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Western Eurasia, 1200-1500

Map 13.1 The Mongol Domains in Eurasia in 1300 After the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, his empire was divided among his sons and grandsons. Son Ogdei succeeded Genghis as Great Khan. Grandson Khubilai expanded the Domain of the Great Kahn into eastern China by 1279. Grandson Hleg was the first II-khan in the Middle East. Grandson Batu founded the Khanate of the Golden Horde in southern Russia. Son Jagadai ruled the Jagadai Khanate in Central Asia.
(From John King Fairbank, et al., East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, rev. ed., pp. 172, 196. Copyright 1989 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Used by permission.)

THE RISE OF THE MONGOLS,

1200-1260

arge federations of nomads had dominated the steppes (dry, high plains) and deserts of Central Asia many times since the beginnings of recorded history. The environment, economic life, cultural institutions, and political traditions of the steppes and deserts all contributed to the expansion and contraction of empires. Similarly, the rise of the Mongols can be attributed at least as much to the long-term trends and particular pressures of Central Asia as to any special abilities of Genghis Khan and his followers.

Nomadism is a way of life forced by a scarcity of resources. Nomadic groups have by far the lowest rates of population density. To find pastures and water for their livestock, they are continually on the move. In the course of their migrations they frequently come into contact with other nomadic groups seeking the same resources, and the outcome of these encounters is commonly warfare, alliance, or both. In times of drought, conflicts increase. The result is the extermination of small groups, the growth of alliances, and frequent outmigration from groups that have grown too large. Historians believe that such a period of environmental stress afflicted northern Eurasia around 1000 C.E. and contributed to the dislocations and conflicts out of which the Mongols eventually

Nomadism in Central Asia

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CHRONOLOGY
Central Asia
1200
Temiijin chosen Genghis Khan of the Mongols 1227 Death of Genghis Khan 12271241 Region of Great Khan Ogodei

Middle East

Russia

1206

1221-1223

First Mongol attacks in Iran

1221-1223
on Russia

First Mongol attacks

1240 1242
Mamluk regime controls Egypt and Syria 1258 Mongols sack Baghdad and kill the caliph 1260 Mamluks defeat II-khans at Ain Jalut

1250

Mongols sack Kiev Alexander Nevskii defeats Teutonic Knights

1260

War between II-khans and Golden Horde

1295 1300

II-khan Ghazan converts to Islam

1349 End of II-khan rule ca. 1350 Egypt infected by

plague

1346

Plague outbreak at Kaffa

1370 1405
-

Reign of Timur

1400 1453
Ottomans capture Constantinople

1462 1505
-

Ivan III unites Russia under rule of Moscow, throws off Mongol rule (1480)

emerged. Some agricultural lands became disastrously wet in this period, but lands in northern Eurasia became unusually dry, and nomadic peoples began to move south in search of new pastures. Nomadic groups in Central Asia frequently engaged in violence, so every man was a full-time herdsman, hunter, and warrior. Like all their predecessors on the steppes, the Mongols were superb riders. They continued the ancient tradition of putting their infants on goats to accustom them to riding. And like all Central Asian warriors the Mongols were adept at shooting arrows from a galloping horse (see Environment and Technology: Horses). Because nomads are constantly moving but also always under pressure to make their movements efficient and accurate, centralized decision making is a necessary part of their life. The relative independence of Mongol individuals and their families forced decision making to be

public, and many people voiced their views. Even at the height of a military campaign nomad warriors moved with their families and their possessions and, if they disagreed with a decision, sometimes struck off on their own. The political structures of the Central Asian empires were designed to accommodate the conflicting centralizing and decentralizing forces of traditional nomadic life. Mongol groups had strong hierarchies, but the leader the khanwas always required to have his decisions ratified by a council of the leaders of powerful families. Competition for resources reinforced slavery and tribute in Central Asia. Many of the men and women captured during warfare or raids became slaves and were forced to do menial work in nomadic camps. Some individuals evidently entered into slavery willingly, to avoid starvation. Slaves were valuable for their labor and also as currency. Weak groups secured land rights and protection from strong groups by providing them with

