Mongol Empire

The twenty years

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)formation

Before there was an empire there was a man with no followers, hiding in a place called Baljuna with a handful of friends and nothing to eat. The twenty years between those two facts are the part of the story that is usually skipped, and they are the part that explains the rest.

What he inherited

Temüjin's father Yesügei had been a chief of the Borjigin, of no great consequence on a plateau full of confederations — Tatars, Kereit, Naiman, Merkit, Tayichiut, Onggirat, Jajirat — most of them larger and better placed. When Yesügei died his following dispersed and his family was left on the steppe.

What he had instead of an inheritance was other people's obligations. Yesügei had once rescued Toghrul, the Kereit chief whom the Jin emperor styled Wang Khan, when his uncle drove him out for usurping a throne and killing his brothers; Yesügei had chased the usurper into the country west of the Yellow River and put Toghrul back. The two had become anda — sworn brothers. That was the capital Temüjin started with, and it is why he addressed Wang Khan as father.

The letter

The alliance broke. Jamukha, Temüjin's own sworn brother and closest rival, worked on Wang Khan's suspicions until the Kereit turned on him; a feast at Sad was arranged at which Temüjin was to be taken. Warned by two shepherds, Kishlik and Badai, he got away — and was beaten anyway. Abandoned by most of his troops, he fled to the desert of Baljuna with a few firm friends and was reduced to great straits. Those companions were afterwards known as the Baljunas, and the two shepherds were made tarkhans, exempt from tax and punishment for nine offences.

From there, a fugitive with almost nothing, he sent Wang Khan a letter. Howorth prints it in seven numbered clauses, and it is the most revealing document about Temüjin that survives from before his rise.

It is a reckoning of favours. Did my father not rescue you and drive out the Gur Khan? Did I not bring your brother back when the Naiman drove you out, and beat the Merkit who attacked him?

When in your distress you came to me with your body peering through your tatters, like the sun through the clouds, and worn out with hunger, you moved languidly like an expiring flame, did I not attack the tribes who molested you, present you with abundance of sheep and horses? You came to me haggard. In a fortnight you were stout and well-favoured again.

Then the reproach: they had sworn on the river Kara that if a snake glided between them and envenomed their words they would not listen to it until they had asked for an explanation — yet you suddenly left me without asking me to explain.

And at the end, the argument, in the form of a cart:

When one wheel of a cart breaks, and the ox tries to drag it, it only hurts its neck. If we then detach the ox, and leave the vehicle, the thieves come and take the load. If we do not unyoke it, the ox will die of hunger. Am I not one wheel of thy chariot?

With it he sent a request that a particular black gelding, with its embroidered and plated saddle, lost on the day of the battle, might be sent back.

What the letter is doing

It is not a plea. It is an indictment delivered in the correct form, with the obligations enumerated, the oath cited and the breach named, from a man who at that moment had a few dozen followers and a lake.

Read it beside what happened next — the Kereit destroyed, the Naiman destroyed, Jamukha handed over by his own men and executed — and the sequence stops looking like a conqueror's rise and starts looking like a legal case being enforced. The steppe ran on sworn alliance, hospitality owed and returned, and the enumeration of services. Temüjin was better at that than anybody, and when the debts were not paid he collected them with an army.

Twenty years later there was nobody left on the plateau to owe anything to.

What was assembled in 1206

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)formation

Temujin spent twenty years destroying the other confederations of the Mongolian plateau — Tatars, Kereit, Naiman, Merkit — and was proclaimed Chinggis Khan at a gathering on the Onon in 1206. The significance is not the conquest. Steppe confederations had risen and dissolved for a thousand years.

The significance is what he did to the tribes afterwards. He broke them up and redistributed their fighting men into decimal units — tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands — commanded by men he appointed, frequently of low birth, who owed their position to him alone. A soldier could not leave his unit on pain of death. The tribal aristocracies that had made every previous steppe polity temporary were dismantled as organising structures and replaced with an army that was loyal to a person and, after him, to a lineage.

That is the innovation, and it is administrative rather than military. The Mongol advantages usually listed — horse archery, mobility, feigned retreat — were shared by every steppe army the settled world had faced. What was not shared was an instrument that stayed assembled.

What the decimal army destroyed

It is worth being exact about what was dismantled, because it had been the permanent feature of steppe politics for a thousand years.

A tribal confederation is an agreement among aristocracies. Each chief brings his own men, who are his men; he can take them away; his successor may or may not be bound by his father's oath. Everything depends on the personal standing of the paramount chief with a dozen other chiefs whose interests are their own. When he dies, or is beaten once, the parts go home. Attila's empire, the Türk khaganates, the Uyghurs, the Kereit and the Naiman that Temüjin had just destroyed — all of them worked this way and all of them came apart the same way.

The decimal reorganisation cut across every one of those loyalties. A man's unit was not his clan. His commander was not his hereditary lord. He could not transfer to another unit, and the penalty for trying was death, as it was for the commander who took him. Men from tribes that had fought each other for generations were put in the same thousand.

