GENGHIS KHAN: EMPEROR OF ALL MEN

Front matter

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The fascinating story GENGHIS KHAN ° of the barbarian who ° conquered half the EMPEROR OF ALL MEN || worid and made the name “Mongol” a cry = of terror down the centuries

Foreword

THE MYSTERY

SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS AGO a man almost conquered the earth. He made himself master of half the known world,

and inspired humankind with a fear that lasted for genera-

tions.

In the course of his life he was given many names—the Mighty Manslayer, the Scourge of God, the Perfect Warrior, and the Master of Thrones and Crowns. He is better known to us as Genghis Khan.

Unlike most rulers of men, he deserved all his titles. We Americans, raised in the European tradition, have been taught the roster of the great that begins with Alexander of Macedon, continues through the Caesars, and ends with Napoleon. Genghis Khan was a conqueror of more gigantic stature than the well known actors of the European stage.

Indeed it is difficult to measure him by ordinary standards. When he marched with his horde, it was over degrees of latitude and longitude instead of miles; cities in his path were often obliterated, and rivers diverted from their courses; deserts were peopled with the fleeing and dying, and when he had passed, wolves and ravens often were the sole living things in once populous lands.

This destruction of human life bewilders the modern imagination—enriched though it be by the concepts of the

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Second World War. Genghis Khan, a nomad chieftain who emerged from the Gobi Desert, waged war upon the civilized peoples of the earth and was victorious.

We must turn back to the thirteenth century for a realization of what this meant. We find the Muhammadans convinced that such an upheaval of earthly things could only be caused by a supernatural visitation. The end of | the world, palpably, was at hand. “Never,” cries the chronicler, “was Islam in such case, divided between the inroads of the Nazarenes and the Mongol.”

And consternation filled all Christendom, a generation after the death of Genghis Khan, when the terrible Mongol horsemen were riding over western Europe, when Boleslas of Poland and Bela of Hungary fled from stricken fields, and Henry, Duke of Silesia, died under the Mongol — arrows with his Teutonic Knights at Liegnitz—sharing the fate of the Grand-Duke George of Russia—and fair Queen Blanche of Castile cried to Saint Louis, “My son, where art thou?” __A cooler head, Frederick II of Germany, wrote to : Henry III of England that the “Tatars” must be no less than the punishment of God, visited upon Christendom for its sins, and the Tatars themselves the descendants of the missing ten tribes of Israel who had worshipped the golden calf and had been penned up for their idolatry within the — wastes of Asia.

Worthy Roger Bacon expressed his opinion that the Mongols were soldiers of Antichrist, come to reap the last, dreadful harvest.

This belief was strengthened by a curious prophecy attributed by mistake to Saint Jerome, that in the day of Antichrist a race of “Turks” would emerge from the land of Gog and Magog behind the mountains of Asia, a race polluted and unwashed, using neither wine nor salt nor wheat, and would cause universal disaster.

So the Pope called the Council of Lyons partly to devise means of stemming the Mongol tide, and stout and venerable John of Plano Carpini, friar of the order of “minorities, was sent forth as legate of the apostolic See to the Mongols, “Because we dreaded that the nearest and most imminent danger to the Church of God arose from — them.”

_ And prayers were offered up in the churches for deliverance from the fury of the Mongol.

If this devastation, this arresting of human progress, had been the whole of his story, Genghis Khan would have been no more than a second Attila, or Alaric—a formidable wanderer without a purpose. But the Scourge was also the Perfect Warrior and Master of Thrones and Crowns.

And here we are face to face with the mystery that surrounds Genghis Khan. A nomad, a hunter and herder of beasts, outgeneraled the powers of three empires; a barbarian who had never seen a city and did not know the use of writing drew up a code of laws for fifty peoples.

In the matter of military genius Napoleon would appear to be the most brilliant of Europeans. But we cannot forget that he abandoned one army to its fate in Egypt, and left the remnant of another in the snows of Russia, and finally strutted into the débdcle of Waterloo. His empire fell about his ears, his Code was torn up and his son disinherited before his death. The whole celebrated affair smacks of the theater and Napoleon himself of the playactor.

