All Things Medieval

The four ruling sons of Genghis Khan didn’t last long. Jochi, the controversial oldest son, died before his father. So already at the Great Khan’s death, grandsons had been assigned to rule parts of the western Empire.

Batu was the most capable grandson; Batu Khan’s western army was known as the Golden Horde (Алтан Ордын улс). In 1235, the Golden Family decided to send a joint force to conquer more western territory. For perhaps the last time in a united Mongol venture, there were grandsons and even great-grandsons of all four of the Khan’s lineages, all jockeying for power. Who would be named the next Great Khan? (Experienced Mongol generals were the real decision-making leaders, but this could be shushed up so a grandson could take credit.)

The Mongols took two years to prepare for the assault, but they spent it in ways Europeans would not have thought of and could not understand. Essentially, they prepared the infrastructure of the new land in small ways. The chief need of Mongol-Tatar armies was fodder for horses. One way to increase grasslands was to send in small bands to move quickly, avoid showdowns, and just set many farms on fire and tear down walls. Frightened peasants moved out, and a year later, the land reverted to weeds and grass, now more open for a horde to ride through. The Mongols also scouted thoroughly, looking for water and pasture. Last, they set up “Pony Express” mail riders so that their forces could stay in touch over distances.

In 1236, the Golden Horde conquered the Bulgar Turks who lived along the Volga River. The Volga Bulgars were a well-established group in the Volga region, not newcomers. They had adopted Islam even before Kyiv became Christian, and by now they were blending with the surrounding Slavs. The region was dotted with small sovereign states, unlike the way we think of Russia now. The Bulgars comprised their own state, controlling Volga trade from the city of Bolghar.

There’s a curious parenthetical story here; the Hungarians, who came from the east in the 500s, sent a Dominican friar eastward in 1235 to search for their legendary brother tribe, the Magyars. He found such a group near the Bulgars on the Volga, and they could understand each other’s speech. Back in Christian Hungary, the friar made plans to preach to the Magyars on a larger scale, but when he arrived at the Volga again, the Mongols had already made hash of them. The Magyars called their attackers Tatars, their ancestral enemies on the steppes. So the first warning to Europe of the “Tartar” attack came via Hungary. (Europeans generalized the word “Tatar” to have some connection to the Greek mythical river Tartarus.)

The Mongols conquered anyone else in the region, including the Alans, who were Indo-Europeans from the Persian Empire. The Alans were another of the small sovereign states; their capital city of Maghas guarded a pass in the Caucasus Mountains between Georgia and the north, now Russia. It’s called the Darial Pass, which means “Gate of the Alans” in Persian. The Alans are the modern Ossetians, whose territory Russia is taking from Georgia.

With these small states wrapped up, Batu Khan sent an envoy to the Grand Duke of Vladimir-Suzdal, another sovereign state on the other side of the Volga River. The envoy asked, of course, for their surrender, which the Duke refused. And now (1238) the grand sacking of Russia began. They began with Ryazan, and they also burnt Moskva. Smolensk agreed to pay tribute, and Novgorod was far enough north that they didn’t get there. Pretty much every other city was stripped of gold and silver, and burnt. The small town of Kozelsk somehow managed to hold off a combined Mongol army siege for an unheard-of seven weeks. Their ruler at the time was a little boy, so it makes an even better story. In the end, though, everyone died.

According to Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World), the siege of Ryazan was conducted in the Mongols’ idiosyncratic way. On approaching the town, the Mongols had seized peasants for slave labor and sent the rest of them to the city to swell the number of refugees and tax the city’s provisions. Using their slave labor, they quickly built their own stockade wall around the walled city. Western war practice had always encircled a walled city, but never with a literal second wall. Reinforcements could not help the city, and sorties from the city gates could not harm the Mongols. The besiegers had longer-range bows than the defenders, so they were safe out of range while they set up their own catapults.

