9

Two Wings of One Bird

At the start of the thirteenth century, China consisted of more than a dozen kingdoms, some large enough to claim to be an empire and others too restricted to be concerned about anything beyond petty rivalries and local strife. Northern China was in political turmoil while southern China was in a protracted period of decadent decay. A so-called barbarian group, the Jurched of Manchuria, ruled the north as the Jin, or Golden, dynasty. Farther south, the Sung dynasty, which had once ruled a united China, continued as a truncated empire teetering on the brink of collapse. In what are now Tibet and Yunnan, a handful of isolated Buddhist kingdoms drifted along with none successfully dominating the others for long.

In the upper reaches of the Yellow River and around the Ordos, in what is now Inner Mongolia, the Tangut people maintained a Buddhist court and controlled the Gansu Corridor, China’s entryway onto the Silk Route. The western part of the Silk Route was ruled by the Kara Khitai ethnic group, whose ancestors once ruled northern China as the Liao dynasty but had been chased out by the Jurched and now held a much smaller kingdom in the Tien Shan Mountains and adjacent oases. Along the southern edge of the Gobi, several tribal kingdoms of mostly Christian Turks patrolled the border region separating the Mongols from the large production centers and trade routes.

The kingdoms of China may have been disunited, but they were rich, and their people enjoyed a high standard of living and even luxury compared with the meager lifestyle offered by the steppe. Every form of known merchandise moved along the trade routes that knitted the Chinese kingdoms together with the Muslim centers of Central Asia. Aside from metal, the most important product was silk. Today it is thought of primarily as a luxury item, but for the Mongols it was a highly practical commodity. Chinese weavers produced silk so tight that lice and other vermin could not penetrate it, and even on lesser qualities of silk, the strands were so slick that lice could not attach their eggs to it. In the cold, dry environment of Mongolia, where bathing was difficult, these characteristics made Chinese silk uniquely valuable. Silk had another, even more important, lifesaving quality. When penetrated by an arrow, the strong, slick fibers wrapped around the arrowhead even as it sank into the flesh. The silk greatly reduced the severity of the wound and, most important, allowed the arrowhead to be gently extracted without doing further damage and with decreased likelihood of infection. For a warrior, silk was a magic fabric.

Despite the great appeal of Chinese goods, trade across the vast Gobi was limited by the distance that needed to be covered over a harsh landscape. The Mongol nomads grew no crops, wove no cloth, mined no metals, and made no pots, yet they required all of these things to continue in their nomadic way of life. To be herders and warriors they needed the trade goods of China. In times of strength, the Chinese carefully controlled the flow of these goods out onto the steppe and demanded steady payment in animals, furs, leather, and wool. The Mongols offered little, however, that could not be supplied more easily by Koreans, Manchurians, Tibetans, Uighurs, and smaller neighboring nationalities. These others far surpassed the Mongols at commerce, but the Mongols were better warriors. Now united and no longer fighting one another, they looked south toward the tempting wealth of China.

While Genghis Khan had been consolidating his power on the steppes, the kingdoms of China remained mired in disarray. As soon as he united his people, he sent out a series of raids on cities just south of the Gobi belonging to the kingdom of Xi Xia and inhabited by the Tangut, a people culturally related to the Tibetans. These raids seemed to be nothing more than typical attacks by nomads whenever settled kingdoms weakened or lowered their guard. For Genghis Khan, however, these early forays were probes to test the resistance and resolve of his neighbors and to locate their weak points.

Instead of encouraging these agricultural and commercial kingdoms to rally together and mount a united front against the steppe nomads, the probes only increased tensions. This turmoil produced a small and irregular stream of refugees from the losing factions. Genghis Khan welcomed them. At first, they trickled in as small groups of families, but then whole tribes began to defect. One of the first to do so was the Onggut, a semisedentary Turkic tribe in alliance with the Jin dynasty charged with patrolling the northern border to keep out the nomads. Genghis Khan accepted them and made a marriage between their khan and his daughter Alaqai, thereby adopting the tribal nation into his empire.

In the summer of 1208, two years after the founding of the Mongol nation, four Chinese officials of the Jin dynasty fled to his court with their families, seeking protection and offering to serve the Great Khan. They encouraged Genghis Khan to overthrow the emperor of the Jin dynasty.¹ Their presence among the Mongols was thought to demonstrate the shifting Will of Heaven, and they convinced Genghis Khan that his duty was not merely to unite the warring tribes of the steppes but to liberate and unite China as well. The flight of such educated and respected men inspired and emboldened the disgruntled soldiers in the Jin army, many of whom fled to join this new nation that awarded much higher respect and far greater rewards to the military than did the Chinese. They convinced Genghis Khan that the Jin dynasty was a dying dynasty that offered new lands and new people for the taking.