Of necessity we must turn to Alexander of Macedon, that reckless and victorious youth, to find a conquering genius the equal of Genghis Khan—Alexander the godlike, marching with his phalanx toward the rising sun, bearing with him the blessing of Greek culture. Both died in the full tide of victory, and their names survive in the legends of Asia to-day.

Only after death the measure of their achievements differs beyond comparison. Alexander’s generals were soon fighting among themselves for the kingdoms from which his son was forced to flee.

So utterly had Genghis Khan made himself master from Armenia to Korea, from Tibet to the Volga that his son entered upon his heritage without protest, and his grandson Kubilai Khan still ruled half the world.

This empire, conjured up out of nothing by a barbarian has mystified historians. The most recent general history of his era compiled by learned persons in England admits that it is an inexplicable fact. A worthy savant pauses to uae wonder at “The fateful personality of Genghis Khan, | :

which, at bottom, we can no more account for than the genius of Shakespeare.”

Many things have contributed to keep the personality of Genghis Khan hidden from us. For one thing the Mongols could not write, or did not care to do so. In consequence the annals of his day exist only in the scattered writings of the Ugurs, the Chinese, the Persians and Armenians. Not until recently was the saga of the Mongol Ssanang Setzen satisfactorily translated.

So the most intelligent chroniclers of the great Mongol were his enemies—a fact that must not be forgotten in judging him. They were men of an alien race. Moreover, like the Europeans of the thirteenth century, their conception of the world as it existed outside their own land was very hazy.

They beheld the Mongol, emerging unheralded out of obscurity. They felt the terrible impact of the Mongol horde, and watched it pass over them to other lands, unknown to them. One Muhammadan summed up sadly in these words his experience with the Mongols, “They came, they mined, they slew—trussed up their loot and departed.”

The difficulty of reading and comparing these various sources has been great. Not unnaturally, the orientologists who have succeeded in doing so have contented themselves mainly with the political details of the Mongol conquests. They present Genghis Khan to us as a kind of incarnation of barbaric power—a scourge that comes every so often out of the desert to destroy decadent civilizations.

The saga of Ssanang Setzen does not help to explain the mystery. It says, quite simply, that Genghis Khan was a bogdo of the race of gods. Instead of a mystery, we have a miracle.

The medieval chronicles of Europe incline, as we have seen, toward a belief in a sort of Satanic power invested in the Mongol and let loose on Europe.

All this is rather exasperating—that modern historians should reécho the superstitions of the thirteenth century. Especially of a thirteenth century Europe that beheld the nomads of Genghis Khan only as shadowy invaders.

There is a simple way of getting light on the mystery © that surrounds Genghis Khan. This way is to turn back the — hands of the clock seven hundred years and look at Genghis Khan as he is revealed in the chronicles of his day, not at the miracle, or the incarnation of barbaric power, but at the man himself.

We will not concern ourselves with the political achievements of the Mongols as a race, but with the man who raised the Mongols from an unknown tribe to world mastery.

To visualize this man, we must actually approach him, among his people and on the surface of the earth as it existed seven hundred years ago. We cannot measure him by the standards of modern civilization. We must view him in the aspects of a barren world peopled by hunters, horse-riding and reindeer-driving nomads.

Here, men clothe themselves in the skins of animals, and nourish themselves on milk and flesh. They grease their bodies to keep out cold and moisture. It is even odds whether they starve or freeze to death, or are cut down by the weapons of other men.

“Here are no towns or cities,” says valiant Fra Carpini, the first European to enter this land, “but everywhere sandy barrens, not a hundredth part of the whole being fertile except where it is watered by rivers, which are very rare.

“This land is nearly destitute of trees, although well adapted for the pasturage of cattle. Even the emperor and princes and all others warm themselves and cook their victuals with fires of horse and cow dung.

