All Things Medieval

“In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumpuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.” — Samuel Purchas (1614) paraphrasing Marco Polo (1299).

Kublai, the youngest son of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, nominally ruled the entire Empire, but specifically, he ruled China. Northern China had been conquered in Genghis Khan’s time, but Kublai and his brothers pushed Mongolian rule until it encompassed all of China. As we’ve seen before, Mongolian war tactics couldn’t survive the tropical climate of Southern China, so Kublai had to innovate. He conquered the rest of China by becoming “more Chinese than the Chinese,” according to Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World).

The Chinese were consciously proud of their culture, but they had been torn apart by civil war countless times. Kublai made his government appealing by adopting all of the cultural markers of former Imperial courts. He named his new dynasty the Da Yuan (“Great Beginnings”) Dynasty and created a back-dated Chinese history: Chinese names and Imperial portraits for his Mongolian ancestors four generations back (to Genghis’s father Yesugei). They needed an ancestral temple in Chinese style, so he built one.

Kublai began with a palace in Shangdu (Xanadu), but to extend his power, he built the new city of Beijing; he called it Khanbalik and his subjects called it Daidu. He created it as a modern city, somewhat like Karakorum with its right-angle intersections and wide streets. Main streets had to be wide enough for 9 mounted men to ride abreast. Because the streets were straight, guards could see from one city gate to the other. Both of these traffic details would make it easier for a Mongolian army to subdue a rebellious citizenry. Like Karakorum, the new city had specific quarters for Muslim, Christian, and Mongolian nomadic residents.

Here’s the most interesting part: the new city was designed around the open land that Mongols prized most. The Imperial “Forbidden City” apparently began as an enclosed parkland complete with Mongolian tents. Just as Xanadu had a large enclosed forest, Beijing’s inner enclosure had an artificial lake and a small mountain. There was plenty of grazing space for horses and sheep, and the park may have been stocked with wild animals for hunting, too. Mongolian children of Kublai’s officials were born in gers and grew up speaking Mongolian while riding ponies. Mongolian customs were kept alive, including the ones that offended the Chinese.

In Chinese Imperial culture, the knife was a kitchen tool, not a dining utensil. Food came to the table ready to eat, no knife needed. But in Mongolian cooking, big chunks of meat were roasted or boiled, then brought to the eating place—-a white felt rug on the ground—-where the diner used his own knife to cut it up. Inside the Forbidden City, they could wipe their mouths on their sleeves and eat unseasoned legs of mutton. The Chinese subjects were not allowed to watch. In places where the Chinese were permitted, the Mongolian rulers followed Chinese etiquette.

The Forbidden City’s secret culture eventually turned out very important when the Yuan Dynasty was overthrown and the survivors came back to Mongolia as refugees. They were soft and unskilled by Mongolian standards, but at least they knew the language and customs so they could try to fit back in.

Perhaps Kublai’s most brilliant achievement was to reform Chinese law to make it both uniform and compatible with the laws laid down by Genghis. Contrary to what we think of the Mongols’ wild cruelty, Kublai’s laws shifted away from whippings and execution, toward fines and encouraging repentance. His legal code required officials to use logical analysis to figure things out and only resort to torture after other investigative means were exhausted. The Chinese had often tattooed a criminal’s forehead, but the Mongols believed this was too cruel because the forehead was the seat of the soul. They discouraged the practice of tattoos at all, and transitioned the locals instead to a system of placing a billboard in front of a criminal’s house to shame him.

The Chinese had pioneered printing paper money, an innovation that the Mongols enthusiastically adopted and expanded. Yuan Dynasty China floated almost entirely on paper currency. Of course, Genghis Khan’s emphasis on a good postal system continued too, so the Chinese were the first to send paper money to each other, carried by paid riders.

Officials in Kublai’s China were always a mix of ethnicities, the way Genghis Khan had mixed them in his armies. Kublai promoted Muslims from the west, Europeans like Marco Polo, and a quota-based mix of regional Chinese. During the Yuan Dynasty, the rigid Chinese system of mandarin exams was suspended. Instead, Kublai began a system of licensing many professions, ensuring some minimal level of competency. Local governments were also pushed to create councils that operated somewhat like the Mongolian kurultai assemblies. Peasants were organized into administrative groups to solve problems and promote literacy. Kublai’s China even had some basic public schools, about 20,000 of them according to Mongol court records.

