11

The Thumb of Fate

Genghis Khan showed no sign of doubting his mission on Earth and his right to decide life and death for whole nations. His conquests were harsh and brutal, but harshness and brutality were typical of his era. Although he showed a remarkable ability to think outside of his time and context about many issues, no evidence suggests that he regretted killing so many men or questioned the morality of his conquests. People who died in war were fulfilling their destiny assigned by heaven; this meant that they deserved to die. In killing them, he was simply fulfilling his own destiny and following the Will of Heaven.

Ever since he had set out on his first foreign campaign against the Tangut in 1209, Genghis Khan had not lost a battle. He had conquered the cities of Khwarizm with much greater ease and speed than he had anticipated. With an unbroken record of success behind him, he fattened his horses in the summer of 1220 and headed off toward Afghanistan in an almost leisurely pursuit of Jalal ad-Din, the new Sultan of Khwarizm. He disliked the heat of the lower lands of Central Asia, so the highlands of Afghanistan offered a tempting respite for the aging warrior while his sons, sons-in-law, grandsons, and one of his daughters continued to lead the troops across the hotter zones.

As Genghis Khan approached sixty, he found that managing his expanding family took up more of his time. The problem of grooming his heirs and preparing them for future leadership of his empire became acute. As stated in the Secret History, “a body must have a head; a coat must have a collar.”¹ Martial valor was well and good, but it had to be tempered by reason. Unfortunately, he did not see his middle-aged sons growing wiser or more capable. They enjoyed life too much, and they argued among themselves over the riches that would come when their father was gone and they were left in charge. Genghis Khan began to worry that his descendants might be so lazy that “even wrapped in fresh grass they would not be eaten by an ox.”² One question plagued him, a terrible question that no parent wants to ask or answer: is it possible “that among my descendants not a single one will be born who is good?”³ He asked, but no one dared to answer. There was only silence.

In the China campaigns, he sent his sons out on independent missions but kept them under his charge, always ready to send reinforcements if needed or to call them back at a crucial moment. In the Muslim lands, his forces had spread out over a much larger territory. He had armies fighting from the Indus River in what is now Pakistan to the Volga in the south of Russia. In these distant lands, his sons had to command on their own for longer stretches of time, and they had to coordinate with one another when they could not reach their father. They also had to make independent decisions. Although the older sons were now men in their forties, the rivalries and issues of their childhood frequently surfaced and seemed exacerbated as each one anticipated what he would soon be inheriting.

The presence of his adult children and grandchildren spread out across Central Asia, sometimes with him and other times in pairs or alone, gave Genghis Khan a chance to test them on the battlefield like an old wolf teaching the young ones to hunt. He taught them war tactics and ways to inspire their men. He explained his precepts for proper government and described the nature of the good life to his sons, but he was not simply issuing orders or edicts. He encouraged them to question him and to disagree with him so that they might find a better way.

The Armenian Christian chronicler Kirakos summed up the differences among the sons. He quoted Genghis Khan’s description of his son Chagatai: “He is a martial man who loves war. But he is proud by nature, more than he should be.” Ogodei, who would become the heir, he described as “gracious from his childhood, full of virtue, generous in gift-giving and, from the time of his birth, my glory and greatness has increased daily.” Another unnamed son, either Jochi or Tolui, was “triumphant in battle, but stingy.”⁴

Jochi’s paternity continued to be an issue. His brothers wanted him barred from the succession because he had been conceived while their mother was married to the Merkid Chilger. However, isolating Jochi within the family only increased competition among the younger ones over their future patrimony. After they squabbled over how to conquer Khiva and whose property it would become, their father called them to Afghanistan in anger and disgust. He first refused to speak with them, but eventually he relented and made an effort to instruct them more properly. In one session with his eldest son, recorded in the Golden Chronicle, Jochi objected to his father’s lesson. Jochi was not interested in the boring aspects of government administration. He wished to conquer, not merely to rule. He rudely told his father, “I expected that you would tell me to go to those people whom as yet nobody has reached in order that I may take into possession the people who are yet unconquered.” He declared that his primary obligation to his father and to the Mongol nation was to expand the empire, not merely to rule already defeated people and their looted cities. “But it appears that you instruct me to rule a completely ready people,” he complained. He then dismissed ruling a conquered state as nothing better than “eating prepared food.”

