5

Messenger of Light

In the nearly twenty-five years he spent consolidating the steppe tribes and bringing them under his leadership, Temujin had encountered no khan worthy of imitation, no successful ideal to follow, no contemporary heroes who could compare with the near mythical glory of the ancient Hun and Turkic khans. He had seen little to emulate in the courts of Ong Khan and Tayang Khan, but the one thing that had caught his attention was the importance of writing. It enshrined laws and seemed to offer both a connection to the past and the promise of future recognition. Led by the desire to create a writing system for his emerging nation, Temujin ended up connecting the Mongols to one of the most unusual cultural and religious traditions in the world. It would play a crucial role in the political and spiritual orientation of his future empire.

Modern Uighurs live in western China, are Muslims, and write their language in a script derived from Arabic; but much earlier the Uighurs had lived in Mongolia, had followed the Manichaean religion, and had written in an alphabet derived from ancient Syriac. They had presided over the third and final Turkic empire on the steppe, from 744 until their defeat and flight to China in 840. Unlike the purely nomadic Mongols, the Uighurs had built cities on the edge of the steppe and introduced agriculture in the river valleys, while never abandoning the long-standing practice of herding. By 1204, when Temujin acquired their former territory from the Naiman, their cities were little more than ruins, but Uighur civilization lived on, preserved by those who had chosen not to flee after the ravaging of their land, and by their written language. The abandoned ruins of the former Uighur capital at Kharbalgas, on the Orkhon River, were at once majestic and mysterious. The first Hun Empire had originated here, and later it was where the Turks had built their first steppe city.

Though small compared with cities in China, the Uighur city nonetheless accommodated the full array of cosmopolitan life, with a temple, palace, citadel, monastery, and market as well as a massive city wall and monumental gates. The Uighurs dug irrigation ditches, planted gardens and orchards, built warehouses, and worked to turn the inhospitable terrain of the icy plateau into agricultural land extending for a month’s walk in every direction. Whereas the prior Turkic Empire had sought to shut out all foreign influence, the Uighurs forged a strong diplomatic and military alliance with the Tang dynasty of China. The Chinese emperor recognized their unique military skills, which he credited to their upbringing in the harsh Mongolian climate: “Severe frost reveals the strongest pine; harsh wind reveals the toughest grass.”¹

Not wanting to depend solely on an alliance with one foreign power, the Uighurs vigorously pursued close commercial connections with the Sogdians, descendants of the ancient Persians who now lived and traded around the city of Samarkand in what is today Uzbekistan. The Sogdians once controlled a great empire in Central Asia, and had sent caravans into China and all along the Silk Route to Constantinople long before the birth of Christ. The Sogdians had been conquered by Alexander the Great in 327 BC and thereafter incorporated Greek words, beliefs, and philosophy into their culture.² They blended Hellenic culture with Persian traditions and Indian influences and transported their sophisticated hybrid to the Mongolian steppe. Through the centuries, they had been stripped of most of their political power, but they had endured as an ethnic group of merchants operating an elaborate mercantile network connecting China and Central Asia through a string of oases and routes leading south to India and west to the Middle East. While China had a fully developed civilization, with everything from an army and royal courts to manufacturing and massive engineering projects, the Sogdians were a remnant of a civilization with few institutions of state and no nation to call their own.

For centuries, the Sogdians had trudged back and forth across the desert with their camel caravans. “Then come the merchants,” wrote an eleventh-century Turkic observer, “they never rest from trading and seeking a profit.” Despite the implicit criticism, he quickly went on to acknowledge their value: “They provide all sorts of silken stuffs, and all the world’s rare and wondrous things. . . . If there were no merchants roaming the world, when could you ever wear a black sable lining? If the China caravan ceased to raise dust on the roads, how could these countless kinds of silks arrive? If the merchants did not travel around the world, who could ever see a string of pearls?”³

The Chinese maintained a harsher, and much more suspicious, perspective on the Sogdians, particularly the merchants who were their rivals, and resented their constant search for goods of the highest quality at the lowest price. “Sogdian children get rock sugar in their mouth at birth,” wrote one Chinese critic, “so that when they grow up they can talk sweet.” They were similarly inculcated to a life of greed: “Glue is pasted in their palms so that money received would never leave their hands.”⁴

Despite these objections, the Sogdians were acknowledged by their critics to be highly literate as well as numerate, and they had produced an ancient and sophisticated culture, literature, and religion. “They roam the world for a living, while they keep mind and heart devoted to God,” wrote a Muslim observer.⁵ The pious Sogdian merchants also acted as missionaries, spreading their faith as they traveled.

