The World

Genghis: A Conquering Family

RISE AND FALL OF THE KHAN

Khabul Khan, chieftain of the Borjigin clan, was successfully uniting the nomadic peoples who had long lived around their sacred mountain, Burkhan Khaldun, and now acclaimed him as khagan of a mysterious federation, Khamag Mongol – the Whole Mongol.^* His great-grandson, raised in a family totally destroyed by fate, would revere his memory and avenge his downfall.

Khabul benefited from the division of China into warring kingdoms – the sophisticated Song in the south vying against the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty in the north, the Xi Xia realm of Tangut peoples, in the west dominating Xinjiang and, in Central Asia, the Qara Khitai Liao empire. When he was invited to pay tribute to the Jurchen emperor in Zhongdu – Central Capital (later Beijing) – Khabul behaved like the most ‘uncooked’ barbarian, gorging and quaffing with unrestrained oafishness, then jovially tugging the beard of the emperor. Courtiers ordered Khabul’s assassination, but he escaped and defeated the Jurchen, winning their recognition.

His Mongol tribe were just one of the many that existed in a constant struggle for power, an ever-mutating kaleidoscope of alliances sometimes coalescing into confederacy. Usually an aristocracy of baghaturs (paladins), who treasured their genealogy, ruled these pastoral keepers of yaks, horses, sheep and cattle, huntsmen and fishermen, spread between forest and steppe. Conflicts were ferocious, feuds nursed, and when the time came, ‘Vengeance is taken – blessed by Tengri [chief deity], we empty their chests, break off a slice of their liver, end the male line and rape all the women that survive’ – as Khabul’s great-grandson, Genghis Khan, put it.

Mongol warriors wore fur hats with earmuffs, a tunic covered in fur for winter, felt stockings and boots, with a leather helmet reaching over the neck and a breastplate of lacquered leather. In summer they wore silks from China. ‘The men shave a little square on the top of their heads and what is left of their hair they braid into plaits which hang down either side as far as their ears,’ noted a western visitor much later. They were ‘astounding men, alien in face, customs, full bodied, bold, strong, handsome with small narrow dark eyes, thick black hair, flat-browed, noses set so low that their cheeks stood out, completely without facial hair’.

Calling themselves the Peoples Who Dwelt in Felt Tents, their homes were the gers, tents mounted on hulking carriages pulled by oxen that could be placed together like a wheeled town. Their horsemen – ‘the peasantry in military dress’ – could gallop sixty miles a day at top speed and survive long periods in the saddle, living on milk, dried marmot meat or the blood of their horses, and they also dried milk that could be mixed with water to make a nutritious drink. Each carried two composite bows, a curved sword, an axe, a mace, a lance and a lasso. They trained for war in the nerge or hunt, pursuing antelope and martens often with the aid of a falcon. Marmots – groundhogs – were a staple, used for fresh food that could be dried for winter and as a source of fur. But these animals, or rather the fleas that lived in their fur, would play a special role in world history. All these delicacies were drunk with lashings of kumis.^* Alcohol was the Mongols’ Achilles heel: they were boozers, and three of Genghis’s sons would die of alcoholism.

Eclectic in their beliefs, they revered Tengri (meaning Blue Heaven), worshipped on sacred mountains and in river springs, and relied on shamans to interpret auspices. But the steppe peoples respected other gods: around 1000, a rival tribe, the Keraits, converted to Nestorian Christianity.^*

In 1146, after ruling for fifteen years, Khabul died, succeeded by his son Ambagai Khan. In 1161, Ambagai was captured by a rival tribe, the Tatars, who handed him over to the Jurchen. ‘Avenge me’ was the message Ambagai sent to his brother Kutula, a man whose ‘voice resounded like thunder, with hands like bear paws that could snap a man in two like an arrow’, and who on ‘winter nights slept naked by a fire’. But Kutula too was captured and the Jurchen placed the two khans on to a gruesome torture machine called a wooden donkey. There ended the short Mongol khanate.

THE FALL OF TEMUJIN

The family fell on such desperate times that Yesugei, grandson of Khabul, was no longer a khan, just a baghatur. Riding across the steppe, he encountered a carriage pulled by yaks, the equipage of an Olqunnut girl called Hoelun, newly married to a Merkit, whom he kidnapped and married in turn, having four children with her. The first, born in 1162 just after the downfall, was Temujin (Ironsmith) – ‘born holding in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knuckle’.^*

When Temujin was about nine, his father selected a wife, Börte, for him and by tradition left him at her father’s camp. Riding home, Yesugei accepted hospitality from old enemies, members of the Tatar tribe, who poisoned him. Yesugei died three days later after telling the son of a family ally, Munglig, to get Temujin back – to defend a family that was still in catastrophic freefall.

Their herds were stolen, the children almost starving. ‘We have no friends other than our shadows,’ they said. Temujin argued with Bekter, a half-brother, about a stolen fish; then, together with his brother Qasar, shot him with their bows. Their mother raged at them, ‘You destroyers, like a wild dog eating its own afterbirth!’ A rival chieftain decided to liquidate Temujin; he was captured, locked into a cangue – neck fetter – and destined for slavery, but he escaped and went into hiding. He became anda – blood brothers – with Jamuqa, another ambitious boy, but both were masterful characters and they soon argued. Soon afterwards, thieves stole the family’s horses, and Temujin, aided by a boy named Boorchu, later one of his companions, got them back. Later he met another family who offered their son Jelme as his sidekick.

