INTRODUCTION

The Anger of the Gods

The evening hours in a military camp belong to the revelry of the young soldiers, but the final dark hours before the sun rises belong to the old veterans, who silently stir the ashes of memory and await the light of day. This is the hour when restless spirits wander the Earth and haunt men with past regrets and future fears. At sixty, Genghis Khan had many memories to savor, and ample ones to regret.

In 1222, entering the final years of his life, he was still out on campaign. He had spent as long as he could remember fighting. Under his guidance, one son was now fighting across northern Iran, two others led campaigns in the Khwarizm Empire of Uzbekistan, and another was with him in the mountain valleys of Afghanistan. His generals were sweeping up the Caucasus Mountains on their way to attack the soft underbelly of European Russia. The list of cities and countries he had conquered, and those he had annihilated, was far too long to remember.

“According to trustworthy persons,” wrote the Persian chronicler Juzjani, he was “a man of tall stature, of vigorous build, robust in body, the hair on his face scanty and with cats’ eyes, possessed of great energy, discernment, genius, and understanding.” To his enemies he appeared “awe-striking, a butcher, just, resolute, an over-thrower of enemies, intrepid, sanguinary, and cruel.”¹ The appearance of Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors inspired instant fear. “They had a hellish and frightening appearance,” wrote the Armenian chronicler Kirakos of Gandzak. “They had no beards, although some of them had a few hairs above their lips or on their chins,” wrote Chao Hung, the Chinese envoy. “They had narrow and quick-seeing eyes, high, shrill voices; they were hardy and long-lived.”² The envoy expressed surprise that instead of wearing his hair like an emperor, the Great Khan had the same distinctive hairstyle as his soldiers—shaved on top, with bangs on the forehead, to protect the soul, and two braids reaching down to the shoulders—strange but practical for controlling lice.³ In old age his sparse but long beard had turned gray.

Measured against the lives of other men, Genghis Khan had achieved much. Although born into a minor lineage in a remote part of the Mongolian steppe, he had slowly conquered one more powerful enemy after another. He was not the son of a khan or the heir to a powerful family. Far from it: he and his mother had been cast out by his tribe and left to die. He was forty-five years old when he acquired full control of the nomadic steppe tribes of nearly a million people. Only then did he set off to fight beyond the Mongolian Plateau that had confined his early life. After conquering adjacent Siberia, northern and western China, and the Kara Khitai Empire of the Tien Shan Mountains, he moved against the shah of Khwarizm, who ruled most of Central Asia from the Caspian Sea to Afghanistan. His army continued on to invade Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, and southern Russia.

With about 100,000 men he defeated armies ten times the size of his and subjugated hundreds of millions of people. Genghis Khan “conquered lands which had never even been heard of before,” wrote Injannasi, one of his proud descendants. His empire “reached the far corners of the world, where foot had never been set before.” He “conquered the four directions and eight quarters beyond the ocean and included so many strange nations.”⁴ He conquered more lands and peoples than all the emperors in the entire history of the Roman Empire. He buried his enemies in the dust of his fast Mongol horses.

He combined the genius of a hunter stalking his prey with the agility of the herder deftly guiding goats, sheep, cows, horses, yaks, and camels across vast distances while protecting them from predators and natural calamity. His army moved across the land with such speed and skill that observers repeatedly compared it to a wind storm, flood, or other fierce force of nature. Cities fell before him as effortlessly as his horses trampled weeds or flowers. He routed enemy armies and relocated thousands of people as seamlessly as moving his herds to a new pasture. He decreed life or death for defeated enemies as swiftly as deciding which animals to slaughter at the start of winter.

It is difficult to grasp the breadth and scope of the Mongol invasions. In a period of approximately seventy-five years, Genghis Khan and his immediate descendants fought armies on the territory of some forty modern countries. From the time Genghis Khan launched his first invasion in 1209 until the death of his grandson Khubilai Khan near the end of the century, the Mongols successfully invaded what are today Russia, China, Korea, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Moldova, Lithuania, Hungary, Greece (Thrace), northern Albania, Poland, Burma, and a few smaller nations such as Tibet and Kashmir that are now part of larger ones. They also received tribute from the kingdoms of what are now Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. Their battles stretched over five thousand miles from Budapest to modern Seoul, and almost the same distance from Hanoi to Budapest.

