19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe (Part 2)
02:44:40 Share

Part 2. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire went into a state of some shock, and its wars of conquest were largely put on hold. But the immense respect he had won during his life carried over into his death, and the plan he had put in place for his succession was carried out.

For the next two years, the empire was held in a kind of regency by his youngest son Tolui, and at the end of that period, once the time of mourning had passed, Ogedei took his position as Great Khan on the 13th of September 1229, as the secret history records.

In accordance with the decree of Chinggis Khan, they installed Ogedei as Khan. The night guards, the quiver-bearers, and the 8,000 day guards who had been protecting the precious life of their father, Chinggis Khan,

The personal slaves and the 10,000 guards who had been in close attendance on the person of his father, the Khan, were all handed over. In fitting with his character, one of Ogedei's first acts as Khan was to hold a grand celebration.

At this festival, feasts were held, songs were sung, and games played, wrestling and hunting, archery and riding, and of course, enormous quantities of alcohol would have been consumed. The Iraq and Black Kumis, the Chinese rice wines and fine Persian grape wines would have flowed from silver goblets, and the revelry would have lasted for days.

Ogedei loved to be liked, and he had always had a generous streak. To celebrate his coming to power, he opened his father's treasuries and distributed gifts and wealth to all the influential families of the Mongol steppe. This generosity gained him many friends, but the Persian scholar Atamalek Chuvaini recounts his profligate behavior with a note of disapproval.

He was ever spreading the carpet of merrymaking and treading the path of excess, in constant application to wine and the company of angelic women. Being by nature extravagantly bountiful, he gave away everything that came in from the farthest and nearest parts of the empire without its being registered by accountant or inspector. No mortal returned from his presence without his lot or share.

and no petitioner heard from his tongue the word, "No." Hurghadei was for the most part a successful ruler, but he also had a quite different vision for the Mongol Empire to that of his father. Genghis Khan had always maintained his dislike and distrust of settled peoples and city dwellers,

He had envisioned his empire as the people of the Felt Walls, a pure confederation of nomadic peoples that would stand up for the pastoralist lifestyle against the corruptions of the settled world. But Ogedei had seen the great cities of China and Persia. He had looked with envious eyes upon the great walls of Beijing and Samarkand and had brought advisors from northern China to help him rule.

One of these, a Khitan man named Yalu Chukai, is said to have given Ogaday the following piece of advice. An empire won on horseback cannot be ruled on horseback. For this reason, Ogaday now dreamed of departing from his father's policy and building a proper capital for the empire he had inherited.

This capital would be complete with all the things a great city needed: buildings, streets, temples, workshops, and palaces. He ordered that this new city be built out in the middle of the steppe at the same spot where his father had set up his main camp, a site where the canyon-like Orkhon River Valley spills out into the pastures below, right in the heart of Mongolia.

Construction of this city happened quickly, with architects and craftsmen being brought primarily from the conquered regions of China. But Ogedei also brought some Persian builders to Mongolia to work on his palaces. Atamalek Juvaini gives an account of the new Mongol city. There had previously been no town or village in that place except for the remains of a wall.

The Khan caused a town to be built on it, which they called Ordu Balik, though it is better known as Karakorum. Karakorum in Mongolian means black castle or black stones.

The city rose out of the bare steppe grasslands with earthwork walls and four gates, and buildings lined with wooden pillars built in the Chinese style with swooping pagoda roofs. At the four corners of the city, he had four stone tortoises carved facing out in each direction. The tortoise was a symbol of stability and protection,

and with their incredibly long lives, had become representations of eternity. These stone guardians watched over the city and formed a statement in stone that Karakoram was built to last. With the help of his foreign craftsmen,

Orgaday built Karakorum into what he hoped would be a fitting capital for the world's largest empire, and a fitting venue for the world's most impressive parties. Above the town, a garden was built for the Khan with four gates, and in the midst of that garden, artisans reared up a castle, and inside it, a throne having three flights of steps for the Khan alone.

The utensils were of gold and silver and studded with jewels. Twice in the year would the Khan alight in this pleasant abode. Whenever the sun entered the sign of Aries, and the world was glad, he would feast for a month in this residence. And as the bounty of the rain reaches both herbs and trees, so both great and small took part in the feasting.

Ogedei encouraged the empire's elites to build houses near his palace, but for the most part, Karakorum remained something of a halfway point between a Mongol camp and a true city. Much of the Mongol nobility continued to live in their gir tents, often pitching them outside the walls, and treated the city as something of an eccentric novelty.

At its heart was the central secretariat, the main civilian governing body of the empire. This contained a large body of scribes who assessed tax registries and tribute, and translated orders to be sent to the various provinces of the empire. Other than this administrative hub and the palaces of the Khan, the city contained mostly warehouses for the vast treasures looted from all over Asia.

and workshops where captured craftsmen toiled, as well as various houses of worship for all the different religions of the empire. The Flemish monk William of Rubruck, who passed through in the middle of the 13th century, was less than impressed with this imperial capital and compared it unfavorably to the small town of Saint-Denis just north of Paris.

Regarding the city of Karakorum, you should know that, discounting the Khan's palace, it is not even as fine as the town of Saint-Denis, and the monastery of Saint-Denis is worth ten of the palace. It contains two quarters, one for the Saracens, where there are bazaars and where many traders gather, the other is the quarter of the Chinese, who are all craftsmen.

Set apart from these quarters lie large palaces belonging to the court secretaries. There are twelve idol temples belonging to different peoples, two mosques where the religion of Muhammad is proclaimed, and one Christian church at the far end of the town. The town is enclosed by a mud wall and has four gates.

but despite its somewhat humble appearance, Karakoram was an expensive city to maintain. Sitting out in the middle of the steppe, its land was not fertile and its people could grow few crops. For this reason, it was never self-sufficient and its population had to be sustained by food brought over long distances from crop-growing regions in northern China.

Ugaday had hoped that Karakoram would become a trading hub in its own right, and that its economy would become self-sustaining. To encourage this, he had trees planted along the roads that were used by trade caravans to help shelter them from the sun and rain, and to show where the roads were when the steppe was covered in winter snows.

Orgaday also expanded one of the Mongols' most impressive achievements, their extensive postal system. This system, which became known as the Jam in Mongolian and Yam in Turkic, connected every corner of the empire with a system of postal stations where fresh horses and supplies were always kept.

The Venetian explorer Marco Polo describes the remarkable functioning of this enormous piece of public infrastructure. "From each city proceed many roads and highways, leading to a variety of provinces, one to one province, another to another. And each road receives the name of the province to which it leads. The messengers of the emperor find at

At each of these stations, a full complement of fresh horses would be kept.

When a messenger approached one of these stations, he would bang a drum so that the people working there would know to get his horse ready, and he could continue his journey with the minimum amount of delay.

At some of these stations, moreover, there shall be posted some 400 horses standing ready for the use of the messengers. At others, there shall be 200. On all these posts taken together, there are more than 300,000 horses kept up, specially for the use of the messengers. The thing is on a scale so wonderful and costly that it is hard to bring oneself to describe it.

The Mongols issued passports to travelers in the form of tablets called paisar, made of wood, bronze, silver, or gold depending on the rank of the person carrying it. These conferred status on the traveler and allowed them to access the services of the jam postal stations.

But despite these measures to bring the vast empire closer together, the capital of Karakoram was some way off the main arteries of the Silk Road, and traders saw little reason to make the long journey out into the steppe, unless it could be made worth their while.

To encourage them to keep coming to his new city, Orgaday decreed that they would be paid above the usual price for their goods, sometimes even twice as much as they were worth elsewhere. For a time, this strategy worked and the merchants kept coming. But this system was obviously unsustainable, and soon the money began to run dry.

By the year 1235, six years into Ogedei's rule, much of the vast wealth that had been amassed by Chinggis Khan had already been frittered away by his son.

The dream of turning the nomadic empire of conquest into a settled empire of trade and commerce was looking ever more unlikely, and facing a potential bankruptcy in his future, Ogedei knew that the Mongol Empire would have to find new sources of gold. The Mongols would once more go to war. It's during Ogedei's reign that the Mongol Empire's ambitions grew.

from the conquest of its neighbors and subjugation of other steppe peoples to a much more expansive vision, a belief that the whole world had been destined to live under Mongol rule, and that there was nowhere on earth that would escape their conquests.

To decide where the Mongol armies should next descend, Ogedei summoned another kurultai, a gathering of the clans, bringing together the entire family of Chinggis Khan, their wives and vassals and key commanders. Here, a number of different options were raised.

Some argued that the Mongols should march south to the lands of India. Others, that it was the turn of southern China and the Song dynasty, who had watched with such glee as the northern Jin were destroyed. Others wanted to march into the Muslim lands and seize the great cities of Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus. But there was one final option that was raised by the general named Subadai

He had been one of Chinggis Khan's closest generals and was now the last surviving member of that old guard, something that gave him immense respect. He suggested that the horde ride west and toward a previously unexplored land that sat on the periphery of the world, a great peninsula jutting out of the Asian landmass about which the Mongols knew little.

These were the lands of Europe. Europe around the year 1200 was something of a backwater. It was home to about 70 million people, but although it produced textiles and fine metals, compared to other areas of the world, much of medieval Europe had low levels of urbanism.

Other than the huge Byzantine capital of Constantinople, Europe had only a handful of cities that had even 50,000 inhabitants and even fewer outside of Italy. Its position, somewhat removed from the Silk Road trading routes, meant that it was not a great beneficiary of the vast wealth that flowed along them. As a result, Europeans were also among the last to hear news coming out of the east.

For this reason, Europeans also had a somewhat confused idea of what the world beyond their borders looked like. It was widely believed in Europe at the time that a great Christian king ruled far in the east, a man that they called Prester John. It was supposed that this Christian emperor would one day ride west to help the Christians retake Jerusalem from the Saracens.

When Mongol armies first arrived in Europe, there was at first some excitement. This was perhaps the coming of the great Prester John, but the reality would be quite different. The late 13th century Chronicle of Novgorod, one of the oldest Russian histories, describes the first arrival of these nomadic horsemen about 14 years earlier in the year 1223.

The same year, for our sins unknown tribes came. No one exactly knows who they are, nor whence they came, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is, but they call them the Tartars. We have heard that they have captured many countries, slaughtered a quantity of the godless peoples, and scattered others.

These perplexing foreigners were in fact a pair of Mongol armies led by the generals of Chinggis Khan, Subodai, and Jebe. They had been sent to destroy any remains of the Kipchak people, a large confederation of steppe nomads who occupied the area of the Volga River and who had fought on the side of the Khwarezmian Empire just a couple of years earlier.