Through their contact with many different religions, the Sogdians followed varied faiths and maintained commercial ties with all of them, but most adhered to what they called the Religion of Light; history has called them Manichaeans after the name of their prophet, Mani. Today in English and many other languages, Manichaean is a derogatory word, referring to a narrow-minded division of the world into good and evil. The name is generally applied as an insult to people with a simple vision of right and wrong, and is closely related to Machiavellian, with which it is sometimes confused. Recently it has been commonly applied to religious fundamentalists of all types and to Muslim terrorists in particular as well as loosely to any type of political, religious, or business activity deemed unscrupulous, devious, or evil. Yet originally, the Manichaeans were a vibrant, albeit highly unusual religion.

Mani was born in the third century near Baghdad to a Persian family belonging to a small Jewish sect that practiced baptism. He received his first prophetic vision as a child and wrote several books of scriptures, which survive in some long but incomplete texts as well as numerous fragments. Dissatisfied with the religion of his birth, Mani sought to combine the major religions around him into one. He believed that God first appeared in human form in Persia as the prophet Zoroaster, was reborn as the Buddha in India and Jesus in Israel before finally taking the form of Mani. His followers worshipped all of these divine incarnations and believed that the divine spirit appeared in different lands to teach in various languages. In addition to combining elements from India, Persia, and Israel, Mani considered the teachings of Greek philosophers to be divinely inspired.

Mani presented his philosophy in the Shabuhragan, the Book of the Two Principles, the only work he wrote in Middle Persian. Although he dedicated the book to the Sassanid Persian shah Shapur I, his teachings did not succeed in converting the shah, and his creed, while popular, never became an official state religion in Iran. He wrote his other works in Syriac, a language closely related to Hebrew and to Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

According to Mani, the universe originally consisted of pure light, spirit, and wisdom. All that was good was set apart from the material world of darkness and evil, but evil managed to seduce light and the two became mixed. Everything spiritual was good and part of the world of light; everything material, including the human body, was wicked and part of the world of darkness. Mani taught his followers to separate the divine spirit within them from the darkness of the material world. His goal was to allow humanity to reenter the light by abandoning earthly desire, including sex and the eating of meat. His was a harsh and unequivocal portrait of a world in which evil is personified as a malevolent spirit that “scorches, he destroys . . . and he terrifies. He flies on wings of air. He swims with fins as in water. And he crawls like a being of Darkness. . . . Poisonous springs gush from him, and he exhales fog; his teeth are like daggers.”⁶

Although Persia boasted a history of religious tolerance in long-ago epochs such as the rule of Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC, by the time of Mani, the religion of Zoroaster dominated and its leaders recognized Mani as a major threat. The Zoroastrian priests urged Shah Shapur to stamp out Mani and his heresy. The shah attempted to comply, declaring Mani and his teachings “useless and pernicious,” chaining him up for nearly a month and then executing him just before springtime of the year 274.⁷

Mani and his followers had sought to unite all religions; instead, they incurred the fury of the older faiths, as the leaders of each religion portrayed their beliefs and practices as totally comprehensive and perfect and therefore not needing to be augmented by foreign ideas. A ninth-century Arab chronicler denounced the Religion of Light as “even worse than Christianity.”⁸ Dislike turned to persecution at the beginning of the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Diocletian outlawed the followers of Mani completely. “We order that the authors and leaders of these sects be subject to severe punishment,” he wrote in his decree of March 31, 302. Manichaean worshippers “together with their abominable writings” were condemned to be “burnt in the flames.”⁹ This repression intensified in the fifth century when the Manichaean Augustine of Hippo denounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Augustine wrote vehement theological condemnations of the Religion of Light and charged its adherents with immorality. Although Augustine did not go so far as to call for a crusade against them, the newly powerful Christian hierarchy quickly turned his philosophical disagreement and charges of crime into grounds for vicious persecution.

