Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine

Chris Peers

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783400560
• eBook ISBN: 9781473853829
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The military might, tactics, and philosophy of Khan is explored in this "fine read" and "useful source for Mongolian... and medieval studies in general" (De Re Militari). As a soldier, general, statesman, and empire-builder, Genghis Khan is a near-mythical figure. His remarkable achievements and his ruthless methods have given rise to a monstrous reputation. But who was the man behind the legend? As historian Chris Peers shows in this concise and authoritative study, Genghis Khan possessed exceptional gifts as a leader and manager of men—ranking among the greatest military commanders in history. But he can only be properly understood in terms of the Mongol society and traditions he was born into. Here, the leader's world is explored—from the military and cultural background of the Mongols, to the nature of steppe societies and their armies, and their relation to other peoples and cultures. The book also looks in detail at the military skills, tactics, and ethos of the Mongol soldiers, and at the advantages and disadvantages they had in combat with the soldiers of other civilizations. For anyone who wants to go beyond the myth of the man who almost conquered the world and learn the real life story behind it, this comprehensive study offers a fascinating perspective on Genghis Khan as a man and a general, and on the armies he led.

Chapter 1

Genghis’ World

The Country and the People

Mongolia consists mainly of a high plateau at the eastern end of the belt of open grassland, or steppe, which stretches across most of Asia between the latitudes of forty and fifty degrees north. Further north lies the Siberian forest, and to the south, where not bounded by mountain ranges, the steppe merges imperceptibly into scrub and stony desert. The whole region is very distant from the sea, and so is subject to seasonal extremes of climate which, together with shortage of rainfall, make it generally unsuitable for agriculture. Therefore in pre-modern times its principal inhabitants were nomadic herdsmen who lived off their herds of sheep, cattle, camels and horses. Both the land and the people have traditionally been seen as remote and backward, but this stereotype is misleading. For one thing, through the southern part of the steppe zone ran the greatest east-west trade route of the ancient and medieval worlds, known from its most prestigious commodity as the Silk Road, which connected China, via a series of local middlemen, with the Mediterranean. The route not only allowed ideas and inventions to flow between the steppe and the agricultural civilisations to the south, but supported a string of wealthy cities along its course, from Hami on the borders of China west to Bokhara on the Oxus River, and beyond to Baghdad. The steppe itself had also been the source of world-changing technological developments, many of them based around the most characteristic of its wild fauna, the horse. Horses had probably first been ridden near the southern end of the Ural Mountains around 4000 BC, and 2,000 years later, in the same region, they were being yoked to the earliest war chariots. The spread of this military technology has been linked to the dispersal of Indo-European languages across an area from Europe to India, suggesting that the steppe warriors had dominated their sedentary cousins from a very early date. By historical times the theme of nomadic horsemen descending from the high grasslands to pillage and conquer had become a familiar one, from the Skythians who wrecked the Assyrian capital at Nineveh in 612 BC to the Huns of Attila, who in the fifth century AD nearly did the same to Constantinople. Most important of all were the Turks, who during the six centuries after AD 600 moved south and west in a series of waves, eventually coming to dominate most of the Middle East, while at the same time their relatives did the same in northern China.

But although Mongolia had been the original homeland of many of the Turkish tribes, it remained something of a backwater. Here the steppe zone reached its greatest altitude above sea level, and its greatest distance from the sea. Thus the country was dry, cold and bleak even by Central Asian standards, and migration within the steppe zone had always tended to be from the east towards the milder and wetter west. By the twelfth century AD the people still living on the high plateau were incredibly hardy, but also relatively poor. They were divided among several tribal confederations, of which the Mongols themselves were among the least important. In the west, in the foothills of the Altai Mountains, lived the Naimans, who are generally regarded as of Turkish origin, although the distinction between Turk and Mongol was mainly linguistic rather than cultural, and is not always detectable in our sources. The Naimans were mostly Buddhists or Nestorian Christians, having been converted by the Uighurs, sedentary Turks whose territory in the Tarim Basin of what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang bordered theirs to the south. Possibly it was distant rumours of Christians in this remote region that had given rise to the European legend of Prester John, a mythical Christian potentate who at various times during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was supposed to be heading west to help his coreligionists in their wars with the Muslims.

The Naimans were former allies of another Turkish people, the Kirghiz, who had briefly dominated the whole of Mongolia in the ninth century, but had since been driven by their numerous enemies into the forests along the River Yenisei further north. East of the Naimans were another powerful group, the Keraits, also mainly Nestorian, who occupied the central Mongolian steppe between the Orkhon and Onon rivers. The northern neighbours of the Keraits were the Merkits, who lived on the lower Selengge River south of Lake Baikal. The Merkit country was mostly forested and the people were as much hunters as stock breeders, although the distinction between the two groups was very fluid. In daily life the Merkits rode reindeer rather than horses, but it is obvious from the sources that they maintained significant cavalry armies, which suggests that their economy must somehow have supported large numbers of livestock as well as people. The Oirats living further north and west, east of the upper Yenisei valley, had a similar lifestyle but were fewer in numbers.