Horses
Be fore the rise of the Mongols, many breeds of horses in Eurasia had been improved and specialized by crossbreeding with the large, quick, graceful horses of the Caucasus and the Middle East. The Mongols, however, preserved a form of domesticated horse that looked not very different from the prehistoric horses that Paleolithic peoples had painted on cave walls. Mongol ponies were an excellent example of the adaptation of traditional technology (in this case horse breeding) to environment. Because they remained semiwild, they were uniquely able to survive the very cold, dry climate of Mongolia. The Mongols never fed or sheltered them, so by natural selection the breed was able to forage in snow, and to survive the plunging night temperatures. During the Tang Empire (618-907), Central Asian ponies were crossbred with specialized strains from the Middle East to produce larger, stronger, more beautiful horses. Occasionally such horses were brought to Mongolia by the Turks and bred with the local horses. But only after the time of Genghis did the numbers of the Mongolian pony decline dramatically. The breed, or a near relative of it, now survives only in game preserves. Charioteers, who for a time dominated warfare in ancient Middle East and East Asia, were no match for well-coordinated and well-armed light horsemen, and chariot driving disappeared as a war art wherever extensive campaigns against Central Eurasian riders occurred. The Parthians of eastern Iran, whose riding skills astonished the empires of the Middle East, were legendary for their ability to shoot arrows at the enemy while retreating from them. In China, the Xiongnu drove out the chariot and forced Chinese soldiers to fight on horseback. For similar reasons, the Huns were a revelation to Europe, which adopted the iron stirrup from them. Central Eurasian riding skills fundamentally altered the social significance of the horse. In the ancient Middle East, the use of horse teams and chariots in warfare was extremely expensive and demanded a select group of warriors wealthy enough to maintain their equipment and powerful enough to control grazing land for their animals. Horses had to be carefully bred to be large enough to pull the chariots and carefully trained to manage their loads with rather inefficient harnessing. In Central Asia, riding was an ability that all men and women in good health possessed. It required only a rudimentary saddle and experience. The deployment of riders in warfare blurred the distinction between a riding herdsman (or hunter) and a riding soldier, and there was no specialization of function along class lines. Because Central Asians did not enclose their herds but left them to forage, no question of individual landownership arose. In Russia, the Middle East, and East Asia, the skills necessary for the use of the horse, including breeding, tacking, and military riding, were all adapted from the nomads. The use of riders for such varied activities as postal service and military scouting changed the speed of communications and some patterns of military strategy. During the Mongol period and for centuries after, the breeding, raising, training, and maintenance of horses for warfare, in particular, dominated the government economies of all countries north of the tropics.

Mongolian Pony This resting pony wears a head collar, as specified by Ghenghis's law. (National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan)

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slaves, livestock, weapons, silk, or cash. Many powerful groups (such as the one to which Genghis Khan's father belonged) found that they could live almost entirely off tribute, so they spent less time and fewer resources on herding and more on the warlike activities that would secure greater tribute. As each group grew in numbers and wealth, its political institutions became more complex. Federations arose, based on an increasing number of alliances among groups, almost always expressed in arranged marriages between the leading families. Children frequently became pawns of diplomacy: their marriages were arranged in childhoodin Temjin's case, at the age of eight. Because of the relationship between marriage and politics, women from prestigious families were often very powerful in negotiation and management. And, when things became violent, they were just as likely as men to suffer assassination or execution. The long-distance, seasonal movements of the Central Asia nomads created powerful channels for trade and communication. The result was great cultural diversity. Nomads aided in the spread of Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam across Central Asia. On the steppe, it was not unique to find within a single family believers in two or more of those religions, in combination with traditional shamanism (ancient practices by which special individuals visited and influenced the supernatural world). This plurality of religious practice reflected the fact that Central Eurasian nomads did not always associate ideas about rulership with ideas about religion. Since very early times, Central Asian societies had been permeated by the idea of world rulership by a khan, who, with the aid of his shamans, would speak to and for an ultimate god, represented in Central Asia as Sky or Heaven. It was believed that this universal ruler, by virtue of his role as the speaker for Heaven, would transcend particular cultures and dominate them all. For the Mongols, the idea of universal rule was centrally importantas the words attributed to Genghis on his deathbed reflect. It permitted them to appeal to any and all religions to legitimate their conquests. And it authorized them to claim superiority over all religious leaders. Nomads strove for economic self-sufficiency by attempting to restrict their diet to foods they could provide for themselvesprimarily meat and milkand by wearing clothes produced from pastoral animalsfelt (from wool), leather, and furs. Women generally oversaw the breeding and birthing of livestock and the preparation of furs, both of which were fundamental to the nomadic economy. Nomads, however, never lived completely independent of the settled regions.