“The climate is very intemperate, as in the middle of summer there are terrible storms of thunder and lightning by which many people are killed, and even then there are great falls of snow and such tempests of cold winds blow that sometimes people can hardly sit on horseback. In one of these we had to throw ourselves down on the ground and could not see through the prodigious dust. There are often showers of hail, and sudden, intolerable heats followed by extreme cold”—

This is the Gobi Desert, A.D. 1162, the Year of the Swine in the calendar of the Twelve Beasts.

Part One ae os ae

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Chapter I The Desert

LIFE DID NOT MATTER very much in the Gobi. Lofty plateaus, wind-swept, lying close to the clouds. Reed bordered lakes, visited by migratory winged creatures on their way to the northern tundras. Huge Lake Baikul visited by all the demons of the upper air. In the clear nights of mid-winter, the flare of the northern lights rising and falling above the horizon.

Children of this corner of the northern Gobi were not hardened to suffering; they were born to it. After they were weaned from their mother’s milk to mare’s milk they were expected to manage for themselves.

The places nearest the fire in the family tent belonged to the grown warriors and to guests. Women, it is true, could sit on the left side, but at a distance, and the boys and girls had to fit in where they could.

So with food. In the spring when horses and cows began to give milk in quantity, all was very well. The sheep grew fatter, too. Game was more abundant and the hunters of the tribe would bring in deer and even a bear instead of the lean fur-bearing animals like the fox, marten and sable. Everything went into the pot and was eaten—the able-bodied men taking the first portions, the aged and the women received the pot next, and the children had to fight for bones and sinewy bits. Very little was left for the dogs.

In the winter when the cattle were lean the children did not fare so well. Milk existed then only in the form of kumiss—milk placed in leather sacks and fermented and beaten. It was nourishing and slightly intoxicating, for a_ young chap of three or four years—if he could contrive — to beg or steal some. Meat failing, boiled millet served to take the edge off hunger after a fashion.

The end of winter was the worst of all for the youngsters.

No more cattle could be killed off without thinning the herds too much. At such a time the warriors of the tribe were usually raiding the food reserves of another tribe, carrying off cattle and horses.

The children learned to organize hunts of their own, stalking dogs and rats with clubs or blunt arrows. They learned to ride, too, on sheep, clinging to the wool.

Endurance was the first heritage of Genghis Khan, whose birth name was Temujin.! At the time of his birth his _ father had been absent on a raid against a tribal enemy —

Temujin by name. The affair went well both home and > afield, the enemy was made prisoner, and the father, re- | turning, gave to his infant son the name of the captive — foeman.

His home was a tent made of felt stretched over a frame- :

work of wattled rods with an aperture at the top to let out — the smoke. This was coated with white lime and orna- _ mented with pictures. A peculiar kind of tent, this yurt that wandered all over the prairies mounted on a cart drawn — by a dozen or more oxen. Serviceable, too, because its dome-like shape enabled it to stand the buffeting of the wind, and it could be taken down at need.

The married women of the chieftains—and Temujin’s father was a chieftain—all had their own ornamented yurts in which their children lived. It was the duty of the girls to attend to the yurt, to keep the fire burning on the stone hearth under the opening that let the smoke out. One of Temujin’s sisers, standing on the platform of the cart before the entrance flap, would manage the oxen when they were on the move. The shaft of one cart would be tied to the axle of another and would creak and roll in this fashion over the level grassland where, more often than not, no single tree or bit of rising ground was to be '

seen.

In the yurt were kept the family treasures, carpets from .

*Temuchin signifies “The Finest Steel”—T'umur-ji. The Chinese version is T’ie ”

mou jen. which has another meaning altogether, ‘“‘Supreme Earth Man uw couumttiltl Pil

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Genghis Khan assumes lordship of all Mongols

Seer ee a GENGHIS KHAN 13

Bokhara or Kabul, looted probably from some caravan— chests filled with women’s gear, silk garments bartered from a shrewd Arab trader, and inlaid silver. More important were the weapons that hung on the walls, short ‘Turkish scimitars, spears, ivory or bamboo bow cases— arrows of different lengths and weights, and perhaps a ‘round shield of tanned leather, lacquered over.

