14

The Last Campaign

In 1224, at sixty-two years of age, Genghis Khan decided to head home, so that he could spend his final years along the Tuul River that ran down from Burkhan Khaldun. Unlike the lightning-strike speed with which he had begun his invasion of Central Asia, his trip home from Afghanistan was slow and leisurely, and included a long pause for one of the largest hunts known in history. During the four-year campaign, his army had conquered land from the Indus to the Volga, including what are today Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, southern Russia, and part of Pakistan. His army had grown weary of fighting and plundering. They wanted to go home.

The return to Mongolia was followed by a full year of reunions with family and friends and riotous celebrations. War veterans told tales of distant places and heroic battles. Children met fathers they had never known or could not remember. Many young boys had grown into men and now, as victorious fighters, they were eager to parade their wealth and find wives. Courtships abounded as girls teased and flirted while friends taunted the young soldiers and laughed at them. The soldiers, in turn, showed off on horseback, wrestled with one another, played anklebones, and enjoyed their mother’s home cooking.

Not everyone celebrated. The triumphant army also brought back many prisoners, including the mother and other family members of the defeated shah. Vilified for defying the Mongols, reduced to slavery and mockery, the shah’s family members disappeared into obscurity and almost certainly endured a short life of terrific suffering in the harsh and unfamiliar environment of the steppe. With so many slaves, every Mongol was rich and none had to work. They spent the year celebrating.

By the time Genghis Khan returned to his homeland after the second of his long foreign campaigns, most of the people he had known from childhood were long since dead, but the places remained the same. His wives were thriving, and each presided over her court in her own territory. Borte controlled the Kherlen River and adjacent steppes in the area of her birth. The woman who had once been kidnapped into a forced marriage and near servitude among the Merkid was now a queen, with deposed queens and princesses as her servants. Khulan administered the upper Khentii and the Onon River, Yesui the Tuul River, and Yesugen the upper Orkhon and Khangai Mountains.

While Genghis Khan’s conquests had changed the world, his homeland had remained nearly unaltered. When he was born, the steppe had no cities, fortresses, temples, or other signs of the sedentary life, and he deliberately left it precisely that way. His people continued to live in the felt walls of their nomadic ger, and they followed the seasons with their herds of horses, cows, yaks, sheep, goats, and camels. They studied the sky to know when to move on to their next grazing grounds.

He refused the role of a conquering hero, and gave all credit to his army and to the blessing of heaven. “I shall pray to Tenger, my divine father,” he announced. Then, “Ascending a high mound, he spread out his felt saddle cloth, hung his belt around his neck and prayed.” His words were simple, modest, and direct:

I did not become Emperor because of my manly virtues, I became emperor because I was so destined by my father, Tenger!

I did not become emperor because of my marvelous virtues, I became emperor because I was so destined by my father, Khan Tenger!

Heaven subjugated the foreign enemies for me!¹

Genghis Khan raised no monuments to his heroic conquests and allowed no inscriptions. His deeds said enough. He was quick to give credit to others, however, and he commissioned one monument to commemorate the best archer of the summer Naadam games of 1225. Using the Mongol measurement of an ald, the distance between the fingertips of a man’s outstretched arms, Khasar’s son Yesungge had hit a target from 335 ald (more than 1,600 feet).² No one had ever achieved such a feat, and it was worthy of a monument.

In his decades of conquering people near and far, Genghis Khan had carefully examined the foreign religions of the world and found each of them—Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam—to hold valuable truths. Just as each land produces its particular crops and fruits, each religion had its own unique customs and value. “The books and writings of each nation follow the characteristics of their respective nation and differ in their themes and views,” wrote Injannasi in The Blue Chronicle many centuries later. “For example, the most fragrant and beautiful thing in this world is a flower, but not all flowers are the same. They all possess their characteristic colors. Fruits are tasty, but they all have a different taste.”³ Poetry can be beautiful in any language, but each country has its own method and discipline. “While the Chinese use end rhyme, the Mongols use alliteration, the Tibetans use rhythm and the Manchu use parallelism in their speech.”

