The Eurasian steppe is big and flat. Not many trees, lots of grass. Supports big herds. Thousands of years ago the ancestor of the horse arrived. At first it was used for meat and milk, then later for riding. The Proto-Indo-Europeans came from the area and spread themselves around a bunch. Much later the Huns came from the area and made Rome sad.
Around the 12th Century, the Mongols were one of a bunch of different nomadic groups living in the area. They had a not-so-great bit of territory in the north. They were themselves divided into smaller groups. There was lots of fighting among everyone. Lots of bits where I’m not sure if the people in question are Mongols or not.
A lot of the story comes from “The Secret History of the Mongols”. Not sure if it’s clear how reliable it is.
Temujin’s mother fell in love and got married. She and her husband were travelling somewhere when they were attacked. She told her husband to ride away and save himself so he could marry someone else later, and he did. She got captured and taken as someone’s second wife.
Temujin grew up with various siblings (all brothers?), including one older half-brother (from his father and his father’s first wife). There were some tensions between them. I think it’s around now he gets a blood brother. At some point he rides somewhere else, to stay with another family for a bit? He falls in love with someone there. I think he’s something like 14 at this time. Before they can marry, he hears that his father has been killed by relatives of his mother’s previous husband, and returns.
His mother and her sons are all abandoned by their tribe and expected to die over winter. But she keeps them alive, and when the tribe comes back they’re surprised and a bit disconcerted. At some point he teams up with a brother to kill the eldest brother. The tribe is a bit worried that as he grows he’s gonna bear a grudge against them, and he’s sent into slavery. He escapes that, goes to claim his bride that he fell in love with previously, rejoins his family, and… I guess probably isn’t at this point spending time with the people who sent him into slavery?
He and his wife and family join up with some other tribe including his blood brother. He becomes a good warrior, and he’s popular. He divides spoils according to who did well in battle, not according to rank. And if a warrior dies, he gives that warrior’s shares of the spoils to his wife and kids. He and his blood brother get more distant, and at one point BB snubs him and his wife encourages them to leave instead of staying. They do, and a bunch of others come with them because he’s popular.
I don’t remember how, but this escalates into a big feud between Temujin and BB. Eventually there’s a big battle. Temujin loses and has to flee. Not clear where he goes but likely China. At this time another group of steppe nomads had conquered Northern China. They had a strategy of protecting themselves against yet more steppe nomads, by hiring some of them as mercenaries to keep the others out. When the mercenaries got too powerful, they’d hire a different group instead. Temujin gets hired, and I think starts assembling a big army again.
What he does is, when his group beats another group, he kills the elites but lets the warriors live and join him, instead of whatever is the custom (killing them all?). His mum, still with him, ceremonially adopts a kid from the group.
(I don’t remember what happens to his wife during all this. Maybe she’s with him in China. But at some point she’s kidnapped, and then he recovers her, and it’s not clear whether her first kid is his or not. He keeps the kid but names him something translating to “guest”.)
His group grows like this, and eventually the Mongols appoint someone (his blood brother?) as something like “Khan over Khans” to face him. But this time he wins. Blood brother flees. Some of BB’s lieutenants offer to betray him to Temujin, but Temujin has them killed for disloyalty. When he does capture BB, he has him executed without spilling blood, which is a mark of respect.
Now Temujin is the ruler of all Mongols and I think all steppe nomads. Calls himself Chinggis Khan, “great ruler” or something, it’s a title that hasn’t been used before. (Translation through Arabic and Latin turns the ch into a soft g and then a hard g, and now he’s usually known as Genghis.) Reorganizes things a bunch. Warriors are organized in groups of ten who live together; then ten of those come together and elect a leader; ten of those, and ten of those, is a force of 10,000 which is big enough to be formidable but small enough to travel fast and feed themselves. He imposes a bunch of regulations. Allows a certain amount of religious freedom (there are Muslims, Buddhists, Christians—Temujin isn’t any of those). Everyone has to perform one day a week in public service.
