10

God’s Omnipotence

Soon after the success of his campaign against the Jin, Genghis Khan received an urgent and unusual request from a group of Muslims living in the Kara Khitai Empire, along the eastern shadow of the Tien Shan Mountains, bridging modern-day China and Kyrgyzstan. Having seen the Uighurs and Karluks, both fellow Muslims, break away from the Kara Khitai to join Genghis Khan, the group beseeched him to come liberate them from their current master and to rule over them. They appealed to the Mongol leader in part because their current ruler happened to be an old nemesis. He was Guchlug, the son of Tayang Khan of the Naiman.

When Genghis Khan had conquered the Christian Kereyid and Naiman tribes nearly a decade earlier, both khans had been killed, but their sons had fled. Ong Khan’s son, who was initially granted refuge among the Buddhist Tangut, died wandering in the southern Gobi, abandoned by his followers. Tayang Khan’s son Guchlug almost met the same fate, but he finally succeeded in making his way to the capital of the Kara Khitai, the westernmost of the Chinese kingdoms, around the year 1208. The Kara Khitai leaders received him warmly; after all, they too had once been refugees from tribal upheaval.

Their ancestors, the Khitai, had ruled northern China and the tribes of Mongolia from 907 to 1125 as the Liao dynasty, but over time they had lost their former glory and they now ruled a much smaller kingdom known as the Kara, meaning “black” or “western,” Khitai. They created their new empire around the former Sogdian trade center of Balasagun, near Issyk Kul, the magnificent deepwater lake high in the Tien Shan mountains, close to the modern Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. Clinging to the remnants of their old imperial style and their staunch Buddhist faith, the ruling family lost contact with their subjects, who increasingly converted to Islam and began to break out of the reins that had once controlled them. As happens at the end of so many regimes, those in power became trapped between a generalized fear of their subjects, whom they no longer understood, and an inability to comprehend a world in which they themselves would no longer be in power.

The Gurkhan, emperor of the Kara Khitai, fantasized that with Guchlug’s support he might defeat his upstart rival Genghis Khan and return the steppe tribes to his control. He saw in Guchlug a dynamic barbarian who could be useful in helping to restore the power and glory of his sclerotic dynasty. Guchlug nourished the emperor’s delusions and happily renounced his Christianity and converted to Buddhism, the official court religion of the Kara Khitai royal family. Guchlug “changed from the religion of Jesus to the practice of idolatry,” in the words of one Muslim chronicler, and he tried to impose his new religion on the people. “He changed the lights of the true path into the darkness of unbelief, and the service of the all merciful into the serfdom of Satan.”¹ The grateful emperor gave his daughter in marriage to Guchlug, made him a khan, and allowed him to begin gathering a private army of steppe soldiers from the dispersed enemies of Genghis Khan.

In a lifetime of inept rule, poorly planned wars, and inconsistent laws and commands, this decision proved to be the Gurkhan’s worst and final mistake. Once empowered with control over the army, Guchlug turned against his father-in-law and “fell upon him like lightning from a cloud.”² In 1211, the year of Genghis Khan’s invasion of the Jin territory, Guchlug deposed the Gurkhan, imprisoned him, and seized control of the capital, treasury, and government. Two years later, in 1213, the Gurkhan died, and Guchlug became sole ruler. With the vitality of a rebel on a mission, he launched a campaign to regain the former territories of the emperor in the fertile oasis cities of western China, noted for their production of grapes, melons, and wine.

Although Guchlug was now a Buddhist, he initially appointed Muslim officials to preside over his Muslim subjects, but discontented locals quickly repudiated them as collaborators and assassinated the new appointees. Guchlug first responded moderately, orchestrating public debates among Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim scholars to soothe religious tensions, but these emotionally charged spectacles only sharpened the differences among his subjects and heated the anger among the rival religions. At this point Guchlug decided that because the Muslims had rejected the officials he had sent to preside over them, he had no choice but to repress them completely. He closed the mosques and forbade instruction in the teachings of Islam. Finally, in a desperate attempt to bring religious homogeneity to his fractious people, he demanded that Muslim converts return to their original religions of Christianity or Buddhism and abandon Muslim dress, adopting the traditional clothes of the Kara Khitai Empire. To enforce his strict new policies against Islam, Guchlug stationed one soldier in each Muslim home to monitor behavior and force compliance. “Oppression, injustice, cruelty, and depravity were made manifest,” wrote Juvaini, “and the pagan idolaters accomplished whatever was their will and in their power, and none was able to prevent it.”³

Although Shah Muhammad II of Khwarizm, based in what is today Uzbekistan, was the closest powerful Muslim ruler in Central Asia, the persecuted Muslims under the Kara Khitai received no assistance from him. He and Guchlug were, at least temporarily, allies. So the beleaguered and desperate Muslims sent emissaries instead to Guchlug’s archenemy, Genghis Khan. “Before the rumors of the conquests of the Emperor of the World, Genghis Khan, had been spread abroad,” wrote Mirza Muhammad Haidar, a fifteenth-century Turkic historian of Central Asia, the Muslims turned to the Mongols for salvation. “Under the protection of the Emperor of the World Genghis Khan” they “obtained immunity from the evil acts of the Gurkhan Guchlug.”⁴

Genghis Khan received the Muslim embassy with dignity. Convinced of the sincerity of their cause, he accepted their plea and sent Jebe, who had become one of his best commanders, with an army to free them in 1216. In Juvaini’s words, their “arrow of prayer hit the target of answer and acceptance.” Genghis Khan set out “to remove the corruption of Guchlug and lance the abscess of his sedition.”⁵ For the Mongol leader, the campaign offered a seemingly simple way to expand his empire to a people eager to join him. It also provided him with an opportunity to seek revenge on Guchlug, the last surviving enemy of his earlier steppe wars.

The mission proved easier than Jebe had anticipated, due to the unintended consequences of Guchlug’s tactic of spreading his soldiers out of their central garrison in the mountains and stationing them in dispersed homes in the desert oases. As the Mongol army approached the towns and villages, the Muslims spontaneously rose up and attacked their resident guards. Thus, “all his soldiers that sojourned in Muslim houses . . . were annihilated at one moment, like quicksilver upon the ground.” Guchlug fled south through the mountains toward India with the rapidly dwindling forces that were still loyal to him. The Mongols chased him “like a mad dog” across the modern borders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where they finally caught and killed him in 1218.

The liberated Muslims of the Kara Khitai and their allied tribes flocked to the banner of Genghis Khan. Juvaini called the arrival of the Mongol army “one of the mercies of the Lord and one of the bounties of divine grace.”⁶ The Kara Khitai were surprised when the disciplined Mongol warriors seized no booty and asked for no tribute from them. Jebe “demanded nothing of them but news” about his enemies. Looking toward the future, Genghis Khan particularly wanted information about Shah Khwarizm, who ruled most of Persia and Central Asia between the Tien Shan Mountains and the Caspian Sea. After liberating the Muslims and killing their usurper khan, Jebe returned triumphantly to central Mongolia. He brought one hundred white horses as a gift to Genghis Khan, to replace the horse he had shot out from under him more than a decade earlier.