And yet each round of martyrdom caused the fleeing Manichaeans to spread their ideas ever farther, as they were driven out of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Their faith spread throughout Asia all the way to India and across China, where they sometimes were absorbed into other religions and even when tolerated often received scorn, as in the Chinese description of them as disgusting “vegetarian demon worshippers.”¹⁰ Their final refuge was on the Mongolian steppe in Kharbalgas, one of the most remote cities on the continent. Here at last they found support among the Uighurs, and for the first time in their long history, a government not only tolerated their presence but also accepted them as the official religion of the court and nation.

By the time Temujin was born, the Manichaean religion had been circulating on the steppes for more than four centuries. While the nomads never followed Manichaean restrictions regarding meat and sex, many of the ideas about light, the sun, and water had so saturated traditional culture that it was nearly impossible to ascertain which ideas originated where. Manichaean cosmology and theology blended seamlessly with traditional steppe spirituality. Like the Huns before them and the Mongols after them, the Uighur nomads had a profound spiritual connection to light. Dawn is the most sacred moment of the day. The sun rising over the expansive and nearly treeless and cloudless steppe casts a special light across the land as it reflects off small patches of ice or snow in the winter and makes the grass shimmer like gold in the summer. The daily miracle of warmth and light is honored in hymns to the morning sun. Even today, Mongols frequently emerge from their warm gers at sunrise to stretch out their arms in respect and to sprinkle milk in the four directions in appreciation as they soak in the sun when its golden rays impart the purest blessing.

“Let the people accept the Religion of Light,” read the stone edict of the Uighur khan recorded in 763. The inscription commanded the Uighurs to abandon their barbarous customs so that they may “change into one people,” and “let the state where men kill be transformed into a kingdom where good works are encouraged.”¹¹ The Uighur khan proudly proclaimed that he had chosen this unusual foreign religion as a means to unite his people.

Once ensconced in power, these somewhat puritanical and intolerant Manichaeans destroyed many of the images and much of the shamanic paraphernalia revered by the Uighurs.¹² While they had incorporated older classical religions and Greek philosophy, they had no room for the animistic practices of the steppes. The traditional family worship of the fire under control of the elder women had to compete with new ideas of fire worship coming from Zoroastrian practices also introduced from Persia by Sogdian merchants. The Manichaeans explained their religion using precisely the same words that the Turkic tribes had been using for centuries: God was Tengri, and now to this they added the name of the old Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, which they eventually pronounced in Mongolian as Qor-Muzda or Khormusta.

While most religions depend largely on a single sacred language—such as Sanskrit, Hebrew, or Arabic—the Religion of Light taught that wisdom came at different times in different languages. “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind, by the messenger called Buddha to India, in another by Zoroaster to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West,” proclaimed Mani in his sacred script. “Thereupon this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age, through me, Mani, messenger of the God of truth to Babylon.” Mani believed that worshipping in different languages was as important as being able to sing songs with more than one note.¹³ “The religions of the ancients were in one land and one language,” he said, “but my religion is such that it will be manifest in all lands and in all languages and will be taught in distant lands.”¹⁴

In this newly introduced worldview, water, wind, and light constituted the primary substances of life. The Manichaeans borrowed an ancient Babylonian idea that the earthly sphere was the “ocean of water” and the heavenly was the “ocean of light,” where the God of Knowledge lived.¹⁵ The Uighurs commonly referred to their religion as the World Ocean—Thalassa in Greek, Samudra in Sanskrit, Tengis in Turkic, and Dalai in Mongolian—as it combined the rivers of all prior religions into one great sea. In a deliberately synergetic effort to unite all religions of the world, the Uighurs compared their Manichaean beliefs to the great World Ocean into which all rivers or knowledge flow.¹⁶ The World Ocean was believed to represent purity, knowledge, power, and peace, and actual treasures from the ocean, such as pearls and coral, were thought to embody the supernatural power of the ocean itself.

