I knew this was going to be a detailed book when over fifty pages in McLynn hadn’t even mentioned one individual person or even a tribe. Instead, he spent time detailing the peculiarities of nature in the steppe region. The Gobi desert, the mountains, the lakes and rivers that made the terrain formidable. For a nomadic peoples the areas where horses, camels, goats, sheep, yak, bison, and cattle could survive during the harsh winters were of utmost importance. Finally, he began to describe the clans of the steppe from the Mongols where Temujin would emerge to the many other ethnicities, from the Chinese Jin, the Uighers, the Tartars, the Ongud, the Kereit, the Naiman, the Merkit, the Cuman, and other minor tribes who encompassed the steppe region.
It was no sure thing that Temujin would become Genghis Khan. He was born into a poor sub-tribe and numerous times escaped execution, starvation, and battle wounds by the closest of hairs. However, time and time again he escaped formidable odds to survive. He was a great warrior, but also a great strategist, and also a deviously cunning foe. He also knew how to delegate and choose his subordinates. He played off opponents against each other, retreated when he didn’t have the numbers, pushed the advantage when he sensed weakness, married off friends into alliances, allied with enemies to defeat common foes, forgave his bitterest rivals when the time was right, and brutally executed enemies when he had the upper hand. Perhaps, his most creative innovation was the breaking down aristocratic lines to form a society based on groupings of the decimal system that gave leadership roles based on meritocratic worth, regardless of ethnicity or age. He united what was once the many disparate peoples of the steppe into one united Mongol “race”. From there he systemically turned his war machine outside the steppe, first towards the Jin in China and then against the Islamic Khwarezmian Empire, who ruled from the Caspian sea to modern Afghanistan and (nominally) Iraq, and finally back to western China to destroy the Hsi Hsia Empire. Perhaps Genghis Khan’s greatest legacy was that his realm was the only “great man’s empire” to actually expand after his death. His third son, Ogedei, was named the next Khaghan, but his other son’s were given divided shares of the empire to rule under him as governors.
The Mongols were vicious warriors who often killed every last man, woman, and child in the towns they conquered. Mass rape, torture, and the slitting of fetuses from pregnant women were not uncommon. However, they also invented and improved on forms of warfare. For one, they often took the best artisans and military engineers from those they conquered and coopted them into their army. Therefore, they added Chinese siege weapons as well as river fording floats to their repertoire. The feigned retreat, the dispersal and lightening fast reuniting of the flanks of their formations, the use of prisoners as the vanguard of siege batteries (and human fodder), and the use of subterfuge in negotiations with towns considering surrender were all Mongol specialities. And throughout the centuries, even as they became more sedentary and accustomed to the finer delicacies of food and drink, their armies could still withstand tremendous hardships, forced marches, and bitter weather to make sure that they were always attacking the enemy at the time and on the ground of their choosing, creating strategic advantage despite most often their large numerical inferiority.
The culture of warfare was so engrained in the Mongols that it was able to survive the death of Genghis. Ogedei’s first campaigns were to destroy what was left of the Jin Empire in northern China and to repacify Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps the Mongol Empire’s most impressive feat was the establishment of their postal/courier service, the yam, established by Genghis, expanded by Ogedai, and reaching its apogee under Qubilai. At its peak the yam had over 10,000 staging posts for over 200,000 horses. A rider could be expected to ride over 250 miles a day and at night was accompanied by runners with torches between staging posts to supplement the moonlight. The yam was a unifying force that was also integral for tax collection. By 1230’s Ogedei had to deal with the fracturing of his own empire as his brothers and their sons vied for more power and riches. His solution was ever more war- this time with the principalities of the Rus. By 1241, the Mongols had conquered the entire western steppe, all of Russia including the great southern city of Kiev, the great northern city of Novgorod, and what was then the small village of Moscow, and were firmly entrenched in eastern Poland and Hungary. However, after reaching the border of Western Europe within a couple of years the Mongols would withdraw back to the steppes. Internecine fighting finally broke into the open with the Golden Horde faction taking control of Russia and the western steppe for the next two hundred years, while the official Khaghan in Mongolia would focus on defeating the Song in southern China, eventually ruled by Qubilai in what would become the Yuan Dynasty by 1279. The Chagatai Khanate would carve out central Asia- most of the modern Stans and parts of modern Mongolia, China, India, and Russia, while the Ilkhanate founded in 1256 would encompass eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia, and some of the other modern Stans. Genghis’ empire had finally split into four, but not before reaching a land mass covering twelve million contiguous square miles, bigger than North America or Africa.
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