Chapters 4–7 of Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World — spitting on the Golden Khan, sultan versus khan, the discovery and conquest of Europe, and the warring queens. Read from
RAW/books/Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 1 — Introduction and Chapters 1–3 · Part 3 — Chapters 8–10 and the Epilogue · What Runs Through All of It. No sibling thread map exists for this source yet.
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which merged the whole book into one account.
Source ingest: Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
A man spits on the ground and starts a world war. In 1210 a delegation arrived to announce a new Golden Khan on the Jurched throne and demand submission. The expected ceremony is on record from a later century: the Mongol kneels reverently on the ground and acknowledges himself a Mongol slave of inferior ability, perfectly unable to repay the imperial bounty in the slightest degree.1
Genghis Khan knew perfectly well how to kowtow — he had done it repeatedly on Burkhan Khaldun to the Eternal Blue Sky. At nearly fifty he would do it to no man, and he was nobody's Mongol slave. He turned to the south, spat on the ground, loosed a line of insults at the Golden Khan, mounted, and rode north, leaving the envoy choking in his dust.
What makes things happen, structurally, is the thing his own success broke. A steppe khan's position rested on winning battles and on keeping a steady supply of trade goods coming — and normally the two coincided, because victory meant looting. By defeating and uniting every tribe, Genghis Khan had ended the looting and cut off the goods.2 Jurched power over the steppe rested less on arms than on their tight control of what flowed north from the workshops of China.
How you go to war is by asking, and by counting who does not turn up. He summoned a khuriltai in the spring of 1211, and since everyone knew what was to be decided, the people could veto it simply by staying away.3 The long public discussion put everyone inside the decision, so that even the lowest-ranking soldier understood why he was fighting and was treated as a junior partner rather than as an instrument, however absolute the obedience expected in the field.
Then the decision goes upward. He withdrew alone, and for three days and nights the whole nation split into three groups — men, women, children — and fasted bareheaded, mumbling the ancient prayer huree, huree, huree. At dawn on the fourth day he came out with the verdict: the Eternal Blue Sky has promised us victory and vengeance.4
The other side's reply is worth keeping for what happened to it. Our empire is like the sea; yours is but a handful of sand. How can we fear you?5
What a person is, in this army, is a man carrying exactly what he needs and nothing more. A wool robe to the ankles, trousers, a fur hat with earflaps, thick-soled boots. Flints for fires, leather canteens, files to sharpen arrowheads, a lasso, sewing needles, a knife, a hatchet, and a skin bag to pack it in. One small tent per squad of ten.6
The army had no infantry and no supply train, which set it apart from every other army of the age. Sixty-five thousand horsemen went against an enemy with about as many horsemen plus eighty-five thousand foot — better than two to one against, and with none of the mobility. They milked and slaughtered the horse herd as they went and fed themselves by hunting and looting. A man chewed dried meat and curd while riding, and put raw flesh under his saddle to soften it when there was no time to cook.
The diet difference is stated as a military fact. The Chinese noticed with disgust that the whole army could camp without a single puff of smoke because it needed no cooking fires. The Mongols lived on meat, milk and yogurt; the men they fought lived on grain gruel that stunted their bones and rotted their teeth.7
How you know an order is accurate when nobody can read is the chapter's sharpest technical answer. Troops were spread across a huge area and the officers were illiterate, so every message had to be oral — repeated precisely, remembered exactly. So the officers composed their orders in rhyme, using a standardised system every soldier knew, with fixed melodies and poetic forms into which the words could be improvised. For a soldier, hearing a message was like learning a new verse to a song he already knew.8
And the laws travelled the same way. The men sang as they rode, about home and women and fighting — and they also sang the laws and rules of conduct, which had been set to music so that every man knew them.9
What is worth having, above everything, is a Mongol life. Warriors everywhere are taught to die for their leader, and Genghis Khan never asked his men to die for him. Unlike generals who sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, he would not willingly sacrifice one.10 His strictest rules concerned the loss of soldiers. On and off the field a warrior was forbidden to speak of death, injury or defeat — just thinking of it might make it happen — and even naming a fallen comrade was a serious taboo.
The bodies went home. On the steppe the dead were left where they fell to decompose naturally; in the cultivated lands the Mongols feared the corpse would be desecrated, so captives carried the dead back to Mongolia in leather bags on camels and in ox-carts. Where that was impossible they buried each man secretly with all his belongings and drove animals over the grave to hide it.11
What honour is, and it is not what the enemy thought. The Mongols found honour in winning rather than in fighting. Deception and cruel trickery still counted as winning and left no stain on a warrior's bravery, because there would be other days for showing prowess. There is no individual honour in a battle that is lost. As he reportedly said, there is no good in anything until it is finished.12
What a farmer is, in Mongol eyes, is livestock. In Jurched territory there were vast numbers of people and almost no animals — the reverse of Mongolia, where five to ten animals stood behind every person. So the fields were grasslands, and the peasants were grazing animals rather than real humans who ate meat. The Mongols used the same words for them that they used for cows and goats, and rounded them up with the same terminology and precision.13
That classification is also a tactic. Other armies of the era treated villages as loot and peasants as a nuisance to be raped or killed. The Mongols, always outnumbered, turned the enemy's population into their largest asset: each warrior had to round up ten local men and replace any who died. They fetched water and fodder, filled moats with stones and dirt, worked the siege engines and pushed the towers — and when they fell in battle, their bodies filled the ditches.