Kublai also put on public shows of theater, which had been neglected in previous dynasties. He wanted acrobats, bright colors, and action. At one point, Weatherford reports, he staged an epic retelling of Mongolian history with thousands of actors, going on for days. The Yuan Dynasty became a period of rapid growth in Chinese literature; if there is a Chinese Shakespeare, he lived during the Yuan years.

Effectively, Kublai’s Mongolian-China became the place everyone would want to live. He competed with the old Song Dynasty so effectively that it eroded from within, as its officials, peasants, and regions deserted to serve the Yuan. He always had an army operating in the southern region, picking off towns and winning small battles. In 1276, this Mongol army finally entered the Song capital of Hangzhou. The heir to the Song throne was sent to Tibet (another Mongolian holding) to become a monk.

Kublai did make an attempt to conquer Japan, at last. When he had taken over a unified China as well as Korea, his empire had the ship building power to invade islands. Japan ignored the usual Mongolian demand for surrender, and they even took the tried and true way of executing envoys, always sure to launch an invasion. In 1274, a naval operation set out from Korea and easily conquered Takashima Island, which lies between the mainland and big islands. In a grand battle against samurai knights, the Mongolian-Chinese-Korean force won a huge victory.

However, conquest of the Japanese islands did not follow. The Mongolian forces took ship again that night, probably intending to sail to another port and attack. But a huge storm came up and the entire fleet was destroyed. In 1281, a newly-built fleet tried again, with the same result. The most important lasting effect from Kublai’s invasions seems to be that Japan began to take foreigners more seriously. Its loose government started to turn into the centralized, militarized power that so awed Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Had Kublai never invaded, perhaps Japan would have remained low-key and rural.

Kublai tried one more naval invasion: Indonesia in 1291. In a direct battle, the Mongolian-Chinese-Korean forces killed the king and appeared to win, but they could not parlay this into actual conquest. The Mongolian genius had been for horseback warfare, and while ships looked at first like so many floating horses, they were very different.

During Kublai’s Yuan Dynasty, Chinese culture started to influence the rest of South-east Asia. Until then, its culture had been Hindu or Buddhist, influenced from India (you can see this in Cambodia’s and Bali’s most ancient ruins). Kublai’s government encouraged Chinese migration to what we now call Indo-China. In tribute-paying places like Thailand and Vietnam, Chinese officials probably represented the Yuans, since they had a core competency in bureaucracy and the Mongols were all about borrowing the competencies of other cultures.

Mongolian expansion had reached its maximum territorial limits.

Hulegu the Ilkhan brought his main force back from Mongolia in 1262. He planned to continue the fight with the Mamluks, trying again to extend his frontier, but now his cousin Berke, Khan in Russia, flew into action. He began attacking Hulegu’s northern territories, creating serious enough invasions that Hulegu had to give up advancing toward Egypt. Their northern border was already “disputed” as we say today; both claimed the Caucasus mountains, both tried to tax its trade. Both were sure they were right.

Berke and Hulegu had another serious conflict as their territories developed competing economic interests. When Batu and his brothers had conquered Crimea, Ukraine, and parts of Hungary previously, they had allowed for the Italian colonies on the Black Sea to keep up a slave trade. In this way, the Golden Horde’s territory was providing most of the slave boys that the Mamluks trained as soldiers. Slavs, Kipchak Turks, and Circassians were much taller than the average Mongol or Arab. If Berke didn’t stop the slave trade, Egypt’s army would keep swelling and then the Ilkhan’s western borders could be pushed back. Mamluks might even take back Baghdad. Of course, this was exactly what Berke wanted.

At first, Berke felt very conflicted about fighting against his cousin Hulegu. It was a prime directive of his grandfather that Mongols must not fight each other, and even more, members of the Golden Family must stay united. But once fighting gets started and trade sanctions begin to take their bite, enmity hardens. And things were just as bad back in Karakorum, where both of Hulegu’s surviving brothers vied to be Great Khan. Berke supported one, Hulegu the other. Kublai tried to get both of them to attend a kurultai in the homeland, but neither would attend.

Both Berke and Hulegu soon died. Hulegu was succeeded by his son Abaka who had already been ruling a city in Iran. The throne in Sarai went to Berke’s nephew, Möngke-Timur, grandson of a different brother. After four years of civil war in Mongolia, Kublai Khan became the Great Khan. He imprisoned his brother Arik Boke and purged his supporters.

