Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

As soon as the Mongols assumed control of Persia, they established an office to encourage and improve agriculture there. After thousands of years of cultivation, the soils of the area had been eroded and productivity threatened. The Mongols addressed these problems with extensive importation of seeds from China, and when needed, shoots, branches, and whole trees that they planted in newly created agricultural stations for adaptation to Middle Eastern climate and soil. They brought new varieties of rice and millet, as well as fruit trees and root crops. India, China, and Persia cultivated some variety of citrus fruits before the Mongols, but the Mongols assiduously moved and mixed the varieties so that each region had more types. Near Canton in southern China, the Mongol authorities planted an orchard of eight hundred lemon trees imported from their territories in the Middle East. At Tabriz in Persia, the Mongols similarly planted groves of a different variety of lemon and other citrus trees imported in the opposite direction—from China to the Middle East. The Mongols transplanted an ever-expanding variety of peas, beans, grapes, lentils, nuts, carrots, turnips, melons, and diverse leaf vegetables, and in turn they developed new varieties and hybrids. In addition to food crops for humans and animals, Mongol authorities had a persistent interest in varieties of cotton and other crops for making textiles, as well as various materials for making rope, dyes, oils, ink, paper, and medicine.

Because of the lucrative textile trade and its prominence in generating foreign trade, the Mongol rulers maintained a particular interest in the varieties of wool that they produced from their herds as well as in the silks, cottons, and other fibers produced by farmers. To promote cotton cultivation, they created a Cotton Promotion Bureau in 1289 and dispersed representatives throughout the newly conquered provinces of the southeast coast and along the Yangtze. The bureau devised methods for growing cotton farther north in the wheat areas and promoted better weaving and manufacturing techniques. Although silk maintained higher prestige both within and beyond China, cotton proved to be a valuable new fiber crop. Each innovation in one area brought the likelihood of many other changes. New crops required new styles of plowing, planting, irrigation, pruning, staking, harvesting, cutting, threshing, grinding, transporting, preserving, brewing, distilling, and cooking. The new or slightly altered techniques required the use of new tools and implements, which, in turn, needed new techniques of manufacture.

The Mongols made culture portable. It was not enough to merely exchange goods, because whole systems of knowledge had to also be transported in order to use many of the new products. Drugs, for example, were not profitable items of trade unless there was adequate knowledge of how to use them. Toward this objective, the Mongol court imported Persian and Arab doctors into China, and they exported Chinese doctors to the Middle East. Every form of knowledge carried new possibilities for merchandising. It became apparent that the Chinese operated with a superior knowledge of pharmacology and of unusual forms of treatment such as acupuncture, the insertion of needles at key points in the body, and moxibustion, the application of fire or heat to similar areas. Muslims doctors, however, possessed a much more sophisticated knowledge of surgery, but, based on their dissection of executed criminals, the Chinese had a detailed knowledge of internal organs and the circulatory system. To encourage a fuller exchange of medical knowledge, the Mongols created hospitals and training centers in China using doctors from India and the Middle East as well as Chinese healers. Khubilai Khan founded a department for the study of Western medicine under the direction of a Christian scholar.

The Mongols established a House of Healing near Tabriz to serve as a combination hospital, research center, and training facility in the medical knowledge of both East and West. In Mongol-occupied Persia in 1313, Rashid al-Din published the first known book on Chinese medicine to be published outside of China, including illustrations actually made in China. Chinese acupuncture did not prove popular in the Middle East because it required, according to Muslim values, too much physical contact and manipulation in placing the needles around the body. On the other hand, the Chinese practice of pulse diagnosis proved very popular in the Middle East and India with Muslims because it merely required the physician to touch the patient’s wrist before rendering a diagnosis and prescribing treatment. Using this novel method, doctors could treat female patients without violating the honor of her family.

Only a few years after uniting China under his rule, Khubilai created the Academy for Calendrical Studies and a printing office to mass produce a variety of calendars and almanacs. If a ruler had the Mandate of Heaven to rule over his people, then he had to display an ability to mark time, to forecast the phases of the moon, the changing of seasons, and, possibly most important for public prestige and opinion, the timing of lunar and solar eclipses. The Mongol rulers, however, faced a much larger problem with their calendar. In a traditional empire with a single court and capital, a single official calendar sufficed, and it mattered little that other nations kept other calendars. In the multiheaded Mongol Empire, capitals were scattered across great distances, and it became important to coordinate them in order to manage the movement of the large armies and massive amounts of goods. East Asians utilized a twelve-year animal cycle, while Muslims used a moon calendar of progressive years beginning with the foundation of their religion. Persians marked the beginning of the year by the equinox of the sun. Some events were marked by the movement of planets, particularly Mars and Venus, or by the stars. Europeans used a solar calendar, except for religious celebrations such as Lent, Easter, and Epiphany that were calculated on the lunar calendar. Even the Christian sects disagreed on the timing of these events, with the result that despite constant adjustments, their calendars failed to coincide.

As the Mongol empire of conquest expanded into an even larger empire of commerce, it became increasingly important for the Mongols to have a smoothly functioning calendar that operated according to the same principles throughout the empire. With the need to coordinate activities and regulate social life in places with such varied ways of marking time, the Mongols, almost as soon as they conquered an area, created observatories to accurately measure the movement of planets and stars for both practical and religious reasons. They built one immediately near Tabriz, but China needed a series of observatories erected across the land because it was so large. Mongol authorities had specific instructions from the central government to seek out astronomers and astronomical instruments and charts in each newly conquered land. Hulegu sent many of the astronomers captured in the Persian and Arab cities back to his homeland in Mongolia. These included Jamal ad-Din, who was one of the most brilliant astronomers of the era; he brought with him the blueprints for major astronomical devices and new means of scientific measurement unknown in China.

On a scale that surpassed prior civilizations, the Mongols needed to process and record massive amounts of numerical information in the censuses of people, animals, and buildings. Each year they had to settle the accounts for all the goods sent back and forth, as well as for the movement of herds, soldiers, and merchants. The new forms of agriculture, the demands of astronomy, the system of censuses, and myriad other issues of administration taxed the numerical knowledge and ability of the era. They necessitated new approaches to the handling of numbers. To make the needed calculations quickly and efficiently, the clerks working for the Mongols relied on the abacus, which, with the movement of a few beads, allowed them to calculate large sums mechanically with less mental effort than making the calculations mentally or through writing.

Always fastidious about numerical information and with hundreds of millions of people across the vast Mongol Empire, the Mongols searched for simpler methods, shortcuts, and ways of calculating ever-larger quantities and processing them in ever more complex sequences. The larger numbers of calculations required new ways of preserving information through the compilation of complex charts and the coordination of the number systems used in different countries. Mongol administrators found both European and Chinese mathematics too simple and impractical, but they adopted many useful innovations from Arabic and Indian mathematics. The cities of the Khwarizm empire had been a particularly important center for mathematic scholarship; the word algorithm was derived from al Khwarizm. The Mongols transported knowledge of these innovations throughout their empire. They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China.

Not just in numbers and calendars, but on many levels, life itself in various parts of the empire had to be coordinated in a way that prior history had not required. The writing of history proved too important to allow each civilization to proceed in its own manner and according to the conventions developed in their literary traditions. To control the way that they themselves were presented to their subjects, the Mongols had to make the local standards on writing history correlate and articulate with the Mongol story. Written history was much more than a means of recording information; it served as a tool to legitimize the ruling dynasty and spread propaganda about its great conquests and achievements. For the Mongols, written history also became an important tool in learning about other nations in order to conquer and rule them more effectively. Khubilai Khan established the National History Office in the 1260s. In keeping with Chinese practices, he commissioned the compilation of complete histories of the Jurched and Khitan kingdoms, as well as the Sung dynasty. The project was probably the most massive history project ever commissioned and took nearly eighty years, until the 1340s, to complete. In Mongol Persia, the Ilkhan Gazan commissioned the first history of the world from Rashid al-Din, a successor of Juvaini. Rashid al-Din orchestrated a massive undertaking that employed many different scholars and translators in order to create histories of the Chinese, Turks, and Franks, as the Mongols called the Europeans.

The volume of information produced in the Mongol Empire required new forms of dissemination. Scribes could no longer handle the flow by laboriously hand copying everything that needed to be written. They compiled the records, wrote letters, and sent information to those who needed it, but they did not have time to copy agricultural manuals, medical treatises, atlases, and astronomical tables. Information had to be mass produced for mass dissemination, and for this task, the Mongols turned again to technology, to printing.

The Mongols adopted printing technology very early. In addition to the printings sponsored by Toregene during the reign of her husband, beginning in 1236 Ogodei ordered the establishment of a series of regional printing facilities across the Mongol-controlled territory of northern China. Printing with movable letters probably began in China in the middle of the twelfth century, but it was the Mongols who employed it on a massive scale and harnessed its potential power to the needs of state administration. Instead of the printing with thousands of characters, as the Chinese did, the Mongols used an alphabet in which the same letters were used repeatedly. Under the Mongols, printers carved out many copies of each letter that could then be arranged into whatever word was needed. Each time the printer wanted a new page of print, instead of carving the whole text, he needed to merely place the right sequence of already carved letters into position, use them, and then wait until the next printing job, when they would be rearranged and then used again.

General literacy increased during the Mongol dynasty, and the volume of literary material grew proportionately. In 1269, Khubilai Khan established a printing office to make government decisions more widely disseminated throughout the population, and he encouraged widespread printing in general by nongovernmental groups as well. This included religious books and novels in addition to government publications. The number of books in print increased so dramatically that their price fell constantly throughout the era of Mongol rule. Presses throughout the Mongol Empire were soon printing agriculture pamphlets, almanacs, scriptures, laws, histories, medical treatises, new mathematical theories, songs, and poetry in many different languages.

Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.

In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system with the original Mongol emphases on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.

Although never ruled by the Mongols, in many ways Europe gained the most from their world system. The Europeans received all the benefits of trade, technology transfer, and the Global Awakening without paying the cost of Mongol conquest. The Mongols had killed off the knights in Hungary and Germany, but they had not destroyed or occupied the cities. The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes, listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard.

The Europeans easily forgot the hysterical commentary of chroniclers such as Matthew Paris and Thomas of Spalato, who wrote about the Mongol invasions back in 1240. Across the intervening century, the Mongols had come to represent sumptuous trade goods and luxurious rarities to the Europeans. The word Tartar no longer signified unbridled terror; instead, the Italian writers Dante and Boccaccio and the English writer Chaucer used the phrase Panni Tartarici, “Tartar cloth,” or “Tartar satin,” as terms for the finest cloth in the world. When King Edward III of England ordered 150 garters to be made for his Knights of the Garters, he specified that they be in Tartar blue. Such terms obviously did not apply to textiles or dyes made by the Mongols, but to ones traded by them or originating in their territory.

One technological innovation after another arrived in Europe. The most labor-intensive professions such as mining, milling, and metalwork had depended almost entirely on human and animal labor, but they quickly became more mechanized with the harnessing of water and wind power. The transmission of the technology for improving the blast furnace also arrived in Europe from Asia via the Mongol trade routes, and it allowed metalworkers to achieve higher temperatures and thereby improve the quality of metal, an increasingly important material in this new high-technology era. In Europe, as a result of the Mongol Global Awakening, carpenters used the general adze less and adapted more specialized tools for specific functions to make their work faster and more efficient; builders used new types of cranes and hoists. There was a quick spread of new crops that required less work to produce or less processing after production; carrots, turnips, cress, buckwheat, and parsnips became common parts of the diet. Labor-intensive cooking was improved by mechanizing the meat spit to be turned more easily. The new tools, machines, and mechanical devices helped to build everything, from ships and docks to warehouses and canals, faster and better, just as previously the improved Mongol technology of war helped to tear down and destroy quicker with improved cannons and firepower.

Something as simple as preparing a single page document on vellum or parchment required the labor of a long line of skilled workers. Aside from the herder who raised the sheep, the slaughtering and skinning were so important to make quality writing material that it required a skilled craft of skinners. Over several weeks, the skin had to be cleaned and scraped of hair on the outside and flesh on the inside, soaked in a sequence of chemical baths, stretched on a frequently readjusted frame, sunned, alternately wet and dried in a precise sequence, shaved, and finally cut into pages of the appropriate size. To make the pages into a book, a whole new sequence of trades were drawn on to make the ink, copy the text, illustrate it, color it, and bind it with leather that had already been through its own sequence of workshops.

The replacement of parchment by paper, a Chinese innovation already known but only rarely used in Europe prior to the Mongol era, required more skill in one worker but far fewer steps and thus, in the overall process, less energy and labor. The papermaker cooked down shredded rags and other fibrous materials, dipped a frame into the vat to coat it with a layer of the fibers, treated it with chemicals, and dried it.

The increased demand for paper arose with the spread of printing. One of the most laborious tasks in medieval society had been the copying of manuscripts and documents, all of which had been done by hand in monasteries that functioned as book factories with scribes carefully copying all day in a large scriptorium. Aside from the cost of their meager food and basic upkeep, the labor was free and the money earned from the sale went to other uses within the church. Johannes Gutenberg completed the adaptation with his production of two hundred Bibles in 1455, and started the printing and information revolution in the West. The new technology made the relatively minor trade of book making into one of the most potent forces of public life. It stimulated the revival of Greek classics, the development of written forms of the vernacular languages, the growth of nationalism, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the birth of science, and virtually every aspect of life and learning from agronomy to zoology.

The ideas of the Mongol Empire awakened new possibilities in the European mind. New knowledge from the travel writings of Marco Polo to the detailed star charts of Ulugh Beg proved that much of their received classical knowledge was simply wrong, and at the same time it opened up new paths of intellectual discovery. Because much of the Mongol Empire had been based on novel ideas and ways of organizing public life rather than on mere technology, these ideas provoked new thoughts and experiments in Europe. The common principles of the Mongol Empire—such as paper money, primacy of the state over the church, freedom of religion, diplomatic immunity, and international law—were ideas that gained new importance.

As early as 1620, the English scientist Francis Bacon recognized the impact that changing technology had produced in Europe. He designated printing, gunpowder, and the compass as three technological innovations on which the modern world was built. Although they were “unknown to the ancients . . . these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation.” More important than the innovations themselves, from them “innumerable changes have been thence derived.” In a clear recognition of their importance he wrote “that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” All of them had been spread to the West during the era of the Mongol Empire.

Under the widespread influences from the paper and printing, gunpowder and firearms, and the spread of the navigational compass and other maritime equipment, Europeans experienced a Renaissance, literally a rebirth, but it was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture.

In May 1288, soon after meeting with Rabban Bar Sawma and receiving a letter and gifts from the Mongol court, Pope Nicholas IV issued a papal bull calling for construction of a new mother church at Assisi for his Franciscan order. As the first Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV, together with his fellow Franciscans, seemingly wanted to proclaim the coming of age of their order. For this project, they wanted imagery that not only proclaimed their new status but highlighted the accomplishments of the order. The Franciscans had the closest ties of any Europe group to the Mongol court. Among others, the monks in the delegation of Plano di Carpini, who had served as the first envoy to the Mongols at the time of Guyuk’s election as Great Khan, and William of Rubruck, who visited in the time of Mongke Khan’s installation, had all been Franciscans. The artists borrowed themes and techniques from the Chinese and Persian art brought in by the Mongols, quite possibly from the gifts brought by Rabban Bar Swama himself.

