6

Jesus of the Steppe

After Ong Khan fled and was killed by his Naiman enemies, Temujin installed Jaqa Gambu, Ong Khan’s younger brother and frequent rival, as a khan over the Kereyid. At first, he allowed the Kereyid a loose rein under their new khan. Although he had killed most of the aristocratic men who had fought against him, he recognized something unique and useful in their women. The Naiman and Kereyid women were some of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan women he had encountered. They were very much women of the steppe—riding horses, shooting arrows, drinking fermented mare’s milk, and participating fully in political life—but their Christian faith gave them knowledge of a world beyond the steppe and connected them to some of the most important centers of civilization.

Temujin arranged a double marriage between his family and that of Jaqa Gambu. He took the new khan’s daughter, Ibaqa Beki (Princess Ibaqa), as his wife, and married his youngest son, Tolui, to her sister Sorkhokhtani Beki.¹ He also took a Naiman princess, Toregene, from her Merkid husband and married her to his son Ogodei. Temujin and two of his sons now each had a Christian wife, and although no Mongol man of that era was known to have converted to Christianity, having a Christian wife became a popular practice over the next generation.

Temujin also arranged Christian marriages for some of his daughters. Alaqai Beki married the khan of the Onggut, another Christian tribe south of the Gobi in Inner Mongolia, who joined the Mongols voluntarily and remained loyal throughout his life. After his death she married several more times, and each husband seems to have been Christian. Chinese envoys reported that she frequently read religious scriptures, but the nature and language of the scriptures was unspecified.²

The appearance of Temujin’s daughters at this time is complicated, as no record survives of their birth or of their mothers. The Secret History originally contained information about them, but this section was cut out of the text sometime during the Mongol rule in China. Six women can be identified as Temujin’s daughters, but whether they were born to him and one of his official wives, were adopted, or bore some other relationship to him is unclear. During Temujin’s lifetime, these daughters occupied powerful positions, though their influence was eclipsed after his death by his daughters-in-law.³

For almost a century from the time of Temujin’s marriage until 1294, every Mongol khan either came from a Christian mother or had a Christian wife. The Secret History suggests that he favored Christian spouses for his children and deliberately chose them because he thought they would make good parents for his grandchildren. He showed keen interest in their skills, knowledge, and connections to the larger world, but dismissed their faith as the failed experiment of a defeated people.

Several Christian chronicles reported that Temujin’s wife was Christian and identified her variously as the daughter of the mystical King David or Prester John. According to one imaginative account, Temujin dreamed that a messenger had promised him power and success, and when he related this strange dream to his Christian wife, she recognized the messenger as Mar Denha, a Christian bishop. He reportedly summoned Mar Denha to interpret the dream, and the bishop told him that he could find success only by being “milder toward the Christians” and by giving them “many distinctions.” Thereafter, according to the French monk Vincent of Beauvais, Temujin favored the Christians and went so far as to ask a Christian monk to forecast the future and make divinations for him.⁴

Mar Denha was an important leader of the church in Baghdad, but he lived at the time of Marco Polo and had not yet been born when the Mongol nation was founded. No record of a religious conversation between Temujin and a Christian can in fact be found in any reliable source. Yet for most of his adult life he had an intimate association with Christians, first as the vassal to the Christian king Ong Khan and then as husband and father-in-law.

Christians lived on the steppe for more than two hundred years prior to the rise of the Mongols. When the Uighur Empire collapsed in the ninth century and most Uighurs fled into the desert oases of western China, Manichaeism lost its status as an official religion and withered into a small and irrelevant sect. In their new homeland, the Uighurs became Muslims, but the remaining steppe tribes in Mongolia wanted to be neither Muslims nor Buddhists, although both religions had dispatched missionaries to convert them. Instead, they chose a religion that had never sent a missionary to Mongolia. Manichaeans had recognized Jesus as one of their main prophets, and even after the fall of the Uighur state and the flight of the Manichaean priests, the people continued to honor him as a god. Unable to find new Manichaean priests, they sought out distant Christians who also worshipped Jesus.