And the commanders were made, not born. Several of the most important — Jebe, who had shot Temüjin's horse from under him while fighting for the other side, and was given a name meaning arrow; Mukhali; Sübedei — had no standing whatever in the old order and everything to lose if the new one failed.

The guard

The other half of the instrument was the keshig, the household guard, raised to ten thousand men and drawn deliberately from the sons of commanders — which made it simultaneously a bodyguard, a staff college and a hostage pool. The men who governed provinces from Korea to the Caucasus for the next fifty years came out of it.

Why it mattered more than the cavalry

The Mongol tactical advantages usually listed — the composite bow, the string of remounts, the feigned retreat, the ability to live off the herd — were shared by every steppe army the settled world had faced since the Scythians, and the settled world had always survived them. Cavalry that cannot be held together does not take cities, and cities were where the wealth was.

What was new in 1206 was an instrument that stayed assembled after the man who assembled it stopped watching it, and then after he died. That is why the empire kept growing for forty years under three successors of quite ordinary ability, and it is the single fact from which everything that follows was built.

The caravan at Otrar

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (1906)expansion

The invasion that destroyed the eastern Islamic world began with a commercial dispute, and the man who provoked it had made himself the only ruler capable of resisting it.

The provocation

A Mongol trade caravan was seized at Otrar on the Syr Darya in 1218 and its merchants put to death by the governor, on the charge of being spies. Chinggis sent envoys to demand redress. They were executed too.

Ibn al-Athir, the Arab historian writing within a decade of the event and from the accounts of people fleeing it, does not treat this as an excuse invented afterwards. He treats it as a blunder, and he apportions the blame precisely — not to the Mongols, whom he regards as a natural catastrophe, but to the Khwarazmshah.

Three charges. Greed: Muhammad had overrun the Muslim lands and destroyed the neighbouring kings until he stood alone over all of them, so that when he was beaten there was nobody left to check the invaders or to protect anyone. Treachery: his murder of the merchants and the ambassador gave Chinggis the best possible pretext, and in the process taught the Mongols how weak and undefended Persia was. And irresolution: at the first reverse he went from boastful defiance to complete panic, and died about two years later a hunted fugitive on an island in the Caspian.

There is a fourth thread in the account. The caliph al-Nasir at Baghdad, suspecting his too-powerful vassal of designs on the city, had been working to weaken him by intrigue — and, Ibn al-Athir hints and al-Maqrizi states outright, encouraged the Mongols to invade his territory. It was the caliph's own house that they destroyed thirty-eight years later.

What Ibn al-Athir wrote

He is the most important witness to the invasion in any language, and he could barely make himself write it down.

For some years I continued averse from mentioning this event, deeming it so horrible that I shrank from recording it, and ever withdrawing one foot as I advanced the other. To whom, indeed, can it be easy to write the announcement of the death-blow of Islam and the Muslims, or who is he on whom the remembrance thereof can weigh lightly? O would that my mother had not born me, or that I had died and become a forgotten thing ere this befell!

His friends urged him to set it down. He hesitated a long time, and concluded at last that omitting it could serve no useful purpose.

What follows is a claim about scale made by a careful man who knew what he was comparing it with. The worst calamity on record, he says, was what Nebuchadnezzar did to the children of Israel — and what was Jerusalem compared to the cities these destroyed, each of them double its size? Those they massacred in a single city exceeded all the children of Israel. Antichrist will at least spare those who follow him; these spared nobody.

The route, in one paragraph

The most useful passage is the geography, because he wrote it as a single breathless sentence and the speed is the point.

They came out of the confines of China and attacked the cities of Turkestan, Kashgar and Balasaghun; thence to Transoxiana, Samarkand and Bukhara; one division then into Khurasan until it had finished taking and destroying and slaying and plundering, and on to Ray, Hamadan and the Highlands as far as Iraq; thence into Azerbaijan and Arran, destroying the towns and killing most of the people, of whom none escaped but a small remnant — and all this in less than a year; this is a thing whereof the like hath not been heard. Then through the Darband of Shirwan, past the fortress they could not take, into the country of the Alans and the Lezgi, and on to the Kipchak, who are the most numerous of the Turks, killing all who withstood them while the survivors fled to the fords and the mountain tops and abandoned the country.

Another division, he adds, went to Ghazna and its dependencies and the borders of India, Sistan and Kirman, and did worse.

Alexander, he notes, is agreed by the historians to have conquered the world — and took about ten years over it, and did not slaughter, being satisfied that men should be subject to him.

Why nothing stopped them

Ibn al-Athir's explanation is logistical and it is correct.

Moreover they need no commissariat, nor the conveyance of supplies, for they have with them sheep, cows, horses, and the like quadrupeds, the flesh of which they eat. As for their beasts which they ride, these dig into the earth with their hoofs and eat the roots of plants, knowing naught of barley. And so, when they alight anywhere, they have need of nothing from without.

An army that carries its own food on the hoof and whose horses forage under snow does not have to stop, does not have to hold a supply line, and cannot be starved out of a country. Every state it met was built to fight armies that could.