The paintings shared a common source in the work of Giotto di Bondone and his disciples, and they seem to radiate from a set of paintings in the Franciscan monastery at Assisi. Although the frescoes of the church depicted events from the life of Christ, more than a thousand years before the Mongol Empire, or the life of Saint Francis, only shortly before Mongol contact, the artists depicted many of their subjects as Mongols or used Mongol dress and cloth for them: “In the fresco cycle, Saint Francis’s life is literally wrapped in silk—almost every scene depicts painted and figured textiles either defining the stories, or draped below in imaginary swaths.” In addition to simple silks, they portray the elaborate brocades that the Mongols liked and sent to the pope and kings as gifts. The artists placed Mongols in a variety of Christian paintings with their distinctive clothing, headgear, and bows. Horses began to appear in the art in the style of Chinese drawings made popular through Mongol commerce. The pictures also showed a strong Asian influence in the depiction of rocky crags and trees. European art, which had been flat and unidimensional throughout the Middle Ages, produced a new hybrid that was neither strictly European nor strictly Asian; it was a style of depth, light, textiles, and horses that became later known as Renaissance art.

By themselves, the images probably represented no more than a new awareness by the artists of the variety of human faces in the world, but in a 1306 illustration of the Robe of Christ in Padua, the robe not only was made in the style and fabric of the Mongols, but the golden trim was painted in Mongol letters from the square Phagspa script commissioned by Khubilai Khan. In the same church, the Vice of Infidelity appeared as a woman wearing the pith helmet style hat favored by Khubilai Khan. Old Testament prophets were depicted holding scrolls open to long, but undecipherable, texts in Mongol script. The direct allusions to the writing and clothing from the court of Khubilai Khan showed an undeniable connection between Italian Renaissance art and the Mongol Empire.

In the same way that Mongol faces and script began to appear in the art of Renaissance Europe, the Mongol ideas also began to show up in the literary and philosophical works of the era. The provocative nature of Mongol ideas and policies appeared decisively in the work of the German cleric Nicolaus of Cusa, whose 1440 essay “On Learned Ignorance” might be considered as the opening of the European Renaissance. He had spent time on church business in Constantinople shortly before its fall to the Ottomans, and, as his subsequent writings revealed, he was well acquainted with the ideas of the Persian, Arab, and Mongol civilizations. In 1453, he wrote a long essay “On the Peace of Faith,” in which he presented imaginary dialogues among representatives of seventeen nations and religions concerning the best way to promote global peace and understanding. The author shows some more than superficial awareness of Mongol religious ideology when he quotes the Tatar representative as describing his nation as “a numerous and simple people, who worship the one God above others, are astounded over the variety of rites which others have, who worship one and the same God with them. They deride the custom by which some Christians, all Arabs and Jews are circumcised, that others are marked on their brows with a brand, others are baptized.” He also notes the Mongol puzzlement at Christian ritual and theology, in particular that “among these various forms of sacrifice there is the Christian sacrifice, in which they offer bread and wine, and say it is the body and blood of Christ. That they eat and drink this sacrifice after the oblations seems most abominable. They devour what they worship.”

The fictional Tatar in the debate echoed precisely the words of Mongke Khan to the French envoy when he denounced the pernicious enmity among the religions of the world: “It is proper to keep the commandments of God. But the Jews say they have received these commandments from Moses, the Arabs say they have them from Muhammad, and the Christians from Jesus. And there are perhaps other nations who honor their prophets, through whose hands they assert they have received the divine precepts. Therefore, how shall we arrive at concord?” The Mongol answer had been that simple religious concord could only be produced by subsuming all religions under the power of the state.

The visit of Mongol envoys such as Rabban Bar Sawma furnished the Europeans with a far different view of the distant and exotic Mongols. No longer feeling a threat from the Mongols, Europeans began to see in Genghis Khan’s empire an intriguing alternative to the society in which they lived. Whereas writers used the Muslims to represent everything that the Europeans despised, they saturated the Mongol story with romantic images of a much better world, which in some ways was considered a utopia, the ideal society. The imagery of Mongol greatness received its clearest statement around 1390 by Geoffrey Chaucer, who had traveled widely in France and Italy on diplomatic business and had a far more international perspective than many of the people for whom he wrote. In The Canterbury Tales, the first book written in English, the story of the squire relates a romantic and fanciful tale about the life and adventures of Genghis Khan.

This noble king was called Genghis Khan,

Who in his time was of so great renown

That there was nowhere in no region

So excellent a lord in all things.

He lacked nothing that belonged to a king.

As of the sect of which he was born

He kept his law, to which that he was sworn.

And thereto he was hardy, wise, and rich,

And piteous and just, always liked;

Soothe of his word, benign, and honorable,

Of his courage as any center stable;

Young, fresh, and strong, in arms desirous

As any bachelor of all his house.

A fair person he was and fortunate,

And kept always so well royal estate

That there was nowhere such another man.

This noble king, this Tartar Genghis Khan.

10

The Empire of Illusion

When Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492,

he was heading for Cathay, the land of the Great Khan.

D

AVID

M

ORGAN

IN 1332, CONFUSION, ALARM, and pain ran amok in the pleasure palaces of Xanadu, the Mongol summer capital of Shangdu. The royal family remained there well past the end of summer, and despite efforts to keep the crisis secret, it became apparent that the Mongol rulers were in a turmoil so deep that it threatened continuation of the dynasty. The surviving information offers muddled accounts of what was happening, but it appears that the office of the Great Khan bounced from brother to brother and from father to son in a flurry of assassinations, disappearances, and inexplicable deaths. From 1328 to 1332, at least four members of the Golden Family occupied the throne, and one, the seven-year-old Rinchinbal Khan, had it for only two months in 1332. Fear gripped everyone. In the household, everyone from the young to the old, from the lowest servant to the Great Khan, seemed in danger of dying a horrible death.

Nearly as much turmoil and confusion churned outside the capital as inside, but it was neither foreign invaders nor rebels that threatened the society. The fear arose from something far more sinister and mysterious, but with quite visible effects everywhere—the plague. A person could appear healthy in the morning, but suddenly break into hot fever that rapidly gave way to chills accompanied by both vomiting and diarrhea. The bodies of individuals who had only a short time earlier appeared active and robust suddenly and inexplicably broke down and began to dissolve before the horrified family observers. Blood began to ooze beneath the skin, which discolored the skin, lumps formed and oozed blood and pus in the groin. The lumps, subsequently called buboes from the Greek word for groin, then formed in the armpit and neck, and from them came the medical term for the disease: bubonic plague. When the lumps grew too large, they burst open. The lack of oxygen moving into the body and the dried blood beneath the skin made the person appear to turn black; from this dramatic symptom, the disease became known as the Black Death. After only a few agonizing days of tortured pain, the person usually died. In some victims, the disease attacked the lungs rather than the lymph nodes, and as the air in the lungs turned bloody and frothy, they drowned. As they died, they infected those around them by violent coughing, sneezing, and gasping.

According to the most plausible, but not completely verifiable, accounts, the disease originated in the south of China, and Mongol warriors brought it north with them. The plague bacterium lives in fleas, which traveled on rats transported in shipments of food or other tribute taken from the south. Although the fleas do not normally infect humans and the smell of horses repels them, they can live in sacks of grain, human clothing, and other places in the vicinity of humans while awaiting their chance to jump on them. Once the infected fleas arrived in the Gobi, they easily found hospitable new homes in marmot burrows and the extensive rodent colonies, where they have lived ever since. On the open steppe of Mongolia, the plague remained just as virulent, but it posed less danger in the sparsely inhabited environment. Even today, it kills a handful of victims every year in the summer, but the small population living among so many horses and the lack of fleas in the Mongol dwellings tend to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic. By contrast, in the densely inhabited urban areas of China, and later in other urban areas, the disease found its perfect environment in the rat populations that had lived in close proximity with humans for so long that no one suspected them as sources for the disease.

In 1331, chroniclers recorded that 90 percent of the people of Hopei Province died. By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million.

China functioned as the manufacturing center of the Mongol World System, and as the goods poured out of China, the disease followed, seemingly spreading in all directions at once. Archaeological evidence of graves near trading posts indicates that by 1338 the plague crossed from China over the Tian Shan Mountains and wiped out a Christian trading community near lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan. The plague was an epidemic of commerce. The same Mongol roads and caravans that knitted together the Eurasian world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries moved more than mere silk and spices. The roads and way stations set up by the Mongols for merchants also served as the inadvertent transfer points for the fleas and, thereby, for the disease itself. With the luxurious fabrics, exotic flavors, and opulent jewels, the caravans brought the fleas that spread the plague from one camp to another, one village to another, one city to another, and one continent to another. If plague destroyed only a single, crucial station in a mountain pass or blocked one route through the desert, it potentially isolated a large region within the vast empire.

Plague reached the capital of the Golden Horde at Sarai on the lower Volga in 1345. At this time, Yanibeg, the Kipchak khan, was preparing to lay siege to the Crimean port of Kaffa (modern-day Feodosija in Ukraine), a trading post established by merchants from Genoa primarily for the export of Russian slaves to Egypt. The Mongols had sometimes cooperated with the Italian slave merchants and at other times tried to suppress their trade. The Mongol authorities had closed the trading post and expelled the Genovese on several occasions, but each time they would eventually relent and allow them to return. To protect themselves from further Mongol threats and to safeguard their transit in slaves, the Genoese built a strong protective wall around their city and a second inner wall to protect the heart of the trading post.

When plague broke out in the Mongol army, it forced Yanibeg to lift the siege and retreat, but the disease readily spread from the Mongol camp to the adjacent port. According to a single European report, Yanibeg had the bodies of plague victims catapulted over the walls and into the city, and though the Genovese tried to dispose of the bodies by throwing them in the sea, the disease erupted. Though often repeated, the story was not based on eyewitness accounts; the only known source for it comes from the papers of a lawyer, Gabriele de Mussis, who worked near Genoa in the town of Piacenza. He claimed, in turn, to have heard the story from some sailors. Since the dead bodies could not breathe on their intended targets and spread the disease in the common manner, they would have needed to carry living fleas to infect the city. The story seems doubtful, not because the Mongols were unwilling to spread the disease in that manner, but because it probably would not have been a strategy likely to succeed.

With or without human intention, the disease was already spreading and would continue to do so. When the Genovese and other refugees fled the port by boat, they took the disease with them to Constantinople, from where it easily spread to Cairo in Egypt and to Messina in Sicily. If the city was the ideal home for the plague, the closed environment of the ship was the ideal incubator, a place where humans, rats, and fleas could mix intimately without the noxious presence of horses or fire, the two things that fleas most avoid. Freed from the comparatively slow movement on the trading route, where the disease had to wait for precisely the right cart or cargo of goods, the plague spread with the speed of the wind in the sails. In 1348, it ravaged the cities of Italy, and by June of that year entered England. By the winter of 1350, the plague had crossed the North Atlantic from the Faeroe Islands on through Iceland and reached Greenland. It may have killed 60 percent of the settlers of Iceland, and the plague was probably the single most important factor in the final extinction of the struggling Viking colony in Greenland.

In the sixty years from 1340 until 1400, according to some estimates, the population of Africa declined from 80 million to 68 million inhabitants, and Asia from 238 million to 201 million. The total world population—including the Americas, where the plague did not strike for another two centuries—fell from approximately 450 million to between 350 and 375 million inhabitants, a net loss of at least 75 million, or more than a million people a year for the remainder of the fourteenth century. As more evidence accumulates, scholarly research continues to push the losses higher. The population of Europe declined from around 75 million to 52 million. With a death toll of around 25 million the loss in the European continent alone was roughly the same as the total worldwide toll of AIDS in the twentieth century. For Europe in the fourteenth century, however, the figure represented between a third and one-half of the total population. By comparison, in the tremendous destruction of World War II in Europe, Great Britain lost less than 1 percent of its population, and France, the scene of much fighting, lost 1.5 percent of its population. German losses reached 9.1 percent. Widespread famine pushed the World War II death rates in Poland and Ukraine toward 19 percent, but even these remained well below the rates for the plague in the fourteenth century.

The plague left some areas completely depopulated, while a few cities survived virtually unscathed. One of the few effective measures was taken by the city of Milan. As soon as plague broke out in a house, officials raced to seal up the entire house with everyone—sick and well, friends and servants—sealed inside. Other cities tried less effective means, such as the ringing of bells or the banning of the ringing of bells. Whether it erupted in a particular community or not, the epidemic permanently changed life in every region of the continent. The plague effectively destroyed the social order that had dominated Europe since the fall of Rome, leaving the continent in dangerous disorder. The disease brought down urban dwellers more readily and thereby destroyed the educated class and the skilled craftsmen. Inside and outside the cities, the closed and polluted environments of monasteries and convents provided an ideal opportunity for the disease to kill everyone, a tragedy from which European monasticism in particular, and the Roman Catholic church in general, never recovered. Dense villages faced a similar danger, as did the residents cooped up inside castles and manorial estates.

The social impact of the plague was best recorded in Florence, where it erupted in 1348, in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio, one of many to lose numerous family members and close friends. In his Decameron, ten young noble ladies and ten men flee the plague and find refuge in a country estate, passing the time by telling tales. In the world described by Boccaccio, husband deserted wife, mother abandoned child just to escape the plague. So many died that priests had no time to offer services and diggers could not accommodate the bodies, which were then tossed into group graves or left for dogs and pigs to eat. The “venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.” Officials were “unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.”

Without understanding the disease’s true cause or methods of transmission, people still quickly recognized its close association with commerce and the movement of people in and out of cities. The writings of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and others of the time show the two primary reactions to the disease were to abandon the city, if possible, or at least to close the city to outsiders. Either response immediately halted trade, communication, and transportation. Local authorities throughout Europe enacted plague laws to limit its spread and control popular reaction. In 1348, the small city of Pistoia in Tuscany barred entry of people from infected areas, banned the importation of any type of used textiles, and forbade the sale of fruit or the slaughtering of animals that might cause the smell of death, which they suspected as contributing to the spread of the disease. Similarly, they forbade the tanning trade, and without it the commerce in leather goods ceased. Citizens returning from other places could only bring a small amount of baggage equivalent to about thirty pounds. No one could send a gift to the home of a person who had died of the plague or go there to visit, and no one was allowed to buy new clothing.