Genghis Khan did not immediately respond to the suggestion of attacking China. At first he continued to consolidate his power at home. A Chinese chronicler described the chaos in the decades prior to his arrival. Civil wars ravaged the land and desperate citizens “jumped into wells and rivers when the terror approached, and there were those who cut their own throats or hung themselves when the situation became critical.” It was an era when “soldiers and civilians alike were slaughtered indiscriminately; the virtuous and the evil died in the same manner. Corpses filled the city, blood covered all the roads and streets.”²

Genghis Khan had spent all of his adult life fighting, but up until now his enemies had been other nomads. He understood how to fight nomadic tribes who lived and fought like him. Though the tribes he had battled previously might have varied in size, the differences were minor compared with the Jin dynasty of the Jurched, who had some fifty million subjects against Genghis Khan’s one million. Altogether, the Chinese kingdoms totaled about 120 million people. In China, for the first time, Genghis Khan had to confront people who lived in cities, behind massive walls, with many more powerful weapons, including gunpowder and exploding devices. He could not fight them the way he had battled nomads on the steppe.

Having been encouraged by the refugees and warriors who had come to him across the desert to descend from the Mongolian Plateau, and having tested the defenses to the south, Genghis Khan decided to escalate his cross-border raids to a full military campaign, which he would lead. To take on these new enemies, he returned to the most basic lessons he had learned as a hunter on Burkhan Khaldun. His military strategy was to approach the enemy like a wolf. Wolves never attack the strongest member of a herd; they do not go after the stallion or the mare, ready to fight to the death to defend their colt. Instead, they pick the weak ones, the slow ones, the young or old, and attack the vulnerable while letting the others flee. Thus, Genghis Khan did not initially move against the Jin dynasty or the more distant Sung; he chose the Tangut, a smaller and weaker independent kingdom in what is today western China, as his first prey. Early in 1209, he crossed the Gobi Desert with his army while the weather was still cool, and attacked. In the words of the French historian René Grousset, “The Mongol and his horse were to hunt the Chinese, the Persian, the Russian, and the Hungarian just as they hunted the antelope or the tiger.”³

His new war strategy drew from the organization of the great Mongol hunts called mingan ava, or “taking a thousand.” For this type of group hunt, hundreds and sometimes thousands of hunters spread out to form a large circle surrounding a vast area. Beating sticks and making noise, they slowly converged, driving all the wild animals before them.⁴ As the noose tightened around the frightened animals, they panicked and ran in all directions with no hope of escape. After corralling them, the hunters could leisurely pick them off one by one.

The Mongols used this same tactic as they approached the Tangut territory, terrifying the people in the countryside and villages and forcing them to flee toward the cities. Some foreign observers were mystified by the apparent lack of coordination among the Mongol warriors, who seemed to be dashing back and forth across the countryside, attacking one place, then leaving their work unfinished to race off to attack another. They even sometimes retreated in the midst of a victory without following through. The Mongol warriors were intentionally stirring up the population and driving people from their homes. Their goal was not to kill people but to use them as a weapon for the coming campaign against the capital city. Once amassed behind the city walls, the fleeing population quickly began to consume supplies of food and provoke panic and discord in populations living in crowded conditions, ripe for outbreaks of illnesses and rapidly spreading epidemics. Unable to escape the Mongol siege, the Tangut turned like animals ferociously on one another.

When Genghis Khan reached Yinchuan, the capital of the Tangut kingdom, and saw its massive walls, it appeared impregnable. He knew there was no point in throwing his men against the heavily fortified walls of the city. At first, he was uncertain what to do next, but he quickly discovered that he could control the flow of water by building dams, diverting rivers away from the city or flooding them to undermine the walls and further weaken the morale and capability of its defenders. He ordered his men to construct a series of canals and dams to divert the river, but the dams were too weak to hold the massive flow of water and he ended up flooding his own siege camps instead.

One of Genghis Khan’s most important attributes was his ability to turn apparent defeat into triumph. By this time, his campaign had been under way for nearly a year. In early 1210, he ordered a lifting of the siege and withdrew from Yinchuan. Overjoyed at their apparent victory, the Tangut soldiers rushed out of the city to attack the fleeing warriors, not realizing that this was a trick to make them open their gates and to lure them out. The Mongols ambushed the weakened and euphorically overconfident army and defeated them. Their king surrendered, swore allegiance to Genghis Khan, paid an enormous tribute, and promised to send more each year in return for keeping his throne.

