Storm from the east, p.1
Storm from the East, page 1
Storm from the East
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHRONOLOGY
CHAPTER 1: BIRTH OF A NATION
CHAPTER 2: From China to the Caspian Sea
CHAPTER 3: THE PROMISE FULFILLED
CHAPTER 4: THE INVASION OF EUROPE
CHAPTER 5: FROM PRESTER JOHN TO ARMAGEDDON
CHAPTER 6: MISSIONS TO TARTARY
CHAPTER 7: MONGOL CRUSADERS
CHAPTER 8: KHUBILAI KHAN AND CHINA
CHAPTER 9: DECLINE AND FALL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
About the Author
Also by Robert Marshall
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
To the memory of Bruce Norman
Acknowledgements
This book is largely a product of the work done by a great many people who came together to work on the television series Storm from the East, the inspiration for which came from my colleagues at NHK Television in Japan. Over the course of the past two years, we have shared and learned a great deal together, and I want to give credit to their contributions. First of all, Mr Takashi Inoue whose determination ensured the project happened at all. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Hisashi Anzai, Sanji Eto and Nobuya Yamamoto. I especially want to thank my colleague and now friend, Tomohito Terai, for his dedication, enthusiasm and indomitable spirit of co-operation.
I am, of course, deeply indebted to everyone who worked on the series here in London. Their contribution has been enormous. I want to mention, in no particular order, John Slater, Vivianna Woodruff, Jo Langford, Susan Vogel, Angela Moonshine, John Adderley, Ron Brown, Paul Dawe, Mike Burton, Sheila Ableman, Martha Caute, Joanna Wiese, Paul Snelgrove, Harry Green, and, especially, Habie Schwarz for her invaluable scholarship and imagination.
Naturally, I have relied a great deal on the contribution of our academic advisers, and their enthusiasm for the series has been a great encouragement. I want to acknowledge the work of James Chambers for his insight into Mongol military matters, Dr Morris Rossabi for his work on Khubilai, and Drs Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Peter Morgan and Judy Kolbas for their advice on the Mongols in the Middle East. My deepest gratitude goes to our consultant, Dr David Morgan, author of The Mongols, for his guidance throughout and for patiently reading my manuscript.
Robert Marshall
London, 1992
CHRONOLOGY
?1167 Birth of Genghis Khan
1200 Accession of ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad II, Khwarazm Shah
1206 Genghis Khan proclaimed supreme ruler of the tribes at quriltai in Mongolia
1209 Mongols invade Hsi-Hsia
1211 Mongols invade Chin empire of north China
1215 Chung-tu falls to Mongols
1218 Mongol troops occupy Qara Khitai empire
1219 Genghis Khan invades empire of the Khwarazm Shah
1221 Death of Khwarazm Shah
1221–3 Journey of Ch’ang Ch’un from China to Genghis’s camp
1223 Genghis Khan returns to Mongolia
1227 Death of Genghis Khan. Definitive conquest of Hsi-Hsia
1229 Election of Ogedei as Great Khan
1234 End of Chin resistance to Mongols
1235 Ogedei builds Qaraqorum, Mongol capital
1237–42 Batu’s campaigns in Russia and eastern Europe
1240 Kiev falls to Mongols
1241 Battles of Liegnitz and River Sajo. Death of Ogedei
1245–7 Journey of John of Plano Carpini to Mongolia
1246 Election of Guyuk as Great Khan
1248 Death of Guyuk
1250 Mamluks seize power in Egypt
1251 Election of Mongke as Great Khan
1252 Conquest of Sung empire begins
1253–5 Journey of William of Rubruck to Mongolia
1253 Hulegu’s forces set off for Persia
1255 Death of Batu, first Khan of Golden Horde
1256 Hulegu takes Assassin castles in north Persia
1257 Accession of Berke, Khan of Golden Horde
1258 Fall of Baghdad to Hulegu. Death of last Abbasid Caliph
1259 Death of Mongke
1260 Hulegu invades Syria, then withdraws. Battle of Ayn Jalut. Rival quriltais elect Khubilai and Ariq Boke as Great Khan: civil war ensues
1261–2 Civil war between Hulegu and Berke
1264 Khubilai victorious over Ariq Boke
1265 Death of Hulegu, first Ilkhan. Accession of Abaqa
1266 Building begins at new Mongol capital of China, Ta-tu (Beijing)
1267 Death of Berke, Khan of Golden Horde
1272 Khubilai adopts Chinese dynastic title, Yuan
1274 First Mongol expedition against Japan