But Mongolian civil wars continued: the lineage of Ögedei in Transoxiana was led by Kaidu, Ögedei’s great-grandson. He refused to attend Kublai’s kurultai, which was a tacit vote “against” and a declaration of war. Kublai sent a son of the fourth lineage, Chagatai, to replace him, and it was open war. Eventually the two made a peace treaty and began attacking the Ilkhanate’s Persia. Kaidu never made peace with Kublai, though. Their territories were at war for 30 years, and the Mongol Empire was split. The western lands in Sarai and the Ilkhanate governed themselves separately, while Kublai’s family established the Yuan Dynasty in China.

The different Mongolian branches took on the coloration of the regions they governed. Kublai’s family adopted Chinese culture and Confucianism. The Forbidden City in Beijing started as the inner walled zone where Mongols could still live as Mongols and speak Mongolian without their Chinese subjects watching. Whenever they were in public, they spoke Chinese and acted in an assimilated way. The other lineages gradually adopted Islam, since it was the dominant culture in their regions. There were no more unified attacks on the eastern or western kingdoms by descendants of Genghis Khan, although that culture would create one last ravaging invader, Timur, in the next century.

Möngke Khan died in 1259. The Mongolian procedure for selecting a new Great Khan was not an automatic succession by Möngke’s son, but a massive family gathering called a kurultai. The kurultai was usually organized with an obvious purpose by one candidate, so voting was done primarily by attending (or not attending). Möngke’s successor would be one of his brothers, so Hulegu had to leave his Ilkhanate to travel to Mongolia and “vote.”

In the year when Möngke died, the Mongolian Empire was enormous. It covered half of China, with Korea and Vietnam as tribute-paying vassals, and all of Siberia and Central Asia, though still excluding most of the subcontinent of India (but including Tibet). Near the end of Möngke’s life, the province of Sindh (modern Pakistan) came under Mongol protection. It ran west through Iran and Iraq, including half of Syria and most of Turkey. It covered all of Russia and Ukraine, with an arm sticking into Poland and Hungary. The three obvious next fronts were the remainder of southern China ruled by the Song Dynasty, India, and the rest of the Holy Land as a gateway to Egypt and North Africa.

Hulegu began to push past Baghdad and into the remaining areas of Syria not yet under Mongol rule. As at Baghdad, the forces included representatives of Christian Antioch, Armenia, and Georgia. In 1260, they entered Aleppo and Damascus, and the Christians held a Mass in the great mosque. Envoys had already been sent to Cairo with the usual message of submission or destruction when Hulegu left for the kurultai. It wasn’t clear if he’d ever come back, or if he’d stay on in Karakorum as Great Khan.

Only two Mongol tumens (units of 10,000), or perhaps less, had been left in Syria under a Nestorian Christian general. In 1980, a scholar looking in the National Library archives at Vienna found a 13th century manuscript that appears to preserve a letter that Hulegu sent to King Louis IX. This letter suggests that Hulegu took most of his army back to Mongolia not just for the kurultai, but because they were again bumping up against the limits of geography. Mongols were all mounted cavalry, so grasslands were absolutely necessary. In Iraq and Syria, their horses quickly over-grazed. So Hulegu may have been intentionally leaving behind the largest force he thought likely to be sustainable in the desert climate.

When the Mamluk Sultan Qutuz heard that Hulegu had personally left the scene with so many men, the time seemed right to make a really significant effort to stop the Mongol advance. A very large Mamluk force left Egypt to challenge this smaller Mongol force somewhere in the Holy Land.

The other Mamluk general was Baybars, who had been born in or near Crimea. He was a Kipchak Turk; his name means “Great Panther” (pars = panther/leopard in Persian). Baybars had been a bodyguard to the last powerful Ayyubid Sultan, and a commanding general at the Battle of La Forbie in Gaza, as well as at al-Mansurah when the Templars were trapped and slaughtered in the town. Baybars was in the inner circle of revolutionary Mamluk leaders.

Qutuz and Baybars split their forces; Qutuz’s larger force stayed in mountainous areas where it was hard for the Mongol scouts to spot them, while Baybars marched openly. The Mongols had been camped in Lebanon but were moving southward in August as the hot rainless summer came to an end. Both armies put out feelers to the small Crusader contingent at Acre, seeking alliance. The Crusaders remained neutral but allowed the Mamluks to march and camp in territory they controlled.