These were some of the last holdouts among the peoples of the steppe who had not yet bent the knee to the Mongols. Now, a large force of Kipchak Turks fled west to Russia and begged the help of the major power in that region, the settled kingdom of Kievan Rus'.

Centered around the city of Kiev in modern Ukraine, Kievan Rus was less of a kingdom and more a fractious collection of princely city-states that formed a belt across the European peninsula, from the Arctic White Sea in the north to the shores of the Black Sea in the south. Like the Khwarezmians, its people had often employed Kipchak nomads as mercenary cavalry in its armies.

When the Kipchaks fled into Russia, they warned the Russians in no uncertain terms about what was coming. As the Novgorod Chronicle records, "To all the Russians they brought many gifts, horses and camels, buffaloes and girls. And they came saying this: 'Our land they have taken away today, and yours will be taken tomorrow.'

Frightened into action by this warning, the princes of Kievan Rus put together a grand coalition and massed a force of 80,000 men under the command of Grand Prince Mstislav III of Kiev. Together, they marched out to meet these barbarians. On the way, they encountered some Mongol envoys who told the Grand Prince that they meant him no harm.

that they were only there to destroy the last remnants of the Kipchaks, who they contemptuously referred to as their slaves and horse herders. But the Kievan ruler would make exactly the same mistake as the Shah of Khwarezm. As the Chronicle of Novgorod recalls, "The Tatars sent envoys to the Russians saying, 'Behold, we hear that you are coming against us.

But we have not occupied your land, nor your towns, nor your villages, nor is it against you we have come. But we have come sent by God against our rebellious horse-herders. But the Russians did not listen to this, but killed all the envoys." Still confident of victory, the Russians advanced to crush the Mongol invaders.

At the sight of the European army, with its mass of peasant infantry supported by colorful columns of heavily armed knights, their pennants flying and helmets gleaming, the Mongols appeared to retreat in panic. The Russians were encouraged, and so they gave chase. They pursued the Mongols for a whole day, and then another, and then another,

but whenever they thought they were getting close, their quarry just managed to pull away. They became perturbed by the almost supernatural speed and endurance of these foreigners, how they never seemed to stop or slow down, never seemed to need supplies, never slept or lit campfires. Gradually, the Europeans ran out of steam. Their horses grew tired, and their foot soldiers too.

It was at this point that the Mongol trap swung shut. On the 1st of April 1223, without warning, a second Mongol army swept out of the forests and began a massacre on the banks of the Kalka river. As the Novgorod Chronicle recalls, "There was a terrible and savage slaughter

And Mstislav, Duke of Kiev, seeing this evil, set up a stockade of hosts about him and fought with them for three days, and of the rest of the troops only every tenth returned to his home. A countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages.

As the infantry was slaughtered, the princes of Kiev tried to flee the battlefield, but they were easily hunted down by the Mongols. A great part of the kingdom's aristocracy was wiped out in that single day of battle. It's recorded that several Kievan nobles were captured, and as a punishment for killing the Mongol ambassadors, they were stuffed under the floorboards of one of the Mongol tents.

All night, the Mongol warriors feasted and celebrated their victory, their weight steadily crushing to death the nobles beneath the floor. Then, with their mission complete, the Mongols vanished. They had appeared, wiped out an entire army with ease, and then disappeared without a trace. The Novgorod Chronicle records the confusion that the event sowed.

The Tartars turned back from the River Dnieper, and we know not where they came from nor where they hid themselves again. Only God knows where he fetched them against us for our sins." To the medieval European mind, the meaning of this event was clear. It was a punishment from God, but little did they know that worse was on its way.

It was the winter of 1237 on the frozen expanse of the Russian steppe when the first Mongol horsemen once more appeared on the edge of Europe, but this time they came to stay. In his Chronica Majora or Great Chronicle, the English writer Matthew Parris wrote about these newcomers in terms of utter condemnation.

An immense horde of that detestable race of Satan, the Tartars, rushed forth like demons loosed from hell. They are inhuman and of the nature of beasts. Rather to be called monsters than man, thirsting after and drinking blood and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings. They are invincible in battle. They have no human laws.

know no mercy and are crueler than lions or bears. The Mongols had waited until the winter set in for their invasion so that the great rivers Volga and Dnieper would freeze over, turning them into a highway for their horses. Moving fast over the frozen ground, they once more easily encircled the Russian armies and utterly destroyed them.

It wasn't just the speed of the invasion that took the Europeans by surprise. For people in Europe, the technologies that the Mongols brought with them were so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

In the city of Ryazan, the citizens were so terrified by the Mongols' incendiary weaponry, the Chinese fire lances and pots of flaming naphtha that they hurled from their catapults, that in the confusion, they believed that the Mongols had brought with them trained dragons from the east. By 1240, virtually all the major cities of Russia had fallen to the Mongols.

In December, they rounded on what was then the cultural, religious, and economic heart of the region, the great city on the Dnieper, the city of Kiev. Kiev held out for nine days during which the Mongol catapults bombarded it with stones and flaming projectiles. In terror, its population flooded towards the great stone Church of the Tithes that stood on the banks of the Dnieper River.

They were desperate to get close to the shrine of the Virgin Mary, which they hoped would protect them, and climbed up onto the church's roof. But the weight of the crowd on the roof timbers caused them to collapse, and many of those sheltering within the church were crushed. The Mongol army soon flooded into the city and put its people to the sword.

Of Kiev's 50,000 inhabitants, it's reported that only 2,000 or so survived. After the invasion, many Russian cities fell into ruin and stone buildings stopped for many decades. Economic links between cities and nearby villages were broken and famine spread. As the Novgorod Chronicle recounts,

For what is there to say, or what to speak of the punishment that came to us from God? How some of the common people killed the living and ate them. Others ate horse flesh, dogs and cats. Some fed on moss, snails, pine bark, lime bark, lime and elm tree leaves, and whatever each could think of.

And again, other wicked men began to burn the good people's houses where they suspected that there was grain." Giovanni d'Apian del Carpine, the Pope's envoy to the Mongol Great Khan, travelled through Kiev a few years later in February 1246 and wrote the following description of the destruction: "When we were journeying through the land we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground.

Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing. For there are at the present time scarce 200 houses there, and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery." In some places, it took more than a hundred years for Russian cities to rebuild. But after devastating Russia, Ogedei's forces were just getting started.

One Mongol army, perhaps 50,000 strong, headed west through the duchies of Poland, riding in the direction of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. From there, all of Western Europe was in their path. In all the cities of Europe, rumors ran rampant, and all anyone had to work with was a name, the Tatars.

Some believed that the name must mean that the Mongols had actually come from hell itself since it reminded them of the name for the deepest region of the underworld in Greek mythology, Tartarus. Others thought that the name reminded them of the biblical king of Tarshish mentioned in the Bible.

Others still thought that the Mongols may have been one of the lost tribes of Israel, now returned to wreak havoc on Christendom, perhaps enraged by the theft of relics from the Holy Land during the Crusades.

The English monk Matthew of Paris was especially responsible for spreading this idea and tried to work his way around the inconvenient fact that the Mongols didn't appear to speak Hebrew or seem to be Jewish, as he wrote in his great chronicle, "In the time of the government of Moses, their rebellious hearts were perverted to an evil way of thinking so that they followed after strange gods and unknown customs.

Their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational wild beast. Unable to beat the Mongols on the battlefield, people instead began to lash out against the defenseless Jewish communities in countless European cities, and a wave of deadly pogroms began.

In 1239, a fiery comet passed by the earth, seeming to some to be a sign of God's judgment. In 1241, the panic only increased as an eclipse blotted out the sun. People began to believe that the end of days might finally have arrived. But the northern Mongol force headed towards Germany was in fact just a distraction.

a typical Mongol tactic to attack in multiple places at once. In fact, their true goal was a land that was much more amenable to their lifestyle. That is the rolling grasslands and river plains of Hungary, which sat on the edge of the Great Steppe behind the wall of the Carpathian Mountains

Hungary too had given shelter to Kipchak Turks fleeing from the Mongols who had begged for shelter from the Hungarian king, Bela IV. The Mongols sent King Bela the following message: "I have learned that you keep the Kipchaks, my slaves, under your protection. I charge you that you do not make me your enemy on their account, for it is easier for them to escape than for you.

"Since they, having no house and continually on the move with their tents, may possibly escape. But you, living in houses and possessing fortresses and cities, how can you flee from my grasp?" For a time, the Hungarian troops managed to hold off the Mongols on a narrow bridge on a crossing of the Cheyenne River, but their resistance did not last long.

One priest and writer, Thomas of Spolato, wrote an eyewitness account of the aftermath of the battle. The dead fell to the right and to the left, like leaves in winter. The slain bodies of these miserable men were strewn across the whole route. Blood poured forth like torrents of rain. The miserable country, stained by the blood of its sons, was dyed red throughout its length and breadth.

From there, the Mongols poured into the great Hungarian plain. They wiped out the royal army and sacked towns and villages, rounding up huge numbers of skilled people who they took away with them, drafting others to take part in their human wave assaults of fortresses, just as they had in China and Persia, and killing countless others.

The Hungarian King Bela fled south to the coastal regions of his kingdom in what is now Croatia. Like the Khwarezm Shah, he took a boat out into the Adriatic and took refuge on an island there. Archaeology paints a clear picture of the desperation of this time.

The remains of many medieval Hungarian churches can be found with concentric rings of earthwork defenses hurriedly constructed, and the earth around them is littered with arrowheads and the bones of the unfortunate defenders.

A great number of buried coin hoards have also been uncovered from around this time as the kingdom's wealthy rushed to hide their riches from the advancing Mongol tide. When the Mongols finally withdrew from Hungary in 1242, a year after they had arrived, they left behind a devastated land

One Italian bishop living in Hungary named Roger of Torre Maggiore wrote the following description of the desolation: "We climbed a tall tree and surveyed the land destroyed by the Tartars. We began to walk across the waste and abandoned land that they had destroyed while retreating. Church towers were our way signs, and the road they marked for us was rough. The roads and paths had vanished.

grass and thorn bushes had taken over. The Mongols were now on the borders of both the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, Europe's two major powers. It looked as though all of Europe would now fall, just like northern China and the Khwarezmian Empire before it. If it had, it's likely that the entire history of the world would have gone down another path.

If the Mongols had devastated Florence, Venice, and Milan the way they had devastated Beijing and Samarkand, the Renaissance would likely never have taken place, and the modern world as we know it would have struggled to be born. But history, again, had other plans. One event would transpire that would save Europe from this fate. That was the death of the great Khan Ogedei.