But the steppe nomads have historically been kind of infighty and Temujin’s worried they’ll go back to fighting each other if he doesn’t give them someone else to fight. First he goes after a smallish nearby kingdom. They ask North and South China for help, but those places are like “um, we like it if our enemies fight each other”. The kingdom falls. Then North China—I think until now he’s been kinda sorta a vassal of them, but their emperor dies and the new one sends an envoy out to get him to reaffirm that he’s still a vassal. He declines. There’s the whole gobi desert in between so China isn’t worried, but the horde crosses it and starts laying waste.
Probably they didn’t really intend to conquer the place, just raid and leave, but they kept winning battles so why not keep fighting them. Eventually they get to Beijing. The emperor (I think another new one) agrees that he’s now a vassal. The horde makes to leave, camping on the edge of the desert until a good season to cross. But then they get word that the emperor is trying to flee Beijing, and they get pissed at that and I think this time actually enter Beijing and do lots of killing.
Finally they go back to the steppe. Next, some traders on the silk road (which now goes through Mongol territory, and maybe the traders were themselves Mongols?) get killed by some noble in, I think somewhere that’s one of the modern-day ’stans. Temujin sends some ambassadors to say, I’m sure this was just a misunderstanding, send us that guy to be executed and we’ll forget the whole thing happened. I think two of those are killed and one allowed to return. So Temujin starts laying waste around there too. When Samarkand tries to defend themselves, they kill one of his sons-in-law; he asks his daughter what should happen to them and she says everyone in the city should be slaughtered and the place completely ravaged so it can be used for farmland, so that’s what happens. (Um, except it doesn’t sound like it went quite that far.)
By the time he’s done, he has the largest empire the world’s seen.
Some battle strategies:
They have Chinese engineers building siege engines.
If a city surrenders, they let the inhabitants live. If not they kill them.
They force peasants to flee into the city. Then the city has lots of people and no food.
They capture peasants and make them do some of the siege engineering work, so the defenders have to spend arrows shooting their own citizens.
They can travel fast. No need for fires to alert people to them. Instead of cooking meat, they can put it under their saddle to tenderize it. If there’s no food, they can drink their horses’ blood. (Each warrior brings like five horses.)
If they want to seem like a larger force than they are, they can tie branches behind their horses to whip up dust.
Maybe that’s the end of Temujin’s large scale conquest? He’s old by now and thinking about immortality, and when a wise man tells him that’s not really an option he thinks about succession. He has four sons by his first (favorite) wife and gathers them to him.
#1 is Guest, he’s always treated him like a legit son but Chaggatai resents him.
#2 is named Chaggatai.
#3 is well-liked but an alcoholic.
#4 is ruthless even by Mongol standards, and doesn’t always spare surrendering cities. By Mongol custom, the youngest son often inherits titles, though not titles that are meant to denote merit (like Khan).
His plan is to split the empire into three, have one son ruling over each part and another ruling over those three. Who gets to be top dog?
Temujin asks Guest to speak first, and Chaggatai gets annoyed at that and he and Guest argue. Eventually they realize they’re not helping their cases, and agree that the alcoholic should rule.
Eventually Temujin dies en-route to pacify some rebels. His burial place is… kept secret to the point where there are rumors that 20,000 people who just happen to come across the funeral procession are killed, and also guarded by a load of arrows stuck into the ground and by warriors?
(Notable omission: my understanding is he had a lot of children, and I don’t remember any mention of that.)
So his alcoholic son becomes Khan. I don’t remember his name, but I think from now on the Khans go by “(first name) Khan”. This one is very profligate, keeps giving people gifts. Also decides he wants a city. So he builds a big one, Karakorum. It’s very impressive. But it’s in a silly place for a city, no agriculture so it needs wheat imported from far away, and silk road traders need to be bribed to come visit because it’s not on the way to anywhere.
So he starts running out of money, and decides to fix that by invading Europe. Now there’s an idea that maybe the whole world should be united under Mongol rule.