The armies met at the spring/oasis town of Ayn Jalut, which means the Well of Goliath in Arabic. It’s fanciful to imagine that the battle was actually fought on the same plain where David used a sling to bring down the Philistine giant, but the Philistines were a coastal and southern people, and this place was inland and well north of Jerusalem.

The Mongol general made an unforced error in the battle, one that’s surprising for someone who may have fought with Genghis Khan himself. Baybars put on a staged retreat that would lead pursuers straight to the main Mamluk forces under Qutuz, and they fell for the trick. The same trick they had used time and again! Chasing means winning, right? Perhaps they had gotten used to the tactics of the west and never considered that their own tactical strategy might be used against them.

Even then, the Mamluks had a hard fight on their hands. Surrounded, the Mongols and their vassal knights fought ferociously. Muslim troops that began as part of their forces may have defected to the Mamluks during the battle. In the end, the Mamluks won and the Mongol army was destroyed. There was no easy retreat to safety, so stragglers and escapees could be hunted down.

Qutuz and Baybars returned to Cairo as joint conquerors, but Qutuz did not arrive home. They were rivals in the Mamluk inner circle, and Baybars chose this moment of vulnerability to murder Qutuz. Baybars entered the city as the sole conqueror of the great Mongol Army and became the Sultan. His line of descendants was more successful than other Mamluk lines at hanging onto power in this very fluid “survival of the fittest” regime.

The last Caliph of Baghdad ascended to his throne in 1242. The position had been powerless for a long time during the Turkish migrations, ruling in name while the cities were virtually independent, but then a series of energetic Caliphs had begun to assert military might in the region. Caliph al-Mutasim allied with the Nizaris before their fall; he had traveled to Güyük Khan’s crowning and tried to ally with both Mongols and Christians against each other, but neither attempt worked. Al-Mutasim is also remembered for his consternation when, during Egypt’s Mamluk Revolution, the widow Shajar el-Durr became Sultan. He is remembered for asking, “Has Egypt run out of men? We can send them some.”

Hulegu Khan had checked off two of his major tasks by 1257: the Lur people of western Iran were easily conquered, and Alamut had surrendered more easily than expected. West of Baghdad, several of the cities had proactively surrendered, so the Ilkhan’s army already had units from Georgia, Armenia, Antioch, Aleppo, and Mosul. Hulegu sent a Mongol embassy to Baghdad demanding submission and tribute. In one of history’s great acts of folly, Caliph al-Mutasim refused.

The Caliph was following his vizier’s advice. The vizier said that the Mongol army was smaller than it really was and assured him of assistance from other Muslim rulers which, in fact, they could not send. They may have been obligated by old treaties, but the realities had changed. Egypt’s Mamluk government might have helped, but they were not willing to extend themselves for a man who had mocked them. Was the vizier’s bad advice intentional treason or incompetence? Judging the past by the present, incompetence and rigidity of thought seem most likely. We’re always fighting the last war, just like Foolish Hans.

The siege began at the start of 1258. Baghdad was ill-prepared. The Caliph believed he had 50,000 fighting men at his disposal, but it turned out to be only 20,000 and not as disciplined or armed as he had thought. After the Mongols were camped on both sides of the Tigris River (a bad sign), the Caliph ordered a sortie to break up the encampment before it could harden into a siege. This went badly.

Moreover, the Mongols had learned a lot about cities by now. First lesson was to delegate strategy and engineering to those with long urban experience. Hulegu’s artillery was commanded by a Han Chinese who came from a many-generational military family. General Guo Kan had sappers attacking the river’s dike system; they opened a flood of river water, cutting off the city’s cavalry retreat. The Caliph and then some leading citizens,began begging to surrender, but Mongols did not reward those who asked too late.

Guo Kan supervised the formal siege of the city. They dug ditches and built a palisade, as had become Mongol practice. Chinese siege engines rolled up behind the palisade and began the bombardment. It took only about ten days for the city to be fully in Mongol hands. Then the city was systematically destroyed.

Effectively all of Baghdad’s population was put to the sword. Nobody is sure how many that was; a low estimate is about 100,000, since the city was not at his peak by 1258. They say Hulegu moved his camp upwind so they wouldn’t have to smell the decaying bodies. But one small sector of the population was apparently spared, the community of Nestorian Christians. Hulegu had a Christian wife, Dokuz Khatun (“Princess Nine”), traveling with him, and she personally interceded.