The scope of their conquests is probably best marked by what the Mongols tried but failed to conquer. They suffered a small defeat on the outskirts of Vienna, but the army was stopped in the west by the Mamluk of Egypt, in the east by the army of Japan, and in the south by a Javanese kingdom in modern Indonesia. No other army managed to fight simultaneous wars so far apart until the United States went to war against Germany and Japan in World War II.

Genghis Khan erupted into history in a century when gods flourished on Earth, when religion ruled the world. Sounds of the muezzin’s call to prayer, tolling church bells, chanting monks, and singing pilgrims filled the air across cities and villages from Japan in the Pacific to Ireland in the Atlantic. Ostentatious displays of religious piety dominated art, literature, architecture, and philosophy, whether at the Sung capital in China, the palace of the caliph in Baghdad, the papal throne in Rome, the court of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the fortress of the sultan in Delhi, or the mosques of Seville and Granada in Spain. In that Golden Age of Religion, tall, thin towers rose up as pagodas in eastern and southern Asia, minarets across the Muslim world, and cathedral spires in Europe. They lifted up the thoughts of humanity toward the heavens, and they stood as victory columns proclaiming the dominance and seeming permanence of the new power of religion.

Religion triumphed over secular life. Priests, lamas, monks, and mullahs controlled the calendar, set borders between rivals, and collected taxes. They operated judicial courts, staffed prisons, built universities, opened hospitals, and managed wineries, banks, brothels, and torture chambers. Lavishly spending the voluntary and forced donations from poor and rich believers, they produced a historic high point for sacred art, literature, music, and architecture. Through the words of Allah in calligraphy, the sculpted image of Buddha on mountains and in temples, and paintings depicting scenes from the life of Jesus, art had become the servant of religious indoctrination.

Arrogantly ignoring the Will of Heaven while claiming to be its representative on Earth, the many masters of organized religion violated the spirit of their own scriptures and focused on what they most enjoyed: collecting wealth, punishing violators of their arbitrary dietary and sexual laws, constructing massive buildings, staging fancy dress rituals, and enthusiastically fighting one another over whether there should be punctuation in the scriptures and what color the ink should be. In the presence of weak emperors, senile kings, and an aristocracy engaged by hunting or poetry, religion grew more powerful.

In Europe the pope claimed supreme power and suppressed kings and heretics with ever-vigilant vigor. In the Muslim world, the tottering Abbasid caliph ruled from Baghdad as both secular emperor and the sacred successor to Muhammad while lesser mullahs enforced the word of God in towns and villages across the land. The assassins of Alamut, a cult of particularly vicious Shiite fanatics in the mountains of Iran, plagued Muslims, Christians, and pagans alike, emerging regularly to kill any ruler who dared to criticize them or refused to pay their extortionary demands for tribute.

The prevalence of religion had generated neither peace nor prosperity. As each sect consolidated power within its home area, it struggled against rival faiths each asserting sole ownership of the word of God on Earth. Followers of a trio of militant movements—Christianity, Buddhism, and the growing new faith of Islam—fought bitterly against one another in an effort to dominate the world. Some sects of Buddhist monks cultivated martial arts while Christians and Muslims organized large sacred militias dedicated to spreading the word of their God and creating the kingdom of God on Earth. Rival religions controlled history and claimed authority over the future. Each one offered an array of techniques and rituals guaranteed to produce eternal peace, claiming exclusive control of the path to spiritual salvation.

Rather than creating a spiritual utopia of art, compassion, and beauty, religion had saturated the world with resentment and hate. History’s earlier wars had been fought mostly for the simple human emotions of lust and greed, but the rise of the world religions had encouraged the hatred and killing of innocent people for no greater reason than that they worshipped God in another way. Religiously motivated or justified warfare posed the greatest threat to world peace and social stability. Wars in the name of competing gods now surpassed avarice, envy, and ethnicity as a source of violence, and these gods proved insatiable. As soon as one conflict subsided, people of faith easily invented another excuse to make war against nonbelievers, pagans, and heretics, or whatever they called people of other religions. In the name of a peaceful and compassionate God, the religiously devout found it easy to torture, rob, beat, blind, rape, burn, drown, starve, dismember, or enslave anyone. From infanticide to genocide, no punishment was too great or too evil when directed against someone perceived as a danger to the true religion. Such killing was not a sin; it became a sacred duty, a sacrament that promised the killer eternal rewards.

