All Things Medieval

Genghis Khan had been having a serious internal family problem during the later campaigns. Although he had promoted on a merit basis for years, and although he railed against aristocratic inheritance, in truth of course he wanted his sons to be Khans after he died. One of his sons would be the Great Khan with authority over the others. He had always favored Jochi, the oldest, for this role, but the second son Chagatai believed that Jochi was the son of a Merkit warrior and should not inherit.

In a family conference, the Khan tried to address the succession question, but Jochi and Chagatai got into a vicious fistfight. The Khan pleaded with them all to accept Jochi as a brother, to honor their mother, who had after all been kidnapped during a time when his rule had not yet imposed peace. The best compromise they could reach was that neither Jochi nor Chagatai would become Great Khan, but instead the third brother Ogedei would inherit this title. Jochi was furious, but the agreement was made. With that understanding, Genghis Khan assigned them zones to rule, separating their future kingdoms as far as possible, and leaving the central homeland to his youngest son Tolui by Mongol tradition.

Here’s another point where Mongol culture is so different from the West: inheritance by the youngest. It makes perfect sense if you think of steppe life where survival is better if people spread out to find new resources. When the oldest son is grown, he will marry and have a herd of his own, gradually spreading farther away to find other hunting grounds. The original family will stay together as the other sons also spread out. When the parents get old, the youngest is still at home. Mongols called the youngest the Ochigen, the Prince of the Hearth. He would have the responsibility of his parents’ care, and would get their possessions or territory.

Jochi was given the territories farthest away: the west, where as yet little land had been won. It was clear that there was much room for relatively easy conquest, and those new lands would belong to Jochi’s branch. Chagatai got the just-conquered regions that are now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Ögedei inherited the Chinese regions in the east, as well as the nod for Great Khan. He was the most sociable of the sons and the Khan hoped he could keep the family branches unified. Tolui, the Ochigen, inherited the Mongolian homeland where his mother still lived.

Tolui’s mother Börte was now very old; she had stopped traveling with Temujin long ago, leaving that hassle to younger wives. The Great Khan had a string of marriage alliances, but only managed four wives at a time. When he had to take a new one, he passed an old one off to a brother or general, except for Börte who counted as his official queen. Now about 65, the Great Khan realized he had one more expedition to make, putting down a rebellion among the Tanguts of western China. In 1226, he saddled up again, choosing a younger Tatar wife named Yesui to accompany him.

In the Gobi Desert, he hunted wild horses and was badly injured. He probably developed an internal infection but he was determined to push through it. The campaign against the Tanguts went forward, and he succeeded in punishing their rebel king. But by the end of the summer, he died. Yesui wrapped him in a felt coffin packed with sandalwood chips, and his army carried his body home.

Here’s where it gets strange. Temujin’s ancestral burial tradition had been open-air, leaving the body for sacred vultures, but legends say variously that he chose to be buried with six cats, that he was buried underground with treasures from around his empire, or that he was buried on top of his sacred mountain. A persistent legend says that in order to hide the place, his army trampled the ground with a thousand horses, covering their trail and a wide berth around it.

Ögedei Khan chose to spend a lot of his father’s wealth on big ceremonies and parties, and then he began to built a stone city called Karakorum. The buildings were for craftsmen and storage for tribute, while the Mongols would live around it in felt gers. The Mongol heartland was now saturated with silk, jewels, spices, silver, and everything else they had carted back. Mongolian culture had no productive use for these luxuries; they didn’t import raw materials to make anything. They only consumed them, like wearing silk while living in a felt ger, or serving their boiled mutton in silver bowls. They were mainly interested in breeding horses, but they didn’t want to use horses for trade.

Ögedei paid attention to improving Silk Road traffic, hoping to generate income. Caravans did get larger. There were oases with amenities like fresh horses, and the Mongols kept back bandits. They printed paper money to make carrying easier and simplified taxes. Silk Road traffic reached a peak during the years of the Mongol Yoke. 

However, tax revenue can’t compare to war loot. Most of Ögedei’s military expansion followed up on his father’s wins. Central Persia, whose young ruler came back from hiding to lead a revolt, was thoroughly subdued in the 1230s. The Jin dynasty of northern China was also wiped out by 1234. A Mongol army finished the conquest of Georgia in 1240, and Korea’s king had to submit and deliver hostages by 1241.

• Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

In four years, Genghis Khan had trampled the Muslim East that is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His armies then ran into a serious problem: as they came out of the mountain and steppe country, heat and humidity made their bows shoot inaccurately. Even in winter, it just wasn’t working. The Khan decided to take the main army, two tumens, back to Mongolia in 1222. (Captives from conquered cities cleared the mountain passes of snow for them, since their lives were not worth anything.)

The other two tumens were sent farther west, probably in pursuit of the Shah of Khwarismia, who had fled. They invaded Armenia and Georgia, coming into official Christendom. Georgia became a vassal state of the Mongols after one devastating battle. For the first time, the Mongols began to have some notion of what was on the other end of the Silk Road. The tumens then moved north, where they encountered the Kievan Rus. Ten envoys approached the Kievan princes to learn what sort of relations the Mongols could expect: alliance or surrender? The envoys were executed. Clearly, the Rus had not heard about the fate of Khwarismia, that did the same, or they thought they’d be different.

It’s worth looking at Jack Weatherford’s account of the Battle of Kalka River in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The battle wasn’t a significant turning point for the Mongol campaign, but it illustrates the Mongols’ idiosyncratic ways of fighting that so baffled Europe and the Middle East.

First, the Mongols began a long retreat that lasted for days; the Slavic cavalry and foot soldiers followed them, thinking that “chasing means winning.” Because the Mongols were on horseback, they could set the pace so as to string out and thin their enemies over many miles. When they suddenly turned to fight, the Rus had no plan for retreat, supply or reinforcement. The Mongols got to choose the fighting venue, on the plain where the Kalka River empties into the Sea of Azov.

The Russians fought as European wars had taught everyone to do: in close formation, in lines that must not break. But the Mongols didn’t attack them at first. They played drums, then suddenly became quiet. Then they began an unusual form of assault that was coordinated with signal flags. Their horses charged, but as the Slavs braced for the clash, the Mongols pulled up. They began firing volleys of arrows at close range, staying out of reach of hand combat. To the Mongols, the Rus were conveniently bunching together like a herd of buffalo. It was easy hunting.

The Slavs had bowmen, but their bows were not as powerful, so when they fired back, the Mongols could ride out of range. Worse, the Mongols fired Russian arrows back at them. They had examined western bows and found a way to make Mongolian arrows not compatible with Russian bows, while Mongolian bows easily used Russian arrows. The foot soldiers of the Rus stampeded into a retreat, which made them run into other troops still arriving, and they crowded and tangled the mounted knights. The Mongols followed, picking off peasants and princes. The Novgorod Chronicle, says Weatherford, reported that only one in ten Slav survived to reach home.

The Mongol army camped in Crimea to rest for some weeks, and they executed their captive princes in a Mongol fashion: rolling each one in felt, they built a wooden platform on top of them and crowded in for a banquet. They were honoring their rank by not spilling blood, but punishing them for executing ambassadors.

Since we know that eventually the Mongols overran the Russian heartland, we’d expect that this is when they did it. But no, they didn’t. There was a general movement among the Mongols to stop expanding for now, to pull back and see what would happen next. They may also have been having the same problem with humidity and bows near Kiev as they’d had in Pakistan. So in the summer of 1223, the western Mongol army headed for home, looping back by a more northerly route to find dry grasslands faster and keep scouting new land.

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.

Far away, in a part of the world utterly unknown to Europe, a world-changer had been born around 1167. Temujin, or Genghis Khan, is one of those people in history whose intelligence still shines brightly. First, Genghis is pronounced Jengis. Modern Mongolian uses Russian letters and spells it Чингис (Chingis). This throws me every time, since in American English, we commonly start it with a hard G. I have to correct the voice in my mind all the time. Genghis Khan, the name we know, is of course a title, just as we know the Caliphs by chosen titles, not by their given names. But in the Great Khan’s case, we do know his childhood given name: Temujin, man of iron. Legend says he got that name because his father had just killed a Tatar named Temujin! Imagine having to name your baby after the last thing you killed.

Learning the history of the Khan’s family is difficult because the family seems to have viewed information as power and actively prevented people from learning Mongolian if they could. When someone wrote up a history of the Khan and his family, it was only for the family’s use, and it was kept in a locked chest. Only parts of it have survived, and it may have been literally censored with scissors at points, someone removing a name that was better left hidden from posterity (in their view). This document is now known as the Secret History of the Mongols. We have a few supplemental records to help check and flesh it out. I’m indebted to Jack Weatherford’s diligent work in assembling what can be known; after the USSR fell and Mongolia became an open country, he went to live there, using the local knowledge of herders to supplement the wisps of information Soviet-era Mongolian scholars had hoarded. All credit goes to Weatherford, and I highly recommend his books.