This victory, Genghis Khan’s first in urban territory, encouraged the border tribes to join the Mongols. Just as the Onggut had voluntarily united with them, soon the Uighurs in the oasis cities of western China enthusiastically broke away from the Kara Khitai and joined the growing Mongol nation. The Karluk Turks on the western steppe followed soon thereafter. Genghis Khan arranged marriages for his daughters to the leaders of these tribes, as well as to the Oirat of southern Siberia, who also joined him. Then, leaving these four kingdoms under the control of his daughters, he summoned their leaders to bring their armies and join the Mongol forces.

Bolstered by the rich bounty taken from the Tangut and by his growing army of vassals, Genghis Khan was now ready to turn his attention to the Jin dynasty and their capital of Zhongdu, which is modern Beijing. He justified his attack on the Jin on different grounds depending on his audience. To his own people he called for revenge, denouncing the Jin for having brutally crucified their ancestor Ambaqai Khan. To the Khitai people who had been deposed by the Jurched and now suffered under their rule, he reminded them of their close kinship to the Mongols and told them that they had a common enemy in the Jurched. He dangled the hope of restoring the Khitai to the power they had once occupied. To the Han people who chafed under the barbarian rule of the Jin, he offered hope of liberation from foreign rule, or at least replacing the choking reign and constant exploitation of the Jin with the looser reign of the Mongols.

The Mongols considered the Golden Emperor of the Jin a usurper, and in deference to the Khitai, who had previously ruled the area, they always referred to China as Khitai. This name was also used by Marco Polo with a different spelling—Cathay. Despite Genghis Khan’s defeat of the Tangut and his alliance with the Onggut, Oirat, Uighur, and Karluk, Jin officials initially showed little fear of their formerly low-ranking vassal and treated him arrogantly, even demanding his renewed submission. The Jin emperor remained unimpressed by Genghis Khan’s victory over these smaller kingdoms fringing the Gobi. He sent a challenge to Genghis Khan: “Our empire is like the sea,” he said, “and your empire is nothing more than a handful of sand.”⁵

Genghis Khan used these insults against him to rally his people. He mastered the art of magic ritual as well as spiritual showmanship. When he faced the daunting mission of attacking the Jin dynasty, he needed the firm and complete commitment of his people. Juzjani reported in detail how he achieved it. Genghis Khan gathered his nation in the steppes around one of the sacred mountains. He had the people divide into separate groups of men, women, and children. “And for three whole days and nights, all of them remained bare-headed; and for three days no one tasted food, and no animal was allowed to give milk to its young. During this time, Genghis Khan prayed alone as the people prayed together and loudly calling of the name of heaven, “‘Tengri, Tengri.’ They did not pray for victory; they prayed to honor the sky.”

Genghis Khan prayed for guidance that he might follow the Will of Heaven and not impose his will on heaven. Finally, “after three days, at dawn, on the fourth day,” he emerged with the message that Tengri had promised him victory. “For the space of another three days, in that same place likewise, a feast was held. At the end of those three days, he led forth his troops.”⁶

Soon a song circulated in Chinese territory:

The Tatars come.

The Tatars depart.

They hunt the emperor.

He has no escape.⁷

In 1211 at nearly fifty years of age, Genghis Khan crossed the Gobi once again—this time to teach the Golden Khan a lesson. The Mongols crisscrossed northern China, attacking one city and another, routing people from their villages, pillaging the smaller cities. Finally, in 1214, after accepting the Golden Khan’s surrender, Genghis Khan was eager to return home with the great wealth his army had seized.

As he had done with the Tangut king, Genghis Khan told the Jin emperor he could remain in office and keep his capital city if he swore obedience to him. He quickly regretted this magnanimity. As soon as the Mongol army withdrew, the Golden Khan revolted and fled south to create a new capital at Kaifeng, which he foolishly thought was too far away to be susceptible to Mongol attack. Genghis Khan returned in the following year, 1215, to lay siege to Zhongdu.

On his return to Zhongdu, Genghis Khan set up a camp about ten miles southwest of the city, near a bridge of remarkable beauty. The bridge was relatively new and spanned 874 feet across the modest Yongding River. In the shimmering light of the morning mist, its white marble floated serenely in the air, a phalanx of carved lions guarding its balustrade. The bridge looked like an arched stairway connecting one cloud to another. The Chinese called it the Lugou Qiao, but foreigners later called it the Marco Polo Bridge. The bridge still stands today, frequently repaired due to flood damage and war, but much the same as it was in Genghis Khan’s time.