Despite the theological appeal of their teachings, Manichaean monks and nuns maintained a bizarre style of life. They strove to eat only food that they designated as filled with light. Water in flowing rivers and streams sparkled with light that passed into the person drinking it, but well water came from deep within the earth and held only darkness, so they argued that humans should avoid drinking it. Green plants, fruits, and vegetables grown above the ground absorbed light, but roots and tubers grown beneath the ground had none and should thus be shunned. They ate fruits, vegetables, and the leaves of plants, but avoided onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, and other underground parts. They refused to eat meat because it did not grow in the sunshine and therefore had no light to offer. They liked grapes but shunned wine because the light was pressed out of the grapes to create wine. The Manichaeans preferred green and yellow vegetables, which they considered to be the ones with the most light. They also ate seeds. In keeping with their belief that a plant has a soul, they thought that seeds contained millions of souls. Consuming these souls filled the person with light and helped to concentrate the souls together and thus move toward the ultimate concentration of all souls in one light-filled entity.

The Manichaean religion of the Uighurs was cloaked in mystery and ceremony. The priests told magical stories of gods and men in faraway places. Where Jesus spoke in parables, Mani trafficked in veiled allusions. One of his scriptures quotes Jesus, who in the Uighur tradition was called Jesus Burkhan, as saying that to “save you from death and destruction . . . I shall give you what you have not seen with the eye, have not heard with the ears and have not touched with the hand.”¹⁷ Only the highest officials claimed a full understanding of the religion and its guarded rituals. Because of their emphasis on secrecy, the Manichaeans were known as Gnostics, from the Greek gnosis, for knowledge, which became bilig in Uighur and Mongolian.¹⁸

The Religion of Light combined practices and ideas from other religions, but it strictly forbade some important ones such as the Christian rite of baptism, the Jewish ritual of circumcision, and the Buddhist rite of cremation. Despite the demand for celibacy, the Manichaeans did not approve of castration as practiced voluntarily by some Christians or imposed as punishment by others to create eunuchs as servants.

Mani also forbade the ritual bathing prescribed by Hinduism. He taught that entering any body of water was a sin, because it polluted the living water on which all life depended. Fire can purify itself and all that it touches, but water is vulnerable and can be easily polluted. In a document known as the Cologne Manichaean Codex, the story is told of a man about to enter a river to wash himself who is rebuked by the soul of the water, which asks him, “Is it not enough that your animals injure me, but do you yourself also mistreat me without reason and profane my waters?” The man replies, “Fornication, defilement, and impurity of the world are thrown into you and you do not refuse them, but are you grieved with me?” The water reminds the man that he is supposed to be righteous and above such foul acts. Another time he is admonished that people and the water are one, and what we do to one drop of water we do to the whole ocean.¹⁹

Only members of the religious elect had to abide by the strict rules of chastity and vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and fermented foods, and the prohibition of roots and tubers or parts of plants cultivated underground, where there was no light. These rules did not apply to aristocrats or to the common people.

The elect dressed in white robes and wore white turbans to show their purity; white thus became the symbolic color of their religion. By contrast, Buddhism became known as the Yellow Religion and Christianity as the Black Religion because of the color of the robes worn by their priests. Muslims were identified as people of the turban. The white robes of the Manichaean priests indicated that they performed no type of work that involved dirt. Unlike shamans, who participated actively in daily life, Manichaean priests formed a class apart from the ordinary people. Later, when Temujin formed his own government, he appointed shamans in similar white robes as his spiritual counselors.²⁰

The priests’ authority over the Uighur populace came not just from the power of their ideas and the appeal of their public rituals but also from their power to tax. In addition to the annual tribute to the khan, used to fund the state and military, the people now had to pay a new tax called the “soul service” specifically for the operation of the monasteries and care of the clergy. To enforce compliance, the Uighur khan revived an ancient steppe military tradition, organizing the people into units of ten. He further ordered that one person out of every group had to attend to the spiritual welfare and proper conduct of the others.²¹ The soul monitor served as a spiritual teacher, ideological police, and religious tax collector, forcing people to pay required alms and fees to the church and reporting on sins and misdeeds.²²

Temujin ultimately rejected the idea of a religious tax, but he adopted the underlying social principle, organizing his military into units of ten and putting one man in charge of each unit. These tens were in turn organized into larger units of one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand, giving the Mongol army a precise decimal organization. Animals were also counted in clusters. To count sheep, cows, goats, horses, yaks, and camels separately was too cumbersome, so the Mongols came up with a simple unit based on the horse. Five goats or sheep equaled one horse. Five cows or yaks counted as four horses, and four camels as five horses. Thus, all the animals could be combined and reduced to one number.

