17

The Legend of Prester John and the Gurkhans of Cathay

On November 18, 1145, Hugh, Bishop of Jabala in the Crusader Principality of Antioch, entered the papal palace at Viterbo, north of Rome. Pope Eugenius III, who was planning a great crusade of Christian kings to rescue the hard-pressed Crusaders in Outremer, had relocated to the pleasant Tuscan town because the radicals led by Arnold of Brescia controlled the Eternal City and declared a commune. Fortunately, we have an eyewitness account of this meeting from an accomplished churchman and writer, Otto of Freising, a great-nephew of the future Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.1 Bishop Hugh pleaded the case for the Christians in the Crusader states. His sovereign prince, Raymond of Antioch, was desperate for a new crusade to check the Turkish emir Zengi, who had stormed the city of Edessa the previous year and now targeted Antioch.2 But Hugh also brought exciting news of a powerful Christian priest-king in the East who had just smitten the Saracens in a climactic battle. This Christian potentate Prester John vowed to reach Jerusalem next. He had marched his host to the Tigris but failed to find a crossing and so withdrew into Inner Asia. Yet Christians clung to the hope that Prester John would soon return. Bishop Hugh, however, wanted to dispel hopeful tales then circulating among Christians in Western Europe that this mighty king would soon return and deliver Jerusalem. For centuries, this king was identified with Saint John, rumored to have escaped death and was even now walking the earth until the Apocalypse.3 This king might have also descended from one of the Magi or one of the wealthy kings of India converted by Saint Thomas, the doubting apostle of Acts and the patron saint of the Christian churches of the East. He wielded an emerald-tipped golden scepter and commanded innumerable legions. His wondrous realm stretched across the distant eastern lands filled with fabulous animals, great riches, and pious Christians. Bishop Hugh succeeded in his immediate task. Pope Eugenius III inspired Kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany to assume the cross in the next year.4

This Second Crusade ended in dismal failure before the walls of Damascus in 1148.5 King Conrad of Germany returned home in disgrace. He was never crowned Holy Roman Emperor and thereafter battled unruly Welf vassals who challenged the Hohenstaufen right to rule.6 The failure was just as humiliating for King Louis. His wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, divorced her dull husband upon their return.7

Louis had grown suspicious over Eleanor’s alleged intimacy with her uncle Raymond of Antioch. Eleanor soon married the dashing Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and heir to the English throne. Henry II and Eleanor, the tempestuous couple celebrated by troubadours, ruled the greatest realm in Latin Christendom since Charlemagne, and outshone their monkish liege lord Louis VII. With the failure of the Second Crusade, hopes of the return of Prester John again ran high. Twenty years after Hugh’s report, a purported Latin translation of a letter from Prester John to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus circulated across Western Europe.8 The letter was a clever conceit to extol the realm of Prester John as a vision of the Paradise to come rather than a correspondence between two Christian autocrats. Over one hundred manuscripts of the Latin version have survived. Throughout the next two centuries, the letter was translated into every European vernacular. Each copyist had no business recording the letter unless he improved upon it. The power of Prester John grew ever greater, his realm ever wider with each retelling. Seventy-two kings served him daily. He ruled the kingdom of the Three Indies, vaguely conceived as Ethiopia, India, and Inner Asia. He guarded the tomb of Saint Thomas in India, and, foremost, he succeeded to Alexander the Great as the guardian against the hordes of Gog and Magog beyond the deserts and steppes of Inner Asia. These rumors were retold and believed ever more enthusiastically in an era of depressing wars among Christian kings. Today such reports, claims, and visions might be grist for the mill of social media, but at least the Medieval tales disseminated apocalyptic hopes rather than the absurd conspiracy theories of today’s media. Pope Alexander III, a shrewd diplomat versed in theology and canon law, decided to write to Prester John in the autumn of 1177. Just several months earlier, Pope Alexander had reconciled with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the cathedral of San Marco in Venice, and so ended eighteen years of warfare between Pope and German emperor.9 Alexander III hoped that a favorable reply from Prester John would inspire the Christian kings of Europe to assume the cross in a Third Crusade. On September 27, 1177, a delegation headed by the Pope’s physician Master Philip set sail from Venice bound for the court of Prester John. The hapless envoys arrived in Outremer, and then disappeared into Asia, never to be heard from again. Pope Alexander truly believed that a great sovereign ruled in Inner Asia, and in his letter claims that Master Philip, when in the East, had spoken with wise elders who knew of Prester John’s realm firsthand.10 The letter also set diplomatic protocol for future papal correspondence with Mongol khans in the next century. Alexander opened with salutations and urged Prester John to embrace the true faith by acknowledging the primacy of Saint Peter’s successors at Rome. Then followed an appeal to unite in a common war against Muslims. The reply never arrived. Ten years later, Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, annihilated the Crusader army at Hattin, and recaptured Jerusalem.11 New crusades of kings and princes followed, and failed, while Christians fervently prayed for the return of Prester John.