He had shown little interest in the walls and moats built by the Chinese, as they were only impediments to him, but in this bridge, he saw something of not only great beauty but also great usefulness. He had never needed bridges for the shallow rivers of Mongolia. Except on the rainiest days of the year, people and animals easily forded them, but the larger rivers of the coastal plain proved too wide and powerful for even the hardiest horses to swim. The bridge construction appealed to his sense of nomadic mobility, and he realized, perhaps for the first time, that massive structures could facilitate movement of people as well as hinder it. From this time, he became a dedicated bridge builder, and he organized units of Chinese builders to accompany his army on future campaigns.

While he was camped near the bridge, a large contingent of the Jurched soldiers, who had been left to defend the Jin capital when their emperor fled to Kaifeng, now defected to the Mongols. Genghis Khan could have easily won without them, but their presence made the victory quicker. He easily captured the dispirited city, deserted by its own royal court and left as a victim to the invaders.

In keeping with the pattern of Mongol conquests, those who survived the battles and forced migrations soon found unexpected advantages under Genghis Khan’s rule. Marco Polo, who was no specialist in military affairs, was nonetheless quick to spot the Mongols’ difficult dilemma: they were so few in number that they would never have enough soldiers to effectively occupy their conquered lands. To prevail and endure, the Mongols would either have to win the support of the local population or else expel them. “When he conquered a province he did no harm to the people or their property, but merely established some of his own men in the country along with a proportion of theirs, whilst he led the remainder to the conquest of other provinces.”⁸ As Marco Polo wrote in reference to Genghis Khan’s conquests across Asia, “when those whom he had conquered became aware how well and safely he protected them against all others, and how they suffered no ill at his hands, and saw what a noble prince he was, then they joined him heart and soul and became his devoted followers.”

After Genghis Khan’s defeat of the Tangut kingdom in western China in 1209 and the Jin dynasty in northern China in 1215, he insisted that everything of value be counted. As soon as he took a city, plunder and tribute had to be carefully recorded and distributed. A census was then made of all material goods and movable property—animals, buildings, mines, factories, and forests. Shigi-Khutukhu, in his capacity as the supreme judge of the Mongol nation, was responsible for overseeing the looted goods in the Jin capital and recording the information.

Genghis Khan was eager to ensure that all of his followers received an appropriate share of loot. Each member of the royal family—along with soldiers and administrators, even orphans, widows, and the elderly back home—was guaranteed his or her specific portion. He tried to be as careful and thorough in peace as in battle. He knew that his continued popularity rested on the scrupulousness with which he shared everything.

Voltaire, who wrote a fanciful play about the conquests and life of Genghis Khan in China, offered up a pithy interpretation of the view of the vanquished toward their conqueror. “This northern tyrant, whom the wrath of heaven hath sent for our destruction . . . these wild sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots, and in fields, will never brook confinement ’midst the walls of this close city; they detest our arts, our customs, and our laws, and therefore mean to change them all; to make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.”⁹

But Genghis Khan did not intend to destroy Chinese civilization. He had not crossed the Gobi and fought so hard only to rob the Chinese and devastate their country. Every nomad understood the value of a good herd and knew you could not get milk from a dead cow. Even the hunters recognized the error of killing too many animals in the forest and leaving none to reproduce for the following year. China was a valuable resource, and Genghis Khan was determined to exploit it, yet protect it.

Genghis Khan conquered every city he saw. In defeat, all looked alike—crumbling towers, broken gates, dangling timbers, burned palaces, dying soldiers, devastated markets, lost children, and looted shops. Scavenging dogs stalked the streets and carrion-eating birds haunted the temples. The shrines where gods were once housed, where wealth and offerings were collected from the rich and poor, where explanations of the past and prophecies of the future emanated, and where commandments for living came from, were now cracked and crumbled like the walls that had failed to defend the city. The temples formerly adorned with paintings of the other world and citations from scriptures, hung with rich tapestries, lit with butter lamps, decorated with marble and gold, smelling of juniper incense, and filled with the chanting of monks and the prayers of the faithful, now stood naked and empty as the wind whipped the few remaining shreds of a once vibrant spiritual life. The sacred scriptures were now scorched pages blowing in the dust, shredded by mice for their nests and gnawed by starving goats. The monks who once knew the secrets of righteousness and eternal life lay in a pile of corpses undistinguishable by age, education, or profession. The priests who spoke to and for the gods, issuing orders in the name of heaven, were dead or had fled in fear. The astrologers, who could forecast the future in the flight of birds or read cracks in the shoulder bone of a sheep, were now war captives hauling the machinery of battle from one defeated city to the next.