So refugees went in front of the Mongols rather than behind them, pouring into the cities, eating the stores and causing chaos. Trapped inside, the Jurched and their subjects starved and resorted to cannibalism, and urban mutinies and peasant rebellions broke out.
How you take a city you cannot batter down is by making the enemy come out. In the Dog Fight tactic, Jebe feigned a withdrawal from Liaoyang, leaving equipment and stores behind as though they had fled in panic. The city sent soldiers to collect it, clogging the open gates with carts and animals — and the Mongols fell on them and rode through the doors.14
The underlying difference is a definition of victory. For a farmer-soldier, to flee is to lose and to chase is to win, and the point is to drive the attacker away from the place. For a nomad, the point is to kill the enemy, and it makes no difference whether you do it advancing or retreating. A fleeing conquest is as good as a stationary one.
What is real, when the attack comes, is a wave of noise and then nothing. In the Crow Swarm or Falling Stars attack, horsemen came galloping from every direction at once at a drum signal or a fire. A Chinese observer put it exactly: they come as though the sky were falling, and they disappear like the flash of lightning.15 The sudden arrival and equally sudden vanishing, the roar and then the greater silence, did the work before the fighting started.
And what the Mongols collected from every campaign was people who knew things. They rewarded defecting engineers and picked engineers out of every batch of captives, making engineering units a permanent part of the army so the war machinery grew more complex with each conquest.16 Everywhere he went, men were brought to him for interrogation to see what skill they had and where in the empire it might be applied.
The shape of a campaign is set by weather rather than by strategy. The lower altitude and the moisture near great rivers made the summers nearly unbearable for the Mongols and their shaggy horses, and they reported falling ill with a horrible variety of maladies in the farmed and urban areas. Campaigning nearly halted in summer while the men and the herds withdrew to the higher grasslands of Inner Mongolia.17
How people should relate, once a place surrenders, was originally light. He took silk, silver, gold, three thousand horses and five hundred young men and women from the Golden Khan, accepted his vassalage and a princess, and withdrew. He showed no intention of ruling the area or setting up a government so long as the goods came.18 Then the Golden Khan abandoned his capital and fled south, which counted as rebellion, and the second time there was no tribute — the city was looted to the last brass button.
And the looting is where the new allies broke the system. Mongol practice treated loot like the harvest of a group hunt: everything collected centrally and distributed by rank. The Khitan and Chinese allies, with generations of grievance against the Jurched, believed each soldier kept what he seized. When the chief judge arrived to inventory the plunder he found chaos, and Mongol officials outside the city — including the royal cook — taking gold-embroidered silk as bribes to let it continue.19
What they did to the land on the way out is a statement of what they wanted it to be. Ploughed fields, stone walls and deep ditches had slowed the horses and blocked the free movement of the wild herds they liked to hunt. So on leaving they churned the land up under their hooves and turned it back toward pasture, in case the army ever needed to come back.20
What is worth having, and it arrived by the cartload. A river of brightly coloured silk flowed out of China — so much of it that they used silk to wrap other goods and as packing material, threw away their rawhide ropes and used twisted silk cords instead.21 Lacquered furniture, paper fans, porcelain bowls, bronze knives, wooden puppets, board games, carved saddles. Perfume of ocher and indigo and musk. Jewellery of ivory and tortoiseshell set with turquoise, pearls, coral, lapis, emeralds and diamonds.
Behind the animals came the endless lines of captives: princes and priests, tailors and pharmacists, translators and scribes, astrologers and jewellers, artists and soothsayers, magicians and goldsmiths. Long lines of clerks catalogued and rechecked each caravan.
Then the trap closes, and it is the appetite of his own people. Every load created the desire for more. Every Mongol could now sit on lacquered furniture draped in silk; every maiden was perfumed and bejewelled; the new craftsmen needed raw materials. What began as a raid for silks and baubles turned into three decades of the most extensive war in world history, and he bequeathed it to his descendants for two more generations.22
How a war finally starts, in 1219, is with a trade treaty and a greedy official. He wrote to the sultan of Khwarizm: I have the greatest desire to live in peace with you. I shall look on you as my son... my country is an ant heap of warriors, a mine of silver, and I have no need to covet other dominions. We have an equal interest in fostering trade between our subjects.23 He sent 450 merchants with white camel cloth, Chinese silk, silver bars and raw jade.
The governor of Otrar seized the goods and killed the merchants. As the Persian observer Juvaini put it, the attack did not merely wipe out a caravan — it laid waste a whole world.24 When Genghis Khan asked for the official to be punished, the sultan killed some of the envoys and mutilated the faces of the rest.
So he went back up the mountain. He uncovered his head, turned his face toward the earth, and for three days and nights prayed: I was not the author of this trouble; grant me strength to exact vengeance. Then he came down, meditating action and making ready for war.25
Read: lines 930–1140.
