19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe (Part 1)
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Around the year 1333, the North African writer and traveler Ibn Battuta went on a journey around all of Asia that would take him to India and over the sea to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and eventually on to his final destination of China. But the first leg of this journey took him along the winding roads overland from Constantinople,

He traveled past the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, over vast grasslands, and on southwards through the deserts of Central Asia in what is now Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Ibn Battuta had heard marvelous stories about the opulent cities that lay along the vast trade route known as the Silk Road, which laced across the continent of Asia.

These were the cities of Balkh, Bukhara, and Samarkand. First, he visited the city of Bukhara, once the jewel of Islamic learning, a city of enormous libraries and colleges. But to his disappointment, when he arrived, he found the city a much reduced place, as he wrote in his journal.

We travelled for a whole day through contiguous orchards with streams, trees and habitations and arrived at the city of Bukhara.

This city was formerly the capital of the lands beyond the river Jain, but was laid in ruins, so at the present time its mosques, colleges and bazaars are in ruins, all but a few, and its inhabitants are looked down upon. There is not one person in it today who possesses any religious learning, or who shows any concern for acquiring it.

Surprised at the sorry sight of the once great city of Bukhara, Ibn Battuta continued on to the opulent metropolis of Samarkand. I journeyed to the city of Samarkand, once one of the greatest and finest of cities, and most perfect of them in beauty.

It is built on the bank of the river called the Wad al-Wasarin, along which there are water wheels to supply water to the orchards." But when he arrived at the oasis of Samarkand, he found it too was in a much diminished state. The city was sparsely inhabited, its legendary walls torn down long ago and its grand buildings standing in ruins.

There were formerly great palaces on the riverbank and constructions which bear witness to the lofty aspirations of the townsfolk. But most of this is obliterated. And most of the city itself has also fallen into ruin. It has no city wall and no gates. And there is vegetation growing inside it.

Ibn Battuta soon left that melancholy place and continued on his journey. Finally, he passed through the city of Balkh, now in northern Afghanistan. This had once been another wealthy trade hub and a center for the Zoroastrian religion. From a distance, he could see its tall buildings rising out of the river plains.

But as he got closer, he saw no smoke of cooking fires, no animals in the fields, no traffic of people in its streets. An eerie feeling must have crept up on him. Then we crossed the river of Jaihun to the land of Kharasan.

Next, we crossed the river Jain into the land of Khorasan and marched for a day and a half, crossing the river through uninhabited desert and sands to the city of Balkh. It is completely dilapidated and uninhabited, but anyone seeing it would think it to still be inhabited because of the solidity of its construction, for it was a vast and important city.

Its mosques and colleges preserve their outward appearance even now, with the inscriptions on their buildings incised with lapis blue paints. As he passed through this devastated region, he heard stories about other ruined cities lying out in the desert, now so empty of life that they could offer no shelter to travelers.

The great cities of Khorasan are four. Two of them are inhabited, namely Herat and Nishapur, and two are in ruins, namely Balkh and Merv.

Had he journeyed out to the city of Merv, he would have found an even more devastated ruin, just a series of jagged earthen remains rising out of the cracked salt flats of the desert, home only to owls and wild dogs, where once a city of half a million people had stood.

Everywhere across this region, the cities bore the scars of one of the Middle Ages' most momentous and world-changing events. This was the uniting of a nomadic people who called themselves the Mongols.

From their homeland far away in the steppe grasslands of East Asia, the Mongols had fused their anarchic pastoral culture into a war machine that has had few equals in history and forged an empire that would stretch across much of the landmass of Asia, the largest continuous land empire in history.

In almost every land they touched, they would bring destruction and death, fear and anguish. But in places, they also laid the foundation for our modern world. As Ibn Battuta stood in the abandoned streets of Balq, Samarkand, and Bukhara, he must have wondered at the unlikely story of these strange nomadic conquerors.

He must have wandered those ruined palaces and crumbled places of worship, those empty markets and dilapidated houses, and asked himself, "Where had these mysterious conquerors come from? What did they want, and why had no one been able to stop them?" My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to tell one of the most remarkable and unlikely stories from medieval history, the story of the Mongol Empire.

I want to show how this group of nomadic horse riders united the peoples of the Mongolian steppe and forged them into a truly unique kind of state. I want to describe how they conquered much of the lands of Eurasia and brought the distant cultures of China, Persia, the Middle East, and Europe into contact

I want to tell the story of how the world's largest land empire finally came apart and left the world as we know it in its wake. The Eurasian steppe is the largest grassland on earth. It's a vast corridor of seasonal savannas that run virtually the entire length of Asia and covers around 7% of the planet's land surface.

It stretches from Hungary and Poland in Eastern Europe more than 8,000 kilometers, passing over mountain ranges and rolling hills, past salty inland seas and sandy deserts, and over countless rivers until it reaches northern China and the forests of Manchuria on the Pacific coast.

The word 'steppe' entered English from the Russian language, with its origin possibly rooted in the old Slavic word 'sutepe', which means a place that is flat and bare. The Russian author Anton Chekhov describes the landscape of the steppe. "A plain, broad, boundless, girdled by a chain of hills, lies stretched before the traveller's eyes,

The hills merge into rising ground, extending to the very horizon and disappearing into the lilac-hued far distance. On and on you travel, but where it all begins and where it ends, you just cannot make out. Coarse, steppe grass, milkwort, wild hemp, all are drenched in dew and caressed by the sun.

The green forested lands of China and Europe receive moisture from the winds blowing in from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, meaning that they can support large trees, forests, and all manner of crops. But the lands of the steppe receive most of their airflow from the north, from the frozen polar ocean of the Arctic.

Cold air cannot hold much moisture, and what little it contains falls as rain in the northern mountains where the great frozen pine forests of Siberia stretch. The low rainfall on the steppe means that trees cannot survive, and even species of long grasses find it difficult to take root. As a result, all that remains here are the hardiest species of short grasses,

For this reason, the steppe has always supported massive herds of grazing animals. The first humans to set foot on the steppe arrived about 40,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who lived off what the land provided.

In its rolling grassland, they hunted mammoths. Then, once those had died out, boar, antelope, goats, and aurochs, and one animal that lived in the steppe in abundance, the wild horse

Horses evolved in North America around four million years ago, but had crossed over to Asia during one of the last ice ages when a land bridge existed between Alaska and eastern Russia. Humans and horses would one day form one of the most successful partnerships in history, but our fascination with them goes back even further.

Horses are the animal most frequently depicted in the oldest prehistoric cave paintings, even in those of Chauvet Cave in France, which are more than 30,000 years old and predate the domestication of the horse by 25 millennia. For all these thousands of years, humankind had looked on the horse as a symbol of power, grace, and perhaps also freedom.

When people arrived on the Eurasian steppe, they initially hunted horses for food like any other animal, with horse bones showing up in slaughter sites from at least 10,000 years ago. But sometime around 6,000 years ago, they began to be kept as livestock. Humans first used horses for milk and meat alongside their cattle, sheep, and goats.

but over the following thousand years or so, humans learned that if a horse was sufficiently tamed, it would allow a human to ride on its back. We will never know which daring young man or woman first leapt up onto the back of a horse and braved the inevitable bucking and kicking that every horse breaker must learn to endure, but when they did, they changed the course of human history.

Around 5,000 years ago, we begin to see evidence of horse riding on the Eurasian steppe. One burial site in Botai in northern Kazakhstan contains the bones of horses with the earliest signs of wear on the teeth and jaw bones that suggest they had worn a metal bit in their mouths for much of their life, which could be attached to reins for a rider.

This development occurred at a momentous time in human history. Around the world, the earliest cities were just then coalescing in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and elsewhere, and a new way of human life was taking shape. This new lifestyle was based on the planting of grain, the making of pottery, and the building of fixed dwellings.

Soon came hierarchies and religions, priests and kings, armies and city walls. From this settled way of life, the first written words would be set down, cut into clay tablets in the Sumerian cities of Ur and Uruk, carved into the stone temples of Egypt, and into shoulder bones and tortoise shells in China.

but it's clear that in the vast expanse of the Eurasian steppe, an equally dramatic revolution was taking place. It's around this time that the first mention of horses begins to appear in the written texts of the Sumerians. They would call them by the name 'anche kura', meaning donkey of the mountains, since they first arrived from the mountainous north.

One Sumerian text written more than 4,000 years ago is one of the first to mention this new animal, describing the hero god Lugalbanda as being as swift as a mountain horse. Holy Lugalbanda came out from the mountain cave, and from that spot he sped away like a horse of the mountains. Like a lone wild ass, he darted over the mountains, like a large powerful donkey he raced.

A slim donkey, eager to run, he bounded along. Human life had just sped up considerably, and the domestication of the horse would change life on the steppe forever. A herder travelling by foot can cover a maximum of only about 30 kilometres a day, which limits how large his flock can be and how far he could range in search of new grazing lands.

but riding on the back of a horse meant you could cover more than 100 kilometers at a push, and you could travel at five times the speed over a short distance. With greater ability to cover large areas, you could also effectively manage much larger herds, and with more food available, you could establish ever bigger families and social groups.

While all around the world, other peoples were settling down into ever larger cities built of mud, brick, and stone, the people of the steppe were developing a parallel way of life, a life constantly on the move. After the horse, people in the western steppe also likely invented the wheel, allowing them to transport bigger loads.

as well as their families, the elderly, and children too young to ride. Whole communities could now become completely mobile, living their lives from birth to death without ever settling in one place. This alternative way of life would meet with remarkable success. One legacy of that success is the language that many of us speak today.

Beginning perhaps around 4000 BC, an enigmatic population known only as the Proto-Indo-Europeans rode out of the western portion of the steppe in all directions. They brought their horses, their wagons, and chariots with them. Wherever they went, from India to Persia, Greece, and Northern Europe,

they conquered or settled and left their language behind. Their lost dialect is the ancestor of 445 languages that survive to this day, from Hindi, Sinhala, Punjabi, and Farsi to Russian, Spanish, French, German, and English. In all of these languages, they left traces of their way of life.

Many languages in the Indo-European family use similar words derived from Proto-Indo-European for objects like wheel, axle, wagon, chariot, and of course, horse,

It's believed the Proto-Indo-Europeans had two words for horses which have been reconstructed to something like equos and marcos, possibly to differentiate between a wild horse and a tamed horse. Equos entered Latin as equus, from which we get equestrian, and it entered ancient Greek as hippos, from which we get hippodrome and hippopotamus.

The word 'marcos' has survived in English as the word for a female horse, a mare. This English word can be found echoing on the other side of the world in Mongolia, where a single horse is called 'mawr', and even in the non-Indo-European language of Mandarin Chinese, where a horse is called 'ma'.

Today, these words connect people on every side of the globe and nearly half of the world's population speaks a language descended from the Indo-European family. The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the first nomads to ride out of the steppe and leave their mark on history, but they were far from the last. Still, there were drawbacks to the nomadic lifestyle.

While the settled peoples of the world developed alphabets and writing systems that allowed them to keep records and recount their histories, the peoples of the steppe did not develop their own system of writing. For this reason, for much of their history, we can only detect their presence through the writings of others who often feared and hated them.

In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus would write one account of the horse-riding nomads who lived in the steppe around the Black Sea and increasingly made armed raids into central Europe, a people the Greeks called the Scythians. Rather than build cities or walls,

they all carry their homes around with them on wagons practise their archery from horseback and depend for their living on cattle rather than the fruits of the plough how then could they fail to defy every effort made to conquer them or to pin them down

Already, the settled peoples of the world were encountering a paradox that despite all the technological advancement that agricultural society had brought, these steppe peoples were still exceptionally difficult to fight. More than 800 years later, the struggling Roman Empire was limping through the remains of the fourth century, rocked by crisis and civil war,

It was at this point that they were menaced by a new threat, a nomadic people who rode out of the steppe and sent waves of refugees fleeing in their wake. They would be known as the Huns. The Roman writer, Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote with distaste about these frighteningly rootless nomads. "The Huns are a race savage beyond all parallel.

They grow up without beards, with closely knit and strong limbs. They are all without fixed abode or settled mode of life. None of their offspring, when asked, can tell you where he comes from since he was conceived in one place, born far from there, and brought up still farther away. The arrival of the Huns was a major factor that contributed to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

In the decades that followed, under the rule of their leader Attila, the Huns would remake the balance of power in Europe. They fleetingly captured large areas up to the banks of the Rhine and left fire and destruction in their wake. Part of the reason for the Huns' success was their innovative use of the technological development of the composite bow.

Bows made of a single piece of wood had a natural limit to their power, but on the steppe, a good bow could mean the difference between life and death, and so people had poured immense energy into developing them.

By the time of the Huns, these were already intricate constructions combining multiple materials. A core of maple wood, bone and antelope horn knotted with sinew, deer gut and leather, all held together with a fish-based glue. The combination of these materials created a bow with immense elasticity

capable of hurtling an arrow at tremendous speeds and over great distances, reportedly as far as 300 meters. If these accounts are accurate, then these bows could shoot further than an English longbow, which stood taller than a man but crucially was compact enough to be drawn from horseback.

The combination of horse and composite bow would make the steppe horse archer the deadliest single entity on the planet. In Europe, these weapons would come to be known with fear and reverence as Hun bows. The people of China struggled no less with their nomadic neighbors.

During the period of the Han dynasty, a people they knew as the Xiongnu constantly menaced their borders for much of the first millennium and may even have been the same people as the European Huns. One Han period Chinese writer, Sumatjian, describes their way of life. The Xiongnu are mountain barbarians

They move in search of water and pasture, and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture. They wear clothes of hide or wraps made of fur or felt. They have no writing, and even their promises and agreements are only verbal. The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow.

Thus, all the young men are able to act as armed cavalry in time of war. Around the 4th century, these peoples also introduced the stirrup - straps for the riders feet that help them stay in the saddle and allow them even greater control of their horses. One medieval Chinese writer describes the sight of a steppe horse warrior in action.

When they ride at a gallop, they always stand in the stirrups rather than sit in the saddle. They are swift as the onrush of a gale and strong as the weight of a mountain, wheeling left and cutting right like wings in flight. They shoot with power enough to pierce armour. For the civilisations that lived on the borders of the steppe, in China, India, Persia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe,

These nomadic peoples could be alien, frightening, and primitive. While they were divided, they could be contained, controlled, and violently put down. But every few hundred years, they would unite into a force large enough to flood out of the steppe.

They would come to conquer and settle, to wreak havoc and sow destruction, but every time to change the course of history. The most dramatic of these stories would take place as the 12th century came to a close, and the memory of Attila's Huns had faded to just another ghost story from classical history.

It would come in the form of a people who were perhaps the most unlikely of conquerors. When our story starts, they had many names but soon they would become known as the Mongols. To find the location of the beginning of this story, we must travel to the east along the wide expanse of the Eurasian steppe.

For thousands of kilometers, we would see only grassland and seasonal deserts. Then, we pass over the Altai Mountains, home to wolves, curly-horned ibex, and eagles. Finally, we would reach the far eastern steppe on a high plateau of what is today Mongolia.

At the end of the 12th century, the Mongols were just one of countless groups that existed in this land, speaking Turkic languages like Uyghur and dialects of Mongolian, and worshipping any number of gods. But despite this variation, many of them followed a similar way of life. Life on the steppe meant following the natural cycles of the world,

In the warm summers, the rains come and the grassland flushes green. During these months, the nomads' herds of cattle, goats, sheep, camels, and horses have plenty to eat, and they graze in their summer pastures on the open grassland. But as the cold, dry winters descend, herders would move to their winter pastures in the north, where the green valleys at the foot of the mountains remain shaded,

and there are still grasses growing. This natural cycle dictated every aspect of steppe life, as one medieval Chinese writer Zhao Gong describes. In their custom, each time the grass grows green is one year. So if someone asks one of them his age, he says how many times the grass has greened.