Conquering the Kara Khitai, with its mixed population of Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians, was Genghis Khan’s first encounter with the disruptive power of religious factionalism. His response was simple and just. He once again permitted “the call to prayer” not only for the Muslims, who had begged him for liberation from the Kara Khitai, but for followers of all religions. Genghis Khan sent messengers to each city and village throughout the newly liberated lands to announce his law so that every person would hear it and know it. He decreed that “each should abide by his own religion and follow his own creed.”⁷ This became a founding principle of his conquests thenceforth, and he remained true to it for all his subjects throughout the remainder of his life.

Religious tolerance, although rare in history, was not completely new in the thirteenth century. In addition to the implicit religious tolerance of exceptional leaders such as Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great, at least once before an emperor had issued an explicit Edict of Tolerance. That was the Roman emperor Julian, commonly known as Julian the Apostate because he had been born a Christian but rejected the faith in the year 361, when he became emperor. The following year he issued the Edict of Tolerance, allowing all types of Christians freedom of practice, restoring the Greek and Roman gods as the state religion, and naming himself, like previous emperors, the Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the empire. He offered to restore the Jewish Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, but despite his leniency toward some religions, he remained devoutly anti-Christian, just as the Christians remained antiemperor. The edict, although justifiably famous for its unique intent, did not create religious freedom. The following year, while on campaign in Iraq, the thirty-two-year-old emperor was assassinated by one of his own troops. According to Julian’s former teacher Libanius, the assassin was a dissatisfied Christian who considered the emperor a pagan.⁸ Upon his death the empire reverted to Christianity and to even more vigorous religious persecutions. Julian’s edict had applied to temples, churches, and priests. It granted tolerance to these Christian and pagan sects to operate within certain limits.

Genghis Khan’s law was unique because it did not merely allow religious clerics to practice their profession; it allowed each individual to choose which religion or belief seemed most appealing. Freedom of religion, under the Mongols, was an individual right. Much later, in the eighteenth century, this distinction between religious freedom as an individual right versus a group right would have important philosophical and political implications in Europe and America.

Juvaini was the first to point out the importance of Genghis Khan’s new law. In part he did so because it was his first international edict. Genghis Khan had created a law code for the Mongols in 1206, and he had issued various military and administrative edicts on his campaigns in China, but this was the first general law that stated a firm legal and moral principle that would extend to the entire new Mongol Empire. This was the first of what became known as the Great Law, a set of international laws that went beyond those of any one nation within the empire. Later scholars, including Pétis de la Croix, whose biography was so influential to Thomas Jefferson, called this the first law of Genghis Khan.

At the time, Genghis Khan had no way of knowing how important his new law would become. His encounter with the Muslims of Kara Khitai had given him a new understanding of the boundaries between the great religions—how different from one another they perceived themselves to be, and how much animosity existed between them. He believed all forms of worship tended toward the same goals and spoke to the same divine presence. One was neither right nor wrong; they simply varied in the means they used to teach their form of morality. He did not view rival faiths as equal so much as he viewed them as all the same. There was one universal religion, but it found different forms of expression, just as there was but one universal empire, his Mongol Empire, but within it, people could speak different languages, follow varied customs, and adhere to various forms of government, according to their traditions and the teachings of their ancestors.

With the subjugation of Guchlug and subsequent annexation of the former Kara Khitai Empire, Genghis Khan unexpectedly became a champion of religious freedom and defender of the oppressed. Among the steppe nomads, kinship and tribal affiliation formed the natural cleavages in society, but in sedentary societies, religious fault lines crisscrossed the nation like flaws in a diamond, waiting to be shattered with one strike. Genghis Khan recognized the benefit of turning one faction against another, but he realized that the only way he could bring peace to his growing empire was to neutralize these potentially explosive divisions.

Marveling at how receptive Genghis Khan was to foreign faiths, al-Umari, a fourteenth-century Arab historian and official in Damascus, mistakenly reported that each of his sons chose a different religion. He claimed that one converted to Judaism, another to Christianity, while some remained faithful to their native religion and others worshipped various idols, but none was fanatical or tried to impose his beliefs on the others.⁹ He wrote that according to Genghis Khan’s law, the penalty for killing a person because of his religious belief was execution.¹⁰

Juvaini also placed a naively benign interpretation on Genghis Khan’s commitment to religious freedom. “Being the adherent of no religion and the follower of no creed, he eschewed bigotry, and the preference of one faith to another and the placing of some above others,” he wrote. Instead of persecuting them, “he honored and respected the learned and pious of every sect, recognizing such conduct as the way to the Court of God.”¹¹ While this may have been true, he also had clear political motivations for his religious policy.

Genghis Khan had a logistical flair for exploiting his enemy’s weaknesses, and for transforming his enemies’ presumed strengths into liabilities. He discovered that religious freedom could be used as a political and military weapon against the civilizations around him. He understood clearly the power that religious belief had over people, and just as he had channeled rivers to knock down the walls of the city, he used the people’s faiths to his strategic advantage.

“Men are difficult to rule because they are quick in doing evil and slow in practicing goodness,”¹² Yelu Chucai wisely observed. The army and government alone could not guarantee good behavior. Genghis Khan understood that he would need religion to control his diverse subjects. His policy of religious freedom offered a practical solution to the pressing problem of factionalism within his growing empire. In the slowly developing Mongol worldview, heaven chose Genghis Khan to revive the proper world order, correct wrongs, restore natural justice, and lead the lost nations back onto the “white road” by uniting them into a single empire under Mongol control. To fulfill his divine mission in a forceful yet sincere manner, Genghis Khan had offered each nation he was about to invade an opportunity to voluntarily submit to his command. Their cities would remain unmolested, their markets would continue to function, and their rulers and religious leaders would be reconfirmed in office. The Mongols promised to protect them from enemies inside and outside their nation, manage their trade routes, and enforce uniform and fair taxes. Genghis Khan did not offer them political freedom, but he offered them protection and stability and total freedom of religion.

His policy attracted the persecuted Muslims and gave them a theological excuse for supporting a pagan leader. Juvaini wrote that whoever promotes Islam, “though it be not his own religion, advances day by day in prosperity and consideration.”¹³ Buddhists and Christians found the same freedom, and instead of turning against one another or denouncing the pagan conqueror who had savaged their land, they found a reason to see his rule as offering a form of liberation.

According to one Muslim chronicle, early in Genghis Khan’s career he had a dream in which he was winding a turban around his head, but the turban continued to grow larger and larger and the cloth grew longer and longer, seemingly without end. As only Muslims wore such turbans, the khan sent for a learned Muslim merchant to interpret the dream. The merchant explained that the turban clearly symbolized power for the Muslims, and the size of his turban in the dream meant that he would conquer all of the countries of Islam and one day rule the Muslim world.¹⁴

Muslims proved to be Genghis Khan’s closest allies, his fiercest enemies, some of the earliest benefactors of his rule, and, in the end, the ones who suffered the most from the Mongol conquests. Eight centuries later, Islam still struggles to recover. Genghis Khan seemed to understand Islam more intuitively than he understood other religions, and he respected the cultural and intellectual achievements of the Muslims, who shared a nomadic core at the heart of their culture. Both Mongols and Muslims were herders with a long and respected military tradition, and both detested eating pigs and dogs. As Juvaini wrote, “In those days the Mongols regarded the Moslems with the eye of respect, and for their dignity and comfort would erect them clean tents of white felt.”¹⁵

Unlike the mystical and magical religions that dominated earlier empires in Greece, Rome, Egypt, India, and China, Islam offered a clear message focused on law contained in a single relatively short book, the Holy Quran. The Arabic script was curving and beautiful, like the Mongol script, with which Arabic shared a common origin. In the view of some of his Muslim defenders, Genghis Khan shared a mystical connection with Islam. The ninety-sixth sura of the Quran relates that Allah created the first man from a clot of blood, and Genghis Khan was born clutching just such a clot in his hand. Genghis Khan represented the beginning of a new age for humanity.