The Mongols entered eastern Europe once before. (That caused a bit of confusion, because there was an idea at the time that there was a great Christian king somewhere in the east and one day he’d come forth and reclaim Jerusalem. Obviously that didn’t happen.) They chased some other steppe nomads there. I think the story was something like: they told the powerful locals “we just want these nomads, let us kill them and leave and we won’t bother you”. The powerful locals weren’t scared of the Mongols and refused. That ended badly for the powerful locals.
Now they invade once more, and do a lot of damage in eastern Europe. They eventually turn back because the alcoholic Khan dies?
I think at this point the empire fractures into four, or maybe there’s another Khan in between. I’ve mostly lost track of the story from here. Monke Khan eventually inherits part of the empire. He wants to invade southern China and gets his… brother? son? Kublai to do it, but Kublai isn’t very successful. When he dies, there’s a power struggle between Kublai (who’s spent most of his life in China) and a brother. The brother is a good diplomat but not a good strategist and loses, I think with Kublai attacking Karakorum. Kublai rules from China and adopts a bunch of Chinese customs and the Mongols back home kinda feel like they’re not being ruled by one of them any more. There’s an invasion of Japan, where Japan is saved by the kamikaze (divine wind, causing shipwrecks). Eventually Kublai is overthrown by what becomes the… Qin dynasty? and China starts looking inwards, doubling down on building its wall and burning its big fleet of ships.
Stuff happens in other parts of the world, too. At one point caliph of Baghdad is killed by having molten silver poured in his mouth, eyes and (ears? nose?).
Marco Polo shows up in the story too. He travelled at some point to somewhere in the Mongol empire, stayed there for a while, and then left. When he went there he travelled by land, but by the time he left the Pax Mongolica was less strong and he travelled by boat.
And at one point there was a religious debate between a Christian, Muslim and (Jew? Buddhist?). The participants also had to drink a lot while debating. The Christian claims to have won easily, but no one converted.
Ultimately the winners were western Europe, who had been kind of a backwater previously because they weren’t on the silk road. They didn’t get invaded but did get a bunch of the benefits of Mongol technology.
Fall of Civilizations #19: The Mongols
The Eurasian steppe is big and flat. Not many trees, lots of grass. Supports big herds. Thousands of years ago the ancestor of the horse arrived. At first it was used for meat and milk, then later for riding. The Proto-Indo-Europeans came from the area and spread themselves around a bunch. Much later the Huns came from the area and made Rome sad.
Around the 12th Century, the Mongols were one of a bunch of different nomadic groups living in the area. They had a not-so-great bit of territory in the north. They were themselves divided into smaller groups. There was lots of fighting among everyone. Lots of bits where I’m not sure if the people in question are Mongols or not.
A lot of the story comes from “The Secret History of the Mongols”. Not sure if it’s clear how reliable it is.
Temujin’s mother fell in love and got married. She and her husband were travelling somewhere when they were attacked. She told her husband to ride away and save himself so he could marry someone else later, and he did. She got captured and taken as someone’s second wife.
Temujin grew up with various siblings (all brothers?), including one older half-brother (from his father and his father’s first wife). There were some tensions between them. I think it’s around now he gets a blood brother. At some point he rides somewhere else, to stay with another family for a bit? He falls in love with someone there. I think he’s something like 14 at this time. Before they can marry, he hears that his father has been killed by relatives of his mother’s previous husband, and returns.
His mother and her sons are all abandoned by their tribe and expected to die over winter. But she keeps them alive, and when the tribe comes back they’re surprised and a bit disconcerted. At some point he teams up with a brother to kill the eldest brother. The tribe is a bit worried that as he grows he’s gonna bear a grudge against them, and he’s sent into slavery. He escapes that, goes to claim his bride that he fell in love with previously, rejoins his family, and… I guess probably isn’t at this point spending time with the people who sent him into slavery?
He and his wife and family join up with some other tribe including his blood brother. He becomes a good warrior, and he’s popular. He divides spoils according to who did well in battle, not according to rank. And if a warrior dies, he gives that warrior’s shares of the spoils to his wife and kids. He and his blood brother get more distant, and at one point BB snubs him and his wife encourages them to leave instead of staying. They do, and a bunch of others come with them because he’s popular.