Ogedei had always been a great drinker, but in recent years, his alcoholism had truly got out of control, partly due to tragedy in his personal life. His beloved brother Tolui had died a few years earlier, with some even whispering that Ogedei had had him poisoned.

His favorite son and heir, Kochu, had also died fighting in China, a mission that Ogade himself had sent him on. From that point, with grief and guilt seemingly warring inside him, Ogade seems to have sunk into a depression. He withdrew from government, increasingly losing his appetite for ruling, and all the while, he drank and drank.

On the 11th of December 1241, the great Khan Ogedei, the son of Chinggis Khan, died as he had lived in a drunken stupor after 13 years of rule and at the age of 55. The secret history contains a note supposedly written by Ogedei himself, but almost certainly penned by one of his successors, in which he notes his failures.

I have sat on the great throne of my Khan father. I made the nation live with their souls on the soil and their grip on the ground, yet...

Although I carried forward on my back the Teeming Kingdom, it was an error of mine to be vanquished by grape wine. This was one of my errors.

With Jochi and Tolui by now all dead, and Chagatai dead soon after, the last surviving son of Chinggis Khan had passed away. But as a man who had lived every day in the moment and thought little of the future, crucially, since the death of his oldest son, Ogedei had named no successor. There was now no certainty at all over who would rule the empire.

After his death, all of Ogedei's successors raised their claims to the throne of the great Khan, and even Chinggis Khan's surviving brother Temüge, now in his 70s, suggested that he should rule. Suddenly, all plans of advancing further west into Europe were forgotten. This power struggle would last for ten years, and for five of these, the empire was ruled by a woman,

the widow of Ogedei, named Toreguna Khan. She performed all the duties of a Mongol khan, minting coins, holding kurultais, and ensured the succession of her son, Guyuk. He ruled for a further three years, and during this time, declared his intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Europe, even sending a letter demanding submission from the pope.

but his health would deteriorate and he died while traveling on the 20th of April 1248. Europe, once again, was spared and during this time of upheaval in the Mongol Empire, the rest of the world could breathe something of a sigh of relief. The struggle over who would become Khan would eventually come to an end with the rise of a man named Mongke,

The previous great Khan, Ogedei, had seven sons, but Mongke was not one of them. He was the oldest son of Tolui, the one brother who had never been considered for the position of Khan. We can tell that this was an awkward fact for Mongke, since one of his first official acts was to crown his father Tolui as great Khan posthumously, thus strengthening his own legitimacy.

And when Mongke came to the throne in 1251, he is said to have given a statement that acted as a rebuke of the ways of his profligate predecessor, Ogedei. "I follow the laws of my ancestors. I do not imitate other countries' ways.

This question of what kind of society the Mongol Empire would be is one that would resurface again and again over the coming century. Like his father before him, Mongke was an accomplished warrior and had fought as one of the most prominent generals in the invasion of Russia. He also had Tolui's somewhat bloodthirsty and ruthless streak.

To quell any resistance when he came to power, Mongke purged all members of the nobility who had supported other claimants to the throne of the great Khan, many of whom were his cousins. More than 300 members of the Mongol aristocracy were slaughtered. While the Mongols were hardly shy about spilling blood, this amount of killing in the upper echelons of Mongol society was unprecedented.

After that, he turned his attention to further conquests. He gave command of his troops in Persia to one of his brothers named Hulagu and his troops in northern China to another brother named Kublai, ordering him to prepare for an invasion of southern Song China. Meanwhile, the Khan Mongke remained back in the imperial heartland in his capital of Karakorum.

It was during the reign of Mongke Khan that the King of France, Louis IX, sent an ambassador to Mongolia, a Flemish friar named William of Rubruck. He would write one of the most fascinating accounts of life in the Mongol court of Karakorum at this time. After many months of travel across the steppe of Central Asia, William of Rubruck arrived at the Mongol capital late in the year 1253,

He was taken to see the Khan and gives a rare description of the appearance of Monka. William was frustrated because his interpreter was drinking continually throughout his meeting with the Khan.

and by the end was thoroughly drunk. By this point, he could hardly understand what the Mongol ruler was saying. Nevertheless, the Khan gave them permission to stay in the city, and William of Rubruck began exploring the Mongol capital. In this melting pot in the heart of the empire, he encountered people from all over Eurasia, including one monk from China who seems to have had some fun at his expense.

on one occasion a priest from china was sitting with me dressed in cloth of the finest red and i asked him where he came by such a colour

he told me how in the east of china there are soaring crags inhabited by creatures built like human beings in every respect except that their knees do not bend and they move along in a kind of hopping and that they are one cubit tall and covered in hair

They live in inaccessible caves, and when men go hunting them, they take the most intoxicating ale they can brew and make cup-shaped hollows in the rocks, which they fill with the ale. So the hunters lie hidden, and these creatures emerge from their caves and sample the drink, crying, Chin-Chin! And it is from this cry that their name is derived, for they are known as Chin-Chin.

Then they gather round in very great numbers, become drunk and fall asleep on the spot. At this point the hunters come forward and tie their hands and feet while they are asleep. And next they open up a vein in their necks and extract from each one three or four drops of blood before letting them go free. The blood, the priest told me, is of the greatest value for making Purple die.

But despite his slightly gullible nature, William explored the city diligently. And there he was astonished to find a number of other Europeans living and working in this foreign land, thousands of kilometers from home. We were discovered by a woman from Metz in France named Pasha, who had been captured in Hungary and she made us as substantial a meal as she could.

This William Boucher had been working in Hungary when the Mongols swept in from the steppe.

and like many others before him, he had been rounded up for his skill in metalworking. When he arrived in Karakorum, the Khan Mongke had soon recognized his potential and set him to work building a remarkable mechanical contraption out of silver.

at the entrance to this great palace master william of paris has constructed for him a large tree made of silver with four silver lions at its roots each one containing a conduit pipe and spewing forth white mare's milk

the branches leaves and fruit of the tree are of silver there are four conduits leading into the tree and over each one of them lies a gilded serpent with its tail twined around the trunk

one of the pipes discharges wine a second fermented mare's milk a third a kind of mead and a fourth a rich ale each beverage has its own silver vessel at the foot of the tree ready to receive it the fountain even had a method of announcing to guests that the drinking had begun the perfect centerpiece for a mongol feast

Between the four pipes at the top, he made an angel holding a trumpet. So when drink is required, a man concealed in its cavity then blows strongly on the pipe that leads to the angel. The angel puts the trumpet to its mouth and the trumpet gives out a very loud blast. When the stewards in the chamber hear this, each pours his drink into the appropriate pipe and the pipes spurt it out.

By this time, Christianity had made great inroads at the Mongol court, and many of the Khan's wives were Christians. But there were also Muslim, Buddhist, and even Jewish holy men living in Karakorum, all enjoying the freedom of religion that made the Mongol realm virtually unique around the world.

The Khan Mongke was curious about religion, but seems to have courted each faith without ever converting to one of them. In order to perhaps settle the matter once and for all, the great Khan organized a series of debates and invited the friar William of Rubruck to take part. The following day he sent to me his secretaries who said, "Our master is sending us to you with this message:

Here you are, Christians, Saracens, and Buddhists, and each one of you claims that his religion is superior and that his writings or books contain more truth. So, he would like you all to assemble together and hold a conference, and each one to put his claims in writing to enable the Khan to learn the truth. William accepted.

But he soon found out that the Mongols arranged their intellectual debates much like their wrestling matches. This would be a rowdy, boisterous affair, and like Mongol wrestlers, the debaters were expected to drink a large cup of alcoholic kumis between each round. Quickly, the holy men became drunk.

To their surprise, and despite their bitter differences back home, the Muslims and Christians found themselves largely in agreement on the broad points, that there was one God, that he was all-powerful, and that heaven awaited them after death. Together, they argued against the Buddhists, who believed in many gods with limited powers and in reincarnation after death.

They argued over the nature of good and evil, whether everything in creation is good, and why God allows bad things to happen. According to William's own account, he effortlessly outsmarted his opponents. But to his disappointment, no one agreed to convert to Christianity then and there. Everybody listened without challenging a single word. But for all that, no one said...

But if William had hoped to convince the great Khan, he would be frustrated. For his part, Monga Khan remained unconvinced. He said,

Believe that there is only one God through whom we have life and through whom we die. And towards him we direct our hearts. But just as God has given the hand several fingers, so he has given mankind several paths. To you, God has given the scriptures.

whereas to us he has given shamans, and we do as they tell us and live in peace." The debates came to an inconclusive end, and the question over which was the true religion would go unsettled for another day. William would leave the Khan's court soon after,

But during his time in Karakorum, he had noticed some extraordinary measures of personal security surrounding Monka and his household. William himself was even grilled by the Khan's security services. "They searched our legs, chests and arms to see whether we had knives on us. They made the interpreter take off his belt.

We were summoned by the Grand Secretary and Judge, and they inquired most minutely whence we came from, why we had come, what was our business, and this inquiry was made because it had been reported to Mongke Khan that 40 assassins had entered the city under various disguises to kill him.

Munker Khan had good reason to be worried. That's because he had become a target for a controversial Islamic sect known as the Hashashin, a group who have given us the English word "assassin."

The Hashashin occupied perhaps as many as a hundred remote mountain fortresses across an area stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Afghanistan, but they coordinated their operations from their headquarters, the lofty Alamut Castle in the Alborz mountain range of northern Iran. Alamut means eagle's nest, and it was perched high up on the mountain crags.

The Hashashin had no armies to speak of, no infantry and no cavalry, but they exercised a formidable strategic power. That is, they assassinated any noble, general, or king who stood in their way. One writer named Benjamin of Tudela wrote an account of these mysterious killers and their enigmatic ruler. They call him Shaykh al-Hashashin. He is their elder.

and upon his command all of the men of the mountain come out or go in they are believers of the word of their elder and everyone everywhere fears them because they even kill kings

Although it's difficult to unpick the legends from the truth when it comes to this secretive sect, according to Arab, Persian, and Chinese sources, the name Hashashin comes from the group's predilection for the drug hashish, a concentrated resin of the cannabis plant.

According to legends, young men would be initiated into the group by smoking hashish, and under its intoxicating effects, they were shown the beautiful gardens that the Hashashin kept in their castles. Marco Polo recounted one version of these tales.

Upon awakening from this state of lethargy, their senses were struck with all the delightful objects that had been described, and each perceived himself surrounded by lovely damsels. He believed himself assuredly in paradise, and felt an unwillingness to relinquish its delights. When four or five days had thus been passed, they were carried out of the garden,

The young initiates were told that they had visited the gardens of paradise and would be allowed to return if they were willing to give their life for the cause. So long as the supply of hashish was kept flowing, the group had an endless reserve of brainwashed young men willing to do their bidding, as Marco Polo describes.

animated to enthusiasm by words of this nature, all went forward to die in his service. The consequence of this system was that when any of the neighboring princes or others gave insult to this chief, they were put to death by these, his discipled assassins, none of whom felt terror at the risk of losing their own lives, provided they could execute their master's will.