Diplomatic delegations and letters ceased to flow. Without the Mongol transportation system, the Catholic church lost touch with its missions in China. Frightened people everywhere blamed foreigners for bringing the disease, further threatening international commerce. In Europe, the Christians once again turned on the Jews, who had a close association with commerce and with the east, from whence the plague came. Some Jews were shut up in their homes and burned; others were taken out and tortured on the rack until they confessed their crimes. Despite a papal bull from Pope Clement VI in July 1348 protecting the Jews and ordering the Christians to stop their persecutions, the campaign against them escalated. On Valentine’s Day in 1349, the authorities of Strasbourg herded two thousand Jews to the Jewish cemetery outside of the city to begin a mass burning. Some Jews were allowed to save themselves by confessing their crimes and converting to Christianity, and some children were forcefully converted. More than a thousand perished over the six days that it took to burn them all, and the city outlawed the presence of any Jew in the city. City after city picked up the practice of publicly burning Jews to thwart the epidemic. According to the boasts of one chronicler, between November 1348 and September 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria had been burned. In the Christian parts of Spain, the people initiated similar persecutions against the resident Muslim minority, driving many of them to seek refuge in Granada and Morocco.

The plague not only isolated Europe, but it also cut off the Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia. The Mongol rulers in Persia could no longer procure the goods from the lands and workshops they owned in China. The Golden Family in China could not get its goods from Russia or Persia. With each group cut off from the other, the interlocking system of ownership collapsed. The plague had devastated the country, demoralized the living, and, by cutting off trade and tribute, deprived the Mongol Golden Family of its primary source of support. For nearly a century, the Mongols had exploited their mutual material interests to overcome the political fault lines dividing them. Even while sacrificing political unity, they had maintained a unified cultural and commercial empire. With the onslaught of plague, the center could not hold, and the complex system collapsed. The Mongol Empire depended on the quick and constant movement of people, goods, and information throughout its massive empire. Without those connections, there was no empire.

As foreign conquerors, the Mongols had been tolerated by their subjects, who often outnumbered the Mongols by as much as a thousand to one, because they continued to produce a tremendous flow of trade goods long after the strength of their army had dissipated. In the plague’s aftermath, with neither trade nor the likelihood of military reinforcement from other Mongols, each branch of the Golden Family of Genghis Khan had to fend for itself in an increasingly volatile environment that might easily turn hostile. Deprived of their two advantages of military strength and commercial lucre, the Mongols in Russia, central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East searched for new modes of power and legitimacy by intermarrying with their subjects and consciously becoming more like them in language, religion, and culture. Mongol authorities purged the remaining elements of shamanism, Buddhism, and Christianity from their families and strengthened their commitment to Islam, which was the primary religion of their subjects, or, in the case of the Golden Horde in Russia, the religion of the Turkic army that helped keep the family in power.

As the different members of the Mongol royal family aligned themselves with particular religious factions within their subject populations, the rifts between the royal lineages increased. When the Golden Horde in Russia became Muslim, before their cousins in Iraq and Iran converted, they allied themselves with Egypt against the Mongol Ilkhanate. Then, when the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate converted to Islam, they moved back and forth between Sunni and Shiite versions as it suited the political moment. During the reign of Oljeitu, the most committed of the Shiites, a severe persecution of minority groups such as Buddhists and Jews was unleashed. The universal principles of Genghis Khan’s empire disappeared like ashes in the wind.

By becoming Muslims, the Mongols in the Middle East seemed to have been following the example of Khubilai Khan, who had made himself powerful in China by appearing to be Chinese. Yet Khubilai Khan’s successors in China failed to follow, or probably even to understand, the cunning genius of his method. Rather than becoming more Chinese, the Mongol authorities increased repression and isolated themselves. During this chaotic time, some Mongol members of the royal court reported dreams in which Genghis Khan appeared to demand a variety of stringent new measures to further repress the Chinese. Officials in the court decided that they had allotted the Chinese too much freedom and that the Mongols had allowed themselves to become too acculturated to Chinese life. Rather than further integrating into Chinese culture, they intensified their foreign identity and further separated themselves from Chinese language, religion, culture, and intermarriage. In the mounting paranoia, Mongol authorities ordered the confiscation not only of all weapons from the Chinese people, but their iron agricultural tools as well, and limited the use of knives. They forbade the Chinese to use horses, and in fear of secret messages being passed, they stopped performances of Chinese opera and the traditional storytelling and other public and private gatherings. In the face of such extreme measures, the Chinese subjects, in turn, became increasingly discontented and still more mistrustful and fearful of their Mongol rulers. Rumors circulated regarding the mass extermination of Chinese children by the Mongols or of plans to kill everyone bearing specific Chinese family names.

In their new effort to be as un-Chinese as possible, the Mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to its Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese. Unable to criticize their Mongol rulers directly, the Chinese people turned much of their hatred toward the foreigners who helped the Mongols administer their empire. The Tibetan Buddhist monks in particular became the object of hatred, since local people along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligation not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for them as well. The monks, often armed, acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand cut off, or that anyone who insulted or defamed a monk, if convicted, could have his tongue cut out. The Mongol officials eventually overturned these laws as incompatible with Mongol rule, which forbade the use of body mutilation as a punishment.

Increasingly isolated from their subjects and unable to take effective action against the progress of the plague, the Mongol khans of China took refuge in the spirituality of the Tibetan monks, who encouraged them to turn away from the outside world of illusory problems of society and to perform acts that would help their own individual soul. The monks persuaded the Mongol royal family that each deed of freeing a prisoner would gain them spiritual merit for an improved station in their next life, and monks soon turned the process into a thriving business. In one of the bizarre ceremonies, a monk at the court rode through the palace gates on a yellow ox while wearing the gown of the Mongol Empress, and then he released the prisoners the way one might release a cage of birds.

The Tibetan clergy encouraged new forms of religious practice in their Tantric rites that proclaimed the path of enlightenment via sexual acts. This movement not only produced a vigorous display of sexual art, but it also encouraged the royal family to engage in elaborate sexual dances and rituals that centered on the eager participation of the Great Khan himself under the watchful eye of the lamas. The rumors of debauchery and the secrecy of the rituals increased paranoia and distrust among the Chinese, who suspected the Tibetan lamas of practicing human sacrifices at court to prolong the life of the khan and to preserve his faltering regime.

While the Mongol rulers of China concentrated on expressing their spirituality and sexuality, the society out beyond the walls of their Forbidden City in the capital collapsed. In perhaps the most telling symptom, Mongol authorities lost control of the monetary system they had so laboriously and meticulously created. The principles by which the economy utilized paper currency had proven more complex and unpredictable than realized by the officials, and the system gradually spiraled out of control. At the least sign of weakness in the Mongol administration, confidence in the paper currency dropped and caused it to fall in value while pushing up the value of copper and silver. Inflation grew so fiercely that by 1356 the paper currency had effectively become worthless.

In Persia and China, the collapse came quickly—in 1335 and 1368, respectively. The Mongols of the Persian Ilkhanate disappeared, either killed or absorbed into the much larger population of their former subjects. In China, the Great Khan Togoon Tumur and some sixty thousand Mongols managed to escape the Ming rebels, but they left behind approximately four hundred thousand who were captured and killed or absorbed by the Chinese. Those that managed to return to Mongolia resumed their nomadic way of pastoralism, almost as if the entire Chinese episode from 1211 until 1368 had been merely an extended stay at their southern summer camp. The Golden Horde of Russia broke into smaller hordes that declined steadily in power through four long centuries. During such an extended interaction, the Mongols and their Turkic allies amalgamated with each other into several different ethnic groups of Turco-Mongols that maintained a separate identity from one another as well as from the larger Slavic society.

After the overthrow of Mongol rule, the triumphant Ming rulers issued edicts forbidding the Chinese from wearing Mongol dress, giving their children Mongol names, and following other foreign habits. In an effort to revitalize the Chinese principles of government and social life, the Ming rulers systematically rejected many of the Mongol policies and institutions. They expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders whom the Mongols had encouraged to settle in China, and in a major blow to the commercial system of the Mongols, Ming authorities abolished the failing paper money entirely and returned to metal. They rejected the Tibetan Lamaist Buddhism that the Mongols had sponsored, and replaced it with traditional Taoist and Confucian thought and traditions. After an abortive effort to revitalize the Mongol trade system, the new rulers burned their ocean vessels, banned foreign travel for Chinese, and spent a large portion of the gross national product on building massive new walls to lock foreigners out and the Chinese in. In so doing, the new Chinese authorities stranded thousands of their citizens living in the ports of Southeast Asia.

In the effort to remove themselves from the danger of a new Mongol invasion, the Ming initially moved the capital south to Nanjing, a more Chinese venue, but in the attitudes and actions of the majority of people, the rule of unified China was so closely associated with their northern capital that the Ming had to return their court to the old Mongol capital of Khanbalik. The Ming sought to remake the city, remove the Mongol appearance, and build a new Forbidden City in their own style. With short exceptions, the capital has remained there with changing names, and Beijing still serves as capital for China, which occupies roughly the same national borders that it did under the Mongols.

In one country after another, indigenous rebellions expelled the Mongols and local elites took the reins of government. While Korea, Russia, and China returned to the hands of native dynasties, the Muslim territories experienced a more complex transition from Mongol rule. Instead of returning to the control of Arabs who had been the traders, the intermediaries, the bankers, the shippers, and the caravan drivers who connected Asia and Europe, a new cultural hybrid emerged that combined a Turco-Mongol military system with the legal institutions of Islam and the ancient cultural traditions of Persia. The eastern part of the Muslim world had found a new cultural freedom in which they could still be Muslims but without the domination of Arabs, whom they never allowed to regain power. New dynasties, such as the Ottoman of Turkey, the Safavid of Persia, and the Moghul of India, sometimes called Gunpowder Empires, relied primarily on the vast innovations in Mongol weaponry, a military organization based on both a cavalry and an armed infantry, and the use of firearms, to fight foreign enemies and, perhaps more important, to maintain domestic power over their ethnically varied subjects.

Despite the plague and collapse of the commercial system, revolts, and the subsequent dismemberment of the Mongol Empire, even the rebels seemed reluctant to let the old empire go completely. The new rulers hung on to the trappings and illusions of the old system to legitimize their own new rule. The facade of the Mongol Empire continued standing long after the internal structure had collapsed and the Mongols were all gone.

Following their purge of Mongol influence in public life, the Ming rulers went to great effort searching for the official seal of the Mongols, and they preserved the use of the Mongol language in diplomacy as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. As late as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Chinese court sent its letters in the Mongol language. In turn, the Manchu, who overthrew the Ming in 1644, strategically intermarried with the descendants of Genghis Khan so that they could claim legitimacy as his heirs in blood as well as in spirit.

At the heart of central Asia, the descendants of Genghis Khan continued in power in the area known as Moghulistan, the Persian name for the Mongol territory. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol holdings in central Asia had fallen under the control of Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, a Turkic warrior who claimed, with flimsy evidence, descent from Genghis Khan. He sought to revive the Mongol Empire, and he conquered much of its former territory from India to the Mediterranean. In an effort to closely associate himself with Genghis Khan, Timur sponsored a variety of books that linked them. To ensure that his lineage would acquire the blood of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, his family intermarried with some of Genghis Khan’s true descendants. Despite all that Emir Timur sought to do in restoring the Mongol Empire, he did not follow the ways of Genghis Khan. He slaughtered without reason and seemed to find a perverse but persistent pleasure in torturing and humiliating his prisoners. When he seized the sultan of the Ottoman kingdom of Turkey, he forced him to watch as his wives and daughters served Timur naked at dinner and, in some reports, satisfied his sexual demands. It was said that Timur harnessed the sultan like an animal and made him pull the royal chariot, and then exhibited him in a cage.

Because Timur claimed to be a Mongol, and was legitimately a son-in-law to the dynasty of Genghis Khan, his deeds became inextricably intertwined with those of the original Mongols in the minds of the people who had been conquered by both. One Mongol was hard to distinguish from another. When Timur delighted in public torture or piled up pyramids of heads outside his conquered cities, it was assumed that he was carrying on the traditions of his Mongol people. The practices of Timur were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan.

The descendants of Timur became known in history as the Moghuls of India. Babur, the founder of the new dynasty in 1519, was thirteen generations descended from Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai. The Moghul Empire reached its zenith under Babur’s grandson Akbar, who ruled from 1556 until 1608. He had Genghis Khan’s genius for administration as well as his appreciation of trade. He abolished the hated jizya tax, the tax on non-Muslims. Akbar organized his cavalry along the traditional Mongol units of ten (up to five thousand) and instituted a civil service based on merit. Just as the Mongols made China into the most productive manufacturing and trading center of their era, the Moghuls made India into the world’s greatest manufacturing and trading nation and—contrary to both Muslim and Hindu traditions—raised the status of women. He continued the universalist attitude toward religion and tried to amalgamate all religion into one Divine Faith, Din-i-Illah, with one God in Heaven and one emperor on earth.

With so many empires striving to maintain the illusion of the Mongol Empire in everything from politics to art, public opinion seemed obstinately unwilling to believe that it no longer existed. Nowhere was the belief in the empire longer lasting or more important than in Europe, where, in 1492, more than a century after the last khan ruled over China, Christopher Columbus convinced the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand that he could reestablish sea contact and revive the lost commerce with the Mongol court of the Great Khan. With the breakup of the Mongol communication system, the Europeans had not heard about the fall of the empire and the overthrow of the Great Khan. Columbus, therefore, insisted that although the Muslims barred the land route from Europe to the Mongol court, he could sail west from Europe across the World Ocean and arrive in the land described by Marco Polo.

Columbus embarked on his voyage to find the Mongols while carrying with him a printed copy of Marco Polo’s travels, into which he had jotted copious notes and observations for his planned arrival at their court. For Columbus, Marco Polo was not merely an inspiration but also a practical guide. When he reached Cuba after visiting several smaller islands, Columbus believed that he was on the edge of the Great Khan’s realm and would soon find the Mongol kingdom of Cathay. Columbus remained convinced that the lands of the khan lay only a little farther to the north within what we today recognize as the mainland of the United States. Since he had not found the land of the Great Khan of the Mongols, he decided that the people he met must be the southern neighbors of the Mongols in India, and thus Columbus called the native people of the Americas Indians, the name by which they have been known ever since.

Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective in that massive continent. As early as 1748, the French philosopher Montesquieu set the tone in his treatise The Spirit of the Laws, holding the Asians in haughty contempt and blaming much of their detestable qualities on the Mongols, whom he labeled “the most singular people on earth.” He described them as both servile slaves and cruel masters. He attributed to them all the major attacks on civilization from ancient Greece to Persia: “They have destroyed Asia, from India even to the Mediterranean; and all the country which forms the east of Persia they have rendered a desert.” Montesquieu glorified the tribal origins of Europeans as the harbingers of democracy while he condemned the tribal people of Asia: “The Tartars who destroyed the Grecian Empire established in the conquered countries slavery and despotic power: the Goths, after subduing the Roman Empire, founded monarchy and liberty.” Based on this history, he summarily dismissed all of Asian civilization: “There reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never been able to shake off, and it is impossible to find in all the histories of that country a single passage which discovers a freedom of spirit; we shall never see anything there but the excess of slavery.”