1276 Hang-chou, capital of Sung empire, falls to Mongols
1279 Sung empire defeated
1281 Second Mongol expedition against Japan
1287 Rabban Sauma sent to Europe by Ilkhan Arghun
1294 Death of Khubilai
1295 Accession of Ghazan as Ilkhan. Mongols in Persia become Muslim
1304 Death of Ilkhan Ghazan. Accession of Oljeitu
1313 Accession of Ozbeg, under whose rule Golden Horde becomes Muslim
1335 Death of Abu Sa’id, last Ilkhan of line of Hulegu
1346 Outbreak of Black Death in Mongol force besieging Kaffa, in the Crimea: from there it spreads to Europe
1353–4 Major outbreak of the disease in China
1368 Mongols driven from China by Ming forces
1370 Death in Qaraqorum of Toghon Temur, last Yuan emperor
CHAPTER 1: BIRTH OF A NATION
In the centre of the main square in Cracow stands St Mary’s church, considered one of the most important churches in Poland. Every hour on the hour, a trumpeter from the Cracow fire department presents himself at the balcony of the main tower and blows an alarm. This ceremony has taken place each day, almost continuously since the middle of the thirteenth century. It commemorates the destruction of the city, for the trumpeter is blowing a call to arms, a signal that the enemy has been sighted and is at the gates. As the trumpeter sounds his haunting melody he comes to an abrupt halt midway through the call – at precisely the moment, so legend has it, when the Mongol arrow struck.
When the alarm was being sounded on that first occasion, more than 700 years ago, the population of Cracow were already abandoning the city, making for the forests beyond the city walls. Some days before, the Polish ruler Duke Boleslaw the Chaste had sent his army out to meet the invaders; but they were ambushed and the small Polish force was decimated under a hail of arrows. When the news reached Cracow, Boleslaw and his family gathered up all the wealth they could carry. With the remaining contingent of soldiers, they fled for Hungary, leaving the citizens to fend for themselves. When the main body of the invading army reached the city, they found the streets strangely quiet, and on 24 March 1241, Palm Sunday, Cracow was put to the torch.
THE FURY OF THE TARTARS
To the rest of Europe, the news of the sacking of Cracow seemed a terrible omen; an unearthly storm was sweeping away everything in its path. From Cracow the invader moved west to confront an allied European army of local mercenaries, Teutonic Knights, Knights Templars and Hospitallers – the very flower of Europe’s chivalry. For the Europeans the battle was a complete disaster and within a few days a second great Christian army was destroyed. Bewildered medieval chroniclers could make no sense of it; confused by the lightning tactics of the invader, they consistently estimated his strength at four or five times their actual numbers. However, for the European commanders the experience had been a devastating lesson in warfare. At every major battle the invaders had been outnumbered and yet their generals constantly outmanoeuvred, out-thought and out-fought the Europeans. Their armies had operated like disciplined machines, co-ordinating a complex series of tactical moves with extraordinary precision. In the grand scheme of things, the Mongol armies had conducted a brilliantly complex campaign, carefully planned and executed from first to last – from Poland to the Hungarian prairies.
News of these disasters swept through the rest of Europe, bringing predictions of utter destruction and damnation. Rumours spread of diabolical atrocities committed by inhuman monsters, of creatures with the head of a horse that devoured their victims, possessed supernatural powers and had been unleashed to bring retribution upon an ungodly world. In Germany this superstitious hysteria generated stories that the Mongols were actually one of the lost tribes of Israel and that Jewish merchants were smuggling arms to them across the borders. As a result many innocent Jews were summarily and pointlessly executed at frontier posts. The Hungarians described the invaders as ‘dog-faced Tartars’, while a French monk living in Austria wrote that, after the Mongol soldiers had raped European women, they tore off their victims’ breasts and delivered these ‘delicacies’ to their ‘dog-headed’ princes, who devoured them.