The rest of his description of them — that they worship the sun at its rising, eat anything including dogs, and do not recognise marriage, so that a child does not know its father — is what a horrified man repeats about people he has never seen, and is worth keeping in the record precisely as that.

The numbers problem

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)aside?What aside means

How many people did the Mongols kill? The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the reason is worth setting out, because the figures get repeated as though somebody did.

The figures

The medieval accounts give casualty figures for the Khurasan sieges — 1.7 million at Nishapur, comparable numbers at Merv — that cannot be reconciled with any plausible population for those cities. Merv at its height was one of the great cities of the Islamic world, and the highest estimates anyone has made for it from its built area fall an order of magnitude short of the figure a Mongol army is said to have killed there in a few days.

The arithmetic alone disposes of them. A million bodies counted in a week, at a rate one chronicler gives as so many per Mongol soldier, is not a tally anybody performed; the number of executioners required to do it in the time available exceeds the army.

What can be said

That the destruction in Khurasan was severe is not in doubt and does not rest on the round numbers. It rests on the irrigation.

The cities of that country lived on qanats — underground channels, dug and maintained by hand over centuries, which brought water tens of kilometres from the foot of the mountains. A qanat is not damaged by an army passing over it. It is destroyed by the death or flight of the people who clean it every year, and once the gallery collapses the labour of restoring it is close to the labour of digging it in the first place.

That is why the Khurasan figure is a real thing even when the numbers attached to it are not. A massacre kills a generation; the loss of a hydraulic system that nobody is left to maintain removes the basis of settlement for centuries, and the records of what was under cultivation in the fourteenth century compared with the twelfth show exactly that.

Why the round millions survive anyway

Because they are doing work that has nothing to do with counting.

Ibn al-Athir wrote his account as a religious catastrophe and said so in the first line. The Persian historians who followed served Mongol masters and had reasons of their own for making the conquest total and irreversible — a ruler whose victory was absolute cannot be blamed for the state of what he rules. Chroniclers writing for a defeated audience, and chroniclers writing for the victors, both had uses for a million dead.

A chronicler's round million is a statement about how the sack felt, not a count of the dead, and it should be quoted with that said out loud. The alternative — a modern writer silently substituting a smaller number they cannot source either — is not an improvement.

We know not whence they came

Drafted from The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (1914)expansion

While Chinggis was finishing Khwarazm, two of his generals took twenty thousand men round the south of the Caspian and kept going — through Azerbaijan, over the Caucasus, into the steppe north of the Black Sea — and in 1223 they destroyed an army of the Rus' principalities in a country no Mongol had ever seen.

It was a reconnaissance. The Novgorod chronicler did not know that, and his entry is the best account in any language of what it was like to be hit by this empire without warning.

What they were

The same year, for our sins, unknown tribes came, whom no one exactly knows, who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is; but they call them Tartars, and others say Taurmen, and others Pecheneg people.

Others again, he notes, said these were the people Bishop Methodius of Patmos had prophesied, who would come at the end of time out of the Etrian desert between East and North, and subdue the whole land from the East to the Euphrates and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, except Ethiopia.

Then the sentence that makes the chronicler worth reading:

God alone knows who they are and whence they came out. Very wise men know them exactly, who understand books; but we do not know who they are, but have written of them here for the sake of the memory of the Russian Knyazes and of the misfortune which came to them from them.

He is a monk in a northern trading city admitting, in writing, the limits of what he can find out — and recording it anyway so that it will not be lost.

The warning

The Polovtsy — the Cuman Turks of the steppe — had been beaten first. Their survivors fled into Rus'. Kotyan, one of their princes, was father-in-law to Mstislav of Galich, and came to him and to all the Rus' princes with greeting and many gifts: horses and camels, buffaloes and girls. And he said:

Our land they have taken away to-day; and yours will be taken to-morrow.

The chronicler, who has no affection for the Polovtsy and calls them cursed and godless and thinks God sent the Tartars to punish them for the Christian blood on their hands, records the warning exactly and records that the princes acted on it. They gathered the whole Russian Land and marched.

The two embassies

Then the Mongols sent envoys, and what they said was their standard opening.

Behold, we hear that you are coming against us, having listened to the Polovets men; but we have not occupied your land, nor your towns, nor your villages, nor is it against you we have come. But we have come sent by God against our serfs and our horse-herds, the pagan Polovets men, and do you take peace with us. If they escape to you, drive them off thence, and take to yourselves their goods.

Our serfs and our horse-herds. The Mongols had never been in that country and had already classified its nomads as their own runaway property.

The princes killed the envoys. A second embassy came: since you have listened to the Polovtsy and killed all our envoys and are coming against us — come then, but we have not touched you, let God judge all. Those envoys were let go.

The Kalka

They pursued for nine days, crossed the river Kalka, and sent the Polovtsy forward as a screen. The Polovtsy broke, ran back through the Rus' camp before it could form, and trampled it. There was a terrible and savage slaughter.

Mstislav of Kiev never moved. He had taken position on a stony hill above the river and built a stockade of posts around himself, and fought from inside it for three days while the rest of the army was destroyed and pursued to the Dnieper.

