the law, and even the reversal of the most sacred precepts as evidence of God’s plan for humanity.

Despite the lack of a conventional army, the Ismaili sect exercised tremendous political power through a highly sophisticated system of terror and assassination, and the secrecy and success of the group bred many myths, making it, still today, difficult to factor out the truth. The cult apparently had one simple and effective political strategy: kill anyone, particularly leaders or powerful people, who opposed them in any way. The cult recruited young men who were willing to die in their attacks with the assurance that they would achieve instant entry into paradise as martyrs of Islam. The Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources all relate the same account of how young men were lured by ample quantities of hashish and other earthly delights that awaited them in the special gardens of the cult’s castles and fortresses. This was the foretaste of the paradise that awaited them if they died in the Grand Master’s service. He then trained them and controlled them with a steady supply of hashish to keep them obedient and make them fearless. 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. Whether the killers had actually used hashish to inspire them or not, the name spread into many languages as the word for the murderer of high officials.

Earlier, in the time of Genghis Khan’s first invasion of the region, the Grand Master willingly swore obedience to the Mongols. In the following decades, the Assassins flourished in the power vacuum created by Genghis Khan’s defeat of the Turkic sultan of Khwarizm and then the withdrawal of most of the Mongol forces. By the time Mongke Khan ascended the throne, the Assassins feared that the return of a large Mongol army might interfere with their newfound powers. In what may have been only a pretext for Hulegu’s attacks, some chroniclers wrote that the Grand Master sent a delegation to Karakorum ostensibly to offer submission to Mongke Khan, but actually trained to kill him. The Mongols had turned them away and prevented the assassination, but because of it Mongke Khan decided to crush the sect permanently and tear down their fortresses.

Before Hulegu’s army reached the Assassin strongholds, the drunken and debauched Grand Master was murdered by disgruntled members of his own entourage and replaced by his equally incapable son. Hulegu assessed the difficulty of capturing the heavily fortified castles one by one, and he devised a simple and more direct plan. Because of the sacred role of the Grand Master, Hulegu concentrated on capturing him with a combination of massive military might and the offer of clemency if he should surrender. The Mongols bombarded the Ismaili stronghold, and the Mongol warriors proved capable of scaling the steepest escarpments to surprise the defenders of the fortress. The combination of force, firepower, and the offer of mercy worked, and on November 19, 1256, on the first anniversary of his coming to power, the Imam surrendered to the Mongols.

Once Hulegu had control of the Imam, he paraded him from Ismaili castle to Ismaili castle to order his followers to surrender. To encourage the cooperation of the Imam and keep him happy until the end of the campaign, Hulegu indulged his obsessive interest in watching camels fight and mate, and he supplied him with girls. In the spring of 1257, once the Assassins’ castles had been taken, the Imam recognized his loss of usefulness to the Mongols, and he requested permission to travel to Karakorum to meet with the Great Khan Mongke himself, perhaps to work out some plan for his own survival. Hulegu sent him on the long journey to Mongolia, but once the Imam arrived there, Mongke refused to see him. Instead, the Mongol escort took the Imam and his party out to the mountains near Karakorum and stomped them to death.

With the extermination of the Assassins, Hulegu’s army had an open route to Baghdad, the largest and richest city in the Muslim world. Whereas the Ismailis occupied the terrorist fringe of the Muslim world, the grand metropolis of Baghdad on the Tigris River reigned as its center, the Mother of Cities. Mecca, in the middle of Arabia, remained Islam’s sacred city, but it was too isolated from the centers of population to function as an important political or commercial center. With the founding of Baghdad in 762, a little more than a century after the foundation of Islam, the Arab world found its metropolitan focus under the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, who ruled as the titular head of the entire Muslim world. The present Abbasid leader ruled as the Caliph, the thirty-seventh successor to the Prophet Muhammad, and therefore in addition to being the most powerful secular ruler in the Muslim world, he had the position as the symbolic leader of all Muslims. He served as virtually a combination emperor and pope.

Baghdad was the city of Scheherazade, the legendary teller of the tales know as the Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights, and for five hundred years the wealth of the Muslim world poured into the city where the Caliphs lavished it on palaces, mosques, schools, private gardens, and public fountains. Baghdad was a city of luxurious baths and overflowing bazaars. In addition to meeting the needs of its Muslim majority, the city served as the religious center for many Christians, who erected churches, and a cultural center for Jews, who built numerous synagogues and schools. The metropolis spilled out along both sides of the Tigris River, which were connected by a bridge, while massive walls protected the heart of the city.

In classic Mongol diplomacy, before mounting an attack on the Caliph, Hulegu sent envoys with a list of legal grievances against him. Hulegu accused the Caliph of not sending an army to assist in the suppression of the Ismaili Assassin sect, even though he had once sworn allegiance to Genghis Khan. In Mongol eyes, the Caliph was as much a rebellious vassal as the Imam, and he possibly faced the same fate. If the Caliph did not immediately atone for his misdeeds by surrendering to Mongol rule, Hulegu threatened to conquer his city and capture him. The Caliph seemed as incapable of understanding the danger of the Mongols as the Imam had been, and scoffed at what he felt were the Mongols’ preposterous demands. He defiantly announced that the entire Muslim world would rise up to defend the independence of the Caliph and that they would not permit an infidel nation to occupy the Arab capital of Baghdad. He swore that Muslims as far away as the Maghreb along the Atlantic coast of Morocco, would rush to kill the Mongol invaders if they continued in their campaign. Neither God nor the Muslim people, he defiantly claimed, would allow Baghdad to fall into the hands of nonbelievers.

In November 1257, unconvinced of the Caliph’s power to speak for either God or the entire Muslim population, Hulegu began to march toward Baghdad. He approached more cautiously than his grandfather would have done, but nevertheless with the same set of proven Mongol strategies and tactics. To supplement his own army, Hulegu summoned the armies of the vassal states of Armenia and Georgia, as well as a variety of Turkic tribes. Thus, while the main army approached in a wide arc from the north and the east, the others approached from the north and west. Although the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers had historically served as natural barriers to foreign attacks on Mesopotamia, the Mongols easily moved back and forth across the rivers with a series of pontoon boats. As the invading armies advanced, they set the local population to flight toward the safety of the fortified city. By the final week of January 1258, the invading armies had encircled the city and occupied the extensive suburbs beyond the city walls, filling the city to its maximum with refugees.

Before commencing the attack, Hulegu sought to exploit political, religious, and ethnic divisions within Baghdad by forging secret ties to the Christians within the city. Because his mother and his two wives were Christians, as well as many of his own men, Hulegu cultivated contacts and nourished respect within the Christian communities across the Middle East, and he had maintained good relations with his Christian vassal kingdoms, Georgia and Armenia. Taking advantage of these connections, Christian envoys secretly slipped back and forth between the city and the Mongol camp, bringing vital reconnaissance to Hulegu and carrying back promises of special treatment to the Christians and other minorities in the city. As a sign of the special favor that the Christians would enjoy under his rule, Hulegu exempted Christian priests from kowtowing at court, since they bowed only to God. Hulegu exploited the fears of the Christians of Baghdad as a small minority in a sea of potentially hostile Muslims. He fed the dreams of Christians and Jews of finally freeing themselves from Muslim domination.

The Caliph also tried to use to his own benefit the close ties of the Mongols and the Christians. He summoned the Catholikos Makikha, the patriarch of the Christian church, and dispatched him and a Muslim minister to negotiate with the Mongols. He offered to make a formal submission, pay enormous tribute, and to read Friday prayers in the mosque in the name of the Great Khan, thereby officially acknowledging his subservience to Mongol rule. Hulegu scoffed at the offer. He knew that he was already too close to victory to settle for such trifles—not when all the wealth of the richest city on earth could easily be his.

The Mongols showed their traditional ability to improvise and use whatever material presented itself as a possible weapon. The largest objects in the vicinity were the tall date palm trees that the Arabs had cultivated and nourished for centuries. The Mongols chopped them down, and turned the trunks into lethal missiles that they fired at the city. Lacking sufficient wood to encircle the large city of Baghdad as the Mongols had done with the cities of Russia, Hulegu nevertheless surrounded the city with a deep ditch and a rampart and began the assault with a terrifying bombardment of the city. The Arabs knew of the use of flamethrowers in combat, but until this point had not encountered the military power of gunpowder.

The Mongols had changed the formula of gunpowder to provide enough oxygen to make it ignite in one rapid blast rather than in the traditional slow burn of the firelance or of rockets. Such instantaneous burning produced an explosion rather than a fire, and the Mongols harnessed these explosions to hurl a variety of projectiles. Craftsmen made some of the tubes small enough that a single man could operate them and thus fire out arrowheads or other metal projectiles. The explosion in these tubes required a stronger material than bamboo; so they were made with iron tubes. The Mongols attached the smaller tubes to a wooden handle for ease of handling, and they mounted the larger ones on wheels for ease of mobility. Larger tubes fired ceramic or metal cases filled with shrapnel or more gunpowder that produced a secondary explosion upon impact. In their assault, the Mongols combined all of these forms of bombardment in an assortment of smoke bombs, proto-grenades, simple forms of mortars, and incendiary rockets. They had developed explosive devices able to hurl projectiles with such force that they may as well have been using real cannons; they managed to concentrate their fire on one area of the city defenses and hammer it down.

The bombardment from such a distance confused and frightened the residents of Baghdad and frustrated its defenders, who had never before been attacked by an enemy too far away to be reached by their weapons. In addition to the gunpowder weapons, Mongol engineers had nearly perfected the use of planted explosives to undermine walls. All of these military innovations complied with the strong Mongol preference to stay as far from the actual fighting and killing as possible. Hulegu destroyed the dams and diverted the Tigris to flood the camp of the Caliph’s army and make them take refuge in the city. The wall of water surrounding the city must have had a similar psychological impact on the people of Baghdad as the wooden wall had produced on the people of the Russian cities. On February 5, 1258, the Mongol forces broke through the walls of Baghdad, and after five days, the Caliph capitulated. To prepare the city for looting, Hulegu ordered the people of Baghdad to surrender their weapons, leave all their goods, and march out of the city. Rather than comply with the order, the defending army bolted and tried to escape, but the Mongols gave chase and cut them down.

Hulegu sent his Christian troops into the city to collect the loot, but they found many people had refused the order to evacuate and were still hiding in their homes. For disobeying the order, the invaders killed them. By Mongol order, the churches and Christian property in the city remained secure from plunder, and Hulegu presented one of the Caliph’s palaces to the Catholikos Makikha. The Christians inside Baghdad joined their fellow believers to loot the city and slaughter the Muslims, from whom they felt their salvation had finally come. Centuries of hatred and anger spilled out as they defiled and destroyed mosques, and turned many of them into churches. The Christians celebrated joyously throughout the Abbasid lands and beyond. An Armenian chronicler described the exulting joy: “Five hundred and fifteen years have passed since the founding of the city,” he wrote. “Throughout its supremacy, like an insatiable leech it [Baghdad] had swallowed up the entire world. Now it restored all that had been taken.” Now Baghdad “was punished for the blood it had shed and the evil it had done; the measure of its iniquity was full.” The looting lasted seventeen days. During this time, the invaders, accidentally or deliberately, set the city afire.