The offer is two sentences long and the second one is the whole policy. To the citizens of Nishapur: Commanders, elders, and commonality, know that God has given me the empire of the earth from the east to the west; whoever submits shall be spared, but those who resist, they shall be destroyed with their wives, children and dependents.26
Submission was framed as kinship, and it came with reciprocal duties. If a city accepted and acted as relatives should — by offering food — the Mongols treated them as family with a guarantee of protection and certain basic rights. If they refused, they were enemies. That is the same danapati logic from chapter I, running at the scale of a civilisation.
How a captured city was sorted is a statement about what a person is worth. First they killed the soldiers, because cavalry has no use for infantry and because they never wanted a hostile army sitting between them and Mongolia — they always wanted a clear, open way home. Then clerks divided the civilians by profession. Anyone who could read and write in any language counted as a professional, along with doctors, and they were spared and put to work. People with no occupation carried loads, dug fortifications, served as human shields, or were pushed into moats as fill.27
And the group that fared worst is the one every other army of the era spared. Under the chivalrous rules of European and Middle Eastern warfare, aristocrats showed each other pompous respect while freely slaughtering common soldiers, and preferred to capture a noble enemy for ransom. The Mongols killed the aristocrats as quickly as possible.28
The reasoning is given plainly. Killing the aristocrats decapitated the enemy's social system and minimised future resistance — some cities never recovered enough to rebuild. And it produced officeholders who owed their position to the Mongols alone. Genghis Khan recognised no titles except those he granted, so even an allied prince who wanted to keep an old title had to have it reconferred. A papal envoy complained that the lowest Mongol could walk in front of visiting kings and speak rudely to them.
He had not always done this. In the early conquests of the Jurched, Tangut and Black Khitan he protected the rich and left rulers in office — and they betrayed him as soon as the army withdrew. By the time he reached the Muslim cities he had learned what the loyalty of the rich was worth, and he had also worked out that the common people cared very little what happened to the idle rich.
The sultan's mother makes the point about aristocratic women. She had been the most powerful woman in the empire; the Mongols killed most of her court and two dozen of her family and sent her to a decade of servitude in Mongolia. Such a woman earned no consideration by virtue of birth — like a captured man, she was only as good as her skills and her work.29
How you spread terror, and this is the chapter's central insight, is with other people's pens. Terror is best spread not by the acts of warriors but by the pens of scribes and scholars.30 In an era before newspapers the letters of the intelligentsia shaped opinion, and the Muslim world had the highest literacy rate anywhere. So he exploited it: the Mongols ran a propaganda machine that consistently inflated the numbers killed, and from every conquered city they sent delegations to the next to describe the horrors.
He showed no interest in having his accomplishments recorded or in praise of his prowess. He simply let people circulate the worst and most incredible stories about him. One that survives has a single Tatar taking a man prisoner with no weapon to hand. He tells the man: lay your head on the ground and do not move — and the man doing so while the Tatar went to fetch a sword.31
The scale of the paper operation is measurable. By August 1221, one year into the campaign, Mongol officials demanded a hundred thousand sheets of famous Korean paper.32
And here the book makes a distinction that cuts against everything the reputation says. The Mongols killed at an unprecedented rate and used death as policy — and they did not torture, mutilate, or maim.33 That was a deviation from standard practice. When four hundred Mongol prisoners fell into enemy hands at Isfahan in 1228, they were tied behind horses, dragged through the streets as public entertainment, killed as sport and fed to dogs. In another case Persian victors killed Mongol captives by driving nails into their heads, the seat of the soul.
The comparison runs the other way too. Emperor Basil blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian captives in 1014, leaving one man in each hundred with one eye to lead the others home and spread the terror. At Cremona in 1160, Frederick Barbarossa's men beheaded prisoners and kicked the heads about outside the walls like balls. The defenders pulled the limbs off German prisoners on the walls in reply, and the Germans hanged more. Finally the Germans strapped captive children into their catapults and hurled them living at the city walls.34
So the Mongols inspired fear by speed and efficiency and by their total disdain for the lives of the rich and powerful, rather than by ostentatious public cruelty.
What makes things happen, when a city revolts, is a woman's decree. Nishapur rose after surrendering, and an arrow from its walls killed Genghis Khan's son-in-law. He let his widowed daughter, pregnant at the time, take whatever revenge she wished. She decreed death for all, and reportedly ordered the heads piled in three separate pyramids — men, women, children — and every dog, cat and living animal killed, so that nothing survived the murder of her husband.35
And the rule for grief in this family is one line long. At Bamiyan an arrow killed Mutugen, his favourite grandson. He got the news before the boy's father did, summoned his son Chaghatai, and before telling him ordered him not to weep or mourn. He had cried publicly many times in his life, in fear and anger and sadness. Faced with the death of the one he loved most, he allowed no tears. Kill, don't mourn.36 The valley's people did not survive it.
How you know a number is false is arithmetic. Persian chronicles report 1,747,000 killed at Nishapur and 1,600,000 at Herat, with Juzjani raising Herat to 2,400,000.37 Even the conservative modern figure of fifteen million in five years would require every Mongol to kill more than a hundred people; the inflated tallies require 350 each. Had that many people lived there, they could easily have overwhelmed the invaders — or simply run away, since the Mongols could not have stopped them. The dry soil preserves bone for millennia and the ruins rarely show a tenth of the enumerated dead.