The immediate events that fired Christian hopes of deliverance by Prester John occurred on the Eurasian steppes. These events heralded major political and military changes that anticipated the arrival of the Mongols a century later. On September 9, 1141, Yelü Dashi, Gurkhan of the Khitans, defeated the Seljuk sultan Ahmad Sanjar in a great battle at Qatwan just outside of Samarkand. By this victory, Yelü Dashi secured the caravan cities of Transoxiana and the central Eurasian steppes, the heartland of the Turkish Karakhanids who had embraced Islam two centuries earlier.12 The Khitans were neither Muslims nor Christians but rather Buddhists and shamanists from the borderlands of northern China. Nestorian monks in the cities of Transoxiana, grateful for his religious tolerance, baptized Yelü Dashi as one of their own and spread rumors of his impending arrival as Prester John ruling the kingdom of Cathay. Within months, these reports raced two thousand miles over the Silk Road to the ports of Outremer, where Bishop Hugh learned about Prester John from informants claiming direct knowledge. Even more significantly, the Khitan victory over Sultan Sanjar shattered the unity of the Seljuk sultanate.13 Thereafter, Turkish rulers waged ruinous, desultory wars among themselves to gain supremacy over the lands of Eastern Islam.14 Across the Muslim world, the imams preached doom for the sinful, and the pious trembled at an impending Khitan invasion of Dar al-Islam. These barbarian nonbelievers must surely be the hordes of Gog and Magog foretold in the Koran because they had just overwhelmed the best army of the Abbasid caliph.

Yet the barbarian victor, Yelü Dashi, a scion of the royal house of the Khitans, halted his advance west after he received the submission of the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.15 The threat of a barbarian invasion quickly faded. Yelü Dashi was himself an exile who had fled from his homeland in northern China fifteen years earlier. The Khitans, a Mongolian-speaking people, long dwelled on the grasslands of the upper Liao River that stretch east to the wooded mountainous regions of Manchuria.16 The Khitans, named in Chinese chronicles since the fourth century AD, exchanged furs, flax, honey, timber, and horses for Chinese silk, foodstuffs, and finished goods.17 During the ninth century, Khitan tribal leaders warred among themselves for the rank of Great Khan, and so each khan rendered homage to either the Uyghur kaghan or the Tang emperor whose patronage could tip the balance in conflicts with rivals.18 In 901, a charismatic warrior, Yelü Abaoji, then age thirty-one, was acclaimed khan of the Yila, a leading tribe of the eight Khitan tribes.19 Later historians hailed Abaoji as the greatest descendant of the legendary progenitors, a warrior astride a white stallion and lady in an ox-drawn cart, who met and married atop the sacred mountain Mu-yeh, where their cult statues were long venerated with sacrifices of a horse and ox.20 These mysterious ancestors were avatars of the lord of the sky and mother earth, and their eight sons were the ancestors of the eight Khitan tribes. Abaoji’s mother, Yaonian Yanmujin, is claimed to have witnessed in a dream the sun fall from the sky into her bosom to impregnate her.21 Her son was to be a marvel, both as a warrior and as a shaman who could foresee the future. In 903, the Khitan Great Khan of the Yaolian clan appointed Abaoji as his supreme commander (yüyu). Within a year, Abaoji overthrew his master, and then battled his way to the rank of Great Khan in 907.22 Yet Abaoji proved to be far more than another warlord. He turned the Khitans from a federation of tribes into imperial conquerors who founded an effective state in northern China that was heir to the Northern Wei and Tang dynasties.