Genghis Khan became the central figure of attack. Voltaire adapted a Mongol dynasty play, The Orphan of Chao, by Chi Chün-hsiang, to fit his personal political and social agenda by portraying Genghis Khan, whom Voltaire used as a substitute for the French king, as an ignorant and cruel villain. The Orphan of China, as he renamed it, debuted on the Paris stage in 1755 while Voltaire enjoyed a safe exile in Switzerland. “I have confined my plan to the grand epoch of Genghis Khan,” he explained. “I have endeavored to describe the manners of the Tartars and Chinese: the most interesting events are nothing when they do not paint the manners; and this painting, which is one of the greatest secrets of the art, is no more than an idle amusement, when it does not tend to inspire notions of honor and virtue.” Voltaire described Genghis Khan as “The king of kings, the fiery Genghis Khan/Who lays the fertile fields of Asia waste.” He called him “a wild Scythian soldier bred to arms/And practiced in the trade of blood.” In Voltaire’s revisionist history, the Mongol warriors were no more than the “wild sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots, and in fields.” They “detest our arts, our customs, and our laws; and therefore mean to change them all; to make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.”

Genghis Khan’s only redeeming quality, in Voltaire’s play, was that he reluctantly recognized the moral superiority of the better educated. “The more I see,” Voltaire quoted Genghis Khan as saying, “the more I must admire this wondrous people, great in arts and arms, in learning and in manners great; their kings on wisdom’s basis founded all their power.” Genghis Khan ended the play with a question: “. . . what have I gained by all my victories, by all my guilty laurels stained with blood?” To which Voltaire answered: “. . . the tears, the sighs, the curses of mankind.” With these words, Voltaire himself began the modern cursing of the Mongols.

Despite all the negative images of Genghis Khan, Voltaire’s real target was the French king, whom he was too afraid to criticize directly. Instead, he projected his France, with the Mongols representing all that was wicked. Other writers quickly copied the method of holding up the Mongols as symbols for world evils, and the Mongols became the victims of an extended literary and scientific assault. The new critique appeared obliquely in the work of Italian poet and playwright Giovanni Casti, who spent much time in the Hapsburg court and later in the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. Unwilling to openly criticize the monarchs who supported him, he used the image of the Mongols as his foil in Poema Tartaro and in the 1778 opera Kublai, the Great Khan of the Tartars, for which Antonio Salieri, the rival of Wolfgang Mozart at the Hapsburg court, composed the music. Recognizing the potentially dangerous ideas in the play, the Holy Roman Emperor suppressed the opera in fear that it might encourage revolutionaries.

The most pernicious rationale for Asian inferiority did not emerge from the philosophers and artists in Europe, however, as much as from the scientists, the new breed of intellectuals spawned by the Enlightenment. In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist, the Compte de Buffon, compiled the first encyclopedia of natural history in which he offered a scientific description of the main human groups, of which the Mongol ranked as the most important in Asia. His descriptions seemed like a return to the hysterical writings of Matthew Paris and Thomas of Spalato, more than five hundred years earlier. “The lips are large and thick, with transverse fissures,” Buffon wrote. “The tongue is long, thick, and is much roughened. The nose is small. The skin has a slight dirty-yellow tinge, and is deficient in elasticity, giving the appearance of being too large for the body.” He proclaimed the Tartar women “as deformed as the men.” Their culture seemed as ugly to him as their faces: “The majority of these tribes are alike strangers to religion, morality, and decency. They are robbers by profession.” Translated from French into all the major European languages, his work became one of the classic sources of information during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

European scientists sought to classify everything from the breeds of dogs and horses to the types of roses and dandelions. German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor of medicine at Göttingen University from 1776 until 1835, created zoological classifications for human beings based on comparative anatomy, particularly on skin pigmentation, hair and eye color, skull type, and facial features such as size and form of the nose, cheeks, and lips. According to his study, humans divided naturally into three primary races corresponding to Africa, Asia, and Europe, and to two less important subcategories of American and Malay. On the theory that Asians originated in Mongolia, he classified all of them under the rubric Mongols. European scientists rapidly accepted his theory, making it scientific gospel.

The categories, of course, also implied an evolutionary ranking of the different races as articulated by Scottish scientist Robert Chambers in his bestselling book of 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. “The leading characters,” he explained, “of the various races of mankind, are simply representatives of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type.” By comparison to the white race, the “Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born.”

Soon it became clear to these theorists that the Mongoloid race exhibited a close relationship to the orangutan, the Asian ape. The similarity showed not only in facial traits but in postures. Asians, like orangutans, sat with folded legs in the “Mongolian” or “Buddha” position. The category of Mongoloid expanded steadily to include all American Indians and Eskimos, as well as “the northern Chinese, the southern Chinese, the Tibetans, the tribal peoples of southern China, the Mongols, some of the Turks, and the Tungus, Koreans, Japanese, and Paleo-Asiatic peoples.”

Once in place and widely accepted in Western science, the system of Mongoloid classification inspired new applications. Based on the physical description of some retarded children as marked by Asian facial features, it became apparent to the scientists of the era that they must also belong to the Mongoloid race. The first recorded link between retarded children and the “Mongoloid race” occurred in the 1844 study by Robert Chambers, who associated the malady with incest: “Parents too nearly related tend to produce offspring of the Mongolian type—that is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children.” In 1867, Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, Medical Superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, England, formalized the new system of categories in “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots” in the British Journal of Mental Science. In addition to incest and other forms of deviant behavior posited as the cause of the Mongoloid condition, medical doctors also suggested dietary deficiencies, maternal anxiety, excessive use of perfume, paternal alcoholism, and two-headed sperm.

In the search for a more directly historical explanation for why these children bore Asian physical characteristics, scientists found a precise biological connection by looking back at the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. According to their new explanation, through the ages, marauding tribes of Huns, Avars, and Mongols had left their genetic impact on Europe when they supposedly raped the white women. The descendants of these genes occasionally erupted in the modern era, when apparently “normal” European women gave birth to a child that was a throwback to the Mongols. Dr. Down’s son refined his father’s theory by revealing that in his research as a medical doctor, he found that these imbeciles derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more “pre-human, rather than human.”

In a popular 1924 book, The Mongol in Our Midst, British physician Francis G. Crookshank easily moved back and forth between Mongoloids as a race and as a mental category in what he delineated as the “Mongolian stigmata,” including small earlobes, protruding anuses, and small genitals among both males and females. The obvious conclusion of this linking of retarded children with another race was that these children do not belong in the communities, or even the families, into which they were born. As Crookshank explained, these individuals “are a race apart. For better or for worse, they are not quite as are other men and women around them. They are indeed ‘Mongol expatriates.’ ” Because these children belonged to a different race from the parents, so doctors and officials reasoned, they should be removed. The retarded child was only the extreme example of a wider occurring phenomenon of “Atavistic Mongolism (or Orangism).” According to this theory, the Occidental Mongols bore responsibility not merely for retardation but for much of the crime and feeblemindedness found in the West. According to this theory, Jews, in particular, sustained much of the Mongol influence because they had interbred with Khazars and other steppe tribes, and then brought that degraded genetic influence with them throughout Europe.

In evolutionary theories of race and retardation, the scientific community supplied hard and supposedly dispassionate evidence of what political demagogues and newspaper editors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called the Yellow Peril. Because many East Asian nations proved reluctant to accept Western colonization, the colonial Europeans heaped increasing invectives on them. Although the fear of the Yellow Peril applied to any group such as Filipinos and Koreans, it focused on the two major dangers of China and Japan. As Japan industrialized and built a large army, and as China continued to rebuff colonization or coerced conversion to Christianity, the Asians became enemies in the public perceptions of the West.

Throughout the nineteenth century, fear of Asians mounted in Europe; it can be clearly seen in a poem that Russian symbolist poet Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev wrote in 1894, entitled simply “Pan Mongolism.” The threat of China and Japan to the values of modern civilization were, in his eyes comparable to the era of Genghis Khan when “from the East an unknown and alien people” attacked and destroyed civilization. The same thing was happening again today: “A swarm of waking tribes prepares for new attacks. From the Altai to Malaysian shores/the leaders of Eastern isles/have gathered a host of regiments/by China’s defeated walls./Countless as locusts/and as ravenous,/shielded by an unearthly power/the tribes move north.” Soon “your tattered banners” will be “passed like toys among yellow children,” he warns his readers. “Pan Mongolism! The name is monstrous.”

In the intervening years since the Renaissance and the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan had been degraded to the lowest level of human history. In its newfound colonial power and its self-imposed mission to rule the world, modern Europe had no room for Asian conquerors. Christian colonialists and Communist commissars alike sought to rescue the Asians from the horrible legacy of barbarian dictatorship and bloodthirsty savagery imposed upon them by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. The focus on the Mongols as the source of Asian problems, and therefore the rationale for European conquest of them from Japan to India, developed as an integral theme in the ideology of European conquest and colonization. The supposed horrors of Genghis Khan and the Mongols became part of the excuse for rule by the more civilized English, Russian, and French colonialists.

In direct opposition to the European scientists and politicians, the victims of this ideology, Asian intellectuals and activists, found a new hero in Genghis Khan. Across Asia, from India to Japan, the new generation of twentieth-century Asians, wishing to free themselves from European domination, found inspiration in Genghis Khan and the Mongols as the greatest Asian conquerors in history and a vivid counter to the doctrines of European superiority. In part because the Europeans, including the Russians, had so vehemently attacked and thoroughly discredited the memory of Genghis Khan and his role in world history, an increasingly large cadre of Asian political activists turned to his memory for guidance and as a way to rebuke the powers and values of the West.

One of the first to reevaluate Genghis Khan was an unlikely candidate: peace advocate Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indian independence. As he sat isolated in a prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1931, he received word that British colonial authorities had just arrested his wife and incarcerated her in another prison, and that according to the newspapers, she had been mistreated. Knowing that their thirteen-year-old daughter Indira, who would herself grow up to become the prime minister of India, would be quite afraid and depressed, particularly since she could see her parents only once in two weeks, Nehru began writing a series of long letters to explain history to her as an antidote to what she had learned in colonial schools. Over the next three years, he wrote these letters of four or five pages almost daily; in them, he attempted, despite his Western education, to understand the place of his country of India and his continent of Asia in world history. It was his way to “dream of the past, and find our way to make the future greater than the past.” As he wrote to her in the first letter, “It would be foolish not to recognize the greatness of Europe. But it would be equally foolish to forget the greatness of Asia.”

One of his intellectual tasks as an Asian man and scholar was struggling to understand the historical role of Genghis Khan, whom the West had used in building its harsh images of Asia. By contrast, Nehru depicted Genghis Khan as a part of an ancient struggle of Asian people against European domination. In reference to the sudden appearance of the Mongols on the world scene, he wrote that “one can well imagine what the amazement of the Eurasian world must have been at this volcanic eruption. It almost seemed like a great natural calamity, like an earthquake, before which man can do little. Strong men and women they were, these nomads from Mongolia, used to hardship and living in tents on the wide steppes of northern Asia. But their strength and hard training might not have availed them much if they had not produced a chief who was a most remarkable man.” Nehru then described Genghis Khan as “a cautious and careful middle-aged man, and every big thing he did was preceded by thought and preparation.”

Nehru realized that although the Mongols did not live in cities, they nevertheless had created a remarkable civilization. “They did not know, of course, many of the city arts, but they had developed a way of life suitable to their world, and they created an intricate organization.” Nehru recognized that though they were small in numbers they “won great victories on the field of battle” because “of their discipline and organization. And above all it was due to the brilliant captainship of Chengiz.” Echoing the description of Chaucer, Nehru concluded that “Chengiz is, without doubt, the greatest military genius and leader in history.” In direct comparison with the greatest European conquerors, he wrote, “Alexander and Caesar seem petty before him.” Yet despite all the military prowess, he wanted friendly relations with the world: “His idea was to combine civilization with nomadic life. But this was not, and is not, possible.” The Mongol Khan believed in “the unchangeable law for ever and ever, and no one could disobey it. Even the emperor was subject to it.” Nehru then offered a personal insight: “I have given you more details and information about Chengiz Khan than was perhaps necessary. But the man fascinates me.”

As the West’s fear of the Yellow Peril grew, Asians increasingly examined the concept of Pan Mongolism as a viable path to creating a common identity for themselves. If they could all unite the way the Mongol Empire had once been, then together they could much better fight off the growing power of the Western nations. The theory offered a way for the Asians to transcend nationalist loyalties and work together in their shared quest. In Inner Mongolia, the new spirit led to the temporary creation of a calendar based on the year 1206, when Genghis Khan created the Mongol nation, as Year 1. Under the new Mongol calendar, 1937 became the Genghis Khan Year 731.

Particularly in Japan, which increasingly saw itself as the leader of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century but also needed to distinguish itself from Europe, Pan Mongolism exerted an increasing allure. In the scramble to become the leader of the new Asia, the image of Genghis Khan became a valuable prize. Whoever could claim control of his body, his shrine, or his homeland had a stronger claim for control over his heritage and therefore over the lands he had once ruled. Some Japanese scholars circulated the story that Genghis Khan had actually been a samurai warrior who had fled his homeland after a power struggle and found refuge among the steppe nomads, whom he then led on a conquest of the world.

In the years leading up to World War II, Genghis Khan ironically took on a new importance as a topic not only of propaganda and ideology, but also of practical military application. The Soviets, the Japanese, and the Germans all pushed to decipher, translate, and interpret the newly available Secret History in the hope that it might provide a useful key to unlocking the Mongol military tactics that allowed them to prevail over China and Russia.

The twentieth-century development of the tank allowed cavalry and artillery to again be combined in one military unit in a way that had not been practical since the Mongol mounted archers. The military minds of all countries looked to these earlier Mongol models for clues of how to fight in the modern era of tank warfare. The Germans found the most effective application in their strategy of the blitzkrieg, which followed the Mongol’s sudden appearance with a highly mobile army that raced across the landscape and kept the enemy surprised and disoriented. In their effort to more precisely understand the Mongol tactics, they began a translation of the Secret History into German. Erich Haenisch, professor of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, prepared a German translation. Haenisch traveled to Mongolia to search for an original Mongol-language version of the Secret History, but he failed to find it. From the Chinese-Mongol text, he managed to make his translation and dictionary. War shortages in Germany delayed the printing until 1941, when a small edition was printed; but even then, difficulties in transportation delayed distribution. The boxes of books remained in Leipzig until 1943, when they went up in flames during an Allied bombing raid. The secrets of the history remained secret from the Nazis.

While the German military pursued its studies of the Mongols, the Soviets had been doing the same. In Stalin’s obsession to understand the two Asian conquerors, Genghis Khan and Timur, he had the body of Timur exhumed, and he sent several unsuccessful military expeditions to the area of Burkhan Khaldun to find the body of Genghis Khan as well. Other scholars busied themselves with translations and some highly eccentric interpretations of Mongol history, such as the angle and power of the sun striking the earth in Mongolia being different than in other parts of the world. From the mixture of the absurd and the serious, the Soviets followed their own version of Mongol strategy in World War II. In a large-scale adaptation of the tactics Subodei used to defeat the Russians at the Kalka River in 1223, the Soviets lured the Germans ever deeper into Russia until they were hopelessly spread out over a large area, and then the Russians began to counterattack and pick them off one by one.