Suddenly, amid the spiritual chaos and cruelty of the thirteenth century, a fierce army mounted on shaggy horses descended from the icy northern horizon and charged into the temples, mosques, monasteries, forts, palaces, and cathedrals of the world. Never had an army moved so fast across continents. With every man mounted on a horse and no foot soldiers or baggage train to slow them, the Mongols could ride for days, changing mounts as they went, and, when needed, sleeping and eating in the saddle without pausing to make camp or build a fire. The Mongol horde descended on warring nations, proclaiming itself the punishment of God and claiming to have been sent to break the power of ruling monarchs, harness them to the service of humankind, and restore the Will of Heaven and the Order of God.

Heaven had sent many messengers to Earth: Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Zoroaster, Mani, Muhammad, and many lesser prophets. Scriptures in Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and other now lost languages were received with an initial burst of enthusiasm and then quickly succumbed to abuse and neglect. Genghis Khan did not deliver fresh scriptures from heaven or establish a new church. He believed that heaven had already sent enough scriptures, and all people basically knew right from wrong. Instead, he set about to discipline wayward nations and guide existing religions to fulfill their mission of helping humanity in obedience to the Order of God. Persuasion, flattery, and bribery were not enough to convince the established religious authorities and the rulers who held power in their name. He would bring them back by force, with the crack of the whip, and herd them back onto the moral path.

Genghis Khan valued the moral truths he found in all of the religions he encountered. It was the men who claimed and often abused their religious authority whom he mistrusted. He held the wrongdoers accountable for their deeds, executed some and banned others. To the general populace he promised freedom and financial support if they would fulfill their duties to society and to heaven.

Genghis Khan’s army was initially composed exclusively of Mongols, but it quickly became a truly international conglomerate. Armenian, Georgian, Kipchak, and Ossetian units descended from the Caucasus Mountains. Turks from dozens of different ethnic tribes joined from Central Asia. Chinese engineers assembled horrific war machines with which to batter the city walls and to rechannel whole rivers while their doctors bandaged the wounded. Slavs were brought from Russia, miners from Saxony, and even one English noble defected to join the global army. An Arab writer described the army as filling the sky like a swarm of locusts.⁵ After his death, Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons continued their wars targeting corrupt religious and political institutions. In 1257, after crushing the Cult of Assassins, demolishing their heavily fortified mountain hideout in Syria, and sending their leader to Mongolia for execution, the Mongols rode toward Baghdad to deal with the caliph.

The conquest of Baghdad in 1258 ended the long and already tarnished Golden Age of the Arabs, but the Mongol horsemen did not stop. They continued to expand their empire throughout the rest of the century. They destroyed the cultural center of the Orthodox Slavic world with the destruction of Kiev and its great cathedral. They swallowed Tibet without a struggle and defeated the skilled fighting monks of Korea. On the battlefields of Hungary and Poland, they permanently broke the power of the Christian military orders of religious knights who had sworn to give their fortune and life to the church. The Mongols invited them to fulfill their promise and killed their leader, Duke Henry the Pious of Silesia. The remaining prisoners were sent off to the mines of Siberia and the mountains of Kazakhstan.

The Mongols swept up to Damascus, accepted the submission of the Christian Crusader Bohemond VI, who was the prince of Antioch and count of Tripoli, and pushed west as far as the Palestinian lands of Gaza on the edge of Egypt. In the years after, they took southern China and reached into Southeast Asia, easily conquering the Bai kingdom of Dali, where the kings customarily abdicated their earthly powers to become Buddhist monks. They also took Pagan in Burma, where the kings lavished riches on massive pagodas instead of building defenses.⁶