Hulegu allowed the Christians to destroy the tombs of the long line of Abbasid Caliphs, and then Hulegu summoned the captive Caliph to his camp outside the city. According to the Armenian chronicler Grigor of Akanc, Hulegu locked up the Caliph for three days without food or water, then brought him out and heaped up his gold and treasure before him. Pointing to the massive piles of wealth looted from the city, Hulegu reportedly ordered the Caliph to eat the gold, and when he could not scolded him for so greedily accumulating wealth instead of building an army to defend himself. He then sentenced the Caliph and his male heirs to death, but as a final gesture of respect for the high status of the condemned, he allowed them the honor of being executed in the Mongol way—without bloodshed. According to the differing but similar accounts, they were either wrapped in carpets or else sewn into sacks and kicked to death by the Mongol warriors or trampled by their horses.

The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.

While the Mongols defeated the Arabs, the Crusaders, who at this time occupied a series of castles and small cities along the Mediterranean coast, had watched the Mongol approach cautiously. Suddenly, with the fall of Baghdad, they saw an opportunity for themselves to ally with the Mongols and share in their victories. When the Mongols left Baghdad and headed further west toward Damascus, the Crusader knight Bohemond of Antioch came out with his army to attack Damascus from the Mediterranean side, and he brought supplies and food to help the Mongols. Similarly, the Seljuk sultan sent his army from Anatolia to join the Mongol assault.

Damascus surrendered and thereby saved itself from the fate of Baghdad. Soon the Mongol warriors were on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea for the second time. Eighteen years earlier, in 1241, the Mongols under Batu had reached the Mediterranean via Europe; now, on their second arrival, they approached it via Asia. In the seven years since Hulegu left his brothers at Karakorum, he had conquered or reconquered everything along a distance of some four thousand miles, and he had added millions of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Persians to the still-growing empire.

In the six centuries since the birth of Islam, the religion had expanded greatly and lost control of a few border zones, but never had so much of the Muslim world fallen under the rule of pagans. The four decades from Genghis Khan’s attack on Bukhara until the fall of Baghdad and Damascus represented the lowest point in Muslim history. While the Crusaders had only managed to take a toehold in a few ports, the Mongols conquered every Muslim kingdom and city from the Indus River to the Mediterranean. They had conquered almost all of the Muslim lands in Asia; only the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa remained beyond their control.

The gleeful gloating of the Christians could hardly have been greater. An account in the Armenian chronicle related an apocryphal story that illustrated more about Christian contempt for and mockery of Muslims than actual Mongol practice. According to the story, after his victory over the Arabs, Hulegu ordered one hundred thousand piglets from Armenia and dispatched two thousand to each Arab city, where he required the Muslim residents to tend the pigs in the middle of their city, feed them almonds and dates daily, and carefully wash them with soap every Saturday. Just as absurdly, the chronicler added that the Mongols demanded that all Arabs eat pork and that they decapitated every Arab who refused.

Although it seemed at the time that the Mongol Empire threatened to swallow all of the Muslim world, the Mongols had, in fact, reached their limit in the West. The empire would not expand any further in that direction. An army of Mamluk slaves, mostly purchased from Italian merchants who brought them from the Kipchak and Slavic people of Russia and sold them to the sultan of Egypt, moved out from Egypt and encountered a Mongol detachment at Ayn al-Jalut, the Springs of Goliath, near the Sea of Galilee in what is today Israel. On the morning of September 3, 1260, a year after Mongke Khan’s death, the Mamluks defeated the Mongols. The empire had reached its western border.

Compared with Hulegu’s military victories and extensive conquests of land and people across the Middle East, the attempts by his brother Khubilai to similarly overthrow the Sung dynasty and annex its lands in southern China still remained more of a distant dream for the Mongols than a pending reality. Khubilai’s apparent lack of military experience stymied fulfillment of his mission. 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. He grew fat and developed gout, which further impaired his ability to be an inspiring military leader on horseback. After receiving the orders from his brother Mongke Khan to move south into China, Khubilai’s army found modest success in a series of limited campaigns against border kingdoms to the west of the Sung kingdom. While openly making elaborate preparations for war against the Sung, Khubilai moved very slowly. Not only did he encounter obstacles to extending the Mongol domains, but within his own administrative territory, sectarian violence flared in a struggle for dominance between Taoist and Buddhist monks, further limiting his control over his lands.

Instead of sending news of victories and dispatching caravans of tribute to Karakorum, Khubilai sent frequent excuses for the delays encountered and unexpected conditions. The generous explanation of scholars sympathetic to Khubilai is that he was a mature and thoughtful leader who wanted to proceed with careful organization and not on impulse, and one who combined the best of Chinese and Mongol military strategies and armies. The less generous explanation is that he lacked the Mongol aptitude for war but managed to avoid failure because of the general momentum of the Mongol conquest and the outstanding martial ability of his generals.

An obviously dissatisfied Mongke Khan dispatched a series of investigators to look into the problems with Khubilai. Finding ample evidence of fraud and corruption in Khubilai’s administration, they executed many of his important administrators and stripped Khubilai of his financial prerogatives and duties. The investigators proceeded in much the same ominous manner that they had done during the purge of Ogedei’s family, and it appeared that not just Khubilai’s power was at stake, but possibly his life as well.

Mongke summoned Khubilai to Karakorum, ostensibly to answer for the fiscal irregularities but probably to account for a variety of issues, most important of which was the lack of military success against the Sung. Rather than resist his brother, as some of his advisers recommended, Khubilai traveled to Karakorum as ordered and threw himself on the mercy of his older brother. Following Khubilai’s degrading display of regret and fawning loyalty, Mongke Khan publicly forgave and reconciled with him, but the incident did little to resolve the underlying cause of the tensions between the two men. Nor did it bring the Mongols any closer to the ultimate goal of victory over the Sung. The frustrated Mongke Khan had to devise a new plan.

In the fall of 1257, while Hulegu’s troops moved against Baghdad, Mongke Khan summoned a small khuriltai to a wooded area of the Khorkhonag Valley on the old family river, the Onon, not far from the sacred mount of Burkhan Khaldun. Here it became clear to him—or at least he made it clear to his court—that he himself would have to lead the campaign against the Sung. Mongke Khan had served extensively in the European campaigns and he had been trained under Subodei, the most accomplished of all Mongol generals, and after the death of his mentor two years earlier, Mongke was probably himself the best general available to lead the campaign against the Sung. For the duration of his absence during the upcoming campaign, Mongke turned over the central administration of the empire at Karakorum, as well as responsibility for his son and heir, to his youngest brother Arik Boke. Mongke Khan ordered Khubilai to return to his territory to end the clerical strife between the warring factions of Taoists and Buddhists, while Mongke took control of the more important military campaign.

Mongke emulated his grandfather’s basic military strategy by first attacking the smaller and weaker areas before moving against the larger target. For Mongke, this meant starting the conquest with a campaign against the adjacent lands of Sichuan to the west and Yunnan to the southwest of the Sung, and then slowly capturing the larger prize in the closing Mongol net. If the Mongols could gain control of these areas, they could attack the Sung from all sides at once. In May 1258, only three months after Hulegu’s sack of Baghdad, Mongke Khan led his army across the Yellow River. Within a year, they had covered the territory from the cold Onon on the Siberian border to the humid and warm south.

After quickly subduing the outlying kingdoms, Mongke began to move against the Sung dynasty itself during the second year of the campaign, but the weather became extremely hot. The climate differed greatly from anything Mongke, and most of his warriors, had experienced in Mongolia or on their European campaigns. Many of the Mongols suffered from bloody diarrhea, probably dysentery, and then other plagues. Mongke Khan became ill but improved—and then, on August 11, 1259, he suddenly died. Every chronicle lists a different cause of death. The Chinese reported that he died of cholera, the Persians that he died of dysentery, and others claimed he died from a battle arrow. The death of Mongke Khan congealed the empire; advancement ceased.

Rather than racing back home to participate in the selection of a new Great Khan as the Mongol leaders had done after the death of the three previous Great Khans, each faction moved to protect the territory it already held. In the Middle East, the newly triumphant Hulegu occupied the richest lands and cities of the empire; he controlled more wealth than the rest of the Mongol Empire combined. He had already taken some of the prized Azerbaijan pastures of his cousins who ruled Russia. For fear of losing yet more land to him, his cousins held their territory and refused to return to Mongolia for an election. Neither Hulegu in the Middle East nor the Golden Horde, as Jochi’s descendants in Russia eventually became known, wanted to risk losing what territory they already controlled in order to haggle over the supreme title of Grand Khan in Mongolia.

The Mongol Empire reached its greatest extent under Mongke Khan, who was the last of Genghis Khan’s descendants to be acknowledged and accepted as Great Khan by the whole of the Mongol Empire. Many khans would continue to rule over the various parts of the empire, and of them, many would claim to be the rightful heirs to Genghis Khan and to the title of Great Khan. But no one of them would be recognized by all the other factions and lineages. Mongke Khan began, but never finished, the Second Mongol World War. It ended with neither victory nor defeat; it merely flickered out.

His brothers pursued episodic campaigns, but they concentrated efforts on each other more than on outside enemies. Khubilai suddenly turned his attention away from the Sung to challenge the youngest brother, Arik Boke, who ruled Mongolia from Karakorum. Each of them summoned a separate khuriltai in his own territory. The choice between the two contestants, and more importantly between their supporters, seemed sharp and clear. As the better educated, Khubilai had been given lands in the agricultural areas where Chinese culture reigned supreme, and he never inspired the full confidence or approval of other members of the Golden Family. Khubilai preferred buildings and cities. He seemed as comfortable in a palace as in a tent, and he may have even spoken some Chinese. This deviance from the traditional Mongol life contributed to an alien aura that always seemed to engulf him.

In contrast to Khubilai’s cosmopolitan persona, Arik Boke lived very much as a man of the steppes, the Mongol who seldom strayed far from his horse. As the youngest son, he was the family Otchigen, Prince of the Hearth, like his father, and he could make the same claim of rights over the office of Great Khan that Mongke had made when he posthumously elevated their father to that rank. In addition, Arik Boke inspired confidence from the other members of the Golden Family by posing less of a threat to their control of their own lands, while Khubilai’s more imperial style invited suspicion. In keeping with Mongol law, Arik Boke held his khuriltai in the homeland of Mongolia. Mongke Khan’s widow and sons supported him as the legitimate and best heir, as did most other members of the family aside from his two brothers, Hulegu and Khubilai. In June 1260, representatives of all the family branches proclaimed Arik Boke as the Great Khan at the khuriltai in Karakorum.