In the year 907, the general Zhu Wen dispensed with ruling through puppet emperors, and deposed the last Tang emperor, the teenager Ai, who was quietly murdered afterward.23 Zhu Wen (907–912) declared himself the emperor Taizu of a new Liang dynasty, but he faced too many rivals among dynasts of the Tang military elite who also aspired to the imperial throne.24 The ailing Zhu Wen, notorious for indulging his prodigious sexual appetite in his summer palace at Luoyang, neglected affairs of state, and so fell victim to an assassination plot of his third son, Zhu Yougui.25 Zhu Yougui, in vain, battled his irate older half brother Zhu Youwen and rebel military governors.26 Later Neo-Confucian historians lamented the next dismal fifty years of disunity as the era of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960).

Abaoji as Great Khan of the Khitans deftly exploited Chinese disunity, for he commanded the most formidable cavalry in East Asia. He organized his veteran warriors into regiments who, along with their families, were based in separate military encampments (orda).27 Abaoji, in the guise of an early Tang warrior emperor, subjected the tribes on the eastern steppes as far as the Altai Mountains, and recruited yet more horse archers. He invited the Uyghurs to return to their ancestral home, and to rebuild their capital, Karabalghasun, which the Kyrgyz Turks had sacked in 840.28 But the Uyghurs declined the offer, preferring the comforts of urban life in the Tarim Basin so that the sacred Orkhon valley passed from the Turks to the Mongols. Abaoji initiated the conquest of the sixteen frontier prefectures of northeastern China. In 916, Abaoji proclaimed himself emperor of the Liao dynasty, and assumed the Chinese throne name Taizu. For the next two centuries, he and his heirs would rule an empire embracing northern China, southern Manchuria, and the Mongolian steppes.

Quite in contrast to previous nomadic conquerors, the Liao emperors were recognized as members of a legitimate Chinese dynasty, and so they were accorded official dynastic histories.29 They, however, adapted rather than embraced Chinese civilization. In the year 1000, the Khitans numbered at most seven hundred fifty thousand souls, of whom thirty thousand warriors were assigned to the military encampments.30 They were outnumbered by their Chinese subjects by a factor of twenty. From the start, Abaoji employed Chinese mandarins to administer the Chinese provinces, and adopted many Chinese court rituals and bureaucratic procedures.31 But he kept the Chinese mandarins at a distance lest the Khitans, just like their predecessors, the Northern Wei, would be assimilated into the Han people. Abaoji ordered the creation of a Khitan script based on Han characters for use in royal correspondence and records. The Khitan script of 378 characters, later modified into one of 370 characters, prevented the mandarin bureaucrats from monopolizing imperial records.32 The Khitan emperors also employed a separate legal code for each of their diverse subjects, and they divided the realm into five great prefectures, each with its own capital and administration.33 The principal capital was Shangjing on the eastern steppes of Inner Mongolia (in today’s banner or district of Bairin), where the Great Khan could reward loyal tribal khans with titles, silk, and marriageable princesses in the best tradition of the Five Baits. Regional capitals were established at Zhongjing (Ningcheng), Dongjing (Liaoyang), Xijing (Datong, Shaanxi), and, in the south, Nanjing (Beijing), the last destined to become the royal metropolis of northern China. Finally, just like the Northern Wei emperors, the Liao emperors embraced Buddhism, which was easily reconciled to their ancestral Khitan gods and shamans.34 They ordered the translations of the principal Buddhist texts into their own language. Foremost, they tolerated all faiths within their empire, reversing the hostility of the later Tang emperors to foreign faiths.