The Mongols targeted religious centers both because they protected rival authorities and because they contained great piles of treasure. They looted the temples and religious monuments, seized objects of gold and silver to be cut up or melted down for new uses, took everything of value and destroyed much of what remained. From the cathedral of Kiev to the mosques of Baghdad, the Mongols treated religious buildings no differently from opulent palaces or daily markets. They put the great stores of religious wealth back into commercial circulation. This wealth became the first global economic stimulus as they revitalized the Silk Route, opened an international network of hostels and banks for merchants to travel freely, suppressed bandits and pirates, built bridges, cleared harbors, lowered taxes, and tried to introduce a global paper currency system. Thousands of merchants, including Marco Polo and his father and uncle, soon trod the Mongols’ routes from Europe to Asia and back home again. By breaking the grip of fanatical religions, they opened an era of unprecedented global prosperity.

“By Virtue of God,” proclaimed Genghis Khan’s grandson Guyuk, “from the rising of the sun to its setting, all realms have been granted to us. Without the Order of God, how could anyone do anything?”⁷ Mongke Khan, another grandson of Genghis Khan and successor to his cousin Guyuk, told King Louis IX of France, “This is the order of Eternal God: In heaven there is none but one eternal God, over the Earth let there not be but one lord and master Genghis Khan.” The Mongols believed that God spoke through those to whom he gave power, and that he had entrusted Genghis Khan with the task of ensuring “happiness and peace from sunrise to sunset.”⁸

To his enemies and their descendants through the centuries, Genghis Khan has remained the enemy of God. After his death the outside world remembered only the conquests and destruction without the achievements. His mighty armies have been depicted in books, plays, songs, and films, but their victories have usually been portrayed as needless and mindless destruction with rivers of blood, bonfires of books, sacks of ears, and pyramids of heads. If Genghis Khan had any role at all to play in history, it was only as a punishment inflicted by heaven. He was the Whip of God.

In contrast to this foreign perception, the Mongols have always seen Genghis Khan as their spiritual guide and religious teacher, comparable to Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad. Mongke Khan referred to him not only as the founder of the Mongol nation but as “Genghis Khan, sweet and venerable son of God.”⁹ God’s commandment was simple: every nation must obey the Mongols. Only through submission, explained the Mongol queen Oghul Ghaimish in a letter to Louis IX, will there be peace on Earth for “those who walk on all fours” and for “those who walk on two legs.”¹⁰

Much of what we know about Genghis Khan’s early life comes from a document known as The Secret History of the Mongols, written two years after his death. Someone, probably the chief Mongol judge Shigi-Khutukhu, gathered all the information that he could find about the man who had created their nation. Genghis Khan’s words held a certain power because he had conquered the world, and so it was thought that the person who controlled his words might harness that magic. The resulting text was a closely guarded treasure of mythic power. It was soon locked away. The manuscript belonged to the royal family, but they guarded it jealously, often even from one another, allowing copies to be made only when necessary, such as to accompany one of them on the conquest of a new land. The document was written in a code that few people understood, and in time it was lost, only to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century and finally decoded in the twentieth.

Possession of a copy of the Secret History became a source of power as the manuscript was thought to channel the spirit of Genghis Khan, inspiring fear among its owner’s rivals and foreign enemies. The owner could pull out a saying or story as needed to support whatever strategy he might wish to pursue at the moment, and only distant members of the family lucky enough to own one of the few other copies could challenge it. Telling the difference between a true saying and one composed at the spur of the moment became increasingly difficult. The few circulating copies may never have been identical, and over time they were deliberately altered further, as inconvenient sections were lost and new pages added as the contingencies of politics demanded.

These various versions formed the basis for overlapping texts which eventually became known by a number of different titles including Sheng-wu ch’in-cheng lu (Description of the Personal Campaigns of the Holy Warrior) in China, and The Secret History of the Mongols in Mongolia. (In the Ilkhanate of Persia it was referred to as the Altan Debter, a golden book or registry.) In general, the words, wisdom, laws, and teaching of Genghis Khan became known collectively by variations on the Mongol word yasa, meaning edict, order, or law, as in Ikh Yasa, Yasa-nama, yasa-yi-buzurg, as-Si-yasa, yasaq, zasag, and jasaq.

After Genghis Khan left Mongolia and began his conquests, he became the focus of much attention, and thus we have early chronicles about him in Chinese, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian, offering the contrasting views of Muslims, Christians, Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, and Jews. Rarely in prior history had one person been the focus of so much attention from such markedly different cultural perspectives.