Having conquered the kingdoms of northern and western China, the Mongols now controlled the world’s richest trade route from the cities of northern China, through the Gansu Corridor and across the Uighur oases of western China to the cities of the Tien Shan Mountains, connecting the two great mercantile civilizations of China and Islam. Everything was in rapid flux. Prisoners were becoming princes, and princes becoming prisoners. Genghis Khan’s daughters now administered the three primary trading kingdoms of Onggut, Uighur, and Karluk, and their husbands served in his army. The Great Khan issued new laws promoting trade, lowering taxes, abolishing local tariffs, and protecting merchants; he posted guards along the trade routes so “that whatever merchants arrived in his territory should be granted safe conduct.”¹⁶

Looting the cities of China had overwhelmed the Mongols with booty. They had so much precious silk, lacquered furniture, tortoiseshell combs, jade vases, gold, silver, turquoise, coral, dishes, pots, medicines, weapons, and wine that they now suffered from a severe scarcity of camels to transport it all. In the bitterly cold climate of Mongolia, the nomads could wear only so much silk and carry only so much jewelry, and their gers could accommodate only so much furniture. The excess goods filled the storehouses and strained the Mongols’ ability to continue in their nomadic ways.

Hearing of the surprising success of the Mongols and their vast wealth, enterprising Muslim merchants from Khojent, a trade city on the Syr Darya River in modern Tajikistan, collected a variety of cotton, wool, and other fabrics, which had always been desirable to the steppe nomads who did not weave, and organized a caravan. “Does this fellow think that fabrics have never been brought to us before?” Genghis Khan asked of the head of the caravan.¹⁷ He asked that the merchants be shown the Mongol storehouses bulging with silk fabrics and other wares. The unprecedented display of such wealth so overwhelmed them that rather than trying to sell their goods to the Mongols, they offered them as a gift, in the hope that Genghis Khan would share his wealth with them.

This turned out to be a wise decision. The Muslim merchants had brought some nice cottons that appealed to Genghis Khan, and a type of gold-embroidered fabric he had never seen before. Chinese weavers used silk threads to create exquisite pictures of mountains, birds, trees, and elaborate scenes, but these Muslim weavers used threads of gold to create elaborate geometric patterns with swirling floral designs and an occasional bird, lion, or other animal.

Genghis Khan liked what he saw and decided he would use his new wealth to buy goods that he could not obtain from China: the sumptuous gold cloth brought by the merchants from Khojent, but also high-quality steel from Damascus and sweet-smelling sandalwood from India. He did not need to send an army into Central Asia to get these goods, as it seemed that he could just send a trade caravan. His newly acquired Muslim subjects were adept at trading and had a long history of organizing trade caravans across the deserts. The expense of sending a caravan was a fraction of the cost and effort of equipping an army. With honest partners and a respectful relationship, the Mongols could acquire whatever they needed simply by purchasing it with gold or silver or bartering for other foreign goods.

In 1218, Genghis Khan sent a diplomatic mission to the shah of Khwarizm to negotiate an opening for trade. Khwarizm, the wide and fertile river delta where the Amu Darya flowed into the Aral Sea, was the home of the royal family. The shahs of Khwarizm had modeled their country on earlier Persian kingdoms, making them the heirs of the ancient Sogdians. Their territory included many great trading cities but also inhospitable desert and mountain lands, stretching from the Aral Sea into Afghanistan and north into modern Kazakhstan and including much of modern Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, southern Kazakhstan, the eastern half of Azerbaijan and western halves of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. The shah’s empire bordered the Arab lands of the caliph of Baghdad to the west and the former Kara Khitai Empire to the northeast. Somehow the shah managed to maintain hostile relations with all his neighbors, large and small.

Even Juzjani, who was harshly critical of all things Mongol, admitted that Genghis Khan had initially sought peace when he went to Khwarizm. He quotes the message that the khan sent to the shah: “I am master of the lands of the rising sun while you rule those of the setting sun. Let us conclude a firm treaty of friendship and peace. Merchants and their caravans should come and go in both directions, carrying the valuable and ordinary products from my land to yours, just as they do from your land to mine.”¹⁸

The shah responded positively and, citing the Mongols’ success in freeing Muslims from Buddhist persecution in the Kara Khitai kingdom, suggested that Genghis Khan had fashioned a permanent alliance with Islam. He invited him to send a caravan of goods. In order to assemble a large caravan, Genghis Khan ordered each of his daughters and sons to select one of their Muslim retainers for the expedition and to equip him with “a brick of gold or silver.”¹⁹ In addition to gold, the Mongols sent sable furs, musk, jade, and textiles of fine camel wool.²⁰ This was both a trade and a diplomatic mission to the largest kingdom in Central Asia.

“We have dispatched to your country in their company a group of merchants,” Genghis Khan informed the shah, in the hope that they may acquire “wondrous wares,” and at the same time “the abscess of evil thoughts may be lanced by the improvement of relations and agreement between us.”²¹ The Secret History records that the caravan consisted of one hundred merchants under the leadership of a man named Uquna,²² who may have been from India because at least one Indian had a major role in leading the caravan. Juvaini puts the total number of retainers at 450 plus their animals and wares, with more than five hundred laden camels.²³ Whatever the number, the caravan was the largest and most valuable caravan ever to have come out of Mongolia.

Genghis Khan sought to rule an empire in which trade formed the basis for prosperity not only for the Mongol nation but also for the vassals under his rule, from the lands of the Chinese to those of Muslims and Christians. However, as Juvaini poetically pointed out, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the bird nesting quietly on one’s roof is the Phoenix of Prosperity or the Owl of Misfortune. Genghis Khan may have been momentarily resting on the roof of the world, but he was about to unleash a great terror on those who underestimated his remaining strength and resolve. Before the “waters of prosperity” could flow with “their rivers of desire,” the Muslims of Khwarizm would endure an “army of affliction and sorrow.”²⁴ The bloodshed, when it came, was unrelenting, but it did not have to be.

In the winter of 1218–19, an official who was a maternal uncle of the shah raided the Mongol caravan as soon as it reached Khwarizm territory at Otrar, a city near the modern borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He imprisoned the merchants leading the caravan, and then, with the approval of the shah, who was also anxious to seize the wealth, he executed all save one, who managed to escape and report back to Genghis Khan. The attack was more than opportunistic theft of a typical merchant’s caravan. It outraged Genghis Khan and, more important, shook his confidence in the trust he thought he had cultivated with the Muslims. This hostile act jeopardized the trade network he had envisioned connecting East and West.