These, too, were looted or purchased, passing from hand to hand with the fortunes of war.

Temujin—the youthful Genghis Khan—had many duties. The boys of the family must fish the streams they passed in their trek from the summer to winter pastures. The horse herds were in their charge, and they had to ride afield after lost animals, and to search for new pasture lands. They watched the skyline for raiders, and spent many a night in the snow without a fire. Of necessity, they learned to keep the saddle for several days at a time, and to go without cooked food for three or four days—sometimes without any food at all.

When mutton or horse-flesh was plentiful they feasted and made up for lost time, stowing away incredible amounts against the day of privation. For diversions they had horse races, twenty miles out into the prairie and back, or wrestling matches in which bones were freely broken.

Temujin was marked by great physical strength, and ability to scheme—which is only another way of adapting himself to circumstances. He became the leader of the wrestlers, although he was spare in build. He could handle a bow remarkably well. Not so well as his brother Kassar who was called the Bowman. But Kassar was afraid of Temujin.

They formed an alliance of two against their hardy half brothers, and the first incident related of Temujin is the slaying of one of the half brothers, who had stolen a fish from him. Mercy seemed to these nomad youths to be of little value, but retribution was an obligation.

And Temujin became aware of feuds more important than the animosity of boys. His mother, Houlun, was beautiful, and so had been carried off by his father from a neighboring tribe on her wedding ride to the tent of her betrothed husband. Houlun, being both sagacious and willful, made the best of circumstances after a little wailing;

but all in the yurt knew that some day men from her tribe would come to avenge the wrong. :

At night by the glowing dung fire Temujin would listen to the tales of the minstrels, old men who rode from one wagon-tent to another carrying a one-stringed fiddle, and singing in a droning voice the tales of a tribe’s forebears and heroes.

He was conscious of his strength, and his right of leadership. Was he not the first-born of Yesukai the Valiant, Khan of the Yakka or Great Mongols, master of forty thousand tents?

From the tales of the minstrels he knew that he came of distinguished stock, the Bourchikoun, or Gray-eyed Men. He harkened to the story of his ancestor, Kabul Khan who had pulled the emperor of Cathay by the beard and who had been poisoned as a consequence. He learned that his father’s sworn brother was Toghrul Khan of the Karaits, the most powerful of the Gobi nomads—he who gave birth in Europe to the tales of Prester John of Asia.

But at that time Temujin’s horizon was limited by the pasture lands of his tribe, the Yakka Mongols.

“We are not a hundredth part of Cathay,” a wise counselor said to the boy, “and the only reason why we have been able to cope with her is that we are all nomads, carrying our supplies with us, and experienced in our kind of warfare. When we can, we plunder; when we cannot, we hide away. If we begin to build towns and change our old habits, we shall not prosper. Besides, monasteries and temples breed mildness of character, and it is only the fierce and warlike who dominate mankind.” ?

When he had served his apprenticeship as herd boy, he was allowed to ride with Yesukai. By all accounts the young Temujin was good to look upon, but remarkable more for the strength of his body and a downright manner than for any beauty of features.

He must have been tall, with high shoulders, his skin a whitish tan. His eyes, set far apart under a sloping forehead, did not slant. And his eyes were green, or blue-gray in the iris, with black pupils. Long reddish-brown hair fell f in braids to his back. He spoke very little, and then only

after meditating on what he would say. He had an un-

governable temper and the gift of winning fast friends. His wooing was as sudden as his sire’s. While father and

"son were passing the night in the tent of a strange warrior, _ the boy’s attention was attracted by the girl of the tent. He asked Yesukai at once if he could have her for a wife.

“She is young,” the father objected.

“When she is older,” Temujin pointed out, “she will do

_ well enough.”

Yesukai considered the girl, who was nine years of age, and a beauty, by name Bourtai—a name that harked back to the legendary ancestor of the tribe—the Gray-eyed.