Accustomed to the open steppe, the Mongols became easily disoriented in urban areas crisscrossed with roads, walls, fields, ditches, and canals. The Mongolian language lacked words to identify different types of structures, which they classified by their materials as wood, stone, mud, or grass but with little understanding of their function. Similarly, they could not identify most crops, which were simply “grass” or “greens” to the Mongols. They lacked knowledge of the various modes of dress, ranks, and social organization of the people they had set out to conquer, did not speak their languages, and could scarcely differentiate one nationality from another.

Although the Mongols easily defeated the Chinese armies, they feared the vengeance of unknown spirits in this alien landscape. Mongol soldiers often became sick and seemed to suffer emotional pain and spiritual longing. The Secret History declared that the spirits “of the lands and rivers of the Chinese are raging violently” against the Mongol invaders “because their cities and towns are destroyed.”¹⁰ The Mongols had entered a spiritually hostile land, filled with unknown dangers. They did not know the songs and chants of these foreign spirits and could not ascertain what type of offering they might like or what acts they might punish. This was not the land of their ancestors; it was filled with the ghosts of the slain. In the alien Chinese landscape of dusty roads, tall walls, plowed fields, arched bridges, high buildings, animal sheds, symmetrical orchards, stinking outhouses, gleaming temples, mounds of rotting garbage, and noisy markets, they did not know what, where, or how to pray.

It had taken Genghis Khan a quarter of a century to conquer one million nomads, but now suddenly, in only a few years in China, his subjects had increased twentyfold. He lacked experience managing sedentary civilizations rooted in agriculture and elaborate tradition. As a warrior of the steppe, Genghis Khan knew how to conquer, but he did not yet know how to rule a sophisticated cosmopolitan civilization. It did not take him long to apply lessons he had learned while hunting on Burkhan Khaldun or herding animals on the steppe to master warfare against this sedentary people, but nothing in his experience of tribal politics had prepared him for the task of ruling cities, managing vast stretches of farmland, organizing networks of merchants, overseeing factories of craftsmen, or governing small villages of peasants. The nomads’ centuries-old skills failed to transfer to this alien environment of farmers and city dwellers.

It was obvious that he could not succeed by force alone. His army may have had fewer than 100,000 men and certainly not more than 110,000. Having now conquered tens of millions, his forces were not sufficient to occupy all the lands they conquered. Genghis Khan could defeat any army and capture any city, but he needed his army to move on to the next stronghold and fight the next battle. He could not leave his soldiers behind as an army of occupation, and he certainly could not trust the promises of fidelity from his subjects. As soon as his army passed over the horizon, the vanquished subjects could and often did revolt. He punished them severely for each such revolt, but he needed their loyalty, or at least their cooperation, to maintain his empire.

Genghis Khan improvised several strategies for ruling his vast and varied empire made up of different languages and religions. Early in his career, he was content to accept submission from conquered people and let their old rulers continue to administer their lands. This failed. As soon as the Mongols withdrew, the renegade rulers acted as though they had defeated the Mongols. To address this problem, he instituted a policy of routinely executing all rebels, so they would never have another chance to revolt. But this too was not enough.

Next, he tried placing his military generals in charge of local administration, but this diverted them from their military tasks of conquest. Besides that, great generals do not tend to make good administrators. He looked briefly at the native bureaucracies and wondered whether he could make use of the highly educated Chinese mandarins or the less educated but clever eunuchs who ran the imperial courts, but he concluded that if they were not competent enough to save their own countries from his aggression, what good would they be to him? They had demonstrated their ineptitude by offering bad advice to their rulers; there was no reason to believe they would do better for him.

This attitude of suspicion appears in Autumn of the Palace Han, a Chinese play written anonymously during Mongol rule in the thirteenth century.¹¹ In the opening act the villain, the chief minister of the Chinese emperor, explains that a government minister must have “the heart of a kite, and the talons of an eagle. Let him deceive his superiors, and oppress those below him. Let him enlist flattery, insinuation, profligacy, and avarice on his side. And he will find them a lasting assistance through life.” The government minister then describes how he rose to power in the royal court. “By a hundred arts of specious flattery and address I have deceived the Emperor, until he places his whole delight in me alone. My words he listens to, and he follows my counsel.”