He took the raid as a deliberate and unprovoked act of betrayal by the shah. In the words of Juvaini, “the whirlwind of anger cast dust into the eyes of patience and clemency while the fire of wrath flared up with such a flame that it drove the water from the eyes and could be quenched only by the shedding of blood.”²⁵ But initially Genghis Khan showed remarkable restraint: he sent an ambassador to the shah to ask that he punish the governor of Otrar. The shah scoffed at demands from this distant barbarian, who might terrorize the nearby Chinese but posed no threat to his heavily fortified Muslim cities protected by a powerful army many times the size of Genghis Khan’s. Rather than responding to the message, the shah executed the envoy. In a lifetime of inept and vacillating rule, this was the worst decision he ever made.

The shah of Khwarizm had not simply betrayed Genghis Khan. From the Mongol point of view, he had violated the Will of Heaven by straying from the path of correct behavior. In the words of Genghis Khan, the shah had broken the sacred bond that tied humanity to the moral path and to heaven. “How can the Golden Cord be broken?” he asked, and then he prepared his nation once again for war.²⁶ He justified his invasion of the Muslim countries of Central Asia as an effort to put them back on the right path. He was coming with the explicit mandate of the Eternal Sky to “return them to righteousness.”²⁷

The Mongol army set out in the winter of 1219–20, less than a year after the attack on the caravan. Genghis Khan’s campaign against the shah and the Muslim cities was a family affair—in both the best and worst senses. His sons and sons-in-law accompanied him on campaign while Borte Khatun remained in charge of the Mongol nation and his daughters ruled the mercantile cities of the Silk Road. At the start of the campaign, Genghis Khan called a meeting with his sons to settle on his successor. He was now fifty-seven years old, and at his age, it was possible he might not return alive. After a bitter family discussion, his sons agreed to support Ogodei, his third son, as the next Great Khan. The other three would all be khans in charge of parts of the territory. Genghis Khan had preferred his eldest son, Jochi, who was the smartest of them all, but questions about his paternity had kept the other brothers from supporting him.

Genghis Khan carefully gathered the men of his extended family and his army and set out on the long path to Central Asia. He chose his fourth wife, Khulan Khatun, to accompany him and manage his mobile military headquarters while his other three wives remained at the imperial court in Mongolia. He was accompanied on campaign by his five sons—the four sons born by Borte and one younger son, Kolgen, born to Khulan.²⁸

Just before leaving the Mongol heartland and crossing the Altai Mountains into Central Asia, Genghis Khan and his army stopped to offer a sacrifice to the imperial banner. This ceremony was one of the most important ones performed by the Keshig at the beginning of a long campaign and held deep symbolic value for everyone involved. Although the ceremony was held in July, three feet of snow fell immediately afterward.

“The emperor was perplexed,” wrote his adviser Yelu Chucai, who, like any skilled reader of signs, interpreted the snow as a favorable sign: the Water Spirit was responsible for the snow, and his appearance “in the height of summer is a sign that you will defeat the enemy.”²⁹ The work of a good astrologer was not so much to predict the future as to be able to give a positive interpretation of whatever situation the soldiers or common people might perceive as a bad omen. Genghis Khan did not need the interpretation himself so much as he needed his people to hear it. Throughout the remainder of his life, Yelu Chucai proved adept at turning potentially negative signs into positive assurances of success and victory for Genghis Khan. He became skilled at propaganda and at the important task of managing public opinion for his master.

More snow lay ahead, and at this point it was a real problem, not just a matter of symbols. “At that time it was just the height of summer,” reported Yelu Chucai, “but snowflakes were flying over the mountain peaks and the mass of ice was deep.”³⁰ He described the mountain pass as nothing more than a “woodcutter’s track,”³¹ but the Great Khan “ordered that a road be cut through the ice so that the army could pass.”³² Nothing would impede him now. “When a man of character has made up his mind, he stands firm as a mountain in his resolve,” Yelu Chucai wrote. “He is not affected by times and circumstances.”³³

Although this would turn out to be one of the bloodiest military campaigns in history, it began as something of a lark for the young Yelu Chucai. Leaving home with the Mongol army offered him a liberation he might otherwise not have had. Crossing Mongolia, western China, and Central Asia exposed him to new sights and ideas. He had spent most of his life studying and learning about the world from poems, books, pictures, and calligraphy. Suddenly he had a chance to discover for himself how the mist looked on the mountains, how the sun reflected in a glassy lake, or how the birds flocking on a hilltop could make it appear almost snow-covered.

With the enthusiasm and indefatigable curiosity of a schoolboy, he jotted down numerous short poems that he called “my bag of poems full of sun and wind.”³⁴ Yelu Chucai also described Genghis Khan’s mobile imperial capital in Mongolia, where “mountains and streams interlaced and the vegetation was dense and green.” In the camp “carriages and tents were as numerous as clouds; officers and soldiers as numerous as raindrops. Horses and oxen covered the fields and weapons brightened the sky. Dwelling faced dwelling and camp followed camp in streaming succession. Of past splendors, none could rival this.”³⁵

Life was a sensuous discovery. As he crossed the mountains and entered the lands of the shah of Khwarizm, Yelu Chucai delighted in Muslim gardens and orchards of pears, almonds, and apples, and rhapsodized when he saw pomegranates “as large as two fists and of a sour-sweet taste.” He saw watermelons so large that “a long-eared donkey could only carry two of them at the same time.” In other places, the melons grew as “large as a horse’s head.”³⁶ Sometimes the simplest of things puzzled him, such as the lack of a hole in the center of Muslim coins, in contrast to Chinese coins, which had such a hole so that they could be strung together for easy counting and transport. He loved grapes and wine and, with the ingenuity and innocent rebelliousness of youth, soon learned to make wine himself, “so that I did not have to pay the tax.”³⁷ Throughout his life, he continued to enjoy wine, sometimes excessively, and frequently referred to it in his poems.

Amid the descriptions of almonds, pomegranates, and duty-free wine, it is sometimes hard to believe, in reading Yelu Chucai’s account of his travels with the Mongols, that there was a war around him. He was participating in one of the greatest conquests of history, and although at first he seemed quite unaware of the significance of this venture, he gradually understood its momentousness and realized that it was important for him to record what he saw. The Mongol campaign against the shah of Khwarizm gave him exposure to new lands and ideas, provoking him to think more about his personal background and to clarify his beliefs. He found his identity. Despite his fierce loyalty to Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the farther Yelu Chucai traveled from home, the more Chinese he became as his early education continually bubbled up from inside him.

Word traveled ahead warning of the Mongols’ approach, but the shah had little idea what to do. He seemed to simultaneously fear the Mongols and believe that Allah would protect him from the foreign brutes. He sent reinforcements to Otrar, knowing that it would be the first city attacked. When the Mongols arrived, they surrounded Otrar and set up a siege that was to last for several months. Under the false assumption that the Mongols would either give up the siege or be satisfied with sacking the city as retaliation for the raid, the shah remained woefully unprepared when the Mongols sent out smaller armies in different directions to attack several cities at once. Similar to the Mongol strategy of frightening animals at the start of a big hunt, the scattered and seemingly disorganized attacks confused the shah and prevented him from making a coordinated response. He did not know which way to go to counter the Mongols, and least expected what happened next.

