In the smoke filled air, the cries of men and women reach towards Eternal Blue Heaven as horsemen ride over ruined city walls. The men of fighting age are forced together, their weapons and armour abandoned or taken, to be shortly executed en masse. A tower of their skulls be all that remains of their resistance The women, holding close crying children and infants, are led away, chattel for their new masters. Those craftsmen and artisans of skills -engineers, masons, woodworkers, and smiths of metal- are deemed to be useful to their new master in the east, and will be carried off for his service. Over the 13th century, from the islands off Korea to the plains of Hungary, from the forests of Siberia to the rugged borderlands of India, variations of this scene are enacted again and again, in the pursuit of nothing less than the domination of everything under Heaven by one family. I’m your host David and welcome to Ages of Conquest: a Kings and Generals Podcast. This is the Mongol conquests. In Bukhara, in early 1220, as the formidable Khwarezmian (Khwa-rez-mian) Empire buckles under their onslaught, the man who has caused this horrific explosion of violence stands before a crowd of the city’s notables and wealthy. Once proud and haughty, now they are held humble before this horseman from the steppe. “O peoples,” he tells them through his translator, “know that you have committed great sins and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have of these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. Had you not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” As the translator finished the statement, the shocked murmurs and hurried glances of the crowd would surely have pleased him - Genghis Khan, the World Conqueror, who had driven this proud people before him like hunters do their prey. The 13th century Mongol Conquests today are often presented in apocalyptic imagery, a carry over from many of the medieval sources, for whom the only explanation for the speed and thoroughness of these conquests could only be that they were a punishment sent by God, surely heralding the end of times. These connotations are difficult to dissociate, and indeed, one might ask why we should look deeper, when these conquests resulted in an estimated 30-40 million deaths, unimaginable suffering, rape and cruelty. Genghis Khan’s name, to many in the west, Iran and China, brings to mind the stock image of the blood thirsty barbarian, who raped his way to over 200 million modern descendants! Yet, in Mongolia today, he is not a national shame, but rather considered the heroic, legendary founder of their country, the unifier of the Mongols who led them to an unprecedented age of greatness. He is a lawgiver, the ideal steppe chieftain. Stern and vengeful to his enemies, but generous to his followers, a protector bringing peace and ending the age of intercine steppe warfare. For centuries, descent from Genghis Khan was perhaps the single most important source of legitimacy for dynasties and states across Asia. Even those monarchs not of the altan urugh - the Golden Lineage- often maintained a puppet Khan descended from him, or married a daughter of distant descent. For many of the Turkic peoples across the steppe today, Genghis takes the form of a great folk hero, and individual clans, tribes and peoples will feature some legend wherein a famous ancestor of theirs was granted their rights to that territory by Genghis himself, or was held as a loyal general by him. How do we reconcile these differing interpretations? As with so much of history, the truth lies in the middle. That is what we will discuss over the course of this podcast series. Not a dramatized, apocalyptic presentation, but neither a glowing heroic description, we will instead in detail go through the Mongol conquests, beginning with the origins of the empire and following through its expansion, administration, collapse and legacy, and address along the way popular misconceptions. To begin this, then perhaps we should first take a note of the name of the great Khan himself. Rather than the ‘Genghis,’ of modern English, we should instead use the more accurate rendition of his name in Mongolian: Chinggis Khan. Not meaning ‘universal emperor,’ it instead is something like ‘fierce, stern ruler,’ and neither was it his birth name. Chinggis Khan was born in about 1162, as Temujin, son of the minor chieftain Yesugei. Greatness did not come to him easily. When he was about 9 years old, his father was poisoned by a rival tribe, and Temujin and his family were soon abandoned by their own people. Only slowly did he gain power, suffering numerous setbacks, captures, and military defeats, forced to crawl and scratch for every inch. It was only in 1206, when he was over 40 years of age, that he finally unified the tribes of Mongolia, was elected Great Khan and took the title of Chinggis Khan. Even then, there is no