Virtually unnoticed in 1944 during the final bellowing paroxysms of World War II, Sayid Alim Khan, the former emir of Bukhara and the last reigning descendant of Genghis Khan, died in Kabul, Afghanistan, after nearly a quarter of a century in exile from the city he had ruled as a young man. The emir, who claimed descent through Jochi and the Golden Horde, had outlasted other branches of the family. In 1857, the British army removed the last Moghul emperor of India, Bahadur Shah II, and in the following year sent him off to exile in Burma in order that they might bestow his title on Queen Victoria, who became Empress of India in 1877.

When Alim Khan of the Manghit dynasty assumed power as emir of Bukhara in 1910, the Russians had already controlled his homeland for two generations, and he ruled more as a pampered puppet than did his ancestors of earlier centuries. Seven hundred thirty-one years after the first tribal khuriltai met on the shores of the Blue Lake by Black-Heart-Shaped Mountain in 1189, a much different group, also calling itself a khuriltai but consisting of the delegates of the Bukhara Communist Party, met to depose his last descendant.

In the final week of August, he fled Bukhara, and after a brief attempt to mount a resistance from Tajikistan, he found refuge under British protection in Afghanistan, where he lived for the remainder of his life. As the emir departed, Bolshevik forces under Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze attacked the citadel in Bukhara, the same fortress where, precisely seven centuries earlier, the Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan had led the Mongols to their first victory in central Asia. On September 2, 1920, Frunze reported to Lenin that “the fortress of old Bukhara was taken today following a powerful attack by Red and Bukharian units.” With a dramatic flourish, he added that “tyranny and coercion have been vanquished, the red flag of revolution is floating over the Registan.”

Throughout most of the twentieth century, Russia and China maintained an accord dividing the homeland of Genghis Khan between them, with China occupying Inner Mongolia, the part south of the Gobi, and the Soviet Union occupying the other half, Outer Mongolia, north of the Gobi. The Soviets turned Mongolia into a buffer zone that they kept largely empty between themselves and the Chinese. Just as the British executed the sons and grandson of the last Moghul emperor of India in the nineteenth century, the Soviets purged the known descendants of Genghis Khan remaining in Mongolia in the twentieth century, marching whole families into the woods to be shot and buried in unmarked pits, exiling them into the gulag of Soviet camps across Siberia where they were worked to death, or simply causing their mysterious disappearance into the night of history.

In April 1964, the official Soviet newspaper Pravda issued a stern warning against attempting “to place the bloodthirsty barbarian Genghis Khan on a pedestal as a historically progressive personage.” The Chinese Communists countered the Soviet attack by charging that the Russians should be more appreciative of the Mongols since their invasion of Russia gave the Russians the opportunity “to get acquainted with a higher culture.” No matter how offended the Mongols may have been by the Soviet attacks on their hero, they remained fiercely loyal to the Russians.

The ensuing persecutions in Mongolia destroyed a whole generation of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and other scholars who specialized in topics tangentially connected to Genghis or the Mongol Empire. Somewhere in the 1960s, eight centuries after the birth of Genghis Khan, his sulde, the Spirit Banner that he had carried across Eurasia, disappeared from where the Communist authorities had kept it. From the time of this purge, the sulde of Genghis Khan has not been seen or accounted for. Many scholars assume that the authorities destroyed it in a final act of malice toward his soul. Still others hope that just perhaps the sulde lies forgotten in some dusty basement or bricked-up room from which it will, one day, be brought out to lead and inspire the Mongols once again.

Epilogue

The Eternal Spirit of Genghis Khan

Is it our fault we have forgotten our history?

D

.

J

ARGALSAIKHAN

GENGHIS KHAN’S WAS THE last great tribal empire of world history. He was the heir of ten thousand years of war between the nomadic tribes and the civilized world, the ancient struggle of the hunter and herder against the farmer. It was a history as old as the story of the Bedouin tribes that followed Muhammad to smash the pagan idolatry of the city, of the Roman campaigns against the Huns, of the Greeks against the wandering Scythians, of the city dwellers of Egypt and Persia who preyed on the wandering tribes of Hebrew herders, and, ultimately, of Cain, the tiller, who slew his brother Abel, the herder.

The clash between the nomadic and urban cultures did not end with Genghis Khan, but it would never again reach the level to which he brought it. Civilization pushed the tribal people toward the ever more distant edges of the world. Chiefs such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Lakota Sioux, Red Eagle of the Muskogee, Tecumseh of the Shawnee, and Shaka Zulu of South Africa valiantly but vainly continued the quest of Genghis Khan over the coming centuries. Without knowing anything about the Mongols or Genghis Khan, these other chiefs faced the same struggles and fought the same battles across Africa and throughout the Americas, but history had moved beyond them. In the end, sedentary civilization won the long world war; the future belonged to the civilized children of Cain, who eternally encroached upon the open lands of the tribes.

Although he arose out of the ancient tribal past, Genghis Khan shaped the modern world of commerce, communication, and large secular states more than any other individual. He was the thoroughly modern man in his mobilized and professional warfare and in his commitment to global commerce and the rule of international secular law. What began as a war of extinction between the nomad and the farmer ended as a Mongol amalgamation of cultures. His vision matured as he aged and as he experienced different ways of life. He worked to create something new and better for his people. The Mongol armies destroyed the uniqueness of the civilizations around them by shattering the protective walls that isolated one civilization from another and by knotting the cultures together.

The great actors of history cannot be neatly tucked between the covers of a book and filed away like so many pressed botanical specimens. Their actions cannot be explained according to a specific timetable like the coming and going of so many trains. Although scholars may designate the beginning and ending of an era with exact precision, great historical events, particularly those that erupt suddenly and violently, build up slowly, and, once having begun, never end. Their effects linger long after the action faded from view. Like the tingling vibrations of a bell that we can still sense well after it has stopped ringing, Genghis Khan has long passed from the scene, but his influence continues to reverberate through our time.

In April 2000, I followed the trail that Temujin and his family probably took eight centuries earlier when they fled from the attacking Merkid who had come to kidnap Borte. After locating the likely spot of the attack on Temujin’s camp, the direction from which the Merkid came, and the path by which the group fled, we set off to follow the chase from the steppe to the mountains. The local herding boys were themselves about the same age as the ones whose trail we were now retracing. They were just as skilled with horses as their ancient predecessors, and they wore the traditional Mongol deel with a tightly wrapped sash of bright gold silk just below the waist. Except for the occasional baseball cap, sunglasses, or jeans worn under the deel, their clothes were still the same heavy layers of wool, fleece, and felt garments worn by their ancestors.

Our nine horses, like those of Hoelun’s fleeing family, were geldings, and the descriptions of the horses in the Secret History are so precise that we could have matched them up by age, color, shape, and other characteristics. Instead, we simply rode with the horses that an old and slightly drunk herder had designated as most appropriate for our task. We did not need to search for the route so much as merely follow the guidance and intuition of the nomads. They knew precisely how a horse and rider would get from here to there. They knew where the ice was too thin to cross the river, where the snow was too deep in the small depressions, and where a cluster of marmot burrows might trip one of the racing horses.

The wind made the new snow dance around the horse’s hooves as we slowly climbed the rocky slope of Burkhan Khaldun, the most sacred mountain in Mongolia. The horse nervously snorted moist puffs of steam into the crisp air. His head jerked. Under the strain of a long, hard climb in such a thin altitude, his heart pounded so loudly that I heard it above the rushing wind, and I felt it throbbing up through my legs to my heart. When we paused in the bright crystal clear light, we saw all the way to the horizon in all directions—across the mountain peaks, boulder fields, winding rivers, and frozen lakes.

When he had finished his work, Genghis Khan returned here, as he always had after each victory, for rest, recovery, and renewal. He had changed the world but had allowed nothing to change in the land of his birth. Today, hawks soar overhead in spring, and the insects still sing in summer just as they did in his day. Nomads move to the hills in autumn, and wolves prowl in winter. When I close my eyes, I can still hear the distant thunder of his horse’s hooves as they gallop off to China, Europe, and India.

Leaving the forested mountains and riding back to find our Jeeps, we decided to return to where the story and our expedition began, the place where the Merkid kidnapped Borte from Temujin. The steppe stretched to the horizon in every direction, barren of trees and unmarred by buildings, roads, fences, electric lines, or other scars of the modern world. During my repeated visits, I had learned to mark the land as the Mongols do, by color of season. The brief green summer lured the mating birds; the yellow fall enticed the horses to race and goats to gnaw at the drying plants. The white winter would find camels wandering slowly up and down the frozen river searching for patches of dried grass, and the brown spring provided only a time of waiting for new grass by the animals and the humans who live off them. Isolated, remote, and unchanged by the centuries, this locale marks the place where Temujin became a man and changed the Mongols from a tribe into a nation.

Upon our return to the windy place where we thought the abduction had occurred, our group grew quiet in the bitter wind that whipped around us. We had fulfilled the mission, and we returned to the spot with a new sense of amazement at what had happened here. The outline of many old campsites were clearly marked by large stones that once were used to tie down the ger in the fierce winds. The Mongol camps now lay cold and empty. Yet it seemed that if I only kicked the dust, I would feel the warmth of the smoldering ashes rising from his last campfire. If I brushed away the snow, I would see the prints of his horses in the frozen mud. The stones seem to have been left quite casually, as though at any time now the owner might return, dust them off, and once again erect either a winter camp for his yaks and sheep or an imperial capital of the world—whichever is most needed at the moment.

We stood in a silent cluster in the whistling wind, tightened our jackets, pulled down our hats, and stared at the ground. One by one, members of the group walked away to gather a few stones and piled them on the spot, in the way that nomadic people have marked important places for thousands of years. The senior horseman, a local headman, gathered some of the dried horse dung, piled it in front of the stones, and, as others blocked the wind by spreading open their flowing deels, lit the dung in much the same way that a mother kindles the fire before the family erects their ger around it.

Once the dung ignited, Professor. O. Sukhbaatar sprinkled some incense of finely ground cedar into the fire. The smell generated a soothing effect that softened the excitement of the long search, and at the same time focused our attention on the fire itself. The smoke wafting from the incense and dung signaled the success and conclusion of this phase in our quest. All the men shuffled a little and gradually pulled themselves up more erectly. Every culture has its proper way to dress and appear respectful. For the Mongols, the three breast buttons had to be securely fastened, their collars pulled straight, and the sleeves of the deels pulled down to cover their wrists and part of the upper hand. Each man tightened the wide gold sash and then bloused out the upper part of the deel to make it loose and full.

When we had identified the place on our earlier passage through here, the herders had asked Professor Sukhbaatar to mark a stone on this place so that everyone would know what had happened. A lady who lived nearby explained that because such knowledge was forbidden for so long, they wanted their children to know it now. For them, the way to remember it was to have it carved in stone. All of the herders respected the elderly professor. They knew him from the years after the purge of scholars, when alone and at great risk to his life, he set out on his journey of more than a million kilometers tracing the route of Genghis Khan and relying on the hospitality of the herders to protect, house, and feed him in his quest.

Now, after completing our journey, Professor Sukhbaatar consented to their request to erect a stone to commemorate the kidnapping of Borte from Temujin. It was quickly decided that he would write the text, Professor T. Jamyansuren would design the calligraphy of the Old Mongol script, and the students would find a stone and engrave it. After sending a student to fetch his well-worn almanac, Professor Sukhbaatar squinted through his smudged glasses to follow a long series of charts and diagrams. He made notes with a stubby pencil on a small slip of paper, performed some quick calculations, and looked up more charts in the almanac. He then announced the most propitious day on which the students should return to this spot to erect the stone.

This piece of business behind us, Professor Lkhagvasuren pulled a bottle of vodka out from the hidden recess of his deel, sprinkled it on the stones, threw some into the air, and touched it to his forehead. In some intimate way or other, each person connected directly back to the story we were researching. Lkhagvasuren had traveled this area many times with his teacher and mentor, the archaeologist Perlee, and when the authorities put Perlee in prison, they also arrested Lkhagvasuren’s father for being too much of a nationalist. They sent his stepmother into internal exile far out in the country, and as the children of political prisoners Lkhagvasuren and his younger siblings were turned out into the streets of Ulaanbaatar. In the months before the authorities came to take him away to the Children’s Prison, he managed to heap enough dirt over a small shed outside of town to serve as a home for his siblings through the winter while they would be alone. After spending his teen years in prison and in forced service on a distant border, he resumed the archaeological work of his mentor.

For each person—whether herder or scholar—the history around us was neither abstract nor distant; their Mongol history cut through their lives as sharply as if the events had happened only last week. For me, the quest across Mongolia and back through time had begun in nearly childlike curiosity that had developed into an intellectual and scholarly quest, but for my Mongol colleagues each step in our search grew much more personal and much more deeply emotional. Each day, as we understood better the hardships and heroism of their ancestors, we slipped farther back into time. Where we stood was not just another historical place; on this spot, the mother of the Mongol nation had been attacked, kidnapped, and ravished. When she was taken from him, the boy Temujin risked all, including his young life, to get her back. He rescued her, and for the rest of his life he fought to keep his own people safe from outside attack, even though that meant that he would spend his life attacking outsiders. In the process, he changed the world, and he created a nation.

They knelt before the small pile of smoking dung, sniffling and with tears pooling in the corners of their eyes. In the golden but dimming light of dusk, eight centuries melted away, and the pain of that dawn of terror so long ago floated in the smoke around us. As the incense burned on the small mound of stones, each person stepped forward individually to honor this place. He took off his hat, knelt before the stones, touched his head to the frozen earth of this sacred spot, and then got up and walked slowly three times around the stones while tossing vodka into the air.

Each person pulled out something as a small personal gift to leave on the stones—the stub of a sugar cube, a few matches, a candy wrapped in crinkling paper, a sprinkle of tea leaves. It was almost as though they wanted to reach back through the centuries to offer these small gifts of nourishment and warmth to the fleeing and frightened Borte as her kidnappers slung her on a horse and galloped away with her to an unknown future. It was as though the members of our muted group wanted to tell her, their mother, that everything would be all right, that she and they, her children, would survive it all for eight more centuries. After all, they are still the children of the Golden Light, the offspring of a wolf and a doe, and in the wispy clouds of the Eternal Blue Sky of Mongolia, the Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan still waves in the wind.

Notes

These notes are to help the reader find information from a variety of sources. Works are cited in languages other than English only if no English translation could be identified.

Introduction: The Missing Conqueror

“Genghis Khan was a doer”: Joel Aschenbacher, “The Era of His Ways: In Which We Chose the Most Important Man of the Last Thousand Years,” Washington Post, December 31, 1989, p. F01.

unprecedented rise in cultural communication: For more information on the cultural exchange, see Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Roger Bacon observed: The quotes are from Bacon’s Opus Majus, trans. Robert Belle Burke (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), vol. 1, p. 416; vol. 2. p. 792.

“we imagined your appearance”: From “Chinggis Khaan,” composed by D. Jargalsaikhan and performed by the musical group Chinggis Khaan.

Rashid al-Din described: The quotes are from Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, p. 88.

Arab politicians: Quoted in Eric L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 113.