When the catapults got to work, they threw not only rocks and tree trunks but also pots of gunpowder and other burning substances learned from the Chinese. Simple “firelances” directed rockets at the city. Ryazan’s peasants, who knew little about the world, thought that the Mongols brought dragons. When the city had been sufficiently terrorized and burnt, the Mongols scaled the walls with ladders and took over quickly. Everyone crowded into the church for safety, but of course to the Mongols, this was just an invitation for mass cremation. The city’s rulers were executed; some survivors were enslaved (as always, craftsmen were most likely to be kept) and others were sent to nearby cities to spread the word and start eating siege provisions. Then the clean-up started: the stockade logs were removed and dragged to the next city, while Mongols took a census so that the loot and captives could be fairly divided among their people. And so it went.

Refugees reliably spread the word that the Mongols were unlike anything seen before. They may not even have been human. They drank blood and refused mercy. They were short and invincible; they had no eyelids. The English chronicler Matthew Paris (who had recorded King John’s supposed bid to become a Muslim) recorded the rumors as they reached Western Europe. All learned men in the West wondered: who were these people? Herodotus didn’t say a word about them, and he had cataloged the whole world! They’d have speculated “space aliens” if the idea had occurred to them, but instead, they wondered: descendants of the Magi who came to take back relics that Germany claimed to have? Or a lost tribe of Jews who had forgotten Hebrew and Moses? Of course, as this idea spread, it was clear that there was only one thing to be done: Jews must be massacred to prevent them from opening city gates to their brethren. (what else?)

In 1239, the Mongols entered the Crimean Peninsula and drove out the Cuman people, another of the local older Turkic peoples. The Cuman survivors fled to nearby hills, but eventually were able to return to the plains. They are known today as the Crimean Tatars.

In 1240, Mongol envoys came to Kyiv but were beheaded. The city’s fate was sealed, and total destruction followed. Kyiv’s story had a special twist: believing that the basilica’s holiness would keep them safe, people crowded into the church until it was packed and its doors closed. Those left outside began to climb the walls until they reached the roof, and they perched on the roof until that, too, was full. Then the roof collapsed and killed everyone both inside and out. The Mongols could not have asked better fortune. Kyiv, of course, fell, and Batu Khan began to be known as the Tsar.

Batu Khan still had to jockey for power among his cousins, but the western lands had indisputably been left to him and his brothers. So they solidified their gains by ordering captive craftsmen to build a new city. Sarai (from the Persian word for “palace”) was built near modern-day Astrakhan, which is on the Caspian Sea. Sarai was probably 50 miles upriver, at a place suitable for Mongol life: high wind to keep off mosquitos, sufficient grasslands for horses. They began to build in 1240.

To advance farther into the west, the Horde was split up so that rumors and refugees would report conflicting things about the path they were taking. They’re heading to Poland! No, they’re heading to Hungary! Actually, they were heading to both. Had they chosen one target, the king of the other would have come to an ally’s assistance. Both being the targets at the same time, neither could help the other. The Battles of Legnica, Poland and Mohi, Hungary took place only two days apart in 1241.

The Kings of Poland and Hungary begged for assistance from farther south or west. The Pope helpfully called a Crusade against the Mongols, but Crusading was just not set up to deal with lightning strikes from an unknown foe. Batu Khan led the force into Hungary, while Möngke Khan went into Poland. Henry II of Silesia defended Poland, hoping for Bohemia’s forces to arrive in time. He was killed, and the Bohemian army was dealt with separately by the Mongols.

In Hungary, the Mongols bombarded the king’s camp with burning material until the army panicked and fled through a gap in the Mongol lines: a gap the Mongols had planned, one leading to a corridor of Mongol archers. King Bela of Hungary barely escaped death and fled first to Austria, then to the Adriatic coast, as a government in exile. After the battle, in a bid for mercy, the Hungarian clergy tried to impress the Mongols with holy relics on parade, since they had heard that some Tatars and Mongols were Christians. But Mongols had a taboo against anything dead and these relics only made them disgusted and angry. Batu’s forces devastated Hungary, killing perhaps a quarter of the general population and most of its knights.