Then a man called Ploskynya, a commander of the auxiliaries with the Mongols, kissed the holy Cross to Mstislav and the two princes with him, swearing not to kill them but to let them go for ransom — and handed them over bound. The stockade was taken and the people in it slaughtered.

And having taken the Knyazes they suffocated them having put them under boards, and themselves took seat on the top to have dinner.

Six other princes were killed in the pursuit. Of the rest of the army, every tenth man came home; some the Polovtsy killed for their horses and others for their clothes. It was the thirty-first of May.

The disappearance

Then the thing that had happened made no sense at all, because it stopped.

And the Tartars turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again; God knows whence he fetched them against us for our sins.

Jebe and Sübedei had ridden something like eight thousand kilometres, destroyed the Georgian army, crossed the Caucasus in winter, broken the Alans and the Polovtsy by persuading them to abandon each other, annihilated the assembled forces of the Rus' princes, and gone home to report.

They came back fourteen years later with the map.

Three hundred thousand horses

Drafted from Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903)expansion

The thing the Mongols built that no previous steppe power had built, and that no settled empire had built on that scale either, was a road system with horses on it.

The yam

Marco Polo saw the finished article under Kublai, and described it with the enthusiasm of a man who had used it.

From the capital the roads ran out to every province, each named for the province it led to — and it is a very sensible plan. At every twenty-five miles along any of them a messenger found a station, called a yamb. Each had a large and handsome building to put up at, the rooms furnished with fine beds and everything else in rich silk. If even a king were to arrive at one of these, he would find himself well lodged.

At the larger stations four hundred horses stood ready; at others two hundred. Where the road crossed country with no house or hostel on it the stations were built anyway, further apart, so that a day's stage became thirty-five to forty-five miles instead of twenty-five to thirty.

On all the posts together, Polo reckoned, more than three hundred thousand horses were kept for the messengers alone, and the buildings numbered more than ten thousand.

The thing is on a scale so wonderful and costly that it is hard to bring oneself to describe it.

The runners

Between the post-houses, every three miles, stood a little fort with about forty houses round it, where the foot-runners lived.

Each runner wore a wide belt hung all over with bells, so that his approach could be heard a long way off. Reaching the post he found the next man standing ready, equipped the same way; he handed over whatever he carried and received a slip of paper from the clerk who was always there for the purpose; and the new man set off and ran his three miles.

By this arrangement, Polo says, the emperor had news from ten days' journey away in a day and a night, and from a hundred days away in ten.

What it was actually for

Not the fruit that Polo mentions being picked one morning and eaten in the capital the next. The yam was the nervous system of a state that covered a quarter of the land surface of the planet, and it did four things at once.

It moved intelligence. A campaign five thousand kilometres from the court could be directed from it — which is precisely how the western invasions were run, with orders arriving from a khan who had never seen the country.

It moved officials, and with them the census returns, the tax registers and the orders. It moved envoys — which is why a friar from Lyon could be at the Mongol court in sixteen months, and why Chinese doctors ended up in Tabriz and Persian astronomers in Beijing.

And it moved the merchants, under passes, along roads that were policed because the state used them. What the fourteenth century called the safety of the road from the Crimea to China was a by-product of a military communications system, not a commercial policy.

What it cost

It was paid for by the districts it ran through, which had to supply the horses, the fodder, the buildings and the men — an obligation that fell on settled farmers and was, in every khanate that inherited it, one of the heaviest taxes in the state. Rubruck, travelling on it, records being moved along at a speed that exhausted him and the animals both.

An empire is not held together by cavalry. It is held together by knowing, sooner than anyone else, what has happened.

The letter they made them read twice

Drafted from Carpini, The Journey of Friar John of Pian de Carpine to the Court of Kuyuk Khan, 1245-47 (1900)peak

In 1245 Pope Innocent IV sent a sixty-year-old Franciscan across Asia to find out what the Mongols were and to ask them to stop. The answer he brought back is one of the most revealing documents of the thirteenth century, and the man who edited his account for English readers dismissed it in a footnote as containing nothing of importance or interest.

Getting there

John of Plano Carpini reached the camp where Güyük was about to be enthroned after a journey of about a year, riding the Mongol post at a pace that nearly killed him. He was kept there for months, hungry.

We remained with him for quite a month, in such hunger and thirst that we were barely able to keep alive, for the allowances which they gave the four of us were scarcely enough for one; and we could find nothing to buy, the market being too far away.

What saved them was a Russian goldsmith named Cosmas, a favourite of the emperor, who helped them a little. Carpini believed they would have died otherwise.

Cosmas also, before it was put in place, showed them the throne he had made for the emperor, and the seal he had manufactured for him, and told them what was written on it:

God in Heaven, and Güyük Khan on earth. Might of God. The seal of the Emperor of all men.

That is the whole Mongol theory of world government in twenty words, engraved on an object made by a captive European craftsman for a court in Mongolia.

The information Carpini actually got

Not from the emperor — Carpini notes that the emperor of the Tartars never addresses a stranger in person, however great, but listens and answers through an intermediary, while his own subjects stay on their knees until the speech is finished, however great they are.