“She is small,” her father observed, secretly delighted

_ by the interest the Mongols showed, “but still, you might look at her.” And of Temujin he approved. “Thy son has a clear face and bright eyes.”

So the next day the bargain was struck and the Mongol Khan rode off, leaving Temujin to make the acquaintance of his future bride and father-in-law.

A few days later a Mongol galloped up with word that Yesukai who had passed a night in the tent of some enemies and had presumably been poisoned, lay dying and had asked for Temujin. Although the thirteen-year-old boy rode as fast as a horse could carry him to the ordu or tent village of the clan, he found his father dead.

More than that had happened in his absence. The leading spirits of the clan had discussed matters and two thirds of them had abandoned the standard of the chieftain and had started off to find other protectors. They were afraid to trust themselves and their families and herds to an inexperienced boy.

“The deep water is gone,” they said, “the strong stone is broken. What have we to do with a woman and her children?”

Houlun, the wise and courageous, did what she could to avert the break-up of the clan. Taking the standard of the nine yak-tails in her hand she rode after the deserters and pleaded with them persuading some few families to

_ turn back their herds and carts.

Temujin was now seated on the white horseskin, Khan of the Yakka Mongols, but he had no more than the remnant of a clan around him, and he was faced with the certainty that all the feudal foes of the Mongols would take advantage of the death of Yesukai to avenge themselves upon his son.

Chapter II The Struggle To Live

IN THE TIME OF his great-grandfather Kabul Khan and of his father Yesukai, the Yakka Mongols had enjoyed a kind of over-lordship in the northern Gobi. Being Mongols, as a natural consequence, they had taken to themselves the best of the grazing lands that stretched from Lake Baikul eastward to the range of mountains known now as the Khingan, on the border of modern Manchuria.

These grazing lands were very desirable, being north of the encroaching sands of the Gobi, between the two fertile valleys of the small rivers Kerulon and Onon. The hills were covered with birch and fir, and game was plentiful, water abundant—due to the late melting of the snows —circumstances only too well known to the clans that had formerly been under the dominion of the Mongol and were now preparing to seize the possessions of the thirteen-year-old Temujin.

Those possessions were of inestimable value to the nomads—fertile grassland, not too bitter cold in the winter, and the herds from which they drew the necessities of life, hair to make felt and ropes to bind the yurts, bone for arrow tips, leather for saddles and kumiss sacks and harness.

Temujin, it seems, might have fled. He could do nothing to avert the coming blow. His vassals, as we may call them, were irresolute and not over-willing to pay the Khan’s tithe of cattle to a boy. Besides, they were strung out through

Dry Bed a sa a i say Oe in, Seige) Soa ee ee all the hills, guarding their own herds against wolves and the inevitable small raiders of early spring-time.

He did not fiee. The chronicle relates that he wept for a while, solitary in the yurt. Then he set about the task of leadership. There were his younger brothers to feed, and his sisters and his remaining half brother, who appears to have been devoted to the youngster. Above all, his mother, who knew only too well the inevitable disaster that must overtake her first-born.

Inevitable, because a certain warrior, Targoutai, likewise descended from the Bourchikoun, the Gray-eyed Men, had announced that he was now over-lord of the northern Gobi. Targoutai, chieftain of the Taidjuts, the feudal foes of the Mongols.

And Targoutai—who had persuaded most of Temujin’s clansmen to join his standard—must now hunt down the youthful khan of the Mongols, as an older wolf seeks and slays a cub too prone to take the leadership of the pack.

The hunt was launched without warning. Throngs of horsemen galloped up to the Mongol ordu, the tent village, some turning aside to drive off the outlying herds. Targoutai himself made for the tent where the standard stood.

And Temujin with his brothers fled before the onset of the warriors, Kassar, the sturdy bowman, reining in his pony to send a few arrows at his foes. Houlun was suffered to live—Targoutai seeking no one but Temujin.

Thus the hunt began, with the Taidjuts close upon the heels of the boys. The hunters made no great haste. The trail was fresh and clear, and these nomads were accustomed to track down a horse for days if need be. So long as Temujin did not get a fresh mount, they would close in on him.