In eastern Mongolia, between the Kerulen River and the Khingan Mountains which marked the border with Manchuria, the dominant people were the Tatars. They are characterised in the Secret History as the deadly enemies of the Mongols, but in fact it seems that the two clans later known as ‘Mongqol’ or Mongol – the Borjigin and the Tayichi’ut – had originally been branches of the Tatar people. The Tayichi’ut inhabited the edge of the forest zone in the north of the Tatar territory and had a reputation as great hunters, while the Borjigin further south were classic stockbreeding nomads. Other tribes in the region included the Jalair, said to have originated as a band of Turkish refugees, who lived between the Merkits and the Keraits; the Onggirats in the far southeast; and the Ongguts, who at some unknown date had migrated south of the Gobi Desert as far as the borders of China, but still maintained contacts with their relatives further north. Despite their apparent isolation, however, most of these tribes had been involved to some degree in the power politics of East Asia, and by the thirteenth century the road south to China was already a well-trodden one.

The Road to Empire

One of the most dramatic features of the millennium or so after AD 300 was the long series of incursions by armies from Central Asia into the settled empires on the coastal fringes of the continent. According to the traditional view, the Huns, Magyars, Turks and Mongols were all part of the same process, the driving force behind which was the imbalance in wealth between the prosperous civilisations of the littoral zones of Asia and Europe and the barren steppes of the interior. The pastoral economies of the grasslands were rich in livestock and certain natural resources, but were not self-sufficient in grain and other agricultural produce, in textiles, or in goods which required specialist craftsmen to produce. The theory is that the nomads needed to acquire these from their settled neighbours, either by trade, or by war and the imposition of tribute. Thus the Mongol conquests have sometimes been seen as the culmination of ‘a primitive attempt to abolish inequality: as the most stupendous and continuous programme of forced aid ever carried out’. But recent research has modified this view in several important respects. Firstly, archaeological work in previously neglected regions of Central Asia has established that steppe societies were far more self-sufficient than had been appreciated. Metalworking was widespread, exploiting extensive local reserves of iron and copper; crops could be grown in irrigated areas and along rivers fed by meltwater from the mountains; and even where most of his food came from animals, the average nomad was better nourished than his contemporaries in farming countries. Equally important was the role of long-distance trade. This not only supported the city states of the Silk Road which connected China and the Mediterranean, but diffused precious metals and other goods among the nomads, as tolls or tribute, or by stimulating demand for horses, hides and other local products. The tribute exacted from China by nomad invaders often included items like silk and gold, but these were easily-transported prestige goods which may have been more of symbolic value to the victors than essential to their societies. It has been noted that the loot which they took by force was more often people and livestock, which represented moveable wealth in their economy, than the grain which they were supposed to need for survival. One analysis has gone so far as to turn the whole argument on its head, maintaining that the Central Asians were more often than not the victims of aggression by the surrounding empires – especially China – and that our idea of the former as ‘barbarians’ stems solely from an uncritical reliance on biased Chinese records.

So we need not suppose that the Mongols were driven to expand outwards by vague world-historical forces, nor that poverty and envy of their settled neighbours were inevitable results of their lifestyle. It may nevertheless be true that a particular trigger for their conquests was a period of drought which is known to have affected the eastern steppes during the late twelfth century. However, the most recent tree ring data from Mongolia provides a more detailed and more complex picture. The growth rings on trees vary in thickness from one year to another, being wider in seasons with plenty of rain, so if samples can be found going back far enough they can give an indication of the weather conditions in a specific year. It appears that a period of drought did begin in the 1180s, and continued until 1211, which was an exceptionally wet year. The following two years were again dry, but then for twelve years from 1214 there was a succession of heavy rains. This is significant because the increased rainfall would have improved growing conditions not only for the trees, but for the grass on which the Mongols relied to feed their herds. In fact productivity might have increased by a factor of four or five, enabling much larger numbers of horses, cattle and sheep to be maintained. It would also of course be easier to move large armies across the steppe if more forage was available for the horses. The era of drought might be tied in with the period of violence on the steppe as the tribes fought over scarce grazing grounds, culminating in their enforced unification after 1206. The increased rainfall came too late to account for Genghis’ rise to power, but it could have greatly improved both the economy and the logistic flexibility of his new empire from 1211 onwards. It is also possible that it encouraged more widespread acceptance of his regime, in accordance with the Chinese tradition that associated good weather with Heaven’s endorsement of a monarch’s right to rule.