The accurate description is a destroyer of cities rather than a slayer of people.38 He razed cities on the less important or less accessible routes to funnel commerce onto roads his army could supervise, and depopulated whole regions by destroying irrigation systems so the fields reverted to grazing — keeping a clear area of advance and retreat with adequate pasture.
The shape of a succession is a fable about a snake. He opened the family council by asking what would happen if all my sons should wish to be Khan and ruler, refusing to serve each other — would it not be as in the fable of the single-headed and the many-headed snake?39 The many heads quarrelled about which hole to shelter in and pulled in different directions; the snake with many tails and one head went straight in and survived the winter.
Then the order of speaking becomes the fight. Order of seating, walking, speaking, drinking and eating carries heavy symbolic weight, so by asking Jochi to speak first he was publicly naming him eldest. Chaghatai refused to let it pass: when you tell Jochi to speak, do you offer him the succession? How could we allow ourselves to be ruled by this bastard son of a Merkid?40 Jochi screamed, lunged across the tent, and the two men beat each other.
What a father can and cannot do is settled in the compromise. He could not impose a choice they would reject after his death, so he negotiated one they would all accept: he reasserted that he himself accepted Jochi as eldest and commanded the others never to repeat the suspicion. Chaghatai obeyed the command and made clear that obeying it changed nothing — the game killed by mouth cannot be loaded onto a horse. Game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned.41 Then he proposed that neither he nor Jochi take the office, and that it fall to the third brother, Ogodei.
How the record handles it is itself a finding. The Muslim scholars at the Mongol court could barely write it down, because for them a man's honour rested on controlling the sexuality of the women around him. Juvaini wrote the fight out of his history entirely and made the council a scene of serene unanimity. Rashid al-Din gave a more honest version with blanks left at exactly the places that would impugn the honour of Genghis Khan or his wife.42
What a leader is, in the lessons he tried to teach too late, begins with self-control. Pride is harder to subdue than a wild lion and anger harder to beat than the greatest wrestler: if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead.43 Never think yourself the strongest or smartest — even the highest mountain has animals that step on it, and when they climb to the top they are higher than it is. Say only what needs saying, and show your thinking through action rather than words. He can never be happy until his people are happy. And without the vision of a goal, a man cannot manage his own life, much less the lives of others.
Some of it pulls the other way, toward caution. The old tunic, or deel, fits better and is always more comfortable; it survives the hardships of life in the bush, while the new or untried deel is quickly torn.44 And a warning against a colourful life of material frivolity and wasteful pleasure.
The most important lesson has two halves and the second one contradicts the tone of the first. Conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation: you take an army with tactics and men, and you take a nation only by taking the hearts of the people. Then, immediately: the empire should be one, and the subject peoples should never be allowed to unite as one. People conquered on different sides of the lake should be ruled on different sides of the lake.45 Like most of his teaching, this was ignored by his sons.
Where the conquest stops is not a decision. Coming down from the Afghan mountains onto the Indus plain, both warriors and horses weakened and sickened as soon as they left the dry cold, and — more alarming — the Mongol bows, which handled the extremes of the steppe, failed in the humidity.46
How he saw himself is in a letter to a Taoist monk, and the voice is plain. He ascribed his enemies' fall to their own failings rather than his prowess: I have not myself distinguished qualities. The Eternal Blue Sky had condemned them for their haughtiness and their extravagant luxury. And: I wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cowherds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifices, and we share the riches.47
He admitted a failure, and it is a specific one. I fear that in my ruling there may be something wanting. Good officials matter to a state as a good rudder does to a boat — and while he had found men of talent to be generals, he had not found men as good in administration.
And to a cleric who suggested he was killing so many people that nobody would be left to remember his name, he answered that there are many kings in the world, and many more people in other parts of it. They will relate my story.48
Read: lines 1141–1344.
An heir opens the treasury and gives it away. At his installation Ogodei threw open his father's stores and distributed everything — pearls by the casket, bolts of silk thrown into the crowd, so many colours that the court wore a different one each day.49 The drinking did not stop; men and women drank until they passed out, slept, and resumed. About then the family took the name of the Golden Family.
What that inauguration set is the model for the reign. Without Genghis Khan to moderate it, his heirs ruled drunk on riches they had not earned and on the alcohol they had come to love.
What makes things happen next is one decision reversed. Ogodei became convinced that a kingdom conquered on horseback could not be ruled on horseback — when rule from horseback and a mobile centre of power had been a primary cause of Mongol success.50 He built a fixed capital at Karakorum, choosing the site by nomadic standards: open steppe, good wind to keep mosquitoes down, water far enough away not to be polluted.
He began it in a Mongol way, probably by shooting an arrow across the steppe and building the first wing the length of a bowshot. Then a second wing the same way, a tall pavilion between them, and a sturdy wall — from which the place got its name, black stones or black walls.51 The Mongols went on living in their gers around it, and the court moved with the seasons, often a week's journey away. Karakorum served mostly as a large warehouse and workshop, ignored by most Mongols including Ogodei.