The Mongols struck at the heart of the Khwarizm Empire before taking the border city of Otrar. If they had stuck to the trade routes followed by most armies since the time of Alexander the Great, they would have passed through a series of cities, including the great trading and arts center of Samarkand, before reaching cities such as Bukhara or the capital at Khiva, also called Khwarizm, near the modern city of Urgench, in Uzbekistan. Instead of taking this route, Genghis Khan and his youngest son, Tolui, took some five units of ten thousand men each and, with the help of local nomads as guides, crossed the Kyzylkum Desert early in 1220, while the weather was still relatively cool. In February, the Mongols leapt upon Bukhara like a pack of wolves on unsuspecting sheep and in two weeks conquered the city.

Within a month they had arrived at the gates of the much better fortified Samarkand, but despite the large army quartered there, the Mongols quickly took the city. The Mongols unleashed their outrage on Otrar, the city of revenge. Knowing the fate that awaited them, the people resisted in every way possible. As the defenders exhausted their arrows and then fell, girls came forward and began dismantling the bricks from the palace in order to hurl them at their attackers, but the Mongols were determined to win. As Juvaini put it, the Mongols slaughtered those who wore the veil as readily as those who wore the turban.³⁸ The “citadel and walls were leveled with the street,” and the haughty governor who had seized the caravan and began the war had “to drink the cup of annihilation and don the garb of eternity.” Juvaini quoted from the Persian classic The Shahnama, the Book of Kings: “Such is the way of High Heaven; in the one hand it holds a crown, in the other a noose.”³⁹

The Mongol victories in Khwarizm were bloody and dreadful, particularly for the defeated warriors, whom the Mongols usually slaughtered en masse or saved for some worse fate such as serving as shields for future battles or as filler to be thrown alive into moats. With only a small invading army, Genghis Khan wanted to ensure that no potential enemy army survived between him and his Mongol homeland, to which he might need to retreat. Alive, such soldiers posed a constant threat, and he eliminated them. His treatment of civilians was more variable, sometimes severe and other times markedly benign. In the long campaign ahead, his policy toward the defeated soldiers remained the same, but his treatment of civilians grew starkly harsher as he moved deeper into Central Asia and farther from home.

After the dramatic fall of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Otrar, Genghis Khan offered every city a chance to surrender. He sent Muslim envoys to them and urged them “to draw out of the whirlpool of destruction and the trough of blood.” If they resisted, he promised to annihilate them in a sea of blood. “But if you will listen to advice and exhortation with the ear of intelligence and consideration and become submissive and obedient to his command, your lives and property will remain in the stronghold of security.”⁴⁰ Genghis Khan always honored his word. Those who surrendered suffered no harm, and he treated them well. In turn, he used this fair treatment as a means of encouraging other cities to surrender.

Though some cities surrendered, others chose to rise up against their oppressive shah even before the Mongols threatened them, and thus as some refugees fled to escape the invaders, others raced to join them. Some of those seeking out the Mongols were fellow nomads who preferred the rule of Genghis Khan to the oppressive exploitation of the shah. Others were from pagan, usually Turkic, tribes who resented the pressure from the Muslim majority to abandon their traditional religion and convert to Islam. Those who resisted faced a fate that grew worse with each new battle.

Nothing could stop the Mongols now. When they came to the great rivers, they built bridges of boats and constructed dams of stone and earth. When the enemy attempted to escape on the river by barges, the Mongol cavalry chased them down, fired flammable petroleum-based naphtha at them, and pulled a massive chain across the river.⁴¹ The Mongols filled the moats around cities with stone, dirt, and captives. When they came to great walls, they built ladders and had their Chinese engineers fashion battering rams, catapults, and other ingenious siege machines while prisoners tunneled under the earth.

Shah Muhammad II was terrified. “Satan the Tempter had caused fear and dread to gain such a hold upon the mind,” wrote Juvaini of the shah, “that he was seeking a hole in the ground or a ladder to the heavens in order to place himself out of reach.”⁴² He began to quarrel bitterly with his eldest son, Jalal ad-Din, who wanted him to fight because the Mongols had not yet reached his capital. “To scatter the armies through the lands and turn tail before an enemy whom one has not encountered,” he said to his father, “is the mark of a craven wretch, not the path of a mighty lord.”⁴³ Jalal ad-Din recognized that his father had failed to organize a united response against the Mongols. Every city and province had to face the invading army on its own and defend itself without coordination and guidance. He asked his father to let him command the army. Otherwise, “we are chewed like gum in the mouth of reproach and drowned in the flood of repentance before the eyes of all mankind.”

The shah tried to justify his position by turning to philosophy. “Every perfection has a defect, every full moon a waning and every defect a perfection,” he said airily. There were times when not fighting was the wiser course of action, as “it is well known and an established fact that agitation in the noose of the rope only precipitates death and that from the union of conjecture and fantasy there can spring naught but madness.”⁴⁴ Jalal ad-Din left in anger, determined “to gallop on to the field of manliness” and fight, even if he had to defy heaven itself.

The Mongols pursued the feckless shah while he fled toward the Caspian Sea from his capital of Khiva, leaving his mother, wives, and children to fend for themselves and face a life of misery as Mongol prisoners. His deserted capital, near the border of modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, was a city of unrivaled riches. “It was the site of the throne of the Sultans of the world and the dwelling-place of the celebrities of mankind,” wrote Juvaini. “Its environs were receptacles for the rarities of the time; its mansions were resplendent with every kind of lofty ideas, and its regions and districts were so many rose gardens through the presence of men of quality.”⁴⁵

The shah’s mother organized the evacuation of the harem and the royal treasury. She killed all the hostages accumulated in the city for fear that the Mongols might liberate them and that they would join the enemy. The people of the city were now abandoned, for “no leader had been appointed to whom they might refer upon the occurrence of untoward events and for the administration of affairs of state and the business of the commonweal, and by whose agency they might resist the violence of Fate.”⁴⁶

Genghis Khan sent Subodei and Jebe, two of his best generals, west with twenty thousand warriors in pursuit of the fleeing shah and the treasury, but he did not besiege the city. Instead, he put his three eldest sons in charge of it so that they might have the honor of taking the capital while learning to work together. They proved as uncoordinated in their efforts as the people of Khiva were in their defense. Jochi expected that he would inherit the city eventually, and therefore he wanted it taken with minimum destruction. Chagatai and Ogodei wanted only to destroy it and loot it. They “arrived with an army like a flood in its onrush and like blasts of wind in the succession of its ranks. They made a promenade around the town and sent ambassadors to call on the inhabitants to submit and surrender.” When they received no response, “they busied themselves with the preparation of instruments of war such as wood, mangonels, and missiles . . . and since there were no stones . . . they manufactured these missiles from the wood of mulberry trees. They plied the inhabitants of the town with promises and threats, inducements and menaces; and occasionally they discharged a few arrows at one another.”⁴⁷

The Mongol attacks proved disjointed and disorganized. The troops filled the moat and almost took the city after firebombing it with naphtha and setting it on fire, but then, in an attempt to save the buildings, they botched the effort to divert the river. Genghis Khan had to remove Jochi from command and replace him with Ogodei. Despite the bungling efforts, the city finally fell. Then, in their greed, the brothers seized everything of value and divided it among themselves without sending the imperial share to their father, the Great Khan.

When Genghis Khan invaded the Khwarizm Empire he found that, in contrast to the Muslims of the Turkic tribes of the steppe and desert oases of western China, the urban Muslims of Central Asia saw no allure in him and expressed no spiritual affinity for the Muslims accompanying him. To them he was merely the latest in a long line of barbarian raiders who descended from nowhere, took everything they could, and disappeared back into nowhere. They discovered too late that this particular ruler had no intention of disappearing.