“tendencies directed at idealizing the role of Genghis Khan”: Almaz Khan, “Chinggis Khan: From Imperial Ancestor to Ethnic Hero,” in Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 261–262.

anti-party elements, Chinese spies, saboteurs, or pests: Tom Ginsburg, “Nationalism, Elites, and Mongolia’s Rapid Transformation,” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan, ed. Stephen Kotkin and Bruce A. Elleman (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 247.

I worked closely with: Most Mongolians today use a single name such as Lkhagvasuren or Sukhbaatar, but when necessary to distinguish among those with the same name, they identify themselves by the initial (or first two letters in the case of sh, ch, kh or ts) of a parent.

I. The Reign of Terror on the Steppe: 1162–1206

“Nations! What are nations?”: Henry David Thoreau, Journal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), entry for May 1, 1851.

1. The Blood Clot

“There is fire in his eyes”: Secret History, § 62.

“choked with horsemen”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 98.

“whoever yields”: Ibid., p. 15.

“a man of tall stature”: Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-I-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, trans. Major H. G. Raverty (Bengal: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881; reprint, New Dehli: Oriental Books, 1970), p. 1077.

“it is the great ones, among you”: Ibid. p. 105.

“like a red-hot furnace”: Juvaini, p. 106.

“If you but live”: Secret History, § 56.

Targutai boasted: Secret History, § 149.

early age of nine: The early events in Temujin’s life prove difficult to date precisely with confidence. The Mongols counted each new year as beginning at the end of winter when spring came. Each greening of the steppe counted as one new year, and age was counted according to the number of greenings a child had been through. Thus, the birth of Temujin at the start of spring gave him an immediate age of one, and each successive greening made him one year older. For purposes of this book, however, ages are calculated in the traditional Western way.

Yesugei’s sons by his other wife: Regarding the marriage of a widow to a stepson, in one known case of an aristocratic Mongol family in the seventeenth century, after a woman’s husband died, she married one of his sons; after that husband died, she then married his son. Finally, when this husband also died, she married his son. Thus, in her lifetime she was married to four men from the same family: her first husband, his son, his grandson, and his great-grandson. See J. Holmgren, “Observations on Marriage and Inheritance Practices in Early Mongol and Yüan Society, with Particular Reference to the Levirate,” Journal of Asian History 20 (1986), p. 158.

“of the skins of dogs and mice”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 21.

“food that could not be digested”: Secret History, § 201.

the eldest son assumed that role: The Mongol language reflects the importance of older siblings by having distinct words for older brother (akh) and older sister (egch), whereas younger siblings, both male and female, are lumped together in one term (düü). The akh, “Elder Brother,” had such importance that his title eventually became synonymous with the leader of a family cluster or other small group. In the case of full siblings, the ranking is obvious: by birth order. But for half siblings, the ranking order of the children depends on many factors, including, most particularly, the relative ranking of their mothers.

“Destroyer! Destroyer!”: Secret History, § 78.

ten years in slavery: “Meng-Ta Peu-Lu Ausführliche Aufzeichnungen über die Mongolischen Tatan von Chao Hung, 1221,” In Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh: Chinesische Gesandtenberichte über die frühen Mongolen 1221 und 1237 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980), p. 12.

2. Tale of Three Rivers

“The banner of Chingiz-Khan’s fortune”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 22.

supernatural power: The etymology of many Mongol and Turkic words show a constant intertwining of physical and political prowess with supernatural strength. Khan, Mongolian for chief, is almost identical to the Turkic term for shaman, kham. The Mongolian female shaman was called an idu-khan, while the term for male shaman originated in the same word for wrestler or athlete.

“We have made their breasts to become empty:” Francis Woodman Cleaves, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), par. 113, pp. 47–48.

“let us love one another”: Urgunge Onon, trans., The History and the Life of Chinggis Khan (The Secret History of the Mongols), (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), § 117.

Jamuka and Temujin rode together: For a contrasting interpretation of the class relations between the two men, see Boris Y. Vladimirtsov, The Life of Chingis-Khan, trans. Prince D. S. Mirsky (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1930).

“Barren Island”: Rachewiltz’s translation of The Secret History, § 136, 1972.

never forgot how Jelme saved him: Temujin’s wound closely paralleled the nearly simultaneous battle wound suffered by King Richard the Lionhearted of England. In April 1199, while combating one of his rebel vassals, an arrow pierced his left shoulder. Richard tried to pull out the arrow, but its iron barb held and the shaft broke. For the next agonizing days, doctors treated him but without being able to combat the growing infection and fever. Finally, on the eleventh day, he died. His body was embalmed but disassembled to be buried with great ostentation in different places of sentimental importance to him. His brain was removed and sent for burial in an abbey in Poitiers. His heart went to the cathedral in Rouen, and his body to the Abbey Fonteurault. In marked contract, by sucking the blood from Temujin’s wound, Jelme prevented him from following the painful and untimely fate of King Richard.

He organized his warriors: For more information on troop estimates, see Bat-Ochir Bold, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the “Medieval” History of Mongolia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 85.

“Let no one set up camp”: Secret History, § 179.

People of the Felt Walls: This phrase is still used in Mongolia, “Esgii Tuurgatan.”

3. War of the Khans

“All the tribes were of one color”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press), p. 38.

“Is not Genghis Khan ashamed”: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 94.

Lake Baljuna: Baljuna is called a lake in the text, but it may have been a river or a small lake connected to the Balj River, a tributary of the Onon. The exact timing of the event is in great debate. Some scholars believe that it occurred at another point in the long civil wars and not as part of the betrayal by Ong Khan. A few scholars discount the story entirely, but based particularly on heavy Chinese documentation, most scholars accept it. For a full discussion of the event and the various versions of it, see Francis Woodman Cleaves, “The Historicity of the Baljuna Covenant,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 18, nos. 3–4 (December 1955), pp. 357–421.

“more fires than the stars in the sky”: Secret History, § 194.

“If he sends me into fire”: “Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh Kurzer Bericht über die schwarzen Tatan von P’eng Ta-Ya und Sü T’ing, 1237,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh: Chinesische Gesandtenberichte über die frühen Mongolen 1221 und 1237 (Welisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980), p. 161.

“rotten logs”: Secret History, § 96.

“Let us be companions”: Urgunge Onon, trans., The History and the Life of Chinggis Khan (The Secret History of the Mongols) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), § 200.

the headwaters of the Onon River: Regarding the location of the khuriltai of 1206, the Secret History describes the place as simply the headwaters of the Onon, but the seventeenth-century Erdeni-yin Tobchi places it more precisely on the island of Kherlen River. Paul Kahn, The Secret History of the Mongols: The Origins of Chingis Khan, exp. ed. (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1998), p. 189.

“placed him upon a black Felt Carpet”: François Pétis de la Croix, The History of Genghizcan the Great: First Emperor of the Ancient Moguls and Tartars (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc., 1722), pp. 62–63.

“obstinate and has a petty, narrow mind”: Secret History, § 243.

The Great Law of Genghis Khan: For more information on the law of Genghis Khan, see Valentin A. Riasanovsky, Fundamental Principles of Mongol Law, Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 43 (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1965), p. 33.

haggling over the value of a wife: For more information on marriage, see Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, trans. Thomas Nivison Haining. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 191.

Theft of animals: For more information, see ibid., p. 155.

hunting rights for wild animals: See Secret History, § 199.

tax exemptions: For more information on Genghis Khan’s tax law, see Riasanovsky, Fundamental Principles of Mongol Law, p. 83.

the supremacy of the rule of law: For more information on the application of law to the royal family, See Boris Y. Vladimirtsov, The Life of Chingis-Khan, trans. Prince D. S. Mirsky (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1930), p. 74.

“punish the thieves”: Onon, Secret History, § 203.

a system of fast riders: For a discussion of postal stations, see Bat-Ochir Bold, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the “Medieval” History of Mongolia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 168.

Genghis Khan’s shaman: Teb Tengeri’s name was Kokochu. In the Secret History, four men had this name, and the text is not always clear on which is meant as the trustee of Hoelun’s estate. Two Kokochus were already dead before this episode. In addition to the shaman, Kokochu was the name of the Tayichiud boy adopted by Mother Hoelun, and who later became the leader of a unit of one thousand. Many scholars assume that the adopted Kokochu was placed in charge of Mother Hoelun’s people, but a case can be made that since Kokochu Teb Tengeri took over Mother Hoelun’s people after her death, he was the Kokochu named as an administrator. While the issue of precise identity is perplexing, it is probably not particularly important.

“Have you seen these?”: Secret History, § 244.

the Uighur khan: In the Secret History (§ 238), the Uighur leader is referred to as the Idu’ut, which means something like king, prince, or khan.

II. The Mongol World War: 1211–1261

“By the arms of Zingis”: Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, J. M. Dent, 1910), vol. 5, p. 76.

4. Spitting on the Golden Khan

“The hooves of our Mongol horses”: Quoted by a Sung representative in “Meng-Ta Peu-Lu Ausführliche Aufzeichnungen über die Mongolischen Tatan von Chao Hung, 1221,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh: Chinesische Gesandtenberichte über die frühen Mongolen 1221 und 1237 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980), p. 210.

their capital city of Zhongdu: The same place had many names at different times. Under the Jurched, it was Zhongdu. When Khubilai Khan created his capital here it became known as Khanbalik (the khan’s city) to Mongolians and other foreigners; the Chinese called it Dadu (or Ta-tu). Later, it was named Peking, and now Beijing.

“reverently upon the ground”: Peking Gazette, June 30, 1878, quoted in C. W. Campbell’s Travels in Mongolia: 1902 (reprint, London: Stationery Office, 2000), p. 74.

the full commitment of every warrior: see Sechen Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society (Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 370.

“Our empire is like the sea”: “Meng-Ta Peu-Lu Ausführliche Aufzeichnungen über die Mongolischen Tatan von Chao Hung, 1221,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh, p. 61.

Mongol military: Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 B.C. to A.D. 1757 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).

Mongol warriors could travel ten days: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: Facts on File, 1984), p. 57.

needed no fires to cook: See “Meng-Ta Peu-Lu Ausführliche Aufzeichnungen über die Mongolischen Tatan von Chao Hung, 1221,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh, p. 58.

the central camp for each unit: See “Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh Kurzer Bericht über die schwarzen Tatan von P’eng Ta-Ya und Sü T’ing, 1237,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh: Chinesische Gesandtenberichte über die frühen Mongolen 1221 und 1237 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980), p. 187.

communications became more important: Walther Heissig, A Lost Civilization: The Mongols Rediscovered, trans. D. J. S. Thompson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), p. 35.

The Mongols referred to these grass-eating people: For more on the Mongol terminology for settled people, see Uradyn E. Bulag, Nationality and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 213.

“they come as though the sky were falling”: See “Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh Kurzer Bericht über die schwarzen Tatan von P’eng Ta-Ya und Sü T’ing, 1237,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh, p. 187.

In 1219, the Year of the Hare: There is debate about whether some of these events occurred in 1207 or 1219, since both were the Year of the Hare.

“red bull”: Secret History, § 240.

Kashgar, a trading city: Regarding the events in Kashgar, the Secret History placed this invasion in the Year of the Ox, 1205, but almost all other sources show that it occurred in the Year of the Ox, 1217.

Jebe’s army defeated the army of Guchlug: For more information on the Mongol campaign against Guchlug, see René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), p. 234.

“to be one of the mercies of the Lord”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 67.

“Jebe pursued Guchlug”: Secret History, § 237.

“He had brought about complete peace and quiet”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 77.

“this Emperor having nothing more to fear”: François Pétis de la Croix, The History of Genghizcan the Great: First Emperor of the Ancient Moguls and Tartars (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc. 1722), pp. 119–120.

“I have the greatest desire to live in peace”: Quoted in René Grousset, Conqueror of the World, trans. Marian McKellar and Denis Sinor (New York: Orion Press, 1966), p. 209.

“henceforth the abscess of evil”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, pp. 79–81.

“laid waste a whole world”: Ibid., p. 80.

“the whirlwind of anger”: Ibid., p. 80.

he uncovered “his head”: Ibid., p. 80.

5. Sultan Versus Khan

“War for the nomadic people”: Sechen Jagchid, Essays in Mongolian Studies (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1988), p. 12.

the story of the tattooed messenger: François Pétis de la Croix, The History of Genghizcan the Great: First Emperor of the Ancient Moguls and Tartars (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc., 1722), p. 136

“Commanders, elders, and commonality”: Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, pt. 1, The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), p. 81.

“it is the will of God”: Robert P. Blake, and Richard N. Frye, “History of the Nation of the Archers (the Mongols) by Grigor of Akanc,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (December 1949), p. 301.

“effaced from off the earth”: Yaqut al-Hamawi quoted in Edward G. Browne, The Literary History of Persia, vol. 2 (Bethesda, Md.: Iranbooks, 1997), p. 431.

“the greatest joy a man can know”: Michael Prawdin, The Mongol Empire: Its Rise and Legacy, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 143.

“Stories have been related to me”: Quoted in Browne, Literary History of Persia, p. 430.

All the Mongol prisoners: The murder of the Mongol warriors is related by Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 131.

nails into their heads: Stuart Legg, The Barbarians of Asia: The Peoples of the Steppes from 1600 B.C. (New York: Dorset, 1970), p. 274.

Those cities that surrendered: For a fuller account of these campaigns, see David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 60–61.

the numbers given by historians: For more on the supposedly high number of people killed, see Legg, Barbarians of Asia, p. 277.

“if all my sons”: Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, trans. Thomas Nivison Haining (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991), p. 140.

“When you tell Jochi to speak”: Paul Kahn, The Secret History of the Mongols: The Origins of Chinggis Khan (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1998), p. 153.

“She didn’t run away from home”: Ibid., § 254.

“from a single hot womb”: Ibid., § 254.

“game killed by mouth”: Ibid., § 255.

“Mother Earth is broad”: Ibid., § 255.

“laid the knee of courtesy”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 182–183.

“because of———”: Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 98.

“the vision should never stray”: Colonel Kh. Shagdar, “Ikh Khaadin surgaal gereeslel,” Chingis Khaan Sydlal, vol. 4 (2002), pp. 3–35; translated from the Mongolian.

“People conquered on different sides”: Ibid., p. 3–35.

his men cordoned off: For a fuller description of the group hunting procedures, see “Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh Kurzer Bericht über die schwarzen Tatan von P’eng Ta-Ya und Sü T’ing, 1237,” in Peter Olbricht and Elisabeth Pinks, Meng-Ta Pei-Lu und Hei-Ta Shih-Lüeh: Chinesische Gesandtenberichte über die frühen Mongolen 1221 und 1237 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980), p. 117.

Yesui prepared the body: For more information on Mongol funeral practices, see V. V. Barthold, “The Burial Rites of the Turks and the Mongols,” trans. J. M. Rogers, Central Asiatic Journal 14 (1970), pp. 195–227.

“A mighty name”: The cleric’s comments come from Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-I-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, trans. Major H. G. Raverty (Bengal: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881; reprint, New Dehli: Oriental Books, 1970), pp. 1041–1042.

the text of a letter: The English text of the letter of Genghis Khan can be found in E. Bretschneider, Mediæval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, vol. I (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 37–39.