There was something about Temujin: ‘He has fire in his eyes, light in his face.’ He never forgot a friend but nor did he forget a slight, repeating like a mantra his determination in ‘avenging the avengement; requiting the requital’. Now he arrived at the ordu – court, (origin of the word horde) – of Toghril, khan of the Christian Keraits, once his father’s anda. Accepting the gift of a black sable coat, Toghril appointed Temujin chieftain of his Borjigin clan. Afterwards, Temujin’s wife Börte was kidnapped by the Merkit tribe in revenge for the stealing of his mother Hoelun twenty years earlier.

Temujin sent Boorchu and Jelme to track the Merkits while he retreated to Burkhan Khaldun, where he meditatively recalled, ‘When my life was worth no more than a louse, I escaped. Spared only my life and a horse, walking the paths of elk, making a home with a tent of willow.’ Temujin sacrificed to Tengri and ‘hung the belt over his shoulder and, kneeling nine times towards the sun, offered a sprinkling of kumis and prayer’. Telling his family, ‘I was protected,’ he believed he had been spared and chosen by Tengri. Yet his ambitions must have seemed delusional. It seemed unlikely the world would ever hear of Temujin again.

TAMARA, CHAMPION OF THE MESSIAH

Far to the west, in 1159, Emperor Manuel rode through the streets of Antioch with its prince Reynald and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem walking behind him. Manuel negotiated marriages to celebrate Roman resurgence – his own to Maria of Antioch, his niece Theodora to Bohemond III, and his great-niece to Amaury of Jerusalem. In 1169, Manuel and King Amaury attacked Egypt, an ill-coordinated plan that failed to take the rich port of Damietta and had lethal blowback. They so weakened the Cairene regime that, after the death of Caliph al-Adid, his vizier, a talented Kurdish amir named Saladin, terminated the Fatimiyya caliphate and united Egypt and Syria into a single Sunni sultanate, a strategic nightmare for the wilting kingdom of Jerusalem, which was now surrounded.

Nor was this the only catastrophe looming for Christendom. In 1172, to the west, a new Berber dynasty had destroyed the Murabits, conquered north Africa all the way to Libya and then crossed to Europe to take much of Spain.^*

Saladin was fortunate that Manuel the Great was overstretched. In 1176, the emperor, by now fifty-eight, was ambushed by the Seljuk sultan of Rum, a setback that exposed the fragility of Outremer. Jerusalem and the Christian states were crippled by a shortage of manpower. The original Franks had intermarried with eastern Christians and Armenians but also with Arabs: their mixed-race children, mocked by westerners as pulains (poultry), often served as turcopole (sons of Turks) cavalry in multi-ethnic armies, fortified by celibate special forces, starting with the military-religious Order of Solomon’s Temple based in the Dome of the Rock – the Templars. But after Amaury, Outremer’s luck ran out.^* The teenaged king of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, suffered from leprosy, yet bravely managed in 1177 to defeat Saladin’s army with just 500 knights and Templars. But his terrible death, his face decaying behind a mask, was an inescapable metaphor for the body politic itself.

In July 1187, at Hattin, Saladin surrounded and routed a feckless, underqualified king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, beheading the ex-prince of Antioch, Reynald, the 200 crack Templars and all the mixed-race turcopoles, who were especially despised. Then on 2 October he took the Holy City for Islam, showing remarkable mercy in contrast to the butchery of the Crusaders eighty-eight years earlier.

Christendom was shocked. In Ethiopia, King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela built a complex of rock-cut churches to create an African Jerusalem. In Europe, three impressive monarchs – Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Richard the Lionheart of England and Aquitaine and Philippe Auguste of France – raised armies. The failure of the Crusades unleashed anti-Jewish attacks: in York the entire community was burned alive as the kings set off for the east. Barbarossa died on the way, drowning in a river.^* The other royal divas bickered with one another, but at Acre fought Saladin to a stalemate: Acre survived as capital of a rump Outremer, of which it was the main port; Saladin ruled from Egypt to Iraq; and Jerusalem remained under Islamic rule until 1917.

The eclipse of Manuel and the fall of Jerusalem benefited a remarkable queen, Tamara of Georgia. The southern Caucasus was a natural buffer between empires: there the ancient kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia, the first to convert to Christianity, nonetheless oscillated between Arab and Roman alliances.^*

In 1178, the eighteen-year-old Tamara was crowned co-ruler alongside her embattled father Giorgi III, who married his other daughter Rusudan to a Komnenos prince. In the Latin west, most women in power were swiftly deposed by magnates, but influenced by the Constantinopolitan tradition of empresses, Tamara at least had a template. Queen at twenty-four on the death of her father, Tamara manoeuvred carefully to appease rebellious potentates who resented feminine power, but in 1185 she was forced to marry a Russian prince descended from Rurik, Yuri of Vladimir-Suzdal. The heyday of Rus was long gone. The Rurikovichi feuded constantly as they struggled to rule the most powerful principalities. Yuri got lucky, becoming king of Georgia, but Tamara was king of kings. She loathed the oafish Yuri, who, ‘when drunk, showed his Scythian habits; utterly debauched and depraved, he even embraced sodomitic behavour’. In 1187, she accused him of unnatural vices, divorced him and exiled him to Constantinople.