The Caliph was executed in the way that the Mongols believed proper for royal blood: rolled into a carpet and trampled by horses. This way, no blood reached the Earth to offend it. (Marco Polo heard a different story years later: that the Caliph was locked into a treasure room to starve on the gold he had refused to spend for his city’s defense.) One of his sons went to Karakorum as a hostage, while the others were executed.

The city was carefully looted; it yielded riches like those found in Genghis Khan’s time. When it was empty, historic buildings were burnt and torn down. The city walls and towers were dismantled, the irrigation canals blocked and filled. The loss that really kills the modern heart was the way the Mongols treated the library. The unoffending books were carted out and dumped in the Tigris River, which was already choking with blood and corpses. They say the water turned black as the ink dissolved in a million ancient manuscripts.

What’s surprising about this decision is that Hulegu and his brothers had been educated by a Persian scholar. They were literate and they also spoke at least two or three languages. Their grandfather had set an example of taking scholars back to Karakorum, rather than killing them. Perhaps Hulegu disdained the history of other nations, valuing only the oral histories told by Mongol singers. To us, the Baghdad collection of books was equally valuable as the Alexandrian library. (People often assume that early Muslim invaders burnt the library, but it may have just burned down in the ordinary way.) Alexandria probably had original copies of Aristotle’s books, Greek plays and poems now utterly lost, and irreplaceable Egyptian historical records. Baghdad had books in Sanskrit and perhaps other Indian languages, brought back by the first Muslim conquerors. What price could we put on the original manuscripts for the invention of digit-based mathematics?

When the city was utterly leveled, Hulegu ordered it to be rebuilt. He wanted a trading town in that place, he just didn’t want it to be the fabled Round City, capital of Islam. Symbolically, the Caliphate of Islam was dead and would never rise.

Hulegu had fulfilled the mandate laid on him by Möngke Khan and now the attention of Karakorum would turn to pushing the boundaries of their Chinese empire farther, under Kublai. But there was one glaring problem that Möngke had not foreseen. Their cousin Berke, Batu’s brother, began to rule in Sarai, Russia in 1257 after Batu died. The sons of Tolui (Möngke, Hulegu, Ariq Boke, Kublai) had always gotten along well with the sons of Jochi (Batu, Berke, Orda). But Berke had become a Muslim.

Batu’s Golden Horde had built Sarai in Russia and another Sarai, “Little Sarai,” eastward in Kazakhstan. Before Batu’s death, Berke was the ruler in Little Sarai, where most of the trade traffic was among Muslim cities like Bokhara and Samarkand. As he conversed with Muslim traders, he had experienced a sincere conversion.

This change of heart in Berke was so strong that it threatened his Mongolian identity. The generation he belonged to had a split identity between Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism. Möngke formally became a Buddhist before his death, but always encouraged pluralism of faith as his grandfather had done. Berke was the first prominent Mongolian convert to Islam, and you might think that he’d continue to be pluralistic since it was such a big part of his culture. You’d be wrong. In later Mongol conversions, too, putting on Islam meant putting off tolerance and pluralism.

Berke, now Khan at the main Russian Sarai, was as outraged as any imam at the destruction of his new faith’s holy city. He never forgave Möngke and Hulegu, and he swore revenge. He intended to declare his Golden Horde for Islam and join Mamluk Egypt against his cousins. However, Möngke Khan’s power was too strong at this time for him to take action. Berke brooded and waited.

I’ve read various accounts of what happened when Hulegu came to the Nizari stronghold of Alamut. Some stories like to say that the Mongols came in there and really got the job done, unlike the weaklings who had tried before. It seems more likely that the Ismaili network was weakened already.

Imam Aladdin Muhammad III, who restored its Shi’ite theology, ruled for 25 years and tried to both expand Ismaili belief into Pakistan and form alliances with Sunnis and Christians to the west. He was a scholar in the Shi’a tradition and he even wrote a constitution for the Nizari state. But ultimately, the Nizaris never really controlled their territory and were too dependent on the loyalty of each of the 50 castles. Some of these misused tax money and Aladdin Muhammad III’s attempts to reform and punish them probably made one of them assassinate him in 1255.

Even before the Imam’s death, Hulegu had begun a campaign against Nizari castles. The new Imam, Rukn ad-Din Kurshah, faced a dwindled power base and Hulegu’s demand to submit to the Mongol yoke. Without strong alliances, Imam Kurshah saw no alternative, so he agreed to submit with reluctance. He was not at Alamut at this time, but at another fortress, Maymundiz.