But Khubilai succeeded in pulling off a coup d’état. Following the advice of his Chinese ministers, Khubilai summoned his khuriltai in his own territory. Aside from his followers hardly anyone came, but the small assembly nevertheless proclaimed him Great Khan. In order to win the loyalty of his Chinese subjects, he additionally proclaimed himself emperor in the same year, 1260, and he chose the title of Zhongtong (Chung-t’ung), meaning “central rule.” This title was a Chinese adaptation of the Mongolian designation of the Great Khan as the Central camp and his armies as the Left and Right.

No matter how untraditional his selection may have been by Mongol standards, Khubilai exercised strong control over the Chinese army as well as his own detachment of Mongols; more important, he controlled the flow of food that Karakorum needed to survive. The population of the Mongol steppe city had swollen too much to survive on the local herds alone, and the land around Karakorum, despite sustained efforts to encourage foreign farmers, proved inhospitable to agriculture. Without substantial and continual food shipments from the farmlands controlled by Khubilai, Karakorum had to be evacuated or face starvation.

Khubilai cut off the food and then sent his army to capture Karakorum. Arik Boke fought hard but withdrew steadily against the overwhelming size of his brother’s Chinese army. Karakorum fell quickly to Khubilai, but in 1261 Arik Boke temporarily took it again. The armies of the dueling khans met two more times, but gradually Arik Boke Khan’s army weakened and began to atrophy as it faced desertions of allies who saw that the younger khan would never prevail against his older, better-equipped, and probably more intelligent elder brother. Arik Boke also faced the worst threat to the Mongols: zud, or animal famine. From 1250 to 1270, Mongolia suffered a lowering of temperatures. In a fragile ecological zone such as Mongolia, a change of only a few degrees in annual temperature severely reduces the small amount of precipitation, restricts the growth of the grass, and thereby weakens or kills the animals. Without strong horses or ample food, the supporters of Arik Boke, already cut off from the agricultural largesse of Khubilai Khan’s territory, proved too weak to mount a sustained war. The winter of 1263 proved particularly cruel, and by the following spring, Arik Boke no longer had a viable power base. Unable to feed his followers, Arik Boke proceeded to Shangdu, where he surrendered to Khubilai in 1264.

When the brothers met at the end of the protracted struggle, Khubilai forced Arik Boke to perform a public ceremony of obeisance. Before the assembled court, Khubilai interrogated his brother, demanding to know which of the two sides in the struggle for the office of Great Khan was the correct one. Arik Boke’s answer showed the strength of his pride even in the face of defeat. “We were then, and you are today.” Other members of the family, including the distant brother, Hulegu, reacted so bitterly to Khubilai’s public shaming of his younger brother that they complained to him. Khubilai summoned another khuriltai on Mongolian territory to decide the fate of Arik Boke and to ratify himself as the legitimate khan without the taint of his earlier election on Chinese soil. Despite the overwhelming military might of Khubilai’s army, the Golden Family refused to attend. They recognized the reality of Khubilai’s rule, but none of them proved willing to participate in a criminal trial of Arik Boke, whom they had supported as Great Khan. None of them trusted Khubilai enough to take the chance of leaving their homelands and perhaps never returning. In the absence of a quorum for a khuriltai, Khubilai forgave his brother. Khubilai tried and executed many of his brother’s supporters, but his only punishment of Arik Boke, at least publicly, was banning him from court. Shortly thereafter, in 1266, mysteriously but conveniently for Khubilai, Arik Boke, still in the prime of life, suddenly sickened and died. He had almost certainly been poisoned.

Khubilai now held the office of Great Khan. He had the world’s largest army under his control, and he ruled one of the most populous nations on earth. The victories had come at a steep price; some of the Mongol royal family and their followers refused to recognize his legitimacy, or, at most, they gave symbolic recognition but ignored him and continued to wage intermittent border wars for another generation.

Like the four fountains of the Silver Tree, the Mongol Empire now divided into four primary zones of political administration. Khubilai ruled China, Tibet, Manchuria, Korea, and eastern Mongolia, but he faced constant problems in enforcing his rule over Mongolia and Manchuria. The Golden Horde ruled the Slavic countries of eastern Europe, and they consistently refused to recognize Khubilai as the Great Khan. The lands ruled by Hulegu and his descendants from Afghanistan to Turkey became known as the Ilkhanate, meaning “vassal empire.” It was here that Persian culture reemerged from centuries of Arab domination to build the foundation for modern Iran. The most traditional Mongols occupied the central steppes, which became known as Moghulistan and encompassed the modern areas from Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north and across Turkistan in central Asia to Afghanistan in the south. For a while, they had some unity under Ogodei’s and Toregene’s grandson Khaidu, who ruled from Bukhara and served as a counterpoint to the power of Khubilai Khan, but the area fragmented repeatedly in the centuries ahead.

For a mere three decades, Karakorum had served as capital of the Mongol Empire before the Mongols themselves, under the command of Khubilai, looted and virtually destroyed it. In that short time it had been the center, the pivot of the world. As part of the looting of Karakorum, the Silver Tree was disassembled and carted away.

PART III

The Global Awakening:

1262–1962

Asia is devouring us. Tartar faces in every direction you look.

THOMAS MANN,

The Magic Mountain

8

Khubilai Khan and the

New Mongol Empire

This Great Khan is the mightiest man, whether in

respects of subjects or of territory or of treasure.

M

ARCO

P

OLO

KHUBILAI KHAN’S GENIUS DERIVED from his recognition that he could not conquer all of China by mere force, no matter how large his army or sophisticated his weapons. Even without the military skills of his grandfather, he had clearly outsmarted everyone in his family. He possessed a keen strategic talent and the ability not merely to have good ideas but to implement them as well; he applied these skills to the management of his territory and, most important, to its expansion toward the south. In the end, he proved able to achieve through public politics what his grandfather had not been able to achieve through brute force—the conquest and unification of all China, the most populous country on earth. He won over the population by skillful manipulation of public opinion, in which martial prowess was an important, but not exclusive, factor. He built a Chinese capital, took Chinese names, created a Chinese dynasty, and set up a Chinese administration. He won control of China by appearing to be more Chinese than the Chinese, or at least more Chinese than the Sung.

For most of its history, China had been a great civilization but not a unified country. While the educated elite shared a written language, classic texts, artistic styles, and other types of high culture, the common people spoke entirely different languages in a constantly changing mosaic of national boundaries and temporary dynasties and ruling families. The educated elite clung to an unfulfilled dream of a united country with all people under a single government. Occasionally a leader or a family temporarily cobbled together several states and then offered, once again, the tantalizing hope of making a unified China a reality. In between these brief periods of unification, the concept of China lingered on as an ideal or a romantic image in the poetry, calligraphy, and essays of the Chinese intelligentsia.

Like no prior leader, Khubilai Khan offered these educated people the enticing opportunity to realize their nationalist desire. Despite his crude origin among steppe barbarians, he proved more capable of fulfilling that ancient dream than the Sung rulers. Everything he did seemed calculated to convince the Chinese people that Heaven had conferred its Mandate unmistakably on him alone, and, in due time, the old dynasty of the Sung would fall since it no longer had the necessary vitality.

Khubilai Khan seemed to recognize that he faced many of the same problems of his grandfather at the time of the original unification of the steppe tribes; namely, how to organize a large number of disparate people into a single cohesive political entity. Although Genghis Khan had faced the problem with a collection of tribes smaller than a hundred thousand each, Khubilai Khan faced the same problem with countries of many millions each. 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. He had to win the loyal support of the Chinese people, and he had to rebuild or, in many cases, invent institutions to unify disparate people into a viable and strong working whole.

In his struggle for supremacy against his brother Arik Boke in 1260, Khubilai had taken a Chinese title that was a translation of a Mongol one, but in 1264 he modified his reign name to Zhiyuan or Chih-yuan, meaning “complete beginning,” and later in 1271, he used this to become the basis of the dynastic name of Da Yuan, meaning “great origins” or “great beginnings,” by which the Mongol dynasty became officially known in Chinese history. The new name meant not only a new beginning for his Chinese subjects, but it also signified a new beginning for his Mongol ones as well. Khubilai was no Genghis Khan, but he had embarked upon a venture no less daunting than his grandfather’s.

As emperor and founder of a new dynasty, Khubilai sought to sinicize his image and thereby make it not merely acceptable, but alluring, to his Chinese subjects. In 1263, Khubilai ordered the building of an ancestral temple for his family. He commissioned his ministers to conduct traditional Chinese ceremonies honoring the family’s ancestors, but, perhaps indicative of the usual Mongol reluctance to avoid anything associated with death, he personally stayed well away from them. By the following year, he erected a series of Chinese-style ancestral tablets to his ancestors. In 1277, after declaring the new Mongol dynasty, he posthumously conferred Chinese names on his ancestors and built a larger temple with eight chambers: one for the founders of the family, Yesugei Baatar and Hoelun, another for Genghis Khan, one for each of Genghis Khan’s four sons, and one each for Guyuk Khan and Mongke Khan. In the new official version of the family history, Jochi, whose family had been the most loyal ally to Khubilai’s lineage, was fully recognized as a legitimate family member. Just as Mongke had posthumously elevated their father, Tolui, to the office of Great Khan, Khubilai conferred the office of Chinese emperor on him. He ordered portraits made of all of them in Chinese style so that they looked more like Mandarin sages than Mongol warriors.

Khubilai acknowledged the utility of both a strong army and good propaganda, but the third element of his strategy came from good administration and policy. Without necessarily following Confucian principles, that had high appeal to the Chinese upper class but less importance to the common people, he strove to install an orderly system of efficient government that could help him build popular support and de-emphasize the foreign origin of his rule. Toward this goal, he appointed Pacification Commissioners to help restore good relations with Han Chinese in newly conquered territory. The commissioners began by repairing the damage of war and prior neglect to public buildings such as temples, shrines, and structures of deep emotional or symbolic value to the population.

To appear as a powerful Chinese leader, Khubilai needed an impressive court located in a real city, not a peripatetic tent court nor the ad hoc structures erected at Shangdu (Xanadu), in modern Inner Mongolia. The place held special importance for him because he had first been proclaimed Great Khan at the khuriltai there, but it had no obvious advantages. Not only was that capital located in a nomadic zone, which the Chinese found quite alien and barbaric, but it had also been the traditional staging area used by his grandfather in the raiding and looting of Chinese cities. Khubilai sought to disassociate himself from the less desirable aspects of that history.

While keeping Shangdu as a summer home and a hunting preserve, he commissioned the building of another city, a real Chinese-style imperial capital, farther south at a place better situated to exploit the agricultural wealth of the lands along the Yellow River. He chose the site of the former Jurched capital of Zhongdu, which had been conquered by Genghis Khan in 1215, the year of Khubilai’s birth. In 1272, Khubilai ordered the building of his new capital, and he connected it by canal to the Yellow River. The Mongols called the place Khanbalik, the City of the Khan. His Chinese subjects called it Dadu, the Great Capital, and it grew into the modern capital of Beijing. Khubilai brought in Muslim architects and Central Asian craftsmen to design his city in a new style that offered more of a compromise between the tastes of the nomadic steppe dwellers and the sedentary civilization.