Animal Husbandry In nomadic societies, it was common for men and boys to tend to the herds in the pastures. The more technical tasks associated with animal husbandrybreeding, birthing, shearing, milking, and the processing of peltswere usually peformed by women who worked together in teams and passed their knowledge from older to younger members of the community. Various activities are depicted in this contemporary
painting. (Ulan Bator Fine Arts Museum)

Iron was crucially important to Central Asian nomads. They used it in bridles and stirrups, wagons, and weapons. Nomads did not develop large mining enterprises, but they eagerly acquired iron implements in trade and reworked them to suit their own purposes. As early as the 600s, the Turks' large ironworking stations south of Mount Altai were famous. Agricultural empires in East Asia and the Middle East attempted to restrict the export of iron in any form to Central Asia, but these attempts were never successful. On the contrary, Central Asians improved many of the sedentary technologies, such as iron forging, and then exported them back to the agricultural regions. The Mongols retained the traditional Central Asian reverence for iron and the secrets of ironworking. Temjin, Genghis Khan's personal name, means "blacksmith ," and several of his prominent followers were sons of blacksmiths. The name of a later conqueror, Timur, means "iron" in Turkish. In addition to iron, the Central Asian nomads also traded with agricultural societies to acquire wood, cotton and cotton seed, silk, vegetables, and grains. In

||
330
CHAPTER 13 Western Eurasia, 1200-1500

Genghis Khan r. 1206-1227

| Jochi Jagadai r. 1227-1242 (Jagadai Khanate of Central Asia)

| gdei r. 1227-1241

Tolui

|
Batu r. 1224-1255 (Golden Horde of Russia) Gyk r. 1246-1248 Mngke r. 1248-1257 Khubilai r. 1265-1294 (Yuan Empire of China) Huleg r. 1256-1265 (II-khan Empire of Iran)

Figure 13.1 Mongol Rulers, 1206 - 1260 This is the family chart of the founders of the Mongol empires. All the names of those who succeeded to the position of Great Khan are shown in bold type. Those who founded the regional khanates are listed with their dates of rule.

exchange they offered wool, leather, and horses. Many nomads learned the value of permanent settlements for the farming of grains and cotton, as well as for the working of iron, and they established villagesoften with the help of migrants from the agricultural regionsat strategic points. The result was extensive frontier regions, particularly east of the Caspian Sea and in northern China, where nomadic peoples and agricultural peoples interacted and created economically as well as culturally pluralistic societies. Despite the mutual dependence of nomadic pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists, conflict between them was common. When farming societies needed land, their soldiers tried to claim additional territory. When nomads needed agricultural goods or slaves, they resorted to raiding or even large-scale invasion. Warfare tended to break out when normal trade relations between the nomads and the agriculturalists were interrupted.

Shortly after he was acclaimed "Great Khan" in 1206, Genghis began to carry out his plan to convince the kingdoms of Eurasia to surrender tribute to him. The next two decades saw the bursting forth of Mongol aggression. The earliest sustained action was westward, against Central Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. Genghis Khan died in 1227, possibly of the effects of alcoholism. His son and successor, the Great Khan

The Mongol Conquests

Ogodei , continued the campaigns seeking domination of China (see Figure 13.1). The Tanggut and then the Jin Empires were destroyed, and their territories were put under Mongol governors (see Chapter 14). In 1236 Genghis's grandson Batu (d. 1255) launched a major offensive into the Russian territories and took control of all the towns along the Volga River (see Map 13.1). Within five years he conquered Moscow and Kievan Russia, Poland, and Hungary and was ready to strike at Central Europe. Under siege by the Mongols by the 1230s, Europe would have suffered grave damage in 1241 had the Mongol forces not lifted their attack because of the death of the Great Khan Ogodei, and the necessity to head east to the Mongol capital at Karakorum for the election of a new Great Khan. After the installation of the new Great Khan, Genghis's grandson Gyk, in 1246, Mongol pressure on the Middle East intensified. It climaxed in 1258 with the sacking of Baghdad and the murder of the last Abbasid caliph (see Chapter 9). Historians often ask why the Mongols, who were not great in number, were able to defeat some of the most formidable armies of the time. Part of the answer lies in the combination of their extraordinary abilities on horseback and the special properties of their bows. The Mongol bow could shoot arrows one-third farther (and was significantly more difficult to pull) than Middle Eastern and European bows of the same period. The
Ogodei (ERG-uh-day) Batu (BAH-too) Volga (VOHL-gah) Gaya (gi-yik)