Hulegu got frustrated with the slow pace of submission. Catapults surrounded Maymundiz and began to bombard. Kurshah could only wave the white flag again, seeking safety for his family. He came down from the fortress with his Grand Vizier and surrendered. Messages went out to the other Nizari fortresses that the Nizari state was no more. Mongols in other parts of Iran helped destroy other Nizari fortresses, Alamut among them.

Rukn ad-Din Kurshah lived as a Mongol hostage for about a year. When most of the Nizari fortresses had surrendered, he asked to travel to Karakorum and submit to the Great Khan in person. Hulegu allowed him to go, but when he arrived in Mongolia, Möngke Khan refused to receive him, saying two fortresses had yet to surrender. Kurshah’s value as a hostage had declined, with the campaign’s success. Somewhere in Mongolia, on the way back, his guards executed him on Möngke’s order. Mongolian royals executed each other by breaking the spine, but they executed other royalty by rolling them in a carpet (to catch the blood) and crushing or beating them.

Nizaris in Syria survived, but their political power dramatically declined without Iranian support. They became a semi-autonomous region within the Mamluk Empire. One son of Rukn ad-Din Kurshah survived, so he became the Imam. He lived his life in hiding and left succession to two sons, but both of their lines also lived in hiding for a long time. Nizaris in both Syria and Iran learned to hide their identities and govern themselves in a very decentralized way. Many Eastern Nizaris took on the identity of Sufis, who were more acceptable among Sunni Muslims.

Today, Nizarism is an association with adherents all over the world. They are still ruled by an Imam descended from one of Rukn ad-Din Kurshah’s grandsons. Since 1814, the Nizari Imam uses the Tatar-Mongol title “Agha Khan”. The Agha Khans have directed their followers to be very peaceful and focus on charitable projects. Nizaris don’t like to be associated with assassins, but they are also offended by the notion that their killers ever needed hashish to work up courage.

• A Short History of the Ismailis, Farhad Daftary

We’ve talked about the Nizaris before; they were Persians converted by missionaries from Ismaili Egypt. Their Ismaili belief system conflated the spiritual ruler, the Imam, with the political leader, the Caliph. They rejected all Fatimid Caliphs after a certain point and believed that their leadership continued the true Imam line. As such, they were perpetually at war with both Baghdad and Cairo. They put a lot of effort into building a state in eastern Iran, but they couldn’t maintain rule over a contiguous region. Instead, they had about 50 castles, in cities or on mountains, but the Sunni Turks controlled (taxed) the land between. I suppose Nizari towns carried their taxes secretly to Alamut, the Eagle’s Nest, dodging other patrols.

With the 25th Imam, Nizari strategy had suddenly changed. The 24th Imam had married a Sunni wife who raised her son to disbelieve in his own divine appointment. So this 25th one, Jalaluddin Hasan, burned the Nizari holy books at Alamut and cursed his ancestors. In exchange, he received the official blessing of Baghdad as Emir. Was he sincere? Or was it a survival strategy of taqqiyah? If he wasn’t sincere, he sure burned a lot of books for nothing. But in any case, it meant that during the years of Mongol invasions, the Nizari fortresses were at least at peace with Baghdad, not weakened by in-house Muslim fighting too. So far, they survived.

The turncoat Imam Hassan III died in 1221, probably poisoned. His son inherited the Imamship in spite of his father’s teaching; he was a child, but with a strong vizier who set about to reverse the Sunni-ization. Sunni teachers, the Imam’s widows, and some of his other relatives all met the axe. But a general alliance with Baghdad persisted; in 1238, the Nizaris and Abbasids joined in sending an embassy to the western Christians, to see if they could form an alliance against the Mongols. It didn’t work out. Then in 1246, the Imam and Caliph traveled to the installation of Güyük Khan in Karakorum, hoping to be seen as peaceful neighboring rulers who were kind of submitting the the Mongols but not actually sending tribute.

The Mongols had many cities in the region by Möngke’s time, and those local rulers all complained about the Nizaris. The Nizaris were again openly Ismaili Shi’ites, which the Turks did not like; they were perpetual rebels in strongholds that could never quite be conquered. Hulegu Ilkhan agreed to clean out the Nizaris for them.