In contrast to the maze of winding alleys in most Chinese cities of the era, Khubilai’s capital had broad, straight streets run on a north-south axis with east-west streets perpendicular to them; the guards at one gate could see straight through the city to the guards at the opposite gate. From the imperial palace, they built boulevards, more to accommodate the horses and military maneuvers of the Mongols than the wheelbarrows or handcarts of the Chinese laborers. The boulevards stretched wide enough for nine horsemen to gallop abreast through the city in case the native people rose up against their foreign rulers.

Furthering the Mongol interest in profits from international trade, Khubilai Khan designated sections of the city for Middle Eastern and Mongol populations as well as for people from all over what is today China. The city was host to merchants from as far away as Italy, India, and North Africa. Where so many men lingered, as Marco Polo pointed out in great detail, large numbers of prostitutes gathered in their own districts to serve them. Scholars and doctors came from the Middle East to practice their trades. Roman Catholic, Nestorian, and Buddhist priests joined their Taoist and Confucian counterparts already practicing in China. Muslim clerics, Indian mystics, and, in some parts of Mongol China, Jewish rabbis added to the mixture of people and ideas that thronged the empire. Far larger than Karakorum, but with many of the same internationalist principles, the city was a true world capital and fit to be capital of the world.

Ultimately, at the heart of the city, however, Khubilai created a Mongol haven where few foreigners, including Chinese, could enter. Behind high walls and guarded by Mongol warriors, the royal family and court continued to live as Mongols. The large open areas for animals in the middle of the city had no precedent in Chinese culture. This Forbidden City constituted a miniature steppe created in the middle of the Mongol capital. During the Mongol era, the whole complex of the Forbidden City was filled with gers, where members of the court often preferred to live, eat, and sleep. Pregnant wives of the khan made sure that their children were born in a ger, and the children received their school lessons in the ger as they grew up. While Khubilai and his successors maintained public lives as Chinese emperors, behind the high walls of their Forbidden City, they continued to live as steppe Mongols.

When the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone visited the Mongol territories in the 1320s, he described the Forbidden City in Khanbalik: “Within the precincts of the said palace imperial, there is a most beautiful mount, set and replenished with trees, for which cause it is called the Green Mount, having a most royal and sumptuous palace standing thereupon, in which, for the most part, the great Can is resident.” In a passage that sounds very close to earlier descriptions of Karakorum, he wrote, “Upon the one side of the said mount there is a great lake, whereupon a most stately bridge is built, in which lake is great abundance of geese, ducks, and all kinds of water-fowl; and in the wood growing upon the mount there is a great store of all birds, and wild beasts.”

The wooden palace built by Khubilai Khan seemed to have the same basic plan as the one at Karakorum. Khubilai Khan installed mechanical peacocks in his palace; they could spread their tails and cry out in a manner reminiscent of Guillaume Boucher’s angel on the Silver Tree in the palace in Karakorum. Khubilai probably brought the magnificent silver tree with him from the Karakorum palace, and he installed at least part of it in Khanbalik. As Marco Polo described it, “in a certain part of the hall near where the Great Kaan holds his table, there is set a large and very beautiful piece of workmanship in the form of a square coffer, or buffet, about three paces each way, exquisitely wrought with figures of animals, finely carved and gilt.” The internal operation also resembled that of the Silver Tree: “The middle is hollow, and in it stands a great vessel of pure gold . . . and at each corner of the great vessel is one of similar size, and from the former the wine or beverage flavored with fine and costly spices is drawn off into the latter.”

Inside the confines of their Forbidden City, Khubilai and his family continued to act as Mongols in dress, speech, food, sports, and entertainment. This meant that they consumed large amounts of alcohol, loudly slurped their soup, and they cut meat with knives at the table, thereby disgusting the Chinese who confined such acts to the kitchen during preparation. With the emphasis on alcohol and rituals of drinking and drunkenness, the scenes at court must have been somewhat chaotic as the free-roaming, individualistic Mongols tried to imitate the complex and highly orchestrated rituals and ceremonies of the Chinese court. In contrast to the Chinese imperial tradition of courtiers lining up according to rank, the Mongols tended to swarm chaotically, and, perhaps most disturbing to the Chinese, the Mongol women mingled freely among the men on even the most important occasions. The ceremonies in the Mongol court became so disorganized that sometimes the khan’s bodyguards had to beat back the crowds of officials and guests with batons.

Like his grandfather, Khubilai recognized the importance of laying down a clear and strong legal code as the center of civil administration. Creating and enforcing new laws was the traditional way that steppe chieftans, as well as Chinese rulers, created legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. In devising a legal code, Khubilai did not replace Chinese law with Mongol so much as reform it to make it compatible with Genghis Khan’s law, and in such a way as to simultaneously win support from both his Mongol and Chinese followers. The law was one more weapon in his struggle for loyalty and support from his subjects, and thus, ultimately, supremacy over the rival Sung dynasty.

Khubilai Khan’s administration guaranteed landowners their property rights, reduced taxes, and improved roads and communications. To further garner public support, the Mongols lessened the harsh penal code of the Sung. The Mongols reduced by nearly half the number of capital offenses in China—from 233 to 135. Khubilai Khan rarely allowed the use of execution even for those offenses that remained. The records of executions survive for all but four of the thirty-four years of his reign. The highest number in a single year was 278 executions in 1283. The lowest was only 7 in 1263, but it is possible that the reason that four of the years are missing from the record is because there were no executions at all in those years. In total, fewer than 2,500 criminals were executed in more than three decades of Khubilai’s rule. His annual rate fell considerably short of the number of executions in modern countries such as China or the United States.

Overall, he installed a more consistent system of laws and punishments as well as one that was substantially milder and more humanitarian than the Sung’s. Where practical, he substituted fines for physical punishment, and he installed procedures to grant amnesty to criminals who repented of their wrongdoings. In a similar way, Mongol authorities sought to eradicate torture or, at least, to severely curtail its use. Mongol law specified that before torture could be applied to elicit a confession, the officials had to already have substantial evidence, not mere suspicion, that the person had committed a particular crime. The Mongol legal code of 1291 specified that officials must “first use reason to analyze and surmise, and shall not impose abruptly any torture.” By comparison, at the same time that the Mongols were moving to limit the use of torture, both church and state in Europe passed laws to expand its usage to an ever greater variety of crimes for which there need be no evidence. Unlike the variety of bloody forms of torture, such as stretching on the rack, being crushed by a great wheel, being impaled on spikes, or various forms of burning, in other countries, Mongols limited it to beating with a cane.

The mildness of Mongol law and the customs of steppe culture showed up in some odd ways. Chinese authorities frequently tattooed a criminal’s crimes on his forehead so that he was permanently marked by his crime. Because Mongols considered the forehead the abode of the soul, they maintained that even a criminal’s head could not be thus abused. The Mongol authorities allowed the tattooing to continue, where it was already in practice, but specified that the tattoos be placed on the upper arms for the first two offenses and on the neck for the third, but never on the forehead. The Mongols did not allow the punishment to be extended into new areas or to ethnic minorities who did not already have the practice. Rather than writing the crime on the body, Mongol authorities preferred to write the offense on a wall erected in front of a criminal’s home so that the entire community could watch him carefully. They also used a system of parole in which freed prisoners had to report twice a month to local officials to have their behavior reviewed. In keeping with the Mongol principle of group culpability and responsibility, the freedom of a prisoner depended, in part, on his willingness to join an auxiliary law enforcement agency in order to apply his knowledge or crime to the apprehension of other prisoners. Criminals, and often their entire families, had to sign documents acknowledging receipt of their sentence and to register their disagreement or complaint with the process. To preserve the record of the event, fingerprints were taken and attached to the document. Whenever practical, Mongol administrators preferred to have as many issues as possible settled at the lowest level without the intervention of officials. Crimes within a family could be settled by the family, or disputes within a group of monks of the same religion could be settled by monks within that religion, and crimes within a profession could be settled by councils of those professionals.

Related to dispute settlement, Mongol authorities encouraged the printing of books on criminology so that individual citizens and these small councils had the benefit of proper guidance. In the area of criminal law, they also set minimum requirements for officials visiting crime scenes to collect, analyze, and report evidence. These included instructions on the handling and examination of a corpse in order to collect as much information from it as practical, the reporting of which had to be made in triplicate, including drawings to depict the location of wounds. The Mongol procedures not only improved the quality of law enforcement, but corresponded with the overarching Mongol policy that all people, not just an educated elite, should know and be able to act through the law. For the Mongols, the law was more a way of handling problems, creating unity, and preserving peace rather than just a tool for deciding guilt or administering punishment.

Instead of educating officials in the classic arts of poetry and calligraphy, Mongols promoted more practical training in a variety of ways. They set minimum standards of knowledge for professions from matchmakers and merchants to doctors and lawyers. On every front, the Mongol policy seemed to be the same. It sought to standardize and raise the level of professions, while at the same time assuring a wide range of individuals access to them and to the benefits and services of the profession.

With so few Mongols ruling over so many people in China, Khubilai Khan seemed forced to accept administration through the traditional mandarins selected through a long process of study and exams, but he refused. Rather than perpetuate the old system, he abolished the exams and turned for administrative assistance to a wide variety of foreigners, particularly Muslims, and, when he could get them, Europeans such as Marco Polo. Like his grandfather, who found the educated Muslim administrators to be skilled in “the laws and customs of cities,” Khubilai imported large numbers of such men from his brother’s realm in Persia. He repeatedly sent requests to the pope and European kings asking them to send scholars and learned men, but with no response.

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 set of administrators that included Tibetans, Armenians, Khitan, Arabs, Tajiks, Uighurs, Tangut, Turks, Persians, and Europeans. 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 a different culture or religion. Just as Genghis Khan promoted men from the lowest levels of society to the highest ranks of leadership based on their skills and achievements rather than birth, Khubilai’s administration constantly promoted men from the lowest jobs, such as cooks, gatekeepers, scribes, and translators. Both the promotion of low-ranking men and the movement of them into new areas increased their dependence on and loyalty to their Mongol overlords and lessened their connection to the people ruled.

Without the rigid hierarchy of the ranked mandarins to administer local areas, Khubilai Khan imposed Genghis Khan’s system of decisions made through large meetings and councils and constant deliberation. Wherever possible and at whatever level, the Mongols replaced the bureaucracy with councils modeled on the small khuriltai of the steppes. The local councils had to meet daily, and any new measure had to come with the seal of approval of at least two officials. The council had to debate the issues and reach a consensus; the decision had to be made by the group, not by a single official. By Chinese standards, this was an extremely inefficient and impractical system that took too much time and energy compared with simply having one official make the decision and the people follow it. The Mongols promoted the use of other small councils, in a variety of ways. Patients displeased with medical service could seek redress from a council composed of representatives of the medical profession and nonmedical officials. Similar groups were formed to settle disputes involving a great variety of professions, from soldiers to musicians.

