Читать книгу In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads - Stanley Stewart - Страница 11

In 1238 the bottom fell out of the herring market in Yarmouth. Ships from the Baltic ports, which normally converged on the port to buy fish, never arrived and the sudden glut sent prices tumbling. Fishermen and merchants went bankrupt, and even in the Midlands you could buy fifty pickled herrings for as little as a shilling.

In the same year a strange mission appeared at the court of Louis IX of France; later they came on to London where they were received by Henry III. They declared themselves the envoys of a mysterious eastern potentate, known to Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountains. From a fortress in the Elburz Mountains of northern Persia, this reclusive figure dispatched young fanatical disciples to kill his political enemies. The disciples were known as hashashin, or hashish eaters, from which our word assassin is derived. With their cloak and dagger methods the Ismaili Assassins had wielded considerable political power throughout the Middle East for almost two centuries. But now suddenly a new threat had arisen, from a people whose leaders were too distant and too unpredictable for assassination squads. The Ismailis had come to Europe to seek alliances against the advancing threat of the Mongols.

It is a measure of the narrowness of European horizons in the early decades of the thirteenth century that they remained in almost total ignorance of the cataclysmic events then unfolding in Asia. Under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, the Mongols had embarked upon a series of conquests that were taking them across the breadth of the continent. Ancient dynasties collapsed, empires crumbled, great cities were levelled and their inhabitants butchered while Europe slumbered on, unaware that the Mongol horsemen were advancing ever westward.

In a reverse of the usual historical pattern, the history of the Mongol campaigns was written by the vanquished not by the victors. The apocalyptic language that has come down to us reflects the terror and the prejudices of the defeated. Invariably the Mongols are forces of darkness, barbarian hordes, the scourge of God, a pestilence that was destroying civilization. It is this tradition, the stories told by his enemies, that has cast Genghis Khan as one of history’s great villains.

To Mongols Genghis was a great and sophisticated leader, disciplined, incorruptible, politically astute. A lawgiver of considerable wisdom and foresight, an efficient administrator and a master of military strategy, he managed to unite the Mongol tribes for the first time in generations. It was this rare unity that allowed them to turn their eyes outward to the rich but degenerate cities that lay beyond their grassy homelands. Early conquests came with surprising ease, and in the terrible momentum that began to build, the Mongol Empire was born.

Genghis Khan could hardly be expected to respect cities or their inhabitants. He was a man of the steppes, a nomad who viewed settled societies from a position of cultural and moral superiority, with suspicion, with horror, and ultimately with pity. To nomads, men and women who lived in cities suffered a kind of debasement, while farmers who spent their lives on their knees tilling the soil were hardly of more regard than a flock of sheep. Their destruction did not bother the Mongols any more than the slaughter of the Incas bothered the Conquistadors, or the fate of Africans troubled the early slave traders. By the standards of medieval Asian warfare Genghis’ methods were not especially brutal. His terrible reputation is a measure of his success, and of the monopoly that the vanquished cities have enjoyed over the historical sources.

The tone was set with the siege and destruction of Bukhara. ‘They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed,’ a historian of the period wrote. Yakut, the famous Arab geographer, who fled from the city of Merv as the Mongols advanced, reported that its noble buildings ‘were effaced from the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper’. Pausing only to water and pasture their horses, the Mongols swept onward and one by one the great cities of Transcaspia and Oxiana, of Afghanistan and northern Persia were sacked: Samarkand, Khiva, Balkh, Merv, Herat, Kandahar, Ardebil, Qazvin, Tabriz, Qum. Typical of their fate was that of Nishapur in the Persian province of Khurasan, the home of the poet, Omar Khayyám. Not a dog or cat was spared. The only monuments left standing in the city were pyramids of human skulls.

Pushing westward the Mongols swept through the Caucasus and into the Ukraine and the Crimea. They wintered on the Black Sea, among the mound tombs of their nomadic predecessors, the Scythians, before galloping northward early in 1223 to defeat three Russian armies. Then they rode home, across the width of Asia, as casually as commuters, for a quriltai, a great gathering of Mongol chieftains. The world had had its first taste of a military campaign which for speed and mobility was not equalled until the modern mechanized age. The idea that the Mongols were merely a flood of horsemen overrunning entire lands by sheer force of numbers has been rightly debunked. They were a disciplined and highly organized force, usually outnumbered by their enemies by more than two to one, whose success depended on their extraordinary mobility as well as on sophisticated military strategies; both Patton and Rommel studied the tactics of the Mongol general Subedei. Mongols were born in the saddle, and their conquests represent the greatest cavalry campaigns in history. Time and again columns of Mongol horsemen appeared as if from nowhere, having crossed vast distances and impossible natural barriers at speeds that easily outpaced their enemies’ intelligence. This was blitzkrieg, seven centuries before the invention of the tank or the aeroplane.

In the summer of 1227, in the middle of conquering China, Genghis Khan died after a severe attack of fever. It is believed he was about seventy years of age. On his deathbed he was said to have gathered his sons and to have handed them a bunch of arrows, instructing them to break them. When they could not, he handed them each arrow separately. His lesson was that they must remain united. Separately, like the arrows, they were weak. He bequeathed his empire to Ogedei, his third son, who would rule as Great Khan. Under him, his second son, Chaghadai, would govern Central Asia; Batu, his grandson, whom Friar William met on the Volga, would rule the Russian steppes which became known as the Golden Horde, and his youngest son, Tolui, was given the Mongol homelands. Thus all of Asia was parcelled out like a series of pastures in accordance with traditional Mongol grazing rights. The eldest son (in this case grandson, as Genghis’s first son had predeceased him) received the pastures furthest from home while the youngest was granted the ‘heartlands’.

The body of the Great Khan was taken home to Mongolia and buried in the Khentii Mountains near the place of his birth at a spot he had chosen himself. All of the bearers of the funeral cortege, and all those who encountered it on its way, were put to death to guard the secret of its location. To this day no one knows where his tomb lies.

At the time of his death, Genghis’ empire was four times the size of Alexander’s and twice the size of the Roman Empire. But the Mongols were still far from their zenith and under the new khan, Ogedei, the campaigns of conquest continued apace. By 1234 the whole of northern China had been subdued. Famously and no doubt apocryphally, Ogedei had considered massacring the entire Chinese population, some forty-five million people. ‘They are of no use to us,’ a Chinese historian reported him as saying. ‘It would be better to exterminate them entirely, and let the grass grow so we can have grazing for our horses.’ Wiser counsel prevailed when they were reminded of the taxes they might expect from all those hardworking Chinese.

Having dealt with the traditional enemy, the Mongols now turned westward once more to new horizons, intending to push the frontiers of the empire well into Europe. In the winter of 1237–8 they crossed the frozen Volga and launched what would prove to be the only successful winter invasion of Russia, a campaign that so alarmed the people of the Baltic that they cancelled their annual trip to Yarmouth with dire consequences for the English herring market.