The people of Khwarizm did not welcome the Mongols as liberating heroes, as had the Muslims under the Kara Khitai. In turn, the Mongols showed contempt for their new enemies. “The dwellers in houses and towns were,” according to a Muslim description of the Mongols’ perception, “a degenerate and effeminate race—the tillers of the soil, slaves who toiled like cattle, in order that their betters might pass their time in luxury.”⁴⁸ In the Mongol view the people of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Otrar were like herds of goats or sheep, quickly frightened, easily led, and completely disposable.

Even those Muslims who sided with the Mongols and served them struggled to understand what had happened to their empire and society. For these devout believers, the unprecedented destruction of the jewels of Islamic civilization was at once puzzling and unprecedented. Only an ally of God could possibly have so much power. But why would God sanction such destruction? They were accustomed to Muslims fighting, raiding, invading, and killing one another as well as to fighting Christians and nonbelievers, but pagans had never before conquered them on such a massive scale. Strange as this conquest was, somehow it had to be the will of God. Genghis Khan must have had some unseen connection to God. As a fourteenth-century Kurdish historian put it, “Even though he was not a Muslim, he had a true friendship with God.”⁴⁹

The Mongol army raced across Khwarizm and the lands of the ancient Persian civilization, conquering one city after another. One of the important cities was Ray, southeast of Tehran. Religious conflicts over competing versions of Islamic law so divided the city that it could scarcely mount an effective defense against the Mongols. According to the sixteenth-century Persian historian Muhammad Khwandamir, followers of two rival schools of Islam met with Jebe, and each pleaded with him to kill the other. He executed both, asking, “What good can be expected of men who plot to have their own countrymen’s blood shed?”⁵⁰ Khwandamir’s report cannot be accepted as factual, coming so long after the conquest, but it illustrates the religious hostility at the time between Muslim factions.

The rivalries and hatreds within Islam proved so deep that many of the Muslim enemies of the shah sided with Genghis Khan and the Mongols and delighted at the spectacle of horsemen crushing the shah’s armies. Both the caliph in Baghdad and the head of the Nizari Ismaili cult better known as the Assassins were accused by other Muslims of surreptitiously aiding the Mongols in their campaign. Whether they did or not, they did not help the shah.

Genghis Khan certainly had mysterious dealings with the Ismailis. He was visited by ambassadors of Hasan III, the twenty-fifth imam of the Nizari Ismaili sect, following his spontaneous offer of submission to the Mongols.⁵¹ The shah of Khwarizm ruled most of the Persian world except for the large piece of mountainous territory controlled by Hasan III around his military base at Alamut, a mountainous region near the Caspian Sea. His Muslim sect, condemned as heretics by most Muslims, considered its leader to be a godlike figure. The Ismailis had a reputation for wild and unusual behavior, smoking hashish and taking other drugs, engaging in sexual abandon, and frequently radically changing their theology and religious practices. Confined to a small country surrounded by powerful neighbors—the shah to the northeast, the caliph of Baghdad to the west, and the Seljuk Turks to the northwest—they took advantage of the rugged terrain of their homeland to protect themselves from being annexed. Though they did not have a large or powerful army, they maintained a series of seemingly impenetrable forts built into the mountains.

In order to ally with the caliph in Baghdad against the shah of Khwarizm, Hasan III had renounced his Shia faith and declared allegiance to the Sunni. His followers accepted that such sudden shifts were due to the changing nature of God himself, but they also knew that it could just be a political strategy without theological meaning. Such tricks occupied a proud place in their religious and political traditions. They followed their leader blindly, without question, doubt, or remorse.

The Nizari managed to maintain a powerful role far beyond their size because of their highly refined and effective use of assassination and terror. Unable to defeat armies on the battlefield, they targeted their leaders in special surgical strikes. For this purpose, the Nizari had a corps of specially trained men known as fedayeen, those willing to sacrifice themselves for their religion. “These people were faithless and lived without laws,” wrote an Armenian chronicler in 1307 in The Flower of Histories of the East. “These are men without any faith or belief except what their lord [imam], called the Old Man of the Mountain, taught them; and they are so obedient to their lord that they put themselves to death at his command.”⁵²

Each fidai was trained to master the language, culture, and dress of his neighbors, as well as the arts of disguise and stealth. The fedayeen were then sent to infiltrate the inner circle of a targeted enemy, working as slowly and methodically as needed until they were well placed to carry out their mission. For the most part they operated as spies, but when necessary they were prepared to strike and to sacrifice their lives. They worked as individuals or in small groups so that if one failed, another could quickly take his place.

Most of their targets were other Muslims, particularly Seljuk Turks, but they also killed prominent crusaders such as Raymond II of Tripoli and Conrad of Montferrat and claimed unsuccessful attempts against kings Philip II and Louis IX of France and Edward II of England.⁵³ Some of the murders blamed on the Nizari may well have been committed by rivals much closer to the victims, and some of the supposedly failed attempts may have been the embroidered war stories of returning Crusaders, eager to recount in glorious terms their exploits and near-death experiences.

Even a failed assassination spread terror. In the twelfth century, fedayeen carefully infiltrated the inner circle of the great Kurdish general Saladin, the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. They managed to gain access to his private quarters and tried and failed twice to kill him. A story circulated that the would-be assassin had deliberately spared him; after creeping into his tent, instead of killing him, he had used his knife to pin a warning letter to the sultan’s pillow. Even the Nizari’s allies were wary of their friendship. “Some as were on terms of agreement with them, whether kings of former times or contemporary rulers,” wrote Juvaini, “went in fear and trembling.”⁵⁴

Usually the assassination was a suicide attack, as his targets’ guards generally either killed assassins immediately or captured and then tortured them to death. But some managed to escape and return to the lands around Alamut, where they were invited to live a blessed life of paradise on Earth, meaning ample supplies of drugs and sex. It is from this practice of using hashish that they supposedly acquired their name of hashshashin, users or smokers of hashish. It is debatable how much hashish was consumed, and this may merely have been an insult hurled by their enemies to explain their addled thinking. Whether or not it was true, the term took on a new connotation in the West and became the modern word assassin.

The meeting between envoys of Imam Hasan III and Genghis Khan was certainly one of the more unusual meetings in history, but it was also one of the most secret. Although Juvaini offers a long history of the Nizari in his biography of Genghis Khan, including within it a biography of Hasan III, he gives only a short and frustratingly cryptic summary of Imam Hasan’s interactions with Genghis Khan. He reports that the imam sent letters to Genghis Khan prior to their meeting and concludes unhelpfully that in regard to these letters, “the truth is not clear.”⁵⁵ He hints that Genghis Khan met personally with Hasan III, but he does not elaborate. He concedes only what was probably common knowledge at the time: “This much is evident,” he admits, “that when the armies of the World-Conquering Emperor Genghis Khan entered the countries of Islam, the first ruler on this side of the Oxus [Amu Darya River] to send ambassadors, and present his duty, and accept allegiance was Jalal-al-Din [Hasan III]. He adopted the course of rectitude and laid the foundation of righteousness.” Juvaini went to some lengths to justify this Mongol alliance with heretics, stressing that, at least at that time, Hasan III was married to Sunni women and following the Sunni faith.