Whereas the old administrative system relied on unpaid scholarly officials who made a living by extorting money from people who needed their services or stamp of approval, the Mongols hired salaried employees for the lower levels of routine administration. They standardized the salaries throughout Mongol territory with a few regional differentials for the varying cost of living.

The move toward consensual councils and paid civil servants did not take deep root in China, and it failed to outlive the Mongols. As soon as the Ming came to power, they reverted to the traditional institutions of bureaucratic offices and abandoned the council form in favor of rule from above. This experiment in participatory administration was not tried again in Chinese history until the twentieth century, when the founders of the republic and the founders of Communism struggled to reintroduce some of the local councils, debates, salaried administrators, and citizen participation in government.

To further facilitate the speed and safety of commerce through the empire, Khubilai radically expanded the use of paper money. By the time Marco Polo arrived, the system was in full operation. He describes the money as made from mulberry bark in a form that we recognize as paper but which was still largely unknown in Europe. The paper money was cut into rectangles of varying size, marked with its value and stamped with a vermilion seal. The primary advantage of paper money was that it was much easier to handle and ship than the bulky coins then in use. Marco Polo wrote that the money was accepted throughout the empire: “To refuse it would be to incur the death penalty,” but most people “are perfectly willing to be paid in paper money since with it they can buy anything including pearls, precious stones, gold, or silver.” Mongol authorities in Persia tried but failed to institute the Mongol system of paper money because the concept was alien to the local merchants, and their discontent bordered on revolt at a time when the Mongols could not be certain they had the forces to win. Rather than risk a humiliating loss, the authorities withdrew the paper money.

Where there is paper money, there are increased opportunities for credit and financial disaster. In an important innovation designed to bring consistency to the markets, particularly involving the extension of credit, Mongol law provided for declarations of bankruptcy, but no merchant or customer could declare bankruptcy more than twice as a way to avoid paying debts. On the third time, he faced the possible punishment of execution.

While the Mongols consistently rejected some parts of Chinese culture such as Confucianism and foot binding, the refinement of the monetary system shows their great appreciation for other aspects of Chinese culture. Khubilai proved willing to reach far back into Chinese history for ideas and institutions that showed practical value. Khubilai built schools and revived the Chinese Hanlin Academy, which was composed of the brightest scholars in the country, in order to promote some types of traditional Chinese learning and culture. He founded the Mongolian Language School in 1269, and then the Mongolian National University at Khanbalik in 1271. He added new departments and commissioned scholars to record contemporary events, edit and reprint old texts, and tend the archives.

The Mongol court maintained scribes not only for the Mongol language but also for Arabic, Persian, Uighur, Tangut, Jurched, Tibetan, Chinese, and lesser-known languages; still, they experienced perplexing difficulties with the variety of languages. With only their Mongol-Uighur alphabet, the Mongols found it difficult to record all the administrative information they needed from their vast empire. In everyday administration, clerks had to be able to spell names as diverse as those of Chinese towns, Russian princes, Persian mountains, Hindu sages, Vietnamese generals, Muslim clerics, and Hungarian rivers. Because the subjects of the Mongol Empire used so many different languages, Khubilai Khan attempted one of the most innovative experiments in intellectual and administrative history. He sought to create a single alphabet that could be used to write all the languages of the world. He assigned this task to the Tibetan Buddhist lama Phagspa, who in 1269 presented the khan with a set of forty-one letters derived from the Tibetan alphabet. Khubilai Khan made Phagspa’s script the empire’s official script, but rather than force the system on anyone, he allowed the Chinese and all other subjects to continue using their own writing system as well in the hope that the new script would eventually replace the old by showing its superiority. Chinese scholars felt too attached to their own ancient language to allow themselves to be cut off from it by a new, and obviously barbarian, system of writing, and most subject people eventually abandoned the Mongol writing system as soon as Mongol power waned.

Peasants traditionally groveled at the bottom of a long line of government officials who commanded the most intimate aspects of their lives. The Mongols upset that ancient hierarchy by organizing the peasants into units of about fifty households called a she. These local units exercised broad responsibility and authority over their lives. They oversaw local farming, exercised responsibility for improving the land and managing water and other natural resources, and provided food reserves for time of famine. In general, they functioned as a form of local government, combining elements of Genghis Khan’s decimal organization and Chinese peasant tradition.

The she also had the task of providing some form of education for peasant children; the Mongols promoted general literacy as a way of improving the quality of life for everyone. Khubilai Khan created public schools to provide universal education to all children, including those of peasants. Until this point, only the rich had the time and income to educate their children and thereby maintain power over the illiterate peasantry for generation after generation. The Mongols recognized that in the winter, peasant children had time to learn, and rather than teaching them in classical Chinese, the teachers used the colloquial language for more practical lessons. The record of the Mongol dynasty lists 20,166 public schools created during Khubilai Khan’s reign. Despite possible exaggeration by officials seeking to improve their record, the Mongol achievement is amazing considering that no other country had attempted such an effort for universal education. In the West, it would be another century before writers began to write in the colloquial language, and it would take nearly five hundred more years before governments picked up the responsibility for public education for the children of common people.

In traditional Confucian society, the literary arts had been directed toward the specific kinds of writing used in the national examination system. This meant that literature always fell well within the confines of the bureaucracy and its interests. The Mongols, however, allowed a wider range of literary endeavors, and they encouraged writers to produce material in the colloquial language of the people rather than in the classical style preferred by the scholarly bureaucrats. Mongol tastes coincided more closely with those of the masses than with the refined elite, and they combined folk culture and court culture to create new and more exciting forms of entertainment.

In keeping with the great ceremonies staged at the installation of Genghis Khan in 1206, the Mongols sponsored spectacular ceremonial dramas involving thousands of people for up to weeks at a time. In 1275, they encapsulated Mongol military history in a ceremonial drama performed by the army. It consisted of six parts to symbolize the important phases of the creation of the Mongol Empire from Genghis to Mongke Khan.

With an impresario’s ability to manage public spectacle and to capture the popular imagination, Khubilai enthusiastically supported drama, a much-neglected art in traditional Chinese culture, and he frequently had plays staged in the royal compound. The Mongol courtiers enjoyed plays filled with acrobatic action, emotional music, bright makeup, and colorful costumes. Much like the works of William Shakespeare in Europe, the playwrights of the Mongol era sought to be entertaining while seeking to understand issues such as the relation of power to virtue. It is reported, but impossible to verify, that no play was censored during Khubilai’s reign. The resulting plays were some of the most enduring in Chinese literature, making the Mongol era rank as the golden age for Chinese drama. Estimates place the total number of new plays performed during the Yuan dynasty at around 500, of which 160 survive.

Traditionally in China, the performing artists such as actors and singers ranked as low in respect and prestige as prostitutes, concubines, and other marginal professions. The Mongol rulers raised their social status as professionals and built theater districts so that the performances would not be confined to marketplaces, brothels, and taverns. The combination of Chinese drama and the Mongolian patronage of music laid the basis for what became the Peking Opera.

In their patronage of popular culture to entertain themselves and the masses, the Mongols adhered to their cultural abhorrence of bloodshed. Although they enjoyed wrestling and archery, they developed no counterpart to the gladiatorial games and public slaughter that fascinated the Romans, nor any of the traditional European sports of pitting animals against each other, as in bear baiting and dogfights, or animals against humans, as in bullfighting. Mongols did not permit the execution of criminals to become a public sport, as in the beheadings and hangings common in European cities. The Mongols offered no counterpart to the common public entertainment of burning people alive that occurred so frequently in western Europe wherever the Christian church had the power to do so.

Khubilai did not pursue a short-term strategy of winning transitory popular support; rather, he consistently and systematically pursued a nearly two-decades long policy of winning the allegiance of a continental civilization. The Mongols portrayed themselves as the strong leaders favored by heaven to unite the Chinese, in contrast to the effete and detached Sung leaders who wallowed in decadent luxury and valued ostentatious displays of wealth more than martial power. As different as the Mongols were in many respects, the Chinese masses found more common ground with them in their taste and sensibilities than with their own Chinese court officials.

Year by year, soldiers, officials, and peasants deserted the Sung to live under the Mongols or helped the Mongols to take over their local area. More merchants took their trade to the Mongols, more priests and scholars found protection and greater freedom of movement under the Mongols, and eventually Chinese generals and whole regiments of soldiers and sailors deserted to the Mongol lines. The collapse of the Sung dynasty was not a sudden fall or conquest, but a slow erosion as it fell apart.

Throughout this campaign, the Mongols sustained their military pressure on the Sung. Each small victory reinforced the idea that Heaven willed the future to the Mongols and had abandoned the Sung. Khubilai Khan directed the public relations campaign but not the military one, which he left in the hands of his highly competent generals, such as a man named Bayan, who proved nearly as skillful in fighting the Chinese as Subodei had been in his destruction of the European armies from Russia to Hungary. In 1276, the Mongol troops finally overtook the Sung capital at Hangzhou, and over the next few years they wiped up the small pockets of local resistance. Through patient propaganda and shrewd policies, Khubilai Khan had succeeded in doing what Genghis Khan had not been able to do with his mighty army. In keeping with his new image as the personification of Chinese virtues, Khubilai provided excellent care for the dowager empress and allowed most of the royal family to live in a wonderful palace with all the luxuries to which they had been accustomed. To avoid the heir of the deposed Sung becoming a center for rebellion, he sent the young emperor to study in Tibet, where he became a monk in 1296.

For Chinese scholars and literati, the defeated Sung dynasty became a nostalgic memory of a golden era. The poet Xie Ao (Hsieh Ao) captured the nostalgia in a poem titled “On Visiting the Former Imperial Palace at Hangchow.”

Like an ancient ruin, the grass grows high: gone are the guards and the gatekeepers.

Fallen towers and crumbling palaces desolate my soul.

Under the eaves of the long-ago hall fly in and out the swallows

But within: Silence. The chatter of cock and hen parrots is heard no more.

Khubilai Khan realized what a jewel he had acquired in his conquest of the Sung capital and officials. They represented the height of Chinese civilization, and in the years ahead, he strove to preserve their achievements while reforming and expanding their empire. As the Japanese scholar Hidehiro Okada wrote, “The greatest legacy of the Mongol Empire bequeathed to the Chinese is the Chinese nation itself.” The Mongols united not only all of the areas speaking various Chinese dialects, but they combined with it the adjacent kingdoms of the Tibetans, Manchurians, Uighurs, and dozens of smaller kingdoms and tribal nations. The new country under their administration was about five times as large as the civilization where people spoke the Chinese languages. The official Chinese state culture that emerged was certainly not Mongol; nor was it Chinese. Khubilai Khan had created a hybrid, and, through his efforts, the culture would have a worldwide impact of unanticipated dimensions and importance.

With his control extended to almost everything reachable by land, Khubilai had to look out to sea to find new lands to conquer. The trading missions of his junks had brought back detailed information on the distant spice islands, Java, Ceylon, and the nearby northern islands of Japan. He wanted to incorporate them into the expanding Mongol Empire. In 1268 he sent an envoy to Japan to demand surrender, but the Japanese refused. Khubilai was still too engaged with the final conquest of the Sung dynasty to launch an attack on Japan, so he continued to send more delegations to persuade them to surrender.