The Uighurs were by one account “strong and invincible” because “the differences between the Princes and the people were not very great.”²³ But Mani believed in the existence of a superior elite, and he deliberately omitted references to the egalitarian ideas in the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, and other religious leaders. He taught that a small minority, the elect, had superior qualities to the masses, and he believed this small superior group should rule the others. As the Uighur state grew powerful and its leaders became more involved with the Manichaean religion, elite families yielded to the temptations of this philosophy that justified, in their opinion, whatever they wanted. Confusion over the real meaning of the scriptures (in part deliberately obscure) offered them an excuse to indulge themselves in ways that Mani had never intended.

The Uighur ruler built splendid palaces filled with imported luxuries, fine clothes, sweet foods, coral, and turquoise. “The women had powder, color for their eyebrows, and clothes decorated with embroidery.”²⁴ Such luxuries were “made in China,” and their import created a decisive “break with barbarian customs.”²⁵

As history affirms, decadent societies can persist for a long time until some unexpected incident causes their demise. That fate befell the Uighurs in the deadly winter of 839, when a severe blizzard resulted in mass starvation of the animals—a phenomenon known as the “white famine.” Disaster for one is often opportunity for another. With the Uighurs temporarily impaired by the famine, the Kirgiz from the Yenisei River in Siberia poured into Mongolia by the tens of thousands to pillage. The Kirgiz killed the Uighur khan and his family, and for more than five years they ravaged the land, looted the temples, burned the cities, stole the animals, and enslaved the people.

At the end of their wave of destruction, the Kirgiz did not create a new empire, rebuild the city, or install another dynasty. Instead, they began to drift away from the devastated nation, taking with them whatever they wanted and searching for new lands to plunder. As the ash and dust settled over the burned-out temples and palaces, a few survivors crawled out of the ruins, abandoned their former cities, and wandered out into the steppe to find a new life. Some fled south across the Gobi to Turpan, Hami, and other oases along the Silk Route in western China, where their Uighur descendants remain today. Others joined the migrating nomads, abandoned their urban civilization, and followed the herding life that had flourished for millennia.

Not all Uighurs fled, and not every Kirgiz moved on. Some of them remained behind to form new tribes on the steppe. Their descendants sometimes returned to the site of the old cities to graze their goats and horses among the ruins, lean against the walls of the old temple, or climb atop the ruined mound of the former citadel to look out over the steppe in the hopes of spotting a missing animal or friendly ger. As Manichaean Uighurs joined other tribes, they enriched their new neighbors’ traditional animistic beliefs by adding a new layer of spiritual practices.

Temujin understood one clear message from the Uighur civilization: for an empire to become successful, it needed a system of writing. He recognized that the first step in transforming his band of nomadic warriors and their followers into a nation was to introduce writing like the Chinese and the Turkic empires, but at first, it was not clear which type of writing he should adopt. Although the Mongolian language was closely related to Turkish in grammar and vocabulary, the original practice of writing with runes had already fallen out of fashion. Sanskrit, also used on some stones, was too remote and incomprehensible. Chinese characters required extensive familiarity with the Chinese way of life and thought, making them difficult to adapt to other languages. Temujin’s highly unusual choice of a script proved to be one of the most important and enduring ways in which he shaped the future culture of his emerging empire.

Suddenly, by one command, Mongolian became a written language. The Mongols called their new form of writing Uighur script because the clerks spoke the Uighur language, but they were actually connecting themselves to a wealth of past civilizations. Uighur writing was derived from the Sogdian alphabet, based on ancient Syriac and related to Aramaic as well as to Hebrew and Arabic, which were written from right to left. To further complicate things, the Uighurs and Mongols turned the alphabet vertically, writing their sentences from top to bottom in the Chinese style. Their writing system drew on roots from Asia to Europe, and in this way it brought a cosmopolitan flair to steppe life. The Chinese ambassador Chao Hung from the Sung court described it as resembling Chinese musical notes for the flute.²⁶

“Chinggis Khaan” in Mongol script.