He got it from the prisoners. Russians and Hungarians who knew Latin and French, Russian clerks, men who had been with the Mongols twenty years and thirty years, in war and in everything else, who had learned the language and knew how the whole thing worked.

From these we were able to learn about everything: they told us most freely of all things without our having to question them, for they knew of our desire.

The single best intelligence source on the Mongol empire available to Europe in 1246 was the Mongol empire's own deported population.

The letter

Then the answer was drafted, and the care taken over it is the point.

Carpini was told to write down his business, and did. Later he was called in again before the procurator of the whole empire and two prothonotaries and a crowd of secretaries and told to say everything again. Then, on the feast of Saint Martin, the letter was translated to them word for word, and as they turned it into Latin the Mongol secretaries made them explain each phrase to check that no word had gone wrong. When both versions were written they were made to read them together and separately in case anything had been left out.

Be sure you understand it all, for it must not be that you do not understand everything, when you have reached such very distant lands.

Then, so that the Pope might be able to find somebody able to read it, they wrote a third copy in Arabic.

A chancery at the far end of Asia, producing a trilingual diplomatic instrument and proof-reading the foreign version against its own, for a correspondent it had never heard of two years earlier.

The man

Carpini's portrait of Güyük is short and worth having. Forty or forty-five or more; of medium stature; very prudent and extremely shrewd; serious and sedate, and never seen to laugh lightly or show any levity.

Christians of his household assured Carpini that he was about to become one himself, and offered evidence: he kept Christian clerks and paid them allowances, and the Christian chapel stood in front of his great tent, where the priests chanted openly at the appointed hours and beat the wooden semantron in the Greek fashion, however many Tartars were about. No other chief had that.

He did not become a Christian, and was dead within two years. But the arrangement Carpini is describing — a Nestorian chapel in front of the imperial tent, a Catholic friar in the camp, a Muslim secretariat drafting in Arabic, and a Russian goldsmith making the throne — is the empire at the top of its arc, and no state before it had ever looked like that.

The Golden Orda

Drafted from Carpini, The Journey of Friar John of Pian de Carpine to the Court of Kuyuk Khan, 1245-47 (1900)peak

In August 1246 two Franciscan friars stood in a crowd on a plain in Mongolia and watched an emperor being made. They were there because the pope had sent them to find out what the Mongols were and what they intended, and they are the first Europeans who saw the imperial government at work and came home to describe it.

John of Plano Carpini was over sixty and had ridden from Lyon.

Two tents

The court moved between them and Carpini names both.

The first was the Sira Orda, where the electors had been sitting for four weeks. He is careful about what he could and could not establish there: I am under the impression that the election was made there, though it was not proclaimed. His evidence is behaviour rather than announcement — whenever Güyük came out of the tent they sang to him, and while he stood outside they inclined towards him fine staffs tipped with tufts of red wool, which was done to no other chief.

Then the whole court rode three or four leagues to a plain by a river, where a second tent stood which they called the Golden Orda. It rested on pillars covered with gold plates fastened with gold nails, and the top and sides were hung with brocade.

The enthronement had been fixed for the Assumption, 15 August. It was put off because of hail.

What he would not do

On 24 August a great multitude assembled and all turned to face the south, each a stone's throw from the next, ranged further and further away, and made genuflections southward.

Carpini's reaction is the most revealing sentence in the passage:

As for us, not knowing whether they were making incantations or bending their knees to God or what else, we would not make any genuflexions.

Two friars stood upright in the middle of an empire's chief religious observance because they could not identify it and would not risk idolatry. Then everyone went back to the tent, Güyük was placed on the imperial seat, the chiefs knelt, and the whole people knelt — except ourselves who were not his subjects.

After that they began drinking and kept on until evening, and carts of cooked meat were brought in, without salt, a quarter distributed to every four or five men.

The oath he did not see

What Carpini could not report is what was said inside. Rockhill prints alongside him a second-hand account, from a contemporary who had it probably from Carpini's own companion, of the form of words used when a Mongol emperor is raised.

The barons set a gilded seat in their midst, put a sword before him and said they wanted, begged and commanded that he should have dominion over all of them. He asked whether they were each ready to do whatever he commanded, to come whenever he called, to go wherever he sent them, and to put to death whomever he named. They said they were. Then:

My command shall be my sword.

They then put a piece of felt on the ground, sat him on it, and told him to look up and recognise God and to look down and see the felt he sat on — and that if he ruled well he would reign in glory, and if he did otherwise he would be so poor that the felt would not be left him. Then they lifted him and his wife up on the felt and proclaimed them.

Whether those exact words were used at any particular enthronement is not something the source establishes, and Rockhill says where he got it. What it preserves is the shape: a ruler asked to accept unlimited power by men who make the offer conditional on their own obedience, and then reminded, at the moment of being lifted, that he is sitting on a mat.

What the mission achieved

Nothing it was sent for. The pope had written asking the Mongols to stop killing Christians and to explain themselves. Güyük's reply, which Carpini carried back, declined both: the Latins were to come in person and submit, and the question of why the Mongols had attacked Hungary and Poland was answered by pointing out that God had given them the earth.