How you attract trade is by overpaying on purpose. Ogodei sat outside his court every day after eating with every kind of merchandise in the world heaped in piles, giving it away to Mongols and Muslims alike. He paid twice the asking price for imported goods, as thanks for the effort of reaching him and as an inducement to others, and decreed that whatever the merchants asked should be paid plus ten per cent.52 He standardised weights and measures, financed caravans, and created paper money exchanges because bullion was too bulky to move.
What is worth having, once the treasury runs out, is a new target. By 1235 he had squandered most of his father's wealth, and no reform of administration changed the fact that the empire rested on conquest. The Mongols grew no crops, manufactured nothing, and would not trade away their horses.
So the council of 1235 chose an unprecedented answer to the question of where to attack. India, Persia, the Sung and Europe all had advocates. The family reached a remarkable decision: the army would push out in all directions at once, fighting campaigns five thousand miles apart across more than a hundred degrees of latitude — a feat unmatched until the Second World War.53 Weatherford's verdict is that it was probably the worst decision in the empire's history, and the half-staffed Sung invasion let that dynasty limp on for four more decades.
How you know how Europeans fight is because one man had been there. Subodei was sixty, blind in one eye, and by some reports too fat to ride and hauled about in an iron chariot — and he was the only surviving commander who had probed Europe, in 1221.54 The probe had gone through Georgia and onto the Russian plain, where a Russian army of forty to eighty thousand met a Mongol force half its size.
The Russian army was farmers. Recruited from grainfields and villages, strong when nourished but not a professional army, and at the end of winter poorly fed. Most had more expertise swinging a scythe or cracking a whip at an ox than using a weapon, and each carried whatever he had adapted from farm tools. Their aristocratic officers assured them of easy victory and sat behind them on horses.
Then the Silent Attack. Instead of charging, the Mongols began singing and beating drums, and then fell into an eerie absolute quiet — the whole assault controlled by waving flags, mounted archers riding forward without a sound.55 The Russian archers replied and their shorter European bows mostly fell short. The Mongols chased down the Russian arrows and, rather than breaking them, fired them back, because the notches fitted a Mongol bowstring.
The princes' horses are the last detail and they are the emblem of the thing. European warhorses were bred for a massive show of strength, to carry armour on a parade ground, rather than for speed or agility in a battle. Against other aristocrats on similar show horses that was safe. With their infantry routed they had to flee, and they could not.
How the ambassadors are avenged sets the price. The Mongols wrapped Prince Mstislav and his two sons-in-law in felt rugs, as befitted high-ranking aristocrats, and stuffed them under the floorboards of a ger, slowly and bloodlessly crushing them while the victors drank and sang above.56 It was important that the Russians understand the penalty for killing envoys, and equally important to reaffirm to their own men how far they would go to avenge one.
And how Europe understood the whole episode is theology. The chroniclers of Armenia, Georgia and Russia had no idea who these people were or where they went. They interpreted their defeat as a punishment from God — and since the Mongols left rather than occupying, they concluded that the invaders had done God's chastising and been sent home again.57
What is real, at Riazan in 1238, is a wall built around a wall. Instead of attacking, the Mongols set their conscripted labourers to cut trees and build a stockade completely surrounding the already walled city, sealing the gates and preventing sorties.58 It was a wooden form of the nerge, the line used to enclose animals in a hunt — and from catwalks behind it the warriors looked down on the city exactly as generations of Mongol hunters had looked down at bunched prey from behind ropes hung with felt.
Then the bombardment: rocks, chunks of wood, flaming pots of naphtha, gunpowder and other unknown substances. The fire, smoke and confusion from an unseen attacker demoralised the people as much as the damage destroyed their defences. After five days they came out from behind their wall with ladders and rams and took the city in a day.
Behind the army came the census takers, recording the people, animals and products seized and dividing them into lots by the laws of shares — for everyone from orphans and widows up to the Golden Family.
How you know what a Mongol is, in western Europe, is entirely from refugees. Matthew Paris of St Albans recorded the oldest known western mention in 1240, calling them an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan and like demons loosed from Tartarus, and derived Tartar wrongly from a river.59 Tartarus was the Greek name for the lowest cavern beneath Hades. He called them monsters rather than men, thirsting after and drinking blood.
And in the middle of the vitriol he relayed accurate information: short and thickset, compact and strong, invincible in battle and indefatigable in labour, wearing armour on the front of the body and none on the back.
How Europe made sense of it once the knights had failed is by looking in the Bible, and the consequences fell on people who had nothing to do with it. Tartar sounded like Tarshish, whose king shall have dominion from sea to sea. When the Mongols turned south rather than riding on Cologne, the clerics decided instead that these must be the lost Jewish tribes from the Babylonian captivity, since 1241 corresponded to the year 5000 in the Jewish calendar.60
The stories were absurd and the consequences were real. Unable to beat the Mongols, Europeans could beat the Jews. From York to Rome, Christian crowds attacked Jewish quarters, set fire to homes and massacred the residents, punishing them with the treatment they had heard the Mongols used. And to identify refugees and keep them out of new communities, the church ordered that Jews wear distinctive clothes and emblems.