Genghis Khan told his son that with this attitude, “you will not be powerful.” He described in detail the difficulty of creating the “prepared food” that Jochi had so contemptuously dismissed. The chief cook must prepare his varied components, making sure that the ingredients and dishes are ready at the right moment, and that he has enough food for everyone. He must guard against poison or other dangers, all the while socializing, having a good time, and encouraging his guests to do the same.⁵

Success in battle is essential but not sufficient to make an empire, he explained. The warrior must also know how to use words to find wisdom and to rule effectively. Winning the war is futile if the victor cannot hold his new nation. “You will rule a host of lands,” he told his sons, but a ruler must be more disciplined than his subjects. The key is to conquer the body with the mind. “Strong in body, one conquers units,” he told his followers, but “strong in soul one conquers multitudes,” and “if you wish to subdue before or after me, having seized the body, hold the soul. If you hold the soul where could the body go?”⁶

As a young warrior dedicated to fighting, Genghis Khan was distracted and not fully focused on nurturing his sons, but with maturity he had become a more loving and caring grandfather. Though he found his middle-aged sons to be recalcitrant and stubborn, he found greater pleasure and was more relaxed in his relationship with his grandsons, particularly his favorite, Mutugen, the eldest son of Chagatai and his wife Yesulun Khatun. While Genghis Khan sent his sons to distant fronts, he campaigned with Mutugen by his side in war, hunted with him in peace, and enjoyed a companionship that he had not shared with his father, brothers, or sons. He “tenderly loved him because he discovered in him all the marks of good conduct.”⁷ Mutugen was the joy of his old age.

Mutugen was always eager for a fight, full of enthusiasm and loved by his men. In his late teens, he had already proved himself a hero on the battlefield. Women adored him, and he frequently gave them opportunities to express their love, fathering children both with his wives and with other women, including the wives of his fellow soldiers. As a young man, he became enamored of the wife of one of his attendants. “He took her into a corner and had intercourse with her. It occurred to him that she might become pregnant, and he ordered her kept apart from her husband. It so happened that she did become pregnant and gave birth to a son, Buri. She was then given back to her husband.”⁸

Despite the gossip generated by Mutugen’s lack of sexual discipline, his grandfather loved him. Maybe he saw in Mutugen the man he himself would have been if he had been born into better circumstances. Instead of chasing rats, or fighting with his brother over a fish, he could have been enjoying life as the favored prince of a doting grandfather. In his eyes, Mutugen was as rare as a star at noon. Mutugen was “a marvelous hero, he had an elegant white face, his clear white eyes brimmed with tears like spring water, his body moved gracefully, he was like another man’s wife.”⁹ His horse always led, and he never tasted dust.¹⁰

Genghis Khan saw something in his grandson that was missing in his sons; he devoted special attention to the military training of Mutugen and seemed to be grooming him to one day become the Great Khan. For the Afghan campaign in pursuit of Jalal ad-Din, he took his grandson as his companion. They conquered a string of cities with ease, but Jalal ad-Din eluded them. Early in 1221 Genghis Khan dispatched Mutugen to Bamiyan, a dry, cold valley in the mountains of central Afghanistan. More than seven centuries earlier, it had been inhabited by thousands of Buddhist monks, most of whom lived in caves, which they had filled with paintings. The monks had carved massive statues of Buddha into the cliffs overlooking the valley, which peered down on those who lived in their shadow. It was a place of austere beauty, rich history, and vibrant culture: just the right place for Mutugen to strike out and begin to apply some of the lessons of leadership his grandfather had taught him on his own.

The campaign to take the Afghan cities proceeded initially more benignly than the war in the low lands. Tolui took his time with the siege of Herat, which had been heavily fortified by troops sent by the shah to protect the entire region. As he had done in China, Genghis Khan admonished his men to look for wise religious leaders who might serve or enlighten them, and during the siege of Herat a respected but clumsy imam, Kazi Wahid ad-Din, fell off the city wall and rolled straight into the Mongol camp. The warriors took him to Tolui and thereafter to the Great Khan who, upon finding that the captive was a religious scholar, held long discussions with him about Islam and morality. “In Genghis Khan’s service, I found great favor,” he later recalled. “I was constantly in attendance at his threshold, and he used continually to inquire of me the traditions of the prophets.” Genghis Khan asked the imam if the Prophet Muhammad had foretold his arrival and that of the Mongols. The imam responded that the Prophet had foretold “the irruption of the Turk.” He then criticized the Mongol leader for killing Muslims and warned him that if no one survived, there would be no one left to remember him or to tell his story.