The later Mongol khans learned from their Khitan subjects these lessons in statecraft for governing China, but the Khitan emperors, unlike their Mongol successors, never aspired to rule over all of China for two reasons. First, Khitan emperors were always hard-pressed to appease both their nomadic warriors and their Chinese subjects, and this juggling act limited their imperial ambitions. In 916, when Abaoji declared himself the emperor Taizu, he also proclaimed his eldest son, Yelü Bei, as his successor.35 With the utmost reluctance, the notables of the national assembly, the kurultai of the later Mongols, consented to strict hereditary succession over traditions of lateral succession. Much to the resentment of the proud Khitan warlords, Yelü Bei received the education of a refined Chinese gentleman, mastering the Confucian classics, calligraphy, and painting at the expense of the martial arts. In 926, upon Abaoji’s death, the dowager empress Shulü Ping refused to join her deceased husband Abaoji. Instead she cut off her right hand for ritual burial with her husband’s body. For the next twenty-five years, she dominated the court in the fashion of Mongol empresses of the thirteenth century. Twice she provoked succession crises to put her candidate on the throne.36 In 953, she was finally forced to abdicate and to retire into a gilded exile. The strong-willed empress championed the martial ways of the steppes so that she rigged the election of her younger son, Yelü Deguang, as Abaoji’s successor under the Chinese throne name of Taizong (927–947).37 Yelü Deguang did not disappoint his mother or his supporters, because he conquered the remaining sixteen prefectures and the lower Yellow River valley, the cradle of Chinese civilization.38 He also briefly occupied the former Tang capital, Kaifeng, at the nexus of four major canals and boasting perhaps a half million residents. But these successes of Yelü Deguang committed later Khitan emperors to consolidating and defending rather than expanding their Chinese domains. Out of necessity, later Liao emperors turned their nomadic confederation into a Chinese bureaucratic state based on predictable revenues gained in taxation rather than the plunder of conquests.39

Second, the later Khitan emperors faced two powerful rivals for the mastery of China. In significant ways, the political division of China in 960 resembled the one following the collapse of the Han Empire. In the far west, Xi Xia emperors, Tangut speakers and descendants of Tibetan highlanders, ruled over Gansu and the Ordos triangle, thereby controlling and profiting off the trade along the strategic corridor of the Silk Road.40 Xi Xia tribesmen had long served as frontier guards (jiedushi) of Tang emperors, and their leaders styled themselves as “dukes” (li) within the Tang military hierarchy.41 They intermarried with Chinese colonists, Turkish nomads, and Tocharian-speaking residents of the caravan cities of the Tarim Basin. In 954, the dynast Li Yixing (954–967) consolidated these Sinified lands into a single realm and assumed the royal title of “he who has pacified the West.” He promptly acknowledged the suzerainty of the Song emperor Taizu of southern China so that Li Yixing was granted the Song imperial title Xia. Thereafter, he ruled as an independent sovereign in splendid isolation.42 His heirs maintained this precarious independence by adroitly exploiting the rivalry between their two more powerful neighbors, the Liao and Song emperors. The Sinified Xi Xia rulers too successfully played the dual role of Han emperor and nomadic khan.