Between 1251 and 1254, Mongol armies subdued the Goryeo Kingdom of Korea, though not without drama. Under military pressure, the Korean king sent them a hostage who was supposedly his son, but it turned out to be a stepson not of the royal blood. This was apparently a deliberate deception, an attempt to cheat the system. Möngke Khan was furious; he held the entire court responsible and ordered the land to be razed. The Goryeo court fled to islands, reasoning that Mongols didn’t sail. But Mongols could order and pay Koreans to sail ships for them. Now with naval experience, the Mongols finally retreated with the actual crown prince as hostage and the land thoroughly cowed (that is, burnt, starved, destroyed). The Korean kingdom served Mongol officials after that.

China’s inland Dali Kingdom in modern Yunnan Province was next on the list. Möngke’s brother Kublai conquered the capital city of Dali then sent a column south, where there was another route through Vietnam to get at the Song Dynasty. The Song Dynasty should have fallen to Genghis Khan long ago, by Mongol reasoning; but it had retreated south, leaving only North China open. Vietnam was uncooperative, so it was conquered; Hanoi was sacked and occupied. But as before, the climate of Vietnam was terrible for Mongol health. The Tran dynasty accepted Mongol overlordship and paid tribute, so all of the Mongols but a few unlucky tribute officials left behind could race north to the dry, cool air again. (Kublai had wisely gone no farther south than Dali.)

After a few years, Möngke Khan was looking for a conquest zone that was not tropical, and apparently his eastern limits had been reached for now (Japan was out of their range). To the west, he’d received the submission of western Armenia and Antioch, the Sultanate of Rum, and the Emirs of Aleppo and Mosul, almost without lifting a finger. The last Mongol invasion had made it amply clear to these rulers that it was much, much better to be an ally of the Mongols than a lone, proud, hold-out waiting for the siege to arrive.

In 1255, following the great census, Möngke named his brother Hulegu as Ilkhan of this southwestern region. This Vice-Khanship wasn’t defined by borders but by its dynastic range. It was defined as being for the family of Hulegu; they were allowed to make it much larger as long as they didn’t encroach on the lands of Batu’s lineage based in Sarai or Kublai’s lineage in China. The Ilkhanate included Afghanistan, Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Pakistan, and India, really as much as Hulegu wished to conquer before he’d get done in by the climate.

Hulegu had a special mandate to subdue remaining Muslim states. This meant the Lur people of coastal Iran, the Nizaris of Iran and Iraq’s mountains, and the Caliph of Baghdad. Everyone else had been conquered or had submitted. And so the Third Mongol World War began.

In 1251, the Mongol Empire went through an internal coup. Temujin’s son Ögedei had died in 1241, and his widow got their son Güyük installed as Great Khan. But when Güyük died and his widow tried to do as her mother in law had done, installing her son, she was thwarted by the other family branches. Batu Khan, leader of the Golden Horde in Sarai, Russia, colluded with the widow of Temujin’s youngest son Tolui. Batu’s family could not inherit the Great Khanship, but it could help select who did. Batu’s clear choice was another grandson who had ridden out with them in Russia and Poland: Möngke, son of Tolui.

When Tolui’s widow and Batu succeeded in transferring the Great Khanship away from Ögedei’s lineage, rule passed to Tolui’s four sons, who (like Batu) were all more capable than the average Mongol grandson. Their mother Sorkhokhtani had been one of the first princesses married into the family (remember when Temujin and his men were starving in the Gobi Desert and a rebel chief’s brother rescued them? that was her Nestorian Christian Kereyit father).

Under Sorkhokhtani, Möngke, Hulagu, Ariq Böke, and Kublai received much better educations than any of their father’s generation, and perhaps better than any of their cousins. They had tutors to teach reading the new Mongol script and the Chinese and Persian languages, in addition to learning traditional Mongol manly arts of archery and riding. They were raised at least nominally as Christians, though it wasn’t a big concern to any but the youngest.

In the wake of Möngke’s election as Great Khan, some of his other cousins attempted a coup. Sorkhokhtani held a trial for Güyük’s widow, who was convicted of black magic and executed accordingly: sewn into a sack and thrown into the river. Many of the Golden Family cousins were executed, leaving open ruling positions for the families of Batu Khan and Sorkhokhtani’s younger sons.

After 1252, the lineage of Genghis’s two middle sons dwindled in importance. Ögedei’s lineage pretty much ended, and Chagatai’s remained mostly stable but subordinate in Central Asia. Batu Khan’s lineage in the west, and Tolui’s in the east, rose in stature. With Möngke Khan ruling as overlord, Hulagu became a subordinate Khan (Ilkhan) in Iran, while Kublai was given North China to rule. Ariq Böke, the youngest, stayed in Möngke’s court and bided his time.