Genghis Khan scoffed at this. “The remaining people who are in other parts of the world, and the sovereigns of other kingdoms that are, they will relate my history,” he confidently informed him. Having tired of his new guest, he dismissed the imam from his court and sent him home.¹¹

Meanwhile, despite the seemingly impregnable fortifications of Herat, the population decided to side with the Mongols and secretly opened the gates to admit the invaders. They had grown tired of the arbitrary ways and oppressive rule of the Khwarizm royal family, and despite being a fellow Muslim, Jalal ad-Din was nearly as foreign to them as the Mongols. They had no incentive to defend him when the Mongols offered them liberation at little cost. The Mongols slaughtered the soldiers, but spared the people of Herat.

Jalal ad-Din was still far away in the east, but he was preparing for war. The newly proclaimed sultan had managed to find allies in the Afghan tribes and to recruit Turcoman, Qanli, and other Turkic groups to his banner. After fleeing his father’s dying capital at Khiva, he had made his way into the mountains of Afghanistan. In Ghazni, he made an alliance with the Qanli governor of the city by marrying his daughter. His new father-in-law brought fifty thousand pagan Qanli recruits to join the fight against the Mongols. The leader of the Muslim Khalaj tribe joined him with forty thousand, as did many local Ghuri warriors anxious for victory and the spoils of defeating the now treasure-laden Mongol army.

Jalal ad-Din set up temporary headquarters at Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, near the modern border with Pakistan. At an altitude above seven thousand feet, surrounded by the Hindu Kush Mountains, Ghazni’s climate was harsh. The inveterate Arab traveler Ibn Battuta visited it and wrote, “It has an exceedingly cold climate, and the inhabitants move from it in the cold season to Kandahar, a large and prosperous town three nights journey.”¹² Jalal ad-Din stayed in Ghazni during the winter of 1220–21, planning to launch a counterattack on the Mongols, liberate his lost kingdom, and send Genghis Khan back to the steppe from which he came. His “condition was now one of glory and splendor and he had a numerous army and following at his command,” wrote Juvaini. Then, early in 1221, “in the first days of spring when the flowers began to bloom,” he moved forward to Parwan to prepare for his campaign against Genghis Khan.¹³

The Mongols were not going to wait for Jalal ad-Din to attack. Genghis Khan always moved first, dictating the terms of engagement. When he heard “how the sultan [Jalal ad-Din] had mended his affairs and restored them to order,” he decided to attack immediately before his prey could grow any stronger. All of his sons were on distant assignments, and for the only recorded instance, he sent his adopted son Shigi-Khutukhu, one of the orphans he had found abandoned at a deserted campsite while fighting the Tatars and given to his mother to raise. Shigi-Khutukhu was now the most educated person in the family, a judge and tribute collector skilled at writing the Uighur script, but he did not have a reputation as a warrior. Nevertheless, Genghis Khan was training him to lead like his other sons, so he placed him in charge of thirty thousand men and sent him to confront Jalal ad-Din. The choice seemed reasonable: the Khwarizm army had consistently folded in the face of Mongol attack, and Genghis Khan saw Jalal ad-Din, despite his new title, as a man on the run.

He sent two seasoned officers to accompany Shigi-Khutukhu, but they did not seem serious about the undertaking. Shigi-Khutukhu later complained to Genghis Khan about their “incessant joking and lightheartedness,” and said, “people renowned for their wit, their pranks, and their clowning assume they are heroes—but on the day when courage is needed, such men achieve nothing and only cause trouble.” According to Rashid al-Din, he called them “buffoons.”¹⁴ They proved of no help in the coming confrontation.

Jalal ad-Din’s army was twice the size of his, but Shigi-Khutukhu knew the Mongol strategies and tactics and seemed eager to apply them. He arrived at Parwan, a narrow valley far more circumscribed than the battlefields to which the Mongols were accustomed, and ordered an attack aimed directly at the center of Jalal ad-Din’s command. His warriors pushed hard on the center, but despite the Mongols’ gaining some ground at first, Jalal ad-Din’s troops, reinforced from the two wings, repulsed the attack. At the end of an indecisive day, the two armies made camp for the night.