Meanwhile, the Song emperors forged a Neo-Confucian state in southern China, home to over two-thirds of the Han people, estimated at 120 million strong in the year 1000.43 This empire was rich in rice paddies and silk farms, and trade was facilitated by the Grand Canal stretching from Kaifeng to Hangzhou. The Song emperors saw themselves as the true heirs of the Han and Tang dynasties. Ironically, Khitan successes compelled many aristocrats, merchants, and peasants to flee North China to Song domains, where their reports of Khitan atrocities galvanized the southern Chinese to resist the barbarian interlopers. In 960, Zhao Kuangyin, a warlord of frontier forces (jiedushi), seized Kaifeng and declared himself emperor Taizu (960–976) of a new Song dynasty.44 This emperor Taizu, the third to take the name in the tenth century, imposed unity over southern China and forged an imperial order based on Neo-Confucian precepts.45 He aimed to break the power of the Tang regional elites who had monopolized office and ruled as regional hereditary dukes (li). Civilian bureaucrats henceforth were chosen by merit upon passing an examination system based on the Confucian classics. The wide dissemination of block printing of Confucian classics enabled many men of humbler origin to study the texts, pass the examinations, and so enter imperial service.46 Mandarin officials from the highest to lowest levels shared a set of philosophical precepts that put correct rule (zheng) at a premium. All were expected to master the canonical texts in order to achieve harmony with the way (dao), especially the proper conduct and veneration of the ancestors. Even the Song emperor, if he were to retain the Mandate of Heaven, had to obey the same ideals. Therefore, later Song emperors, their courtiers, and officials all preferred diplomacy and peace over war, and they subordinated generals, officers, and soldiers to the civilian officials. Furthermore, Song emperors of the eleventh century elaborated ritual and protocol at court to elevate themselves above their officials and subjects.47 Yet at the same time, they demonstrated their proper conduct by undertaking projects to promote the welfare of their subjects. State monopolies in manufacturing ceramics and iron have been praised as veritable prototypes for economies to scale in the later industrial revolution.48 International commerce linking ports of southern China to those of Chola India and Fatimid Egypt boomed. Simultaneously, Song emperors incorporated non-Han peoples in the far south, and they sponsored Han colonists to expand the arable portions of these new lands.

Yet for all their successes, the Song emperors lacked the military means and will to restore the northern frontier of the Great Wall. Foremost, the Song could never mount sufficient cavalry in quality or quantity to match the horse archers of the Khitan Liao emperors.49 In 1005, the Song emperor Zhenzong negotiated with his Liao counterpart Shengzong the Treaty of Chaoyuan, whereby the two monarchs agreed to the permanent partition of China. Zhenzong, although he retained Kaifeng, renounced claims to the sixteen prefectures and agreed to an annual subsidy of one hundred thousand taels of silver and two hundred thousand bolts of silk in return for Shengzong’s nominal submission.50 Shengzong emerged from these negotiations as the winner, because he gained access to a revenue stream of gifts to reward his vassals. He and his successors repeatedly renegotiated the terms to their advantage. The Song court neither forgot nor forgave this expensive humiliation to purchase peace from the Khitan emperor so that Song diplomats clandestinely backed Khitan rebels and sought out other barbarian allies. They found their instrument in an ambitious Khitan vassal, Wanyan Aguda (1114–1123), chieftain of the Jurchens, a Tangut-speaking people of the Manchurian forests who had settled on the eastern steppes and adopted the nomadic way of life.51 Wanyan Aguda loathed his Liao master, the emperor Tianzuo (1101–1128). Tianzuo, while on a royal progress, had humiliated the proud Wanyan Aguda when he refused to join other Jurchen chieftains in a degrading dance to amuse the Khitan court.52 In the autumn of 1114, Wanyan Aguda rebelled, and defeated a Khitan army. Early the next year, Wanyan Aguda exchanged envoys with the Song court in the first of seven diplomatic missions crossing the Bohai Gulf (the northwestern arm of the Yellow Sea).53 In 1121, the Song emperor Huizong and Wanyan Aguda concluded the so-called “Alliance Conducted at Sea” that stipulated joint military operations against the Khitans, and the return to Song control all lands south of the Great Wall.54 Huizong and his diplomats at Kaifeng congratulated themselves on destroying the hated Khitan invader at minimal cost, but the agreement turned out to be a blunder. Huizong overestimated the ability of his army, and underestimated that of Wanyan Aguda. The Song army lacked the cavalry and logistics to wage offensive operations, and failed to take any of its objectives. Wanyan Aguda, who had declared himself the emperor Taizu of the Jin dynasty, quickly overran the Khitan Empire. Tianzuo, while wickedly clever in humiliating his vassal, was not up to the task of defeating him in battle. Contrary to Song expectations, the Jurchens were not simple barbarians satisfied with looting and leaving. Wanyan Aguda refused to hand over the sixteen prefectures to Song control. In 1125, Wanyan Sheng (1123–1135), brother and successor of Wanyan Aguda, captured Tianzuo, and ended the Khitan Empire.55 Two years later, in 1127, Wanyan Sheng invaded the lower valley of the Yellow River, occupied Kaifeng, and captured Huizong and his court.56 A younger son of Huizong, Gaozung (1127–1162), escaped and retreated to Hangzhou, the cosmopolitan metropolis at the southern terminus of the Grand Canal. There he consolidated his hold over the southern domains of the Song Empire. Gaozung, however, formally accepted the loss of the northern lands, including the capital Kaifeng, by the treaty of Shaoxing in 1141.57 He also agreed to pay Wanyan Hela, the third Jurchen emperor known by his Chinese throne name as Xizong, an annual subsidy of two hundred thousand taels of silver and two hundred fifty thousand bolts of silk. The emperor Huizong and his diplomats had substituted one nomadic foe with a far more dangerous one who had seized the capital of Kaifeng and lands of the lower Yellow River.