Liberated from the patriarchy of clergymen and barons, she now married – unusually, for love – her attractive, intelligent cousin David Soslam, an Ossetian prince whom she had known all her life. Faced with Islamic resurgence, she formed an alliance with Saladin, then unleashed her husband David against the Turkic rulers of eastern Türkiye and western Iran. When she was challenged by a Seljuk prince, she told him, ‘You rely on gold and numerous warriors, I on God’s power.’ Her coins, in Arabic and Georgian, just read: ‘Champion of the Messiah’.^*

As her Ossetian prince won his victories for ‘the goddess whom David the sun serves’, Tamara now ruled an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian. Meanwhile the marriage of Tamara’s sister Rusudan into the Komnenoi could hardly have been more ill-starred.

The Basileia Romaion was about to fall apart. but the real change would come from the east where the rising Mongol chieftain Temujin faced an unbearable prospect. ‘My wife’, lamented the future Genghis, ‘has been raped.’ And she was pregnant.

TEMUJIN BOUNCES BACK

Temujin learned that Börte had been given as war spoils to a Merkit prince. He appealed to his patron Toghril (his ‘father-khan’) and blood brother, Jamuqa, who attacked the Merkits at night. The Merkits, warned of the ambush, fled helter-skelter into the steppe. The rescue, told in Genghis’s family history, reveals a rare side of Temujin. ‘As pillage and rape went on, Temujin galloped through the fleeing Merkits, crying out “Börte! Börte!” Recognizing his voice, she got off her cart and ran towards him, grabbing his reins. It was moonlight; he recognized Lady Börte, and they fell into each other’s arms.’

Yet she was eight months pregnant. Temujin did not reject her, and she gave birth to Jöchi, whom Temujin treated as a son. But together they had three more sons, Chagatai, Ögodei and Tolui, and five daughters. When Tolui was five, a Tatar tried to kidnap him from the family camp, but he was saved by his sister Altani who held the kidnapper until the bodyguards killed him. The guards claimed credit but Temujin promoted the girl to baghatur.

Gradually Temujin’s exceptional character was recognized – he was ‘tall, vigorous, sturdy, with cats’ eyes, possessed of a focused energy’. He had black hair and a steely constitution, with the rare ability to listen, and the superabundant vigour and invincible confidence, fortified by sacred mission, essential for transcendent leadership. He was a spotter of talent and a winner of loyalty. Three cousins from the House of Khabul declared that ‘Blue Heaven has ordained that Temujin be our khan,’ promising to bring ‘beautiful virgins, palatial tents, fine-rumped geldings’, and in return he praised his early henchmen, telling them, ‘When I had no companions other than my shadow, you were my shadow. I’ll promote you.’ Followers began to call him Genghis (Fierce) Khan.

When the Jurchen emperor of northern China asked them to attack the ferocious Tatars who were raiding across Chinese borders, Toghril and Genghis killed the Tatar chieftain – vengeance at last for Genghis’s father. The emperor made Toghril wang-khan (king-khan) and Genghis keeper of the frontier: both still recognized Jin authority. Genghis promised loyalty to Toghril: ‘Like a falcon I flew upon the mountain, for you I caught the blue-footed cranes.’

Massacring many Tatars, Genghis took two girls as concubines and captured a privileged, literate boy called Shigi, wearing a gold nose-ring and silken sash, whom he gave to his mother to bring up and who later became his chief judge. When the tribes elected Jamuqa as Gur (Universal) Khan to lead them against Toghril and Genghis, it became likely either Genghis or Jamuqa, boyhood pals, would end up as ruler of the steppe. In 1201, Jamuqa and his coalition of tribes attacked Temujin, who was backed by old Toghril. The Battle of the Thirteen Sides was so closely fought that their armies slept almost propping each other up. Genghis’s horse was shot, then he himself was hit in the neck by a poisoned arrow. Jelme rescued him, sucked out the poison, then crept across the battlefield to steal bean curd and water for him from the enemy camp. At dawn, Genghis recovered – ‘my eyes feel bright again’ – and recognized that Jelme had ‘saved my life thrice’.

After the victory was won, the archer who had shot his horse was brought before him, admitting what he had done. Remorseless yet empathetic, Genghis forgave him, granting him the name Arrow – Jebe – and adding, ‘I’ll use him as my arrow.’ Jebe would soon be one of his paladins.

Now the relationship between the old khan Toghril and young Genghis soured: when Genghis proposed marrying his son Jöchi to Toghril’s daughter, the king-khan refused, perhaps because Jöchi was not really Genghis’s son.

In 1203, Toghril joined forces with Jamuqa: ‘Let’s seize Temujin and kill him,’ they agreed, and hunted him down. Genghis only just escaped, but he noticed his son Ögodei was missing. When the boy was brought in, wounded by an arrow in the neck and hanging over his saddle bag, the khan wept. Vanishing into Transbaikal (Siberia), Genghis recovered, then re-emerged. At the Battle of the Burning Sands, he defeated the ailing Toghril, who fled and was beheaded.

Conquered tribes sent girls for him and his sons: girls were treated as trophies, and rape was a vicious rite of Mongol conquest. Yet some of the women showed defiant agency in the face of male cruelty, and a few rose to become the most powerful women in the world – and to tell their own stories.