Shigi-Khutukhu chose to apply an old trick that had worked many times for Genghis Khan. Because the Mongols always campaigned with a large number of relief horses, he ordered the men to make felt dummies and tie them on the unmanned horses. The next morning the Mongols rode back toward the battlefield with what appeared to be a massive number of reinforcements. Jalal ad-Din recognized the trick and ordered his army to stand firm, and again they repulsed the Mongol charge.

Finally, Shigi-Khutukhu attempted the oldest trick in the Mongol repertoire. He ordered an attack followed by a retreat in an effort to lure the enemy out and to break their ranks. Jalal ad-Din’s men chased after the fleeing Mongols, and then, after luring them away from their base, the Mongols suddenly turned and attacked the men, who were now dispersed and no longer in fighting formation. The Mongols quickly killed some five hundred enemy troops, but Jalal ad-Din had been prepared for the counterattack. “At this very juncture the sultan rose up like a lion of the meadow or a leviathan of the raging sea.”¹⁵ He attacked with full force and routed the Mongols. Rashid al-Din reported that “the grassland in that region is full of holes and ditches, so that many of the Mongol warriors were thrown from their horses,” but the sultan’s horses seemed better able to maneuver through them.¹⁶ For the first time, Genghis Khan’s army had suffered an important defeat, a loss that would not be repeated for forty years, when an Egyptian Mamluk army would have a similar victory at Ayn Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, in what is today northern Israel near the borders with Lebanon and Syria.

Shigi-Khutukhu escaped with most of his men, but Jalal ad-Din captured many of the fleeing Mongols. Here at last was a formidable enemy who seemed as determined to win as his rival did. Jalal ad-Din was brave and resourceful, but he could not control the men supposedly under his command. They did not view themselves as his subjects so much as his rescuers, and their goal was not to restore the Khwarizm Empire but to plunder the Mongols. Some of his Muslim allies despised the pagans alongside whom they had been forced to fight, seeing them as no better than Mongols. They went wild capturing Mongol horses and stealing the loot that the Mongols had taken from the fallen cities and soon began to fight among themselves. Jalal ad-Din’s father-in-law, who had commanded the pagan Qanli tribesmen on the right flank, began fighting over a prized horse with the Muslim commander of the left flank, whom he struck in the head with a whip. Victory turned to chaos.

Genghis Khan and his troops never tortured their enemies. They could be swift in meting out punishments and left cities in rubble, but they never inflicted gratuitous pain. In contrast, Jalal ad-Din ordered the worst possible executions for the Mongols. He knew the Mongols feared losing their soul at the moment of death by having it pour out on the ground with their blood. They preferred strangulation, suffocation, or any form of death that left their blood and other soul-bearing fluids inside their body and left their head, the locus of the immortal part of the soul, intact. Jalal ad-Din had the prisoners pulled out one by one and ordered his men to pound nails or wooden stakes into their heads and leave them to bleed to death as their souls flowed out and disappeared into the sand.

Jalal ad-Din fled toward India soon after his victory. Genghis Khan was too busy at first administering his empire to chase him, but he wanted to understand exactly what had caused the Mongol defeat. He traveled to the battlefield with Shigi-Khutukhu and some of his men. They explained precisely what had happened, and in the end, without chastising Shigi-Khutukhu, he explained his errors in tactics, beginning with his having fought in a narrow valley with limited means of withdrawal or escape. He then gave Shigi-Khutukhu an assignment more appropriate to his abilities, sending him to spend the rest of 1221 in Ghazni. As the official charged with taking a census of the people after the defeat, he was tasked with organizing the transportation of chosen craftsmen and looted goods to Mongolia.

News of the Mongol defeat by the forces of Jalal ad-Din spread quickly throughout the former Khwarizm Empire. Compared with their own losses over the past two years, it was only a minor defeat, but it heartened them that the barbarians finally proved vulnerable. Defeating even this small army and then killing the survivors exposed the Mongols’ weakness. As the news traveled with refugees and merchants from village to village and city to city, the people still holding out against the Mongols felt greatly encouraged, and many of those who had previously surrendered now revolted. They killed the officials left in place by the Mongols, even when they were Muslims and fellow Turks or Persians. The conquered people of Khwarizm resisted the Mongols at every opportunity and raided their baggage trains crammed with looted wealth.

The Mongol army had never been spread out over such a large area, and it was vastly outnumbered by the urban populations around it. At this point, a coordinated rebellion or organized army could have defeated it. Genghis Khan moved quickly and violently to put down the uprisings before they could become an organized campaign against him.