Also, once when I asked one of them what month and day he was born, he laughed and replied, "I can't remember, nor did I ever know it in the first place." Winter on the steppe is harsh. During these months, the wind blows straight from Siberia, and a layer of ice can often cover the grasslands completely.

When the grass is frozen, steppe peoples would allow their horses to graze ahead of the other animals. They would use their hooves to crack the ice, and then other livestock like sheep could follow. In the flat, featureless landscape, people navigated primarily using rivers which interlace the steppe in countless waterways, among them the Orkhon, the Selenga, and the Onon.

By riding up and down these rivers, the steppe peoples could find their way and would never be far from water for their horses. The knowledge of these river paths were passed on from person to person by word of mouth through poems and songs. The primary mode of shelter in the steppe was the tent.

One Chinese writer of the time named Li Hsinchuan describes these habitations. They have neither walls nor moats, nor houses nor mansions, but instead make felt tents for which they choose dwelling places that have the most beneficial water and grass.

In English, these tents are often called yurts, derived from a Turkic word, but in Mongolian, they are known as gir. Their structures are made of lattice of light but strong willow wands, and their walls are made of felt, a material created by pressing together layer upon layer of sheep's wool

These tents are warm during winter and cool during summer, and they are also fully mobile, designed to be dismantled and rebuilt every day if necessary, and carried from place to place on the back of carts. The Chinese observer Peng Dayar wrote the following description of seeing steppe people moving across the landscape.

The yurts, that is felt tents in which they live, have neither walls nor roof beams. They move them to follow the grass and water, never staying for long. Cattle, horses, or camels are used to pull their carts, on which it is roomy enough to sit or recline. These carts are dispatched in groups of five, looking like columns of ants as they wind along, extending out for five miles.

Some of these carts could be huge, designed to carry the tents of nobles on their back. One European visitor to Mongolia in the Middle Ages, William of Rubruck, described seeing carts as large as 10 meters wide, about the length of a London bus. These dwellings are constructed of such a size as to be on occasions 30 feet across –

These carts were insulated from the changeable weather of the steppe.

and those used to transport valuables were protected by a special kind of felt that had been soaked in waxy tallow to keep out the rain. When their day's traveling was done, the steppe peoples would fortify their camp by placing their carts in a ring, making a makeshift wall to keep out raiders and thieves.

Their gir tents were always erected facing south so that the sun would shine in through the doorway. The heads of the house and people of high status would always sit on the north side of the tent facing the door, while more junior members of the clan would sit in the south. In the center of the gir was a hearth fire made from burning pieces of dried dung.

This was a resource in infinite abundance among herders, but usually goat dung was preferred since it burned cleanly and gave off a pleasant smell like burning leaves. Above this fire, there was a smoke hole cut in the felt roof. These smoke holes had a practical purpose as a chimney, but they also held a kind of spiritual significance.

The fire and the hole in the tent were considered to be a means to communicate with the clan's ancestors and was a ceremonial space for rituals.

We can imagine a Mongol family sitting around this fire with the vast darkness of the steppe at night outside, watching the sparks of their fire drift out through the hole in the roof as the howling steppe wind outside batters the felt walls of the tent. For those nomads who lived on the open grasslands of the steppe, life was good.

Their vast herds turned the virtually infinite supply of grass into ample meat and milk from which they could make a variety of cheese, yogurts, and other dairy products, and into dung that could be burned in their fires. The steppe gave them everything they needed to survive and for everything else, they could trade with the lands of China to the south.

Nomadic peoples would buy silk, fine silver items, and carved furniture along with all the comforts of sophisticated society.

In return, they would trade northern goods like furs, of which the most valued was the delicate dark pelt of the sable, a kind of small pine marten, along with leather, bone, and antler for carving, herd animals like cattle and sheep, and majestic tame hunting birds like the golden eagle, taken from the forest as fledglings and trained to hunt small game.

But above all, they traded the thing that settled societies needed most, and nomads had in enormous supply, horses. As a result, these clans in the south of the Mongolian steppe, like the Tatars and the Kerait, were richer and lived more comfortable lives, and they defended their enviable positions with extreme ferocity.

In contrast, for much of their history, the Mongols were among the losers of the steppe world. While other nomads thrived on the southern grasslands, the Mongols subsisted in the harsh north, on the edge of the mountains and the endless Siberian forests, home to wolves, bears, and wild forest peoples like the Merkit.

Here, the grasses were meager and couldn't support large herds. As a result, the Mongols supplemented their diets by hunting deer and small mammals like marmots, gathering pine nuts in the forests, and fishing in the rivers. The medieval Persian historian Atamalek Juvaini writes about the sorry state of this people. They had no chief or ruler.

Each tribe lived separately, they were not united with one another, and there was constant fighting and hostility between them. Their clothing was of the skins of dogs and mice, and their food was the flesh of those animals and other dead things. Their wine was mare's milk, and their dessert the fruit of a tree shaped like a pine.

The sign of a great king amongst them was that his stirrups were made of iron. From that, one can form a picture of their other luxuries. Part of the reason for their poor situation was that the Mongols were among the most divided peoples of the steppe, constantly fighting amongst themselves. Other steppe peoples had long ago formed large confederations

adapted to the cultures of more settled societies around them, even taking on their religions. Some, like the Khitan, had adopted Buddhism while others had converted to Islam, which had arrived in the southern steppe some centuries before, usually with traders passing through.

Others still, like the Kerait and the Naiman, had even converted to the cult of a powerful shaman from a faraway land who was rumored to have risen from the dead, a man named Jesus Christ.

Word of his teachings had been brought to Mongolia by Assyrian Nestorian missionaries around the 11th century and had appealed to many people there since the name Jesus reminded them of the word Yesu, which in Mongolian means the number nine, a number considered to be sacred and to bring good luck. But the Mongols on the edge of the Siberian forests had adopted no such beliefs.

They maintained the ancient beliefs of their ancestors, worshipping the earth mother goddess and their ancient god of the great blue sky, who they named Tengri. The 11th century Muslim scholar Mahmud al-Khashgari describes the worship of this god. Tengri means god. The infidel nomads call heaven Tengri, and likewise everything natural that impresses them

For example, a high mountain or a large tree. They worship such things and they call a wise man Tengri Khan. The god Tengri was believed to reside particularly in the region of a vast freshwater lake known as Lake Baikal and it's here that the mythology of the Mongols begins.

In the Mongol conception of their own history, their story began when a Siberian wolf mated with a roe deer and gave birth to the first of their royal line. This founding myth is recounted in the enigmatic document known as the Secret History of the Mongols.

There was a blue-gray wolf born with a destiny from heaven above. His wife was a beautiful red fallow doe. They came crossing the sea. They made their home at the headwaters of the Onan River.

With a surface area of more than 30,000 square kilometers, Lake Baikal is slightly larger than the country of Belgium and is the largest freshwater lake in Eurasia. Sitting as it does on a tectonic rift, it is also by far the deepest on the planet, plunging to a depth of more than 1600 meters.

As a result, it is also the world's largest lake in volume, containing more than all the American Great Lakes combined. In fact, this one lake is estimated to contain somewhere between a quarter to a fifth of all the surface fresh water on planet Earth.

For most people of the steppe, this was the largest body of water they would ever see, and on account of this, the Mongols would often simply refer to it as the sea. When winter comes to the Siberian wastes, Lake Baikal freezes solid with ice many meters thick, and the snows blow in chaotic patterns over its surface.

According to the story, eleven generations after this unnatural coupling of wolf and deer on the shore of Lake Baikal, a woman known as Alangua or Alain the Beautiful would give birth to five sons. From these five men were supposed to have descended the royal lineage of the Mongols.

One day, the legend says, Arlan the Beautiful found her five sons arguing with one another. She gathered them together and taught them a lesson that has passed into legend. She gave them each an arrow shaft and told them to break it.

Each one was broken and let fall. Then she took five arrow shafts bundled together, gave the shafts to them and told them to break them. All five of them, one after another, took the five arrow shafts joined together but were unable to do as she said and break it. Then their mother, Alan the Beautiful, spoke words of admonition to her five sons.

You, my five sons, were born from a single womb. You are just like the five arrow shafts. If you are alone, one by one, you will be easily broken by anyone. But if you are joined in accord as one, then how could you be broken by anyone?

This story was told to generations of Mongol children, and it contained a powerful truth about life on the steppe. Out there, family was the most powerful connection that anyone had, and without it, you were left alone, hungry, and defenseless. Mongols thought of their kin relationships as a kind of branching tree or river.

They traced their ancestry back to real ancestors, a relationship known as Uruk, but the Mongol elite also held to a kind of mythical kinship in which every person was descended from one or other semi-mythical character who lived in the vague and distant past, often one of the sons of Alain the Beautiful.

In this way, Mongols considered themselves to belong to a wider clan group that often had little to do with their actual heritage. These they called their Obok. Accompanied with these two systems of relationship was a third, one that people could freely choose to enter into. This was known as Anda, a kind of blood brother.

In this ritual, two close friends could swear an eternal allegiance, essentially becoming family. This relationship was taken just as seriously as any connection of kinship. One Mongol text of the time records the depth of this bond.

If we listen to the words of the elders and the ancients...

This is the way in which Anda love each other. People who are Anda are as if they have one life without any separation and are lifelong saviours to each other. To survive in the harsh world of the steppe, people had to be tough, but they also had to come together.

To get a sense of the reality of this life, there is no better example than the upbringing of one man born here on the steppe whose story we know in unprecedented detail, a man who would rise from the humblest beginnings imaginable to change the course of world history. His name was Temujin, but that is not the name that history would know him by.

It's worth mentioning that all of the story you are about to hear was very nearly lost to history. But in 1866, a Russian monk working in the archives of China uncovered a remarkable manuscript. It was a Chinese copy of a copy of a copy of a lost Mongolian document written by an unknown author sometime in the 13th century.

This book used Chinese characters to recreate the phonetic sounds of the Mongolian language and was used as a kind of textbook to help Chinese scholars who were learning Mongolian. For this reason, its characters appeared to be nonsense in Chinese, and so it was lost among the archives. But once its contents were deciphered, it transformed our understanding of this period.

It was a document written only for the eyes of the Mongolian royal family, telling in unprecedented detail the ups and downs of their story. For this reason, it came to be known as the Secret History of the Mongols. It's the first and most important source ever written in the Mongolian language, and it blends narrative history with flourishes of vaulting epic poetry.

The story of the man named Temujin begins in the second half of the 12th century with his mother, a young woman named Oolun. She was from the eastern Mongolian steppe to the southeast of Lake Baikal and was probably no more than a teenager. She had just married a man named Chiledu of the Merkit people.

This young couple was in love and she was now traveling back to his homeland with him to live with his family in their camp. But things would not go according to the young lover's plan. On their fateful journey home, they passed through the lands of a warrior named Yesugei, the leader of a small Mongol band on the great Onon River. Yesugei had once been a powerful leader but had recently fallen on tough times.

That day, he was out hunting with his hawk when he saw the marriage procession pass by and caught sight of the beautiful face of Oolun. Yesugei already had a wife, but upon seeing Oolun, he became overcome with desire for her and as a Mongol warrior, he was used to taking what he desired.

He rode back to his camp and gathered his two brothers, and together they chased after the wedding party with murder in their hearts. When Oolun and her husband saw the warrior brothers bearing down on them, she begged her husband to flee and save his life, as the secret history recalls. His bride, Madame Oolun, said to him, "You, have you understood what those three men are about?"

Their looks say they want your life. As long as you have your life at least, you will find a woman to wed. Save your life!" Shiledu listened to her pleas and fled across the grasslands, leaving Oelun to be captured. The two of them would never see each other again. The three riders chased him from behind over seven ridges. Until they drove him off, they came back.

And Yasugei took Madam Oolun by the tether, and she wailed in a great voice. She wailed until the Onon River echoed it, and the wooded valley rang with it." We don't know what happened to Oolun's husband, Shiledu, but it seems he never made any attempt to recapture her. In the harsh world of the steppe, a man only had rights to what he could defend, and Oolun was now no longer considered his wife.

As for Oolun, her heartbreak must have been overwhelming. But she seems to have accepted her fate and settled into the new life that Yesugei had forced upon her at the edge of the mountains and the great Siberian forest. Here, she would have to be tough to survive.

Yesugei already had a wife, and by then this woman had borne him a son named Begta. Soon, Oelun too became pregnant and gave Yesugei their first child together. This child was a boy, and it's said that when he came screaming into the world, he was clutching a tiny but fearsome omen in his little hand.

When Madame Olun was big with child, just then, when they were at Delhi on Baldak on the Onon River, he was born. When he was born, he was born clutching a clot of blood in his right hand the size of a knuckle bone. To the Mongols, this was an unmistakable sign that the boy would grow up to be a warrior.

The year was around 1162 in the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Horse. At the time, the Mongols were at war with another much more powerful steppe people, the Tatars, who lived closer to the border with northern China.

Yesugei had recently captured a Tatar warrior named Temujin Ugar in battle, and in celebration of this feat, he decided to name the new baby boy after his captured enemy. The name Temujin likely meant blacksmith or iron worker, but in time it would come to gain a different association, the iron one or the man of iron.

This captured man may even have been executed at the naming ceremony, and his strength ritually given to the new baby boy. From this bloody beginning, Temujin's childhood was a tough one, but it forged him into the man he would become. Living at Yesugei's camp on the banks of the Onon River, he would have learned to hunt and fish, and of course, how to ride a horse from a young age.

One Chinese writer describes the life of a stepchild. Even three-year-old toddlers are secured to the saddle with rope and given something to grasp with their hands so they can follow along as the rest dash about on horseback. In their fourth and fifth years, they carry under one arm a small bow and short arrows, and when grown, they occupy themselves during all four seasons with hunting game.

Hunting on the steppe was done using a system known as the nurj or noose, and these grand hunts would take place every year and involve large numbers of different families and kin groups. Every Mongol learned from a young age how to work together with other riders across a vast distance, encircling a huge area of land

and driving all the wild animals within it into the center of their ring. Then, the noose tightened. They would drive the animals closer and closer together until there was nowhere left to run. Then, they would begin to fire hundreds of arrows into the mass of terrified prey. Yesugei would have taught his young sons this skill from a young age.

but Temujin's relationship with his kidnapper of a father may have been a strained one. Yesugei already had an oldest son by another woman, the boy named Begta, and Begta seems to have enjoyed reminding Temujin of his place. When Temujin was nine years old, his father clearly worried about the divisions in his family. He decided to take the young boy to find a wife of his own.

They traveled out together and met with the ruler of a nearby clan, who was also something of a shaman. He told Yesugei that the boy who rode beside him was destined for great things. This boy of yours is a boy with flame in his eyes and fire in his face. Last night I dreamt a dream.

A white falcon flew towards me clutching the sun and the moon and alighted on my hand. This dream of mine was showing me that you would come leading this boy of yours. The chief gave the young boy the hand of one of his daughters, a girl named Borta.

She was a year older than him, and at the first sight of her, Temujin fell in love, a love that would never leave him. On his way home, his father Yesugei must have been satisfied. He had found a good wife for his young son and could now head home to a family made at peace, but fate would conspire against him. That night, he stopped at a camp belonging to some Tatar men.

By this time, the Tatars and the Mongols were no longer at war, but they were still bitter rivals. The customs on the steppe stated that whenever someone stopped at your camp, you were required to set your differences aside and offer them hospitality. But these Tatars had other ideas, as the secret history recounts.