All religions made the same claims to teach and enlighten. They loved good and worshipped God and heaven. They taught virtue, honesty, duty, and righteousness. They decried evil and wrongdoing and denounced greed, jealousy, acquisitiveness, and the instinct to harm others. Where they differed was in the details and in their understanding of how to do these things. Should the believer walk clockwise or counterclockwise around the holy place? Should he or she abstain from beef, fish, birds, or onions? Pray in yellow, black, or white? Remove their shoes to pray or their belt; wear a hat or bare their head; veil their face or uncover it? Should the dead be buried, burned, hung in a tree, or fed to the dogs and birds? Was it more honorable to execute a condemned man by cutting off his head or by strangling him? Would God prefer the sacrifice of a sheep, or rice and wine, a bouquet of flowers, or a piece of the believer’s flesh? Did God prefer to hear them recite in Arabic, sing in Latin, chant in Tibetan, pray in Chinese, or merely dance?

Genghis Khan recognized that religious belief and practice fulfilled an important universal spiritual longing that transcended national and ethnic borders. The principle of universalism arose explicitly in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and it seemed to underlie the beliefs of most religions. The universal message appealed directly to his desires to create a universal empire, but he decided his empire would not be based solely on one prophet, one scripture, or one set of beliefs.

At the conclusion of his many conversations with shamans, priests, scholars, monks, and mullahs, he reached one firm conclusion. While some demonstrated a genuine connection to the good, none, he believed, demonstrated adequate knowledge of morality, the meaning of life, or the nature of the divine. They were simply men, like him, struggling to make sense of the world. No amount of study had brought any of them closer to God. No scriptures, chants, dances, rituals, medicines, or prayers had revealed a secret way, a hidden path, to finding the right course in life. He believed that people did not need secret knowledge from prophets, teachers, enlightened masters, shamans, or their scriptures. Everyone possessed the same inner compass. Each person was born with the ability to discover and cultivate the moral way through careful thought, inner reflection, and simple common sense and awareness. Any faith might help along the path, but he found none that guaranteed exclusive access to the right way.⁴

The devout adherents of each faith wanted to be judged solely by the content of their ideas and not by the truth of their deeds or the consequences of their actions. They piously claimed credit for good deeds and consigned evil ones to those who had been mistaken, who had misunderstood the teaching, or to unbelievers who willfully committed evil. Genghis Khan was too pragmatic in his worldview to separate ideas from action. He did not judge by words, he judged by deeds. Stated goals mattered only when followed by proven achievement.

He found that each religion had its weak points and false teachings, its share of nonsense and trickery. Each one had flaws that appeared most starkly when its leaders remained unsupervised and were allowed to manage their own affairs and to slip into the chasm of authoritarian greed. He decided that promoting one religion above the others would harm his empire. Despite their claims to complete truth, each religion was local, rooted in a particular place, language, and culture, while he intended his empire to be universal, including all lands, peoples, and gods. Every religion contained some important truths, but neither their teachers nor their books contained the single, ultimate moral truth. Scholars of the same faith, reading the same scripture, constantly quarreled and even killed one another over issues big and small. While interpreting the same texts, they produced opposite judgments. How could any one of them be trusted with the all-important practical responsibilities of managing society? Only the firm rule of law and a strong ruler could prevent members of supposedly the same faith from tearing one another apart like starving dogs fighting over a bone. Was the answer a firmer hand or fewer restrictions? This was the central question bedeviling Genghis Khan as he entered the final years of his life.

Practicing virtue, like learning to shoot an arrow or ride a horse, combines physical discipline and mental strength that did not originate in a list of rules and instructions. Ethics did not come out of a book; it came from active practice. Morality is a skill that can only be learned and perfected through doing. Genghis Khan did not acquire his sense of right and wrong from scholars, priests, or religious teachers. He learned ethics and values from the people closest to him, from simple people. In his childhood, these were his mother and the Old Man Jarchigudai from the mountain. But as he grew older it became the men around him, his companions and fellow soldiers. “You urged me to carry out what was right; you persuaded me not to do what was wrong,” he said to men of lower rank but great wisdom in the Secret History. “You pulled until my right proceeded; you restrained until my wrong subsided.”⁵ He publicly acknowledged that the teachings of his humble companions such as Boorchu and Muhali “made me gain the throne.”⁶