The boys headed instinctively for the shelter of gorges, with timber growth to screen them. At times they dismounted to hack down trees over the narrow track and hinder the pursuers. When twilight came upon them they separated, the younger brothers and the girls hiding in a cave, Kassar turning off, and Temujin himself riding on toward a mountain that offered concealment,

Here he kept away from the pursuers for days, until hunger made him risk an attempt to lead his horse through ss = eo Se ee ye _ » a i a ; C ’ a

_ the waiting Taidjuts. He was seen, overtaken and brought

before Targoutai who commanded that a kang be put upon

- him—a wooden yoke resting on the shoulders and holding

_ the wrists of a captive prisoned at both ends. Thus fettered,

_ Temujin was led off, the warriors moving back to their own grazing land, driving the captured cattle. And so he remained, helpless until he was left with a single guard while the warriors went off to feast elsewhere. Darkness settled down on the camp, and the young Mongol was in no mood to lose an opportunity to escape.

In the murk of the tent, he struck the head of his guard with the end of the kang, knocking the man senseless. Running from the tent he found the moon risen and a half light through the forest in which the camp had been pitched. Plunging into the brush he made his way toward a river they had crossed the day before. And, hearing the sound of pursuit behind him, he entered the water, sinking down among the rushes near the bank until only his head was above the water.

So situated, he watched the Taidjut riders search the bank for him, and he noticed that one warrior saw him, hesitated and went on without betraying him.

In the kang Temujin was almost as helpless as before, and it took both intuition and daring to do what he next did. He left the river, following the horsemen back into the camp, and crept to the yurt of the warrior who had noticed him among the rushes and had not given him away—a stranger, as it happened, stopping for the nonce with the hunters of this other clan.

At the apparition of the dripping boy the man was more frightened than Temujin. He pitied the captive, and must have reflected that the best thing to do was to rid himself of the youth. So he split the kang and burned up the fragments, hiding Temujin meanwhile in a cart loaded with wool.

It was hot in the loose wool—no pleasant abiding place especially when the Taidjut warriors came to search the tent, and thrust spears into the cart, one of the blades wounding Temujin in the leg.

“The smoke of my house would have vanished and my fire would have died out forever had they found thee,” the

Gas ee man remarked grimly to the fugitive, giving him at the same time food and milk and a bow with two arrows. “Go now to thy brothers and mother.”

And Temujin, riding a borrowed horse, found his estate little better than that pictured by the stranger—the site of his camp filled with the ashes of fires, his herds gone, his mother and brothers vanished. He tracked them down, and discovered a hungry family in hiding, the stern Houlun, the doughty Kassar, and Belgutai the half brother who idolized him.

They lived after a fashion, traveling by night to the camp of a distant well-wisher, with no more than eight horses in their string, trapping the more miserable game such as marmots and contenting themselves with fish instead of mutton. Temujin learned how to keep out of an ambush, and to break through the lines of men that hunted him down. Hunted he was, and his cunning grew with the years. He was not, apparently, caught a second time.

He might, even then, have fled from his ancestral grazing lands. But the youthful khan had no intention of leaving his heritage to his enemies. He visited the scattered settlements of his clan, demanding gravely the khan’s tithe of the four beasts—a camel, ox, horse and sheep— to provide for his mother.

It is noticeable that he refrained from doing two things. Bourtai the Gray-eyed still awaited his coming, to bear her off to his tent and the father of Bourtai was a powerful clansman, a leader of many spears. But Temujin did not go near them.

Nor did he appeal to the aged and influential Toghrul, the “Provider” chieftan of the Karait Turks who had drunk the oath of comradeship with Yesukai—a bond that entitled the son of one to go at need and claim the other for foster father. A simple matter, perhaps, to ride over the prairies to the Karaits who lived in walled cities and were possessed of real treasures, precious stones, woven stuffs, fine weapons and even tents of cloth-of-gold —to the Karaits who were the people of this Prester John of Asia.