Remembering their early grudge, they plotted murder and mixed in poison for him. Feeling sick on the way, he went for three days and arrived at his ger and felt worse. Yesugei said, My insides feel sick. I fell victim to a plot and now I feel sick inside. Having spoken, he died. Yesugei said,

Hearing of this treachery from a rider sent by his dying father, Temujin rode hard across the steppe, heading home to be with his mother, and left his betrothed Borta behind. The death of Yesugei left this vulnerable family exposed and alone in the cruel world of steppe politics.

Yesugei's clan had been a mixture of different peoples, including families of Mongols known as the Bozhigin and Tayichut, and they had little holding them together other than Yesugei's leadership. Now they split into separate parts and departed in all directions, and none of them had any room for a widowed woman and her hungry children.

They left Oolun and her children behind, alone, destitute, and starving on the banks of the Onon River, as the secret history records. The Tai Chute brethren moved camp down along the Onon River to leave behind on the range Madame Oolun the widow, the little ones and boys, the mothers and children,

The Tayichut took their livestock, their goats and their sheep, and left them with only the few horses they owned. This was practically a death sentence. When winter came to the steppe, this feeble group would no doubt freeze and run out of food. But remarkably, that's not what happened. That's because Oulun refused to let her children starve.

Madame Olune, born both womanly and wise, finding food for her small boys, fixing up her flowing skirts, flying up and down the Onon River's flood, finding wild fruits, crabapples and cherries, filled she the night and day their famished throats. They were well raised on wild garlic and onion, lily bulbs, leeks and onion leaves.

At night, while they ate these meager foods, she told them the stories of her ancestors, the stories that had been passed down to her from her parents, the stories of Alain the Beautiful and her five unruly sons, and the parable of the five arrows that could not be broken so long as they stayed together. At first, the boys seemed to have taken these lessons to heart.

saying to each other, "We must feed our mother." They sat on Mother Onon's muddy banks and mastered metal hooks and lures, catching maimed and motley fish. Turning needles into hooks, they hooked trout and little whitefish. They sifted pools for silver minnows

and so they served back their mother's love. It was around this time that Temujin met another boy of the same age, whose family would often camp near to their own settlement. This boy's name was Jamukha.

The two boys hunted and fished together and became good friends. In fact, they became so close that they swore to enter into that bond of chosen kinship and became what the Mongols called Anda, a kind of blood brother.

They most likely spilled a drop of their blood into a cup of fermented mare's milk and both drank from it, swearing an oath of eternal brotherhood and always to fight on one another's behalf.

It must have been hard to imagine at the time watching these two skinny boys playing in the hills or at games of knuckle bones beside the great river. But one day, they would fight one another in a bitter civil war over who would rule all the people of the Mongols. Soon, winter came to the steppe. Snow fell and the Onon River froze solid.

The now reduced family must have come close to death, but finally spring arrived on the steppe and the ice on the grasslands thawed. But by this time all was not well among this lonely family.

Despite their mother's stories warning them to stay united, a bitter rivalry had always existed between Temujin and Yesugei's oldest son, Begta, who had been born of another mother. This rivalry would only grow bitterer as their situation worsened and hunger set in.

As the older and larger boy, Begta often took for himself the best of the fish and birds that they caught until eventually Temujin had had enough. He and his younger brother Kassar soon plotted to kill their older brother. It wasn't just Begta's selfishness that motivated this decision. With their father dead, their mother Oulun was an unmarried woman

As a result, she was considered available for marriage. Though it might seem strange to us, the most likely candidate may have been her young stepson, Begta. Traveling to Mongolia a century later, the Venetian explorer Marco Polo noted this peculiarity of Mongol marriage laws.

The marriage customs of Tartars are as follows: Any man may take a hundred wives if he so please, and if he be able to keep them; but the first wife is ever held most in honour, and as the most legitimate. They may marry their cousins; and if a father dies, his son may take any of the wives, his mother always excepted.

That is to say, the eldest son may do this, but no other. If Begta married Oelun, he would secure his position as the undisputed head of the family. Temujin and Kassar were determined not to let that happen. The pair of them chose their moment carefully. They took their bows and crept up on Begta while he sat on the hill, drawing their bowstrings taut.

When he saw them, he briefly pleaded for his life, but they didn't listen. Temujin and Kassar shot him with their arrows and left his body to lie in the long grass of the steppe. When they returned to their tent, their mother saw the murder in their eyes.

When they came back into the gear, the madam mother understood it all from the faces of her two children. Murderers! she shouted. When bursting out from my hot womb, he wielded in his hand a black blood clot.

like a hound that devours its own, like a panther that pounters against a cliff, like a lion that cannot restrain its wrath, like a wolf that stalks in the whirling blizzard. You killed your own brother! When summer came again that year, their old tribe, the Tayichut, returned, following their seasonal route as always.

They must have expected to find nothing but a collection of whitened bones littering the steppe, where they had left the family of Oolun and her children to die. But they were astonished and a little concerned to find these young men and their mother still living by the side of the river. Somehow, they had clung to life. This could turn out to be a problem for the Tayichut

These boys were becoming stronger each year and maybe one day they would be strong enough to take revenge for abandoning them. Perhaps when the Tayichut heard of Temujin's killing of Begta, they used this as an excuse to hunt him down as an outlaw. Temujin ran and they chased him high up into the mountains. Fleeing for his life, he made for one peak in particular that held a great significance -

the sacred mountain named Burqan Khaldun. Among the rocky slopes strewn with scree, there grow forests of Siberian larch and pine where it was possible for him to hide. For a while, he evaded them among the forest's shady depths, but the Tayichut posted guards in a wide circle and slowly closed the net around him.

Eventually, they cornered him and dragged him back to their camp as a prisoner. At first, the Tayichut planned to execute Temujin, but they soon changed their minds. A young strong boy like him would make a good worker, and so they brought the young man back to live as a slave in their camp. To humiliate him, they forced him to wear a heavy wooden board around his neck and

This prevented him from eating or sleeping comfortably and made his status as a slave known to everyone. It's not known how long he was held captive here, but all that time Temüjin must have been thinking of his bride Borta and dreaming that they would one day be reunited. Eventually, he saw his chance to escape. The 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14th day of the 14

One night the Taichut feasted on the reddest day, the sixteenth of the first moon of summer, on the banks of the Onon as the sun went down. A feeble youth brought him to that feast.

As the fellows at the feast were being sent away, he grabbed the wooden board away from the feeble boy, struck him on the head once with it, and ran. He lay down on his back on the river's edge, the moonlight bright as day. With the Tayichut guards combing the steppe for him, Temujin saw only one chance to escape.

He leapt into the icy river, and the heavy wooden board acted as a flotation device. When he climbed out of the water some way downstream, he found a family of herdsmen who helped him to remove the lock on the heavy piece of wood, and he limped back home to his family. By this time, he was a young man of about 16. Oelun and his siblings must have been overjoyed to see him when he returned,

but he had other things on his mind. The first thing he did when he returned was to ride out to claim his bride, Borta. He must have feared the worst, that her father had gone back on his word and given her to someone else, but perhaps the old shaman had remembered his vision and the fire he had seen in the eyes of that young boy. All those years, he had kept his daughter for the man she was promised to,

She and Temüjin were married. They had a daughter and lived together happily on the banks of the Onan River. That is where the story of Temüjin might have ended - with a happy family, with children and grandchildren, with a quiet death in a gir tent in the middle of the steppe, and we would never know his name. But history had other plans.

The steppe was no place for a quiet life. One day, a raiding party of the northern forest people known as the Merkit swept down on their camp while Temujin was out hunting. This raid was a perfect example of the tangled world of steppe rivalries and blood feuds.

For in fact, these men were the brothers of Chiledu, the man that Temujin's mother, Oulun, had once married and who had lost his wife to Yesugei. With Yesugei dead, these brothers of Chiledu were taking their revenge on the man's son instead.

They burned his tents and took away his animals and what possessions he had, and just as Yesugei had once stolen Oolun, these Merkit raiders now stole his wife Borta away and retreated with her back to the cover of the Siberian forests. With his small band, Temujin had little hope of reclaiming her, but he did have one chance.

That was to reach out to the man who had once been his childhood friend on the banks of the Onon River, a man who was now a rising warrior in the nearby clan of the Kerait, his Anda blood brother, Jamuka. When Jamuka saw his old friend after so many years, he was overjoyed, but he must have seen the pain in Temujin's face.

And when Temujin told him what had happened, Jamukha flew into a rage. The secret history records him giving the following promise.

A black leather war drum with its booming bellow I have beaten, a steed with swift steps have I saddled, a steel shirt have I worn, a solid spear have I seized, a stinging arrow on my string have I strung.

to slaughter all the savage market I set out. The lord that Jamukha served was a man named Toghril Khan, the Khan of the Kerait people, and he agreed to help Temujin get his wife back.

They spent that year building an army and set out in the autumn with a host over 30,000 strong, riding north into the hostile forests where the Merkit lived. They waited until nightfall and then, under cover of darkness, they swept down on the Merkit camp in a surprise attack. The secret history records what happened next.

They swarmed in to seize his girls in a sudden swoop. They plundered his kingdom mercilessly. As the Merkit folk fled down the Selenge River in the night, as our soldiers dogged the heels of the fugitive Merkit through the night, plundering and looting, and as Temujin called out, "'Borta! Borta!' they met."

Madame Borta was there among the fugitives. She recognised Temujin's voice, got down from the wagon and ran towards him, and they hugged each other in welcome. There was only one complication. Temujin soon found out that his wife Borta had become pregnant.

Since she had been captured and forcibly married to a murkite lord, Temüjin could never know whether the child was his. Perhaps for this reason, when his firstborn son came into the world, Temüjin gave him the name Jochi, which in Mongolian means guest, perhaps alluding to the question of his fatherhood.

but they all agreed to put the issue behind them, and Temujin accepted Jochi the guest as his eldest son. After this experience, it was now clear to Temujin that a life of peace was impossible on the steppe. For protection, he and his family joined Jamukha's camp, and the pair of Anda blood brothers rode together as equals for a year and a half.

They hunted and fought together, and perhaps even played knuckle bones together the way they had as boys. Jamukha also introduced Temujin to his lord and patron, the ruler of the Kerayit clan, the man named Toghril Khan. This time would have been crucial for Temujin. During his upbringing, he had known only hardship and poverty.

whereas Jamukha had become an experienced warrior and leader. He must have taught Temujin all he knew. For a while, everything seemed to be going well, but eventually, Temujin began to detect a hint of resentment from his blood brother, perhaps even a glimmer of contempt. One day, Jamukha ordered him to stay home and protect the clan's sheep herds

A clear sign that things were beginning to sour between these old friends. The two quarreled, and Temujin's wife Borta advised him to leave his friend and start out on his own. Burdujungu, Biltrong.

Madam Borta said, Jamukha Andar is said to be a person who easily gets tired of things. Now the time has come that he has become tired of us. Let us not pitch camp. Let us make a clean break and move away through the night.

With a heavy heart, Temujin agreed and he and his family prepared to leave. He would now be starting again from the beginning, alone on the step. He expected to leave with just his wife and his small children, but to his surprise, he had gained a great deal of popularity among Jamukha's people.

In fact, when Temujin made to leave Jamukha's camp, half of his blood brother's followers asked to go with him. The loyalty that Temujin clearly inspired was partly due to his reputation for generosity.

When dividing up the loot from a successful raid, steppe peoples had for thousands of years adhered to an ancient system by which the elites and nobles took all the best plunder for themselves and then divided the rest among the other men as they saw fit. Common people were usually left out of this system. In the harsh world of the steppe, strength was everything and the strong took the lion's share.

but Temujin appears to have been different. He had grown up on the freezing bank of the Onon River with his siblings and learned to share everything in common. He had once killed his older brother Begta, partly for taking the best food for himself, and since then must have harbored a distaste for this ancient system.

and perhaps he had learned that inspiring loyalty in those around him was worth any amount of gold or any number of horses. As a result, he pioneered a new and somewhat radical system in the world of the steppe. In his party, loot would be shared according to merit, and those who did well in battle were given a greater share, even if they were just common people.

Among his followers, he also at times introduced a kind of insurance policy, decreeing that any soldier who was killed in battle would have their share of the loot given to their widow and orphaned children - a policy perhaps inspired by his own experience of losing his father and being plunged into poverty as a child. A certain amount of loot was also distributed to the elderly and disabled.

All of this meant that when he left Jamukha's camp, a number of men wanted to follow him. But in taking half of his blood brother's people, Temujin had also gained a powerful enemy. Throughout this time, the Mongols were still a fractured and divided people.

But now, these two rival warriors both desired to make themselves ruler over all the Mongols, a title that had long been known as Khan. In the summer of 1189, Temujin decided to take his chance. He summoned a meeting of the clans known as a kurultai. A kurultai was a riotous event, part political rally and part festival.

This one took place on the shores of a place on the steppe known as the Blue Lake. Here, the air would be filled with the sound of horses, laughter, and perhaps the mesmerizing sound of Mongolian throat singing, a unique vocal form in which the singers summon sound from deep in their larynx with such precision that they are able to sing two notes at once.

The Kuraltai would have included games and feasts, the so-called three manly pursuits of horse races, wrestling, and archery tournaments, and of course, the consumption of vast quantities of alcohol. It's likely the attendants would have drunk ayrak or kumis, the alcoholic drink made from fermented mare's milk.

One Chinese diplomat named Zhao Gong, who attended a Mongol feast in the early 1220s, even records a kind of Mongol drinking game. They do not end their banqueting until everyone is roaring drunk. Every time they drink wine, it is their custom that those who sit next to each other should, after tasting, exchange cups.

If one's counterpart holds the cup with one hand, it means that I must taste a mouthful, and only then will he dare to drink. If he holds the cup in both hands, then he wishes to switch cups with me. Then I have to drink his wine to the bottom, and pour wine to toast him. This made it very easy to get drunk.

But despite the revelry, the cruel tie had a very serious purpose.

By holding this gathering of the clans, Temüjin was declaring his intention to become Khan of the Mongols. This was not a particularly prestigious title. The Mongols were a weak and divided people, and any Khan who led them would still pay tribute to the much more powerful Toghril Khan of the Qara'ites. But it was still a clear declaration of war against the more likely claimant to the title.

and the man who commanded the support of most Mongol nobles, his own blood brother Jamukha. When Jamukha heard news about this Kurultai, he must have been enraged. Clashes between the two men's followers intensified until one day, one of Jamukha's relatives was killed in a cattle raid. This was the excuse he was looking for.

to finally go to war and crush his blood brother Temujin. The two sides gathered their forces. Temujin would finally meet his blood brother in battle at a place called Dalan Baljut. The Mongol horsemen would have wheeled around each other in great thundering packs, hailing one another with arrows before closing in and clashing with their long lances.

We can imagine the thundering of the hooves, the cries of the dying men and horses, the whoops and battle cries, and the angry buzzing of arrows through the air. But here, Jamukha's greater experience and years of warrior training easily overpowered the inexperienced Temujin. The Secret History reports this loss in few words.

They formed up into three units, rode against Jamukha. He was forced back then by Jamukha and escaped into the Jiran Gorge on the Onan River. With Temujin defeated, the wrath of Jamukha was terrible.

In retribution for siding with the upstart, Jamukha ordered that 70 princes of the Chinoa clan be boiled alive in great iron cauldrons. One leader's head was cut off and Jamukha tied it to his horse's tail and dragged it behind him as he rode. Temujin's situation was now worse than ever.

He was now an outlaw and fled for his life with the riders of Jamukha hot on his heels. He would not return to the steppe for another 10 years, and those years are a gap in his biography. But some historians think it likely that he went south to the lands that lay across the great expanse of the Gobi Desert

a domain of large wealthy cities, artists, merchants, poets, and emperors, the lands of China. China at the end of the 12th century was a divided land

Since the days of the first emperors of the Qin and Han dynasty, the settled people who lived in the flood plains around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers had fought bitterly with the nomadic horse-riding peoples of the steppe. Since that time, China's emperors had built numerous defenses on their northern border that would become known as the Great Wall.