The sudden collapse of the Khitan Empire had long-term consequences for both China and the Eurasian steppes. Any chances of restoring the unity of the Middle Kingdom were gone. Song emperors henceforth accepted partition, and so they were forced on the defensive. The Song army fortified the Yangtze and its tributaries in a succession of fortified lines to check nomadic invaders.58 The imperial navy launched river flotillas to support this Maginot line, and squadrons to guard the ports, to suppress pirates, and to protect overseas commerce. Beyond their northern fortifications, Song diplomats looked for yet another barbarian ally to rid them of the one they had summoned to destroy the Khitans.

The Jurchen emperors too accepted partition, and they set in motion two important events that transformed the Eurasian steppes. First, since Jurchen emperors enjoyed their role as Chinese emperors of the Jin dynasty, they exercised a far looser hegemony over the nomadic tribes of Mongolia.59 Jurchen emperors, in contrast to their Khitan predecessors, came to despise their nomadic kinsmen and neighbors. They promoted tribal and clan warfare rather than courting the kaghans and tribes on the eastern Eurasian steppes.60 Their contempt was quickly returned with fear and loathing from their nomadic vassals. By inciting wars among the tribes during the next two generations, the Jin emperors unwittingly created the conditions for the rise of Genghis Khan.

The Jurchen emperors also drove Yelü Dashi and his Khitans west into the Islamic world, and thereby contributed to the making of the legends about Prester John. Yelü Dashi of history is in many ways far more remarkable than his counterpart Prester John of legend. In 1125, Yelü Dashi, when he decided to retreat west, was age thirty-seven and an accomplished minister and general.61 He had attained the highest Confucian degree (jinshi), mastered Chinese and Khitan calligraphy, and excelled in riding and archery. He fought bravely for his emperor, Tianzuo, until he was captured, and released on the promise to take service with the Jurchen conqueror.62 Yelü Dashi, however, soon defected, allegedly fearing punishment because he had bested his Jurchen commander, Nian Han, in a board game. Yelü Dashi soon realized serving Tianzuo again was a lost cause. On an evening in 1125, he and a small band of followers slipped out of Tianzuo’s encampment in Inner Mongolia and headed west for the Liao military settlement at Kedun, one of the Khitan desert fortresses near the archaeological site of Chin Tolgoin Balgas in central Mongolia, 145 miles west of Ulaanbaatar.63 From there, Yelü Dashi recruited ten thousand warriors from among the Tatars and Turkish tribes dwelling on the Mongolian steppes to the north as far as the Orkhon valley. Initially, Yelü Dashi posed as a loyal subordinate of his emperor, Tianzuo, so that he won over the Liao military governor and the vassal kaghans. During the next six years at Kedun, Yelü Dashi fought an uneven defensive war against the superior Jurchens. He failed to lure both the Xi Xia and Song emperors into an alliance against the common foe of the Jurchens, because his would-be allies viewed him as little more than a leader of nomadic brigands.64