The Church was not above regurgitating ancient myths and legends in a vain attempt to explain the disaster. A Dominican monk, Ricoldo of Monte Croce, explained that the name Mongol was derived from Mogogoli, the sons of the legendary Magog. Gog and Magog, so the legend goes, had been a pair of marauding giants who had terrorised Europe in ancient times. They had been defeated by Alexander the Great and locked away behind massive gates in the Caucasus Mountains. Now their descendants were loose and bent upon the destruction of civilisation. Only by invoking the name of Alexander could these monsters be subdued. In packed churches across northern Europe sermons were being conducted before a terrified population, while prayers were offered up pleading: ‘… from the fury of the Tartars, oh Lord deliver us’. The only sizeable army that might stand in the path of the invader was that of the French King, who was prepared for the onslaught but expected martyrdom. To the Pope it seemed that all of Christendom would be destroyed: ‘When we consider that through these Tartars the name of Christian might utterly perish, our bones shudder at the thought.’
Europe had been struck and left reeling by an alien force that might just as well have come from Mars. The Mongols, or Tartars as they called them, were a race that had emerged from a land which, to Europeans, was on no known map. Narrow and inward-looking Europe had no knowledge or experience of the territories beyond the Urals. Indeed, European ignorance of who the Mongols were or what they had accomplished persisted for centuries. This was not just because of the limits of European knowledge, but also because the sheer breadth and scope of the Mongol conquests beggared the imagination. Never had so much territory been conquered so quickly. The sudden and overwhelming devastation that shook Europe to its core had already been visited upon the entire expanse of Asia. From the Korean peninsula to the River Danube, nearly a third of the world’s land surface lay under the command of one single family – and all this had been achieved in less than fifty years.
Yet still they continued to expand. No more than thirty years after their armies had stood on the frontiers of Germany, the Mongols had completed the conquest of all of China and were launching invasions upon Japan and Java. By any standards it was a breath-taking achievement.
The storm that swept across the world during the thirteenth century changed the political boundaries of Asia and Europe, uprooted entire peoples and dispersed them across the continent. It transformed the ethnic character of many regions, while at the same time permanently changing the strength and influence of the three major religions: Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. Most important, the Mongols opened up the East to the West, expanded our knowledge of the world and in so doing created for the first time one whole world.
MOUNTED HERDSMEN
All of this is remarkable enough, yet when one considers the Mongols’ humble beginnings it is almost beyond comprehension. At the end of the twelfth century, the Mongols were one of a number of small nomadic tribes that inhabited an isolated plateau in the heart of Central Asia. To the west lay two massive and converging chains of mountains, the Altai and the Tien Shan; to the north were the vast frozen Siberian forests; while the Gobi desert lay to the south and the Khinghan Mountains to the east. Though technically the Mongolian Plateau lies within that vast expanse known as the steppe, which extends across the breadth of Asia from Manchuria to Hungary, in reality it is locked behind natural barriers that kept the inhabitants safe from invasion for centuries.
The plateau lies some 1200m (4000 feet) above sea level and is subject to dramatic extremes of climate. In the summer the temperature often rises above 40°C (104°F) and in winter drops well below –40°C (–40°F). The soil itself varies from a loose gravel to a thin clay and is frozen hard during the winter. By November all the streams, rivers and lakes are also completely frozen and water has to be got by laboriously cutting and dragging large blocks of ice to the nearest fire. Nothing stirs until April. Add to the extreme climate a low rainfall, and it is clear that the steppe makes poor agricultural land. However, during the summer it is carpeted by a luxuriant blanket of grass that gives the countryside the appearance of a gently undulating billiard table. Even during the winter months, the more sheltered valleys retain a hardy turf that provides reliable pasture for the herds of sheep, goats, cattle and horses that nomads have kept here for centuries.