The people of Balkh, another city noted for its wealth and scholarship, famed as the home of the Bactrian princess Roxana, who had married Alexander the Great, rose up in rebellion. Juzjani informs us that afterward, “the few remaining people, for the period of a full year, had to sustain life on the flesh of dogs and cats and human beings, for this reason that the forces of Chingiz Khan had burnt all the stores, barns, and granaries leaving not a grain of corn, and no cultivation whatever existed.”¹⁷ Some fifty thousand were killed, but one of the many families to escape was that of one of the greatest of Persian poets and mystics, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, better known in the West as Rumi. He spent much of his life fleeing the Mongols through Nishapur, Baghdad, and Damascus, and finally settled in Konya in modern Turkey, where he became a renowned scholar and Sufi teacher.

Despite his suffering at the hands of the Mongols, Rumi, noted for his generosity of spirit and deep spirituality, seemed accepting, almost forgiving. Finding some good in everything that happens, he even seemed to appreciate the peripatetic life that resulted from being forced to flee his home as a refugee.

Oh, if a tree could wander

and move with foot and wings!

It would not suffer the axe blows

and not the pain of saws!¹⁸

In 1221, in the beautiful valley of Bamiyan with its giant Buddhas sculpted into the living mountain, an arrow shot “by the thumb of Fate” struck Mutugen.¹⁹ Muslim chroniclers wrote that because of Mutugen’s love of his grandfather and his frustration at the dogged resistance of the Muslims of Bamiyan, “he exposed himself to the greatest dangers.”²⁰ According to one account, “the young prince fell dead at his grandfather’s feet.” It is unlikely that the end came quite so dramatically. He had simply been killed, like so many other soldiers, in the senseless crush of battle.

Genghis Khan was stunned. In a lifetime of fighting, none of his sons had fallen, none of his wives or daughters had died, and he had never lost a general. In his adult life, everyone close to him seemed to enjoy the same blessing of heaven that protected him. At this moment of unprecedented success and power, how could fate snatch away the most beloved member of his family? He could never again ride beside his grandson, smell his scent, hear his laugh, or see his eyes sparkle in battle. In a lifetime fighting, chasing, and fleeing, Genghis Khan had endured gnawing hunger, burning frostbite, piercing arrows, crushing clubs, and slicing swords, but to know that someone he loved was in agony and not be able to save him was the greatest suffering imaginable. The goals he had pursued, the dreams he had followed, the hopes he had nourished began to melt like snow falling into fire. He was drunk with sorrow and drowning in grief.

He began to fear that his whole family stood in danger and there might be no future for his empire. His life’s work could abruptly be broken by a single arrow of fate. Genghis Khan did not believe the assertion of some philosophers that pain and pleasure were simple illusions or that suffering might be alleviated through meditation, compassion, sacrifices, or denial. From his lifetime of experience, he knew that although pleasure was fleeting, misery poured down cruelly and abundantly from the sky. Humans could no more prevent it than they could stop the rain, wind, or hail. In childhood, he had watched those around him writhe and die in agony, but when he became a man, he learned to redirect this suffering away from himself and from those he loved onto others. He became the aggressor, never the victim, and thereby conquered the largest empire in history.

Throughout his adult life, his strategy of calculated aggression had protected his family and nation, but now suddenly pain came pouring in. He was no longer a great conqueror, he was nothing more than a hapless victim of fate. Voltaire quoted Genghis Khan as saying, “Fate conquers all.”²¹ Whether or not he actually spoke those words, he understood their painful truth. Mutugen’s death threatened not only his plans for his empire but his deepest spiritual core. If heaven had truly blessed him and given him so much success, why had it denied him the love of his grandson? Why had his fate failed him in front of the cliffs of Bamiyan?

Fate determined death’s hour, but he reasserted his will by channeling the grief inside him into revenge on the world. He forbade mourning. In keeping with Mongol tradition, the name of the fallen could not be spoken, but he went further and forbade any mention of his death, lest the enemy know that a member of the royal family had died. Even the Mongolian chroniclers who later wrote the history of the empire refused to mention Mutugen’s death or the revenge that followed, so we must depend on Muslim observers to understand what happened.