After breaking the Tatars, Genghis chose the chieftain’s daughter Yesugen as his concubine. As they were having sex, she suggested, ‘If it pleases the khan, he will take care of me, regarding me as a human being and a person worth keeping. But my elder sister, who is called Yesui, is superior to me: she is indeed fit for a ruler.’ Genghis kidnapped the other sister, and both girls became senior wives. Now that he was in love with Yesugen, she accompanied him on future expeditions. When he defeated the Merkits, he captured another girl, Khulan, who was kept by one of his generals for himself – a dangerous impertinence. As Genghis interrogated the officer, Khulan herself frankly challenged the khan to inspect her virginity and have sex with her himself. He gave Töregene, the wife of the Merkit khan, to Ögodei.

When Toghril’s two Keraite nieces were delivered to him, Genghis kept one for himself and gave the other, Sorqaqtani, to his youngest son Tolui. She would be the mother of two monarchs and, for thirty years, the most powerful woman in Eurasia.

Finally, Genghis captured his blood brother turned nemesis Jamuqa, who begged to be executed, saying, ‘The sun rose with my name and now sets with it.’ Genghis generously delivered a bloodless royal death: Jamuqa’s back was broken.

Like his great-grandfather Khabul, Genghis was ruler of the People Who Dwelt in Felt Tents – but it was unlikely that anyone outside the barbarian marches would ever hear of him.

The fall of Constantinople, Queen of Cities, seemed more important: the rot started when the Komnenoi, who had produced three outstanding emperors, delivered history’s most toxic playboy.

THE SEDUCER AND THE AVENGER: THE TEETH OF ANDRONIKOS AND THE EYES OF THE DOGE

Andronikos, grandson of Emperor Alexios and cousin of Manuel, was a vainglorious, incompetent and overpromoted buffoon whose rise to the top seemed an impossible joke – until the process of momentous inevitability made it imminent. His ambitions were vaulting, his seductions priapic, his succession catastrophic. After first marrying a sister of King Giorgi III of Georgia (Tamara’s aunt), he started by seducing his cousin Eudokia Komnene, then he bolted, pursued by her furious brothers, and settled in Antioch, where he had an affair with Empress Maria’s sister, the Hauteville princess Philippa. After bolting again, to Jerusalem, Andronikos (now fifty-six, antique in medieval times) seduced Queen Theodora Komnene, the beautiful widow of Baldwin III, who was three decades younger. Together they eloped to the court of the atabeg of Mosul and leader of the jihad against the Crusaders, Nur al-Din.

Andronikos had retired to the provinces as an international joke when a rare set of circumstances removed his rivals and closed alternative roads: Manuel the Great died of a fever; his widow Maria of Antioch, an unpopular Hauteville, became regent for a child, Alexios II, and a wave of xenophobia made Italians hated for their trading privileges. In 1183, Andronikos rode the wave, marched on Constantinople and massacred Pisans and Genoans. Then he had Maria drowned and the fourteen-year-old Alexios strangled, before marrying the boy’s fiancée Agnes of France. She was twelve, he sixty-five – though proudly flaunting his lustrous hair and all his teeth. As plots multiplied, Andronikos slaughtered his opponents, but both ancestral enemies launched incursions – Seljuks from the east, Hautevilles from the west. In Venice, Andronikos’ depredations provoked outrage. Enrico Dandalo, merchant nephew of the Venetian patriarch, blind since a blow to the head twenty years earlier, possibly in Constantinople, led a fleet that was struck by the plague and achieved nothing. But Andronikos, abandoned by everyone, was forced to negotiate with Dandalo, releasing Venetian prisoners and returning their quarter to them.

In 1185 a popular rebellion, led by the aristocrat Isaac Angelos, overthrew Andronikos, subjecting him to three days of torture. After he had been hung upside down in the hippodrome, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals amputated, his teeth extracted, his face burned, all designed to destroy the features with which this cruel peacock of contumacious narcissism had beguiled not just many women but also the people of Constantinople.

Then he was stabbed and quartered. Soon thereafter one of his sons was killed; another, brother-in-law of Tamara of Georgia, was blinded and sent to Tbilisi.

In 1192, Venice elected a new doge, Dandalo, who received a delegation of French Crusaders seeking a loan to fund their Crusade against Egypt.^* When they could not raise the lucre, Dandalo commandeered the entire operation, took the Cross and declared that, although he was ‘old and weak, no one knows how to govern and direct you like me, and I will go and die’ on ‘the greatest enterprise anyone has ever undertaken’. Sailing across the Adriatic to Venetian Croatia, with 12,000 Venetians and Frenchmen, he attacked a rebel city Zara, where he was joined by a Romaioi prince, Alexios IV Angelos, who asked for his help in overthrowing his uncle, the emperor of Constantinople. Dandalo, enthusiastically backed by most of the Crusaders, sailed to the Bosphoros, expecting the citizens of the Great City to welcome Alexios, but they did not. Exasperated, he ordered the storming of Constantinople. Listening to the sounds of battle from the deck of the vermilion galley, he suddenly ordered his ship to be beached as he stood defiantly in the prow – a sight that inspired his troops and possibly the Constantinopolitans for they overthrew their emperor and welcomed the Venetian candidate. He paid some of the gold owed to Dandalo – not enough for Venice – but too much for his subjects: he was assassinated.