In the nearly 10 centuries since the time of the Han dynasty, the Tang were the first to unite the area of the central Chinese plains. After the collapse of that dynasty, a period of chaos and dissolution followed known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Eventually, around the year 1000, the plains of China united once more under the Song dynasty.

The Song were ethnically Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of China, and under their reign, the people of the central plains had flourished. Over the next hundred years, China's population would double so that by the year 1100, more than a hundred million people or one-third of the planet's entire human population could be found there. China at this time was the undisputed center of the world,

and technologically, the most advanced civilization on earth. But in the 1120s, disaster struck. The Jurchen were a people from the oak and pine forests of Manchuria, near the border with Korea, where Siberian tigers were known to roam. To the Chinese in the south, these Jurchen were considered barbarians.

They were mostly not nomadic and lived in villages, but they were a horse-rearing people and they rode and fought as horse archers in much the same way as the Mongols. Once subservient to another Manchurian people known as the Khitan, they had overthrown their former masters and now swept across northern China in a tide of conquest.

The Chinese Song dynasty, weakened by internal divisions and taken by surprise, could do little to stop them. In a disaster that the Song would rue for centuries, Zhecheng horsemen swept south and seized the lands around the northern Yellow River, pushing south and even capturing the former Song capital of Kaifeng.

From this point onwards, the lands of northern China would be ruled by these Zhechen, and their new emperor would crown himself with a title that elevated him above the other peoples of the steppe. He was now the Golden Khan, and his empire would be known as the Jin, or Golden Empire.

The Zhechen Jin dynasty of northern China was what has been called a conquest dynasty. That is, one founded by outside invaders. But throughout Chinese history, these kinds of conquerors had always learned that military might was not the only kind of power, that culture too had its own kind of force.

Over time, the founders of these conquest dynasties often adopted the Chinese language, began to live by Confucian ideals and dress in Chinese clothes, intermarry with the locals, and gradually become every bit as Chinese as the Chinese. The Zhechen were no different.

In fact, over the century that they ruled northern China, they adopted the Chinese language so enthusiastically that very few written texts in the Zhechen language have survived. Just 30 years after their conquest, one Jin emperor known as the Prince of Hailing even began writing Chinese poetry and drinking Chinese tea, something that his hardy forebears would have mocked.

But no matter how many Chinese manners or customs they adopted, the Jin would always be considered outside barbarians by the Song Chinese in the south, who referred to them as slaves and dog sheep, and dreamed of one day retaking their lost lands and uniting China once more

For the next two centuries, China would be divided into these two halves - the Chinese Song in the rugged and tropical south and the Jurchen Jin in the dry and arid north, with their border along the Huai River, roughly halfway between the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. There was almost constant warfare between them as they seized forts and border towns from one another whenever the opportunity arose to

but neither side was ever able to gain the upper hand. Since they themselves had once swept out of the wilderness and seized the cities of China, the Zhechen rulers of the Jin dynasty knew all too well how quickly a new threat could develop in those wild lands, and they were determined not to be caught by surprise as the Song had been.

As a result, the Jin operated a policy of using nomads to fight nomads. On their frontier, the Jin dynasty employed what were called Zhu-Yin. These were their border guards, vassals and subject states, along with mercenaries who they paid handsomely to create a buffer zone between them and the other peoples of the north.

These Zhu-Yin border guards would raid and plunder other steppe peoples whenever they became too powerful, and suppressed any chance of a united power emerging in the Mongolian steppe. When any one group of Zhu-Yin themselves became too powerful, the Jin would shift their support to a different people and bring them tumbling down in turn.

The southern Chinese writer Zhao Gong recounts this practice with the usual sung contempt for their northern rivals. "When the Tartars were in their original countries, during the Jin coward's reign, there was a rumor spoken: 'The Tartars are coming!'

This brutal policy had been remarkably successful.

Constantly beset by punitive raids, the peoples of the north, like the Mongols, had remained bitterly divided, crippled by blood feuds and rivalries, of which the life of Temujin gives just a glimpse. Zhao Gong describes the chaotic state of the steppe during this time: "At present, the Tatars are very simple and wild, and they have almost no institutions.

I have studied and researched this and have found that they prosper and decline, rise and are destroyed with no regularity." The brutal Jin policy had created immense hardship but they also provided something of a safety net. For any group facing extinction in the steppe, there always remained this one way of surviving.

to enter the service of the Jin and defend the borders of their empire. It's thought that after losing his battle with Jamukha, Temujin may have fled south into the borderlands of the Jin Empire with what remained of his followers, and there sold his services as a Zhu-Yin. If this is where Temujin spent those ten years, then it's here that he would hone his skills as a leader and strategist.

and he would learn lessons in brutality. In the winter of 1196, the Jin paid him to attack the wealthy steppe people known as the Tatars. The Tatars had actually been Zhu-Yin border guards themselves and had grown rich from all the loot they had plundered on behalf of the Jin. But now, the Jin dynasty feared that their loyal attack dogs had become too powerful.

They employed Temujin's Mongols and their overlords, the powerful Kerait people, to attack the Tatars and reduce any threat they might eventually pose. Since the Tatars had once poisoned his father, Temujin must have been all too happy to accept, as the secret history recalls. When he learned the news, Temujin said,

"From days of old, the Tatars have been a hateful folk who murdered their grandfathers and fathers. In this opportunity, let us join in on this attack." The ruler of the Karaites, Toghril Khan, also had reason to hate the Tatars. He had once been the Ander or blood brother of Temujin's murdered father, Yasuge, and in this period would become something of a father figure to Temujin. Together, they rode out against their joint enemy,

and in a surprise attack swept into Tatar lands and plundered them mercilessly. The Mongols were amazed by the rich trade goods they seized from the tents and treasure carts of the Tatars. They noticed that even the children of the Tatars had gold rings in their noses and wore sable cloaks stitched with gold.

The Jin dynasty were delighted with Temujin's work and promoted him to the rank of jütao or pacification officer. Looting the Tatars brought his band great wealth and doubtless more followers too, and it solidified his relationship with the powerful Toghril Khan. From this point on, Temujin became his right-hand man and his power began to grow.

One people known as the Jurkin had raided some of Temüjin's camps while he was away on his war with the Tatars, and so when he returned home, he rounded on them. But instead of simply taking their animals and chasing them off, as was usually the way on the steppe, he rounded up their leadership and executed every one. Then to the common people of the Jurkin, he gave an offer.

to join the Mongols, not as slaves as would have been usual, but as members of the clan. He even gave his mother an orphan jerkin boy to adopt, symbolically accepting him as his brother. The jerkin must have been perplexed, but many of them accepted his deal. This was a new way of doing things on the steppe,

Suddenly, the established elite of Mongolia began to get nervous. These old powerful Khans rallied around the one person they thought could challenge Temujin. In fact, the only man who had ever beaten him in battle, his own blood brother Jamukha.

These old Khans gathered and crowned Jamukha with an ancient and powerful title, Gur Khan, meaning something like Khan over Khans. The only thing standing between Jamukha and his final victory was Temujin. When Temujin and Jamukha met in battle for the final time, the year was 1201.

Both sides gathered their horsemen, who by now would have numbered in the many thousands. Wars in Mongolia were fought with horse and spear, with bow and arrow and sword. One Chinese chronicler, Peng Dayar, writes an account of the typical equipment of a Mongol warrior. Their weapons and armour consist of scale armour, chain mail with leather six layers deep, and tough sheephorn bows.

They whittle wood for the shafts and take down birds of prey for the feathers. Their scimitars follow the Westerners' style, light and sharp. They have long and short spears with tips like drills, so that what is speared does not slip off, and they can penetrate heavy armor. They have defensive shields of short-stemmed bamboo or else of willow tied with leather.

But as well as these physical weapons, battles in Mongolia were also fought with magic. Both sides would bring their most powerful shamans to the battlefield, and these holy men were considered to have exceptional abilities at their disposal: to turn away enemy arrows, cause their shields and bowstrings to break, and even use enchanted stones to control the weather.

The great respect that all Mongols held for these shamans meant that they actually had a very real psychological effect on the battlefield.

In a narrow contest that could go either way, an impressive display of shamanic power could even make the difference between an army standing and fighting or panicking and running, between victory and defeat. On the day of the battle, as the horsemen clashed and arrows flew in angry swarms through the air, it was Temüjin's shamans who seemed to win the day.

As the battle wore on, the clouds darkened and a great steppe storm swept down over the blood-stained grasslands. When they were pushing each other back and forth, up and down the slope, and reforming their own ranks, at that very moment the shamans of Jamukha performed the weatherstone magic. But the weather magic reversed and the magic fell on themselves.

then saying to each other, 'Heaven is not pleased with us.' They scattered." Jamukha now fled just as Temujin once had. Over the next few years he would regroup with some of his men, but many could now see which way the wind was blowing. Some of Jamukha's followers betrayed him, hoping that if they handed him over to Temujin they would curry favor with the new ascendant lord of the steppe.

When they came to Temujin with their captive, however, they were disappointed. For their reward, Temujin had them all put to death, condemning them in the following terms. People who laid hands on their own ruler, how can they be allowed to live? Who would befriend such people? Execute them all, down to their offspring.

but his rival Jamukha could not be allowed to live. Despite their sworn bond, Temujin ordered that he be killed. Perhaps as a sign of the love they had once held for one another, the deed was done in the most noble manner according to Mongol tradition, that is, without shedding any of his blood. Jamukha was likely strangled or his back broken, and his body was buried

With the killing of Jamukha, Temüjin's childhood died too, and a new man was born. The war of the Khans had come to an end, and now Temüjin's claim to be Khan of all the Mongols faced no opposition. Before long, other peoples of the steppe fell before his horsemen, the Naiman, the Jadaran, the Oirat, the Tayichut, and the Tatars.

In each clan that fell to him, the elites and nobles were killed. But as with the Jurkin, the commoners were absorbed into the Mongol army, and Temüjin's mother, Oulun, would ceremoniously adopt an orphaned child of their people as Temüjin's brother. As a system, it was immensely symbolic and ruthlessly effective.

Eventually, even his mentor Toghril, the Khan of the Qara'it, recognized how powerful his protege had become. He turned on Temujin and tried to have him killed, but he too was swept aside. Now around the age of 70, Toghril was defeated at a clash remembered as the Battle of the Burning Sands. Now there was no one left to stand in Temujin's way.

Temujin was the undisputed overlord of virtually all the peoples of Mongolia and the commander of as many as a hundred thousand horsemen. In a grand Kurultai ceremony in the year 1206, he gathered all the peoples he had conquered and declared himself the emperor of the eastern steppe.

When he was crowned, he chose to rule not with the old traditional title of Gurkhan that Jamukha had chosen, but with a new title. This title would symbolize that things in the world of the steppe were about to change, that Temujin would be the kind of ruler that Asia had never seen before.

The meaning of this title is much debated and meant something like "Great Khan", "Righteous King" or "Oceanic Emperor", but soon it would be known all around the world. A title that in the Mongolian language was pronounced "Chingis Khan".

The title that Temujin chose to rule under has suffered much from translation through the ages. From Mongolian, it entered the Persian language relatively unscathed as Cengiz Khan, but when these sources were translated into Arabic, the confusion began. Arabic has no ch sound, and so they used their letter j to make it Cengiz Khan.

European scholars would later translate these sources into Latin and eventually into English in the 19th century, at which time the translators used the letter G to denote a soft sound like in general or German. But due to the ambiguous pronunciation of the letter G in English, this soon led to an extremely common mispronunciation, Genghis Khan,

The mispronunciation is so widespread today that Genghis Khan has arguably become the standard way that the name is pronounced in English, but for the sake of correctness, in this episode I will pronounce the name Chinggis as it is said in Mongolia today. Beyond the pronunciation of his name, much else is mysterious about the figure of Chinggis Khan, not least his appearance.

No artistic representations were ever made of him during his life or by anyone who met him. As a result, those imaginary depictions we do have are deeply influenced by the artist's cultural background. In one Chinese portrait of the great Khan made after his death, he appears painted like a Chinese emperor wearing a white Mongolian-style robe and with hooped earrings in his ears.

Meanwhile, in the Persian miniature paintings, he is depicted wearing a great golden crown or later as a Persian prince with a feathered turban, necklaces of pearls, or dressed in fine silk and brocades. In Europe too, he would be depicted with European features, with fine fur cloaks and a gown of flowing silk, sporting a handsome moustache.

Written descriptions of him could be no less fragmentary. The Chinese writer Zhao Gong writes one rare account of his appearance. "On the whole, the Tartars are not very tall, the tallest not exceeding five feet and three or four inches.

They grow extremely little facial hair. The Tatar lord Temujin differs in that he is of a large and noble bearing with a broad forehead and long whiskers and cuts a heroic, robust figure. The 13th century Persian writer Minaj al-Siraj Juzjani writes another rare description of what he looked like, although he got his account third hand and never saw the great Khan himself.

A man of tall stature, of vigorous build, robust in body, the hair on his face scanty and turned white, with cat's eyes, possessed of dedicated energy, discernment, genius and understanding, awe-striking, a butcher, just, resolute, an overthrower of enemies, intrepid, bloodthirsty and cruel,

He was adept at magic and deception, and some of the devils were his friends. Historians have never settled exactly what Juzjani means when he says that Chinggis Khan had cat's eyes. This may have referred to the epicanthic folds that are typical of the faces of Mongolians and many peoples in East Asia, and may have been worthy of mention to the Persian chronicler

but it may also indicate that Chinggis Khan had a striking and unusual eye color, perhaps a bright yellow that occurs in rare cases with a higher incidence in East Asia.

Throughout these sources, Genghis Khan is elusive, insubstantial, and mysterious. But the changes he brought about in the world would be immense. After conquering much of the world of the steppe, the man who was once Temüjin began the work of building a state.

The empire that Genghis Khan would forge, he would call the Yeke Mongol Ulus or the Great Mongol State, but he also referred to it informally and affectionately as the people of the felt walls, referring to the felt tents that characterized the nomadic way of life.

The empire was a vast confederation covering a land area roughly the size of Western Europe and comprising at least one million people and probably 20 million herd animals. But it was an empire of grass, an empire without cities, without governors or administrators.

To make sense of this organizational nightmare, Genghis Khan embarked on a dramatic restructuring of Mongol society. He would tear out the old system of clan loyalties and replace it with one based around the military. He organized his warriors according to an old decimal system that had been used for centuries on the steppe, going back to the time of the Xiongnu.

His soldiers were placed into squads of ten men called an arban who lived together and fought as brothers. These squads were typically led by the eldest man. Ten of these arban joined together to make a zagun, or a hundred men, and these hundred voted to choose its leader.

Ten Zagun made a Mingan, or a thousand men, and ten Mingan made a Tumen, an army of 10,000 Mongol horsemen. This was considered to be a practical size, large enough to be effective in battle, but not so large that it could not move quickly or ran into problems with supply. The leaders of these Tumen were chosen by Temujin personally.

In this way, the old messy clan system which had fostered infighting and backstabbing had been replaced by a regimented system that promoted coordination and cooperation. The Persian scholar Atamalek Juvaini, writing in the service of the Mongols in the 1250s, gushes about the great success of these reforms.

God Almighty in wisdom and intelligence distinguished Genghis Khan in alertness of mind and absoluteness of power, and exalted him above all the kings of the world, so that all that had been recorded touching the ways of the pharaohs and Caesars was by Genghis Khan invented from the page of his own mind.