Genghis Khan’s refusal to embrace any one of the popular religions caused some scholars to believe that he was apathetic toward religion, but Russian scholar Nikolai Trubetzkoy, writing in the early twentieth century, understood clearly how much religion formed the core of Mongolian success in Russia and the other countries they conquered. “In order for a man to fulfill his duties fearlessly and unconditionally,” wrote Trubetzkoy, “he must believe firmly—not theoretically, but intuitively, with his whole being—that his personal destiny, like the destinies of others and of the entire world, is in the hands of a higher being, a being infinitely high and beyond criticism. Such a being must be God, not a man.” Only a slave submits to the authority of another man, but men of noble virtue submit to the will of God in a hierarchy of beings. “A disciplined soldier who can obey a superior willingly as he gives orders to a subordinate, who never loses his self-respect, is by nature capable of submitting only to the authority of an immaterial, transcendent first cause—in contrast to a slave, who submits to the authority of earthly fear, earthly prosperity, and earthly vanity.” Throughout his career, “Genghis Khan regarded only those people who were sincerely and deeply religious as valuable to his state.”⁷

In his younger years, Genghis Khan’s closest companions had been members of his Keshig who were around him every day. As he became the emperor of an ever-larger territory and as he and they grew older, most of these men were far away leading the campaigns scattered from China to Iraq and Russia. They had been replaced in the Keshig by their sons and grandsons and a growing number of sons from the khans of tribes incorporated into the Mongols. While their importance grew with the expansion of the empire, Genghis Khan had less of an emotional tie to these younger men who had not shared with him the long struggle to power. Increasingly, he turned to others, inside his inner circle of administration and outside the Keshig.

In his final years, Genghis Khan seemed to be fully aware that his time on Earth would soon end, and he suffered from an increasing frustration that he had not fulfilled his heavenly mission to conquer the world. The Sung dynasty clung to power in southern China, and his soldiers had barely reached the edge of Russia, Tibet, Iraq, Korea, and India. Europe, Byzantium, Syria, and Egypt remained beyond his grasp.

One country, however, still obsessed him more than any other, keeping him awake at night and gnawing at him during the day. It was the “Great State of White and High,” as the Tangut referred to their kingdom. They had surrendered to him more than fifteen years earlier, in 1209, and had sworn to obey him always, but soon after the Mongol army had moved on, the Tangut ruler had contemptuously mocked its leader when ordered to send soldiers to join the Mongol army for the campaign against the shah of Khwarizm. He sent a message saying that if Genghis Khan were truly the ruler of the world, he would not need Tangut help and he should not attack if he did not think that his soldiers could defeat the shah.

Genghis Khan was angered and humiliated by the Tangut ruler’s refusal to fulfill his obligations, but he was unable to punish him at that time because of the pressing need to focus on his campaign against the shah of Khwarizm. He postponed action against the arrogant Tangut, but he never forgave or forgot. Now, nearing the end of life, he was determined to punish them for their treachery.

He set out in winter in early 1226. He chose his Tatar wife, the wise and respected Yesui Khatun, to accompany him. Her court would be his headquarters. For Mongols, a cold start to a campaign was a good sign, just as it was when he crossed the Altai Mountains during a heavy summer blizzard on his way to attack the shah of Khwarizm, but this year was particularly brutal. They had to wrap the horses in felt blankets to prevent them from freezing, and he ordered that his soldiers take sheep fleeces with which to line their already well-padded robes, some with capes made from wolf pelts.⁸ He rode out from his camp on the Tuul River, in the Black Forest area near the modern Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. The air was clear and sharp with tiny ice crystals sparkling in the winter sun like diamonds floating on the wind. The bellowing oxen pulling their carts, the grunting camels in a caravan, and the snorting and panting of so many horses created a fog around them like a protective cloud as the massive army moved forward.

After less than a week, the army headed south following the Ongi River, the only river flowing into the Gobi Desert.⁹ Although crossing the gravel desert of the Gobi can be difficult in winter, it is easier for men and animals than in the heat of summer. The men chiseled out large blocks of ice from the Ongi, which they transported on oxcarts or on camelback. When they needed water along the route, they melted the ice in large pots over dung fires.