On 12 April 1204, Dandalo, infuriated, stormed the city, using merchant vessels lashed together as platforms for siege engines, while Venetian and French troops scaled the walls. This was possible only because the demoralized city was thinly defended. But, once inside, the Latins, disgusted by the effete, traitorous, icon-loving Greeks, sacked the city, raping nuns, killing children and desecrating the silver iconostasis of Hagia Sophia, where they enthroned an ancient prostitute. The doge organized the looting of the porphyry sculptures of the tetrarchs of Rome and the bronze horses that had stood above the starting line of the hippodrome (they still stand within and – in replica – outside St Mark’s in Venice). From the territories of the Romaioi, Dandalo created a new empire called Romania. Dandalo himself, now ninety-seven, was offered the throne but refused. A Frenchman was chosen instead, but Dandalo won for Venice three-eighths of the Partitio Romaniae. After accepting the resonant titles Despot of Romania and Lord of Three-Eighths of the Roman Empire, he died – the only person ever buried in Hagia Sophia. Constantinople never recovered; Venice seized Crete, Cyprus and southern Greece for its own mercantile empire. But Dandalo’s very success provoked war with Genoa, in which the doge’s only son was killed.

Queen Tamara of Georgia had watched all of this with horror: her blinded brother-in-law Manuel Komnenos lived in Tbilisi with his son Alexios. Now Tamara sent Georgian troops to take Trebizond, and there Alexios Komnenos declared himself emperor, founding a Trapezuntine client state of Georgia.^* As for Tamara, her beloved king David died and she suffered from a ‘feminine infirmity’, possibly uterine cancer, which prompted her to crown their son, Giorgi IV the Resplendent, as co-ruler. Hearing that there was a new crusade, Resplendent Giorgi took the Cross to liberate Jerusalem, encouraged by (fake) news that a Christian king, Prester John, was advancing from the east. Some of the news was correct, however: there was a new king in the east, and he was coming.

GENGHIS – MY GOLDEN LIFE – AND THE BLACK DEATH

In 1206, Genghis summoned a qurultai – the assembly that confirmed leadership of the steppes not by voting but by attendance – to celebrate his accession as khagan. Blessed after sacred consultation with Blue Heaven by his court shaman Kokochu, who had been with him since his youth, he officially became the khagan of All the Tribes Who Live in Felt Tents – Keraits, Naimans, Merkits, Tatars – at the head of a new nobility of trusted commanders, united under his white standard of nine yak tails. Genghis praised his retainers, telling stories from his past, and dubbing Jebe, the brothers Jelme and Subotai, and Kublai ‘the Four Hounds’.

His code of laws, the Yasa, was read out, cases to be judged by his adopted son Shigi, enforced by his son Chagatai. Although he was illiterate, Genghis hired a Uighur scribe to be his keeper of the seal, using Uighur script for business. A mounted courier service, the Yam, would communicate between armies and provinces. This was the enterprise of a divinely blessed dynasty now called the Golden Family: only the Golden Family would rule the world, only the Golden Family would select the khan at the qurultai and no Golden blood could ever be spilt. Genghis’s four daughters were entrusted with considerable power; all were married to potentates and given kingdoms to rule in their own right. The eldest daughter, Alakahi, ruled the Ongud tribes and later much of northern China, becoming chief horse supplier to her father, who called her Princess Who Rules.

At his supreme moment, his shaman Kokochu accused Genghis’s brother Qasar of treason: ‘The Spirit has revealed to me – Temujin will rule first, then Qasar. Unless you remove Qasar, you’ll be in danger.’ Kokochu had inviolable status – as the son of the khagan’s oldest adviser Munglik who was married to his mother Hoelun, he was Genghis’s stepbrother. Genghis arrested Qasar, but his mother harnessed a white camel, drove her carriage through the night and arrived to appeal to her son, baring her breasts and crying, ‘These are the breasts that suckled you both!’ But his wife Börte warned him that Kokochu could threaten their own sons. Releasing Qasar, Genghis ordered his brother Temüge to kill Kokochu by breaking his back. ‘He was no longer loved by Heaven,’ said Genghis, warning Kokochu’s family, ‘You were beginning to think you are my equals.’ He appointed another shaman. ‘Heaven has ordered me to rule over all men,’ said Genghis. ‘The protection and promotion of Blue Heaven has enabled me to destroy my enemies and achieve this elevated dignity.’

The exceptional talents of Genghis combined with the blessings of good harvests and equable climate, the large human and equine population of the steppe and the division of China meant that the khagan now deployed 80,000 horse archers who regarded victory, adventure and loot as the essential prizes of loyalty and proof of sacred leadership. The prizes were the three kingdoms of the Song, the Tanguts and the Jurchens.

In 1209, Genghis defeated the Buddhist Tangut empire of Xi Xia in north-western China,^* but, unable to take their walled capital, he accepted their emperor’s submission. Next he turned to the Jurchen empire of Jin that ruled forty million people in north-eastern China, sneering to their envoy, ‘I thought the emperor was appointed by Heaven.’ This, he said, was revenge for the killing of his forefathers Kutula and Ambagai. Reaching the walls of Zhongdu (Beijing), he found he lacked siege machines, so he raided the south. In 1214, Genghis reassembled his armies north of Zhongdu, but they were now suffering from an epidemic of unknown pathology. The Jurchen emperor made peace, sending a daughter as the khagan’s bride, plus 500 boys and girls, 3,000 horses and 10,000 bolts of silk – but the Jin dynasty was falling apart. Genghis hired Chinese engineers to build his siege engines, shoot firebombs and rockets, originally developed by the Song, and employed a Chinese prince to advise on strategy. In 1215, he took Zhongdu, sacking it, killing thousands, their corpses rotting in heaps. Then Genghis turned west, leaving his general Muqali with a smaller force of around 23,000 Mongols to reduce the shattered empire.