He established a rule for every occasion and a regulation for every circumstance, while for every crime he fixed a penalty. Every Mongol of all ages and genders were now required to give one day a week of public service, either in the army or working on public projects. These could be herding animals and collecting milk, gathering dung for fuel, or making felt from wool.

Sometimes, their service could simply be to serve food at a feast or to sing and entertain the troops. Genghis Khan worked to end the feuding that had for centuries defined the harsh reality of Mongol life. Previously, the only justice on the steppe was the vengeance you could exact on those who wronged you, which had the tendency to bring about cycles of reprisal and violence that echoed down the generations.

But Temujin introduced a series of laws that he would call the Great Law or Yasa. Since the Mongols had no written script, they adopted the writing system of the nearby Uyghur people and copied these laws down in a series of books with bright blue bindings, as the Persian scholar Juvaini recalls.

These roles are called the Great Book of the Yasa and are kept in the treasury of the chief princes. Whenever a Khan ascends the throne, or a great army is mobilized, or the princes assemble and begin to consult together concerning affairs of state and the administration thereof, they produce these roles and model their actions thereon.

Each one of the new laws that Chinggis Khan wrote seemed to be directly influenced by his own experiences in earlier life. One of his first laws was to forbid the kidnapping of women on the Mongol steppe. He had come close to losing his wife, Borta, in this way and knew the pain of it firsthand, and his own mother, Oulun, had been kidnapped by his father.

In this way, it must have been a deeply personal issue, but kidnapping was also one of the main causes of friction on the steppe and had sparked countless bitter feuds. Outlawing it completely would bring peace where before there had been only conflict. He also outlawed the taking of other Mongols as slaves. After being kept as a slave by the Tayichut, this issue seems to have arisen from his own bitter memories.

although there would be no law against taking slaves from other steppe peoples. He also outlawed the theft of animals and brought in regulations on when people could hunt, banning hunting throughout the breeding season so that stocks of game animals would not become depleted. Finally, he began the introduction of what would become a law that guaranteed a degree of religious protection to his subjects.

perhaps the first law of its kind in the Middle Ages, as Giovanni records: "Being the adherent of no religion and the follower of no creed, he rejected bigotry, and the preference of one faith to another, and the placing of some above others. Rather he honored and respected the learned and the pious of every sect, recognizing such conduct as the way of the court of God,

These laws may sound idealistic to us today, but they were also pragmatic. Religious conflicts could cause ruptures between different families and clans and damage the cohesion of the empire, but now all the steppe peoples, whether Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or like him, a worshipper of Tengri and the great blue sky, would all share equal protection under the law.

Certain religious practices like the slaughter of halal meat were outlawed, sometimes on penalty of death, so it has been contested how much we can really call this religious freedom. But it was still a radical new vision for what kind of state the Mongol Empire could be. On top of these reforms, Chinggis Khan created a new inner heartland for the empire,

This was the original homeland of the Mongols, the region where the rivers Onon, Kheilen, and Toul found their source, and where he had once sheltered from the Tayetut warriors who had hunted him. This was the land centered around the mountain Burkhan Khaldun. Only members of his close family and inner court were allowed to venture into this private land,

It was here that Mongol royalty would bury their dead for centuries to come. At the head of Mongol society sat Genghis Khan and his inner court, which in Mongolian was known as an 'urdu', a word that means something like 'great tent' and is the origin of the English word 'hoard'.

The word "Mongol" itself has a somewhat uncertain origin, perhaps deriving from the Mongolian phrase "monke tengri gal" meaning "eternal sky fire" or from the word "mongu" meaning "silver." It had been used for some time about all the scattered clans like Yesugeis and Temüjins, but now everyone who lived in the empire was considered a Mongol citizen.

but much to the Mongols' frustration, they struggled to get anyone outside of the steppe to call them by that name. For much of their history, people in China, Persia, the Middle East, and Europe all insisted on calling them by the name of what had been, up until then, the largest and most powerful of the steppe peoples, the Tatars.

They did this sometimes out of calculated disrespect and sometimes out of genuine confusion, and despite Mongol insistence that they were not Tatars but Mongols, the name stuck. Still, despite all the reforms of Chinggis Khan, Mongol society still remained a fragile entity, and its people still lived lives of poverty and subsistence in the harsh land of the steppe.

Genghis Khan knew that his people would remain united only as long as they had an enemy to fight together. If no such enemy arose, they would return to their old ways, fight one another, and tear his new empire apart.

Partly for this reason, he began to cast his gaze beyond the high plateau of the Mongolian steppe and hunger for wars of conquest and the riches they could bring. While the Jin and Sung divided the river plains of China between them, there was a third smaller kingdom to their west, known as the Western Xia,

This was located partly in the hilly upper reaches of the Yellow River and the dry desert regions to the north of the Tibetan Plateau, known as the He Shi Corridor. This had been a strategic trade route for the past thousand years since the time of the Han dynasty, and it's through this narrow passage that the vast majority of Silk Road goods passed on huge caravans of Bactrian camels.

Like the Jin, the Western Xia were a conquest dynasty ruled by a people known as the Tanguts, nomadic Buddhists from the region of Tibet. Their society was a hybrid including both nomadic herders not unlike the Mongols and settled cities full of Chinese, Turkic, and Tibetan peoples with a booming economy based on Silk Road trade.

This was the smallest and weakest kingdom bordering the steppe, and it had recently sheltered some enemies of Chinggis Khan who had fled from his conquest. For this reason, the Tanguts were the first prey upon which he set his sights. At first, the Mongols initiated a series of raids on their border forts, testing their defenses.

But in the year 1209, Chinggis Khan gathered his horde and descended on their borders. When they got news that the Khan was marching on their lands, the Tanguts sent out messengers begging for help from their neighbors, the powerful Jin and Song dynasties in the south. But neither the Jin nor the Song sent any aid.

The ruler of the Jin Dynasty, known as Prince Xiao of Wei, is even recorded to have sent the following dismissive reply. It is to our advantage when our enemies attack one another. Wherein lies the danger to us? As we will see, this pattern would repeat itself in almost all the lands that the Mongols arrived in.

At various points, a coordinated and united response might have stopped their advance, but everywhere, local rivalries prevented anyone from uniting against them. In the desert regions, the Mongols easily overwhelmed the Tangut armies, but the walled cities of western Sia proved to be a much greater obstacle.

The Mongols had no siege equipment, no ladders or battering rams, no catapults or engineers, and so all they could do was surround the fortresses, gaze up at their towering walls, and try to starve the Tangut people into surrender.

This was highly unpalatable for Mongol warriors who delighted in moving quickly, striking fast, and always finding new grasslands for their horses. The Mongols encircled the Tanguts in their capital of Yinchuan, but it was a powerful fortress guarded by an army of 150,000 soldiers.

At the sight of the Mongol army, the Tanguts simply disappeared behind their walls and refused to be baited out for battle. In an act of desperation, at one point the Mongols even attempted to dam the Yellow River in the hope of redirecting it into the city, flooding it, and undermining the foundations of its walls. But the river instead flooded the Mongols' camp.

Still, the Tanguts had had enough of the destruction and soon sued for peace. The secret history of the Mongols records their plea to the great Khan.

If Genghis Khan shows us favor, then we, the Tangut people, shall bring forth many camels reared in the shelter of the tall feather grass. We shall weave woolen material and make satin, and then we shall give them to you. Training falcons to fly loose at game, we shall gather them, and all the best ones we shall send to you.

Sources in southern Song China recorded the subjugation of the Tanguts with a mixture of contempt and amusement. From their perspective, a hated rival had been bested by mere barbarians. The Song writer Li Xinquan records this event with a sneer.

The Black Tatars became increasingly powerful. Having gradually unified the clan lands, they then raised a great army and attacked Hexi. Within several years, all the districts and prefectures of Hexi had been sacked. They even forcibly carried off a false princess of the Xia kingdom in departing, and the Xia actually had to serve them as vassals. In the decades that followed, the situation would not seem so amusing to the Song dynasty.

The conquest of the western Hsieh had proven the effectiveness of the Mongol war machine, but it had also exposed a number of glaring weaknesses. Walled cities had frustrated and slowed the Mongol advance, and it became clear that if they hoped to tackle even larger prey, something would have to change.

One Chinese writer, Xu Ting, records how the Mongol conquest of the Tanguts set the stage for ever greater expansion. "The Tatars in the beginning were primitively ignorant and lacked even a single of the known crafts. Only later, when they conquered the Westerners, did they begin to have products, craftsmen and mechanisms. The craftsmanship of the Westerners is extremely refined.

Especially fine are their instruments of siege warfare. But the Tanguts simply ruled over the trade corridor that transported the goods from east to west. Genghis Khan knew that even greater wealth could be found in the lands where those goods were actually produced, the lands of China. All he needed was an excuse for war.

That would come with the death of the Golden Khan of the Jin Dynasty in the year 1208 AD. When the old Golden Khan of the Jin died, his young son, Prince Xiao of Wei, took the throne. This young man had heard of the rise of Genghis Khan to the north of the Gobi Desert, the mysterious character who had united the peoples of the steppe.

but it had so far not particularly troubled him, other than the annoying fact that this new ruler had stopped paying him tribute. The new Golden Khan ruled a sprawling empire of more than 50 million people, perhaps the most populous and powerful in the world at the time. Their armies totaled 600,000 men, mostly comprised of armored pikemen and crossbowmen.

They commanded perhaps the most technologically advanced forces on earth, even experimenting with early gunpowder weaponry. On top of that, their steppe roots in the region of Manchuria meant that they still fielded a mighty cavalry force of more than 150,000 horsemen dispersed as cavalry divisions among their various armies. The Mongols looked weak in comparison,

Their forces totaled no more than about a hundred thousand horse archers, with not a single foot soldier among them, and the Jin were confident that no one could lead an army across the Gobi Desert large enough to threaten them. For this reason, this young Jin emperor had every reason to be confident. One Song Chinese writer, Zhao Gong, recalls their attitude.

The djinn said about the Tartars, our country is like the sea. Your country is like two handfuls of sand. How could you shake us? The Tartars to this day, young and old, can all remember these words. It's perhaps this confidence that would lead to the terrible mistake he would make in the year 1210 AD.

Every new emperor began his reign by sending out envoys to the empire's subjects, those kingdoms and peoples who had sworn allegiance to his father, to ask them to swear loyalty to him in turn and recommit to whatever tribute they had previously been paying.

As part of this process, he sent one envoy across the Gobi Desert to demand that their previous Zhu-Yin border guard, Chinggis Khan, come south and make a gesture of loyalty and submission to the new golden Khan of the Jin. When the envoys arrived, they would have met with Chinggis Khan, who was now nearly 50 years old.

If he had ever seen the value in bowing and scraping to the lords of the south, those days were now very much behind him. When the Chinese envoys met him, they asked him to send word of his submission to the Jin. The later Chinese source, the Yuan Shi, describes what happened next. Chinggis Khan asked the Jin messengers, "Who is the new emperor?"

The messengers of the Emperor replied, "The Prince of Wei." Genghis Khan turned his face to the south, spat in that direction, and said, "I thought that the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom should be a man blessed by heaven. Can he be such an ordinary and weak man? Why should I show him respect?" Then he mounted his horse and rode to the north,

The jinn envoys left, shaken at their encounter, and Chinggis Khan deliberated on his course of action. His insult to the jinn would likely bring a military response, that is, unless he moved first. But he must have been full of doubts and fears about taking on such a powerful enemy. To find the best course of action, he would need to speak to his god.

To do this, he climbed up the slopes of the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun through the forests of larch and elegant Siberian pine, and there on its stony peak, surrounded by twisted rock formations, he prayed to Tengri, the god of the great blue sky, to ask him what to do. According to the secret history,

When the sun rose on the fourth day, Chinggis Khan emerged with his answer. "The eternal blue sky has promised us victory and vengeance." In the spring of 1211, the vast horde of the Mongols gathered and set out on its march south across the Gobi Desert. The sight of this force would have been terrifying,

Overhead, pennants and banners flew, and at the head of the army flew the great spirit banner of Chinggis Khan, woven from the tail hairs of hundreds of black horses. Every Mongol warrior rode with five spare mounts at a time, so with an army of a hundred thousand horsemen, they would have brought with them an extra half a million horses, and probably the same number of sheep and goats.

With them also came giant supply carts pulled by as many as 20 oxen and thousands of Bactrian camels, some carrying enormous drums that were beaten to signal the men and rally them for battle. This was an invasion force, but it was also a mass migration - an enormous traveling city designed to flatten everything in its path.

The people who would have stood and watched this pandemonium approaching across the desert in a great cloud of dust were known as the Ongut. They were a desert people that for years had been serving as Zhu-Yin border guards for the Jin, keeping their empire safe from steppe raiders. But upon seeing the enormous Mongol army approaching, the Ongut reassessed their position.

These border nomads welcomed the Mongols as brothers and even showed them the most direct route south through the narrow mountain passes, right into the heart of the Jin lands. The invasion of China had begun.

The Mongols' strategy was always to attack in multiple places at once, sowing maximum fear and confusion and giving the appearance that their forces were much more numerous than they were. For this reason, while Genghis Khan led his forces in the west, his general Jebei led an army into the east. The Song Chinese writer Zhao Gong describes what happened next.

Tumujin, indignant over their bullying and insults, invaded the frontier. The frontier prefectures were all conquered and their people killed. The Mongols took these border forts and then crossed through the mountains. They first met Jin resistance at a place called Badger's Mouth Pass, and there they smashed the Jin army sent to face them.

The Mongols broke through the mountains by autumn of 1211 and spilled out into the Chinese heartland. For the next three years, the Mongols pillaged the entire North China Plain, and for much of this time, the Jin were powerless to stop them. Part of the reason for this was the immense mobility of Mongol armies.

Jin armies were enormous and well-equipped, but they were also slow. Typically containing twice as many infantry as cavalry, they lumbered across the land at a snail's pace and needed to be constantly supplied with food brought by wagon along precarious supply routes. Meanwhile, the Mongols could disappear and reappear anywhere they liked,

allowing them to ambush and destroy whole Jin armies in the field, and everything the Mongols needed they brought with them. Their horseback armies lived on milk and meat from their animals, and in times of difficulty would even open up a vein on their horses' necks and drink the blood directly from their mouths.

They would place strips of raw meat under their saddles in the morning so that the flesh was tenderized throughout the day of riding so that it could be eaten raw in the evening. In this way, they could camp without lighting fires that would give away their position to enemy scouts. One Jin officer, Tu Shanyi, gave the following appraisal of the desperate situation.

"Since the Mongolian army is on horseback, it goes into the plain in only one body, but we defend ourselves divided. Our defeat is certain." The Mongols relied on surprise and deception in a way that completely blindsided the Jin generals, who conducted their wars according to a long-established system of martial honor.

One Song Chinese writer named Peng Dayar describes their array of inventive and unscrupulous tactics. The Tartars do things that are not addressed in the ancient techniques. If the enemy puts up a strong defense, then all the Tartars' plans fail to penetrate. They drive cattle at them or lash wild horses toward them, using animals to disturb the enemy's ranks. Seldom does it fail to defeat them.

When their own troops are few, sometimes the Tartars will drag branches behind them, making dust rise to the heavens and leading the enemy to suspect that their troops are many. When victorious, they dog the enemy's tail until the last man is killed, not permitting any to escape. But if they are the ones defeated, they scatter in all four directions, beyond pursuit. The Mongols had learned how to turn the Jin's great strengths against them.

One of these strengths was their large population and the other their powerful walled cities, but these could also be weaknesses. The Mongols exploited these by borrowing tactics that they had learned hunting animals on the steppe. They would devastate the countryside for miles around, which drove vast numbers of refugees towards the only safe places left, the walled cities.