By the order of Genghis Khan, no Mongol could cry or scream, not even the boy’s father. Genghis Khan would not let his son shed one tear or mourn. Instead, he made the local people wail in horror, shriek in pain, and beg vainly for mercy that never came. Genghis Khan drowned the fiery anguish in his soul by making others suffer. In the explanation offered by Juvaini, he “dispatched to the right and the left to the East and the West, and subjugated it all.” Suddenly, “with one stroke, a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert and the great part of the living dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust.” Thus, “the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of perdition.”²²

He “gave orders that every living creature, from mankind down to the brute beasts, should be killed; that no prisoner should be taken; that not even the child in the mother’s womb should be spared.”²³ His troops destroyed city after city. Tolui raced to put down a rebellion in Merv, which overflowed with refugees. He did so and killed everyone. The general sent to restore rule over Herat, which Tolui had treated with such tender mercy, did the same. In city after city, the Mongols entered with drawn swords and left nothing but dust in their wake.

“It was a pitiful sight,” wrote the Armenian chronicler Kirakos. “Dead parents and their children were heaped on top of one another, like a pile of rough stones—old, young, children, adolescents, and many virgins.” Across the plains, “the land drank in the blood and fat of the wounded. Tender bodies, once washed with soap, lay blackened and swollen. Those who had not gone out of the city were led away barefoot into captivity.” There was nothing left to say. “This was the end of the affair.”²⁴

They carefully targeted the aristocrats whose ancestors had ruled from the time of Alexander the Great, and sent refugees fleeing to India and Persia. “Mongols of those days,” wrote Injannasi, “regarded warfare as joyous and beautiful.”²⁵ They conquered every city that had revolted, put it to the torch and annihilated the people. No rebels could survive to threaten Genghis Khan again.

In the late summer, still in the fiery anguish of losing his beloved grandson, Genghis Khan moved forward with his campaign to chase down Jalal ad-Din. The only cure for pain was to make someone else hurt more. “Like a male dragon panting for vengeance, a clod of calamity,” wrote Juvaini, Genghis Khan “went forth to defeat him and exact vengeance, like flashing lightning or a torrential flood, his heart filled with rage and leading an army more numerous than the raindrops.”²⁶

He caught up with Jalal ad-Din on the banks of the Indus River near Kalabagh in modern Pakistan, southwest of Islamabad. Having been deserted by his two quarreling allies, Jalal ad-Din still led his own much smaller army of around seven hundred men. They were preparing boats to cross the river. When he saw the Mongol warriors on the horizon, he knew he was trapped “between water and fire—on one side the water of the Indus and on the other an army like consuming fire,” but instead of surrendering, “he saddled the horse of vengeance and chose to plunge into the fray.”²⁷

Genghis Khan’s army pressed in harder and tighter around the beleaguered sultan. Jalal ad-Din immediately knew that he had lost. He called his wives and children and bade farewell to them “with a burning heart and a weeping eye.”²⁸ In an act much heralded by Muslim writers in desperate want of a hero in the war against the Mongols, he forced his horse to jump from the cliff into the raging water and swim to the other side. Mongol archers rushed to the edge of the cliff to shoot the target of their hunt, but Genghis Khan stopped them. He allowed them to shoot the other fleeing men and ordered them to let the sultan escape.

What could Genghis Khan have been thinking as he sat on his horse high above the Indus River, watching the son of his greatest enemy, the only foreigner to have ever defeated the Mongols in battle, swim away? He was a man of great consistency, with little hint of sentimentality in war, but this unexpected act of mercy was not consistent with who he was and what he had done before in similar circumstances. After slaughtering thousands of innocent people across Afghanistan, he let this one man go free. Was he doing what he wished he had done for his bond brother Jamuka decades ago? Was he granting Jalal ad-Din a special gift of life that had been denied to his beloved grandson? Was he following the Mongol tradition to always free some of the animals at the end of a successful hunt? Or did the aging conqueror see in this reckless jump a quality that he wished to honor?

He watched in silence as Jalal ad-Din swam to India until, in the words of Juvaini, “crossing the great river like a fiery lion he reached the shore of safety.”²⁹ He did not explain his actions, but he turned to his sons, who had been called to join the rampage across Afghanistan after the death of Mutugen, and said gravely, “Such sons should a father have.”³⁰ Genghis Khan did not pursue Jalal ad-Din, and he never crossed the Indus River. Jalal ad-Din found safety in India and in the subsequent years he continued to harass the Mongol soldiers across Central Asia, but the Mongols never harmed him. In the end, he was killed by a fellow Muslim when a Kurdish assassin stuck him down in 1231.