In 1218, switching eastwards, Genghis swallowed the Kara-Khitai (Kazakhstan) khanate, where he captured the famously svelte Empress Juerbiesu. She mocked the stink of Mongols, an affront which was reported to Genghis. He cross-examined her but, dazzled by her looks, kept her for the night. She became his third-ranking wife.

These movements in remote lands would reverberate across Eurasia, unleashing a new pathogen that would become the Black Death. Tiny but mysterious changes in global climate and human nourishment can lead to outbreaks of diseases that have been present but dormant for centuries. The plague has been discovered in an ancient Swedish tomb from 3000 BC, suggesting it may have originated in Europe long before it appeared in the east. The bubonic plague had for a long time been enzootic, commonly carried by the fleas in the fur of marmots, in camels and in the rats that thrived wherever humans left the detritus of their daily life. Marmots were a staple of Mongol life, given that the tribesmen wore marmot fur and leather, and ate their meat. The plague did not flare up in the west for another century, but new research proves that it began much earlier.

Somewhere on the slopes of the Tian Shan mountains, the fatal transfer between humans and animals took place – with a Mongol eating the flesh of an infected marmot or being bitten by a flea from one of the rodents. Infected with the pathogen Yersinia pestis, the flea fed on the blood of a human or defecated into a skin abrasion, spewing bacilli into the bloodstream. Once infected, humans transferred the disease directly by coughing or indirectly via their ever-present companions, flea-ridden rats. The flare-ups were scarcely recorded. If nomads were hit by the plague, they could move camp. But cities could not just move. Mongol armies unknowingly bore the pathogen into China and then westwards.

GENGHIS AND SONS: WHAT IS THE GREATEST JOY FOR A MAN?

The conquest brought Genghis to the borders of Khwarizm, a new Islamic kingdom encompassing Uzbekistan, eastern Iran and Afghanistan, conquered by a cruel jackanapes, Shah Muhammad, who had heard eyewitness accounts of the sacking of Zhongdu. The shah was convinced of his own superiority over the coarse Mongols and by his own success. But the conqueror was about to be out-conquered, the classic case of jaguar–crocodile predation. When Genghis dispatched Mongol envoys and around 400 Muslim merchants, the Khwarizmians executed them, sending the heads to Genghis.

‘Avenging the avengement; requiting the requital’, Genghis planned the invasion of this new theatre. His favourite wife Yesui warned, ‘When your body falls like a great tree, to whom will you leave your peoples? Which of the four sons?’

‘Even if she’s a woman,’ mused Genghis, ‘she’s righter than right.’ All the sons had distinguished themselves as commanders but all were flawed: Jöchi had an uncontrolled temper; Chagatai was meticulous but harsh; Tolui was the best general; Ögodei, the favourite, was big, cheerful and conciliatory. All were raging alcoholics. Chagatai hated Jöchi.

‘Do we have to be governed by this Merkit bastard?’ cried Chagatai.

‘Our father never said I was different, how come you do?’ replied Jöchi. The princes fought but were pulled apart.

‘Ögodei is merciful,’ proposed Genghis’s generals. ‘Let’s have Ögodei.’

‘Jöchi, what do you say? Speak!’ cried Genghis.

‘Let’s say Ögodei,’ agreed Jöchi.

‘Ögodei, speak!’ said Genghis.

‘How can I say, I can’t do this? ’ replied Ögodei, displaying the required but also characteristic modesty. ‘I will do my best.’ The princes approved.

‘That will do,’ said Genghis.

In 1219 Genghis invaded Khwarizm, sending Jebe and Subotai as the vanguard, followed by Prince Jöchi^* with one column, while he led the other with Prince Tolui towards Bukhara (Uzbekistan), a cultured Persianate city with 300,000 inhabitants and a famed library. Genghis used the great mosque as stables – ‘There’s no fodder in the countryside; fill my horses’ bellies!’ Then he addressed the elite: ‘You’ve committed great sins. What proof? I am God’s punishment.’ Then the citadel was stormed, the people enslaved, the library burned, before he moved on to Samarkand, where he was joined by his other sons. They were dispatched to take the Khwarizmi capital Gurganj (Urgench, Turkmenistan). When the city fell, 50,000 Mongol soldiers were ordered to kill twenty-four Gurganj citizens each, which would mean 1.2 million people. This may have been the largest single massacre in history.

The shah fled, pursued by Jebe the Arrow and Subotai, in a hot chase that ended with Muhammad’s lonely death on a Caspian island. His more able sons did not give up: they sought an alliance against Genghis with the sultans of Delhi in India but were ultimately destroyed.