A total solar eclipse in October 1241 presaged the utter destruction of Europe, and the peasants became hysterical with fear. But soon after the twin battles had opened the way into Austria, Bohemia, and Germany, a Mongol rider brought news from the east. Ögedei Khan, Temujin’s third son who had been elected Great Khan, had died. Möngke and Batu had emerged as leaders in the western expedition, but their cousin Güyük was actually Ögedei’s son. He was really hard to get along with and had already fought with them all. There was no question he’d be trying to seize central power, and the other grandsons didn’t want to let that happen. Besides, any change in leadership required their personal attendance at a khurultai meeting.

So just like that, the western invasions ended. The grandsons and top generals rode back to Mongolia. The building of Sarai went on; there was no question they’d be back. The Russian princes who had survived and sworn fealty to the Mongols were not permitted to renege. However, it was an open question whether the Mongols would expand their invasions. King Bela came back to Hungary, and Poland had a new High Duke. During the time that the Mongols were gone, their top priority was to stop being Christendom’s buffer states by getting the pagans on their margins to convert (and thus become the new buffer states).

Jack Weatherford supplies another interesting outcome: in the Crimean Peninsula, the Mongols traded luxury goods in Italian port cities for the right of Italian merchants to kidnap Slavs and Kipchaks in Mongol lands and sell them as slaves (Slavs/ slaves not a coincidence). Ironically, many of these tall, strong Slavs were sold to Ayyubid Egypt, where they became Mamluks. The Mongols would live to regret this choice.

By 1218, the Mongol hordes were ruling the Kara Khitan, the last province that was culturally part of northern China’s long reach. This placed them on the border of the easternmost outpost of the Muslim empire. This eastern territory by the Aral Sea was known as Khwarismia (possibly means “the lowlands” in Old Persian).  In the early 1200s the Shah of Khwarismia was very Turkish and aggressive compared to Muslims farther west. Control of the region had swayed back and forth between Iran and China, while the Shah of Khwarismia himself had often threatened other Muslim cities and regions.

Genghis Khan ruled so much territory and had so much loot now that he wanted to begin trading westward on the Silk Road. At first, the Shah seemed receptive to a trade treaty, but when the Khan sent 450 merchants with a caravan of wares, the local governor seized the goods and killed the men. The Khan asked the Shah to punish this egregious attack on the Mongol nation, but the Shah killed and mutilated his envoys. The Persian historian Juvaini said that with this attack, they “laid waste a whole world.” (As in previous entries, I am relying primarily on Jack Weatherford’s excellent Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.)

Temujin was almost 60 and he had fulfilled his own ambitions ten times over. He was living in his homeland, near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun. He had to decide what to do with this terrible insult; but at the high level he was operating by then, there was only one answer: total war. So in 1219, the Mongol hordes set out to attack Khwarismia’s key cities of Bokhara, Urgench and Samarkand.

The Mongol army was split in half. One half took the route that the Shah would expect them to take, following the Silk Road. The other half crossed the Gobi Desert, where there was not enough water for such a host. They traveled in winter, so that they didn’t face terrible heat, and they knew every possible water source inside the Desert. Normally, it took at least six weeks to cross the desert, if you made it at all. The Khan pushed his men hard, though it’s not clear how many weeks they shaved off the average. The Gobi contingent then slowed its pace, trying to look like some peaceful caravans, if anyone was watching. They came to Bokhara by the back way and stopped. Meanwhile, the main army was confronting the city at its main gates. The defending army decided to cut their losses and leave Bokhara to the enemy, retreating to the capital of Urgench, but of course when they retreated, they learned they were surrounded.

Weatherford tells us that Bokhara was the only city Genghis Khan chose to enter. He was supremely uninterested in cities. But there was an inner citadel with soldiers who had not surrendered, and the Khan wanted to put on a psychological show. First, he rode to the great mosque and ordered the scholars there to bring hay for his horse. They probably didn’t realize that he was designating them as survivors, but he was. Next, he summoned the wealthiest men in the city. On the mosque stairs, he made a speech to them about misusing their power and told them it was time to atone. Each rich man was to go with some Mongols to his house and show them the hidden treasures, if he valued his life. The Khan moved on to the next stage of the show, in which his Chinese engineer corps rolled in the siege engines they had been building. These machines surrounded the inner citadel and then began to bombard it thoroughly in a showy display of technique. Teams of miners started digging under the wall, too.