The conversion of the steppe tribes from Manichaeism to Christianity occurred at the start of the eleventh century. In Baghdad in the year 1009, Catholicos Yohannan V, the patriarch of the Assyrian Christian Church of the East, received a strange letter from the metropolitan bishop Abdisho of Merv, a small city just over a thousand miles from Baghdad, in what is today eastern Turkmenistan but was then a part of Persia. The church in Persia considered itself the oldest of the Christian branches, closest to the teachings of Jesus in both language and spirit, but times were growing steadily more difficult for its followers. Cut off from other Christian communities, they battled oppression first by the Zoroastrian elite and then by the conquering Muslims, who suspected them of being covert allies of the Europeans.

The news in the metropolitan’s letter was as welcome as it was strange. He reported that in the far northern steppe, a warrior tribe of 200,000 had converted to Christianity. This was the Kereyid tribe, later under the leadership of Ong Khan. The bishop informed the patriarch that the conversion had occurred two years previously, around the year 1007, and he related a standard Christian narrative of a pagan king in distress being rescued by a Christian saint. According to Bar Hebraeus’s account, written two centuries later, the Kereyid khan went hunting in the mountains and was lost in a blizzard. An apparition said to be Saint Sergius offered to rescue the khan if he converted to Christianity, a religion that was known to him from itinerant merchants along the Silk Route. The khan agreed and followed the teachings of one of the Christian traders as best he understood them. After the rescue, the khan sent a request 2,500 miles away to Metropolitan Abdisho in Merv, requesting missionary priests to conduct a mass baptism of the entire tribe.

Christianity fit the Kereyid pastoral lifestyle. The steppe nomads understood the biblical references to shepherds and herding, appreciated the importance of law for a dispersed people operating in a harsh environment, and were themselves engaged in an eternal search for a better life. The Kereyid traveled with a portable shrine (or chapel) and priests, called rabban, or teacher (from the Hebrew rabbi), who foretold the future, read the stars, healed the sick, located lost animals, and controlled the weather, chanting their Christian scriptures in Syriac. Dressed in flowing robes, they performed elaborate rituals with incense and lamps and glorified the khan and his rule.

As part of their conversion, some aristocrats accepted Christian names such as Yahu (Jesus), Shiremun (Solomon), and Markos. They performed the Christian ritual of communion by drinking fermented mare’s milk in lieu of wine, though they did not take bread, which was largely unknown to them. Their communion continued the traditional steppe practice of combining ritual occasions with the drinking of fermented airag, and thus the Christian service frequently ended in drunkenness.

The Book of the Tower, written by an Arab Christian in the twelfth century, described the unusual form of Christianity among the steppe tribes. According to this account, the Kereyid worshipped in a tent and kept special mares nearby to produce the milk used for religious services. Prior to their absorption into Temujin’s camp, the Kereyid khan performed most of the religious services for his people himself, saying what prayers he knew, and placing the milk on the altar before the Bible and a cross.⁵ For this reason, some reports described the khan as a priest.

The steppe tribes appreciated Christianity because it permitted eating all types of meat and used alcohol in its religious services. Muslims and Jews abstained from pork, Hindus from beef, and Buddhists from all meat, and all but the Christians forbade or severely limited the consumption of alcohol. One aspect of the Christian liturgy, however, they found repulsive. During their religious service, the Christians claimed to be eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their prophet. In 1453, the year that Constantinople fell to the Turks, Nicholas of Cusa described an imaginary meeting with representatives of various faiths. The Tatar complained that the Christians “offer bread and wine and say, it is the body and blood of Christ. That they eat and drink this sacrifice after the oblation seems most abominable. They devour what they worship.”⁶

Catholics prayed with their hands folded in front of them, Orthodox with their hands together on their chest, but the steppe Christians raised their outstretched arms to the sky in the Mongol fashion. They threw a small piece of food into the air before eating and poured a drop of their drink onto the ground in the traditional Mongol offering to the sky and earth.⁷

The steppe Christians mounted no crusades against the Europeans and no jihad against Muslims. No one persecuted them as heretics or forced them to believe anything. They wandered freely in their land, with few constraints on their religion, not confined to special buildings or trapped in seemingly incessant arguments over the exact meaning of words. For arguably the first time in its thousand-year history, Christianity found nearly total freedom on the steppes of Mongolia.