Genghis mopped up Afghanistan and northern Iran, slaughtering the entire populations of Balkh and Herat. Tolui took the resplendent former Seljuk capital Merv,^* where Genghis sat on a golden throne and ordered the burning of Nizam al-Mulk’s library. Next, declaring, ‘These people resisted us,’ they separated hundreds of thousands of men, women and children into herds and then slaughtered most of them like sheep. ‘Genghis Khan ordered the counting of the dead,’ wrote the Arab historian al-Athir, who interviewed survivors, ‘and there were around 700,000 corpses’ – an exaggeration, but again one of the most atrocious days in all history. Those kept alive as slaves were driven ahead of the Mongols as human shields, a practice already used in China. During the siege of Nishapur (Iran), Toquchar, married to Genghis’s daughter Checheikhen, was killed by an arrow. When the city fell, his widow took command, orchestrating the killing of everyone, the heads of men, women and children collected in different unisex head towers. Perhaps it was Genghis’s daughter who devised these dread towers, which became architectural statements of Mongol ferocity. Genghis’s favourite grandson Mutugen, son of Chagatai, was killed at the siege of Bamian (Afghanistan). At dinner, Genghis informed the father, banned grieving and then ordered the destruction of Bamian: there would be no plundering, just fire and death. Even dogs and cats were killed. These cities never recovered.

In 1220, Genghis was fifty-eight but had not lost the exhilaration of conquest. Once, feasting with his marshals, he asked: ‘What’s the greatest joy for a man?’ The generals chose different pleasures – drinking, hunting, feasting – until Genghis said, ‘The greatest pleasure for a man is to crush a rebel and defeat an enemy, destroy him, taking everything he possesses, seize his married women and make them weep, ride his fine beautiful horses and fornicate with his beautiful wives and daughters – and possess them completely.’ This ‘possession’ was literal: nomads regarded their conquests as total – treasures, cities, livestock, humans were now theirs to share or kill. Sexual warfare was regarded as a right of conquest and a pleasure of life. DNA evidence shows that millions of people are descended from a single ancestor who travelled across Asia at this time. It is most likely that this was Genghis Khan himself, who, after centuries in which his descendants have multiplied, is literally the father of Asia.

While in Afghanistan, Genghis summoned a revered Taoist philosopher Qiu Chuji, recommended to him in China: ‘Master, have you brought me an elixir of immortality?’

‘I can protect life but no elixir will extend it,’ replied the Master, who recommended the curbing of appetites for girls, hunting, fighting and boozing.

‘Heaven sent this Holy Immortal to teach us these things,’ the khagan told his courtiers. ‘Engrave them on your hearts,’ though ‘unfortunately we Mongols are raised to shoot arrows and ride – habits hard to give up’. But by his orders Taoism was encouraged across China, and Buddhism fell out of favour.

Success had not spoiled Genghis, who like all autocrats enjoyed talking about himself: ‘Heaven disapproves of the luxury of China,’ he reflected. ‘I cleave to the simplicity of the steppe. I wear the same clothes, eat the same food, as cowherds and grooms do, and I treat soldiers as my brothers; in a hundred battles I was at the forefront of the fray. In seven years, I’ve performed great deeds; in six directions, everything is subject to a single rule.’

As Genghis held court, he was in contact via his pony mail with the noyan (marshal) Jebe and the one-eyed baghatur Subotai, whom he had sent on the greatest raid in history. Setting off with 20,000 men on a 4,500-mile adventure across Iran, they galloped into Georgia. In February 1221, they obliterated the knights of Tamara’s son. Giorgi the Resplendent died of wounds, succeeded by his sister Rusudan, as beautiful as her mother Tamara but less shrewd and less lucky. ‘A savage people, the Tatars,’ she wrote, the first European to encounter the Mongols, ‘hellish of aspect, as voracious as wolves, have invaded my country.’

The Arrow and Subotai rode north into Russia and Ukraine, where they defeated a coalition of steppe peoples. Now they faced the Russians ruled by House Rurik. The Mongols were outnumbered: 30,000 Russians led by Prince Mstislav Mstislavich the Daring of Galich and the princes of Kyiv, Chernigov, and Smolensk met them at Kalka close to the Sea of Azov. The Mongols routed them. Mstislav Romanovich, grand prince of Kyiv, submitted – providing there was no bloodshed. Jebe and Subotai slyly honoured the promise, feasting on a wooden platform that gradually crushed the Russian princes.

The Rurikovichi had not lost their biggest army, that of Grand Duke Yuri of Vladimir-Suzdal. As Jebe and Subotai swerved homewards, summoned by Genghis, the Europeans now learned about the Mongols.

If Genghis was the khagan of the east, the khagan of the west was the most extraordinary of the Hautevilles. Emperor Frederick II, who gloried in the nickname Stupor Mundi – Wonder of the World – prepared to defend Christendom.

* Khabul was not the first of the family to create a kingdom: around 900, his great-grandfather Butunchar Munkhag had ruled the Mongols.

* Kumis is an alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk drunk by all the steppe peoples from the Scythians onwards and, in recognition of the sanctity of horses, offered as sacred offerings. It remains a national drink of Kazakhstan today.

* Nestorius was the Byzantine archbishop who had argued that Christ had two simultaneous natures, divine and human. He was deposed and exiled in 431, but his views became popular in the east.

* The main eastern sources of the life of Genghis and his family are the works of three remarkable historians. The most important is the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, original title unknown, commissioned by Genghis’s son Ogodei not long after his death and, some believe, written by his adopted son and chief judge, Shigi. The other two historians – the Persian treasurer Ata-Malek Juvayni, writing twenty years later, and the grand vizier Rashid al-Din a hundred years later (but using another official family history which was afterwards lost) – were both high-ranking ministers of Genghis’s descendants who were thus able to learn much family history at first hand.