When the Mongols swept through a conquered city, they got rid of the existing soldiers and rulers, first. They collected all of the treasure, and it was divided equally among them, so they didn’t actually get distracted by looting the way other warriors did. They collected anyone who might be of use to the Mongol nation, whether doctors, astronomers, or goldsmiths. These began the long march back to Mongol territory, where they were resettled. Women and children were distributed as slaves. Unskilled workers were recruited to help build, dig, or march to the next city and throw themselves into a moat.

Samarkand and Urgench both required sieges, so the Khan chose to do a mass execution of their populations outside the city. Urgench’s siege was particularly grueling. They held out for six months! When the Mongols got inside the walls, they fought house to house. The Mongols set the city on fire, as they might have done on the steppes to flush game out. When the burnt-out buildings still hid resistance fighters, they diverted a river to flood it. Urgench never recovered. The Shah’s mother had been ruling Urgench, but she fled before the fighting began. They captured her, and she was sent to live as a slave in Mongolia, serving some chieftain’s wife.

Contemporary histories record death tolls of over a million for these Asian cities. Weatherford suggests that the Khan appears to have systematically inflated death tolls, making sure they got into written histories and were carried around by refugee-heralds. He wanted the next cities in line to believe that he had committed atrocities beyond imagining. After the refugee-heralds had time to terrify the next cities, Mongol envoys arrived with the message, “God has given  you into the Great Khan’s hands. If you will give us food, like family members, you will become family. If not, you will all die.”

Some surrendering cities didn’t understand the magnitude of what they had just escaped, or they saw the Mongols as a barbarian horde passing by just once. When the coast seemed clear, they stopped sending tribute. Oh, what a mistake. The city of Nishapur revolted, and as the Mongols began a siege, an arrow flew over the city walls and struck a son-in-law of the Khan. He put the widow, his daughter, in charge of the city’s defeat. She decreed that every single living thing in the city should die; after the people had been killed, their heads piled in pyramids, the soldiers were to go find the dogs and cats too. Similarly, when the Khan’s favorite grandson died in a battle in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, he channeled his grief into wiping the valley clean of residents.

Sometimes, the Mongols razed a conquered city. Very, very often, they trampled and razed all surrounding walls and boundary features of the farmland. They didn’t understand this “wall” business, which just made it harder for the horses to run. They preferred to see farmland return to fields and grass. They wanted the cities to fall down and sink, so that hordes of horses could pass through.

The Mongols’ cultural ways were so different that by comparison, Arabs and Europeans look like they’re part of one single culture. In a way, they were; they were all part of the Mediterranean continuum. They had been influencing each other for many centuries. They’d even taken some influence from the Chinese at a distance. But the Mongols, separated by the Gobi Desert, had not done cultural exchanges with any of them. They did everything backwards from the West because it just seemed the right way to do things.

For example, Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 2004) points out that to everyone else, chasing an enemy meant you were winning and hiding behind a stout wall meant you were safe. To the Mongols, walls enclosed the animals they were hunting, so anything enclosed in a circular wall was ready to be picked off at will. And they had never had a fixed place to defend or come home to (just temporary camps). So all fighting was done in motion, and the direction didn’t matter. They won by killing the enemy while moving, no matter who was chasing or being chased. So the decisions they made during a battle left their enemies bewildered.

For the rest of the world, moving an army was a big deal. The army needed provisions that entailed a secondary force going along with them, just to house and feed them. This doubled their pack animal need and cut their speed way down. We saw that Richard the Lion-Heart solved the problem by keeping the provisions afloat so that his men could march as fast as possible while the food kept up with them at sea. But that was a unique solution not applicable in most cases.

The Mongols, however, didn’t eat grain. To them, eating grain meant you were an animal. They were hunters who lived on meat and milk. It turns out that if your diet is entirely protein, you don’t have to eat as often. They could eat dried meat from a saddlebag and not be hungry during a long ride or battle, where their foes who ate carbohydrate-based foods were fainting. So they didn’t need provision trains or any wagons at all. They wore a thick coat that doubled as a sleeping bag. They carried some tents, but in a pinch they easily slept on the ground as they were. No need for fires if you’re only eating dried meat and can skip food for a day.