The steppe Christians maintained a flexible attitude toward other beliefs. They used shamans to control the weather, important for both herding and warfare,⁸ and invoked whatever power they believed might work. Christianity served as an official religion, and Christians assisted with correspondence and translation as well as some healing, but Christianity operated not so much as a court religion as a religion attached to a court. Even the royal family turned to traditional spiritual healers and shamans when needed. Both Ong Khan and Tayang Khan of the Naiman had difficulty fathering sons; they both turned to shamans in order to secure the birth of an heir.⁹

The established church hierarchy in Baghdad maintained a persistent mistrust of the sincerity of the steppe Christians and their fidelity to the church. As one bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church wrote of Ong Khan, God rejected the Kereyid ruler, “but he was not rejected for nothing, but only after he had turned aside his heart from the fear of Christ His Lord, who had magnified him, and had taken a wife from a tribe of the Chinese people which was called Kara Kitai.” In so doing, Ong Khan “forsook the religion of his fathers and worshipped strange gods.”¹⁰

Temujin’s Christian wife did not come to his camp alone. Ibaqa Beki brought with her a contingent of two hundred retainers and vassals in addition to her household staff of cooks and servants.¹¹ Together they formed a floating community of Christians at the center of the Mongol court. The new Christian princesses and their numerous subjects brought the Mongols into a complex religious and commercial network that stretched across Europe and Asia and connected the Mongols to a long and tortured religious history that spanned across Russia, the Byzantine Empire, most of Europe, and many outposts in the Muslim world.

In addition to the princesses, Temujin recruited the help of many Christian clerks because of their strategic and bureaucratic skills. Some became officers and commanding generals, and Christians were among the first foreigners to hold office in Temujin’s government. The first and one of the most important Christian scribes, variously identified as Uighur, Kereyid, or Onggut, joined him by 1202. He was called Chinqai, from the Chinese Zhenhai, meaning True Ocean. Through him, Temujin strengthened the Uighur model of civilization, and he became a high official in the future Mongol imperial court.

Later, Juvaini criticized Chinqai for his persistent favoritism of Christianity. He wrote that Chinqai “went to great lengths in honoring the Christians and their priests, and when this was noised abroad, priests set their faces towards his Court from Damascus and Rum and Baghdad and the As [Ossetians] and the Rus; and for the most part too it was Christian physicians that were attached to his service.” He held power of “the tying and untying of affairs” and was “responsible for good and evil, weal and woe.” Consequently, “the cause of the Christians flourished during his reign, and no Moslem dared to raise his voice to them.”¹²

Chinqai concentrated on building trade relations with China and along the Silk Route. Because the Uighurs knew much more about commerce, agriculture, and the organization of city life, Temujin relied heavily on his advice and delegated responsibilities in these areas to him. In his administrative capacity, he founded a new city, usually called Chinqai City, which served as a military garrison, wheat growing area, and craft production center. During Chinqai’s time of prominence, the Mongols revived one of the Manichaean centers on the Selenge River in northern Mongolia. Founded as Rich Town, Bai Baliq, in the year 757 by the Uighur ruler Moyun Chur, the city served as a northern trade center with the tribes of Siberia and housed artisans who produced gold jewelry and other items for the Mongol aristocracy.¹³

Given the large number of Christian priests and portable chapels among the Mongols, some foreign observers assumed that Christianity was the chosen religion of the Mongol court. Bar Hebraeus wrote, with proud exaggeration, that the Mongols preferred Christianity over other religions. “And having seen very much modesty (or, chastity) and other habits of this kind among the Christian people, certainly the Mongols loved them greatly at the beginning of their kingdom, a time ago somewhat short.”¹⁴

Despite the tremendous influence of Christians at the Mongol court, Temujin showed little interest in Christian theology. For him, the defeat of the rich, powerful, and prestigious Kereyid clearly illustrated the powerlessness of the Christian religion. Either it was a false religion from the start or its members had drifted so far from the true faith that heaven had turned against them. Ong Khan was a Christian and yet he had betrayed him. If the Christian religion could not persuade its members to act morally, then the Mongols had little use for it.