* This time the charismatic preacher-warrior was Ibn Tumert, who fulminated against the decadence of the Murabits in favour of a mysticism mixed with puritanical fundamentalism that promoted a return to the Quran. His followers called themselves al-Muwahhidun – people of unity (Almohads). In 1121, Tumert declared himself Mahdi. In 1147 his successor Abd al-Muamin declared himself caliph and captured Marrakesh, before conquering the Maghreb and then in 1172 crossing to Spain, where he based himself in Seville and launched a vicious persecution of Jews and Christians. The great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides escaped their repression and arrived in Cairo, where he became doctor and adviser to Saladin and his sons. These Berber caliphs were avid minaret builders: after his father’s death in 1163, the second caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf built the Giralda Tower as a minaret to his mosque in Seville, as well as the palace that became the Alcazar. The third caliph, al-Mansur, who in 1195 massacred a Castilian army, built the Hassan Tower in Rabat. There was no reason to suppose that Spain would ever be fully Christian again.

* The competence of the first five monarchs was formidable: Baldwin I and II were gifted, indefatigable warrior-kings, while Queen Melisende (the latter’s daughter with his Armenian queen Morphia) was every bit their equal as a potentate – though she required a husband, Fulk, to lead her armies. It was she who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the market that we see today in Jerusalem. Her son Baldwin III deposed her, but inherited the family gifts, as did his obese brother Amaury.

* Barbarossa’s death spawned the legend of a sleeping emperor who would rise again at the End of Days, his mystical prestige inspiring a later German ruler, Adolf Hitler, who named his invasion of Russia in his honour. Richard inherited the bountiful accumulations of his father Henry II, duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, and his mother Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine: all of England and the western half of France. Persecutor of the Jews, whom he expelled then allowed to return, Philippe later won the epithet Augustus for dramatically expanding France, reducing the English holdings, aided by the spectacular and vicious incompetence of Richard’s brother John. But the English kept Gascony for three centuries.

* In 806, Ashot the Carnivorous (a meat-chomping enthusiast even at Lent) was appointed by Haroun al-Rashid as prince of Armenia, founding the Bagration dynasty that ruled in the Caucasus for the next thousand years, until 1810. In 885, Ashot the Great was recognized by both caliph and Roman emperor as the first king of Armenia, and three years later another of the family, Adarnase IV, was installed as king of Tao, in south-western Georgia, by Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer. In 1122, King David IV the Builder took advantage of Islamic distraction during the Crusades to take Tbilisi, unite an expanded Georgia and wage holy war against the Seljuks so ferociously that, after one battle, blood supposedly poured out of his belt when he took it off. Fusing Persian, Turkic and Frankish troubadour cultures, marrying one Christian and one Turk, splicing one daughter to a Seljuk and another to a Komnenos, David travelled with sword and library, reading the Quran and Persian poetry and, like his biblical namesake, writing hymns.

* The queen’s treasurer, Shota Rustaveli, was also a poet, author of the Georgian epic Knight in the Panther Skin, in which the beauteous princess and her suitor are tributes to Tamara and David. Rustaveli celebrated the rare partnership of the king of kings and her king consort: ‘She who strikes terror from the East to the West, wherever she fights: / Those who are traitors, she destroys; those who are loyal, she delights.’ As with Melisende in Jerusalem, the partnership showed that a woman could remain in charge in Crusader times even when married to a warrior-consort – precedents later relevant to Queen Elizabeth I of England, who feared this was not possible in her time.

* Saladin and his brother Safadin, who ruled Egypt, most of Israel and Lebanon, Syria, half Iraq and Yemen, had also conquered Mecca where they installed Qatada, a Hashemite descendant of Muhammad, as amir, controlling the revenues of the hajj pilgrimage. Using an army of Nubian slaves, navigating between Saladin’s successors and the Baghdad caliphs, Qatada took control of both holy places, founding the Hashemite family that, with short intervals, ruled Mecca until the 1920s and provided the kings of Hejaz, Syria, Jordan, Jerusalem and Iraq. They still rule Jordan. In 1221, an ailing Qatada was strangled by his son Hassan.

* After they had recognized the Greek emperors who retook Constantinople from the Latins, the emperors of Trebizond used the title Emperor and Autocrat of all the East, and survived by trading with Venice and Genoa and with Islamic rulers who were offered prestigious Trepuzuntine princesses. This kingdom lasted until 1461.

* Genghis distilled his tactics into three manoeuvres: first, the Thorny Sarayana Shrub, the march in which troops massed in close order; then the Lake, in which troops flowed over a wide area; and finally the Chisel, in which the horsemen were concentrated with devastating force.

* Genghis’s eldest son by a Merkit rapist, Jöchi, was treated as a Golden prince, receiving a vast appanage, but he was not considered for the succession. He may have fallen out with Genghis, but the son died first, his territories inherited by his able son, Batu.

* A Turkish Oghuz clan who had lived in Merv escaped the Mongols to seek refuge in the Seljuk sultanate of Rum where they were granted lands. They were led by a chieftain named Osman, the founder of the Osmanlik or Ottoman family who would rule a Eurasian empire until 1918.