On May 13, 1130, Yelü Dashi sacrificed a gray ox and white horse to the ancestral progenitors and announced his bold plan to march over two thousand miles west to the grasslands around Lake Issyk, to where many Khitans had already fled as immigrants or mercenaries serving the Eastern Karakhanid kaghan of Balasagun.65 These central Eurasian steppes had been the extreme western edge of the Tang Empire four centuries earlier, but now Muslim Turkish kaghans ruled as resentful vassals of the Seljuk sultan Sanjar. Yelü Dashi gambled on the long shot of recruiting more warriors and gaining Ferghana’s heavenly steeds that sweat blood for his war against the Jurchens. He had to cut short his first western expedition, return to Kedun, and drive off a Jurchen attack. In commemoration of this victory, either in 1131 or 1132, Yelü Dashi was acclaimed by his followers as Gurkhan or Universal Khan.66 Yelü Dashi also assumed the Chinese throne name of Dezong so that Chinese chroniclers recognized him as a legitimate emperor, albeit a provincial one, ruling as the Western Liao Son of Heaven. His followers henceforth were known as the Karakhitans, “Black Khitans,” whose ethnic name Christian chroniclers turned into Cathay, the European name for northern China. The conquest of the central Eurasian steppes proved costly, because Khitan expeditions from Kedun had to cover great distances over arid terrain that took a hideous toll on men and horses. The Turkish kaghans on the central steppes and the Uyghur rulers of Khotan and Kashgar in the Tarim Basin opposed Yelü Dashi and conspired to hire away Khitan warriors as mercenaries for their own conflicts. In 1134, Yelü Dashi received an unexpected stroke of good luck. He entered Balasagun on invitation of the feckless Eastern Karakhanid kaghan, long weary of the burdens of the crown.67 Yelü Dashi assumed absolute control of this kaghanate. He built his own Chinese-style capital near Balasagun, from whence he steadily subjected the Turkish tribes north of the Jaxartes River (Syr Darya).68 He also defeated another Jurchen army under his former commander, Nian Han, in a decisive battle in the desert to the west of Kedun in 1137.69 His military achievements to date had been extraordinary, and Yelü Dashi is more than worthy to enter the hall of great nomadic conquerors. Over the course of twelve years, Yelü Dashi boldly, even recklessly, fought his way west over three thousand miles from his homeland in China to the Central Eurasian steppes around Lake Issyk, where he established a new Chinese bureaucratic state, the Karakhitan Empire. Despite repeated defeats, he proved a resilient, charismatic Gurkhan who rallied warriors to win the battles that mattered. Yet his greatest victory was yet to come.

Yelü Dashi, once master of Balasagun, inevitably clashed with the ruler of Eastern Islam, the Seljuk sultan Sanjar, because Yelü Dashi quickly became entangled in the web of local conflicts among the rival Muslim rulers of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khwarazm. In the summer of 1141, the sultan Sanjar marched east with an army of fifty thousand in response to appeals from his vassals about Khitan and Karluk attacks along the caravan routes.70 The sultan aimed to restore order in Transoxiana, and to reckon with the new ruler at Balasagun, Yelü Dashi, whose kingdom posed a serious threat on the northeastern border of Dar al-Islam. At the same time, Yelü Dashi and the Khitan army crossed the Jaxartes in response to an appeal from Atsiz, shah of Khwarazm, who never forgave the execution of his son on orders of Sanjar. Accounts of the great battle survive from both Muslim and Chinese sources. The meticulous Persian historian Atâ-Malek Juvayni, writing at the Mongol court of Tabriz in the thirteenth century, drew on eyewitness accounts, while the Chinese Chronicle of the Liao (Liao Shi) provides details of the Khitan army. The two armies, each perhaps fifty thousand strong, clashed at Qatwan, eight miles outside of Samarkand, on September 9, 1141.71 Each army employed the same nomadic tactics, but the Khitan horse archers, along with their Karluk allies, proved superior in archery and mobility. The Seljuk army was encircled and annihilated. Sultan Sanjar escaped, but Yelü Dashi captured the sultan’s harem and treasury.