We don't know if these rumors were true or just stories made up by the group's enemies. The word "hashishi" can often mean simply "rabble" or "outlaws," and their name may have actually been the Arabic word "assasiyun," meaning something like "the principled ones."

Regardless of the truth, what is certain is that the assassins were a thorn in the side of the mighty Middle Eastern powers like the Fatimid, Abbasid, and Seljuk empires. Over the course of nearly two centuries, they killed hundreds of notable people, including three caliphs and one crusader king of Jerusalem. Now, they had set their sights on the Khan of the Mongols.

They had clearly enjoyed the respite that the ten years of Mongol infighting had brought the world, and hoped that by killing Mongke, they might bring about another, and perhaps even that the entire Mongol entity would simply unravel. In the 1240s, one Mongol general was even assassinated by this group, and for Mongke, this was the final straw.

In 1253, he ordered his younger brother Hulagu to march into the west and crush the assassins for good. Hulagu advanced into Afghanistan and from there seized their fortresses one by one. Finally, he rounded on the Eagle's Nest castle of Alamut, high in the snowy mountains of northern Iran.

Atamalek Juvaini describes the sight that the defenders of Alamut saw approaching through the jagged peaks. And from the direction of Ustandar there came armies all fire and fury, along steep roads as crooked as the covenant of the wicked. And from Alamut, which lay to the left, came the princes Balagai and Tutar,

with a great body of men, all clamoring for vengeance with a host like a mountain of iron. The mountains and valleys billowed with the great masses of men. The approach to Alamut was steep and virtually impregnable, but by now the Mongol armies were experts at siege warfare. With their morning draft,

The Mongol army struck the harp of war and prepared to do battle with mangonels and stones. They cut down and trimmed for these mangonels the trees which these people had watered for many years past, not realizing what purpose they would serve or what fruit they would ultimately bear. The castle of Alamut soon surrendered and the assassins were crushed as an independent force.

With this inconvenience safely out of the way, the Mongols now rounded on the Muslim Middle East and its great capital of Baghdad. Baghdad at this time was a grand city. It was the center of the Abbasid Caliphate throughout the Islamic Golden Age of the 9th and 10th centuries, growing to be the largest city worldwide by the beginning of the 10th century.

and though at this point it had suffered some centuries of decline, it was still the beating heart of the Muslim world. It was a city of cabarets and taverns, places where backgammon and chess were played. On street corners, acrobats performed and storytellers spun tales for their audiences like those later found in the Arabian Nights. The city also had formidable defences with a high and thick wall,

Each of its four gates had double doors that were made of iron, so heavy that it took several men to open and close them. The caliphate was ruled by the caliph who was the supreme religious figure across the Muslim world, somewhere between an emperor and a pope. Until that point, relations with the caliph in Baghdad, a man named al-Mustasim, had been relatively friendly.

but the Mongols had asked him for soldiers to help them fight the assassins, and perhaps fearing that their daggers might be turned against him, he ignored the Mongol request. This disrespect was enough for the Khan Mongke to order his younger brother Hulagu to march down into the lowlands of Mesopotamia and destroy the caliphate entirely.

The Mongols gathered a huge force, including a thousand Chinese siege engineers, and swept into the plains of Mesopotamia in the year 1257. Hulagu sent a letter to the Caliph al-Mustasim, urging him to surrender in ferocious terms. I will bring you crashing down from the summit of the sky. Like a lion, I will throw you down to the lowest depths.

I will not leave a single person alive in your country. I will turn your city, lands, and empire flames. If you have the heart to save your head and your ancient family, listen carefully to my advice. If you refuse to accept it, I will show you the meaning of the will of God.

But the Caliph al-Mustasim did not listen. The Mongols arrived at the capital of Baghdad in January of 1258. The 9th century writer al-Jahiz wrote the following description of the sight that the Mongol soldiers would have seen as they approached across the broad floodplain of the rushing river Tigris.

The Mongols settled in for a siege and built a rampart completely surrounding the city.

They constructed their vast mangonels and other siege engines and began to bombard the city with their terrifying gunpowder weapons and incendiary pots of naphtha brought all the way from China. But once these ran out, the Mongols realized that they had a problem. The valley of the Tigris and Euphrates is essentially a vast salt flat and contains virtually no stone.

so they had no projectiles for their catapults. Faced with this problem, they would have to be creative. The Mongols began to cut down the heavy date palms that grew everywhere along the riverbank and loaded pieces of their heavy trunks into their catapults. The citizens of Baghdad would soon face the sight of their own date trees being hurled over enormous distances into the city.

Mongol siege engines broke through Baghdad's defenses within just a few days, and the assault on the walls began in late January. By February the 4th, Hulagu's elite forces had seized control of the eastern wall. In a growing state of desperation, the Caliph al-Mustasim made frantic attempts to negotiate, but Hulagu refused.

even executing the Caliph's soldiers who tried to surrender. The Caliph ultimately capitulated on February the 10th, and the Mongols captured him and began to sack the city. The Hawadit al-Gamia, written by an anonymous eyewitness, records the scenes of carnage. The inhabitants of Baghdad were put under the sword on Monday.

and were subjected to 40 days of continuous killing, pillaging, and enslavement. A great part of the city, including the Caliph's Mosque and its surrounding, were burnt, and the city was laid in ruins. The dead lay as mounds in the streets and the markets. Rain fell on them, horses trampled down upon them. Their faces were disfigured, and they became an example to anyone who saw them.

Some among the city's populations were spared. The Shia Muslims in the city, as well as Baghdad's Jewish population, avoided the worst of the massacre. The city's Christian community was also spared, since the Mongol general Hulagu's wife was a Christian and asked her husband to show them mercy.

Many of the glorious libraries of Baghdad were destroyed, and the books within them likely burned up in the fires that engulfed the city. Some later sources, like Qutub ad-Din al-Nahrawali, writing around 300 years later, embellished the story with the poetic flourish that the River Tigris had turned black with the ink of the books thrown into it.

After the slaughter was done, Hulagu held a victory feast, where he had the Caliph brought to him in chains. The chronicler Nazir ad-Din al-Tusi, who may have been present as an eyewitness, recorded the words of the Mongol general: "Hulagu set a golden tray before the Caliph and said, 'Eat, it is not edible,' said the Caliph.

"'Then why did you keep it?' asked the Khan. "'And not give it to your soldiers? And why did you not make these iron doors into arrowheads, and come to the bank of the river, so that I might not have been able to cross it?' "'Such,' replied the Caliph, "'was God's will.' "'What will befall you,' said the Khan, "'is also God's will.'"

The Caliph was rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses in accordance with the Mongol requirement that royal blood not be spilled. The sack of Baghdad tore the heart out of the Muslim world and ended the 500-year rule of the Abbasid Caliphate. But the Mongol armies were just getting started.

Hulagu arrived at the Syrian city of Aleppo in December 1259, and after a siege of seven days, stormed it and massacred its population. The Sultan of Syria, An-Nasir Yusuf, was still at large, and when the news of the sack of Aleppo reached him, he and his army fled south. The Mongols followed hot on his heels and captured Damascus 16 days after they had taken Aleppo.

The Mongols followed the sultan down the shores of the Mediterranean and forged through Palestine up to the border of Egypt. They finally tracked down the Syrian sultan, An-Nasir Yusuf, at the port town of Gaza, and later had him killed. Now on the border of Egypt, Hulagu sent ambassadors to the sultan there, a man named Qutuz, demanding that he swear loyalty to the Mongol Empire

The Egyptian sultan responded by having the men beheaded and displaying their heads on Cairo's Bab Suwaila Gate. It was an act virtually guaranteed to lead to a Mongol invasion, and soon, perhaps the land of the pyramids might have also been added to the vast stretch of the Mongol Empire. But that was not to be the case.

That's because news soon came down the Silk Road of another seismic shock that would send tremors throughout the Mongol world. That was the death on the 11th of August 1259 of the great Khan Mongke. For years now, the Khan Mongke had been concerned with how poorly the war in China was going.

News of his brother Hulagu's glorious victories in Persia and Mesopotamia trickled back to him in Mongolia. The destruction of the assassins, the seizing of Alamut, the sack of Baghdad. But meanwhile, the news from China was one of slow, grinding progress.

The Khan's other brother Kublai, who had been left in charge of the final conquest of Sung China, could give him only excuses. The Sung Chinese had by now spent decades hardening their border on the Yangtze River against the Mongol invasion that they knew would come, and their fortifications were formidable. Kublai was not a seasoned warrior like his other brothers,

He had a much better head for administration and finance. In fact, he had spent much of his life feasting in a luxurious estate in northern China, a kind of quasi-capital that would be called Shangdu and has been rendered into English as Xanadu. Eventually, the Khan Mongke announced that he would leave Mongolia and travel to China to take charge of the war himself.

In the steppe capital of Karakorum, he left his youngest brother in charge, a man named Arik Boker. Mongke took charge of an army and marched south. His final documented presence was during the siege of Diaoyu Castle near present-day Chongqing in southwestern China.

Later Chinese sources claim that he was killed during an assault on the fortress, either by a crossbow bolt or a flying stone from a cannon or catapult. But more reliable sources, such as Rashid ad-Din, record that he simply died of a disease. Due to the climate there, an epidemic of dysentery broke out. Cholera spread among the Mongol soldiers and many of them died.

The monarch of the world drank wine to ward off the cholera, and he continued so to do. Suddenly, he developed an indisposition, and his illness came to a crisis. He soon passed away at the foot of the unlucky fortress. He was 52 years old, and this was the seventh year of his reign. However he died, the death of Mongke in 1259 would mark a watershed in the history of the Mongols.

This was the maximum extent of their territory and the last time that the entire Mongol Empire would ever fight as one force. After the deaths of previous Khans, members of the royal family had mostly rushed back to Mongolia to help elect a new overlord in a grand kurultai, but this time none of them moved. They decided to stay where they were and claim their own territory.

Now, the vast swathe of Asia that the Mongols had conquered fractured into what were essentially four distinct empires. Firstly, in Persia and the Middle East, Mongke's brother Hulagu declared himself the ruler or Ilkhan of the territory he had spent years conquering, which now stretched from Afghanistan to Turkey. It would become known as the Ilkhanate.