Soon, they would be flooded with desperate and hungry people, and their storehouses ran out of food. These mighty fortresses now became tombs from which no one could escape. The Mongols also rounded up huge numbers of peasants from the countryside and forced them to work, filling in defensive ditches and moats, pushing siege engines, and dismantling the city's defenses.

Each Mongol warrior was tasked with gathering up ten peasants for this purpose. The defenders on the city walls were left with the brutal choice of allowing their defenses to be destroyed by these unwilling laborers or using up their arrows to slaughter their own people. The Chinese writer Li Xinchuan describes this ruthless tactic.

In the cities, villagers were drafted as soldiers and sent up onto the walls to defend them. The Tartars drove their family members onto the attack, and fathers and sons and older and younger brothers would often shout at each other from afar in mutual recognition. For this reason, the people had no will to fight, and all the walled towns that the Tartars reached surrendered at the first drum roll.

Prisoners of war were also conscripted to fight for their Mongol captors, with the promise that if they proved themselves in battle, they would be freed and allowed to join the Mongol army. But despite their reputation for brutality, Chinggis Khan and his warriors also practiced the judicious use of restraint. Sieges were costly and time-consuming,

and he hoped that by showing mercy to those cities that surrendered without a fight, he would increase the likelihood of others doing the same. Cities that opened their gates to the Mongols were thoroughly looted of their treasure, but their people were spared. Still, those cities that resisted were slaughtered mercilessly, and in the countryside, the death and destruction was rampant, as Li Xinquan describes.

The massacre of the people was almost total. Gold, silk, boys, girls, cattle, sheep, horses, and other livestock all were rolled up like a mat and carried off. Houses and cottages were burned down. The walls and ramparts became deserted ruins.

It's likely that the Mongols had not intended to undertake a full invasion of China, but more like a series of large raids into these wealthy lands. But the more success they met with, the longer they decided to stay. As the war entered its second and third years, and the Mongol armies still rampaged unchecked, the Jin became desperate.

They began drafting civilians into their army en masse and even pardoned any criminal who would take up arms and fight. But the Mongols could not be stopped. Soon, they were pushing far enough south to reach the Jin capital on the site of modern Beijing, then known as Chengdu. They laid eyes on the walls of the city in the year 1214, three years after the war had started.

Beijing at the time was among the largest cities on earth. Records show that it had a population of nearly a million people and was defended by an 18-kilometer rectangle of rammed earth walls rising up to 12 meters high, broken by 12 gates and 900 guard towers, ringed by a triple moat.

Its walls were topped with powerful crossbows and trebuchets capable of hurling projectiles more than 300 meters. The Mongols laid siege of the city but had little success in breaking through its defenses. Even for them, this final prize must have seemed like a step too far.

They were now dangerously overstretched, a long way from home, and facing some of the world's most formidable fortifications. On top of that, the climate didn't suit them. Summer in this part of the world was hot, and plague was beginning to spread among their army. Their men and horses were exhausted, and they increasingly longed to return to the cool lands of Mongolia.

Genghis Khan sent word to the Jin Emperor that he was willing to accept terms for peace with the following demands for tribute: "God has made you so weak that should I further molest you, I fear how heaven would judge me. I am willing to withdraw my army. What provision will you make to still the demands of my officers?

Many in the Jin court urged the emperor to keep fighting. They argued that the shame of surrendering to these barbarians would be too great for the dynasty to bear, and the city of Beijing could never be taken while a determined force defended it. But luckily for the Mongols, the political situation in the Jin Empire was rapidly disintegrating.

Having lost the confidence of his court after two years of failure, the young Golden Khan of the Jin, the Prince of Wei, had been assassinated the year earlier and his nephew was placed on the throne by a military coup. This man named Xuanzhong of Jin was now facing another plot in the palace that threatened to topple him.

Rather than deal with both the Mongols and his own treacherous courtiers, he decided to finally sue for peace. He accepted a humiliating series of conditions, recognizing himself as a vassal to Chinggis Khan, giving the Khan one of his daughters to marry, and massive amounts of gold, silver, and silk, along with 500 young men and women of the court to take away as slaves.

With these crushing terms, the war came to an end. The lands of northern China breathed a sigh of relief, and the Mongols rode north towards the Gobi Desert and home. The Jin Emperor had seemingly averted further disaster, but he would soon make a critical mistake. Summer was still here, and the Gobi Desert was too hot to cross.

For that reason, Genghis Khan camped on the southern side of the desert and waited for the cool months to come before they could return to Mongolia with the vast treasure of their successful raid in tow. But then, the Khan got news of something that would send him flying into a rage. Word reached him that the new Jin Emperor was fleeing Beijing,

The embattled ruler was taking his forces and what remained of his treasury with him, and retreating far into the south to the old fortress of Kaifeng on the other side of the Yellow River, an obstacle that the Mongols had not yet been able to cross. This seemed like a clear sign that the jinn did not intend to keep their word. One chronicler recalls the enraged words of Chinggis Khan,

The Jin Emperor made an agreement with me, but now he has moved his capital south. Evidently, he mistrusts my word and has used the peace to deceive me." Instead of crossing the desert and returning to his own lands, Genghis Khan wheeled his forces back around and marched once again to the capital of Beijing. The writer Li Xinquan describes what happened next.

In Moon 5, the Jin ruler moved the capital to Kaifeng. The Tatars heard about this and said, "To move right away after making peace? This shows they are suspicious and still harbor resentment. They purposely talked peace only as a means to forestall us." In the autumn, Moon 8, they again led troops to attack the counties and prefectures of the central plains.

With the emperor gone, along with all his personal troops, the city's people were left all but defenseless. The remaining citizens' garrison of Beijing held out for eight agonizing months of siege. Starvation soon spread. The Jin made several attempts to relieve the city from the south, but each army they sent was intercepted and ambushed on the road.

For the city's defenders, it soon became clear that no reinforcements would be coming. On this realization, whole divisions of Jin soldiers, particularly of the semi-nomadic Khitan people, simply switched sides and joined the Mongols. On the 1st of June 1215, the Mongols finally broke through the walls.

As a punishment for holding out so long and for the betrayal of the Jin Emperor, the Mongols sacked the city and huge numbers of its people were put to the sword. The writer Li Xinxuan describes the destruction. "The grandeur and beauty of Beijing's palaces were the crowning achievement of ancient and modern times.

When the Tartars saw them, they were so stunned and frightened they did not dare look up. Yet, not long afterward, the fires set by their soldiers would burn for over a month." What had once been the Golden Jin Empire now fractured into countless feuding warlords fighting over territory, some loyal to the Mongols, others defecting to the Song Chinese in the south,

and many others still simply out for themselves. All imperial authority north of the Yellow River collapsed. One Jin Dynasty poet, a blind man named Zhao Yuan, wrote a poem about this time that he called The Song of Helplessness. The eastern barbarians charge and raid the fields of the western mountains. God willing, they will fester eternally.

With Beijing in ruins, Genghis Khan left one of his generals behind in China to mop up the remnants of the Jin. But it would not be as easy as he thought.

and the final conquest of northern China would take many more years. In the south, the Song Chinese watched the destruction with delight. Their old enemies had been utterly smashed, and with the delightful irony that it had come at the hands of another barbarian people.

The writer Zhao Gong describes with amusement how members of the former Jin government and royal family were now reduced to the level of manual labourers. There are great men of the vanquished Jin who have gotten mixed up in odd jobs, falling as low as butchering and peddling, or leaving to become bandits. All of them are still referred to by their old government titles.

One family has a number of men who push carts around the towns and who still call themselves Commissioner of Transport." The destruction of the Mongol invasion left its marks everywhere in the landscape. City walls had been torn down. In places, crops had been destroyed since the Mongols deliberately rode their horses over the fields so that the land could return to pastures for their animals.

and the event sent reverberations around the world. Sometime afterwards, a delegation of diplomats traveled to China from the region of Central Asia to investigate what had happened. They arrived at the ruins of Beijing, and the scenes of carnage that they witnessed they later related to the Persian scholar Juzjani, who recounts them like something out of a nightmare.

When we arrived near to the seat of the government of the Golden Khan, from a considerable distance a high white mound appeared in sight. We supposed that that white eminence was perhaps a hill of snow, and we made inquiries of the guides and the people of that part about it. They replied, "The whole of it is the bones of men slain."

When they reached the city walls, they found similar scenes of slaughter.

On reaching the gate of the city, we perceived, in a place under a bastion of the citadel, an immense quantity of human bones collected. Inquiry was made, and people replied that, on the day the city was captured, 60,000 young girls threw themselves from this bastion of the fortress and destroyed themselves, in order that they might not fall captive into the hands of the Mongol forces.

and that all these were their bones. The scholar Juzjani was a fierce critic of the Mongols and has been criticized for his colorful exaggerations that occur throughout his writings. He didn't witness these scenes himself and may have exaggerated stories told to him, but either way, it's clear that the destruction of the Jin dynasty left a terrible human toll.

When summer ended, Chinggis Khan rode back across the Gobi Desert with all the gold and assorted riches of northern China packed on the backs of his camels, leaving untold suffering behind him. The bounty of silk alone was so great that Mongol soldiers ran out of uses for it,

They began to use it as packing material and rope to tie up their horses, and used silver jugs as water troughs for their animals. Precious metals, slaves, and other treasure poured north back to Mongolia in a river of gold that seemed never to end. The year was 1215. In the Chinese calendar, the year of the pig was

and the Mongol Empire was now among the wealthiest on earth. History has remembered Chinggis Khan as a bloodthirsty conqueror, a man hell-bent on subjugating the known world. But in fact, most sources suggest that when he left China, conquest was not the first thing on his mind. In fact, he seemed satisfied.

He had made his people wealthier than they had ever dreamed and destroyed all nearby rivals. He now controlled a vast swathe of territory that covered almost the entire length of the Mongolian steppe and the Silk Road trade that flowed across it. The Persian scholar Atta Malik Juveni eulogizes this time of relative peace.

In the latter part of his reign he had brought about complete peace and quiet, and security and tranquility, and had achieved the extreme of prosperity and well-being. The roads were secure and disturbances allayed, so that whatever profit or gain was displayed in the uppermost west or the furthermost east, there merchants would bend their steps.

Genghis Khan's empire now connected the wealthy production areas of Song China with the rich markets of Persia, Central Asia, and the Near East. He wanted to make the most of this profitable route. When it came to the settled societies that bordered him, he seems to have treated his neighbors not as enemies to be conquered but as potential future customers.

For years now, he had been exchanging diplomatic missions with his neighbors to the west. In the year 1218, this culminated in the sending of a great trade delegation

This was a caravan of hundreds of Bactrian camels, along with 450 merchants led by an Indian man named Jafar, who were ordered to head into the west and contact the wealthy empires that existed there in what is today Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

With them, they brought an enormous wealth of goods to trade, as Juzjani recounts, with perhaps some of his characteristic exaggeration. Among the rarities and presents that the Genghis Khan sent was a nugget of pure gold as big as a camel's neck. Also, he dispatched 500 camels laden with gold, silver, and silks, beaver furs, sable, and elegant and ingenious things of China and the desert regions.

This trade delegation was a clear statement of the new empire's power and wealth, all of it looted from the coffers of northern China. It's likely that a large portion of the Mongol elite had invested their treasure in this expedition and had bet heavily on its success. For this reason, Chinggis Khan's reputation among the Mongol lords was also at stake.

During the cooler autumn months, this trade caravan traveled for several weeks through Mongolia, across the Altai Mountains, and over the grasslands and deserts of what is today Kazakhstan. Finally, in November, they arrived at the border of what was then the largest Muslim kingdom in the world, the empire of Khwarezm. Khwarezm was a relatively new power,

Only a century earlier, it had been a small kingdom centered on the powerful city of Gurganj in the Khwarezmian oasis. Here, the lands are watered by the two great rivers, Sir Darya and Amu Darya, which flow down from the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan and the Pamir mountains north of the Hindu Kush.

The oasis cities along these two rivers, Balkh and Bukhara, Samarkand and Merv, were enticing stops after the long weeks on the desert roads. For centuries, they had swelled with wealth from silk road trade. With these riches, they had irrigated their arid lands until they bloomed and fed vast and thriving populations.

But over the preceding century, the Turkic rulers of Gurganj had formed a fruitful partnership with the nomadic people known as the Kipchaks and had recently used their powerful cavalry armies to expand into Turkmenistan and Afghanistan and spilled south into the mountains of Persia. The Khwarezmian Empire was now the largest and wealthiest Muslim power on the planet.

The Persian scholar Atamalek Chuvaini records the beauty of this region. Chorazma to me is the best of lands. May its rain-giving clouds never be blown away. It was the site of the throne of the sultans of the world.

Its corners supported the shoulders of the great men of the age. Its mansions were resplendent with every kind of lofty idea, and its regions and districts were so many rose gardens. Such was the state of that country. The ruler of the new empire of Khwarezm was known as the Khwarezm Shah, and his name was Ala ad-Din Muhammad.

He was a warrior and a conqueror, and proud of it. He had inherited a powerful kingdom from his father, and over the last two decades had expanded its borders even further into a true empire. Some in his court even flattered him that he was the new Alexander, that legends of his conquests would be told for centuries to come.

This flattery made him bold, but also rash and impulsive. This proud shah had agreed to receive the Mongol trade delegation, along with Genghis Khan's offer of friendship, as Juzjani recalls: "The Genghis Khan sent a great number of offerings and said, 'Say unto the Khwarezm shah, I am the sovereign of the sunrise, and thou the sovereign of the sunset.

Let there be between us a firm treaty of friendship and peace, and let traders and caravans on both sides come and go. But when the merchants arrived in the borderlands of Khwarezm, they ran into trouble. The first Khwarezmian town they arrived in was named Otrá.

It sat in the middle of an oasis on the Sir Darya River, and as a crucial junction of several major roads, it was a quintessential silk road trading town. If you walked its streets during this time, they would have been heaving with merchant traffic, sounds of prayer from the mosques, vendors crying their wares, and the sounds of camels noisily watering after long days on the desert roads.

But the governor of Otra had a foolhardy nature. His name was Inalchuk and he was an uncle of the Khwarezm Shah, the brother of the Shah's mother, and this gave him a great deal of power. The Shah ala ad-Din Muhammad had a complicated relationship with his mother and she had amassed a great deal of influence at court. Some even whispered that she was the real power behind the throne.

and so her brother Inalchuk may have believed he could do whatever he pleased. When he saw the Mongol caravan passing through his lands, packed with gold and fine silks, Inalchuk hungered after their cargo.

Some sources claim that he acted on the orders of the shah himself, while others say that he acted alone. But we know that when the caravan passed through Otra, Inalçuk accused the merchants of being spies. He ordered that they be arrested immediately and their goods seized.

In the struggle, the merchants were killed, and their gold and silks and other goods were taken to the great market town of Bukhara, where they were sold. The governor in Alchuk of Otra took his cut. He had just become a great deal richer, he might have thought, and what were a bunch of barbarian horsemen 3,000 kilometers away going to do about it?

Atamalek Juvaini describes the magnitude of this man's mistake: "In executing his command, he deprived these men of their lives and possessions. Nay, rather he desolated and laid waste a whole world. For every drop of their blood there would flow a whole river. In retribution for every hair on their heads, a hundred thousand heads would roll in the dust at every crossroad.

In exchange for every dinar, a thousand were exacted. Far away in the Mongol heartlands, on the banks of the Onan river, a storm was brewing in the court of the Khan. Genghis Khan was naturally offended when he got word of the attack on his merchants, but he assumed there must have been some mistake.