What the journey produced instead was a report on how these people fought, how they treated a city that resisted, how their armies were organised in tens and hundreds and thousands, and what a European force would have to do to survive meeting one. That was the actual commission, and it is the part of the book that was copied.

The silver tree

Drafted from Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-55 (1900)peak

In 1254 a Flemish friar reached the Mongol capital and found that the drinks fountain in the great palace had been built by a goldsmith from Paris.

Guillaume Buchier

The man's name was William, a native of Paris; his family name was Buchier, his father was Laurent Buchier, and Rubruck learned from a woman at the court that there was still a brother of his living on the Grand Pont in Paris. He had been captured in the Hungarian campaign, probably around 1242, and taken four thousand miles east.

At Karakorum he was the khan's silversmith.

What he built

It was thought unseemly to carry skins of milk into the palace, so he made a tree.

Master William the Parisian had made for him a great silver tree, and at its roots are four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares.

Four more conduits ran up inside the trunk to the top and bent over, each with a gilded serpent whose tail twined round the tree. From one pipe flowed wine, from another caracosmos — clarified mare's milk — from another honey mead, and from the fourth rice mead. A silver bowl at the foot of the tree caught each.

Between the four spouts at the top he set an angel holding a trumpet, and under the tree he built a vault a man could hide in, with pipes running up through the trunk to the angel.

He tried bellows first. They did not give enough wind. So when drink is wanted, the head butler calls up to the angel, and the man in the vault blows with all his might into the pipe, and the angel raises its trumpet and sounds it loudly. The servants in the cellar outside hear it, pour the liquors into the proper conduits, and the butlers draw off the bowls and carry them in.

The tree had silver branches, leaves and fruit.

What it is a picture of

Everything about the empire at its height is in that machine.

The materials came from everywhere and so did the drinks: grape wine from the west, fermented mare's milk from the steppe, honey mead from the northern forests, rice mead from China. Four liquors from four ecologies, arriving in one room through one object, because one family now took a share of all four.

The craftsmanship is European, involuntary, and superb. The empire's most characteristic asset was not its cavalry but its ability to take a skilled man from anywhere on earth and put him to work at the centre — engineers from Persia for the siege trains, Chinese for the administration, Uyghurs for the script, Muslims for the accounts, and a Parisian for the plumbing.

And the machinery is a fake. The angel does not blow the trumpet; a man in a hole underneath does, because the bellows failed. That is not a criticism of Master William, who solved the problem he had. It is the thing itself: an enormous apparatus of display, assembled out of the whole world's skills, with somebody hidden underneath doing the actual work.

What else Rubruck found

He is the best witness the empire ever had, mostly because he was not impressed.

He counts. He measures. He asks what things cost. He records that he would not drink mare's milk and that this was noticed. He records that Möngke's palace was laid out like a church, with a nave and two aisles beyond two rows of pillars — and then, in the sentence that has probably done more than any other to fix the scale of the place in European minds, that the city apart from the palace was not as big as the village of Saint-Denis, and that the abbey of Saint-Denis is ten times larger than the palace.

Inside that town were two quarters — one of Muslim traders, where the markets were, and one of Chinese artisans — with the court secretaries' offices between them, a mud wall, and four gates: grain sold at the eastern, sheep and goats at the western, oxen and carts at the southern, horses at the northern. And there were twelve temples of different nations, two mosques, and one Christian church at the far end of the city.

Twelve temples, two mosques and one church, in a capital you could walk across in an afternoon. The khan's own family included Nestorian Christians; his mother had been one. In 1254 Möngke ordered a formal debate at court between Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, with Rubruck arguing for the Christian side, and afterwards told him that God had given men different fingers on one hand and different ways in the same manner.

Rubruck went home having converted nobody and having been given no alliance. What he brought back instead was the only detailed account by a European of what the Mongol empire looked like from inside it while it was still one thing.

The war between the brothers

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)contraction

The Mongol empire stopped being one empire in 1260, in a war between two of Tolui's sons over a succession, and the fighting settled nothing except that the thing could not be put back together.

Why a death abroad was fatal

Möngke died in 1259 on campaign in Sichuan. Under Mongol practice the succession belonged to a quriltai: an assembly of the whole imperial family, held in Mongolia, which the princes were obliged to attend.

That requirement had already dictated Eurasian history once. In 1241, when Ögödei died, Batu's armies were in Hungary and had just destroyed the Hungarian and Polish field forces; the campaign was broken off and the princes rode east for the assembly, and central Europe was not attacked again. Whether the succession was the real reason is argued, but it is what the sources say.

In 1259 the same rule produced the opposite result: nobody went.

Two assemblies

Kublai was in China with the armies. He held his own assembly at Kaiping, among his own commanders, and was proclaimed. Ariq Böke was at Karakorum, holding the capital and the homeland, and held the proper kind of assembly with the proper people, and was proclaimed too.

Four years of civil war followed, and the decisive factor was food. Karakorum had never been able to feed itself and depended on grain convoys from north China. Kublai held north China and cut them. Ariq Böke surrendered in 1264 and was dead within two years.