As Khubilai incorporated the defeated Sung navy into his own, he acquired the personnel and skills needed to invade the defiant islands. He revitalized and enlarged the Sung navy, and he tried to transform the navy from mere guardians of the coastal and river districts into a bona fide ocean fleet capable of operating on the high seas in both commercial and military enterprises. He turned the Korean Peninsula into a large shipbuilding facility and a military and naval base from which he attempted to conquer Japan. Although the ships were some of the largest in the world of that era, the speed with which they were built compromised their quality. Archaeological evidence reveals shortcuts such as attaching two large stones together to make an anchor rather than carving a single stone and thereby creating a much more stable anchor. The Mongols loaded the ships with food, armor, and ammunition, including large numbers of melon-sized pottery grenades filled with gunpowder and shrapnel to bombard the Japanese defenders.

Khubilai sent several more envoys to persuade the island nation of Japan to submit to Mongol rule, but the military authorities rejected each one. By 1274, Khubilai had assembled an armada of about nine hundred ships to transport an army of twenty-three thousand Korean and Chinese infantry and an unknown number of Mongol horsemen. In November, they sailed out into the treacherous waters that separated Korea from Japan by 110 miles. The Mongols easily captured Tsushima Island about halfway across the strait and then Ika Island closer to Kyushu. The armada sailed into Hakata Bay and landed its forces and animals.

The samurai warriors rode out against the Mongol forces for individual combat, but the Mongols held their formation. As usual, the Mongols fought as a united force, not as individuals. Instead of coming out for duels, the Mongols bombarded the samurai with exploding missiles and showered them in arrows. The Mongols slaughtered the famed Japanese warriors, and the remaining Japanese withdrew from the coastal zone inland to a fortress. The Mongol forces did not chase the fleeing Japanese into an area about which they lacked reliable intelligence. Instead, they left the battlefield victorious but damaged, and they reloaded the men, horses, and supplies on the ship. The plan of the Mongols remains a mystery. Were they going to return the next day to pursue the Japanese? After winning this battle, did they intend to move farther along the coast and attack at another point? Had they been sent as a test probe to assess Japanese reaction and tactics? Were they more badly damaged in the fight than they appeared and therefore sought to retreat?

That night, with all the invaders on their ships, a terrific fall storm blew in across the ocean. The Kamikaze, or Divine Wind, as it was later named by the Japanese, churned up the seas and shattered many of the hurriedly constructed boats against the rocks and shore. In an effort to escape, some thirteen thousand of the invaders died, most by drowning, in the deadly channel that separated them from the safe harbors of Korea. The greatest armada in history had turned into the greatest, but largely bloodless, massacre at sea.

In the mythical explanations that rulers sometimes construct for others but end up believing themselves, Khubilai and his courtiers maintained that the invasion had been a success because the Mongols had defeated the Japanese army in the brief land battle; the subsequent loss of life and destruction of nearly the entire navy seemed less important. So he dispatched envoys back to Japan the following year to demand that the emperor now come in person to the Mongol capital to articulate his submission, after which Khubilai would reinvest him in office as ruler of Japan. The Japanese, equally as convinced that they had won, despite the loss of life on land, rejected the Mongol demands. With new confidence in either themselves or the divine protection of their gods, the Japanese committed the ultimate offense against the Mongols. They executed the envoys by chopping off their heads, spilling their blood, and then displaying the severed heads for public mockery.

Khubilai prepared for another expedition. The Japanese began building a small fleet of ships to fight the invaders on water, and along the shore they erected a stone wall to block the Mongol soldiers and horses from landing. When more delegates arrived from Khubilai in 1279, the Japanese executed them, and both sides prepared for imminent war. This time the Mongols would invade from two directions, with another Korean fleet of about the same size as the first. Following it would come the main fleet from China with 3,500 ships manned by 60,000 sailors to transport 100,000 soldiers; and this time they were coming in summer, instead of sailing in the fall.

At the end of May 1281 the Korean fleet sailed, and despite heavy Japanese resistance, within a few days, they again conquered the island in the channel. Mongol planning at sea, however, was not as accurate and easily executed as on land. The Chinese ships encountered numerous difficulties and delays. The Korean fleet sailed into Hakata Bay expecting to be backed up by their Chinese counterparts from the south, but they never came. The Japanese wall prevented a successful landing, and the invaders remained cramped in their ships in the sweltering heat of June, quickly becoming ill as small epidemics of unknown diseases broke out. At night, the small Japanese boats came out to attack the large ships under cover of darkness, their intention being to spread panic and confusion more than to inflict decisive military harm. Unable to land and harried by the night attacks, the Korean fleet withdrew on June 30 to return to Takashima Island and await the southern fleet, which finally arrived two weeks later. Disorganized, sick, and already at sea much longer than prepared or supplied to do, the entire armada sailed for Japan in mid-August. Again, a storm churned the seas, capsizing and smashing boats, and perhaps more than one hundred thousand men died. Few ships survived to relate the story of the disaster.

Khubilai’s invasions of Japan had failed, but they left a tremendous impact on Japanese social and political life by pushing them toward cultural unification and militaristic government. The Mongols, meanwhile, turned away from Japan, pretending the failures never happened as they looked elsewhere for what they hoped would be easier targets.

The Mongol conquests on land continued. Despite the extreme difficulty of the tropical heat and the unfamiliar landscape, the Mongol army had success in Burma, Annam in northern Vietnam, and Laos. Several of the Southeast Asian kingdoms, including the rulers of Champa in southern Vietnam and Malabar on the coast of India, voluntarily submitted to Mongol rule. In some regard, these acts of submission were more ceremonial than real, and the Mongols lacked the personnel to administer them. The new subjects did, however, send tribute on to the Mongol court, including elephants, rhinoceroses, and a tooth reportedly from the Buddha himself. The exchange of tribute and gifts served as a thin ceremonial disguise for commercial trade that gradually increased in volume and value.

The Mongols not only succeeded in building a unified Chinese state; at the same time, their influence exerted the same pressure on the small states around them. Early on, the Mongols had pushed for the unification of the culturally similar but constantly warring states of the Korean Peninsula into a unified nation. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, which remained beyond direct Mongol administration, the Mongol forces forged together new nations that laid a basis for Vietnam and Thailand. 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 the Chinese immigrants whom they had brought created a new hybrid culture that thereafter became known as Indo-Chinese.

The Mongols had less success in the islands that are today Indonesia. In 1289, Khubilai dispatched an envoy to Java to request the same submission he had received from the rulers of nearby kingdoms, but the king feared that the Mongols might be planning on taking away Javanese control of the valuable spice trade from the Molucca Islands. The Javanese king defiantly branded the face of the envoy and sent him back to Khubilai, who ordered the preparation of an armada to capture Java and exact revenge on its king, just as he had done in the similar episode in Japan. In 1292, the newly constructed fleet of one thousand ships and boats with twenty thousand soldiers set sail with a year’s supply of provisions. When they arrived in 1293, the Mongols met with easy success, soon killed the offending king, and apparently conquered the island with apparent ease. But then they fell into a trap. Believing that they were preparing for a ceremonial submission by the new king, the Mongol leaders were lured into an ambush, where many of the leaders were killed, and the remaining troops retreated in humiliation from the island.

Khubilai had failed to adapt the successful Mongol strategies to the sea. The ancient techniques of the mounted hunter that his grandfather had used as the basis for his campaigns on land, did not translate to campaigns on ships. In contrast to former sea powers such as Rome and Athens, which had operated in small confined areas of the enclosed Mediterranean Sea, the Mongols had made China into an oceanic power. In this regard, the Mongols portended a new type of imperial power based on naval armadas that would rise in Spain, England, and the Netherlands in the coming centuries.

For the time being, however, Khubilai’s defeats in Japan and Java had drawn the eastern limit of the Mongol Empire which would never extend across the water, not even to closer islands such as Taiwan or the Philippines. Similarly, the defeat by the Egyptian Mamluks in 1260, at the start of Khubilai’s rule, had marked the southwestern border, just as precisely as the voluntary abandonment of Poland and Hungary had marked the northwestern point twenty years earlier. Thus, between 1242 and 1293, the Mongol expansion reached its maximum, and four battles marked the outer borders of the Mongol world—Poland, Egypt, Java, and Japan. The area inside those four points had suffered devastating conquests and radical adjustments to a markedly different kind of rule, but they were about to enjoy an unprecedented century of political peace with a commercial, technological, and intellectual explosion unlike any in prior history.

Every spring when flocks of cranes passed over northern China headed north to breed around the shallow lakes and rivers of Mongolia, Khubilai Khan awaited them in the countryside, stretched out on his silk couch covered with tiger skins in a beautiful gilded pavilion mounted on the backs of four elephants brought to him as part of the plunder from Burma. Too fat to ride a horse and pained by gout, he hunted from the more comfortable confines of this special and elaborately mounted chamber. When he was ready to hunt, the roof of the room rolled back to reveal the white and gray cranes so dense overhead that they appeared as clouds against the crisp blue sky. At the signal from Khubilai, hundreds of falconers lined up on either side of the elephants, removed the leather hoods from their birds, and the gyrfalcons, peregrine falcons, and eagles took flight. They raced after the cranes and, one by one, tore them out of the sky, and brought them back to their handler.

Although his grandfather codified the Mongol preference for hunting only in winter and never in spring, Khubilai did not enjoy hunting in the cold of winter and changed the law. Even with his white ermine coat, sable blankets, and tiger skin rugs on the floor and walls around him, he found the temperature uncomfortable and the wind biting; as a result, he pushed the hunting season into the early spring when the weather proved more agreeable.

In the hunting procession, soldiers rode the horses. Camels transported the goods, and other elephants carried smaller individual pavilions in case the khan wanted to chase the game into more confined areas than his four-elephant mobile palace could fit. The caravan followed the imperial banners of Khubilai and was festooned with brightly colored silks. The procession included hunting tigers riding in mobile cages pulled by powerful oxen, as well as leopards and lynx riding on the hind quarters of horses, alone or seated behind their trainers. When prey appeared, Khubilai dispatched one of his trained predators to bring it down. Dogs sufficed for the bears and smaller game, leopards for the deer, and tigers for the large wild asses or bulls. A phalanx of archers stood ready to shoot at whatever target their master might command if it could not be reached by the hunting animals.

Khubilai’s processions across the countryside included a large number of astrologers, diviners, Mongol shamans, and Tibetan monks, whose work, vaguely reminiscent of Genghis Khan’s use of shamans before battle, consisted of clearing the path of clouds, rain, and any other form of inclement weather that might hamper the mighty hunter. With the sounds and smells of such a massive caravan, animals had ample warning and opportunity to flee. It was hard for them to be taken by surprise, so Khubilai’s caravan moved like the traditional Mongol army. While the emperor, his court and menagerie moved as the center or pivot of the caravan, he kept a tumen (nominally of ten thousand men, but in this case perhaps less) spread out to his forward left, and another spread out to the forward right. To show their wing assignment, one side wore scarlet, and the other wore blue. According to Marco Polo, they spread the distance of a whole day’s journey in both directions. Accompanied by mastiffs and hunting birds, the retainers drove the animals before them and toward the center so that they would be correctly positioned when the elephants arrived with Khubilai in his portable palace.