Temujin’s Mongols were people who lived at the border of the tundra, probably genetically related to the Eskimo-like Siberians who lived on the tundra proper. They were fur hunters who traded mink and bear pelts to the south. But just south of Temujin’s Mongols were tribes they were also related to, who were herders. We think of these groups as Mongols now, but before Temujin made Mongol identity a thing, they were just Merkit, Ongut, Kerait, Naiman, and Khitan. They were part of the trading chain from north to south, but their place was more firmly in the sheep and goat pastoral niche, whereas Temujin’s Mongols also hunted. The Mongols began to move out of the harsher conditions of the mountains and tundra, toward the plains, and began to adopt some of the pastoral ways.

Temujin’s father Yesugei was a “blood brother” to the Khan of the Keraits, Toghrul. This connection didn’t help Temujin much at first. Yesugei was killed by a rival tribe or rival leaders, and his two wives and their children were driven out to die in the wilderness. They survived; Temujin was not the oldest, but he rose to family leadership. He reportedly killed one of his half brothers when he was about 12. Temujin’s early life was filled with hardship: they starved, then he was captured and enslaved by another tribe. A friendly member of the capturing tribe helped him get out of the camp, and he hid in a freezing river for a long time while dogs searched for him. His family then lived as outcasts, tribeless wanderers, for a few years.

Temujin approached the Khan of the Keraits and asked to be made a commander. Toghrul seems to have led a similarly hard life, enslaved by the Merkits but escaping to rise to leadership among his people. It’s a bit hard to figure these things out because, at the same time that we get hard-luck stories, these tribes had a rigid idea of aristocracy. Lineage was counted both maternally and paternally, and there were right and wrong ways to be descended from the same person. Temujin seems to have taken a visceral dislike to aristocracy. In his early rising years, it came back to bite him again and again: his blood line was not quite the right stuff, so his children would be turned down for marriage alliances.

Temujin’s big break came when his wife, who had been engaged to him back when his father was still alive, was kidnapped by the Merkits. Toghril Khan had no fondness for the Merkits, so he approved Temujin’s request to lead a force out to find his wife and punish the Merkits. He obliterated those Merkits and found his wife Börte. She was pregnant, and it was never clear to anyone if the father was her husband or a Merkit, but Temujin raised the child as an oldest son. (As we’ll see, Mongols had some ways of looking at life that were very different from ours.)

Temujin did wonders for the Kerait as a war leader, but when his power seemed to threaten the Khan’s family, he was cast out. It was 1203. By now he was in his 40s, with a large family. He was again an outcast on the fringes of eastern Mongolia. He had a war band but they were reduced to starvation. However, in eastern Mongolia, they were on the edge of the Gobi Desert, which traders crossed in search of Siberian furs. A trader for the Onguts fell in with them and decided to give them food. Soon after, the rebel brother of the Kerait Khan who had cast out Temujin got in touch and made marriage alliances to gain his support.

Temujin’s power increased from that day. His genius lay in seeing that tribalism was keeping his people powerless against the Jin, the northern (ethnic Jurchen) Chinese dynasty that usually dominated them. He wanted to forge a super tribe out of all of them. With marriage alliances and force, he brought in the Siberian fur-hunting tribes, the Keraits, the Naimans, the Merkits, the Onguts, the Tanguts, and the Tatars (previously the Mongols’ fierce enemy to the north and west). In 1206, at a massive Khurultai assembly of all tribes, Temujin became the Great Khan of them all: the Khan of the Grass Sea, the Jengis Khan. He doled out former tribal territories to his wives to rule, and then began marrying off his daughters, creating a family-run empire.

One of the quirks of Mongol family life (quirk in our eyes) is that they had a tradition of marrying young boys to older girls. Giving birth and surviving is much more likely if a girl’s bone structure is mature, and survival was tight on the plains. A 12 year old boy (considered an adult fighting warrior) could father a child, but a 12 year old girl might not safely bear it. So Temujin married his sons to older girls, and his girls to younger boys: but strategically. The girls had been tutored by Börte to know how to rule a tribe. Nobody was surprised when Temujin married them out, but then he did something nobody anticipated.