Möngke Khan retrenched and reformed the central government, putting an end to the spendthrift luxury of Ögedei’s lineage. His cousin Güyük had issued paper money as IOU’s, and to everyone’s surprise, Möngke insisted on honoring and paying them off to keep Mongol credit good. He printed new paper money with a new Department of Currency and sent out officials to make a full tax census of the entire area of conquest. The poll tax he set forth was a cut for some, and increase for others, but it was predictable and universal. No clergy of any religion was taxed, nor was any church or monastery—or any medical doctor!

Louis IX sent an ambassador to Karakorum in 1254, seeking an alliance against the Muslims and to convert the Tatars and Mongols to Catholic Christianity. William was a Franciscan friar in Rubruck, Flanders. William’s party came first to the western Mongol lands of Batu Khan at Sarai. Batu Khan declined to convert, but sent him with an escort to Möngke Khan at Karakorum.

Karakorum meant Black Stones; it was the only stone city the Mongols built or maintained. Each khan had added to it, and Möngke’s addition was the stupa temple wall that now encloses the oldest monastery in Mongolia. He also commissioned a Parisian goldsmith and sculptor to make a tree of silver and gold. The tree became the central wonder of the palace, shown to visitors.

The tree was a machine that used medieval technology to make announcements and serve drinks. Its tall silver trunk supported branches and silver leaves and fruit, but four golden snakes were also wrapped around the trunk. An angel sat at the top, with a trumpet. Möngke Khan could signal for the angel’s mechanism to raise his arm and blow the trumpet. At this signal, the golden snakes poured piped-in wine into a silver basin.

Father William of Rubruck was otherwise unimpressed. Louis IX had recently built the Chapel of St. Denis and nothing in Karakorum could come close to its grandeur. He described a city with four gates and one large palace, of which the silver tree was really the only thing worth describing. There was a Muslim quarter and a Chinese quarter, as well as craftsmen from every part of the Mongol conquest. Every religion had a church or temple in Karakorum: Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and possibly some the priest could only identify as “pagan.”

map of Karakorum

Möngke Khan explained to the Franciscan that the Mongols believed in one God who gave different ways to men. The Mongols had shamans, the Catholics had their Bible. “To you God has given the Scriptures and you Christians do not observe them,” he added. The Khan’s interpretation of God’s will was very direct: sending an army against his rule would be rebellion against God, and he would deal with it quickly. He was doubtless disappointed that King Louis had not sent tribute.

Father William spent Christmas with Möngke and his wife, who gave out gifts after the Christmas Mass (at this time in Europe, nobody gave gifts on Christmas). Christmas dinner was mutton and carp, with copious amounts of grape wine, rice wine, and airak.

William also participated in a debate with Muslims and Buddhists, for the Khan’s appreciation and entertainment. They had to form teams—the Franciscan had to work with Armenians, Assyrians, and Byzantines!—and the Khan appointed 3 judges. Debate topics included whether reincarnation was real, how had evil come into existence if God made the world, and whether animals have souls. In keeping with the Mongol tradition of wrestling competitions, fermented mare’s milk (airak) was passed around between rounds. Gradually everyone got drunk. The Christians grew frustrated and began to sing a hymn. The Muslims felt this was very unfair because they did not use music in worship. The Buddhists just started to meditate. Finally, the judges called it a draw and passed the airak again. (with thanks to Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World!)

During all these centuries, we have sometimes noted the Armenian kingdom in Cilicia made up of refugees who fled Turkish invasion of their original mountain home. By the 13th century, these Armenians were tightly tied to the Christians of both Antioch and Constantinople. In 1252, King Hethum traveled to Karakorum to offer submission of their small Armenia to the Mongols, in exchange for protection. He was graciously received by Möngke Khan, who patiently explained that the Mongols would never force their entire conquest to follow the Christian religion. However, he said, he planned a new expedition to march on Baghdad. Should the Armenians join him in victory, he would gladly give them Jerusalem. Prince Bohemund IV of Antioch and Tripoli joined the Armenian king in submitting to the Mongols.

And so the ground was laid for what we might call the Mongol Crusade, though historians never use that term. As Möngke Khan’s kingdom came into better order, he began to look about and plan the next wave of expansion.