Initially, Genghis Khan showed disdain for the scholarship of his new subjects. If their holy men could see the future and God designated them to speak for Him, why had they not seen his army riding across the desert and over the mountain? If they knew the secrets of the scriptures and stars and could read the omens of flying birds and fluttering leaves, why had they not fled their city to avoid the Mongols? If God taught them what to eat and wear and how to pray, why had He not taught them how to speak the Mongolian language so that they could prepare for their fate? If their religion was so powerful, why had the Mongols been able to pull down their idols, pry out their jewels, and melt their gold into nuggets?

Ten years earlier, with his first conquest of the Naiman, he had begun to take clerks from his defeated enemies. By now he needed more than a handful of clerks. He needed a large corps of administrators to manage the hundreds of cities and thousands of villages under his control. To fill the administrative requirements of his rapidly expanding empire, he turned to religious leaders, who typically were highly educated, familiar with writing, and good at interpreting and implementing written law. They claimed devotion to principles and ideals well beyond the greed and graft of traditional aristocrats, and they knew how to lead and communicate with the masses. Genghis Khan looked to the Chinese religious establishment for possible assistance and guidance. He made it known that he sought religious personnel to “assist the Court in promoting culture and education and in realizing the way of goodness, so that fine customs and benevolent rule may excel those of former ages.”

He broadcast a general appeal to scholars and religious leaders to “submit plans to the Court” designed “to fix the laws, to deliberate upon rituals and music, to erect ancestral temples, to build houses, to found schools, to hold examinations, to seek out retired scholars, to search for the ministers of the previous dynasty, to promote the worthy and the good, to seek upright men, to encourage agriculture and sericulture, to suppress indolence, to moderate punishments, to reduce taxes, to honor moral integrity, to castigate profligacy, to dismiss superfluous officials, to expel oppressive officers, to exalt filial and brotherly devotion, and to relieve poverty and distress.” If these things are done, then people will “yield to reform like grass bending to the wind,” or like “water flowing downward.” Thereby, a “Great Peace” will settle across the land.¹²

He quickly recognized that the city scholars lacked a deep understanding of life in the countryside or in distant provinces. To gain a fuller view of the entire country, he sent messengers throughout the newly conquered territories, summoning scholars and priests to “our Mongol land so that I, the Khan, can complete the great deeds of the state.”¹³ According to the Buddhist chronicle The Pearl Rosary, Genghis Khan invited scholars with training to instruct him in “the good customs of the Chinese nom,” their law and religion.¹⁴ The Book of the Golden Wheel with a Thousand Spokes and the History of the Golden Lineage of Lord Genghis, both Mongolian chronicles of the eighteenth century, each relate in nearly identical wording that “when he had assembled in his power the many people having other customs,” Genghis Khan summoned learned men to his military camp to learn about the customs of his new subjects. He inquired about the manner in which one might support and uphold the Tore, the principles of good government, in order to “protect and support living beings.”¹⁵ Only after examining these laws and customs did he appoint officials to govern in his name.¹⁶ After conquering northern China, Genghis Khan “then chose the wisest ministers of the external peoples to make and sharpen the empire’s laws.”

In his desperate need for men to help him count and catalog what had been seized, he turned to a special class of former advisers to the Jin court who entered Mongol service after the fall of Zhongdu. One of the first new recruits was Yelu Chucai. By 1218, although he was only twenty-eight years old, Yelu Chucai was appointed clerk to the nomadic court of the khan and served as an astrologer searching for signs in the night sky. Upon meeting the lanky youth, Genghis Khan was struck by how tall he was compared with the Mongols and also what a fine beard he had for such a young man. He often gave nicknames to officials whose foreign names were difficult to remember, and thereafter he called the young scholar Utu Sakhal, Long Beard.

Yelu Chucai descended from the royal family of the Liao dynasty and was a member of the Khitan ethnic group, a steppe tribe closely related in language and culture to the Mongols. When the Liao were overthrown by the Jurched tribe, many members of his family had continued to serve the new rulers, just as Yelu Chucai had chosen to serve Genghis Khan. As a member of a family that had originated in Mongolia but had lived in China for three centuries, Yelu Chucai displayed a keen understanding of both nomadic and sedentary life. This combination of backgrounds made him an effective conduit of Chinese ideas and culture in the early Mongol Empire. His subsequent writings became a valuable source of information on Genghis Khan and, more generally, on the laws and structure of the Mongol empire.