What a defeat does to the aristocracy that suffers it is stated as an ending. European knighthood never recovered from losing nearly a hundred thousand men in Hungary and Poland — what Europeans mourned as the flower of their knighthood.61 Walled cities and heavily armoured knights were finished, and in the smoke of Easter 1241 the Mongol victory portended the destruction of European feudalism.
Where the empire stops is a botanical fact. They followed the grass steppes across Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Hungary — and where the pastures ended, the Mongols stopped.62 With five horses per warrior they needed that pasture. Speed, mobility and surprise were all lost picking through forests, rivers, ploughed fields, ditches, hedges and fences; the soft furrows gave the horses no footing; and the damp coastal climate weakened the bows.
What is worth having, at the end of a campaign that produced little loot, is a business relationship. Disappointed and eager to show a profit, the Mongol officers struck a deal with the Italian merchants in the Crimea. They offered trade goods in exchange for the right to take European prisoners, especially young ones, to sell as slaves around the Mediterranean.63
Most of them went to the sultan of Egypt for his slave army. In twenty years the Mongols would meet that army — mostly Slavs and Kipchaks with experience of fighting Mongols, many of whom had even learned the language before being sold — beside the Sea of Galilee.
Read: lines 1345–1558.
While the men fought, women ran the empire. Among the herding tribes women had always managed affairs at home while the men herded, hunted or fought — and when the campaigns lasted years rather than months and home became a continent, they went on ruling.64 Aside from Russia and eastern Europe, women administered every remaining part of the Mongol Empire.
None of them had been born a Mongol. They had all married in from conquered steppe tribes, and most were Christians. Neither their gender nor their religion hindered their rise, nor their struggle against one another. From 1241 to 1251, Toregene and a small group of women controlled the largest empire in world history.
What is worth having, from their seat, is different from what the men wanted. The oldest surviving record of Toregene's power is an order to print Taoist texts, issued in April 1240 under her own name as Yeke Khatun, Great Empress, with Ogodei's seal.65 While the men fought, she supported religion and education and built social institutions on an imperial scale.
How you get your son elected is five years of committee work. She could not raise a quorum of the Golden Family for the candidate she wanted, so she continued as regent and spent five years building support. She dismissed her late husband's ministers and replaced them with her own. The most important of them was another woman, Fatima, a Tajik or Persian captive from the Khwarizm campaign.66
What a person is, when the succession is settled and she is no longer needed, is shown by what happened to Fatima. Guyuk demanded her from his mother on a charge of witchcraft; his mother refused several times, and their relations became very bad; then Toregene died and Guyuk's men took Fatima.
The court then fixated on one woman. She was brought before him stripped naked and bound, kept hungry and thirsty for days, beaten and flogged. When she confessed, he ordered all the orifices of her upper and lower body sewn shut, so that none of the essences of her soul could escape from her body. Then he had her rolled in a felt blanket and drowned.67
The legal logic is worth stating, because it is the same logic that made the empire work. The torture was arguably legal because she was neither a Mongol nor married to one — a war captive of uncertain and unprotected status.
How you get rid of a Great Khan is not recorded, and the silence is itself evidence. Sorkhokhtani warned Batu of Guyuk's planned surprise attack, and once Guyuk left his stronghold the forty-three-year-old, seemingly healthy khan suddenly died after eighteen months in office.68 No Mongol document records the details, and the Persian chroniclers turn laconic.
How you win an election you cannot convene is by choosing the ground. Sorkhokhtani lacked access to the imperial capital, but as the widow of the youngest son she controlled the ancient homeland where Genghis Khan had been born, elected and buried. Nobody could refuse to attend a khuriltai held on that ground. Batu sent thirty thousand troops to protect her, and on 1 July 1251 the assembly proclaimed Mongke Great Khan.69
What a sacred day looks like is a list of prohibitions. On the day of his election nobody was to work and no animal was to carry a burden. The earth was not to be pierced with tent pegs and water was not to be polluted. No wild animals were to be hunted, and animals killed for the feast had to be killed without shedding blood on the sacred earth.70 Then a week of feasting on three hundred horses or oxen and three thousand sheep a day.
The verdict on her, from Bar Hebraeus, is the clearest thing said about any woman in the book. if I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to men.71 Genghis Khan produced sons who were weak, drink-prone and self-centred; she produced and trained four who each became a khan.
And the decade's real product was institutional rather than territorial. Even while competing with one another, the women brought outside talent into the inner circle and gave the empire a new foundation through monasteries and schools, the printing of books, and the exchange of ideas. When the men resumed the world war, it would be those institutions that had the greatest lasting effect.
What is real, in Mongke's courtyard, is a silver tree with pipes in it. A tree of silver and precious metals rose over the palace, its branches running along the rafters. Silver fruit hanging from the limbs and four golden serpents braided around the trunk, and a silver angel at the top holding a trumpet. Pneumatic tubes let unseen servants make the angel sound.72 The four serpents stood for the four directions of the empire, and four alcoholic drinks came out of them — from grapes, milk, rice and honey.