When Genghis Khan married his daughter into your tribe, there were special conditions. First, other pre-existing wives were out. After the husband had an opportunity get his Mongol wife pregnant (maybe), he had to go join the Khan’s horde. (Horde, by the way, is a genuine Mongolian word.) He was needed as a son-in-law to lead a brigade, but he was not needed to rule his own land. Each daughter was charged with ruling her new tribe as a subsidiary of the Khan’s enterprise and for his benefit. The new tribe was left in no doubt what would happen if they didn’t obey her.

One daughter went to the Oirat people in the fur-hunting north. One went to the Uyghurs, a southern tribe that controlled some important caravansaries along the Silk road. Another two were similarly positioned in key places along Mongolia’s border with China. The new Queen of the Uyghurs actually learned to read several languages, since her city had a rich library. The Uyghur script was the first used to write the Mongolian language, though soon after, Chinese characters were also adapted. The daughters appear to have been very intelligent and capable. Genghis Khan’s rise was certainly fueled by the tribute they kept steadily pouring in, and the border stability they maintained. When a husband died, the Queen just married the heir, whatever his age or relationship: son, nephew, uncle, whatever.

Temujin’s four sons were not as bright, and they tended to drink too much. They were all married to Khatuns (princesses) from the confederacy tribes such as the Naimans and Keraits. Their wives were from Buddhist-based tribes that had adopted Nestorian Christianity in the last few generations. Genghis Khan didn’t care about religion; he was a Tengrist, praying to the Father Sky and Mother Earth. Later, some of his grandsons enjoyed hosting religious debates among Jews, Christians, and Buddhists.

By 1206, Genghis Khan came onto the international radar (though not yet Europe’s) by taking his united “Mongolian” tribes to conquer the Jin dynasty, the northern Chinese who represented settled civilization to the Khan. They were farmers who ate rice, instead of the meat-only diet of the plains tribes. They used writing; they networked with powers even farther south. They built walls and trained standing armies. Conquering the Jin would be quite a feat. Spoiler: Yeah, he did it.

What’s really notable about the Khan, though, is how he organized his tribes into one super-tribe. He banned the old aristocratic notions of lineage, first. Then he did what early democratic Athens had done (without knowledge of Athens): he created artificial organizations to mix tribes together.

Ten fighting men were organized into a unit that, they were told, would replace their families. Not their actual wives and children, who were left home in any case, but their brothers and cousins. From now on, they had familial duties to their brothers in the “aravt;” they were to leave none behind, betray none, and so on. Ten tens were a “zuut,” and the aravts in a zuut also owed each other extended-family loyalty. The commanders of zuuts conferred with their commander of a ten tens of tens, the “mingghan” thousand. Ten mingghans were a “tumen,” and each tumen was led by someone personally appointed by the Great Khan. A son, a son-in-law, a friend, or someone who had risen by merit.

That’s the innovation: promotion was based on merit, not blood. The Khan passed over his own kin at times for someone more effective, which is utterly shocking in comparison with Frankish and Turkish or Arab familial loyalty. How could you build a strong organization without a band of brothers? Temujin had faced that question early in his life, and he had decided that merit and oaths meant more than blood. Your family may desert you to starve. Your band of brothers, made up of outlaws and strangers, can save your life. The Khan loved personal heroism as much as he hated aristocracy.

All of the ten-based units crossed not only familial but ethnic lines, mixing Merkits with Tatars, Uyghurs with Onguts. They all became Mongols. His tumen leaders composed marching songs that recited in Tatar the new set of laws and obligations they all lived under, so that every man knew just what he owed to the tumen, mingghan, zuut, and aravt. They also had marching songs with geography rhymes, so that messengers were sent from tumen to tumen with orders made up of the scraps from familiar rhymes. They had only to remember a few new numbers or words, and the rest fitted into a jingle to get stuck in their heads. In addition to his jingle-chanting horse messengers, the Khan set up a regular pony express postal service along the Silk Road as it came gradually under his control.

That’s the state of the Mongol super-nation when it conquered the Jin, sending Chinese aristocrats fleeing to Beijing to await the return of their time. The entire Siberian north had unified. The riches of China were exactly what the Khan had been hoping to find, but the Silk Road pointed west.