The Secret History relates that Genghis Khan “thought of establishing order over his many people, climbing high passes, crossing wide rivers, and waging a long campaign,” but he knew clearly that “living beings are not eternal.” Soon after the conquest of northern China, his wife Yesui Khatun reminded him, as Borte had once earlier, that he would grow old “and like a great old tree, will fall down.” Even the stone base of a great pillar will eventually collapse, she told him. Grass is not forever green. Now fifty-seven years old, an age when most Mongols would step back from active life, he knew he would need a new system of management for his rapidly expanding empire if it was to outlive him.

On May 15, 1219, he sent a letter to the elderly Taoist Qiu Chuji, a renowned sage, requesting a meeting. Although Yelu Chucai may have written it for him, to conform to Chinese literary style, the letter makes clear his objective in summoning the religious leader. His words reveal a candid picture of a man at the height of his earthly power but facing the long, irreversible decline into old age, and hoping that his empire might endure.

Instead of bragging about his conquests, he matter-of-factly explained why he had succeeded and his enemies had failed. His victory came because of the feebleness of his enemies, he wrote. “Heaven had abandoned them,” he claimed, because of their “haughtiness and extravagant luxury.” The government of the Jin dynasty “was inconsistent, and therefore Heaven assisted me to obtain the throne.” Consequently, “in the space of seven years I have succeeded in accomplishing a great work uniting the whole world in one empire.” He showed a keen awareness of the uniqueness of his conquest. “It seems to me that since remote time, such a vast empire has not been seen.”

As for himself, his virtues were by his own account modest. “I have not myself distinguishing qualities” other than that “I hate luxury and exercise moderation,” he went on. “I have only one coat” and “I eat the food and am dressed in the same tatters as my humble herdsmen.”

After introducing himself as he wished to be seen, he described his paternalistic but benign system of rule based on merit. “I consider the people my children and take an interest in talented men as if they were my brothers.” He cited the philosophical and spiritual unity of his people as important factors in his government and observed that religious ideology tore other societies apart and made them vulnerable to conquest. As the Mongol Christian priest Rabban Bar Sauma wrote, dogma “makes bitter the soul.”¹⁷ By contrast, Genghis Khan claimed that in his Mongol nation, “We always agree in our principles and are always united by mutual affection.”

He seemed almost to regret the burden that heaven and history put on him, acknowledging that he needed help to fulfill it. “As my calling is high, the obligations incumbent on me are also heavy; and I fear that in my ruling there may be something wanting.” Just as in “crossing a river we need boats and rudders,” he needed “sage men . . . for keeping the empire in order.” However, “Since the time when I came to the throne . . . I could not find worthy men.” He then asked for help, saying, “have pity on me. . . . give me a little of your wisdom. Say only one word to me and I shall be happy.”¹⁸

Genghis Khan’s signed his letters without the long and flowery titles beloved by monarchs and tyrants. His triumphs spoke for themselves, without the need for frivolous ornamentation.

By the time Qiu Chuji could respond, Genghis Khan had moved on to another campaign. Two years would pass before the sage and his disciplines finally caught up with the Mongol army in Afghanistan in the spring of 1222. Although he would become the most famous of the many religious scholars to meet with Genghis Khan, he was far from the only one. Wherever Genghis Khan went on campaign, Mongol officials eagerly sought out other sages. In this early phase of his effort to master his new empire, the most detailed account of his quest to find Chinese holy men appears in the report of two Buddhist monks found wandering about Lanzhou in 1219, shortly after the Mongols had captured the city. The Buddhist master, who was about sixty years old, told his teenage disciple Haiyun to flee and save his life. “I am an old monk,” he told the boy. “It would be natural if I were to die in this war. You, however, are still young and you should therefore try to escape the disaster.”

The disciple stubbornly refused. “Life and death are a matter of destiny,” he told his master, echoing what he had been taught. “How can I abandon my own teacher at this critical moment?” If I escape, he said, “what will I tell my friends when I meet them afterwards?”¹⁹

A Chinese officer in the Mongol army came upon the two monks tranquilly going about their sacred duties amid the devastation of war around them. When asked why they did not fear the Mongols like the others, the younger monk cleverly replied that they knew the Mongol soldiers had come to protect them. The surprised officer asked him what kind of monk he was, a Chan or Zen Buddhist, devoted to meditation, or a devotee of one of the more ritualistic sects known as Tantric Buddhism.