After conquering his enemies, looting their cities, and taking control of their markets, Genghis Khan considered how well their actions matched their stated beliefs. Religious authorities accustomed to issuing verdicts of guilt or innocence and dispensing judgments of life or death now found themselves and their faith on trial by a nonbeliever. “You have committed great sins,” Genghis Khan shouted at the newly conquered leaders of Bukhara. “The great ones among you have committed these sins,” he explained. “If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”¹¹

He paused for the interpreters to translate what he had said, and then he told the people about his “intimate communication” with God “and the authority he had by Inspiration received from him to govern all the Kingdoms of the Earth.”¹² Just as he held the defeated leaders accountable for misguiding their society, he held religious leaders responsible for their actions and the behavior of their followers. He showed little interest in judging the accuracy of scriptures, the authenticity of prophets, or what anyone claimed to believe. He judged them simply by their deeds.

Genghis Khan seemed unaware of or uninterested in how he compared with other conquerors. He treated his triumphant superiority as a burdensome duty more than an honor. He was fulfilling the role placed on him by fate; he was following his duty to his people. Lingering in the pleasant climate of Afghanistan, his attention strayed from the details of battles which he now easily won by force of habit, almost without thinking. He enjoyed the higher altitude and crisper climate of the mountain valleys and fertile plains of Afghanistan, and his attention turned away from the past and present to focus on the future. What would happen when he was gone? What was to become of his family? His Mongol people? His great empire?

Genghis Khan freely admitted that he had few outstanding qualities, but he had an ability to find and to inspire the best talent around him. He had never been as strong a warrior as his brother Khasar, as good a strategist as his general Subodei, as decisive as his wife Borte, or as steadfast as his mother Hoelun. Yet he recognized their outstanding traits and incorporated them into himself. His closest advisers were his fellow Mongols, particularly his wives and generals, but as he moved beyond the Mongolian steppe and into the sedentary lands of the south, he quickly applied the same technique of seeking out those with skills. After conquering each city, he ordered a complete census of its people and resources, including their skills. Thus, he incorporated engineers, clerks, and physicians from China, and accountants, auditors, and metalsmiths from the Muslim countries.

In his old age in Afghanistan, clearly aware that the end of life was approaching, he wanted to talk with learned men and hear ideas from the most educated minds of civilization. He summoned the best Muslim and Chinese scholars to meet with him. He beckoned mullahs from his newly conquered territory and Taoist priests all the way from their tranquil monasteries in China to the still-smoldering cities of Afghanistan to hear about their religion and ask what advice they had to offer.

Genghis Khan initially viewed the religious institutions of the sedentary civilizations with deep skepticism. He suspected that the great religions with their temples, wealth, and pageantry might be frauds. Yet, he wanted to hear what the leaders of these strange institutions had to say. The chronicler Bar Hebraeus, a prolific thirteenth-century scholar, wrote that Genghis Khan had summoned “the lords of wisdom” to read from their sacred books in the various languages and to discuss their religion and debate with one another in his presence.¹³ Monks, priests, astrologers, magicians, prophets, alchemists, soothsayers, sages, fortune tellers, and charlatans traveled for months from across the widest rivers, over the tallest mountains, and beyond distant borders to search out his nomadic camp.

One at a time, he talked with these self-proclaimed men of God, listened to their teachings, questioned their practices, examined their achievements, and tested their morals. He scrutinized each religion known in his empire—Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Manichaeism, Confucianism, and smaller branches from the world tree of faith. He campaigned by day, and the sages met with him during the evening hours to discuss Taoist and Muslim theology, life’s meaning, fate, the relationship of heaven to Earth, and the roles of war, violence, peace, and law in human affairs. Genghis Khan was a warrior pursuing a lifelong battle for power and dominance, but he was also a man struggling for spiritual understanding. The bloody battlefields of Afghanistan served as a backdrop for one of history’s strangest set of philosophical debates, whose effects reverberate in seen and unseen ways throughout the world today.

The quest began many years earlier on Mongolia’s most sacred mountain, Burkhan Khaldun.