“died in the fullness of years and glory”: Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), vol. 6, p. 280.

6. The Discovery and Conquest of Europe

“For our sins”: The Chronicle of Novgorod: 1016–1491; trans. Robert Michel and Novill Forbes, Camden 3rd Series, vol. 25 (London: Offices of the Society, 1914), p. 64.

“was ever spreading the carpet of merrymaking”: Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 202.

“exceedingly tall in structure”: Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 61–62.

newly recruited clerks: For more information on the growing administration, see Thomas T. Allsen, “The Rise of the Mongolian Empire and Mongolian Rule in North China,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 397.

“a castle with doors”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, pp. 236–237.

“would sit, every day”: al-Din, Successors of Genghis Khan, pp. 84–85.

a 10 percent bonus: For more information on the bonus, see Larry Moses and Stephen A. Halkovic Jr. Introduction to Mongolian History and Culture (Bloomington, Ind.: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1985), p. 71.

In an effort to improve trade: See Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 B.C. to A.D. 1757 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), p. 206.

weights and measures: See Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, pt. 1, The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), p. 156.

– “that wherever profit”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 77.

“every tenth returned to his home”: The Chronicle of Novgorod: 1016–1471, trans. Robert Michel and Nevill Forbes, Camden 3rd Series, vol. 25 (London: Offices of the Society, 1914), p. 66.

“the Tartars turned back”: Ibid., p. 66.

“Tartars came in countless numbers”: Ibid., p. 81.

“They have hard and robust breasts: The quotes in this paragraph are from Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History from the Year 1235 to 1273, trans. J. A. Giles, 1852. (London: Henry G. Bohn; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968), vol. 1, p. 469.

“no eye remained open to cry for the dead”: J. J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 82.

“an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan”: Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, vol. 1, p. 314.

“ravaged the eastern countries”: Ibid., p. 314.

“They clothe themselves”: Ibid., p. 314.

“They have no human laws”: Ibid., p. 314.

“clouds of Tatars”: Saunders, History of the Mongol Conquests, p. 83.

“To thee, Tsar, I bow”: Chronicle of Novgorod, pp. 87–90.

“headstrong and brave”: al-Din, Successors of Genghis Khan, p. 138.

“You broke the spirit of every man”: Secret History, § 277.

the two armies met: For information on the battle, see Erik Hildinger, “Mongol Invasion of Europe,” Military History (June 1997).

“great head”: Jan Dlugosz, The Annals of Jan Dlugosz, trans. Maurice Michael, commentary by Paul Smith, Chichester, United Kingdom: IM Publications, (1997), entry for the year 1241.

“The dead fell”: James Ross Sweeney, “Thomas of Spalato and the Mongols,” Florilegium: Archives of Canadian Society of Medievalists 12 (1980).

“cannibals from Hell”: Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, vol. 1, pp. 469–472.

– Christian clerics looked to the Bible: Information on the hypothetical biblical connections to the Mongols can be found in Axel Klopprogge, Ursprung und Auspraegung des abdendlaendischen Mongolenbildes im 13. Jahrhundert: Eine Versuch zur Ideengeschichte des Mitterlaters (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1993).

“in the time of the government”: Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, vol. 1, p. 314.

“the enormous wickedness of the Jews”: The quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 357–358.

a thirty-year-old literate Englishman: For an interesting novel on the identity of the English knight, see Gabriel Ronay, The Tartar Khan’s Englishman (London: Cassell, 1978).

7. Warring Queens

“Just as God”: Christopher Dawson, ed. The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), p. 195.

record of Torogene’s power: For a fuller discussion of Toregene’s edict, see Igor de Rachewiltz, “Töregene’s Edict of 1240,” Papers on Far Eastern History 23 (March, 1981), pp. 38–63.

“became the sharer”: Ata-Malik, Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 245–246.

“desist entirely”: Christopher Dawson, ed., The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), pp. 73–76.

“He sent again”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 245.

“but God knows the truth”: Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-I-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, trans. Major H. G. Raverty (Bengal: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881; reprint, New Delhi: Oriental Books, 1970), p. 1144.

“hungry and thirsty”: Juvaini, p. 245.

“his predestined hour arrived”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 185.

“the affairs of the world”: Ibid., p. 556.

Mongke Khan expanded the trials: For more on the purge, see Thomas T. Allsen, “The Rise of the Mongolian Empire and Mongolian Rule in North China,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 394.

“if I were to see among the race of women”: Morris Rossabi, “The Reign of Khubilai Khan,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 414.

“I follow the laws of my ancestors”: Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism: The Politics of the Grand Qan Mongke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251–1259 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 36.

Guillaume Boucher: For more information on the goldsmith, see Leonardo Olschki, Guillaume Boucher: A French Artist at the Court of the Khans (New York: Greenwood, 1946), p. 5.

“I ate a little”: William of Rubruck, “The Journey of William of Rubruck,” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Christopher Dawson (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), p. 163.

“Is there any man”: Ibid., p. 189.

“no one shall dare to speak”: Ibid., p. 191.

“We Mongols believe in one God”: Ibid., p. 195.

by the power of the eternal God”: Ibid.

“And from what book”: Juvaini, Genghis Khan, p. 604.

a commercial world not yet accustomed: For more on the Mongol monetary system, see Allsen, Mongol Imperialism, pp. 171–188, and Allsen, “Rise of the Mongolian Empire,” p. 402.

the word assassin: Dante became one of the earliest European writers to use the word in print. It appeared in Book XIX of The Divine Comedy, and his usage made it apparent that he expected the reader to know its meaning full well: “Io stava come il frate che confessa Lo perfido assassin . . .” (“like a friar who is confessing the wicked assassin . . .”).

“Five hundred and fifteen years”: René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), p. 357.

The Armenian chronicler Grigor of Akanc: in “History of the Nation of the Archers (the Mongols) by Grigor of Akanc,” trans. Robert P. Blake and Richard N. Frye. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (December 1949).

had conquered the heart of the Muslim World: For more on the Mongol conquests, see David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell), 1986, pp. 154–155.

Hulegu ordered one hundred thousand piglets: See Blake and Frye, “History,” p. 343.

Khubilai’s cosmopolitan persona: On all issues related to Khubilai khan, the most authoritative source is Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

“Central Rule”: Herbert Franke, From Tribal Chieftain to Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yüan Dynasty (München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichete, vol. 2, 1978), page 27.

a lowering of temperatures: For information on weather and climate in the Mongol imperial era, see William Atwell, “Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asia and World History, c. 1200–1699,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 50.

“We were then, and you are today”: Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 261.

III. The Global Awakening: 1262–1962

“Asia is devouring us”: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 238.

8. Khubilai Khan and the New Mongol Empire

“This Great Khan”: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1958), p. 113.

“Within the precincts”: Sir John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the Voyage of Johannes de Plano Carpini, the Journal of Friar William de Rubruquis, the Journal of Friar Odoric (New York: Dover, 1964), p. 348.

“in a certain part of the hall”: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition (New York: Dover, 1993), vol. 1, p. 382.

the number of capital offenses: Figures on executions are taken from Paul Heng-chao Ch’en, Chinese Legal Tradition Under the Mongols: The Code of 1291 as Reconstructed (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 44–45.

“first use reason to analyze”: Ibid., p. 154.

“the laws and customs of cities”: Secret History, § 263. For a fuller description of Mongol law, see Valentin A. Riasanovsky, Fundamental Principles of Mongol Law, Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 43 (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1965), p. 83.

Khubilai’s administration: For an extensive assessment of the Mongol administration, see Elizabeth Endicott-West, Mongolian Rule in China: Local Administration in the Yuan Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

“To refuse it would be to incur the death penalty:” Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: Facts on File, 1984), p. 88.

rejected some parts of Chinese Culture: For more on Mongol cultural influences, see Adam T. Kessler, Empires Beyond the Great Wall: The Heritage of Genghis Khan (Los Angeles: Natural History Museum, 1993).

promoted general literacy: For more on Mongol education in China, see Morris Rossabi, “The Reign of Khubilai Khan,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 447.

consisted of six parts: The parts commemorated and reenacted the conquests of the Kereyid and Ong Khan; the Tangut; the Chin-Chin; the West and Honan (south of the Yellow River); Sichuan and the Thai state of Nanchao; and Korea and Vietnam. Sechen Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society (Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 241.

performing artists such as actors and singers: For more information on Mongol support of the arts, see Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 161.

“Like an ancient ruin”: Quoted in Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276, trans. H. M. Wright (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 237.

“The greatest legacy of the Mongol Empire”: Hidehiro Okada, “China as a Successor State to the Mongol Empire,” in The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, ed. Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1999), p. 260.

revitalized and enlarged the Sung navy: For information on the Mongol fleet and the invasions of Japan, see James P. Delgado, “Relics of the Kamikaze,” Archaeology (January 2003), pp. 36–41, and Theodore F. Cook Jr., “Mongol Invasion,” Quarterly Journal of Military History (Winter 1999), pp. 8–19.

In the hunting procession: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1958), pp. 141–145.

the traditional Mongol emphasis on meat and dairy products: For more information on Mongol food in China, see Paul D. Buell, Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2003), pp. 309–312, and Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson, A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao (London: Kegan Paul, 2000).

9. Their Golden Light

“The artists of China”: Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, J. M. Dent, 1910) vol. 6, p. 287.

“two envoys came from the Tartars”: Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History from the Year 1235 to 1273, trans. J. A. Giles, 1852 (London: Henry G. Bohn; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 155.

related the events of his travels: For the complete text of Rabban Bar Sawma’s account, see E. A. Wallis Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China; or, The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Swama, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe, and Markos Who as Mar Yahbhallaha III Became Patriarch of the Nestorian Church in Asia (London: Religious Tract Society, 1928).

“silk sheets and every other luxury”: Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), p. 89.

Mongols in Persia supplied their kinsmen: For a thorough account of the exchange between China and the Ilkhanate, see Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

the most sophisticated cartography known: For more information on science in China under the Mongols, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization, vols. 4 and 6 (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971, 1986).

moved some 3,000 tons by ship: For information on the Mongol navy, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

“perfectly safe”: Ronald Latham, introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo, by Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1958), p. 15.

attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice: For more information on the Mongol’s cultural attitudes toward their subjects, see Erich Haenisch, Die Kulturpolitik des Mongolishchen Welstreichs (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heft 17, 1943), or Larry Moses and Stephen A. Halkovic Jr. Introduction to Mongolian History and Culture, (Bloomington, Ind.: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1985).

massive amounts of numerical information: For more information on number systems and mathematics, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization, vol. 3 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

“unknown to the ancients:” Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, vol. 3, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. and trans. Basil Montague (1620; reprint, Philadelphia: Parry & MacMillan, 1854), p. 370.

“In the fresco cycle”: Lauren Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China and Its Influence on the Art of the West, 1250–1350 (San Francisco: Desiderata Press, 1999), p. 39.

“a numerous and simple people”: Nicolaus of Cusa, Toward a New Council of Florence: “On the Peace of Faith” and Other Works by Nicolaus of Cusa, ed. William F. Wertz Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1993), pp. 264.

“among these various forms of sacrifice”: Ibid., p. 264.

“It is proper to keep the commandments”: Ibid., pp. 266–267.

imagery of Mongol greatness: For more on “The Squire’s Tale” and the Mongols, see Vincent J. DiMarco, “The Historical Basis of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” Edebiyat, vol. 1, no. 2 (1989), pp. 1–22, and Kathryn L. Lynch, “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 530–551.

“This noble king”: The original text by Chaucer reads as follows:

Heere Bigynneth the Squieres Tale

At Sarray, in the land of Tartarye,

Ther dwelte a kyng that werreyed Russye,

Thurgh which ther dyde many a doughty man.

This noble kyng was cleped Cambyuskan,

Which in his tyme was of so greet renoun

That ther was nowher in no regioun

So excellent a lord in alle thyng.

Hym lakked noght that longeth to a kyng.

As of the secte of which that he was born

He kept his lay, to which that he was sworn;

And therto he was hardy, wys, and riche,

And pitous and just, alwey yliche;

Sooth of his word, benigne, and honourable,

Of his corage as any centre stable;

Yong, fressh, and strong, in armes desirous

As any bacheler of al his hous.

A fair persone he was and fortunat,

And kepte alwey so wel roial estat

That ther was nowher swich another man.

This noble kyng this Tartre Cambyuskan.

10. The Empire of Illusion

“When Christopher Columbus”: David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1986), p. 198.

– For information on the plague in Mongol territories, see Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

– For more information on the plague in general, see Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death (New York: Free Press, 1983), and David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

bodies of plague victims catapulted over the walls: Belief that the Mongols deliberately spread the plague remained strong enough to inspire imitation of it through the years, but without success. Russian troops reportedly used the tactic against Sweden in 1710, and in World War II, Japan tried it by dropping infected fleas from airplanes onto Chinese villages. The fleas had been exposed to a particularly virulent form of plague and did infect some villagers, but they did not create an epidemic.

the population of Africa declined: For population estimates, see Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 2^nd ed., trans. Carl Ipsen (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), p. 31, and Jean-Noel Biraben, “An Essay Concerning Mankind’s Evolution,” Population (December 1980).

the epidemic permanently changed life: For a fuller discussion of the impact of the plague and similar diseases, see William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 132–175.

“venerable authority of laws”: Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. M. Rigg (London: David Campbell, 1921), vol. 1, pp. 5–11.

Christians once again turned on the Jews: For information on the Jews being blamed for the plague, see Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 209–226.

the Mongol authorities increased repression: Regarding anti-Chinese policies on the Mongols, see John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yüan China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism: Regarding Tibetan Buddhism under the Mongols, see Hok-lam Chan and William Theodore de Bary, eds., Yüan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mongols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.484.

the collapse came quickly: For an account of the end of Mongol rule in China, see Udo Barkmann, “Some Comments on the Consequences of the Decline of the Mongol Empire on the Social Development of the Mongols,” in The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, ed. Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1999).

expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders: For more on the impact of trade, see Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 112.

Columbus embarked on his voyage: For more on Christopher Columbus and the Mongol influence, see John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

“the most singular people on earth”: The quotes in this paragraph are from the Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), pp. 268–280.

“I have confined my plan”: The quotes in this paragraph are from Voltaire, The Orphan of China, in The Works of Voltaire, vol. 15, trans. William F. Fleming (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), p. 180.

“The more I see”: Ibid., p. 216.

“what have I gained”: Ibid., p. 216.

“The lips are large”: The quotes in this paragraph are from George Louis Leclerc Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History of the Globe and Man (London: T. Tegg, 1831), p. 122, quoted in Kevin Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness (Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), pp. 61–79.

“The leading characters:” Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 307.

“the northern Chinese”: Carleton Coon, The Living Races of Man (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 148.

“Mongoloid race”: John Langdon Haydon Down, “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” Journal of Mental Science 13 (1867), pp. 120–121, Quoted in Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness.

“Parents too nearly related”: Chambers, Vestiges, p. 309.

“pre-human, rather than human”: quoted in Francis G. Crookshank. The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces (New York: Dutton, 1924), p. 21.