This hybrid script became the Mongols’ new window on the world and a prized link to history. Unlike the Sky Turks’ attempt to reject foreign influences, the Uighurs had welcomed them, but they picked precisely which foreign elements to incorporate into their culture. Temujin recognized in the Uighurs the kind of society he wished to make for the Mongols. But he wanted his empire to be larger and longer lasting. He set out to learn the secrets of Uighur success and, just as important, the lessons taught by their failures.

In 1204, two years before the official founding of the Mongol nation, Temujin adopted a clerk by the name of Tata Tonga from the Naiman court and instructed him to adapt the Uighur alphabet to the Mongolian language.²⁷ Tata Tonga recruited other scribes into the thus-far quite small Mongol court and began tutorials for the younger men, including Temujin’s sons and his adopted Tatar brother Shigi-Khutukhu. These seemingly small steps were to have profound ramifications in the coming decades as the clique around Temujin transformed into an imperial court. With each future victory on the battlefield, the number of scribes increased as men literate in other languages and cultural traditions were added to the administration. They grew from a simple corps of clerks into language schools that gathered clusters of intellectuals trained in philosophy and literature from rival religions and contrasting intellectual traditions. From this meager beginning would emerge a group of steppe scholars, a sort of new intelligentsia that would become increasingly important in the decades ahead.

By choosing the Uighur script and the chancellery practices associated with it, Temujin accepted the world’s first and only Manichaean state as a model for his emerging nation and gave his formerly illiterate tribe access to the civilizations of the world. Juvaini wrote somewhat snidely that the Mongols “consider the Uighur language and script to be the height of knowledge and learning.”²⁸ The Uighurs may have been peripheral players on the world stage, but the Mongols suddenly enjoyed access to information about Sogdian business practices, Chinese philosophy, Turkish literature, Hebrew scriptures, Greek history, Hindu mathematics, Persian fairy tales, and the major precepts of the great religions.

The abundance and variety of new influences can be seen in some of the words introduced into the Mongolian language by means of the new script: crystal, sugar, candy, alcohol, steel, crown, dagger, soap, pomegranate, parrot, chess, diamond, emerald, book, bell, fig, and jewel.²⁹ The Uighur script also brought in new terms for dealing with the larger world and for creating a government with words such as sang, signifying a warehouse or storehouse but quickly expanded to mean treasury and finance. With the increased vocabulary came knowledge of a different way of life.

Temujin absorbed some Manichaean religious laws directly into his legal code, such as the protection of water. Both Christian and Muslim observers later expressed bewilderment and disgust at Mongol laws concerning water, particularly those forbidding the washing of people or clothes in rivers or lakes, but in reality these were simply imported from the Manichaean rules of the Uighur state.

The Uighur language and Manichaean teachings introduced a new worldview, particularly the notion of life as a perpetual war of light against darkness. Evil and good were separate and could not be combined any more than the sun could shine at night. Temujin began to see himself as an embodiment of the Will of Heaven, engaged in a constant struggle with those who would not submit to his will. People were either good because they sided with him and heaven, or evil because they opposed him and represented darkness.³⁰ His mission was to spread peace by subduing rebels and bringing them into submission.

The Uighurs provided the Mongols with a new ritual language for explaining the world, the law, and the state. Much of this language was incorporated into the Secret History, elevating the prose from tribal myth to official ideology clothed in metaphors of gold and light. Manichaeism offered a strong religious endorsement of the ruler, whose power was deemed to come directly from heaven, more specifically from the sun and the moon. Under traditional practice, the khan was the strongest man on the steppe, but now, burnished by Manichaean belief, he became “the beautiful, lovely, noble, luminous, valiant, sublime, mighty khan.”³¹ In one Manichaean hymn, the elect are told to “put on a bright garment and clothe yourself with light.” Only then can they deserve to rule and have God “place the diadem of kingship on your head.”³² This image of the man of light would eventually become a part of the glorification of Genghis Khan. In a story with direct Manichaean connections, it was said that one of his ancestors, Alan Goa, had been impregnated by a golden man riding a ray of light, and from this miraculous event, she prophesied that her descendants would “become the rulers of all.”³³