He sent an envoy of three ambassadors to seek an audience with the Khwarezm Shah and to ask for his uncle Inalchuk to be handed over for punishment. But the Khwarezm Shah, perhaps feeling his mother breathing down his neck, refused the Khan's demands. To make matters worse, he attempted what he must have hoped would look like a show of strength.

When the Khan's ambassadors came before him, he had one of them killed on the spot. Then, he rounded on the other two. He ordered that their beards be shaved and that they be sent back to Mongolia with their humiliation as an answer to the Khan. When these ambassadors returned to Mongolia with their faces shorn and the Shah's words on their lips, Chinggis Khan's rage was seismic.

Just as he had done before his invasion of China, he climbed to the top of the sacred mountain Burqan Khaldun, up through the broken stones and whispering pine needles, and there with the Mongolian wind battering around him, asked the god of the great blue sky what he should do. The secret history records what answer he received.

These tidings had such an effect upon the Khan's mind that the whirlwind of anger flared up with such a flame that it could be quenched only by the shedding of blood. In this fever, Chinggis Khan went up alone to the summit of a hill, bared his head, turned his face towards the earth, and for three days and nights offered up prayer, saying, "'I was not the author of this trouble.'

grant me strength to exact vengeance. Thereupon, he descended from the hill, meditating action and making ready for war." In the year 1219, Genghis Khan gathered a vast force of warriors. At perhaps as many as 200,000 men, it may have been twice the size of the force that had devastated Jin China.

Along with his usual horde of nomadic horsemen, he brought powerful new units of Chinese siege engineers, experts at cracking open city walls with a variety of ingenious engines. With that horde, he marched west. Ahead of him was a journey of thousands of kilometers over deserts and mountains, but steadily the doom of the Khwarezmian Empire drew near.

Juvaini describes the sight that the governor of Otra saw, arriving one day in December in a thunderous cataclysm outside his city walls. He bit the back of his hand in amazement at the unexpected sight.

for he perceived that the plain had become a tossing sea of countless hosts and splendid troops, while the air was full of clamour and uproar and the neighing of armoured horses and the roaring of mail-clad lions. The air became blue, the earth ebony, the sea boiled with the noise of the drums. With his fingers he pointed to the army on the plain, a host to which there was no end.

The Khwarizm Shah had expected the arrival of the Mongol forces, but he had dramatically miscalculated the kind of response that Chinggis Khan would give him. He himself commanded a force of perhaps 400,000 men, twice the size of the Mongol armies, and his cities were among the most fortified in the world.

He was sure that if he shut up his armies in his great walled fortresses, the Mongols would soon run out of farms to burn and sheep herders to rob and would eventually go home. But this would not turn out to be the case. The moment the Mongols arrived, their Chinese siege engineers began to build their engines. Otrara's defenses were formidable, but even these didn't hold out for long.

The Persian scholar Juzjani, a citizen of the Khwarezmian Empire who would flee to India after the Mongol invasion, writes about what happened next. In a short time, they took Otrar. They put both small and great, young and old to the sword and left not a soul alive. They martyred the whole of them. The governor of Otrar in Alchuk was taken alive.

To punish him for his greed in seizing the merchant's gold, Chinggis Khan ordered that he be executed with a cruelly fitting punishment. He had a great quantity of silver melted down, reaching temperatures of nearly a thousand degrees, and then poured the searing molten metal into the man's mouth, eyes, and ears.

The city of Otrá was destroyed and its people slaughtered, its remains a shattered site rising from the arid plains in ragged heaps of fallen stone. But the rage of the Khan had only just begun. Otrá sat on the Sirdaria River, which formed the northernmost border of the Khwarezmian Empire.

Several hundred kilometers to the south, another river, the Amu Darya, ran almost parallel to it and on its banks stood the wealthiest cities of the region, the booming metropolis of Samarkand and the scholarly religious heart of Bukhara. The 10th century Iranian author, Istakhri, who traveled in the region, provides a vivid description of its pleasant landscape.

I know no place in it or in Samarkand itself where if one ascends some elevated ground, one does not see greenery and a pleasant place. The land extends eight days' travel through unbroken greenery and gardens along both sides of the river. And beyond these fields is pasture for flocks. Every town and settlement has a fortress. It is the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.

In it are the best trees and fruits. In every home are gardens, cisterns, and flowing water. It was on these cities that Chinggis Khan now set his sights. But reaching these wealthy cities would be no easy feat.

Between the Mongol armies and the walls of Samarkand and Bukhara lay more than 500 kilometers of sandy desert known as the Kizilkum, a name which means red sands in Turkic languages. This desert was baking hot, and even trade caravans would skirt around its edges rather than risk death in the wastes.

The citizens of Bukhara and Samarkand had heard about the arrival of the Mongols in the north, but they were not particularly worried. Tribal nomads had raided along the northern riverlands before, but no large army could cross the Kizil-Kum desert. But they had severely underestimated the Mongols.

Genghis Khan left his two middle sons, Chagatai and Ogadai, to finish up the siege of Otra with his eldest son Jochi, taking an army north towards the Aral Sea. Meanwhile, he sent two small armies southward into the Fergana Valley with instructions to hunt down and kill the Shah Muhammad.

But Chinggis Khan himself, accompanied by his youngest son Tolui, was determined to do what others had considered impossible, to cross the Qizil-Kum desert with 30,000 horses and strike right at the heart of the empire, the religious center of Bukhara. The crossing would have been hard,

Chinggis Khan employed local men who knew the hidden paths through the wastes and the best time of year to make the journey. In the colder winter months, dew would sometimes form on the ground in certain places, and small plants could grow. With this help, the army successfully made the crossing and arrived on the other side on the 7th of February 1220.

Atamalek Juvaini describes the sight that the citizens of Bukhara saw outside their city walls. In the morning, Genghis Khan arrived unexpectedly before the town. When the inhabitants, unaware, beheld the surrounding countryside choked with horsemen and the air black as night with a dust of cavalry, fright and panic overcame them, and fear and dread prevailed.

His troops were more numerous than ants or locusts, being in their multitude beyond estimation or computation. Detachment after detachment arrived, each like a billowing sea, and encamped round about the town. At the sight of this force, the 20,000 or so soldiers stationed at Bukhara lost all hope of defending their city.

When night fell, they attempted to flee under cover of darkness, but the Mongols spotted them and simply chased them down on the plains. By the light of the moon, the Mongol horsemen hunted and killed every single soldier as though chasing deer on the steppe.

The city of Bukhara surrendered within three days and opened its gates, with only a determined corps of soldiers holed up in its inner citadel. Intriguingly, it's in this moment that we have the only purported instance of Chinggis Khan ever setting foot inside a city.

Usually, when it became clear that a settlement was about to fall to his soldiers, the Khan would leave one of his generals to loot the place while he would return to his camp and his felt-walled tent, his job done. It's clear he had a powerful distaste for cities and for anyone who would voluntarily imprison themselves within their walls and foul-smelling streets.

But when Bukhara opened its great gate, the Persian sources describe him riding into its streets. Bukhara was one of the religious centers of the Muslim world at the time, and its reputation was known far and wide. But the Khan likely hated what he saw,

We can imagine him wrinkling his nose at the pungent aromas of the medieval city, the rats scuttling through the sewers and fish markets and tanneries, the clouds of flies circling over rotting midden heaps and dunghills, all of it so different to the fresh, open grasslands that he knew and loved.

He went straight to the largest and grandest building, the great mosque of the city, which was famed across the Muslim world for its size and opulence. This, he assumed, must be the house of the king, as Atamalek Juvaini recounts: "Jingis Khan asked those present whether this was the place of the Sultan. They replied that it was the house of God.

Then he too got down from the horse, and mounting two or three steps of the pulpit, he exclaimed: "The countryside is empty of food. Fill our horses' bellies!" And the Mongols brought the cases in which the Qurans were kept out into the courtyard of the mosque, where they cast the Qurans right and left, and turned the cases into mangers for their horses.

Then Chinggis Khan gathered the common people of the city in the great mosque of Bukhara. With the pages of the Qur'an still littering the floor, the people must have been terrified, shaking with fear, praying and weeping softly. Then, over their heads, the great Khan's voice rang out. He mounted the pulpit in the festival prayer space and said, "O people,

We don't know if this event truly took place as Giovanni describes,

He was not old enough to witness it himself, but may have heard it secondhand. Or perhaps this episode was an invention of the writer designed to make sense of what happened and explain the destruction of the Mongol invasion in terms that his Muslim readers could understand as a judgment of God. But either way, we know what happened next.

The citizens of Bukhara were rounded up and driven towards the citadel where the shah's forces were still resisting. Just as in China, the citizens were forced to dismantle their own city's defenses and their bodies piled up below the walls. Against this onslaught, the citadel of Bukhara didn't last long.

Chinggis Khan now wielded an army that combined the strength and mobility of the steppe warrior with the technological ingenuity of the Chinese. The combination was terrifying, as Juvaini describes: "On the outside, catapults were erected, bows bent and stones and arrows discharged, and on the inside, ballistas and pots of naphtha were set in motion.

It was like a red-hot furnace fed from without by hard sticks, while from the belly of the furnace sparks shoot into the air. For days they fought in this manner." When the citadel finally fell, Chinggis Khan ordered the city walls to be demolished utterly, and all the soldiers inside were slaughtered. But in return for their speedy surrender, the citizens of the wider city were spared.

Juvaini recalls the simple proposition he offered to the Khwarezmian people. "Let the emirs and great ones and the numerous common people know this: that all the face of the earth, from the going up of the sun to his going down, I have given unto the Khan whosoever shall submit. Mercy shall be shown to him and to his wives and children and household.

This strategy of calculated leniency and brutality was ruthlessly effective, but it could only work if word got around.

For this reason, Chinggis Khan would always allow refugees to flood into other cities around the region, filling people's heads with stories of the vast destruction visited on all who opposed the Khan and his mercy to those who bent the knee. The Arab writer Ibn al-Athir, living in Mosul at the time, recounts the effect of these increasingly outlandish rumors.

This was one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history and the strategy paid off.

With the siege of Bukhara completed, Chinggis Khan now swung around and bore down on the wealthy metropolis of Samarkand. Samarkand was not just a booming trade hub, it was also a mighty fortress and considered by many to be impregnable. It was defended by a large army, even including 20 war elephants brought from India

But at the sight of the Mongol force approaching, and with refugees in its streets spreading tales of terror, the army tasked with guarding its walls simply threw down their spears and surrendered. At the time of prayer, they opened the gate and closed the door of resistance. The Mongols then entered and that day busied themselves with the destruction of the town and its defenses.

The inhabitants drew their feet beneath the skirt of security, and the Mongols in no way molested them. The fall of Samarkand provided uncountable amounts of loot, and the Mongols now found themselves the new owners of some exotic novelties: the 20 Indian war elephants that the Shah had used in his army,

But Chinggis Khan had little use for these beasts. The elephant handlers brought their elephants to Chinggis Khan and demanded elephant food. He asked them what the elephants had lived on before they fell into captivity. They replied, "The grass of the plains." When he heard this, he ordered the elephants be set free to forage for themselves. They were accordingly released, and in the end,

perished of hunger. In return for surrendering, the citizens of Samarkand were spared a massacre. But in other places that surrendered, the Mongols' restraint was misinterpreted as weakness. This was when things could get ugly. One such example was the Khwarezmian city of Nishapur.

Nishapur was the largest metropolitan city on the Silk Road, a vast and wealthy place in what is today northeastern Iran. It sat in a fertile plain at the foot of the Binalud mountain range in a region known as Khorasan. Juvaini describes its beauty: "If the earth may be compared to the heavens, then the lands are like its stars,

And Nishapur, among these stars, is like the fair Venus of the skies. What are men doing in Baghdad and Kufa, seeing that Nishapur is upon the earth? For if there be a paradise on the face of the earth, it is this. And if it is not a paradise, then there is no paradise at all. The Mongols arrived at Nishapur in 1221 AD.

and at first the city took the Khan's deal. It opened its gates and its treasuries to the Mongols, but then the Mongol army departed with their riches and left behind only a handful of governors to keep their hold on the city. The citizens of Nishapur took this withdrawal as a sign that the Mongols didn't intend to hold it.

They soon revolted, killed the small number of Mongol governors, and locked their gates. When they got word of this, the Khan's armies swung back around and laid siege to the city. Still, its fate was not entirely sealed. That was until a single arrow flew down from the city walls and struck one of the Mongol attackers, killing him.

Unfortunately for the people of Nishapur, he was the husband of one of Chinggis Khan's daughters, the great Khan's son-in-law, a man named Tokachar. Until the third day they fought fiercely from the tower of Karakush and discharged quarrels and arrows from the walls and ramparts by an evil chance which was to be the bane of all that people.

An arrow was let fly whereby Dokuchah fell lifeless, the townsmen having made an end of him without recognizing his person. The death of a member of the Mongol royal bloodline was something that Chinggis Khan took extremely seriously. When the city finally fell, he called upon his widowed daughter and told her that she would be allowed to decide the fate of Nishapur.

In her grief and rage, she ordered that the city be utterly destroyed, and every living thing within its walls put to death. They then drove all the survivors, men and women, out onto the plain, and in order to avenge Tokajar, it was commanded that the town should be laid waste in such a manner that the site could be ploughed upon.

and that in the exaction of vengeance not even cats and dogs would be left alive. The destruction of the city was total, and the vengeance of the Khan remorseless in its totality. They severed the heads of the slain from their bodies and heaped them up in piles, keeping those of the men separate from those of the women and children.

Abodes and dwelling places were leveled with the dust. Rose gardens became furnaces. After the fall of the empire's most powerful fortress of Samarkand, the Khwarezmian shah truly began to panic. As his cities fell one by one, the shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad turned tail and fled.

He rode from fortress to fortress as the Mongol armies pursued him, and as he did, he slipped into a deep depression. Juvaini recounts that he began to be plagued with nightmares. He began drinking heavily and spent all his time in the pursuit of pleasures. The terror of the last day was apparent in his condition, and fear and dread were manifest in his speech. For the remainder of his life,

He constantly applied himself to the quaffing of cups of purple wine. One night in his sleep, the Sultan saw luminous persons, their faces scratched, their hair disordered and disheveled, clad in black robes like mourners, who smote their heads and made lamentation. He asked them who they were, and they replied, "We are Islam."

Eventually, with his nightmares and the Mongol horsemen chasing close behind him, the Shah escaped to the most remote hideout he could manage. He took a boat out onto a small island off the coast of the Caspian Sea and hid there. Whenever he halted for a day, the Mongols would overtake him. The Sultan sent for certain emirs and consulted them,

They thought it best for him to seek asylum in one of the islands of the Sea of Abbasgum. He went to one of these islands, where he remained for a while. Then when the report of his presence on the island was spread about, he took the precaution of removing to another island. Finally, the Mongols captured the Shah's capital of Gurganj, and his family fell into the hands of Chinggis Khan.

When the dreadful news reached the Sultan, and he learnt that his small sons had been put to the sword, that his veiled woman-folk had been in the clutches of strangers, and that all of his wedded wives had fallen into the embraces of other men, his head grew dizzy, the world grew dark before his eyes. Then was the pain past remedy, and threatened his very existence, and he preferred death to life.

He writhed in this anguish and agitation and bemoaned this calamity and disaster until he delivered up his soul to God and was released from the sorrow of his life and the trickery of the revolving heavens. Alone on his tiny island, the Shah of the Khwarezmian Empire, Alaa ad-Din Muhammad, died, possibly of dysentery, in the year 1220.

He was buried wrapped in a torn white shirt for a shroud. His empire, now utterly destroyed, passed into the hands of the Mongols. His eldest son, an accomplished warrior named Jalal ad-Din, evaded capture and led a sizable force south in the direction of India, where he intended to continue his resistance.

but he was finally caught by the pursuing Mongol force in the autumn of 1221, and his army was utterly destroyed. Legend has it that Jalal ad-Din only escaped death by leaping his horse into the Indus River and swimming for safety across the rushing torrent of its waters.