The apparently barren steppe was also rich in other ways. The Mongols’ use of regular autumn hunts as training for war is well known, but the grassland fauna is less often appreciated as a logistic factor in their campaigns. Modern ecologists recognise what they call a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ – a reference to the fact that our expectations are now so diminished that we find it impossible to appreciate how much more productive most natural environments were before the era of mass overexploitation. But there is reason to believe that the wild game of the Central Asian steppe was once as abundant as the buffalo herds of the North American plains in the nineteenth century, and far more diverse. According to the Secret History, when Genghis despatched his general Subotei in pursuit of the sons of Toqto’a in 1216, his main concern was that the men might be distracted by the abundance of wild animals they would encounter, and tempted into exhausting their horses by chasing them. And Juvaini tells how, when Genghis summoned his son Jochi to join him after the capture of Samarkand, the latter arrived from the steppes to the north driving herds of wild asses in front of him ‘like sheep’. On this occasion the animals were not eaten, but captured when exhausted, branded and presumably drafted as baggage animals. At the same time Chagatai and Ogodei went hunting swans at Qara Kol, the ‘Black Lake’ in Uzbekistan, and sent fifty camel-loads of the birds every week to their father ‘as a sample’. With such abundance of food available, there can have been little difficulty in supplying the Mongol warriors or their families in their own environment. And as hunters, the Mongols would also have been skilled at making use of wild animal products such as bone, hides and glue to repair their armour and other equipment. The main constraint on the mobility of the nomads and their armies was undoubtedly the availability of grass and water for the horses, an issue to which we will return in Chapter 3.

If their nomadic lifestyle did not automatically make the Central Asian tribes more aggressive, or force them to attack their neighbours out of sheer desperation, it certainly contributed to their effectiveness if they did decide to go to war. Hunting encouraged familiarity with weapons – bows and arrows in particular. Herdsmen often worked without supervision and needed to be self-reliant, but at the same time to be able to cooperate with their neighbours in occasional large-scale migrations. Most nomads did not wander across the steppe at will, but followed regular traditional routes between summer and winter pastures, so that twice a year the whole community would move together with their tents, wagons and other possessions. Such a migration could involve transporting several thousand people over a distance of hundreds of miles, while at the same time ensuring their security against predators, both human and animal. This was excellent training for the logistical side of warfare, and at the same time it instilled in the people a respect for the virtues of discipline and loyalty. An army of stockbreeders was also highly mobile, because of its easy access to large numbers of horses, and could take its food supply and even its families with it on campaign with a minimum of disruption to the economy. This is why, despite the disparity in numbers between the sparsely-populated steppe and the surrounding agricultural civilisations, the people of the former managed not only to retain their independence over thousands of years, but on occasion to impose their authority on the farmers.

The Nomads and China

Of all the settled lands around the edges of the steppe the one closest to Mongolia, and most intimately involved with events there, was China. Along the northern frontier of China a series of nomad invaders from the north managed to establish themselves at various times in the settled zone, only to be gradually absorbed into the larger native population. Then the Chinese would resume the initiative and push their garrisons and agricultural colonies out into the steppes, until they eventually overreached themselves and the whole cycle began again. Under the T’ang dynasty of the seventh to ninth centuries AD Chinese power had extended far into Central Asia, but in 907 the T’ang empire collapsed and China was divided among numerous mutually hostile warlords in an era known as the ‘Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms’. At that time several tribes from the north had taken advantage of the confusion to migrate into north China. Among these were the Sha-t’o Turks, who had been brought in by the T’ang as mercenaries, the Tanguts from the Tibetan borderlands who were recognised by the T’ang as subordinate ‘kings’ in the Ordos steppe of the upper Yellow River in return for similar services, and the Khitans from what is now Manchuria, newly united under their own self-styled ‘emperor’ of the Liao dynasty. In 960 a Chinese officer named Chao K’uang-yin managed to bring most of the country under his control and established a new native dynasty, the Sung, but the Khitans retained control of sixteen districts in the northeast. They also pushed their frontier west into what was later to become known as Mongolia, holding a line of garrisons along the Orkhon River and imposing a temporary peace in that turbulent region. The Sung were also forced to recognise the Tangut state of Hsi Hsia in the northwest as an independent, if nominally subordinate, kingdom. The Sung made a lasting peace with the Khitans in 1004, but in 982 they launched the first in a long series of unsuccessful campaigns against Hsi Hsia. One reason for their hostility was that the Tanguts controlled not only the best horse-rearing lands in the empire, but also the economically valuable trading cities along the Silk Road. Another was that the interlopers refused to acknowledge the Sung emperors as their overlords as they had with the T’ang; in 1040 their ruler Chao Yuanhao even proclaimed himself emperor, thus putting himself on an equal footing with the Sung emperor as the head of a fully independent state.