The life of the Mongols is therefore a constant cycle of seasonal migrations from the flat open summer pastures to protected river valleys for the winter. These migrations are not arbitrary. Each tribe or clan would return to their traditional pastures year after year, and would only alter this pattern if the growing size of their flocks obliged them to search for more land, or if they were forced off their traditional territory by other nomads. Maintaining control of traditional pasture or seeking out better pastures was a common source of conflict between the Mongol tribes. The need for good grazing land for their herds was a primary preoccupation, for their survival depended on it. Today, the life of the average Mongol herdsman has changed little in 800 years. Sheep still provide the main staples of life: meat, milk, cheese, leather and wool for clothing and the manufacture of felt from which they still build their tents. Cattle are also kept for meat, but are more commonly used as beasts of burden. During the autumn months each Mongol family slaughters a number of their sheep, prepares the mutton and then freezes it, usually by simply burying it in the ground before the snows arrive. Mutton is the major source of protein, and through the long winters it sustains the population on meals that are usually produced by melting a block of ice in a cauldron and then boiling frozen slabs of the stuff until it forms a thick stew. Another useful food during the long winters is ayrag, a mildly alcoholic and somewhat bitter fermentation made from mare’s milk.
Today, extended nomadic families live on large collectives of land controlled by the state. Any number of families may share these tracts of land, herding their sheep or horses, which are bred both for riding and for their milk. Eight hundred years ago, the Mongols lived not on collectives but in loosely defined tribes or clans. They tended not to live together in a single large encampment; instead, the tribe would be scattered among any number of smaller encampments that might be spread across two or three different valleys. These encampments had to be mobile enough to be struck and loaded on to wagons for the annual migration. An essential aid to this mobility was the ger or yurt, the Mongol tent, which is still made by stretching a piece of thick woollen felt across a squat cylindrical framework of thin wooden struts. The floor is usually covered by simple planking while beds, cupboards and chests containing the family heirlooms are arranged in a circle against the wall. Beside the centre pole stands a stove, which is vented through a hole in the roof. Although the average ger can be dismantled and re-erected in under an hour, it was not uncommon for clans simply to lift the entire structure on to the back of an ox-cart. It must have been an extraordinary sight, the migration of vast herds of sheep and horses and, in their midst, three or four mobile gers sailing across the steppe.
The key to the nomads’ dominion over the steppe was the horse. Since its domestication in southern Russia during the second millennium bc, the horse’s remarkable speed and stamina has been exploited by steppe nomads. It became an essential element of daily life, the primary means of transport, an aid for tending the herds and of course an invaluable asset for the hunt. All steppe nomads were exceptional hunters. Their principal weapon was the compound bow, made from alternate sections of horn and bamboo, bonded together by silk and resin. They developed stirrups (perhaps borrowed from the Chinese), which enabled them to ride without using reins. As a result, they could fire arrows or use the lasso while at full gallop. It was these skills that were to contribute to the emergence of a great military power from the heart of the Asian grasslands.
From about 800 bc onwards, the settled societies to the south began encountering nomadic horsemen who appeared periodically, sometimes attacked and pillaged the towns and villages, and then disappeared again. But what set these people apart from their predecessors was their exclusive use of cavalry: a swift and lethal force of men on horseback, able to direct a withering barrage of arrows at their enemies from a distance. They became the scourge of most settled societies. Indeed, historians have recorded that wave upon wave of nomadic horsemen have charged out of Asia through the low passes of the Tien Shan and Altai Mountains into Europe or down into the Middle East, from the days of the Scythians in the fifth and sixth centuries BC right up to the Mongols.
The relationship between the steppe nomads and settled societies was never an easy one. Living in their pastoral wilderness for century upon century, trapped within a perennial struggle against climate and the fluctuations of tribal power, the nomads developed no technologies, produced no manufactures nor even learned simple mining. The demands of seasonal migrations made this impossible. So the nomadic societies soon developed a traditional dependency upon the settled societies that had developed in the Middle East and China. Wrought metals and products such as swords, armour, silks, gold and silver were bought, traded or stolen. In terms of the exchange of materials it was a very one-sided relationship, for the nomads had little to offer in return but woollen goods and animal skins.