The Sogdians brought to Mongolia a sophisticated ideology of kingship based in part on Persian ideas but embodied most dramatically by Alexander the Great. They did not condemn Alexander as an invading menace or tyrant; they celebrated him as a hero. The Romance of Alexander and Aesop’s Fables were two of the earliest literary works translated into Mongolian using the new alphabet. Although Alexander ruled for only a brief period in the long history of the region, his kingdoms had a profound cultural impact with their blending of civilizations, languages, and ideas. Through Alexander, the Sogdians, Uighurs, and eventually the Mongols acquired a rich background in art, aesthetics, and philosophy, and a correspondingly expansive vocabulary.³⁴

Mani borrowed many of his ideas directly from Greek philosophy. His teachings regarding the spiritually superior class of the elect corresponded closely with Plato’s advocacy for rule by elite philosopher kings in the Republic. Plato described the guardians as “brought into this world to be rulers.”³⁵ Through their education and their determined effort to master themselves, they acquire the talent to rule others. Guardians were expected to abstain from the luxuries of the world and empty honors, things of importance only to those who prefer to live like pigs. They regarded justice as the greatest and most necessary of all things.³⁶ The Turkic and Mongol khans sought to portray themselves as wisdom-loving guardians of their people even before Temujin, but he embraced this identity with new scope and commitment.

Temujin’s struggle was more than an effort to enact his own individual fate; he was creating a nation and enjoyed the blessing of heaven in this endeavor. Mani himself had claimed aristocratic ancestry, and he attempted to win royal converts by offering a justification of the power of ruling monarchs. He and his followers wrote several books of advice to kings, explaining how to make decisions, conduct public rituals, and build support from the people and from heaven simultaneously. A strong army is necessary but not sufficient alone to create a strong nation, he advised. The duty of the ruler, he wrote, is to subject “his jewel-like, noble body to torture in the service of the kingdom, for the sake of religion within and the whole realm without.”³⁷

Manichaeans had introduced to the steppes a strong ideology of the state and rationale for the power of the ruler. They also provided a decisive explanation of the relationship between government and religion in their theory of the two principles: the inner law and the outer government.³⁸ Just as each individual had a soul, each state had a leader. The khan was the soul of the state. According to Mani, the khan reigns supreme over both the divine and the secular realms. He is “perfect in both types of the good.” He is master of both types of happiness, “of both sovereignties, of the body and the soul.”³⁹ He is “worthy of both kinds of bliss, of both kinds of life, of both kinds of dominion: the body and soul.”⁴⁰ The khan’s domain may have extended over the body and the soul, but matters of faith remained internal and personal, while external matters belonged to the government. Temujin adapted this idea to the steppe by designating personal problems as matters of the ger and public behavior as matters of the steppe.⁴¹

More important than the army for Manichaeans was the law, often called the pure law (arig nom). To follow their religion was to “walk the pure path.” They called their religion and God Nom Quti, combining the Greek word for law and the Turkic word for majesty. The Uighurs embraced this great emphasis on the law, drawn from both Greek and Manichaean traditions, and in time Temujin would too. Greek law, nomos, had a long philosophical and legal tradition, and the Uighurs thought of the law in the larger sense almost as a written scripture.⁴² The law was both natural and spiritual. The Mongols already had words for law, but they adopted the Greek term nom to designate books of divine law and spiritual morality.

For Manichaeans, the law of the khan was divine. Manichaeans viewed God as “king of the whole law” and the khan as “clothed by the majesty of the law.”⁴³ One of their hymns refers to God as “King of the Law, Jesus the Buddha!” and in another he is “all-wise King of Law, Mani the Buddha.”⁴⁴ He is perfect in both the spiritual and earthly realm. “Because he has established the law of the Burkhan, we are saved from sorrow and wretchedness.”⁴⁵

In Book IX of his Laws, Plato compared laws to stones that were necessary for the building of the state. Some are already in place when a ruler is born, but others must be gathered and added to the structure over time. In proclaiming new laws, the ruler is not so much creating them as finding them and using them for the appropriate purpose at the right time.