The Chinese campaigns against Hsi Hsia continued until 1119, but succeeded only in weakening the Sung state. Although greatly outnumbered, the Tanguts had superior cavalry and were usually fighting on the defensive, so they were almost invariably victorious. But by this time an even greater threat had emerged at the other end of the Sung’s northern frontier. One of the Khitan’s Manchurian subject peoples, the Jurchens, had rebelled against their overlords, and in 1115 had set up their own Chinese-style dynasty, the Chin or ‘Golden’ under Wan-yen Akuta. The Sung Emperor Hui-tsung, instead of supporting the Liao as a friendly buffer state, stabbed them in the back in the hope of regaining the lost sixteen districts, but succeeded only in distracting the Khitans long enough to enable the Jurchens to overrun the entire northeastern frontier. Many of the Khitan ruling classes fled westwards into Central Asia, where they established the state of Qara-Khitai west of the Altai Mountains, while others became reluctant subjects of the Jurchens. In 1127 the Chin armies captured the Sung capital at K’aifeng and took possession of the whole of the northern half of the empire, forcing the Sung to retreat to a new capital at Hangchow in the south, now known as ‘Lin-an’ or ‘Temporary Peace’. Over the next half-century both the Chin and the Sung tried repeatedly to overthrow the other and reunite the empire, but the result was only to weaken both.

What was more, the Jurchen regime had already established itself as the natural enemy of whoever controlled Mongolia. In many ways the Chin had become a typical Chinese dynasty, but it had never turned its back on the steppes as most other successful invaders tended to do. Neither, however, did it try to maintain a direct military presence as the Khitans had done. Instead it abandoned the Orkhon garrisons and pursued a ‘forward policy’ in Mongolia, by supporting its own protégés among the contending nomad chiefs who moved into the vacuum left behind. However, the way in which this policy had been executed was remarkably inept. According to the Sung general Meng Hung, the Jurchen rulers had reversed a longstanding Chinese embargo on supplying iron to the steppe tribes, and in fact had made the situation worse by refusing to accept the old Sung iron currency as legal tender. The people had therefore sold their useless coins as scrap to merchants who had transported them to Mongolia, where they were forged into weapons and armour. This may have been a factor in the increased availability of metal in the Mongol armies, but it is unlikely to have been as significant as Meng Hung suggests. The Turks and other steppe peoples had in fact been famous as iron workers since at least the fifth century AD, and most of their supplies of metal undoubtedly came from within Central Asia itself.

More serious for the Chin was that their meddling in steppe politics had made them some formidable enemies. In the mid-twelfth century they had supported the Tatars, which made them natural opponents of the Borjigin Mongols, who had made a successful bid for independence under Kabul Khan, the great-grandfather of the future Genghis Khan. Kabul seems to have been on the way to establishing some sort of central control over all the various Mongolian tribes, but Jurchen plotting sabotaged the attempt. The Chin emperor first invited Kabul to a conference in his capital at Chung-tu (modern Beijing), then connived at a botched attempt to assassinate him on his way home. Finally, in 1161, the Chin sent troops to support a Tatar army which smashed the Borjigin confederation. Ambakai, Kabul’s nephew, was handed over to the Jurchens by the Tatars and humiliatingly put to death by being impaled on a wooden donkey with knives set into its back. But the Tatars were unable to consolidate their victory, and as soon as the Jurchen troops were withdrawn Mongolia collapsed into anarchy. The Chin emperors nevertheless continued to consider themselves the overlords of the Mongol chiefs, awarding them empty titles and demanding tribute in return.

One Borjigin who managed to maintain a small following in these turbulent times was Kabul’s grandson Yesugei. He supported a Kerait neighbour, Toghril, in his bid to become chief of that tribe, and was rewarded with the status of ‘anda’, or blood brother. But he also earned the renewed hatred of the Tatars, and one day about the year 1170...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Timeline: The Mongol Conquests and the Career of Genghis Khan
• The Family Tree of Genghis Khan
• Who’s Who in Thirteenth-Century Mongolia
• Map
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Genghis’ World
• Chapter 2 War on the Steppes
• Chapter 3 The Khan’s Armies
• Chapter 4 The First Campaigns in the East
• Chapter 5 War in the West
• Chapter 6 The Fall of North China
• Chapter 7 A Mongol Empire?
• Chapter 8 Genghis – The Verdict
• Source Notes
• Sources and Recommended Reading