In order to cater to the needs of the hunting party after an exhausting day on the backs of the elephants, a vanguard of servants preceded them to erect a camp that resembled a portable city. The largest pavilion held a thousand guests for the rowdy Mongol celebrations. Adjacent tents provided sleeping quarters. A troupe of musicians accompanied the court to perform with singers, acrobats, jugglers, and the contortionists so enjoyed by the court.

At each evening’s celebration, everyone wore a deel of the same style and assigned color for the day; but lest they appear too egalitarian, rank and power were symbolized in the number and value of the jewels and pearls worked into the costume. They wore golden belts and silver embroidered onto their boots. In the midst of all the celebration, one of the trained tigers entered the pavilion, proceeded slowly among the guests to the khan, bowed, and then took its place seated beside the throne for the evening. The meals were served in dishes of gold and silver. Each servant wore a silk napkin trimmed in gold as a veil across his nose and mouth to prevent his breath, or any other essence, from contaminating the food. The recipes of the dishes served Khubilai Khan still survive. They include a variety of foods but maintain the traditional Mongol emphasis on meat and dairy products. The members of the Mongol court ate such delicacies as strips of mutton tail fat dusted with flour and baked with leeks. Bull testicles fried in hot oil, basted with saffron paste, and sprinkled with coriander. Mutton boiled with cardamom and cinnamon and served with rice and chickpeas. Young eggplant stuffed with chopped mutton, fat, yogurt, orange peel, and basil.

Like true Mongols, they gorged themselves on their favorite drink of fermented mare’s milk, but this milk originated from the special imperial herd of pure white mares that had been impregnated by pure white stallions to produce a special milk restricted exclusively for Khubilai and his court. When it came time to retire to his chamber for the night, the khan had his pick of beautiful young women, all of whom had been tested to make sure that they did not snore, have bad breath, or discharge any unpleasant body odors. The next morning, to recover from the excessive drinking, eating, and indulging of every appetite, the khan’s mobile unit of doctors and pharmacists served him a tea made from orange peel, kudzu flowers, ginseng, sandalwood, and cardamom. Sipped on an empty stomach, the tea was guaranteed to overcome a hangover and make the khan fit for another day of hunting, eating, and drinking.

Only a few generations earlier, Khubilai’s ancestors had used the hunt as the primary means of acquiring food. His great-grandfather Yesugei had been out hunting with his gyrfalcon when he saw the bride Hoelun, whom he seized to make his own wife. Khubilai’s grandfather Genghis Khan fed his family by hunting after his father’s death, and he had killed his half brother Begter in an argument ostensibly following a hunting quarrel about a bird and a fish. Later in life, Genghis Khan, with the aid of Subodei and other good hunters, adapted the extensive hunting strategies, techniques, and weapons to the task of warfare by treating his enemies as objects of prey to be trapped and stalked, and he thereby conquered his vast empire.

The hunt combined a recreational pastime enjoyed by Khubilai with the imperial needs of ceremonial pomp and wasteful spectacle. Khubilai still participated in some of the traditional features of the Mongol hunt and lifestyle—the emphasis on archery, trained raptors, enjoyment of mare’s milk, sleeping in tents, and organization of the Armies of the Left and the Right. But he turned it into a decadent and luxurious recreation that provided costly, if vapid, amusements for the Mongol elite and himself. His great procession was more show than substance. Its meaning came from the public spectacle that it made and the impression it created on his subjects and foreign visitors.

Like the frequent relocation of camp on the Mongol steppe, Khubilai’s caravan followed a rider carrying his Spirit Banner before him. The Spirit Banner led him on a frivolous round of entertainments that ultimately meant nothing and ended nowhere. The Mongol Empire would continue on for another century, but already, only three generations after its founding, it had lost its way. It was clear to anyone that the Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan no longer led his descendants and the people who claimed to be his followers.

9

Their Golden Light

The artists of China and Paris vied with each other

in the service of the great Khan.

E

DWARD

G

IBBON

DURING MASS ONE DAY in the winter of 1287–1288, King Edward I of England rose up from his throne to stand in honor of Rabban Bar Sawma, the newly arrived envoy from the Mongol Emperor Khubilai Khan. When he reached the court of the English king, Rabban Bar Sawma had probably traveled farther than any official envoy in history, covering some seven thousand miles on the circuitous land route from the Mongol capital, through the major cities of the Middle East, and on to the capitals of Europe. King Edward stood before the envoy not to offer submission to the Mongol Khan, but to accept bread from the hand of the Mongol envoy as part of the Christian sacrament of communion. Since the early European envoys to the Mongols had been priests, Khubilai Khan had chosen Rabban Bar Sawma because, although a loyal Mongol, he was also a Christian priest, albeit of the Assyrian rite.

Rabban Bar Sawma’s mission began as a pilgrimage from Khubilai Khan’s capital to Jerusalem, but after reaching Baghdad, his superiors diverted him to Europe in 1287. In addition to visiting with the Mongol Ilkhan in Persia, Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus of Byzantium in Constantinople, the College of Cardinals in Rome, and King Philip IV of France in Paris, Rabban Bar Sawma made his way to the court of Edward, at the most distant point of his journey. He delivered letters and gifts to each monarch along his route, and he stayed in each court for a few weeks or months before moving on to the next. He used his time sightseeing and meeting with scholars, politicians, and church officials to tell them about the Great Khan of the Mongols, his subordinate the Ilkhan, and their burning desire for peaceful relations with the world. On his way back through Rome, Pope Nicholas IV invited Rabban Bar Sawma to celebrate Mass in his language; and then, on Palm Sunday, 1288, the pope celebrated Mass and personally gave communion to the Mongol envoy.

The crowned heads of Europe received Rabban Bar Sawma openly in their courts, but many prior envoys had been sent, only to be officially ignored by church and state. As early as 1247, during the reign of Guyuk Khan, Matthew Paris reported ambassadors from the Mongols arriving at the French court. Again in the summer of the following year, “two envoys came from the Tartars, sent to the lord pope by their prince.” During the earlier visits, however, European officials seemed afraid to let out any information about the Mongols. As Paris wrote, “the cause of their arrival was kept so secret from everyone at the curia that it was unknown to clerks, notaries and others, even those familiar with the pope.” Again in 1269, when the Polo brothers, Maffeo and Nicolo, returned from their first trip to Asia, they brought a request from Khubilai Khan to the pope to send the Mongols one hundred priests, that they might share their knowledge with the Mongol court.

With the tremendous emphasis on religious freedom throughout the Mongol Empire, Rabban Bar Sawma was surprised when he arrived in Europe and found that only a single religion was tolerated. He found particularly amazing that the religious leaders had so much political power over nations as well as more mundane powers over the everyday lives of the common people. As a Christian himself, he was delighted with the monopoly that his religion exercised, but it presented a stark contrast to the Mongol Empire where many religions flourished but had the obligation to serve the needs of the empire before their own.

Despite the publicity of his visit and the cordial reception across Europe, Rabban Bar Sawma fared no better in his mission than the other unacknowledged envoys; he failed to secure treaties with a single one of the European monarchs or church officials. His only success was that he managed to get a commitment from the pope to send teachers to the Mongol court as Khubilai had requested several times already. Failing in his diplomatic mission, Rabban Bar Sawma returned to the court of the Ilkhan in Persia, and related the events of his travels that were copied down in Syriac as The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Swama, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe. The trip of Rabban Bar Sawma, and particularly his serving communion to the king of England and personally receiving communion from the hands of the pope, illustrates how much the Mongols had changed the world in the fifty years since their army invaded Europe. Civilizations that had once been separate worlds unto themselves and largely unknown to one another, had become part of a single intercontinental system of communication, commerce, technology, and politics.

Instead of sending mounted warriors and fearsome siege engines, the Mongols now dispatched humble priests, scholars, and ambassadors. The time of Mongol conquests had ended, but the era of the Mongol Peace was only beginning. In recognition of the phenomenal changes of expanding peace and prosperity on the international scene, Western scholars later designated the fourteenth century as the Pax Mongolica or Pax Tatarica. The Mongol Khans now sought to bring about through peaceful commerce and diplomacy the commercial and diplomatic connections that they had not been able to create through force of arms. The Mongols continued, by a different means, to pursue their compulsive goal of uniting all people under the Eternal Blue Sky.

The commercial influence of the Mongols spread much farther than their army, and the transition from the Mongol Empire to the Mongol Corporation occurred during the reign of Khubilai Khan. Throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Mongols maintained trade routes across the empire and stocked shelters with provisions interspersed every twenty to thirty miles. The stations provided transport animals as well as guides to lead the merchants through difficult terrain. Marco Polo, who was at the Mongol court at the same time that Bar Sawma was on his mission to Europe, frequently used the Mongol relay stations in his travels. With perhaps a little more enthusiasm than accuracy, he describes them as not merely “beautiful” and “palatial,” but also having “silk sheets and every other luxury suitable for a king.” To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early type of combined passport and credit card. The Mongol paiza was a tablet of gold, silver, or wood larger than a man’s hand, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothing. Depending on which metal was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render the appropriate level of service. The paiza allowed the holder to travel throughout the empire and be assured of protection, accommodations, transportation, and exemption from local taxes or duties.

The expansion and maintenance of the trading routes did not derive from an ideological commitment of the Mongols to commerce and communication in general. Rather, it stemmed from the deeply rooted system of shares, or khubi, in the Mongol tribal organization that had been formalized by Genghis Khan. Just as each orphan and widow, as well as each soldier, was entitled to an appropriate measure of all the goods seized in war, each member of the Golden Family was entitled to a share of the wealth of each part of the empire. Instead of the salary paid to non-Mongol administrators, the higher-ranking Mongol officials received shares in goods, a large part of which they sold or traded on the market to get money or other commodities. As ruler of the Ilkhanate in Persia, Hulegu still had twenty-five thousand households of silk workers in China under his brother Khubilai. Hulegu also owned valleys in Tibet, and he had claim on a share of the furs and falcons of the northern steppes, and, of course, he had pastures, horses, and men assigned to him in the homeland of Mongolia itself. Each lineage in the Mongol ruling family demanded its appropriate share of astronomers, doctors, weavers, miners, and acrobats.

Khubilai owned farms in Persia and Iraq, as well as herds of camels, horses, sheep, and goats. An army of clerics traveled throughout the empire checking on the goods in one place and verifying accounts in another. The Mongols in Persia supplied their kinsmen in China with spices, steel, jewels, pearls, and textiles, while the Mongol court in China sent porcelains and medicines to Persia. In return for collecting and shipping the goods, the Mongols in China kept about three-quarters of this output for themselves; nevertheless, they exported a considerable amount to their relatives in other areas. Khubilai Khan imported Persian translators and doctors as well as some ten thousand Russian soldiers, who were used to colonize land north of the capital. The Russians stayed as permanent residents, and they remained in the official Chinese chronicles until last mentioned in 1339.