“Mongolian stigmata”: Ibid., pp. 72–73.

“Mongol expatriates”: Ibid., p. 13.

“Atavistic Mongolism”: Ibid., p. 92.

“from the East”: Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev, Pan Mongolism, in From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, available at http://max.mmic.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.htm.

“dream of the past”: Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (New York: John Day, 1942), p. 5.

calendar based on the year 1206: For Information on the Genghis Khan calendar, see Sechen Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society. Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 115.

translation of the Secret History: During World War I, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions prevented much study of the Secret History. In the 1920s, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot prepared a French translation, but it failed to be published until after World War II. The German publisher Bruno Schindler of Verlag Asia Maior prepared the German text for publication in Leipzig, but because of growing Nazi persecutions, Schindler had to flee to England. He left the manuscript behind, where it was eventually taken over by another publishing house, Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, which managed to set it in type in 1940. In France, Pelliot’s translation was finally published in 1949. A complete Russian translation was made public about the same time, and the German edition appeared in 1981. Except for the few eccentric international scholars who worked on the manuscript, the world took little notice. Over the subsequent decades, these dedicated scholars from several countries labored to reconstruct and translate the history first into proper Mongolian and Chinese, then into Russian and French, and still now many debates still rage over particular passages. Some excerpts from Russian, German, and French translations did make their way into English, but overall the English-speaking world seemed to show a profound lack of interest in the Mongols in general, including this so-called Secret History.

“the fortress of old Bukhara”: Helene Carrere D’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Revolution: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia, trans. Quintin Hjoare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 164–165.

“to place the bloodthirsty barbarian Genghis Khan”: Larry Moses and Stephen A. Halkovic Jr., Introduction to Mongolian History and Culture (Bloomington, Ind.: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1985), p. 168.

Epilogue

“Is it our fault”: From “Chinggis Khaan,” composed by D. Jargalsaikhan and performed by the musical group Chinggis Khaan.

A Note on Transliteration

Transliteration

There are at least a dozen systems for transliterating classical and modern Mongolian names and words into Latin letters, but no single system has been agreed upon. In the belief that scholars can easily understand all the spellings, I opted to use the renderings that are easiest for the English speaker to read, understand, and pronounce, and in so doing I adhere to the following principles.

1. If a common form already exists in English, I use it. Thus, I use the Persian name Genghis, simply because that spelling is more recognized than Chinggis, Jenghiz, Djingis, or the many other renditions of the name. Similarly, for the old capital I use the widely known Turkic form Karakorum, rather than the modern Mongolian name Kharkhorin or the more scholarly name Qaraqorum.

2. For toponyms, I prefer modern Mongolian names whenever possible—such as Kherlen River, rather than Herlen, Kerulen, or Qerelen. I use the Mongolian version of the modern capital Ulaanbaatar rather than the Russian form of Ulan Bator.

3. I use khan for tribal leader or Mongol king, but I use Great Khan for the highest office. To follow modern Mongol usage of khan for king and khaan for the Great Khan would be too confusing for the English reader.

4. One of the most common consonants in Mongol is the Mongol kh—similar to ch in German ich or Scottish loch. It is sometimes written as q, h, or an apostrophe.

5. Whenever possible, I avoid umlauts or diacritical marks. In Mongolian, as in the other Altaic languages, the differences between front vowels and back vowels is of critical importance. Anyone who speaks the Mongolian language will know whether the names are pronounced in the front or the back of the mouth, and for most other readers, the marks are probably not relevant.

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Glossary

airak Fermented mare’s milk.

anda Sworn brothers. Temujin and Jamuka were andas. Yesugei (Temujin’s father) was the anda of Torghil Khan, known as Ong Khan of the Kereyid.

Arik Boke Youngest son of Tolui, defeated by his brother Khubilai in the quest to become Great Khan. Born about 1217; died in 1264.

Avarga First capital of the Mongol Empire at the base camp of Genghis Khan after he seized the territory from the Jurkin; located at the confluence of the Kherlen and Tsenker Rivers.

Baljuna, Lake Place where the Baljuna Oath or Covenant was made between Genghis Khan and a handful of his most faithful followers. It may actually have been a river.

Batu Son of Jochi, khan over Russia from 1227 until his death in 1255.

Begter Half brother of Temujin, who killed him. Son of Yesugei and Sochigel.

Belgutei Half brother of Temujin, to whom he remained loyal throughout his long life of more than a hundred years. Died in 1255.

Berke Son of Jochi; after his brother Batu Khan, he became the khan over Russia from 1257 to 1267. He fought with his cousins in the Ilkhanate and refused to recognize Khubilai as Great Khan.

Boorchu Early companion of Temujin, later a major general in the Mongol army.

Borijin Genghis Khan’s clan name.

Borte First and primary wife of Temujin. Born around 1160; died around 1222.

Burkhan Khaldun “God Mountain,” located in the Khentii range.

busgui Male; literally, “beltless.”

Cathay Early European spelling for the Khitan, relatives of the Mongols and rulers of northern China during the period 907–1125, called the Liao dynasty by the Chinese.

Chaghatai Second son of Genghis Khan and Borte (1183–1242); his descendents ruled most of central Asia and eventually became the Moghul dynasty of India.

Chiledu Merkid tribesman, first husband of Hoelun before her kidnapping by Yesugei.

deel traditional Mongolian robe worn by men and women.

Genghis Khan Title given to Temujin in 1206, although he may have also used it as early as 1189, when he first became khan.

ger Portable home made of felt over a latticework frame, called a yurt by outsiders.

Guchlug Son of Tayang Khan of the Naiman, later ruler of the Black Khitan Kingdom.

Gur-khan Ancient title meaning supreme khan.

Guyuk Great Khan of the Mongol Empire (1246–1248); son of Ogodei.

Hoelun Mother of Genghis Khan. Around the year 1161, she was kidnapped from Chiledu of the Merkid by Yesugei, with whom she had four sons and a daughter.

Hulegu Conqueror of Baghdad, and founder of the Ilkhanate over Persia. Died in 1265.

Ikh Khorig The Great Taboo, name applied to the area around Genghis Khan’s burial site.

Jadaran clan Descended from the first son born after Bodonchar the Fool kidnapped a pregnant wife. (The Borijin clan descended from the last son born to her.)

Jamuka Anda of Genghis Khan, and for a brief time Gur-khan of the Mongols until executed by Genghis Khan.

Jochi Eldest son of Genghis Khan and Borte, but his legitimacy was not acknowledged by his brothers. He died in 1227, the same year as his father; his descendants became the Golden Horde of Russia.

Jurched Manchurian tribes that ruled in northern China. Also known as the Jin (Chin) dynasty, 1115–1234; ruled by the Golden Khan.

Jurkin Lineage closely related to Genghis Khan.

Karakorum Also known as Kharkhorin; second capital of the Mongol Empire (from 1235 until 1260). It was built by Ogodei on the Orkhon River in central Mongolia in the land that had once belonged to Ong Khan of the Kereyid.

Kereyid Tribe or collection of tribes of central Mongolia, along rich pasturelands of the Orkhon and Tuul Rivers; ruled by Torghil, the Ong Khan.

Khaidu Grandson of Toregene and Ogodei (1236–1301); khan over much of central Asia and rival to his cousin Khubilai Khan.

Khan Chief or king. Steppe titles can be very confusing. In addition to khan, the most common designation for the emperor in the dynasty of Genghis Khan was the title that is written in modern Mongolian as khaan or is transliterated from classical Mongolian as kha’an, khagan, qahan, qaghan, or qa’an. To avoid confusion between the Mongolian titles of khan and khaan in this book, only khan is used with names, as in Khubilai Khan or Batu Khan, and Great Khan is used instead of emperor or khaan. For example, “Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei was elected Great Khan in 1229.”

Khanbalik Mongol capital built by Khubilai and now the city of Beijing. In the Mongol era, it was also known as Da-Du or Ta-Tu to the Chinese; previously, it had been Zhongdu when it served as the Jurched capital.

Khasar Brother next in age to Genghis Khan; he was both a strongman and a marksman.

khatun Mongol queen.

Kherlen River One of the three rivers that flows from Burkhan Khaldun. Temujin lived on this river when Borte was taken by the Merkid, and he later made his base camp farther downstream at Avarga.

Khitan Tribe closely related to Mongols. They ruled northern China as the Liao dynasty (907–1125), but were defeated and replaced by the Jurched. The Mongols used this name for all of northern China, and Marco Polo picked it up with the word Cathay.

Khodoe Aral Name used for the area around Avarga, near the confluence of the Kherlen and Tsenker Rivers.

khubi Share of booty, hunt, or loot.

Khubilai Khan Grandson of Genghis Khan (1215–1294); claimed the title of Great Khan and established the Yuan dynasty over China.

khuriltai An official council or meeting, usually summoned to confirm elections or make major decisions such as whether to go to war.

Kipchak Turkic tribe in southern Russia.

Merkid Tribe along the Selenge River, modern border of Mongolia and Siberia.

Mongke Khan Eldest son of Tolui, Great Khan from 1251 to 1259.

morin huur Horsehead fiddle.

naadam Celebration involving wrestling, archery, and horse racing.

Naiman Tribe of western Mongolia, ruled by Tayang Khan until defeated by Genghis Khan in 1205.

nerge Line used to enclose the animals at the start of a group hunt.

Oghul Ghaimish Wife of Guyuk; as his widow, she tried to rule as regent of the Mongol Empire but was defeated by Sorkhokhtani and her sons.

Ogodei Third son of Genghis Khan and Borte, Great Khan of the Mongol Empire from 1229 to 1241.

Ong Khan Ruler of the Kereyid tribe. Also known by his name Torghil as well as by Wang Khan or Van Khan, variations of his title. Because his tribe was Christian, he was often assumed by Europeans to have been the fabled Prester John.

Onon River One of the three rivers that flows from Burkhan Khaldun; the river on which Genghis Khan was born and spent his childhood.

ordu or horde The court of the khan. The word came into English as horde. It was also used in Turkish, ordu, and became the word Urdu, the camp or army language that became the official language of Pakistan.

ortoo Mongolian postal system; also called yam.

Otchigen Youngest son of the family; Prince of the Hearth, or Prince of the Fire.

Shankh Monastery Buddhist monastery founded by Zanabazar and the resting place of the black sulde of Genghis Khan.

Shigi-Khutukhu Tatar boy raised by Hoelun, born around 1180 and died about 1262. Supreme judge of the Mongol Empire and the likely author of The Secret History of the Mongols.

Sochigel Mother of Begter and Belgutei, who were fathered by Yesugei, to whom she may or may not have been married. Her name is not mentioned in the Secret History.

Sorkhokhtani Wife of Tolui, mother of Mongke, Khubilai, Hulegu, and Arik Boke. By defeating the ruling family of Ogodei in 1251, she gave control of the Mongol Empire to her sons, but she died shortly thereafter.

Sulde Banner; soul; spirit.

Tangut Tribal dynasty over kingdom of Xia-Xia (Hsia-Hsia) along upper Yellow River, including Ordos, ruled by Burkhan Khan, who was killed by the Mongols in 1227 when his kingdom was incorporated into the Mongol Empire.

Tayang Khan Ruler of the Naiman of western Mongolia.

Tayichiud Close relatives of Temujin’s family, but they deserted his family when his father died.

Teb Tengeri The shaman who created discord in Genghis Khan’s family and was killed by Temuge, the youngest brother of Genghis Khan.

Temuge Youngest brother (Prince of the Hearth or Fire) of Genghis Khan.

Temujin Birth name of Genghis Khan.

Temujin Uge Tatar warrior killed by Yesugei, who subsequently gave his son that name.

Temulun Youngest sibling and only sister of Temujin.

Tolui Youngest son of Genghis Khan (1193–1233). Married to Sorkhokhtani, who managed to seize control of the empire for their four sons, with power eventually falling to their son Khubilai.

Toregene Wife of Ogodei Khan, regent of the Mongol Empire during the period (1241–1246).

tumen Military unit of ten thousand.

Uighur Turkic people now living in western China; first foreign nation to seek admission to the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan.

Ulaanbaatar Modern capital of Mongolia; name means Red Hero.

Xanadu Western name for Khublai’s capital of Shangdu in inner Mongolia. After he built Khanbalik as the permanent capital, Shangdu became the summer capital.

Yeke Khatun Great Empress.

Yeke Mongol Ulus Great Mongol Nation.

Yesugen and Yesui Tatar sisters who married Genghis Khan.

Zanabazar Buddhist lama, descendant of Genghis Khan and founder of the Shankh Monastery.

For a complete listing of names, terms, and alternate spellings, see Paul D. Buell, Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003).

Acknowledgments

The Mongolian nation founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 survives today, and my first thanks go to the state officials who made my research possible, particularly to President N. Bagabandi, to Minister A. Tsanjid of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Education, and Culture, and to Parliament Member A. Shagdarsuren of the Ikh Hural.

I appreciate the spontaneous gestures of support from teachers and herders all over Mongolia. Because of the respect the people had for my companions, Professors Kh. Lkhagvasuren and O. Sukhbaatar, wherever we went, people sought us out to help in our study. As an unknown foreigner, I was the constant beneficiary of the honor given to them.

It is hard to describe the dedication with which people came out to help me. Even when camped in what seemed to be the most remote place we could find, it was never long before a girl appeared on the horizon leading her yak cart filled with water or with dried dung for our fire. One warm day someone might give a small canister made from tightly sewn birch bark and filled with wild berries and dried yogurt, and another day a young hunter would bring a freshly prepared marmot or a bowl of milk. Herders not only offered me shelter and food along the way, but they also brought horses and sheep to make a personal contribution to the study of their ancestors. More than once a whole family dropped what they were doing and, leaving a boy in charge of their herd, set out to accompany us and discuss our work. On one of the most grueling days, while the older men rode horses, four armed young men voluntarily accompanied us on foot, usually running, for more than thirty miles to protect us in a wolf-infested area.

Sometimes people brought gifts of overwhelming generosity—shimmering pelts or highly polished animal horns. Others brought small wooden figures carved in the form of a horse, a sheep, or a goat. Shamans offered prayers for the success of our research, and monks donated incense for us to burn on the holy places we encountered. Some people with little else to offer simply gave me small stones that I might remember the place where they lived. Such debts can never be repaid.

While I alone bear responsibility for the shortcomings of this work, credit for any achievements must be shared among many people. I appreciate the guidance of Professor J. Boldbaatar of the Faculty of Social Science of the National University of Mongolia. I was consistently helped by the staff, faculty, and students of Chinggis Khaan College in Ulaanbaatar. When I published the original edition of this book and a series of related articles in Mongolian, they kindly critiqued my work and helped to improve it. For this great service, I thank Professors O. Purev, Kh. Shagdar, D. Bold-Erdene, and G. Baatartsooj. I gratefully acknowledge the valuable assistance of T. Jamyansuren, A. Mungunzul, Ts. Khishigbayar, and D. Chimedlkham in matters of translation, and to the students O. Hashbat and D. Ochirdorj for their help in the field. The drawings for this book were made by Dr. S. Badral, and I thank him deeply.