At first Haiyun said that both branches of Buddhism deserved equal importance, “like the two wings of a bird.” It soon became clear that the two monks practiced the meditative Zen type of Buddhism, but they had practical knowledge as well. While some monks condemned violence and had little interest in the martial arts, Haiyun said that “warriors and scholars” are like two wings of a bird, “with neither of whom a State can dispense.”²⁰

Impressed by their story, Muhali sent a message to Genghis Khan recommending the two monks as true “speakers to Heaven.”²¹ The Mongol leader was too far away to meet with them, so he asked them to gather together and pray with others for the success of heaven and protection of the Mongols. He said he hoped that he might meet them in the future. “Feed and clothe them well, and if you find any others of the same sort gather them all in and let them speak to Heaven as much as they will,” he instructed. He further ordered that “they are not to be treated with disrespect by any one and are to rank as dark an,”²² a category of freeman that exempted them from taxes, military conscription, and obligatory service such as road repair and other forms of manual labor demanded by local officials in the name of the state.

Muhali took the two men to his headquarters in northeastern China to care for them as he had been instructed to do. He bestowed titles on them, calling them Senior Venerable and Junior Venerable, but the two men declined the worldly honors and continued to live simply among the people, begging for food.²³ The elderly Zen master died soon afterward, in the summer of 1220, and his disciple Haiyun was destined never to meet Genghis Khan, but the young monk would later play an important role during the reigns of his grandsons.²⁴

From his earliest conquests, Genghis Khan had been interested in identifying men of talent, but in the earlier days, he focused predominantly on recruiting loyal fighters and men who knew how to fashion weapons, work with metal, or serve as guides, spies, and scouts. Later his interests expanded to include doctors, weavers, carpenters, jewelry makers, translators, engineers, potters, and a variety of craft workers. Following the campaigns in northern China, he began to collect a menagerie of priests and spiritualists as well. Monks, astrologers, magicians, prophets, alchemists, soothsayers, sages, fortune-tellers, and charlatans traveled for months, crossing the widest rivers and traveling from beyond distant borders to search out his nomadic camp. “Now that the world from one end to the other is under one or the other branch” of the Mongols, wrote Rashid al-Din at the end of the thirteenth century, “philosophers, astronomers, scholars, and historians of all sects and religions connected with China, ancient India, Kashmir, Tibet, Uyghur, as well as other people like the Turks, Arabs, and Franks are before our eyes in large numbers.” Furthermore, he elaborated, “Every one of them has books containing the history, chronology, and religious thought of those countries.”²⁵

Genghis Khan’s court attracted Mongol shamans with magical stones, Taoist alchemists, chanting Buddhist monks and astrologers, praying mullahs, singing Christians, Confucian masters of ceremony and court ritual, Tibetan soothsayers, and a great variety of freelance spiritualists and charlatans renowned as conjurers or simply able to delight with magic tricks. Genghis Khan’s camp combined aspects of a nomadic university and a spiritual zoo with scholars from a multitude of languages, cultures, and religions. The camp bustled with fluttering robes in bright yellow, pure white, iridescent orange, oxblood red, and stark black. The days began with the sounds of clanking religious beads, drums, gongs, whistles, and wooden bells and ended with feathered shamans dancing into a trance by the fire, sorcerers reading the cracks on the burned bones of sheep, astrologers calling to the night sky, and soldiers tossing anklebones.

From the beginning, this recruitment of foreign scholars and men of religion was not universally well received, as Mongols tended to mistrust all things foreign. Bar Hebraeus explained that when Genghis Khan invaded China he heard that the people revered images and had “priests who were lords of wisdom.” Therefore, he “sent ambassadors to them, and asked them for priests, and promised to hold them in honor. And when the priests came Genghis Khan ordered them to make a debate on faith and an inquiry into it with the Enchanters [shamans]. And when the priests spoke and read extracts from their Book, which they called ‘Nom’ in their language, the enchanters failed and were vanquished, and they were unable to reply because they were destitute of knowledge. And from this time, the rank of the priests increased among the Mongols, and they were commanded to fashion images, and to cast copies of them as they did in their home country, and to offer to the full sacrifices and libations according to their customs. And although they honored the priests greatly, the Mongols at the same time did not reject the enchanters. And both parties remained among them, each to carry on its own special work, without despising or holding the other in contempt.”²⁶

Religious personnel seemed an appropriate choice to tap in the task of organizing a new society, as they were already experienced in many cases in supervising the collection of taxes and codifying law. In Genghis Khan’s perspective, all priests venerated heaven in some form or other. He had not yet witnessed the great animosity that often separates one faith from another and one worshipper from another. Having gathered together men of different religions to assist him in governing, he quickly came to see the problematic way that they sowed distrust, suspicion, or even hatred of those whose spiritual beliefs or practices differed from their own.

Though he did not know it, Genghis Khan was about to be pulled into his first war of religions.