Trees were rare on the steppe and heavy with meaning in this family. The first ancestor to try to unite the tribes was made khan under a tree, and it was in that same area that Temujin and Jamuka swore their oath as andas.
How you settle a religious question is by holding a wrestling match. The Mongols loved competitions and organised debates between rival religions the way they organised wrestling — a set date, a panel of three judges, one Christian, one Muslim, one Buddhist, and a rule announced on pain of death: no one shall dare to speak words of contention.73
Nothing like it had happened before. Representatives of several kinds of Christianity, of Islam and of Buddhism argued as equals, using no weapons and no authority beyond their own arguments. They formed shifting coalitions depending on the topic. And between rounds, exactly as between rounds of wrestling, everyone drank.
The ending is the most Mongol thing in the book. As the alcohol took hold the Christians gave up arguing and started singing; the Muslims, who did not sing, recited the Koran loudly to drown them out; the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. Unable to convert or kill one another, they finished the way most Mongol occasions finished, too drunk to continue.
What was happening elsewhere at the same hour is the comparison the chapter makes and does not labour. While they debated, Rubruck's own sponsor Louis IX was burning some twelve thousand handwritten Jewish books in France, for which the church later canonised him. And in 1255 the church sanctioned torturing people suspected of heresy — priests had not previously inflicted torture for religious purposes.74
Mongke's own statement of the doctrine is four sentences and it is the epigraph of the chapter. We Mongols believe in one God, by Whom we live and Whom we die and toward Him we have an upright heart. Then: Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men. To you God has given the Scriptures and you Christians do not observe them.75
How you keep an empire solvent is by honouring a dead man's debts. Guyuk had bought vast amounts of goods with paper drafts, and after his death many officials did not want to pay. Mongke recognised that refusing would destroy the confidence of merchants everywhere, and paid.76
Then he built the machinery. In 1253 he created a Department of Monetary Affairs to control and standardise the issuance of paper money and prevent inflation. Each nation went on minting its traditional coins, tied to a universal measure — the sukhe, a silver ingot divided into five hundred parts — which eased accounting and exchange and let taxes be monetised rather than collected in local goods.77
What a person is, at the fringe, is a young man given hashish and a garden. The Ismailis held perhaps a hundred mountain fortresses and no conventional army, and exercised power through assassination. They recruited young men willing to die, with the assurance of instant entry into paradise, and gave them a foretaste of it in the cult's gardens. The word for them, hashshashin, became the word assassin in many languages.78
How you take a hundred fortresses is by taking one man. Hulegu judged the castles too costly to reduce one by one and concentrated instead on capturing the Imam himself, with massive force plus an offer of clemency. Then he paraded the Imam from castle to castle to order his own followers to surrender, keeping him cooperative by indulging his obsessive interest in watching camels fight and mate.79
What is worth having, at Baghdad, is the richest city on earth. The Caliph offered formal submission, enormous tribute, and Friday prayers read in the Great Khan's name. Hulegu scoffed — he was too close to victory to settle for trifles when all the wealth of the city could be his.80
The improvisation that took it is the tallest thing in the neighbourhood. Lacking siege timber, the Mongols chopped down the date palms the Arabs had cultivated for centuries and fired the trunks at the city.81 They had also changed the gunpowder formula to give it enough oxygen to explode rather than burn slowly. They used the explosions to hurl projectiles from tubes — small enough for one man in an iron tube on a wooden handle. Every one of these innovations kept the Mongols as far as possible from the actual fighting, which they abhorred.
And the fate of the Caliph is a lesson delivered as a meal. Hulegu locked him up for three days without food or water. Then he brought him out and heaped his looted gold and treasure in front of him, and ordered him to eat the gold — then scolded him for accumulating wealth instead of building an army to defend himself.82
Where it ends is where the slaves came back. The Mamluk army of Egypt, bought mostly from Italian merchants who took them from the Kipchak and Slavic peoples of Russia, met a Mongol detachment at the Springs of Goliath near the Sea of Galilee on 3 September 1260, and beat them.83 The empire had reached its western border.
The shape of the succession, by now, is that nobody comes home. When Mongke died in 1259, no faction raced back for an election. Each moved to protect what it already held, and neither Hulegu in the Middle East nor his cousins in Russia would leave their territory.84 Mongke was the last of Genghis Khan's descendants accepted as Great Khan by the whole empire. He began, and never finished, the Second Mongol World War, which ended with neither victory nor defeat and merely flickered out.
Then Khubilai took Karakorum by cutting off its food. The city had grown too large to live off the local herds and the land around it would not farm, so without shipments from the farmland he controlled it had to be evacuated or starve.85 Arik Boke was also facing zud, animal famine, through the two worst decades of the century.
The exchange when the brothers finally met is four words long. Khubilai forced a public ceremony of obeisance and demanded to know which side in the struggle had been the correct one. Arik Boke answered: we were then, and you are today.86
And the last act of the chapter is a demolition. Karakorum served as capital of the Mongol Empire for a mere three decades before the Mongols themselves, under Khubilai, looted and virtually destroyed it. The Silver Tree was taken apart and carted away.87
Read: lines 1559–1823.