Second was in the northwest, in the steppe bordering Europe in Ukraine and Russia, and stretching across the Volga region to the Ural and Caucasus mountains. These lands were held by Khans descended from Chinggis Khan's oldest son Jochi, the guest, who had fought all his life to prove himself to his father. They would call themselves the Ulus of Jochi,

but later historians would give them the name the Golden Horde. Their rulers would be among the first of the Mongols to convert to Islam. A third was in the center of the empire, in the conquered Silk Road regions that had once been the Khwarezmian Empire and the vast steppe of Kazakhstan and Siberia.

Here, the descendants of Chagatai ruled what became known as the Chagatai Khanate, presiding over the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, which had by now recovered somewhat from the destruction of Chinggis Khan and once more brought healthy income to their rulers. But it was in the east that the heir to the throne of the great Khan rose,

He was the second son of Tolui and the late Mongke Khan's brother, the somewhat unlikely new emperor, Kublai. Kublai was born on September the 23rd, 1215, the same year that Chinggis Khan had sacked Beijing, and for his entire life, the Mongol Empire had been at war in China.

As an adult, he had been awarded a Chinese estate with 10,000 households and since then had divided his time between China and the Mongolian steppe. Kublai had a liking for the trappings of settled society, the silks and the finery.

He was advised by Chinese advisors and even a Buddhist monk who converted him to Tibetan Buddhism and taught him to speak Chinese in a rudimentary way. Already, the people back in Mongolia may have begun to whisper that Kublai was more Chinese than Mongolian.

When his brother Mongke came to the throne as Great Khan, Kublai was made viceroy over part of northern China and set about building an opulent palace at Shangdu, and he was made one of the commanders of the final assault on the last bastion of Chinese culture, the Southern Song Dynasty.

But much to the frustration of his older brother, Mongke Khan, the conquest of the Sung was a long and difficult campaign. In the Sung, the Mongols faced without doubt the most technologically advanced army on earth.

The Song pelted Mongol armies with repeating crossbows, launched huge gunpowder bombs from their catapults, and even filled their explosives with pieces of broken pottery to create perhaps the first shrapnel bombs in history. Rashid ad-Din paints a picture of this grinding campaign. "The roads were difficult and the places and castles hard to capture.

They had repeatedly given battle, and entry and exit had been made difficult for them. Moreover, on account of the unhealthy climate, many of that army had fallen sick and died. Still, the momentum of Mongol advance was by this point unstoppable. Despite heavy losses, they pushed steadily into the heartlands of the Sungh.

That was until Kublai heard news that his brother, Mongke, had died and the throne of the great Khan was up for grabs. Kublai had long dreamed of taking that throne for himself, and as Mongke's brother, he was a prime candidate. But he was at a distinct disadvantage. Having spent so many years in China, he had become distant from the life of the imperial court,

Meanwhile, his main rival was the man that Mongke had left in charge back in Karakorum, their youngest brother, the fourth son of Tolui, Arik Boke. While his brothers Hulagu and Kublai were away fighting in distant corners of the empire, Arik Boke had been back in the capital, living the life of a true steppe Mongol, hunting and riding.

and supervising the administration of Mongke Khan's empire, and he had been making friends. He was a skilled politician, and over his years in Karakorum had come to gain the support of the majority of Mongol nobility, including most of Mongke Khan's own family.

It's possible that people may have hoped that under his rule, the empire would remain an empire of the steppe for all the people of the Felt Walls and would not, like Kublai, be seduced by the ways of the settled societies it had conquered. When the great Khan Mongke died, Arik Boke knew that his time was short. The chronicler Rashid ad-Din recalls how he plotted to seize the throne.

No sooner had Arik Boker heard the news of his brother's death than his eyes fell upon the Imperial throne, and his courtiers and retainers also urged him to seize it.

but it's worth remembering that Rashid ad-Din was writing on behalf of the Mongol court in Persia, who were Kublai's allies. In fact, all evidence points to the fact that Arik Boker was Mongke's preferred successor, and that it was Kublai, and not him, who was attempting to seize the throne in a coup.

To Arik Bokha's anger, he soon got news that Kublai, still in China, had held a cruel tie of his own in 1260 in his summer palace at Shangdu and announced his counterclaim to the throne of the great Khan. This action was by all Mongol standards illegal. It was not held in Mongolia as was proper.

None of the royal family was in attendance, and to make matters worse, it was done with some of the trappings of Chinese ceremony. In virtually every way, it was an affront. Blindsided, Arik Boka rushed to announce a Kurultai in Mongolia, and at that gathering, he declared himself the new Great Khan. In response, Kublai gathered his armies and marched north.

The Mongol Empire was now at war with itself. In the west, Hulagu's Ilkhanate backed his brother Kublai's claim and went to war with the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate who backed Arik Boka. Meanwhile, Kublai gathered all his forces and marched into Mongolia. With him, he brought all the might of northern China,

Unfortunately for Arik Boka, his skill as a politician did not translate into strategic thinking. Although he sat at the political heart of the empire, his military position was vulnerable. Karakorum had no natural defenses other than the Mongolian steppe around it, and no one who built it ever imagined it having to withstand a siege.

The city had little agriculture of its own and for the last 30 years had needed to be supplied with food and other necessities along sprawling supply routes, as Rashid ad-Din recounts: "It was customary for food and drink to be brought to Karakoram from China by cart. Kublai cut off the supply and this resulted in shortages and severe inflation. Arakboka was helpless."

Arik Boker recognized the precarity of his position, and at his brother's advance in 1261, he fled the capital for the northern steppe. Kublai swept into Karakorum and looted the city that his uncle Ogade had built, as though it were any other conquest. He stripped it of much of its wealth and sent this back to his palace at Shangdu in China.

It's likely that the silver tree of Karakorum, built by the French silversmith William Boucher, was also seized and possibly melted down for transport. Treasure carts rolled back over the Gobi Desert, laden with precious things, now heading in the opposite direction. Only 50 years after Chinggis Khan's conquest of the Jin Dynasty, China's wealth was coming home.

Arik Boker spent the next few years being chased from place to place, trying to gather support on the steppe. But his weakness in the face of his brother's advance had destroyed any respect that anyone held for him. At times, it seemed like even the weather had turned against him, as Rashid Ad-Din records.

One day, Arik Boker was busy reveling and carousing when suddenly a fierce wind came and tore out the stakes and broke the poles of his court tent, resulting in the injury of several people. The court ministers and commanders took this as an omen of his demise and totally abandoned him. Arik Boker was left there with only a few soldiers, and he was dumbfounded.

The outcome was soon clear. In 1264, four years into the civil war, Arik Boka traveled to Kublai's palace at Shangdu to formally surrender in tears to his brother. Kublai is recorded to have also wept as he received his surrender. Arik Boka was imprisoned and died a year later while still in captivity, possibly from poison.

Kublai now ascended the throne and was confirmed as Great Khan in another Grand Cruelty, but there were some notable absences at this event. None of the Khans of the other sides of the empire attended. Now, the Mongol Empire was officially divided and turned its strength not against its enemies but against itself.

The late 13th century Syrian historian Ibn Wasil recounts the solemn words of one Mongol general. Mongols are now killed by Mongol swords. If we were united, then we would have conquered all of the world. If Chinggis Khan had been alive, doubtless he would have reminded his grandsons of the story his mother O'alun had told him.

of Alun the Fair and her sons, and the arrows that united could not be broken, but divided, each would snap one by one. In the coming decades and centuries, this is exactly what would happen. Despite ruling over a now much reduced empire, Kublai Khan still commanded a vast territory.

At as much as 14 million square kilometers, it was 50% larger than modern China, encompassing the fertile central plains and a large stretch of the steppe of Mongolia and eastern Russia. He was determined to build a power base there that would last and that would perhaps allow him to reconquer the other quadrants of his grandfather's domain.

But to do that, he would have to adopt the trappings of power that his Chinese subjects understood according to their traditions. To this end, in 1271, Kublai Khan formally claimed the mandate of heaven and crowned himself Emperor of China.

The following year of 1272 would be the first year of a new dynasty, which he would call the Great Yuan, a word which means either beginning or center. In accordance with Chinese tradition, his courtiers begged him to take the title of emperor, and he modestly refused twice, only accepting the third time they asked. A Chinese emperor needed an imperial capital,

Kublai decided to move his from the site of Shangdu and build a new one near the ruined city of Beijing that his grandfather had destroyed. There, he would build the new city of Dadu, meaning "great capital." But his Mongolian and Turkic subjects would often refer to it as Khanbalik, which in Mongolian means "the city of the Khan."

Rashid ad-Din recalls his decision. He designated as his winter residence the city of Khanbaliq, which had been an imperial capital. It had been chosen as a site in ancient times by astrologers and philosophers, and it was considered to be very auspicious and lucky.

Since Genghis Khan had destroyed it, Kublai Khan wanted to rebuild it. So for his own fame and reputation, he built another city next to it. Inside the city, he built a truly magnificent palace for his ordu. Its pillars and paving are all marble. It was to this capital of Khan Balik that a weary traveler arrived from the other side of the world.

probably sometime around the year 1271. He had left his home at the age of 16 or 17 and set out on a journey of exploration with his brother that had taken him across Central Asia and through many of the lands that now belonged to the Mongol Khanates. His name was Marco Polo,

It was likely the unification of much of Asia under the Mongols that allowed Polo to conduct his journey since the strict enforcement of the Mongol Yasa law code had kept banditry and robbery to a minimum. This was the period that has been called the Pax Mongolica or the Mongol Peace.

when it was said with some exaggeration that even a maiden carrying a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely across the realm without being robbed. When Polo arrived in Khan Balik, he was given an audience with the great Khan, which he describes in his later work.

I shall tell you of the great and wonderful magnificence of the great Khan now reigning. By name, Kublai Khan, he is the most powerful man as regards forces and lands and treasure that exists in the world or ever hath existed from the time of our first father, Adam, until this day.

He is of a good stature, neither tall nor short, but of a middle height. He has a becoming amount of flesh and is very shapely in all his limbs. His complexion is white and red, the eyes black and fine, the nose well-formed. He also describes the opulence of the Khan's palace.

The hall of the palace is so large that it could easily dine six thousand people, and it is quite a marvel to see how many rooms there are besides. The outside of the roof also is all colored with vermilion, and yellow, and green, and blue, and other hues which are fixed with a varnish so fine and exquisite.

Marco Polo was also astonished to see the Chinese invention of paper money being circulated by the imperial mint, a concept that he struggled to understand.

He makes them take of the bark of the mulberry tree. This they make into something resembling sheets of paper. When these sheets have been prepared, they are cut up into pieces of different sizes. The smallest of these is worth a half silver coin. The next a little larger, a whole silver coin. One, a little larger still, is worth half a silver groat of Venice.