Furthermore, Temujin upheld his animist beliefs that spirits were everywhere, while Christians believed the word of God was in their books, as though they had trapped God and now contained him in a small, portable box bound in leather. Only the Christian priests could read the holy scriptures or hear the voice of God. The priests controlled access to God, but they greedily sold this access to those with money and power. In contrast, Mongols believed that heaven spoke directly to them on mountaintops and from trees but not through a book. They communicated with gods and spirits regularly and were frustrated when Christians failed to answer basic, practical questions about the scriptures they quoted and memorized.

Did you have to go to heaven to receive God’s words or did God come to you to deliver them? If you did not receive these words yourself, to whom did God give them? Was that person your ancestor? Did God speak the words, write them, or deliver them through signs? Did these meetings with God take place in a dream, a trance, or in person? Were you alone or with other people or gods? What language does God use to communicate? What happens if you do not speak that language?

The nomadic Christians of the Mongol steppe did not share Western Christianity’s fondness for paintings or sculpture. They had little use for icons. They particularly rejected Christian art because it depicted the worst imaginable human acts of torture and martyrdom (people being beheaded, boiled in pots, crucified, eaten by savage beasts, strangled, tortured on the rack, broken on the wheel, pulled asunder by animals, shot with arrows, pierced with lances, starved, fed to lions, sealed alive in tombs, whipped, raped, skinned alive, eviscerated, burned at the stake, roasted on a spit, nailed upside down, drowned, hung by ropes, thrown from high places). Western Christians not only wrote stories, sang songs, and made pictures of suffering; they eagerly collected the blood, broken bones, dried skin, hair, and other body parts of their holy martyrs and prayed to them.

The nomads, in contrast, believed that to mention evil or depict suffering only created more evil and suffering. They particularly abhorred depictions of Jesus nailed on a cross, bleeding from his crown of thorns, or with his side pierced by a spear. Images of a tortured God defied their moral sensibility. To the steppe Christians, the idea that Jesus could be killed as he triumphantly rose to heaven made no sense. Unlike the Kereyid and the Naiman, the Mongols perceived a clear separation between the divine and the earthly. For them God was the sky, or heaven, not a person.

The Christian notion of individual salvation mystified and frightened the Mongols because it conflicted with the strong communitarian ideals of steppe culture. Most Mongols did not dare even to sleep alone at night, and so to imagine eternity in a supposed paradise without their family or close companions was horrifying. To become an orphan was considered life’s worst fate, and getting separated from the group terrified them; indeed much of their magic, rituals, and customs were used to protect family members until they could safely return home. Why, the Mongols wondered, would a religion reward believers with a heaven that their parents, grandparents, and ancestors had not been allowed to enter?

No direct dialogue between Temujin and a Christian has survived, but there is an interesting one written by the first French envoy, William of Rubruck, who arrived at the court of his grandson Mongke Khan in 1254. William traveled to Mongolia at the behest of Louis IX, a fervent Christian, to convert the Tatars and explore the possibility of an anti-Muslim alliance. The French king had organized and led a crusade to the Holy Land and was eager to learn more about the community of Christians that was said to lie between Persia and China.

Mostly on horseback, but sometimes on foot or in oxcarts, William and a handful of carefully chosen companions endured a nearly four-thousand-mile trek from Constantinople to the Mongol capital on the Orkhon River. The presence of so many Christians in the Mongol camp, including some from Paris, surprised him and gave him both great hope and tremendous frustration. He hoped with so many Christians already present that the other Mongols might easily convert, but he quickly found that their very familiarity with Christian faith made them resistant to it.

