LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

AWAY IN THE BACK OF BEYOND, MONGOLIA IS A HARSH, DUSTY wilderness that’s synonymous with remote. It’s where you find dinosaur bones and shaggy nomads and none of the major fast-food franchises. Modern Mongolia is a tiny football-shaped country that has been kicked around by larger countries for hundreds of years, but the Mongolians comfort themselves with the knowledge that once upon a time they produced the absolutely baddest badass in human history: Genghis Khan.

      Of course, the Mongolians can’t actually brag about his wholesale butchery—in fact, they vigorously deny it—so they emphasize his courage, his audacity, his splendor, his cunning, his occasional acts of charity, along with the admittedly useful feat of temporarily bridging East and West into a single political entity. They point out all of the helpful inventions (such as pasta and gunpowder, maybe) that passed back and forth across this vast, unprecedented empire. They proudly use him to decorate their banknotes, vodka bottles, beer bottles, shops, hotels, street signs, and chocolate bars.²

      Some Westerners buy into this. When a recent genetic study indicated that Genghis Khan might have 16 million living descendants, many reports described him as a “prolific lover,” not a serial rapist.^{a 3} Throughout the best-selling Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford often writes like a defense counsel picking away at the prosecution’s case: “Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate . . . they deviated from standard practice of the times in an important and surprising way. The Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim.”⁴ After an arrow from the walls of the besieged city of Nishapur killed his son-in-law, Genghis Khan allowed his widowed daughter to decide the fate of the city: “She reportedly decreed death for all. . . . According to widely circulated but unverified stories, she ordered soldiers to pile the heads . . . in three separate pyramids—one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she supposedly ordered that the dogs, the cats . . . be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder [sic] of her husband” (emphasis added).⁵

      Personally, I find it unsettling to see the victims of Genghis Khan shrugged off as easily as Holocaust-deniers ignore the Jews, and then to realize that hundreds of years from now, some historians will be rehabilitating Hitler’s reputation.

      But it’s not really a black or white issue. No world leader can get as far as Genghis Khan without a certain amount of charisma, adaptability, and competence. If we spend several generations stereotyping a ruler as a dim-witted, bloodthirsty savage, then sooner or later iconoclastic researchers will realize that there’s more to the story than our simplistic stereotypes.

       Angry Orphan

      Who was this man named Genghis Khan? Well, for starters, that’s not his name; it’s a title meaning “Universal Leader.” It isn’t even a very good transliteration into English because we tend to pronounce both of the g’s the same. Across the centuries, the “Universal” part has been rendered in English as Zingis (1700s), Jenghiz (1800s), Genghis (1900s), and Chinggis (2000s), and even though my spell-checker prefers Genghis, we should start getting used to Chinggis.

      But let’s begin with Temujin, since that was his actual name. He was born insignificantly, somewhere in Mongolia, sometime around 1162, to one among several rival tribes on the steppe. When Temujin was nine, a rival tribe, the Tatars, murdered his father, and the family had to flee into exile. Temujin had to fight for supremacy within his family; he killed his older half-brother, ostensibly for stealing the game he took in a hunt. Temujin got married at the age of sixteen, but a rival tribe kidnapped his wife. Although he got her back quickly, she turned out to be pregnant, so the paternity of that son, his eldest, was always in doubt. Eventually, Temujin linked up with a chieftain who was most notorious for occasionally boiling the flesh off live prisoners in a cauldron.

      Personally charismatic, Temujin gathered followers from among other dispossessed individuals, which meant that these followers owed everything they had to him, not to an accident of birth.⁶ Temujin valued loyalty so highly that even when disloyalty among his enemies worked to his advantage, the culprit was punished. At one city, the soldiers of the garrison snuck down and opened the gates for his army to flood in. Chinggis Khan had them executed for their treachery.

      Temujin heard of the legendary beauty of a Tatar princess, so he had his followers hunt her down. His soldiers swooped in and chased away her fiancé. They carried the princess back to Temujin, who took her as one of his many wives. Some time later, at a court gathering, he saw his bride go white with terror. Glancing around, Temujin saw only one unfamiliar face in the crowd, so he had this man seized and interrogated. It was the former fiancé, who just wanted to look at her one more time. Temujin had him beheaded.

      When Chinggis Khan finally beat the Tatars, he is said to have lined up all of the men and boys alongside a wagon and ordered his followers to kill every Tatar male who stood taller than the lynch pin of the wagon wheel; however, this attempt to exterminate the tribe that killed his father was either pure myth or less than successful. Tatars eventually formed such a major part of his armies that the terms Tatar and Mongol became almost interchangeable among Europeans.⁷

      Most of Temujin’s career was spent consolidating the tribes of the Mongolian grasslands into a single fighting nation. Temujin incorporated conquered tribes into his army by scattering them across his organization. The Mongols came to be more of an army than an actual ethnicity, a fusion of diverse clans that abandoned their petty feuds and grudges and subordinated themselves to Temujin. After many hard years of killing, a gathering of the freshly unified tribes of Mongolia in 1206 proclaimed Temujin to be Chinggis Khan, ruler of the world. The title was only a little bit premature.

       Steppenwolves

      War colleges and polemophiles^b have a special warm spot for the Mongols. These horsemen combined the big-sky freedom of cowboys with the shock and awe of a blitzkrieg. Like a modern army, Mongol horse archers relied on mobility and projectiles to annihilate their enemies, so they inspire more professional admiration and daydreams than do plodding lines of peasant pikemen.

      Among the nomadic herdsmen of the Eurasian steppe, boys old enough to walk were old enough to ride, so they became expert horsemen at an early age. Because the management of a herd was so much like battle itself, all men were trained in the arts of war by default. The herdsmen would circle their herds of sheep, cattle, and goats on fast ponies, leading a herd in a chosen direction, splitting it into smaller sections, and selecting a few head of livestock to pick off for the day’s meal. The techniques for slaughtering cattle and sheep worked just as well for slaughtering people. The archers rode up close enough to send a volley into the massed enemy, and then veered off before the enemy could retaliate. They would keep this up all day, thinning the enemy ranks and creating gaps that could be slowly widened, wedging the mob apart into smaller, bite-sized groups.⁸

      Adding to the tactical skills of the nomads was their amazing long-distance mobility. Peasant armies were tied to the land—both defending it and working it—and they could spare only a handful of their adult males for long-distance campaigning. The nomads, however, lived in carts and tents and lived off cattle, goats, and sheep. They could simply uproot their entire nation and drag it along wherever they went. In the quiet times between battles, they could still tend their herds and their families, thriving wherever there was enough pasture to support them.

      This ability to hurry from place to place made Mongol armies seem much larger than they really were, which is why the word ordu, originally a Mongol military unit, has come into English as horde, a huge mob.

      Many historians openly admire Chinggis Khan’s mastery of psychological warfare. By wiping out every population that resisted him, Chinggis Khan hoped to terrify future enemies into immediate submission, thereby saving countless lives—well, except for the thousands he originally massacred to make his point, obviously.⁹ And excluding the towns that bravely tried to stand up to him; obviously they got massacred as well. And sometimes a town surrendered without a fight, but then Chinggis Khan decided that leaving behind a garrison was too much trouble, so he just killed everyone instead. And of course, many, many refugees—terrified

Скачать книгу