All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver, and on every piece a variety of officials, whose duty it is, have to write their names and put their seals.

Anyone forging it would be punished with death. And the Khan causes every year to be made such a vast quantity of this money, which costs him nothing, that it must equal in amount all the treasures in the world." According to Marco Polo, Kublai Khan was so impressed with his adventurous spirit and command of four different languages that he appointed him an ambassador.

Over the next 17 years, Polo claims to have conducted a large number of ambassadorial journeys for Kublai, visiting the far south of China, Burma, and other lands around Southeast Asia, before finally being allowed to return home through Mesopotamia. Back home, the Venetian Marco Polo was taken as a prisoner of war by the rival Genoese and imprisoned for a year in Genoa,

During his imprisonment, Polo shared a cell with a writer named Rustichello da Pisa. Throughout their time imprisoned together, Polo recounted his extensive travels through Asia to Rustichello, who transcribed them into a work that they called The Description of the World. But it would become known as The Travels of Marco Polo, one of the most famous and influential travel books in history.

Polo's work, published in a dialect of Italian, caused a sensation back home, and after being translated into Latin, it was published around all of Europe continuously for the next centuries. But one detail from Marco Polo's journey does stand out.

When he finally got permission to leave China and return home in 1292, nearly 20 years after leaving home, he returned not over land but by boat. That's because the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol peace that had brought stability to Asia and allowed his journey in the first place, was already beginning to fracture.

Despite the glowing impression that the empire left on Marco Polo, China under Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty was a troubled place. For one thing, it was still at war with the remnants of the Southern Song who held out in several strongholds for many years.

But by the 19th of March 1279, the Mongols had cornered the last child emperor of the Sung in a coastal fortress called Yamen at the mouth of the Pearl River. The boy was only six or seven years of age, but he was the final hope for the continuation of the Sung line.

When Mongol forces finally closed in and it became clear that all was lost, one of the young emperor's attendants took the boy in his arms and gave the following cry: "The affairs of the nation lie in ruin and our country is destroyed. There is no hope now. His Majesty has no alternative but to die for the country." With the boy in his arms, he leapt from the cliffs into the ocean.

It's said that hundreds of the royal family and attendants followed the young emperor to his watery grave rather than face the Mongols. The sorrow of the collapse of the Song dynasty would haunt the Chinese people for generations. The poet Xie Ao captured the sense of melancholy when he visited the ruins of the former imperial palace at Hangzhou and memorialized it in a poem.

何属何人未守婚 落花台殿暗消魂 朝圆阁下归来艳 Like an ancient ruin, the grass grows high. Gone are the guards and the gatekeepers. Fallen towers and crumbling palaces desolate my soul. Under the eaves of the long-ago hall fly in and out the swallows.

But within, silence. The destruction of the Song was something that many of the Chinese citizens of the Yuan Dynasty would never forget. And for some, it was a wound that they would never forgive.

With the south of China finally crushed, Kublai Khan was the first foreign invader to ever conquer the whole of the central plains of China. This was also the first time that the land had been united since the Tang dynasty 400 years earlier. But Kublai had won an empire now devastated by decades of war. The north of China had been suffering from famine ever since it was first occupied by the Mongols.

Its agriculture had always been weaker than the south, where the humid weather meant that rice could be grown. But in the north, the major crops were wheat, sorghum, and millet. Since the destruction of Chinggis Khan's initial invasion, the northern economy had recovered somewhat, but famine was an ever-present threat.

To remedy this, Kublai Khan ordered the lengthening of the so-called Grand Canal so that it now connected his new capital of Khanbalik with the old Song capital of Hangzhou, a symbol of national reunification that also allowed the transport of rice from the south to the famine-struck north. This measure improved matters, and for a time a level of stability came to the once divided land,

But already, the Mongols were finding that conquering a vast and complex kingdom like China was much easier than actually ruling it. The new hybrid empire of Mongolian China was also going through a crisis of identity. Kublai's government was a tiny Mongol minority ruling over a vast population of tens of millions of Han Chinese.

and they were steadily losing their military advantage. Most of his soldiers were now no longer Mongolian horsemen but Chinese foot soldiers. The old capital of Karakorum, far out in the steppe, had become an irrelevance. Its palaces stripped of their treasures and what wealth it once had taken back to China.

people back in Mongolia must have begun to wonder who it was that had actually been conquered. To ensure that the empire maintained its Mongol identity, Kublai was keen to keep all the higher echelons of power reserved for Mongols.

To this end, southern Chinese people of the former Song were relegated to fourth-class citizens in their own country, with the northern Chinese above them, the Central Asians and Tanguts above them both, and of course, Mongols as the empire's elite class. Han Chinese were forbidden from holding many of the most powerful positions or holding key roles in the civil service.

That meant that many of the people who were most familiar with the land and the workings of its administration were kept away from any positions where they might do some good. Increasingly, Kublai feared that he might lose a grip on this slippery empire, and so he decided to do what Mongols had always done when they wanted to unite people around them. They went to war.

First, he was determined to conquer the kingdom of Dai Viet in the south, the northern kingdom of what is Vietnam today, but these plans would be frustrated. Although he swept south in three major invasions and managed to capture the Vietnamese capital of Thang Long near modern Hanoi, the Mongol forces found the humid tropical weather and thick jungle landscape impossible to contend with.

The Vietnamese soldiers melted away into the matted vegetation and raided Mongol armies with hit-and-run tactics that slowly whittled away their strength, as the history of Yuan describes. Although the Viet were defeated many times, they gathered more and more troops. Without sufficient supplies, both our generals and troops suffered hardships and many of them were killed.

While they were never actually defeated in battle, the Mongols eventually withdrew after taking heavy losses, leaving the kingdom of Daiviyet still independent, if somewhat devastated.

These tactics of guerrilla warfare were so successful for the medieval Vietnamese that the generals who had masterminded them became national heroes, and the books on strategy that they wrote would be read for centuries to come. As a result, the same tactics would be used again in the 20th century when they would inspire the North Vietnamese Army

and the irregular forces of the Viet Cong when they once again faced a more powerful invader in the form of the United States. For his part, Kublai Khan was angered by these failed invasions and even had one of his own sons named Thokkan banished for his part in the disaster.

With this embarrassment no doubt stinging, Kublai planned an invasion of one of the last holdouts against Mongol rule in the east, the island nation of Japan. The first Mongol attempt to capture Japan had ended in failure. Although they had briefly occupied the islands of Tsushima and Iki,

Although they had inherited a large navy from the Jin and Sung, and the Koreans who they had recently subjugated, the Mongols were not used to naval warfare and struggled to seize a credible hold on any land in Japan. This time, in the Second Invasion of 1280,

Kublai sent a larger force of perhaps 30,000 soldiers and ordered the construction of a grand fleet that was probably at that time the largest in the world. He was determined to seize a bridgehead from which a larger force could spread out over the whole of Japan.

The armada of as many as 4,000 ships sailed from the port of Masan in Korea and from China, leaving from Ningbo at the mouth of the Yangtze River. They chose the landing site of Hakata Bay, near the modern city of Fukuoka, which sits on the large Japanese island of Kyushu, just 200 kilometers off the coast of Korea.

but Japanese resistance would be fierce. They had learned the lessons of the first invasion and spent the intervening years preparing, even building a strong defensive wall surrounding Hakata Bay. When the Mongols landed, they brought all the technological might of China with them.

The Japanese source, the Hachiman Gudō-kun, describes the challenge of dealing with these terrifying weapons and notes with scorn the Mongols' lack of adherence to the traditional conventions of warfare. They sent iron bombshells flying against us, which made our side dizzy and confused. Our soldiers were frightened out of their wits by the thundering explosions. Their eyes were blinded, their ears deafened.

so that they could hardly distinguish East from West. According to our manner of fighting, we must first call out by name someone from the enemy ranks and then attack in single combat. But they took no notice at all of such conventions. They rushed forward all together in a mass, grappling with any individuals they could catch and killing them. Many of the invading soldiers were Chinese, not Mongol, and they had little stake in this conflict.

Many deserted or surrendered when the fighting got tough. The Mongols fought for two months at Hakata Bay in a kind of bitter stalemate. They were unable to make any headway against the Japanese defenses, while the Japanese too struggled to dislodge them entirely. Then, on the 15th of August, fate intervened.

A powerful typhoon swept in from the west, a common occurrence in late summer in Southeast Asia. The storm struck the Mongol fleet anchored off the coast, causing severe destruction. The Venetian Marco Polo describes the outcome. Now it happened one day, such a gale was blowing from the north that the troops declared that if they did not get away, all their ships would be wrecked.

So they all embarked and left the island and put out to sea. And let me tell you that when they had sailed about four miles, the gale began to freshen and there was such a crowd of ships that many of them were smashed by colliding with one another. Thousands of soldiers were left clinging to debris or swept ashore by the force of the storm.

Japanese warriors walked up and down the beaches, killing all Mongols they could find, only sparing the Chinese, who they believed had been forced into participating in the invasion. To the Japanese, this typhoon was no accident. It was the kamikaze, or divine wind, that had been sent by the gods to smash the Mongol invaders and protect the lands of Japan.

To Kublai Khan, this further crushing loss was a disaster from which his morale would never fully recover. In Burma too, the Mongols succeeded in toppling the empire of Bagan, but the humid tropical environment in the south of the country soon defeated them, along with its host of tropical diseases. The Mongols had now found the geographic bounds of their expansion,

There was no more treasure left to plunder, no more lands left to seize. All that was left to do was turn against one another and collapse from within. The great Khan Kublai died on the 18th of February 1294, and his death would begin the slow decline of Mongol power in Asia.

In China, nine further Khans followed the reign of Kublai, but their reigns were largely short, unstable, and characterized by widespread incompetence, corruption, and famine. Kublai's successor, his grandson Temur-ol-Jetu, died without an heir, and a period of struggle followed that led to growing resentment among China's people.

Meanwhile, the Mongols who remained back in the Mongolian steppe increasingly viewed these emperors as foreigners who had forgotten their old way of life and began to ignore the rule of the great Khan in China. The last emperor of the Yuan dynasty ascended the throne in the year 1333.

His name was Toghan Temür, and it's in his hands that the Yuan dynasty would truly disintegrate. Toghan Temür came to the throne at the age of 13 and ruled for 33 years, but as a young boy emperor, he mostly left the business of governing to his corrupt officials, and when he came of age, he saw little reason to change that.