Although William compiled an excellent account of what he saw, he dismissed Mongol religion as ignorant and impious superstition. William of Rubruck’s writings illuminated the profound and persistent differences between the Mongols and the Christians, despite so many Mongol men having Christian wives and mothers. William incorrectly believed that the felt figurines the Mongols made to honor their ancestors were also their gods. “The Mongols, though they believe in one God,” he explained, in his invaluable account of his journey, “made nevertheless images of their dead in felt, and dress them in the richest stuffs, and put them in one or two carts, and no one dare touch these carts, which are under the care of their soothsayers.” William thought that if they worshipped these idols with a human form then they could understand that God had also made his son into a human.

“I asked them what they believed concerning God,” he recorded.

“We only believe that there is one God,” they answered.

“Do you believe that he is a spirit, or something physical?” Rubruck asked.

“We believe that he is a spirit,” they said.

William then tried to convey the heart of his Christian belief, that God had created his son Jesus, who was both a God and a man. “Do you believe that God never became human?” he asked them.

“Never!” they answered.

William challenged them by pointing out that they worshipped idols, gods in a human form. If you believe that God is only spirit, then “why do you make Him in the form of bodily images?” And, he added, “Why do you make so many of them? Furthermore, if you do not believe that He became man, why do you make Him in human shape rather than in that of some animal?”

The Mongol shamans insisted that the figures they made and honored were not gods. “We do not make images of God!” they declared emphatically. The images are made in honor of the dead—“a son, or wife, or someone dear.” The image was only to revere the memory of such a loved one.

William ridiculed this as vanity and false piety. “Then you make these only out of flattery,” he charged.

“Then they asked me, as if in derision,” he wrote, “where is God?”

William began delivering a sermon on Christian belief and the soul in very abstract terms, but he soon lost his audience. “Just as I wanted to continue reasoning with them,” he wrote in his official report, “my interpreter got tired, and would no longer express my words; so he made me stop talking.”¹⁵

Already exasperated by his dealings with shamans and animists, William became even more frustrated by his dealing with the Christians, who showed no interest in his teachings or in the pope in Rome. The freedom of the steppe Christians irritated their Catholic observers, who believed in a rigid conformity to doctrine and a powerful church hierarchy. William expressed extreme hostility to these Asian Christians. They claimed to be Christians, he wrote, “but that lord of theirs had abandoned the worship of Christ, and taken to idolatry, having about him priests of the idols, who are all evokers of demons and sorcerers.”¹⁶ William complained that the priests among the steppe Christians made statements that are “ten times more than was true” and “out of nothing they will make a great story.” Even the Buddhists led a “more innocent” life.

The Christians “know nothing,” William complained in his account of his journey. Their priests perform the rituals haphazardly. They “have books in Syrian, but they do not know the language; so they chant like those monks among us who do not know grammar, and they are absolutely depraved.” William claimed that the priests were more interested in alcohol, women, and making money than in religion. “In the first place, they are usurers and drunkards.” Some have several wives. “They are bigamists, for when the first wife dies these priests take another.” They are mercenary, and people have to pay for their Christian rituals, “for they administer no sacrament gratis.” They are “more intent on the increase of their wealth than of the faith.”¹⁷

Temujin’s connection with Christians remained important throughout his life, but his marriage to his Christian wife, Ibaqa Beki, did not endure. The marriage had been made for political reasons, and through politics it was severed. Soon after being named khan, her father, Jaqa Gambu, defied Temujin, still considering his Kereyid people masters of the Mongols. Temujin sent a detachment of soldiers to defeat and execute him. The general who performed this important service received Ibaqa Beki as his wife. Temujin made it clear in a public statement that he was not giving her away because she was ugly or displeased him; he was forced to do it for political reasons, because he could not be married to the daughter of a traitor. He allowed his son Tolui to keep her sister Sorkhokhtani as his wife, and he further honored Ibaqa Beki by permitting her to retain her title as princess along with all her property and all the people assigned to her, and added the command that she always be treated with respect.¹⁸

While politically justified, Temujin’s motives may not have been purely political. He wanted a different wife—Khulan, the daughter of the defeated Merkid chief. She had the name of the onager, the wild horse of the Gobi.¹⁹ The onager is extremely swift and avoids humans. Unlike other species related to the horse, the onager had never been tamed, and that perhaps indicated something about the personality of Khulan and what attracted Temujin to her. Aside from Borte, who remained his primary wife as long as he lived, he loved Khulan the most, and had one son with her.