I don’t remember how, but this escalates into a big feud between Temujin and BB. Eventually there’s a big battle. Temujin loses and has to flee. Not clear where he goes but likely China. At this time another group of steppe nomads had conquered Northern China. They had a strategy of protecting themselves against yet more steppe nomads, by hiring some of them as mercenaries to keep the others out. When the mercenaries got too powerful, they’d hire a different group instead. Temujin gets hired, and I think starts assembling a big army again.
What he does is, when his group beats another group, he kills the elites but lets the warriors live and join him, instead of whatever is the custom (killing them all?). His mum, still with him, ceremonially adopts a kid from the group.
(I don’t remember what happens to his wife during all this. Maybe she’s with him in China. But at some point she’s kidnapped, and then he recovers her, and it’s not clear whether her first kid is his or not. He keeps the kid but names him something translating to “guest”.)
His group grows like this, and eventually the Mongols appoint someone (his blood brother?) as something like “Khan over Khans” to face him. But this time he wins. Blood brother flees. Some of BB’s lieutenants offer to betray him to Temujin, but Temujin has them killed for disloyalty. When he does capture BB, he has him executed without spilling blood, which is a mark of respect.
Now Temujin is the ruler of all Mongols and I think all steppe nomads. Calls himself Chinggis Khan, “great ruler” or something, it’s a title that hasn’t been used before. (Translation through Arabic and Latin turns the ch into a soft g and then a hard g, and now he’s usually known as Genghis.) Reorganizes things a bunch. Warriors are organized in groups of ten who live together; then ten of those come together and elect a leader; ten of those, and ten of those, is a force of 10,000 which is big enough to be formidable but small enough to travel fast and feed themselves. He imposes a bunch of regulations. Allows a certain amount of religious freedom (there are Muslims, Buddhists, Christians—Temujin isn’t any of those). Everyone has to perform one day a week in public service.
But the steppe nomads have historically been kind of infighty and Temujin’s worried they’ll go back to fighting each other if he doesn’t give them someone else to fight. First he goes after a smallish nearby kingdom. They ask North and South China for help, but those places are like “um, we like it if our enemies fight each other”. The kingdom falls. Then North China—I think until now he’s been kinda sorta a vassal of them, but their emperor dies and the new one sends an envoy out to get him to reaffirm that he’s still a vassal. He declines. There’s the whole gobi desert in between so China isn’t worried, but the horde crosses it and starts laying waste.
Probably they didn’t really intend to conquer the place, just raid and leave, but they kept winning battles so why not keep fighting them. Eventually they get to Beijing. The emperor (I think another new one) agrees that he’s now a vassal. The horde makes to leave, camping on the edge of the desert until a good season to cross. But then they get word that the emperor is trying to flee Beijing, and they get pissed at that and I think this time actually enter Beijing and do lots of killing.
Finally they go back to the steppe. Next, some traders on the silk road (which now goes through Mongol territory, and maybe the traders were themselves Mongols?) get killed by some noble in, I think somewhere that’s one of the modern-day ’stans. Temujin sends some ambassadors to say, I’m sure this was just a misunderstanding, send us that guy to be executed and we’ll forget the whole thing happened. I think two of those are killed and one allowed to return. So Temujin starts laying waste around there too. When Samarkand tries to defend themselves, they kill one of his sons-in-law; he asks his daughter what should happen to them and she says everyone in the city should be slaughtered and the place completely ravaged so it can be used for farmland, so that’s what happens. (Um, except it doesn’t sound like it went quite that far.)
By the time he’s done, he has the largest empire the world’s seen.
Some battle strategies:
They have Chinese engineers building siege engines.
If a city surrenders, they let the inhabitants live. If not they kill them.
They force peasants to flee into the city. Then the city has lots of people and no food.
They capture peasants and make them do some of the siege engineering work, so the defenders have to spend arrows shooting their own citizens.