The geographer Yaqub al-Hamawi, a citizen of the city of Merv, who fled the advance of the Mongols, wrote about the destruction they left in their wake. Those infidels and heathens roamed through those abodes, so that palaces were erased off the earth, as lines of writing are effaced from paper, and cities became a dwelling for the owl and the raven.

The Arab writer Ibn al-Athir also wrote with palpable sorrow about the horror of those days.

With one stroke, a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert, and the greater part of the living, dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust, and the mighty were humbled. For some years I continued a verse from mentioning this event, deeming it so horrible that I shrank from recording it,

"Oh, would that my mother had not borne me, or that I had died and become a forgotten thing before this Bethel. It is unlikely that mankind will see the like of this calamity until the world comes to an end and perishes." The conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire had taken four years.

It had wiped some of the world's largest cities off the map and cost countless lives, and by the end of it, Genghis Khan's empire was the largest that the world had ever seen. By this time, Genghis Khan was in his 60s, and he was beginning to think with increasing trepidation about his own mortality.

During his campaign in Persia, he invited a Chinese Daoist monk named Master Changchun to visit him in the hopes that this wise man might have some answer about how a man could live forever. This holy man's journey is recorded in a text called "The Account of the Perfect Master Changchun's Journey to the West."

In it, he describes his journey over the Mongolian steppe. "On the fifth day of the third month, we began traveling in a northeasterly direction. All around us we saw human habitation, nothing but black carts and white tents, and herders following the grass and water to pasture their animals.

When we passed out of the marshy plains, there was not even the smallest tree or shrub. Only yellow dust clouds and white grasses were in sight. On his journey, he saw everywhere the signs of the great war that was unfolding and passed by a number of battlefields left by the passage of the Mongol armies into the west. The stony gorge on the south was unbearably alarming.

On both sides, precipices held up the towering sky, and the chilly surge of a mountain stream flowed and rolled over the ground. People covered their noses because of corpses strewn about the narrow path. But it was the long-eared donkeys drowned in the stream that sickened my heart. War has raged for ten years, and over huge distances.

When he finally arrived in Samarkand after months of travel, he found the city half empty. Many of its inhabitants fled and its walls and defences torn down. In the second month of winter, on the eighteenth day, we crossed a large river and reached north of the city of Samarkand. Before the Sultan was defeated, there were more than a hundred thousand households in the city.

Since the fall of the city, only one in four remains. Finally, he reached the court of the great Khan. When he arrived, Chinggis Khan had one question on his mind. Refreshments and drinks were served and then the emperor asked, "Now that you have come all this way, what secret elixir for long life can you provide me?" But the Taoist master would disappoint him.

It's clear from this that Genghis Khan was beginning to fear that he did not have long left.

A hunting accident also seems to have frightened him and brought the question of his mortality to the forefront of his mind. "On the eighth day, the emperor went hunting in the foothills of the eastern mountains and shot at a large boar. His horse tripped and he lost control. The boar stood nearby not daring to advance until his entourage rushed in with another horse.

The hunt was called off and the emperor returned. When the master heard about the incident, he went to remonstrate with the emperor, saying, "Your falling from your horse is a warning from heaven." The emperor responded, saying, "I have already come to this deep realization." For two months thereafter, he did not go out to hunt.

The man who had brought so much death to other lands now felt its icy hand on his own shoulder. Genghis Khan's concern wasn't just for his own life. Now in his 60s, he began to realize too late that he had not sufficiently prepared for the inevitable question of his succession.

He would pass on to his heirs the largest land empire that history would ever know, but when he looked at his four sons by his chief empress Borta, he found them totally unprepared to take on such a burden. It's likely that his plan was a simple one. His empire would be divided into a kaleidoscope of different provinces, and over these, three of his sons would rule.

but he would ensure that each held possessions in the other's lands so that none would be tempted to go to war. Above these three brothers would sit the fourth son who would rule the entire empire in his place as the great Khan. The system was well conceived, but it would depend on the cooperation of every one of his sons.

and for a number of reasons, that is the one thing that Chinggis Khan did not have. He had brought his four sons, Jochi, Chagatai, Ogadei, and Tolui with him on the Khwarezmian campaign, and they had each led armies and fought bravely. But throughout the war, trouble had been brewing.

Just as he and his half-brother Begta had once quarreled over fish and rabbits, now his sons fought over cities and kingdoms. First, let's take a look at the character of each of his sons. The eldest of Genghis Khan's sons was Jochi, but his life had been lived under a cloud of suspicion.

He was the son whose name meant guest, as though he was simply a visitor who was being shown courtesy by the rest of the family. He had been born shortly after Chinggis Khan's wife, Borta, was kidnapped by the Merkit forest people, and no one could know for sure whether Chinggis Khan was truly his father. Still, the Khan had all his life treated Jochi as one of his sons,

and Jochi also had the strongest desire to prove himself. He was a courageous leader who always charged right into the heart of the fight. Whatever the truth of his fatherhood, he had spent his life living up to the reputation of his father. But while Genghis Khan seems to have set the issue of his parenthood aside, his other sons couldn't forget it so readily.

Next in line was Chinggis Khan's second son, Chagatai. Chagatai was hot-headed and proud, and all his life had resented his older brother Jochi. When Chinggis Khan looked at Jochi and Chagatai, it's hard to imagine that he didn't see the similarity between himself and his older brother Begta, and remember, perhaps now with a little sadness, how that story had ended.

with Begta lying dead in the long grass of the steppe. All his life, Chagatai had felt sure that Jochi was not his father's son, and he treated his older brother with contempt. Silently, he feared that the throne of the great Khan would be given to his older brother, in his eyes a usurper and the son of the Merkit who raped his mother.

In hope of mending the relationship between these two brothers, Genghis Khan had given them a joint mission in the last war to capture the Khwarezm Shah's capital of Gurganj. But the plan had been a disaster. The defenders of the city put up a fearsome resistance that lasted six months, and the brothers were forced to burn it down in order to push them back. Since the city would belong to Jochi once it was captured,

Chagatai cared little about how much damage was done to it, whereas Jochi wished to protect its buildings, even at the cost of Mongol lives. Chinggis Khan had hoped to capture the jewel of this empire intact, but now Guganch was a ruin and the city would never regain its former splendor.

This episode seems to have been just another point of bitter contention between the two brothers and a warning about the burning resentments smoldering between them. The third brother was named Ogaday. He was charismatic and larger than life, a barrel-chested man with an unusually large beard for a Mongol. He had a jovial personality and a love of feasting and drinking.

He was a capable general, but he did have one overriding weakness. That was his raging alcoholism. Like many Mongols, Ogedei was a big drinker, but even by Mongol standards, his habit went too far. At one point, his older brother Chagatai had appointed an official to monitor Ogedei's drinking, but it was no good.

Ogedei evaded his watcher and drank himself silly regardless. One common story about him describes how he promised his brothers that he would half the number of cups he drank every night, but he simply ordered a new cup to be made that was twice the size, and so his drinking went on.

Still, Ogade was diplomatic and generous, and as a result, was well-liked by all. The final brother was Tolui. He was the youngest of the four, a calculating and formidable warrior, and he had a famed streak of cruelty.

During the conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire, he had been sent to pacify the region of Khorasan and pass through the region dealing out death on a scale that was unusual even for Mongols. He had been leading the army responsible for the massacre at Nishapur, and he repeated the same genocidal violence at the great cities of Merv and Herat.

At these settlements, he promised the inhabitants that he would spare them if they surrendered. But unlike his father, he went back on his word. When they opened the gates, he ordered that every living person be put to the sword. Interestingly, Mongol tradition often held that the youngest son should inherit his father's property as a kind of social welfare.

It was assumed that by the time their father died, the older brothers would have already amassed their own wealth, whereas the youngest had the most need of an inheritance. This rule had never been applied to titles which were supposed to be appointed to the most worthy candidate, but it must have been playing on everyone's minds as the question of the Khan succession became ever more pressing.

It was these four sons that Chinggis Khan summoned to a fateful Kurultai, a meeting of the clans in 1223 at a region called Kulanbashi in modern Kazakhstan. Jochi, the man of uncertain fatherhood, Chagatai, the hot-headed and embittered would-be older brother, Ogadei, the stocky wine-soaked drinker, and Tolui, the cold-hearted warrior,

and in the smoke-filled atmosphere of his great tent, he told them that there they would decide who would rule the empire after he was gone. The secret history records that one of his wives, Yesui, urged him to choose his successor in the following words: "Living beings who are born to this world are not eternal.

When your body, like a great old tree, will fall down, to whom will you give your people, which is like tangled hemp? When your body, like the stone base of a pillar, will collapse, to whom will you bequeath your people, which is like a flock of birds? Of your four sons, the heroes whom you have begotten, which one will you designate as your successor?

But the Kurultai got off to a bad start. First, Chinggis Khan asked his oldest son Jochi to speak, and this sign of apparent favor enraged his hot-headed younger brother Chagatai. He said, The eldest of my sons is Jochi. What do you, Jochi, say? Speak up!

But before Jochi could utter a sound, Chagatai said, "Do you mean that you will appoint Jochi as your successor? How can we let ourselves be ruled by this bastard son of a Merkit?" The effect of this pronouncement was explosive. At these words, Jochi rose and grabbing Chagatai by the collar said, "I have never been told by my father the Khan that I was different from my brothers.

How can you discriminate against me? In what skill are you better than I? Only in your pig-headedness could you possibly exceed me. Chinggis Khan watched his sons fighting in silence. Seeing the flames of the hearth fire dance in their eyes, perhaps he remembered the words of his mother Oelun on the day that he and Kassar had killed their brother Begta.

Suddenly, his great voice boomed out, trembling with anger. "Before you were born, the starry sky was turning upon itself. The many people of the Felt Tents were in turmoil. They fought against each other. At such time, your mother was abducted. It was not her wish. It happened at a time when one man slew another.

She was not in love with someone else. You speak so as to harden the butter of your mother's affection, so as to sow the milk of that lady's heart. Were you two not born from the same belly? Were you two not issued from a single womb? These were almost the same words that his mother, Oolun, had once used on him, the same words that the legendary Alain the Beautiful had said to her quarreling sons.

The brothers were chastened, and perhaps realizing that they had harmed both of their own chances, Chagatai suggested another candidate that everyone could agree on. "I shall not dispute Jochi's strength, nor shall I reply to his claims of skill. But it is Ogedei among us who is steady and reliable. Let us, therefore, agree on Ogedei.

So he spoke, and at these words Chinggis Khan said, "What do you say, Jochi? Speak up!" Whereupon Jochi said, "Chagatai has just said it. Chagatai and I shall, in cooperation with each other, serve the Khan. Let us agree on Ogedei." From this moment on, the drunken but charismatic Ogedei would be the heir to the Mongol Empire.

After that explosive meeting, the brothers rode off in all directions, never to be reunited. The oldest son, Jochi, was most wounded by Genghis Khan's decision and would never see his father again. Wearied by this conflict in his family, the great Khan set out back to Mongolia, arriving there in spring of 1225.

Perhaps those who saw him there felt a change come over him. The life of the great Khan was coming to an end. In the year 1225, Genghis Khan set out on what would be his final military campaign.

It would be against the Tanguts of western Xir, the Tibetan Buddhists he had already conquered on his way to northern China. In the years since, they had become unreliable allies and were beginning to rebel against his rule. With the Khwarezmian empire conquered, he now wanted to punish the Tanguts for their impudence. He marched into their lands and laid waste to them,

But on this campaign, while travelling through the hot deserts of the western regions, Chinggis Khan fell from his horse, as the secret history records: "Chinggis Khan, riding his steed named Red Earth Grey, on the way hunted the many wild asses of Arbuka.

When the wild asses passed close by them, his horse took fright. Chinggis Khan fell, and his body being in great pain, he halted at Chokat. He spent that night there, and the following morning his wife, Yesui Khatun, said, Princes and commanders,

consult each other on what to do. The Khan has spent the night, his body hot with fever. The summer heat made the Khan's condition worse and so his men took him up into the nearby mountains of Liupan, densely forested with Chinese pine and dragon spruce, just beginning to turn to their autumn colours.

Not long after, the great Khan's illness worsened and he died at the end of August in the year 1227. The Secret History of the Mongols records his passing in brief terms. Genghis Khan came back and in the year of the pig,

ascended to heaven. There is much debate over what exactly killed Chinggis Khan. There are several outlandish myths that circulate around the circumstances of his death. Some more colorful versions fill his passing with dramatic irony. Imagining a Tangut princess killing and castrating him when he tries to force her into bed,

But most chronicles simply mention an illness that fell on him suddenly. Among them, the Persian historian Atamalek Juvaini. When Genghis Khan returned from the lands of the West to his old incumbent in the East, he was overcome by an incurable disease arising from the unpleasantness of the climate.

Some modern scholars have even suggested that he was an early casualty of the bubonic plague which would soon spread westwards across Eurasia and cause death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. The Chinese language source, The History of Yuan or Yuan Shi, records that on the 18th of August, the Khan felt unwell with a fever and eight days later he died.

Such a rapid pace of decline could point to the Black Death being the cause. Whatever the cause of his death, the Khan's body was soon prepared for burial. Mongols of this time held a great taboo around speaking about death, and so we actually know little about the deaths of many of the characters in this story.

Some, like Chinggis Khan's wife Borta, simply disappear from records altogether and we have no information about when or how she died. As for the Khan, some believe that he was probably buried close to where his army was situated, somewhere in Ningxia among the Liu-Pan mountains, but other sources record a more dramatic version of events.

The Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who traveled to Mongolia nearly half a century later, wrote the following account that was told to him.

All the Grand Khans and all the descendants of Chinggis, their first lord, are carried to a mountain to be interred. Wherever so the sovereign may die, he is carried to his burial in that mountain with his predecessors. No matter if the place of his death were a hundred days' journey distant, there must he be carried to his burial."

Mongol religious beliefs held that the bodies of the dead should never be disturbed. For this reason, Marco Polo also recounts that the Mongols were determined that no one should ever find the grave of the great Khan, that his body would forever lie undisturbed, and that they went to extraordinary lengths to make sure its location remained a secret.

When they are carrying the body of any emperor to be buried with the others, the convoy that goes with the body puts to the sword all whom they fall in with on the road. They do the same too with horses, for when the emperor dies, they kill all his best horses in order that he may have the use of them in the other world as they believe.

And I tell you as a certain truth that when one Khan died, more than 20,000 persons who chanced to meet the body on its way were slain in the manner I have told." While these accounts may be an exaggeration, what is sure is that the Mongol soldiers fenced off a large area of land around the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun, marking it with a fence of arrows stuck in the ground.

Other than the closest royal family of the Khan, no one was allowed to enter this forbidden zone on pain of death, with guards permanently stationed on its perimeter. The later Mongol historian Sagan Sechen describes the body of Chinggis Khan being removed to his native Mongolia on a two-wheeled wagon, escorted by his great army.

On the way, one of the Khan's old friends began to sing a mournful song. Kiluken Bahadur of the Sunid tribe lifted up his voice and sang. "Once you did swoop like a falcon, but now a rumbling wagon trundles you off. Oh my king, have you in truth then forsaken your wife and your children, and the rule of your people? Oh my king,

Today, it's thought that the most likely place for the Khan's burial is in this area, somewhere around the mountain of Burqan Khaldun.

the holy peak that he had always climbed whenever he needed to hear the voice of his god, and to be close to the great sky above. Now, between Chinggis Khan and the great blue sky, there was only silence. End of part one.