By his great victory at Qatwan, Yelü Dashi extended his realm, from the western slopes of the Altai Mountains across the central Eurasian steppes to the Oxus River (Amu Darya). Henceforth, he also exercised a hegemony over the caravan cities of the western Tarim Basin. If Yelü Dashi had then marched another two thousand miles west and entered Jerusalem, as Christians hoped, they would have been disappointed. Yelü Dashi would have tolerated and accommodated his far more numerous Muslim subjects, pursuing a policy that was not unlike one of his Mongol successors.72 Although he professed Buddhism, he tempered his faith with Confucian teachings and Khitan animist beliefs. In the tradition of the Liao emperors, he respected the faiths of all his subjects: Christian, Manichaean, and Muslim. To be sure, he wielded no magical scepter like Prester John, and hardly marked the coming of the Last Judgment. Instead, he was a pragmatic, farsighted emperor ruling in the style of the Tang emperor Taizong, and inspiring the loyalty of his nomadic warriors in the manner of the Northern Wei emperor Tuoba Gul. His successors would rule just as judiciously over Central Asia for the next century.73

Once the initial shock of the defeat of Seljuk sultan Sanjar had passed, Muslims were puzzled by what to make of these new invaders from the steppes. After the caravan cities of the Transoxiana submitted, Yelü Dashi and his heirs were content to rule a distant empire on the northeastern edge of the Islamic world.74 This Karakhitan realm, in a number of ways, approximated the Hephthalite Empire of seven centuries earlier. The Khitans thus did not turn out to be the scions of Gog and Magog of the Apocalypse, but rather they brought peace and prosperity along the Silk Road. Karakhitan emperors allowed their Muslim vassals to retain their titles and courts; they never interfered in the administration of sharia in Muslim cities. For Muslim jurists and theologians, tolerant Karakhitan rule posed a dilemma, because it was inconsistent with the teachings of the Koran that nonbelievers, especially Buddhists, who were scorned and considered heathens (gavur), should rule over Muslims. Even more puzzling to Muslims, Karakhitan emperors, in contrast to Turkish kaghans, never showed any interest in converting to Islam. Instead, the Karakhitan emperors had brought their own civilization from northern China.75 They possessed a veteran field army of forty thousand horse archers, and numerous officials trained in both Chinese and Khitan languages and bureaucratic procedures. These imperial servants ensured the primacy of the Han literary canon and imperial institutions of the Liao state of northern China.76 Muslims were tolerated and protected, but they enjoyed no special status over Khitan subjects of other faiths. What Muslims at the time could not have realized was that this orderly Karakhitan rule was a preview of Mongol rule yet to come.

Popular perceptions of the Karakhitans varied across the Islamic world.77 In the Middle East, rulers, theologians, and historians soon dismissed the Karakhitans as restless marauders intent on plunder and slaves and little else. They perceived the Frankish Crusaders as far more dangerous foes because the Franks fought to take the Holy City of Jerusalem, and threatened Cairo and Damascus. In the lands of Eastern Islam, many Muslims too soon viewed Karakhitan rule with indifference. Muslim merchants, travelers, and pilgrims who visited the caravan cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin seldom commented on the Karakhitan overlords because ordinary life had changed so little. Therefore, few Muslims were prepared to confront the far greater shock when Genghis Khan burst into the Islamic world.

Meanwhile, Christian Europe still blissfully pinned hopes on Prester John. In the spring of 1221, an excited Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, penned effusive letters to Pope Honorius III, King Henry III of England, and Duke Leopold VI of Austria, reporting news of the expected savior from Inner Asia.78 At the same time, the members of the Fifth Crusade were bogged down in the flooded fields of the Egyptian Delta in a doomed advance to capture Cairo.79 In 1217, the Crusaders had invaded Egypt to win Jerusalem on the banks of the Nile with a strategy of exchanging Cairo for the Holy City. In the face of yet another failed crusade, Jacques de Vitry proclaimed that David, Prester John’s son, or perhaps his grandson, had just defeated the Saracens in another great battle and was even now on the march to Jerusalem. Once again, a French bishop seized upon the garbled reports of Nestorian monks about great events in Central Asia, but this time, the deliverer turned out not to be a grandson of Prester John, but rather the greatest of all conquerors of the steppes, Genghis Khan.