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331

composite structure of the Mongol bow and a jade thumb-ring that allowed the archer's hand to withstand the tremendous tension of the drawn bowstring also gave the archer an advantage. Mounted Mongol archers rarely used all of the five dozen or more arrows they carried in their quivers. At the opening of battle, they shot a volley of arrows from a distance to destroy the ranks of enemy marksmen. Then they rode their swift horses nearly without challenge into sword, lance, javelin, and mace combat against the enemy's infantry. The Mongol cavalry met its match only at the Battle of Ain Jalut, where it confronted Mamluk forces, whose war techniques also reflected the riding traditions of Central Asia. Thus it was Central Asian knowledge that stopped the Mongol advance toward the Mediterranean. Another reason for the Mongols' success was their use of Genghis's principles of adaptability and inclusiveness. They changed their techniques for penetrating sophisticated fortifications. A typical Mongol attack began with a volley of flaming arrows, after which the Mongols hurled enormous projectilesfrequently on firefrom catapults. The first Mongol catapults were taken from the Chinese. Though easy to transport, they had short ranges and poor accuracy. From the defeated Khwarazmshahs in Central Asia the Mongols adapted a catapult design that was half again as powerful as the Chinese catapult. They used this improved weapon against the cities of Iran and Iraq. Residents of cities under Mongol attack faced immediate slaughter if they opened their gates to fight or slow starvation followed by slaughter if they did not. As a third alternative, the Mongols offered their prospective victims food, shelter, and protection if they surrendered without a fight. The terrible bloodletting that the Mongols inflicted on cities such as Balkh (in present-day northern Afghanistan) in their early conquests gave staggering force to these appeals, and throughout the Middle East the Mongols found populations willing to acknowledge their overlordship in return for life. With the capture of each city the "Mongol" armies swelled in number. The conquest in the Middle East was accomplished by a small Mongol elite overseeing armies of recently recruited Turks, Iranians, and Arabs. Through their experiences with so many different cultures the Mongols quickly learned about the rivalries among neighboring groups and found ways to take advantage of them to further the conquest. In their campaigns against the cities of Central Asia the Mongols exploited Muslims' resentment against nonbelievers. In
Ain Jalut (Me jah-LOOT) Khwarazmshah (hwa-RAZZ-um-shah) Balkh (bahlk)

the Middle East, where Muslims were a solid majority, the Mongols exploited Christian resentment of Muslim rule in their seizure of cities in Syria (where Christians were a large group), forcing the conversion of mosques to churches. When Hleg captured Baghdad in 1258, he agreed to the requests of his Christian wife that Christians be sought out and put in prominent posts.

The cosmopolitan nature of the Mongol conquests underscores the influence of the Mongols in the transmission of military technology and related scientific knowledge across Eurasia. The overland connections of the time were similarly important to the spread of civil technologies and artistic styles. A spectacular example of their importance is the leap forward in textile manufacture and tradeparticularly in silk. Like their aristocratic predecessors in Central Asia, Mongol nobles had the exclusive right to wear silk, almost all bought from China. The unprecedented commercial integration of Eurasia under the Mongols brought new styles and huge quantities of silk westward. Since the material was used not only for clothing but also for wall hangings and furnishings, the presence of silk throughout the Middle East and Europe transformed the daily life of the elite and urban groups. At the same time, the trading of designs brought a mixing and merging of artistic motifs from Japan and Tibet to England and Morocco. This trade was protected by Mongol control of the overland routes and promoted by Mongol tax policies, but it was carried out by a collection of very different peoples from all over Eurasia. Merchants hoping for wealth and prestige joined political ambassadors, learned men, and religious missionaries over long distances to the Mongol courts. These journeys produced travel literature that gives us vivid insights into the Eurasian world of the thirteenth century. Some narratives, such as that of the Venetian traveler Marco Polo (1254-1324), freely mixed the fantastic with the factual, to the delight of the audience (Map 13.1 shows Marco Polo's route). Most important, these books left an image of the inexhaustible wealth of the Mongols, and of Asia generally, that created in Europe a persisting ambition to find easier routes to Asia for trade and conquest. Though the accounts of these travelers mesmerized readers for centuries, their unembellished experiences were not rare for their time. In the towns they visited in Central Asia or China, they regularly encountered other