That is the whole argument of the empire settled by a supply line. The brother with the farmland beat the brother with the steppe, and the imperial centre moved permanently out of Mongolia.

The other war, at the same time

While that was happening, two more Chinggisid princes were fighting each other in the Caucasus.

Berke of the Golden Horde had converted to Islam. His cousin Hülegü had sacked Baghdad in 1258 and killed the caliph. Berke is reported to have said that Hülegü had destroyed all the cities of the Muslims and taken the life of the caliph without consulting his kinsmen, and that if God willed he would call him to account for so much innocent blood.

In 1262 they went to war. The Golden Horde allied with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt — the state that had beaten Hülegü's army at Ain Jalut two years before — and the two Mongol houses fought each other along the Terek for decades.

So within four years of Möngke's death: two khans claiming the succession, two more khans at war with each other, and one of them in formal alliance with the empire's most successful enemy.

What was left

Not a partition anybody agreed to. Four states with a common ancestry, of which the Yuan in China was the largest and richest, the Ilkhanate in Iran recognised its seniority, and the Golden Horde and the Chagatai ulus effectively did not.

The Great Khan's title survived and stopped meaning anything outside the territory he actually held. Coins were still struck in his name in places he had no power over, and envoys still went back and forth. But after 1260 no assembly of the whole family was ever held again, and the one institution that had made the empire a single object — the obligation of every prince to ride to Mongolia and vote — was gone.

An empire that had conquered from the Danube to the Yellow Sea was undone by the one procedure it had never bothered to write down.

An empire that divided itself

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (1968)end

The empire was never a single inheritance in Mongol practice. It was patrimony, divided among a family, and the parts were assigned in Chinggis's lifetime: Jochi's line the western steppe, Chagatai's line Transoxiana, Tolui's line the homeland, Ogedei's line the succession.

It held together as long as the great khanate was worth having. Mongke's death in 1259 produced a war between two of his brothers, Kublai and Ariq Boke, and the winner moved the centre of gravity to China and founded a Chinese dynasty. After 1260 the western khanates ran their own foreign policies, adopted different religions, and fought each other — the Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde over the Caucasus, the Ilkhanate and the Chagatais over Khurasan.

Why it fell apart on that particular fault line

Not because the brothers quarrelled — royal brothers quarrel everywhere. Because of what a Mongol inheritance was.

A settled empire has a throne and a rule for filling it. The Mongols had a patrimony, an ulus, which meant a body of people rather than a territory, and it was distributed among sons in the founder's lifetime the way a herd is distributed. Every one of Chinggis's sons received real subjects, real commanders and real pasture, held in his own right and not at the great khan's pleasure. The great khan was senior, and the seniority was worth having while the conquests continued and the loot was shared from the centre.

The succession compounded it. A khan was supposed to be raised by a quriltai, an assembly of the family and the commanders, which meant that every succession was an election among people who each had armies and none of whom could be compelled to attend. Güyük's election took years to arrange. Möngke's was disputed. After 1260 nobody even tried: Kublai and Ariq Böke each held their own assembly, each declared the other's invalid, and the machinery for deciding between them did not exist because it had never been anything but a negotiation.

The shape afterwards

Four states, all of them Chinggisid, all of them at war with at least one of the others within a generation.

The Ilkhans in Iran and the Golden Horde fought over the Caucasus for sixty years, and the Horde allied with the Mamluks of Egypt — the one power that had beaten a Mongol army — against their own cousins. The Chagatais and the Ilkhans fought over Khurasan. Kublai's line, ruling China as the Yuan, was acknowledged as senior by the Ilkhans and ignored by everybody else.

They also diverged in religion, and fast. The Ilkhans went from Buddhist to Muslim in a generation; the Horde and the Chagatais became Muslim; the Yuan patronised Tibetan Buddhism. By 1320 the four branches of one family were praying in three directions.

What did not divide

The claim. Every one of the successor states, and every state in this region for the next four hundred years, went on deriving the right to rule from descent from one man — in the coinage, in the Friday sermon, in the titles, and in the rule that only a descendant of Chinggis could be called khan.

That rule outlived the empire by centuries and did more work than the empire ever did. It is why the Manghit ataliqs of Bukhara called themselves amir instead, why Timur ruled through a puppet, why Edigü made khans he could not be, and why a Qungrat inaq at Khiva in 1804 had to send to the Kazakh steppe for a figurehead before he could bring himself to take the title.

Nobody defeated this empire. Its parts stopped taking instructions, and then spent four hundred years insisting they were still its heirs.

The descent

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)afterlife

Chinggis Khan's most durable creation was not a state. It was a qualification.

For roughly four centuries after his death, across an enormous stretch of Eurasia, the answer to the question of who was entitled to rule was: a man descended from him in the male line. Not the strongest man, not the best Muslim, not the man the notables preferred — a Chinggisid.

What the rule did to people who were not one

Timur is the clearest case, because he was the most powerful man in the world for thirty years and could not have the title.