The Mongol hordes had no foot soldiers, so they all moved at the speed of cavalry. Every other army, including all of the Crusader and Muslim armies we’ve discussed, had more soldiers on foot than on horseback. They all moved at a walking pace. But the Mongols could trot and canter for miles, moving far faster than adversaries calculated that anyone could move.

The Mongols had a taboo about touching blood, so they much preferred to kill at a distance by arrows. Also because they were always moving, their primary fighting was firing on horseback, as the Plains Indians later did. (The two cultures have a lot of parallels.) The civilized world assumed that fighting meant you would come into close contact, so they taught their boys hand-to-hand combat. The Mongols preferred to have most of the enemy dead before they got close. In the same spirit, the Mongols did not talk about dying for the Khan, any more than flight attendants talk about crashing. The idea was not to die! They wanted to win with no casualties, if possible.

One way to win cheaply was to use trickery. Mongols had no sense of chivalry holding them back from lying, using disguises, or any other ruse they could think of. To understand this, it helps to remember that every city they encountered was a novel situation, not something they had seen before. Like aliens in sci-fi, they saw everything with fresh eyes and invented a new method. There was no sense of “it’s just not done that way.”

When Mongol warriors did fall in battle, nobody worried about burial. It was steppe tradition to allow the Sky Father to look down on the bodies and dispose of them naturally, probably with vultures. Here again was another task that weighed down other armies, but not theirs. Mongols just walked away from a battlefield, leaving everything as it fell. In fact, when the Mongols began to see their enemies stripping and burying bodies, they were alarmed. As possible, they sent their dead back to the steppes where they’d be given a decent non-burial!

The Mongols preferred to fight in the winter, when the Gobi Desert was not as hot and draining. Frozen rivers could be crossed easily. Their horses scratched the snow for grass either way, and they could eat meat in any weather. So without the seasonal rhythm of planting and harvest shared by everyone else, they could catch their targets off guard.

Genghis Khan was a very intelligent man who admired the technology of every culture he saw. As soon as he was in control of the Northern Chinese cities, he ordered craftsmen into his service. Many were sent to Mongolia, where eventually they began to build a store-house city, Karakorum. Craftsmen were set up in workshops to start doing their technology miracles for the Khan. The Khan paid special attention to war machinery.

When the hordes had absorbed what Chinese and Uyghur culture had to offer, they began to bring squads of engineers along on expeditions. These men could build every kind of siege weapon on site. They didn’t have to bring anything with them. On arriving at a city, the Mongols enslaved everyone in nearby villages and set them to cutting trees. Their Chinese engineers quickly built every sort of catapult or tower needed for the situation at hand. The Chinese also had primitive gunpowder in rocket form, and the Mongols happily borrowed this, too.  One great thing about siege machines was that the Khan could pretend to abandon them, to draw the enemy (who thought chasing meant winning!) into the open.

The Mongols used displaced refugees as human shields, herding them ahead to create riots and confusion. They might herd refugees into moats to fill up with bodies. They used survivors as messengers, letting them go out with florid stories to scare other cities. They conscripted them as labor, and rewarded those who joined them. In fact, they had a tradition that if you fed their horses, you were a servant to be protected. When a Mongol accepted the hay or water you brought, it meant he had hired you and you had submitted. In this way, they absorbed as many people who would join them, and made material use of those who would not.

Finally, the rest of the world had come to an understanding that their ruling classes could respect each other. Saladin had sent ice to Richard when he was sick, for example. But the Mongols singled out the ruling class of each city to publicly blame and execute. They invoked whatever latent revolutionary energy was in the working poor. Because they made it crystal clear that submission was rewarded and resistance punished, their conquered cities usually remained submissive. The Mongols wanted tribute and treasure, but they did not want to take away anyone’s farmland. They didn’t want anyone to change religion or name. It wasn’t that hard to become Mongol vassals, if you were just ordinary people without a stake in the ruling class.