Despite political disagreement between contending branches of the family over the office of Great Khan, the economic and commercial system continued to operate with only brief pauses or detours because of sporadic fighting. Sometimes even in the midst of war, the fighting sides allowed the exchange of these shares. Khaidu, the grandson of Ogodei Khan and the ruler of the central steppe, was often in rebellion against his cousin Khubilai. Yet Khaidu also had extensive holdings of craftsmen and farmers around the Chinese city of Nanjing. In between sessions of fighting with Khubilai Khan, Khaidu would claim shipments of his Nanjing goods, and, presumably in exchange, he allowed Khubilai to collect his share of horses and other goods from the steppe tribes. The administrative division of the Mongol Empire into four major parts—China, Moghulistan, Persia, and Russia—did nothing to lessen the need for goods in the other regions. If anything, the political fragmentation increased the need to preserve the older system of shares. If one khan refused to furnish the shares to other members of the family, they would refuse to send him his share in their territories. Mutual financial interests trumped political squabbles.

The constant movement of shares gradually transformed the Mongol war routes into commercial arteries. Through the constantly expanding ortoo or yam, messages, people, and goods could be sent by horse or camel caravan from Mongolia to Vietnam or from Korea to Persia. As the movement of goods increased, Mongol authorities sought out faster or easier routes than the older traditional ones. Toward this end, Khubilai Khan launched a major expedition in 1281 to discover and map the source of the Yellow River, which the Mongols called the Black River. Scholars used the information to make a detailed map of the river. The expedition opened up a route from China into Tibet, and the Mongols used this as a means of including Tibet and the Himalayan area in the Mongol postal system. The new connections did more to connect Tibet—commercially, religiously, and politically—with the rest of China than anything else during the Mongol era.

During military campaigns, Mongol officials exerted a conscientious effort to locate and appropriate maps, atlases, and other geographic works found in enemy camps or cities. Under Khubilai’s rule, scholars synthesized Chinese, Arab, and Greek knowledge of geography to produce the most sophisticated cartography known. Under the influence of the Arab geographers brought in by Khubilai Khan, particularly Jamal al-Din, craftsmen constructed terrestrial globes for Khubilai in 1267, which depicted Europe and Africa as well as Asia and the adjacent Pacific islands.

Despite the initial reliance of commerce on routes created through military conquest, it soon became obvious that whereas armies moved quickest by horse across land, massive quantities of goods moved best by water. Mongols expanded and lengthened the Grand Canal that already connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to transport grain and other agricultural products farther and more efficiently into the northern districts. Adapting Chinese engineering and technology to new environments, they built water projects throughout their territories. In Yunnan, the Mongol governor created a dozen dams and reservoirs with connecting canals that survived until modern times.

The failed invasions of Japan and Java taught the Mongols much about shipbuilding, and when their military efforts failed, they turned that knowledge to peaceful pursuits of commerce. Khubilai Khan made the strategic decision to transport food within his empire primarily by ship because he realized how much cheaper and more efficient water transportation, which was dependent on wind and current, was than the much slower land transport, which was dependent on the labor of humans and animals that required constant feeding. In the first years, the Mongols moved some 3,000 tons by ship, but by 1329 it had grown to 210,000 tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others.

En route, the ships also called at the ports of Vietnam, Java, Ceylon, and India, and in each place the Mongol representatives encountered more goods, such as sugar, ivory, cinnamon, and cotton, that were not easily produced in their own lands. From the Persian Gulf, the ships continued outside of the areas under Mongol influence to include regular trade for a still greater variety of goods from Arabia, Egypt, and Somalia. Rulers and merchants in these other areas outside the Mongol system of influence did not operate within the system of shares in the Mongol goods; instead, the Mongol authorities created long-term trading relations with them. Under Mongol protection, their vassals proved as worthy competitors in commerce as the Mongols had been in conquest and they began to dominate trade on the Indian Ocean.

To expand the trade into new areas beyond Mongol political control, they encouraged some of their vassals, particularly the South Chinese, to emigrate and set up trading stations in foreign ports. Throughout the rule of the Mongol dynasty, thousands of Chinese left home and sailed off to settle along the coastal communities of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. They worked mostly in shipping and trade and as merchants up and down the rivers leading to the ports, but they gradually expanded into other professions as well.

To reach the markets of Europe more directly, without the lengthy detour through the southern Muslim countries, the Mongols encouraged foreigners to create trading posts on the edges of the empire along the Black Sea. Although the Mongols had initially raided the trading posts, as early as 1226, during the reign of Genghis Khan, they allowed the Genoese to maintain a trading station at the port of Kaffa in the Crimea, and later added another at Tana. To protect these stations on land and sea, the Mongols hunted down pirates and robbers. In the Pratica della mercatura (Practice of Marketing), a commercial handbook published in 1340, the Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti stressed that the routes to Mongol Cathay were “perfectly safe, whether by day or by night.”

The opening of new trade routes, combined with the widespread destruction of manufacturing in Persia and Iraq by the Mongol invasions, created new opportunities for Chinese manufacturing. The Mongol conquest of China had been far less disruptive than the military campaigns in the Middle East, and Khubilai pressed for the expansion of traditional Chinese wares into these markets as well as the widespread transfer of Muslim and Indian technology to China. Through their shares, the members of the Mongol royal family controlled much of the production throughout Eurasia, but they depended on the merchant class to transport and sell these wares. Mongols had turned from warriors into shareholders, but they had no skill or apparent desire to become merchants themselves.

The Mongol elite’s intimate involvement with trade represented a marked break with tradition. From China to Europe, traditional aristocrats generally disdained commercial enterprise as undignified, dirty, and, often, immoral; it ranked with the manual trades beneath the interests of either the powerful or the pious. Furthermore, the economic ideal in feudal Europe of this time was not merely that each country should be self-sufficient, but that each manor estate should strive to be as self-supporting as practical. Any goods that left the estate should not be going to trade for other goods for the peasants on the land but to buy jewelry, religious relics, and other luxury goods for the aristocratic family or church. The feudal rulers sought to have their peasants supply all their own needs—to produce their food, grow their timber, make their tools, and weave their cloth—and to trade for as little as possible. In a feudal system, reliance on imported goods represented a failure at home.

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars.

Since the time of Genghis Khan, the Mongols realized that items that were commonplace and taken for granted in one place were exotic and potentially marketable in another. The latter decades of the thirteenth century became a time of nearly frenetic search for new commodities that could be marketed somewhere in the expanding network of Mongol commerce or for old commodities that could be marketed in a new way. It must have seemed that every item, from dyes, paper, and drugs to pistachios, firecrackers, and poison, had a potential buyer, and the Mongol officials seemed determined to find who and where that buyer might be. By responding to the needs of a universal market, the Mongol workshops in China eventually were producing not merely traditional Chinese crafts of porcelains and silks for the world market, but adding entirely new items for specialized markets, including the manufacture of images of the Madonna and the Christ Child carved in ivory and exported to Europe.

The Mongol promotion of trade introduced a variety of new fabrics by taking local products and finding an international market for them. The origins of such textiles can still be seen in the etymology of many of their names. A particularly smooth and glossy type of silk became known in the West as satin, taking its name from the Mongol port of Zaytun from which Marco Polo sailed on his return to Europe. A style of highly ornate cloth became known as damask silk, derived from the name of Damascus, the city through which most of the trade from the Ilkhanate of Persia passed en route to Europe. Marco Polo mentioned another type of fine, delicate cloth made in Mosul, and it became known as mouslin in Old French and then as muslin in English.

Even the most trivial items might yield a great profit, as when the new commerce sparked a rapid spread of card playing because merchants and soldiers found the light and easily transported game an entertaining and novel pastime. Compared to the more cumbersome objects needed for chess and other board games, any soldier or camel driver could carry a pack of cards in his gear. This new market stimulated the need to make card production faster and cheaper, and the solution for that process was found in printing them from carved blocks normally used for printing religious scripture. The market for printed cards proved much greater than that for scripture.

Most empires of conquest in history have imposed their own civilization on the conquered. The Romans imposed the Latin language, their gods, and a preference for wine, olive oil, and wheat agriculture even in locales where it did not thrive. Each Roman city from Ephesus in Turkey to Cologne in Germany had the same urban design and architectural style, from markets and baths all the way to the smallest details on the columns or doorways. In other eras, the British erected Tudor buildings in Bombay, the Dutch built windmills in the Caribbean, the Spaniards constructed their own style of cathedrals and plazas from Mexico to Argentina, and Americans erected their distinctive residential compounds from Panama to Saudi Arabia. Merely by studying the physical remains of a place, archaeologists can trace the growth of Hindu, Aztec, Malian, Incan, or Arab empires.

By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered. They brought no distinctive architectural style with them. Nor did they seek to impose their language and religion on the conquered since in most cases they forbade non-Mongols to learn their language. The Mongols did not force cultivation of an alien crop nor impose radical change on their subjects’ collective way of life.

Skilled at moving large numbers of people and utilizing new technology for purposes of war, the Mongols continued the same practices during the Mongol Peace and applied itinerant principles of the nomadic society to very conservative areas of life and culture. The Mongol armies rounded up translators, scribes, doctors, astronomers, and mathematicians to be parceled out among the families in the same shares that they parceled out musicians, cooks, goldsmiths, acrobats, and painters. The authorities divided these knowledge workers, together with all the other craftsmen, the animals, and other goods for transportation via a long caravan trek or sea journey to the various parts of the family.

Traditional empires accumulated wealth in a single city. All routes led to the capital city, and the best of everything ended up there. One place so dominated such empires that the name of cities like Rome or Babylon became the names of the empires themselves. The Mongol Empire never had a single major city, and within the empire goods and people constantly traveled from one place to another.

In 1261, Khubilai Khan created the Office for the Stimulation of Agriculture under the authority of eight commissioners who sought ways to improve farmers’ lives and their yields. In addition to improving crop cultivation, the office bore responsibility to generally protect and promote the well-being of the peasants. This policy toward farmers constituted a substantial attitudinal shift on the part of a government that preserved the attitudes derived from the Mongols’ traditional nomadic lifestyle and had traditionally shown limited concern for the peasantry and for agricultural problems. Prior to the Mongol occupation of China, most farmers within any area cultivated the same set of crops; the crops varied by region, but not within a region. The Mongols encouraged farmers to cultivate those crops that proved most appropriate for the climate, soil type, and drainage pattern. This change in emphasis promoted greater variety within an area and higher productivity. Mongol authorities encouraged the spread of traditional Chinese crops such as tea and rice into new areas, particularly into Persia and the Middle East. The Mongols sought better tools and thus spread the use of an improved, triangular plow introduced into China from Southeast Asia.