evidence suggesting world domination was a goal he set himself to at this point: the initial attacks on China, beginning with an invasion of the Tangut Xi Xia in 1209 ,and an invasion of the Jurchen ruled Jin Dynasty in 1211, were intended for plunder and the punishing old enemies rather than establishing a vast empire. Only in the final years of his life, as Mongol armies obliterated the Khwarezmian ((Khwa-rez-mian)) Empire in modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, does it seem the Mongols started to envisage themselves not just as rulers of the steppe and north China, but of much, much more. To paraphrase the Historian David Morgan, the Mongols came to believe it was their destiny to rule the world when they found out that they were in fact, doing so. The empire Chinggis Khan founded was the largest contiguous land empire in history, coming to incorporate most of the Eurasian continent by the end of the thirteenth century. Contrary to some statements you may seen online by those reminding you of the size of the British Empire that this was an ‘empire of empty space,’ the Mongols took control of all of the Chinese mainland, the trade cities of the famed Silk Routes in Central Asia, with Persia, Iraq, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia and the cities of what is now Russia and Ukraine. That Mongol armies never landed in England and France is perhaps why to many in the west they remain but a foggy topic, the might of Genghis Khan glossed over in favour of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great for most English speakers. Yet the Great Khan’s lifetime and legacy was a defining period for most of Eurasia, an immense period of transformation. Few powers of the 12th and early 13th century survived the Mongol onslaughts, and those that did were often significantly impacted by them. Neither were these impacts solely military: the expansion of trans-continental trade, spread of ideas and movements of peoples resulted in major economic changes, and Europe learned in detail of the wealth of China and the far east; population losses from the conquests and the Mongol civil wars, and finally the Black Death, as well as huge migrations of people across Asia, changed the population figures and distribution across the continent; Islam, from its low point with the destruction of Baghdad by Mongol armies in 1258, spread across Central Asia in the wake of the Mongols; and the states which succeeded the Mongol Empire now bore much different political and cultural outlooks, with a slew of Turko-Mongolian empires rising and falling ruled by Chinggisids or those who married into the family, most famously the great conqueror Temur; the likes of the Ming Dynasty in China, which after a brief flirtation with its famous trade fleets, became a Dynasty famously insular, closing itself off to outsiders and with a near-paralyzing phobia of the Mongols: it is this dynasty which built the Great Wall of China as we know it today. All of these various aspects and more, we will explore over the course of this series. For purposes of this series, we define the Mongol Empire as the single, unified state ruled by the Great Khans from 1206-1259. Upon the death of Chinggis Khan’s grandson, the Great Khan Mongke in 1259, civil war tore apart the empire into regional Khanates: the Yuan Dynasty in China, ruled by the heirs of the famous Kublai Khan, who maintained the title of Great Khan; the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Caucasus and Iraq, ruled by the descendants of Kublai’s brother Hulegu (Hoo-le-goo), the conqueror of Baghdad; the Golden Horde in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, ruled by the sons of Chinggis Khan’s ill-fated eldest child, Jochi; and the Chagatai Khanate in the geographic expanse between them, where the line of Chinggis’ second son Chagatai would rule in some form for centuries. These were not the only Khanates of the period: an Ogedaid (O-ge-dai-id) Khanate would emerge in the late thirteenth century under the rule of Qaidu (Kai-doo) Khan, and would dominate the Chagatai khanate for some time; the rambunctious Neguderis (Neg-ood-er-is) in modern Afghanistan would be a thorn in the side of the Ilkhans and rulers of India; and one may even suggest the constituent Khanates of the Golden horde like the White Horde, held their own true independence. And this is not even discussing the further fragmentations and reunifications over the following centuries! As one can gather from this brief description, this can be a complicated period and certainly overwhelming if we dive in unprepared. This series will hopefully serve to ease the uninitiated into it: we will begin with an introduction to nomadism in Mongolia, the tribes of that region and the local powers of North China, before detailing the rise of Chinggis Khan and his conquests. From there we will follow a history of the empire and