During his reign, he presided over a China rife with discord and instability. Banditry became rampant, with the weakened Yuan armies unable to restore order. On top of this increasing discord, it was during these decades that the Black Death arrived in earnest and moved with shocking speed and lethality through the population of China and the rest of the Mongol world.

The very trade routes that had made the Mongols rich over the last century now became conduits through which the disease flowed unchecked. During the 14th century, it's estimated that China would lose between a half and two-thirds of its population to this plague. One later Chinese source describes the effect of this disease. "In the autumn, there was a great epidemic.

The victim first developed a hard lump below the armpits, or between the thighs, or else coughed thin blood and died before they had time to take medicine. There were whole families wiped out, with none to bury them.

From the late 1290s onward, the countryside endured a truly baffling intensity of natural disasters, including droughts, floods of the Yellow River, plagues of locusts, snowstorms, torrential rains, typhoons, landslides, earthquakes, and even the reported appearance of dragons over the skies of China.

These extreme weather events were partly driven by global weather conditions and the medieval climate shift known as the Little Ice Age. But throughout this period of hardship, the Yuan government's ineffective policies made everything worse, and before long, its people became convinced that the Yuan Mongols had lost the mandate of heaven.

The later Chinese source, The History of Ming or Ming Shi, describes the collapse of central order. "At this time, the Yuan government was no longer in control and bandits rose up on all sides. They amassed armies of several myriads each, and they all appointed generals and commanders who slaughtered the officials and invaded the prefectures and districts.

Still other bandits collected their swarms of soldiers and took possession of various places on the sea coast. The world was in chaos. By 1351, popular hatred of China's Mongol rulers erupted in a major peasant uprising that would become known by the scarlet headgear that its fighters wore. It was called the Red Turban Rebellions.

The Red Turbans were a large coalition of different groups, many motivated by a religious conviction that the end of the world was coming, that the prophesied final Buddha named Maitreya would soon arrive and bring an end to all suffering. These rebels met at night in clandestine meetings and recruited followers from among the workers conscripted to dig the Grand Canal.

It was soon a nationwide uprising. By 1351, the rebels had seized several cities, and even the old Song capital of Kaifeng fell into the hands of one red turban group. In the midst of all this chaos, the famine and plague passed through the village of one young man living in the valley of the River Huai, right in the center of China.

He was barely more than a boy, born into the depths of the poverty-stricken peasantry. His name was Zhu Yuanzhang. The history of Ming describes this tragedy. Drought, locusts, and pestilence came.

At that time, he was 17 years of age. His father, mother, and eldest brother all died in succession. The survivors were too poor to be able to provide a proper burial for the dead. He was now alone, with no one on whom he could lean. This orphaned boy would join a Buddhist monastery, but from there was swept up in the rising groundswell of rebellion.

and when he was old enough, he joined the Red Turban Rebellion. Eventually, he would rise through the ranks of this rebel insurgency and then break away to form his own army. To the astonishment of the Mongols, this peasant general even captured the large and important city of Nanjing. After this victory, he announced a war of national liberation in the following terms:

It used to be said that the Yuan, or Mongols, who came from the regions of the North, conquered our empire not so much by their courage and skill as by the aid of Heaven. And now it is sufficiently plain that Heaven itself wishes to deprive them of that empire. The time has come to drive these foreigners out of China!

Such was the weakened state of the Yuan dynasty that much of Zhu Yuanzhang's energy was spent fighting not the Mongols but other Chinese rivals among the Red Turbans. But after years of war, he finally won supremacy over all other rebel groups.

On the 20th of January 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang formally claimed the mandate of heaven and declared himself the Emperor of China. He announced the beginning of a new dynasty that he called the Ming, meaning bright or brilliant, and this orphaned peasant would go down in history with the name of the Hongwu Emperor.

With his rule now secure, he declared his intentions to march north and against the Mongol capital of Khan Balik. As the history of Ming recounts: "On the 9th of November, the emperor summoned his generals to discuss an expedition to the north. He said, 'The Yuan reign will soon be over, and North China is already in ruins.'

Now we shall strike northward and rescue the living from flood and flame. Let us take our veterans of a hundred battles, pit them against their long untried soldiers, and strike directly at the Yuan capital. So great is our force that this can be done as easily as splitting bamboo.

In August of 1368, the Ming forces arrived in the region of Beijing and at the site of the army, the Khan's capital of Khanbalik, surrendered without a fight. Beijing was now in the hands of the Chinese, little more than 150 years since Chinggis Khan had sacked it.

The later Mongol chronicle, the Altan Tobchi, attributes the following lament to the last Khan of China, Togan Temur, using the Chinese name Daidu for the capital. "My Daidu, straight and wonderfully made of various jewels, the summer residence of ancient Khans. My dear Daidu, that I've lost on the year of the bald red rabbit,

Nobles born foolish cared not for their state. I was left alone, weeping. I became like a calf left behind on its native pastures. Kublai the wise Khan spent his summers there. They besieged and took precious Daidu. I have lost the whole of it to China. Next, the Hongwu Emperor turned his sights on the heartland of the Mongols.

the Great Steppe itself, and the city that the Chinese called Houlin, the Mongol capital of Karakoram. With vengeance in their hearts, the Ming marched out into the steppe and arrived at the walls of Karakoram in 1372. After a period of bitter resistance, they occupied the city. As the Ming Shi recalls,

On the 1st of March, the Duke of Wei was appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition against the enemy slaves. They were to campaign northward into the sandy desert. He was to depart from the Yanmen Pass and race onto Houlin. On the 29th, Li Wencheng defeated the Wan forces at the Oakhon River. On the 18th of May, Lan Yu attacked and smashed the Wan hereditary ruler,

He captured his younger son and concubines, princesses, princes, dukes, and others of lower rank totaling several tens of thousands of people. He then returned to the capital. The timeline of the destruction of Karakorum is uncertain, but it was likely burned and sacked again in 1380, although by this point there would have been few people left living there.

The city had always been a figment of one great Khan's imagination, and when it lost its status as capital, it had been in a state of decline for years. Now, the final death blow was delivered, and though it would resurge a number of times, its ruins would eventually crumble back into the grasses of the steppe.

In the centuries that followed, its stones were taken and reused to create the Buddhist monastery of Erdenezu, which now sits over its ruin. The destruction was so total that for centuries, the location of the city of the Khans was lost until in the 19th century, Russian archaeologists uncovered certain inscriptions in the area of the monastery that identified the site.

Today, the only sign that the city ever stood there at all is the mounds of earth covered in the grasses of the steppe, stretching out to the north of the Erdenesu Monastery, and among them a single stone tortoise, one of the four that once stood at the four corners of the city, symbols of everlasting eternity.

Now, it stands alone in the grasslands of Mongolia, an ironic statement about an empire that rose so far and fell so fast. Across the rest of the Mongol world, the dissolution of their rule was sometimes gradual but just as total.

In Persia and the Middle East, the rulers of the Ilkhanate, descended from the Ilkhan Hulagu, Saka of Baghdad, would suffer a similar fate. They would convert to Islam and adopt many of the ways of life of their Persian and Arab subjects.

During their reign, Persia would experience something of a golden age, creating hybrid styles of architecture that would be repeated around the world, especially in the India of the Mughals. They resurrected the language of Persian, which had until then been supplanted by Arabic as a language of administration and literature.

and commissioned a gloriously illustrated copy of the epic work known as the Shah Nama, or the Book of Kings. They commissioned the historian Rashid ad-Din to write his work, the Compendium of Chronicles, the first attempted history of the world ever written, and which we have heard much from in this episode. But their time too would pass,

The ninth and final ruler of the Ilkhanate was named Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan. He died in 1335, either a victim of the Black Death or poisoned by one of his wives. After that, the Ilkhanate disintegrated rapidly into several states which were soon swallowed up by the Timurid and Safavid empires.

The Chagatai Khanate in the former lands of the Khwarezmian Empire and Kazakhstan also followed a similar fate and was snatched up by the warlord named Timur. When his empire collapsed in turn, the region was given over to local powers.

During this time, many of the cities damaged by the Mongols like Samarkand and Bukhara enjoyed a kind of revival and became once again wealthy trading stops along the Silk Road. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, as Europeans opened up trading routes by sea and bypassed the Silk Road entirely, these cities slowly began to lose their relevance.

Eventually, merchants stopped coming. The booming markets grew quiet, and many of these cities were abandoned. The destructive power of the economy eventually left these cities in ruins more effectively than the Mongols ever had. In the western steppe of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia, the Golden Horde, founded by the descendants of Genghis Khan's oldest son, Jochi,

was the dominant power for three centuries, but it eventually weakened under the ravages of the Black Death and the competing rivalries of the descendants of Jochi. Eventually, it split into more than half a dozen smaller carnates during the 15th century.

The lands were divided between the Kazakh Khanate, the Khanate of Kazan, the Astrakhan Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Khanate of Sibir, the Great Horde, the Nogai Horde, and the White Horde. The steppe once more looked much as it had in the time before Genghis Khan had united it, a warring mess of competing nomadic states.

Throughout this time, the Mongols had favored one Russian city above all others and had allowed it to gather taxes from the whole region on their behalf. This city was Muscovy, which we know today as Moscow. Eventually, Muscovy would break out from under Mongol control and bring the other city-states in the region under its banner, until in 1547 it founded its own kingdom.

the Tsardom of Russia. The Russian Tsars would advance into the steppe, now armed with muskets. For the first time in nearly 5,000 years, the steppe horse archer was no longer the deadliest entity on the planet, and with the rise of powerful centralized nations and the crack of powder and shot, the retreat of the nomads quietly began.

The Industrial Revolution sealed their fate. Soon, railways would carve through the wilderness, and the sound of repeating rifles echoed across the steppe. These technological innovations finally allowed settled peoples to push into the most remote and untamed territories where once only nomads had roamed.

Even the fiercest of nomadic warrior peoples were subdued by this new age. The ancient rhythm of nomadic incursions, which had ebbed and flowed for millennia, finally came to an end, and the wild heart of the steppe grew still.

In the 170 years or so between Genghis Khan's first conquests and the collapse of the Yuan dynasty, the Mongols had reshaped the structure of the world. Old power centers had been swept away, and in their place, new nations would begin to rise. Russia, Iran, Mughal India, and the newly united China. The Mongols have left their mark everywhere,

from a vast genetic legacy to the names that many of us have today. At this time, the Turko-Mongolian word for ruler, Khan, is one of the world's most popular surnames, belonging to more than 23 million people worldwide, and it is the 12th most common surname in the United Kingdom. It's in China that they left perhaps their greatest legacy,

In some ways, the Mongols invented the modern concept of China, uniting its two halves along with Tibet and Manchuria, making up the borders of the modern nation today. But on the Chinese people, the psychological effect of the Mongol conquest and occupation was immense, and the centuries that followed would be characterized by a great turning inwards.