From the Uighurs and the Turks, Temujin acquired the simple idea that religion and the law could not be separated. What was right was sacred, what was holy was legal. The ruler could not rule without support from heaven, and to build that support his laws had to conform to the laws of Mother Earth and Father Sky.

The Mongols already recognized tor as the unwritten moral code of the universe, but nom added a new element by introducing written laws. All people were connected by the same tether like camels in a long caravan crossing the Gobi Desert. Temujin called this binding thread “the golden cord.”⁴⁶ It connected people to the golden stake, as the Mongols referred to the North Star. As long as they stayed connected, they could easily find the way to their goal, but if they broke that cord, they would drift and die alone.

When Temujin began to conquer the steppe tribes, his Mongols appeared to be so akin in religion and culture to the Uighurs and Sogdians that many foreigners simply called them Uighurs, Sogdians, or Manichaeans and did not recognize them as a different people with their own unique culture.⁴⁷ Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian of the fourteenth century, stated that the Mongols followed the religion of the fire-worshipping Magi of Persia and were Manichaeans.⁴⁸ The Uighurs called their priests bogu, using a Turkish term, but they were sometimes called by the older Zoroastrian name of magi. The distinction between Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism—two religions born in Persia, though bitter enemies—was often muddled.⁴⁹

The Mongolian word for shaman, boo, was derived from the Uighur bogu, which was applied to holy men in other tribes such as the Kereyid but not to Mongols until later.⁵⁰ The use of this same term for Manichaean priests and steppe shamans led Bar Hebraeus to write that the Mongols borrowed many of their religious ideas from the Uighurs, particularly the use of “enchanters” or shamans. He also accused them of sexual impropriety (as the Manichaeans were considered sexual deviants). He wrote that when in trance their “secret conversation with devils was not complete until after they had been defiled by other men, because the greater number of them were women-men.”⁵¹

Eventually the Manichaeans were cut out of Mongol history by most Christian, Muslim, and Chinese scholars. Centuries later when converting the Mongols to Buddhism, the Buddhist monks censored any mention of the hated religion. Yet, despite the monopoly that scholars maintained over written history, the people preserved these censored parts of history in their myths and tales.

Thus, a strange and intriguing Mongolian story connects Temujin to the prophet Mani in a supernatural figure known as Mani Khan, described in Mongolian prayers as having “a body of gold and silver.”⁵² The Prophet Mani preached vegetarianism and forbade the slaughter of animals, and Mani Khan became the protector of wild animals, “the lord of all beasts,” who has “tens of thousands of wild animals in his power.”

The contrast between the vegetarian Mani and the meat-loving Mongol hunters was addressed in a mythical account of how Temujin came to strike a bargain with Mani Khan. According to a legend, probably composed much later, he was hunting black sables, white foxes, and spotted snow leopards on the Bogd Khan Mountain when Mani Khan cast a heavy fog around him. As his horses were unable to find the path down the mountain, Temujin made camp and built a fire to cook the deer and antelope he had killed. A wizened old man with a wrinkled face and long beard appeared before Temujin. He introduced himself as Bayan Khan Mani, the Rich King Mani, and claimed that the animals here belonged to him—antelope, hare, deer, fox, tiger, panther, and others. “I offer a few of them to you,” he said to Temujin, but “please, save the life of the others.”

The old man’s request moved Temujin, who offered to let the wild animals from the mountain roam out on the steppes controlled by him. But in return he wanted enough meat to feed his people. Mani Khan agreed to always furnish Temujin with enough meat, skins, and fur to help his people to survive. Temujin asked that he not give the meat as a gift but instead allow the hunters to take it so that they might keep their skills sharp, and Mani Khan agreed. Having made this compact, old Mani Khan drove out many evil beings, including “fox-demons, riotous animals, yetis, and one-legged demons.” This is how the mountain became safe for humans and for animals. Mani Khan reigned thereafter as the spiritual protector of Mongol herders and hunters so long as they hunted justly.

When any society adopts a religion, they change it to conform to their own culture. And so the vegetarian prophet of the Manichaeans became the lord of the hunt for the Mongols.⁵³