Whatever transpired in the meetings, the Mongols and Nizari reached an accord that both the Assassins and the forces of the caliph would stand back and let Genghis Khan destroy their enemy the shah.⁵⁶ The Nizari would not interfere with the Mongols, but they did not have to contribute warriors to Genghis Khan’s army. They were free to attack Khwarizm themselves, so long as their attacks did not compete with the Mongol operations. Perhaps most important, throughout Genghis Khan’s campaign in Central Asia all land occupied by the Nizari served as a safe zone for refugees fleeing either the Mongols or the shah. The land of the Nizari became a lifesaving corridor for many civilians, although not for soldiers.

The pact between Genghis Khan and the Nizari imam appears to have been political and strategic. At the time of their alliance, Genghis Khan was focused on conquest, and the imam was already nearing the end of his life. One reason that Genghis Khan did not need troops from the Nizari was that they had something much more valuable to offer. The Nizari operated an excellent spy network, gathering intelligence across Central Asia and as far as the Mediterranean. According to the chronicler Ali Ibn al-Athir, a Nizari official met with the Mongol general Chormaqan to offer information and encouragement in the search for Jalal ad-Din.⁵⁷ The alliance held throughout Genghis Khan’s lifetime, and the Nizari continued to supply intelligence to the Mongols for more than a decade after his death.⁵⁸ The Nizari did not supply soldiers or offer tribute to the Mongols, but while the Mongol army conquered city after city, the Assassins sometimes launched their own raids against Khwarizm and kept their borders open to refugees of all sorts who were deserting the shah.

The tremendous rifts within the Muslim world offered Genghis Khan a simple path to conquer people by appealing to religious rivalries and sectarian feuds. While many Muslims accepted Genghis Khan’s assertion that he was a punishment inflicted on them by God, some mystical Sufis claimed that they had actually summoned the Mongols in a holy quest to destroy their enemies within Islam and punish the decadence of the shah’s court. According to one account, the Sufi leader himself allegedly guided the Mongol warriors into the city and encouraged them to kill all the Muslims, shouting, “O tribe of infidels, kill these evildoers.”⁵⁹ The same story and phrase were used repeatedly by competing Sufi schools that claimed credit for bringing the Mongols into the Muslim world. Though numerous, these accounts were all written long after the fact and appear to be more myth than fact.

In a more credible account, Rashid al-Din claimed that in 1221, Genghis Khan had sought to rescue the great Sufi leader Najm al-Din Kobra and his disciples before attacking Khiva, the capital of Khwarizm, where the Sufi leader lived. The Mongols fired messages into the city on arrows, encouraging the Sufis to flee. Seventy Sufi disciples came out, but their master was too old to flee. According to some accounts, he had been praying to God for just such an attack. The old Sufi master refused Genghis Khan’s invitation to abandon the city, replying that he had lived through “both bitter and sweet times” for seven decades, and fleeing from his home now would lack “manly honor and magnanimity.” “I will attain the blessing of holy war and martyrdom from you,” he reportedly said, “and you will obtain the blessing of Islam from us.” He believed that after purifying Islam the Mongols would eventually convert to it.⁶⁰

As soon as the city surrendered, Rashid al-Din tells us that Genghis Khan had his men search for the old Sufi, and “after much searching, his body was found among the slain.”⁶¹ A rival anti-Mongol Sufi leader then took credit for his death, claiming that he had ordered Genghis Khan to kill him and other deviant Sufi leaders for sins such as teaching the true faith to unworthy disciples and even to dogs.⁶²

Genghis Khan recognized the general piety of Muslims, and he quickly devised an effective way to use their deep trust in God as a powerful weapon against them. In March 1220, after visiting the mosque of newly conquered Bukhara, he summoned the city’s leaders. “You have committed great sins,” Juvaini relates that Genghis Khan told them. “The great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”⁶³ Just as he held defeated leaders accountable for misguiding their society, he considered religious leaders responsible for their actions and for the behavior of their followers.

He did not summon Muslim leaders in order to become their student or disciple. He called them to judgment. As heaven’s representative on Earth, he felt it was his duty to examine the religions of the people he had conquered to determine what they were doing incorrectly and to correct their errors. He scrutinized the Muslim leaders as carefully as a merchant checking an apple for worms or a precious stone for flaws. His duty was to separate good actions from bad, to punish the wicked, reward the virtuous, and restore everyone to the correct path. Few of those who came to him really understood the meaning of the Mongol invasion. “Be silent!” a leading imam commanded his followers when he was asked how this could be happening. Genghis Khan “is the wind of God’s omnipotence that is blowing, and we have no power to speak.”⁶⁴

Over the coming months, as he met with the self-proclaimed men of God and teachers of wisdom, he listened to them, asked about their practices, examined their achievements, and tested their morals. His quest was not the leisurely study of a scholar or a hermit meditating in an isolated cave; he approached his search as a man of action. The fighting that raged around him, the decisions regarding life or death, the physical and emotional turmoil of battle all added urgency to his spiritual mission. Ideas have to stand strong and clear to distinguish themselves amid war’s choking smoke and to rise above the cries of the dying.

He had come to harness the wandering religions with a golden tether and to guide them into a single caravan that he would lead. One lone camel cannot make a caravan, and so he felt that one single religion could not lead humanity to heaven. He proclaimed that it was his duty to make “the whole great people walk on the road of the true state of the law for the sake of attaining glory and honor.”⁶⁵

It was not so much religion itself that he mistrusted as the men who controlled it, those who used their power to promote their own goals rather than those of heaven. He held the wrongdoers accountable, executed some and banned many. To others he promised freedom and financial support if they would fulfill their duties to society and heaven. He encouraged religious freedom in the lands he conquered, but crushed religious extremism wherever he encountered it.

In his meetings with Muslim scholars in Samarkand, Genghis Khan asked that pious Muslims include him in their prayers wherever they might be. He approved of most Muslim practices, praising their commitment to prayer and to almsgiving, but he chastised them because “they drink and eat what they pleased, and pass whole Nights in Debauches,” even in the holy month of Ramadan.⁶⁶ The Quran may have contained a valid message, but it seemed no more effective at promoting proper behavior than the scriptures of other religions. A book could be no more important than the deeds it inspired. If Muslims did not follow the dictates of their own holy book, why should the Mongols be interested in it?

He told the Muslims that there was no need to go to the mosque to worship or to make the pilgrimage to Mecca because God was everywhere. He criticized, but did not forbid, such practices and more strenuously discouraged the Muslim punishment of amputation, the ritual of circumcision, and the veiling or segregation of women. Just as he detested foot-binding among Chinese, so he condemned some Muslim practices as deplorable and unclean. In his judgment, they violated the higher law of morality. He objected strenuously, for instance, to butchering animals by slitting their throats and bleeding them to death. In Mongol eyes, the practice was cruel, wasteful, and unclean because it polluted the air and earth. Similarly, bathing in streams or pools was thought to pollute the precious water that people and animals needed to drink.

As fighting subsided and some cities chose to surrender, the Mongols came to appreciate that Islam was more than the simple religion of nomadic herders. They had encountered one of the great Muslim civilizations and marveled at its beauty. The mosques of Bukhara and Samarkand rose up like turquoise mountains, their floors adorned with carpets that were like poetry on white marble.