They can travel fast. No need for fires to alert people to them. Instead of cooking meat, they can put it under their saddle to tenderize it. If there’s no food, they can drink their horses’ blood. (Each warrior brings like five horses.)
If they want to seem like a larger force than they are, they can tie branches behind their horses to whip up dust.
Maybe that’s the end of Temujin’s large scale conquest? He’s old by now and thinking about immortality, and when a wise man tells him that’s not really an option he thinks about succession. He has four sons by his first (favorite) wife and gathers them to him.
#1 is Guest, he’s always treated him like a legit son but Chaggatai resents him.
#2 is named Chaggatai.
#3 is well-liked but an alcoholic.
#4 is ruthless even by Mongol standards, and doesn’t always spare surrendering cities. By Mongol custom, the youngest son often inherits titles, though not titles that are meant to denote merit (like Khan).
His plan is to split the empire into three, have one son ruling over each part and another ruling over those three. Who gets to be top dog?
Temujin asks Guest to speak first, and Chaggatai gets annoyed at that and he and Guest argue. Eventually they realize they’re not helping their cases, and agree that the alcoholic should rule.
Eventually Temujin dies en-route to pacify some rebels. His burial place is… kept secret to the point where there are rumors that 20,000 people who just happen to come across the funeral procession are killed, and also guarded by a load of arrows stuck into the ground and by warriors?
(Notable omission: my understanding is he had a lot of children, and I don’t remember any mention of that.)
So his alcoholic son becomes Khan. I don’t remember his name, but I think from now on the Khans go by “(first name) Khan”. This one is very profligate, keeps giving people gifts. Also decides he wants a city. So he builds a big one, Karakorum. It’s very impressive. But it’s in a silly place for a city, no agriculture so it needs wheat imported from far away, and silk road traders need to be bribed to come visit because it’s not on the way to anywhere.
So he starts running out of money, and decides to fix that by invading Europe. Now there’s an idea that maybe the whole world should be united under Mongol rule.
The Mongols entered eastern Europe once before. (That caused a bit of confusion, because there was an idea at the time that there was a great Christian king somewhere in the east and one day he’d come forth and reclaim Jerusalem. Obviously that didn’t happen.) They chased some other steppe nomads there. I think the story was something like: they told the powerful locals “we just want these nomads, let us kill them and leave and we won’t bother you”. The powerful locals weren’t scared of the Mongols and refused. That ended badly for the powerful locals.
Now they invade once more, and do a lot of damage in eastern Europe. They eventually turn back because the alcoholic Khan dies?
I think at this point the empire fractures into four, or maybe there’s another Khan in between. I’ve mostly lost track of the story from here. Monke Khan eventually inherits part of the empire. He wants to invade southern China and gets his… brother? son? Kublai to do it, but Kublai isn’t very successful. When he dies, there’s a power struggle between Kublai (who’s spent most of his life in China) and a brother. The brother is a good diplomat but not a good strategist and loses, I think with Kublai attacking Karakorum. Kublai rules from China and adopts a bunch of Chinese customs and the Mongols back home kinda feel like they’re not being ruled by one of them any more. There’s an invasion of Japan, where Japan is saved by the kamikaze (divine wind, causing shipwrecks). Eventually Kublai is overthrown by what becomes the… Qin dynasty? and China starts looking inwards, doubling down on building its wall and burning its big fleet of ships.
Stuff happens in other parts of the world, too. At one point caliph of Baghdad is killed by having molten silver poured in his mouth, eyes and (ears? nose?).
Marco Polo shows up in the story too. He travelled at some point to somewhere in the Mongol empire, stayed there for a while, and then left. When he went there he travelled by land, but by the time he left the Pax Mongolica was less strong and he travelled by boat.
And at one point there was a religious debate between a Christian, Muslim and (Jew? Buddhist?). The participants also had to drink a lot while debating. The Christian claims to have won easily, but no one converted.
Ultimately the winners were western Europe, who had been kind of a backwater previously because they weren’t on the silk road. They didn’t get invaded but did get a bunch of the benefits of Mongol technology.