According to the Golden Chronicle, Temujin was reluctant to tell Borte about the new wife. He had earlier taken the two Tatar queens as well as Ibaqa Beki as wives more as a political decision than one of passion, but he exhibited stronger feelings for Khulan. Instead of taking Khulan home, presenting her to his wives and family, and then consummating the marriage, Temujin seemed overcome with desire for her and wished to sleep with her while still out on campaign. “If you united on a pillow with her in the field, it would not be customary,” warned one of Temujin’s unnamed companions. “How about uniting on a pillow with her once we reach home?”

But Temujin “did not follow these words, and united on a pillow with the Lady Khulan in the countryside and was delayed.”²⁰

He had known Borte since childhood and still loved her. “It will be difficult to see her face,” he said to one of his retainers after the encounter with Khulan. “I did not discuss it with her,” he explained. “When I enter the house it will be narrow,” and if “she is angry and enraged, that will be something shameful and frightening.” So instead of going to tell Borte of his new wife, he sent a messenger.

“Why have you come?” Borte asked the messenger. He told her that Temujin had a change of heart, and that desire had overcome his own will and he had ignored the advice of his companions. His words through the messenger were simple and direct: “I have indulged in the beauty of the tiger-skin house,” he said, referring to his nuptial tryst. “I have slept with the Queen Khulan.”

Borte received the news with the resigned dignity of a true queen. “He is the desire of all Mongols,” she exclaimed. “He is the desire of them all,” she repeated. “On the banks and rivers are many swans and geese. My Lord will know how to shoot them from on horseback until his thumb is worn out. In the ordinary people are many girls and women. My Lord will know himself how to find and take them.” She seemed understanding and forgiving of his having started his relationship with Khulan while out on campaign and contrary to custom. She quoted the proverb, “Let a saddle be placed on an unbroken horse.”

Then, cryptically, Borte wondered aloud, “Is it bad to have too much? Is it good to have too little?”²¹

After sending Ibaqa Beki away and taking Khulan as a queen, Temujin never married again. He now had four wives, counting the two Tatar sisters, and he never saw a political or emotional need for another.

With the death of Jaqa Gambu, Temujin ended the loose reins of the Kereyid. He decided that his nation would not be a confederacy or league of tribes like the Tatar, Kereyid, and Naiman whom he had defeated; he intended to unite all of his various clans and tribes into one single nation with himself as the sole khan. All tribes and clans would be part of a new Mongol nation and would thus become continuously less important. Their main identity now was Mongol; everything else was secondary.

Now in his forties, Temujin shifted his focus from conquest to administration. He had destroyed every government on the steppe and now it was time to build up a new one. The elite systems of the Tatars, Kereyid, and Naiman had collapsed totally when he had killed off the aristocrats and redistributed the survivors among his own followers. He had successfully created a powerful army, but now to stay in power he realized he would need a functioning government with systematic and publicly known laws, with a division of labor and responsibility, and a means of settling disputes. His days were increasingly devoted to the practical concerns of deciding who gets what pastures, mediating family squabbles and settling inheritances, feeding the growing number of officials and clerks around him, and other such issues big and small. He was mired in practical concerns, but he did not want to govern like other khans. He wanted to start something new.

Temujin had failed to achieve the power he sought through marriage into the Christian royal family of the Kereyid, and he had failed in his effort to rule through the puppet khan Jaqa Gambu. Although not the son of a khan, he decided that he himself must be the khan of his own nation, but it would become a nation unlike any other in the history of the steppe or the world. And he would become a ruler unlike any other. At age forty-four, he was at last ready to step into the arena of world history.