Everything above is sourced to the chapters named. Everything below is built rather than found, and is not measured by assessgate.sh.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, named by a son in front of the whole family. Chaghatai proposed that neither he nor Jochi should be khan, and that the office fall to Ogodei. The alternative was on the table and was the one everybody in the tent expected: Jochi first, by seniority, which is what the order of speaking had just announced.
What that compromise bought and what it cost are both visible by chapter six. It bought peace for the two decades Genghis Khan had left, and it put on the throne a man whose inauguration set the model of his reign by giving away the treasury while drunk. Chaghatai's proposal solved the succession by choosing the son nobody would fight over, which is a different criterion from the one the family said it used — office by ability and support rather than by birth. Ogodei's qualification was that he was not a threat.
[SPECULATIVE]Let the enemy write your reputation and do not correct it. He showed no interest in recording his own accomplishments and let the worst stories circulate freely, in the most literate region on earth. Applies when your opponents' scribes are more credible to your next target than your own would be, and when the exaggeration runs in a direction that helps you — inflated body counts induce surrender. Fails over a long horizon, because the reputation outlives the use you had for it. Chaucer wrote in awe; Voltaire wrote of a wild Scythian bred to arms; and by the nineteenth century the name was a medical slur. Decision type: timing a bold move.
Kill the aristocracy and keep the professionals. Clerks sorted captured cities by occupation, sparing anyone literate in any language along with doctors and craftsmen, and killing the rich. Applies when the local elite's loyalty is worthless to you — he had tried leaving rulers in office and been betrayed each time — and when the skills you need are held by people the elite outranks. Fails where the elite is the only thing holding the administration together, which is why some of those cities never rebuilt at all. Decision type: power consolidation.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, and the council took both roads instead of choosing. The 1235 khuriltai had advocates for India, for Persia and Baghdad, for the Sung, and for Europe. The decision was to attack the Sung and Europe simultaneously, five thousand miles apart.
Weatherford's verdict is that this was probably the worst decision in the empire's history, and the mechanism is stated: the Sung campaign was half-staffed and lacked Subodei, so the dynasty survived four more decades. What the split reveals is that the council could not choose, because the two proposals belonged to two branches of the family — Batu stood to gain from Europe and Ogodei from the Sung. Doing both was not a strategy. It was a way of not settling a succession question.
[SPECULATIVE]A Kautilyan advisor on Ogodei's overpaying. The Arthashastra treats extremes of price as harmful to everyone and puts an overseer of trade in charge of containing them, fixing the trader's profit at five per cent on local goods and ten on foreign — a transport charge proportional to distance rather than a reward for risk. See What a Mauryan Statecraft Manual Took For Granted, Chapters 4–6.
Ogodei did the exact opposite and did it deliberately: double the asking price, plus a ten per cent bonus, on goods he did not need and whether they were good or bad. A Kautilyan reader would call that a subsidy misdescribed as a market, and would predict precisely what happened — the treasury emptied in under a decade and the empire had to go back to war to refill it.
Where the two would agree is on the diagnosis rather than the cure. Both take the ruler to be a participant in trade as well as its regulator, and both take a full treasury as the precondition of everything else. The Mauryan answer is to squeeze the merchant's margin toward a fair price; Ogodei's is to inflate it to attract caravans to a city nobody had a reason to visit. He was paying for a capital, not for goods — and when Khubilai cut its food off thirty years later, the thing he had bought turned out to be indefensible.
[SPECULATIVE]When you cannot convene the meeting, move it to ground nobody can refuse. Sorkhokhtani could not get access to Karakorum, so she held the election on the homeland where Genghis Khan was born, elected and buried. Applies when legitimacy attaches to a place rather than to an institution, and when you control that place — the venue then does the work that a quorum would otherwise have to do. Fails where the rival can simply hold his own meeting elsewhere and claim it, which is exactly what Khubilai did nine years later with almost nobody present. Decision type: succession.
Pay a dead predecessor's debts even when nobody can make you. Mongke honoured Guyuk's paper drafts because refusing would have destroyed merchant confidence across two continents. Applies when your revenue depends on voluntary participation by people who can go elsewhere, and when the debt is small against the traffic it protects. Fails where the obligations exceed what the institution can carry, in which case honouring them is how you inherit somebody else's collapse. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
[SPECULATIVE]A Buddhist monastic advisor on the debate at Karakorum. The monastic world Fa-hien walked through ran on ninety-six rival systems that all begged their food and all kept free hostels for each other's travellers on the empty roads, with the only recorded difference being the length of stay. See What the Buddhist Kingdoms Took For Granted, Chapters XIV–XXVI. Disputes over doctrine there got settled by a lion roaring on a pillar, on terms both sides had agreed in advance.
That is the same instrument Mongke used, and it makes the Karakorum debate look less like tolerance and more like procedure. A wrestling match has judges, rounds, rules and a drink between falls, and the point of it is that the loser walks away. Rubruck came from a world where his own king was burning twelve thousand books that year and where the church was about to license torture for heresy — and he could not work out why his arguments were not landing.
The counsel would be that he had misread the format. He thought he was proving something. Everyone else in the tent understood that the format was designed so that nothing needed to be proved, and that its whole value lay in the fact that at the end of it all the participants were merely drunk.