Prior to entering Bukhara, the Mongols had not encountered a society where men of religion exercised political power, acted as judges, and performed the functions of offices of state. In the Buddhist kingdoms, the ruler reigned as a virtual god, but in the Muslim states, it was difficult to ascertain who made the law and whether the ruler ruled religion or vice versa. Such comingling of the two realms seemed problematic. Mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs administered the law, effectively becoming the state and removing the need for secular rulers. The Mongol empire was based on opposite principles.

The Muslims immediately sought to convert the Mongols, but Genghis Khan resisted, partly out of suspicion of Islam’s intimate connection to urban life. The Mongols saw Islam as an appropriate religion for craftsmen, traders, and farmers. As one khan told a Muslim trying to convert him, “there are no barbers, smiths, or tailors among my warriors.” If they become “Muslim and follow the rules of Islam, where will they gain their livelihood?”⁶⁷ Mongols were nomads, herders, and warriors; their beliefs supported their way of life.

Accounts of these moral discussions appear in the writings of the mystical Muslim Sufis, but these quickly degenerate into self-serving efforts to persuade the Mongols to attack rival Sufi sects. The stories are often undated and rarely tell where the meetings took place and sometimes omit even the author of the story, but taken together, they provide insight into tone and topics of discussions. When Sufi leader Khvaja Ali was brought before Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader was informed that the holy man’s father was a saint who “used to give food to the people.”

“Did he give food to his own people or to strangers?” asked Genghis Khan.

“Everyone gives food to his own people,” said one of his disciples. “This man’s father gave food to strangers.”

“It was a good person indeed who gave food to the people of God,” Genghis Khan responded. He then released the man and gave him a new cloak.⁶⁸

For the Sufis the woolen cloak was a sign of faith, rendering this gesture, in the eyes of some Sufis, an endorsement of their religious practices. But Mongols scarcely seemed able to separate Muslims from Jews, much less one Muslim faction from another. It is hardly surprising that no Mongol record mentions meeting with Sufis or even knowledge of them, whereas Muslim writers record a long list of such encounters with Sufi leaders and their disciples.

There is little evidence to support any particular anecdote among the many reported encounters, but the Sufis did proliferate under the Mongols. The initial Mongol invasion sent thousands of Sufis, such as the family of the great poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, into exile, carrying their brand of worship west toward Turkey and along the eastern Mediterranean. These refugees certainly had no reason to praise the Mongols, but the Mongol policies of tolerance gave Sufis the freedom to proselytize and to prosper.

Sufis frequently claimed Genghis Khan as one of their own. One Sufi account describes Genghis Khan as an ascetic prior to his rise to power, saying that he “left his family and tribe, and stayed up in the mountains.” As related by the Egyptian encyclopedist al-Nuwayri, the story seems to reflect some knowledge of Genghis Khan’s early years on Burkhan Khaldun. In the Sufi version, his fame spread and people “used to come to him on pilgrimage, and he would speak to them.” He “did not belong to any religious community,” but when people came to him “he signaled them to clap with their hands. As he danced they chanted ‘ya Allah, ya Allah, yakshidir—O God, O God, he is good.’ They did this, beat time for him, and he danced.”⁶⁹ The Sufi schools frequently utilized unconventional means of communing with God, singing, chanting, twirling, or dancing, often accompanied by the beating of drums or the rhythmic clapping and pounding of feet on the floor. Such hypnotic rituals allowed the practitioners to put themselves into a virtual trance, much like the steppe shamans.

One type of Sufi, known as antinomians because they went against the norms of society, wore unconventional clothes and sometimes even went nearly naked. The indefatigable Arab traveler Ibn Battuta reported that they wore “iron rings on their hands, necks, ears, and even penises, so that sexual relations were not feasible for them.”⁷⁰ Their bizarre behavior somewhat resembled the Turkic and Mongol shamans noted for going naked in the snow and sitting by blazing fires without being burned.

Yet, apparently, Genghis Khan took little notice of the Sufis. He did not need more shamans. He sought men with practical skills, and he found these in the more traditionally trained Muslim clerics, who could read and write foreign languages with unusual scripts, calculate numbers, compile records, make simultaneous translations, and in general had mastered the skills of bureaucrats. He drafted the best of them into the clerical service of his growing Mongol nation. Muslim scholars combined their philosophy and theology with practical matters of how to design buildings, construct irrigation systems, dig wells, transplant trees, breed animals, make dyes, cast metal, and handle many other issues of daily life.

With the Mongol obsession for making censuses of everything and everyone in the empire, they needed accountants, and the Muslims’ ability to handle numbers impressed them greatly. Of all the people they had encountered, the Muslims had the highest mathematical skills. Genghis Khan needed clerks with strong math skills as he organized his empire based on units of ten combined into hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands. He needed men whose fingers were more skilled with an abacus than with rosary beads. He found the Chinese mandarin class to be educated in poetry, calligraphy, and etiquette and skilled in court politics, but they could not do arithmetic the way Muslim clerks could. Buddhist scholars focused on ritual and meditation, and got lost in endless discussions about the meaning of words. Muslim scholars, by contrast, offered more practical skills. After the conquest of Khwarizm, the Mongols created a completely new class of Muslim administrators and dispatched them to China to help manage their newly conquered territory there.

Despite the utility of Muslims as clerks, Genghis Khan deliberately limited the potential influence of any single religion by employing rivals of different sects and ethnicities and granting them overlapping responsibilities. These included Jews and Christians as well as a large variety of Muslims from normally contentious groups. He forced Sunnis and Shias to work together, alongside Zoroastrians and Sufis. The tensions between them kept any one person from achieving too much power. Their personal animosities were so strong that they often suppressed negative attitudes toward the Mongols.

By the end of 1220, the Mongols had chased the shah of Khwarizm to a lonely island in the Caspian Sea, where he died. Eager to fight and defend the dynastic honor, his son and heir, Jalal ad-Din Manguberdi, now became the nominal, but last, ruler of the crumbling Khwarizm Empire. Despite his lofty titles of shah and sultan, he ruled little more than the land occupied at any one time by his roving and shrinking army. Having lost all his cities, he fled into the mountains of Afghanistan in the hopes of finding refuge for his army and family in India.

Having devastated Khwarizm, Genghis Khan dispatched units across Iran into the Caucasus Mountains to take Armenia and Georgia and attack southern Russia. He himself then headed for Afghanistan in pursuit of Jalal ad-Din. He hoped to kill him before he could reach India and possibly find new allies there.

The next three years saw some of the bloodiest of the Mongol conquests as Genghis Khan’s armies raced from the Himalayas to the Ural Mountains, from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea, fighting on fronts as distant as the Yellow River in China, the Dnieper in Ukraine, and the Indus in India. Fortresses and cities crumbled, armies evaporated, churches, mosques, and temples were left in ruin. The world had witnessed prior episodes of violence just as devastating but never on such a huge geographic scale.

Chronicles in many languages, written by men of many different religions, echoed the same astonished and devastated assessment of the blood and ruin. We can hear it in the anguished cry of the author of The Novgorod Chronicle after the Mongols defeated the Russians at the Battle of Kalka in the spring of 1223: “And thus, for our sins God put misunderstanding into us and a countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages. . . . And the Tartars turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again; God knows whence he fetched them against us for our sins.”⁷¹