Overland Trade and the Plague

Hleg (HE-luh-gee) Marco Polo (mar-koe POE-loe )

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Passport The Mongol Empire that united Eurasia in the mid1200s provided good roads and protection for the movement of products, merchants, and diplomats. Individuals traveling from one culture area to another encountered new languages, laws, and customs frequently. The paisa (from a Chinese word for "card" or "sign"), with its inscription in Mongolian, proclaimed to all that the traveler had received the ruler's permission to travel through the region. Europeans later applied the practice to travel through their small and diverse countries. The paisa was thus the ancestor of modern passports. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase bequest of Dorothy Graham Bennett, 1993 [1993.256]. Photograph 1997 The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Europeans, sometimes from their own home regions. Some were travelers and some were captives, but all were part of a steady flow of people across Eurasia. The economic, political, and cultural benefits of this traffic were great. Technical knowledge, whether of pharmacology, engineering, mathematics, or financial management, flowed between China and Iran. Mongol policy and occasionally Mongol competition also widened the steady stream of knowledge between Europe and the Middle East. For instance, the wish of the Mongols in the Middle East (in the Il-khan Empire) to drive the Mongols of Russia out of the Caucasus in the 1260s helped create a half-century of complex diplomacy in which Muslims often allied themselves with the European sponsors of the Crusader states sometimes against Christians, sometimes against the Mongols. Or to use a different case, when the Mongols in Russia granted a special trade charter to merchants from

Anatomy Illustrated Persian anatomical texts from the II-khan and Timurid periods were based on ancient Greek ideas about the functions of the body. Here, the digestive and arterial systems are depicted together because it was assumed that heat generated by digestion forced circulation of the blood. The nervous system, which was not well understood, is not included. Diagrams such as these became very important in Europe a few centuries later, as European scientists continued to build on the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the Islamic world. (Bodleian Library,
Oxford, Ms. Fraser 201 fol. 104r)

Genoa, the Mongols in the Middle East granted a similar privilege to traders from Venice. And it was probably also by this route that the cosmological ideas and technical knowledge of scholars working under Mongol patrons were communicated to Europe and helped to profoundly change its intellectual life. There were also great dangers to the exchange. Europe had been free of bubonic plague since about 700. The Middle East had seen no plague since about the year 1200. In southwestern China, however, the plague had festered in Yunnan province since the early Tang period.

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In the mid-thirteenth century, Mongol troops arrived in Yunnan and established a garrison. From that point, military and supply traffic in and out of Yunnan provided the means for flea-infested rats carrying plague to be carried from Yunnan to central China, to northwestern China, and across Central Asia. Along the routes, marmots and other desert rodents were infected and passed the disease to dogs and people. The caravan traffic across Central Asia infected the oasis towns when rats and fleas disembarked from the overloaded camels, covered wagons, and the wagon-mounted felt tents of the nomads. The Mongols themselves were incapacitated by the plague during their assault on the city of Kaffa in Crimea in 1346. They withdrew, but the plague infiltrated Crimea. From Kaffa, both Europe and Egypt were repeatedly infected by fleas from rats on ships bound across the Mediterranean. Bubonic plague was only one of the diseases at work weakening the resistance of urban populations in particular and unleashing new waves of latent illness. Typhus, influenza, and smallpox traveled with the plague. The combination of these and other diseases created what is often called the "great pandemic" of 1347-1352. The human and cultural damage that resulted was far greater than any of the direct consequences of the Mongol military conquests. It is tempting to associate the social disorder of conquest and the plague as twin illnesses, but it was not the Mongol invaders who brought the disease westward. Rather, disease was transmitted by the trade encouraged by Mongol protection of the Eurasian land routes. Peace and profit were the channels by which pandemic illness terrorized Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century.

Celebrating Battle The Mongols were in a long line of Central Asian warriors who mastered the art of shooting arrows from a galloping horse. They were renowned not only for their mobility but also for the unusual distance and accuracy their archers could attain with their distinctive compound bows. This detail from a painted bowl of the early II-khan period illustrates a contemporary portrayal of the military skills of shooting from horseback, as well as depicting the violence of the battlefield. But it carefully avoids a fact of war in the thirteenth-century Middle East: the slaughter, starvation, and enslavement of civilians are not shown. (Courtesy
of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.)