Before leaving the Ongi River, Genghis Khan decided to pause and hunt for khulan, a type of onager, the Asian wild ass, to provision the army before crossing the barren and frozen lands ahead. It was the last hunt of his life. He set out after the khulan riding a reddish-gray horse.¹⁰ As he raced forward toward his prey, his horse became frightened by the stampeding khulan and unexpectedly bucked and bolted, throwing him to the ground and leaving him severely wounded and in great pain. For a leader to fall from a horse at any time is a bad omen, but to do it at the start of an important military campaign could be extremely disheartening to the soldiers under his command. Even clever Yelu Chucai could not construe such an accident as an auspicious sign.

Yesui Khatun immediately recognized the grave danger to a man of his age and frantically pleaded with him to delay the invasion and return to the Mongolian steppe to recuperate. He refused. Such a retreat would further frighten his people, weaken their confidence in him, and embolden his enemies. He ordered his army to move forward, across the Gobi, through the Gurvan Saihan Mountains known as the Three Beauties, and on toward Tangut territory.

Genghis Khan made his choice clearly and deliberately. Better to die on the verge of triumph than in the certainty of defeat. His life would not end on a sickbed at home, surrounded by chanting healers and mourning relatives while his whole nation idly waited, watching his every breath. He was going to die on the campaign trail, still fighting for what fate had promised him. If he could not fall in the midst of battle like his grandson Mutugen, then at least he would die close by, encouraging and inspiring his men with his determined presence.

The Tangut state subscribed to a national cult similar to Tibetan Buddhism, with a divine king who bore the name of God, Burkhan. The ruler at the time of Genghis Khan’s invasion was Iluqu Burkhan, or Victorious God. Burkhan Khaldun was God’s Sacred Mountain, but for the Mongols, it was idolatrous for a human to claim the name of God. Humans, even a king, could not become divine.

As a living god, the Tangut ruler cultivated a reputation for pious sanctity fortified by fierce magic. He was rumored to be a feared shape-changer. In the morning, he “becomes a poisonous yellow striped snake,” and at noon, “a brown striped tiger.” In the evening, he “becomes a beautiful yellow boy.”¹¹ As befitted his name, he could become Khormusta, the King of Heaven.¹² He was accompanied by “a prophetic black muzzled fallow yellow dog named Kubeleg.”¹³

The Tangut straddled the Silk Route and had grown rich on its wealth, surrounded by vast stretches of desert; they felt safe and secure enough to live in an illusory world of spiritual decadence. The Tangut rulers built magnificent temples and raised pagodas in their own honor, decorating them with larger-than-life statues and paintings in vivid colors. The smell of burning juniper and butter lamps drifted through their ceremonies, punctuated by the loud clang of cymbals, the groaning strains of the giant trumpets, and the throbbing of drums. Monks fluttered around in identical robes as bright as coral; they published illustrated books using the Tangut version of Chinese characters and printed their prayers on long silk banners that fluttered in the wind. The Tangut crafted beautiful jade vases, carved wooden altars, and sculpted images of their gods in precious gold and silver as well as more fragile images made of flour, butter, sugar, and sand. The Tangut religious rituals soothed the senses: sight, sound, and smell. The sweet words and soft chanting lulled the mind.

For a Mongol such as Genghis Khan, praying on the open mountaintop or in the vast expanse of the steppe emphasized one’s unimportance while giving the worshipper direct contact with the Eternal Blue Sky. The Buddhists and Christians built temples of brick, stone, and wood covered by a heavy roof, as though they wanted to hide from the eyes of God or avoid personal contact with the sky. Only by going through a priest could an ordinary person connect to God. The magnificent art and architecture glorified the priest who stood on a raised platform, at the center of the universe.

The Tangut’s Buddhist rituals and man-made temples glorified things artificial, such as statues, paintings, and pagodas. When they claimed to worship a mountain or a cave, they disfigured it by erecting man-made images and buildings. They revered their priests, monks, and saints more than the sky, and listened to the voices of men rather than to their gods. Their walls, closed to nature, amplified the human voice reverberating inside. Mongols preferred the open air, where the human voice, no matter how loud, never competes with the sound of the eternal wind that envelops the earth, the roar of the river, the howl of the wolf, the persistent call of the cuckoo, or the drumming of the black woodpecker.