He was not a Chinggisid. So he ruled as amir, married a Chinggisid princess to become güregen — son-in-law — and kept a puppet khan of Chinggis's line at his court, in whose name documents were issued, for most of his reign. A man who conquered from Delhi to Anatolia, sacked Baghdad and Damascus, and captured an Ottoman sultan alive spent his whole career deferring to a figurehead because the alternative was a claim nobody would accept.

His descendants did the same. So did the Uzbek and Kazakh khans, who were Chinggisids and said so constantly. So, in a different way, did the Ottomans, who had no Chinggisid descent and built their legitimacy out of ghaza and later the caliphate instead — and who were still, in the fifteenth century, careful about how they addressed Chinggisid rulers.

Where it lasted longest

The Crimean khanate, founded in the 1440s by a descendant of Jochi, survived as a Chinggisid state until Russia annexed it in 1783.

That is five hundred and seventy-seven years after the assembly of 1206, and the Girays were still ruling on the same claim their ancestor had made. For most of that period they were also the last state to which Muscovy paid anything resembling tribute — payments to the Crimea continued into the eighteenth century, long after Russia had become the larger power, because the arrangement was old and the alternative was raids.

The Mughals in India are the other long survival, and they are a hybrid: Babur descended from Timur on his father's side and from Chinggis on his mother's, and used both. The dynasty called itself Timurid; everyone else called it Mughal, which is simply the Persian word for Mongol.

What it was actually worth

It is easy to treat this as a curiosity — a prestige name outliving its usefulness. It was not. A rule about who may rule is the scarcest thing a political order has, and this one solved, for a very large part of Eurasia, the problem that had produced permanent civil war on the steppe before 1206.

It also had a cost, and the Mongol empire itself paid it first. A qualification by descent does not narrow the field. Chinggis had four sons by his principal wife and a great many descendants, all equally qualified, and no rule at all for choosing among them — which is why the succession had to be settled by an assembly, why the assembly stopped being held after 1260, and why every khanate in this family spent its existence in dynastic war.

The most successful principle of legitimacy in medieval Eurasia contained no procedure for applying itself, and its author, who thought about everything else, does not appear to have noticed.

What moved on the roads

Drafted from Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903)afterlife

For about a century it was possible to go from the Black Sea to Beijing under one set of passes, and the things that made that journey are the empire's most durable consequence — including the one that killed a third of Europe.

The people

The evidence is in the eyewitnesses themselves, and it is worth laying out as evidence rather than as a generalisation.

A Franciscan from Italy is at a Mongol enthronement in Mongolia in 1246 and gets his intelligence from Russian and Hungarian captives who have learned the language. A Flemish friar reaches Karakorum in 1254 and finds there a Parisian goldsmith called Guillaume Boucher, taken at Belgrade, building a silver drinking fountain for the khan; an Englishman; a Frenchwoman from Lorraine married to a Russian; a Nestorian from Damascus; Armenians; Chinese craftsmen. A Venetian family spends seventeen years in the service of Kublai. A Moroccan judge travels from Tangier to the Volga and on to Delhi and China, and is employed by rulers in three of them.

None of those journeys had been possible in the twelfth century and none was possible again until the nineteenth.

The techniques

What moved with them is harder to date precisely and more consequential than any of it.

Persian astronomers worked at the observatory in Beijing and Chinese astronomers at Maragha in Azerbaijan, where the Ilkhans built the best-equipped observatory in the world and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi produced tables that were still being copied in Europe three centuries later. Chinese medical texts were translated into Persian. Rashid al-Din, the Ilkhanid vizier, wrote a history that tried to cover the Franks, the Chinese, the Indians and the Turks in one book, because for the first time there was a court where informants on all of them were sitting in the same room.

Gunpowder, printing and the blast furnace all existed in China before the Mongols and all appear in the west after them. The routes by which they travelled are argued about and the coincidence is not.

The plague

And in the 1340s something else came along the same roads.

The Black Death appears in the Crimea in 1346, at the siege of the Genoese trading post of Caffa by a Mongol army of the Golden Horde, and reaches Constantinople, Genoa and Marseille in 1347 in the ships that left it. Behind it lies a reservoir of infection in the rodent populations of Inner Asia, and in front of it lies a third of Europe.

The mechanism that carried it is exactly the mechanism that carried the friars, the merchants and the astronomers: a continuous, policed, well-supplied road network across the whole of Eurasia, with ships at the western end. A world that can be crossed in a year by a man with a pass can be crossed in a year by a disease.

The pandemic then helped destroy every state that had built the roads. The Yuan lost China within twenty-five years of it. The Golden Horde entered the twenty years of troubles from which it never fully recovered. The Ilkhanate was already gone.

What was left

Three things outlasted all four khanates.

A rule about who may rule, which governed the politics of half of Asia into the nineteenth century. A set of trade routes and city networks that were not the same after the connection broke and never went back to what they had been before it.

And a demonstration, which every empire since has been measured against, that the distance between Korea and Hungary is not a natural limit — that it can be crossed, administered, taxed and reported on from one place, by people with no cities of their own, in a single lifetime.