The China of the Song dynasty had been inventive and outward-looking, seeking new technologies and foreign influences. But the Ming dynasty that took its place was paranoid and suspicious of change. While the Song had experimented with innovative and modern economic systems, the Ming went backwards, reverting to a more feudal society to deal with the damage left by the Mongols.

This inward-looking mentality is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the project that would take up much of the 15th and 16th centuries. That is, the building of the Great Wall. While China had built defensive walls for more than a thousand years at this point, it was in the Ming period that the true Great Wall as we know it today took its shape.

This snaking line of elegant fortifications runs for nearly 9,000 kilometers across the northern border of China, turning the entire land into a fortress. Using an estimated 100 million tons of building material, the Ming Great Wall is the equivalent of building the Great Pyramid of Giza nearly 50 times.

For much of this era, the construction of the Great Wall occupied an enormous part of the labor, economy, and political will of successive Chinese governments. The cost was so great that the Ming diverted funds from other parts of their budget, especially from their fleets of ships.

The Ming had inherited one of the largest fleets in the world with thousands of large vessels, many larger than any ship being built in Europe at the time. These had been used on voyages of exploration to India, Arabia, and Africa. But in the 15th century, the Ming dismantled much of this naval power and even burned some of the ships in harbor to save costs.

The historian James Watterson describes this inward turn: "After China's painful experience with the foreign invaders, it is no coincidence that the Ming worked hard to seal off the world beyond their Great Wall and to build it ever stronger in the post-Mongol period. The Ming suffered a self-inflicted wound by their efforts to seclude their state from the rest of the world and in doing so effectively missed out on modernity.

But while China looked inwards and built their Great Wall, on the other side of the continent, another people looked outwards. While China burned its ships, another people were building them. These were the people who were undoubtedly the biggest winners of the Mongol invasions and who were now positioned to embark on a wave of conquests of their own. Those were the people of Europe.

While Eastern European lands in the areas of modern Poland, Hungary, and Russia had all suffered from Mongol incursions, the kingdoms of Western Europe in France, England, Spain, and Portugal had escaped unscathed. On top of that, they had reaped a huge number of benefits. The anthropologist Jack Weatherford makes the following argument:

Although never ruled by the Mongols, in many ways Europe gained the most from their world system. The Europeans received all the benefits of trade, technology transfer, and the global awakening, without paying the cost of Mongol conquest. The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes,

listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard. Europe was fascinated by the Mongols and their vast world-spanning empire. In Italy, people even started giving their children Mongol names, with one Grande Khan, meaning Great Khan, being especially popular.

The Mongols had caused Europeans to come into contact with Chinese technologies that might have otherwise taken them centuries more to encounter, among them Chinese paper, the compass, and gunpowder. The Elizabethan English writer Francis Bacon commented on the transformative effect that these Chinese technologies had on European society.

We should notice the force, effect and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world, first in literature, then in warfare and lastly in navigation.

and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." The Mongol conquests helped Europe in another way too, that is, in broadening its horizons.

The text of The Travels of Marco Polo was still being printed in the 15th century when an Italian navigator bought a copy in a Genoese bookshop. The text had a transformative effect on him. This copy he would read over and over with an obsessive attention to detail, even leaving handwritten annotations in its margins. This navigator dreamed of one day visiting the lands of the Far East himself

and the court of the great Khan that he had read about. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he too would change the course of history. In the journal that he kept on his voyage westwards, he wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain that he wanted to reach this far-off place.

"'In this present month, in consequence of the information "'which I had given your Highnesses respecting the countries of India "'and of a prince called Great Khan, "'which in our language signifies King of Kings, "'your Highnesses determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, "'to the above-mentioned countries of India "'to see the said princes, people, and territories.'

and to learn their disposition. With the Chinese invention of gunpowder, by this point Europeans had already developed or adopted cannons, muskets, and arquebuses. With these, in the coming century, they would conquer vast swathes of land in the Americas and all around the world.

The age of European colonialism and the following 500 years of European power around the globe all found their roots in the fertile soil left behind after the inferno of the Mongol conquests.

In his work, The Canterbury Tales, the first book published in the English language, written around the year 1390, the author Geoffrey Chaucer relates one legend associated with Genghis Khan and writes in the following glowing terms about his legacy. This noble king was called Genghis Khan.

who in his time was of so great renown that there was nowhere, in no region, so excellent a lord at all things. He lacked nothing that belonged to a king, as of the sect of which he was born. He kept his law to which he was sworn, and thereto he was hardy, wise, and rich, and kept always so well royal estate that there was nowhere such another man, this noble king, this tartar, Genghis Khan."

In 1876, the Russian traveler Nikolai Mikhailovich Prezhevalsky traveled to Mongolia, hoping to find there traces of the great Khans of old, and perhaps even find the lost burial place of Chinggis Khan himself. But he found himself disappointed at what he saw. All he found was the vast empty grasslands and deserts,

broken by rocky mounds of stone. And the only evidence of past greatness he could find was in the people's stories. "The effect of these bare yellow hillocks is most dreary and depressing when you are among them and can see nothing but the sky and the sand. No sounds are heard, not even the chirping of the grasshopper. The silence of the tomb surrounds you.

No wonder that the local Mongols relate some marvelous stories about these frightful deserts. They tell you that this was the scene of the principal exploits of Chinggis Khan and here warriors fought against the Chinese and slew countless numbers of people whose bodies God caused the winds to cover with the sand from the desert.

To this day the Mongols relate with superstitious awe how groans and cries may be heard in the sands of Khuzubchi from the spirits of the departed and that every now and then the winds which stir up the sands expose to view different treasures such as silver dishes which may not be taken away because death immediately overtakes the bold man who would venture to touch them.

Wherever Prezhevalsky travelled, he found legends about Chinggis Khan still circulating on the lips of Mongol people. Some even told him of a prophecy that the great Khan would one day return and once again lead his people to greatness. Chinggis Khan's memory is better preserved in Ordos than in any part of Mongolia. We heard more tales here about the conqueror than anywhere else.

The Mongols reckon that 650 years have elapsed since his death, leaving 150 to 350 years more before his coming resurrection. The same people assert that on the very day of the accomplishments of this miracle, some hero will be born in China with whom Genghis Khan will do battle.

subdue him and lead his people from Ordos to what is now called the land of the Kalkas, the native country of the Mongols. And if Prezhevalsky hoped to find the grave of Chinggis Khan, he would also be disappointed. If anyone did know where his body was to be found, Prezhevalsky found that even after so many centuries, the Mongolian people still weren't telling.

In the 20th century, a communist government seized power in Mongolia and in close cooperation with the Soviet Union, engaged in purges of some 30,000 Mongolians, including thousands of Buddhist monks.

Many of the victims were from one clan who still traced their descent back to Genghis Khan. The Soviets were haunted by the ghost of the great Khan, fearing that he might become a rallying point for Mongolian nationalists. For this reason, they worked hard to destroy any relics associated with him, closing Buddhist monasteries, and trying to erase all memory of the great Khan.

but the Soviet-aligned government did maintain one aspect of Mongolian tradition. For 800 years, successive Mongolian rulers had maintained the law against anyone entering the region of the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun, the site where Chinggis Khan is most likely buried. For centuries, this land would be known as the Yekei Koreg or Great Taboo.

When the communists seized power, they feared that this region would become a pilgrimage site and a focus of Mongolian nationalism. For this reason, the Soviet-aligned government maintained the ancient prohibition on entering it. The region of the Great Taboo was renamed and called simply the Highly Restricted Area.

They built a top-secret air base there for the use of Soviet planes and most likely a stockpile of nuclear weapons so that even in the modern era, the land cannot be entered without special permissions. The grave of Chinggis Khan remains unfound to this day.

I want to end the episode with a reading from a piece of Chinese poetry written during this time by a poet from the southern Song dynasty. His name was Wen Tianxiang. Wen had been a government minister in Song China, and after witnessing the destruction of his land, he led the resistance against the Mongol invaders. He was eventually captured and held in a Mongol prison.

Despite all the tortures and deprivations that he suffered, he never wavered in his resistance. It was during this time of imprisonment that he wrote one of his masterpieces titled Crossing the Sea of Solitude. As you listen, consider the contradictions and paradoxes of this time

a time of discovery and exploration, a time of new ideas and unforeseen encounters, but also a time of incalculable sorrow, as the great powers of the world crumbled and a new world order took shape. Imagine the hollowed halls and shattered walls, the empty markets of Samarkand, Nishapur and Bukhara,

Imagine the gutted palaces and empty temples of Beijing and Hangzhou. Imagine the emptied streets and burned-out houses, the crumbling libraries of Baghdad and Aleppo, and the fallen churches of Novgorod and Kiev. And finally, at the end of it all, the windswept grasses growing through the stones of Karakorum. Imagine the world as you know it coming to an end,

And a new one, rising from the ashes. Through painstaking mastery of the classics, I have risen high. But four years of raging war have well nigh, brought all-round destitution and ruin.

My shattered country does remind me of willow catkins swept by wind. In my life I sink or swim, like duckweed beaten by rain. Through the frightful shallows we fought our way. They tell us now of the frightful battle never won. But on the lonely ocean, I could but sigh.

For being captured and all alone. Down through the ages, who that ever lived has not met with death. I wish only to leave my loyal heart shining red in history's great book.

Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode. Michael Hagi-Antonis, Lachlan Lucas, Alexandra Boulton, Tom Marshall-Lee, Chris Harvey, Nick Denton, Henry Stenhouse, Amrit Sandhu, Peter Walters, Matthew Biddulph, Garrett Caver, Sebastian Balzarolo,

and Paul Cassell. Readings in Arabic were performed by Osama Taher. Readings in Chinese by Richard Tang. Readings from the Secret History of the Mongols in Mongolian were performed by Wiles Efinhala. The title theme is Home at Last by John Bartman.

I'd also like to thank my historical advisors for this episode, Toby Jones of the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Jack Wilson of the Central European University Vienna.

You can find Toby on Twitter @tobiasbahadur and if you're interested in more information about the Mongols, Jack runs a YouTube channel called Jack Meister: Mongol History, where he explores many of the myths and misconceptions surrounding the Mongols. My book, Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, is now out in the United States and American readers can get it from all good bookstores.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Blue Sky, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul M. M. Cooper, and if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at FallOfSivPod with underscores separating the words.

This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and help keep the podcast ad-free. You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading on to patreon.com forward slash fallofcivilizations underscore podcast or just google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n. For now, all the best and thanks for listening.