Buddhist monks not only presided over faith and ritual, they occupied most of the high offices in the government of the Tangut kingdom, and served as messengers, clerks, diplomatic envoys, and spies. Because they could not marry and thereby accumulate wealth and power for their own offspring, they posed less of a threat to the king and royal family. The Buddhist church was a state institution. The government had to approve every religious appointment, and so all monks served effectively as state officials and received strict supervision over their sermons, preaching, and writing. No building or religious structure could be erected without state approval; not even a well could be dug on church property without written authorization. Punishments were swift and severe, and any act that threatened the state or welfare of the established clergy would be punished by execution.¹⁴ The Tangut state and Buddhist faith were one and the same, making their god and king one and the same.

The state preceptor sponsored numerous Tantric texts, called “the practice in Pair,” stressing the importance of sexual activities that he needed to perform to create the “body of supreme bliss.” In Brief Records of Black Tartars, written late in the Yuan dynasty, an observer of the Mongol conquest of the Tangut reportedly stated, “Once I followed Genghis Khan in his campaign against the Tangut Kingdom of Xia,” the state preceptor of the Tangut “was customarily served with great respect by all under the king.” In particular, “every girl had to be recommended to serve the State Preceptor first, before she is allowed to get married to anyone.”¹⁵ This was not a practice that impressed Genghis Khan: “after Genghis Khan destroyed the kingdom, he first killed the State Preceptor. The State Preceptor was a Buddhist monk.”¹⁶

During most of the campaign, Yesui Khatun ran the Mongol court and kept Genghis Khan’s suffering and deteriorating condition hidden. He remained in her ger protected from public view. He shared leadership with his main general, Subodei of the Uriyankhai. Following their traditional pattern, they attacked the smaller cities first, but they encountered stiffer resistance than expected. When summer came, the heat impaired Genghis’s recovery, and Yesugei evacuated him to the mountains. He remained in charge and ordered the pressure be kept up during the summer; several smaller cities were taken, but they waited for the return of cold weather before besieging the capital city, Yinchuan. When the rivers froze again, they besieged the capital at the beginning of 1227.

The Tangut, desperate but knowing the fate that awaited them if they surrendered, fought hard, but the Mongols fought harder. Having been unable to impress the Mongols with his religious power, Iluqu Burkhan decided to shower them with spiritual praise. He anxiously gathered his sacred scriptures, the statue of a golden Buddha, and other precious objects to take to the Great Khan, hoping to soften his anger and beg for his forgiveness. Genghis Khan was close to death when the Tangut ruler came to surrender, but he refused to see him or to allow his religious objects into his royal ger. At the moment of death, he did not need the scriptures or idols of his enemy. If they had not helped the Tangut king to follow the moral path and retain his kingdom, he had no use for them now. In the words of the Secret History, “Genghis Khan felt revulsion in his heart.”¹⁷

He sent a message to the waiting Tangut king that the king had been abandoned by heaven, and therefore he could no longer carry a holy name, Burkhan. He was a mortal, not a god. He ordered him to take a new name, Shidurgu, meaning Surrender to Righteousness. Having nominally brought the Tangut ruler back to the moral path, Genghis Khan condemned him to death. The Tangut Buddhists taught that in this world human fate is as fragile and fleeting as “summer flowers” or “autumn dew.” The destiny of an individual or a whole nation signifies nothing more than “bubbles in the tide.”¹⁸ The end had come not only for the Tangut ruler but for his dynasty and his nation as well.

Because the Tangut believed in reincarnation, giving the king an appropriate name before killing him would allow him to be born into a new life with a fresh chance to do right. To make sure that the executed monarch could not be reborn into his royal dynasty and seek revenge against the Mongols, Genghis Khan ordered the execution of the entire royal family. “Exterminate the mothers and fathers down to the offspring of their offspring,” he said.¹⁹ He then had the golden bowls and gifts from the Tangut king gathered together and presented them to the executioner. The Mongol warriors then turned their fury against the Tangut and punished them with a fierce vengeance. They blamed the Tangut for forcing Genghis Khan to come out and fight and held them responsible for the accident that had put his life in danger. Not knowing whether their leader was alive or dead, the Mongol warriors turned their fear and mourning into rage.

Genghis Khan was too near the end of life to feel such rage. He put an end to the murderous rampage, spared the remaining survivors, and assigned the Tangut people to the care of his wife Yesui Khatun, who had ministered to him on that campaign. As the Tangut no longer had a royal family, she would rule them. He had accomplished his final mission and returned the Tangut nation to the path of righteousness. Some Mongolian chronicles erroneously report that he married the widow of the Tangut king, but if he was still alive at that point, he was certainly in no condition to marry. The same accounts say that she flung herself into the Yellow River and drowned, but the details of the story seem to have been borrowed directly from the fictional Yuan drama Autumn of the Palace Han rather than from the pages of history.

The Golden Chronicle states that as his death approached, Genghis Khan expressed the wish that his good companions around him might go with him to the next world, but then he reflected that they were needed to carry on the work of the empire. “Now, do not die,” he ordered them shortly before he expired. Instead, he asked them to help his descendants rule the nation. He asked the learned ministers to show his people how to find “water in the desert places, and a road in the mountains.”²⁰

The Mongols refrain from using words such as death and dying, and instead substitute the euphemism “becoming a god.” Thus, in August 1227, Genghis Khan became a god. Yesui Khatun supervised the wrapping of his body in felt, and his personal guard prepared to take him home for burial. He did not die as a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Taoist, or disciple of any one religion. He died a Mongol. After carefully observing each of the religions known to him and after long conversations with both genuine and fake holy men, he did not condemn any one of these faiths, yet neither did he find comfort in any of them. No foreigners had attended his creation of the Mongol nation in 1206 and none were allowed to come near him at death. He chose to have his body returned to Burkhan Khaldun, the holy mountain where he had found refuge and spiritual renewal throughout his life. In death, as in life, a Mongol belongs to nature. He needed no tomb or mausoleum. Genghis Khan’s memorial was not carved in stone or decorated with precious jewels; his monument was in the memory of the nation he created. His memorial stone was the nom sang of law.

His family gathered to honor him and bid farewell, but it was his loyal Keshig companions who accompanied his body for burial where he had first met Jarchigudai. Now Jarchigudai’s grandson, Yisun Toe, commanded the guard that escorted the Great Khan home. More than half a century after Temujin left Burkhan Khaldun as an abused and abandoned child, he was returning home as the emperor Genghis Khan, conqueror of the world. Old Jarchigudai had been his moral guide then, and Jarchigudai’s grandson now was the guide to bring his body home.

Speaking for the entire Mongol nation, one of his warriors offered the final salute to their leader. Addressing Genghis Khan directly as though he still lived, he informed him that his men were returning him to the land and waters of his birth. “They are there!” he exclaimed emotionally to his departing soul, “your spirit banner made from the manes of your chestnut stallions . . . Your drums, conches, and whistles,” they are there. And most important, “all your great laws, there they are!”²¹

He would die, but his nation would live on.²² His mortal body was no greater than an ald, the span from the tip of one outstretched hand to the tip of the other, and although he had been a powerful khan, his life must end like every other and thus, in death, he carried no more importance than any other. His nation, however, could encompass the world. The Jewel Translucent Sutra offered a concise summary of his life: “Temujin was born by the Will of Heaven above, founded the sublime state from its beginning, brought the entire world under his power, and became famous as the holy Genghis Khan.”²³

In the Mongolian lament for Genghis Khan, a mourner addressed the deceased conqueror soon after his death to express the shared agony of his people, who had never before seen such a leader. “Have you left this great nation behind?” he cried. “Did you lose yourself, Lord?” Or “did you fly off with the wind?” Pleading on behalf of the whole nation, he asked: “Lord Genghis Khan, have you abandoned your old Mongol people?”

There was only silence as the mournful lament hung in the still air. But for those who cared to remember, Genghis Khan had already answered that question four years earlier in his last recorded dispatch from the battlefront.

“I have never forgotten you,” he wrote in a letter from Afghanistan. “Do not forget me.”²⁴