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disease, and exhaustion while fleeing the Mongol onslaught. So when you add it all up, his propaganda probably didn’t save nearly as many lives as some historians say it did.

      Mongol weapons were the finest of their kind anywhere in the world, and the composite bow was the deadliest weapon known to man for many centuries. It originated in distant antiquity, but the Mongols became the masters of it.

      Bend a stick over your knee until it breaks. That is the kind of pressure a bow is put through every time you shoot an arrow. The best solution is to build the bow with materials that enhance the performance and counteract the specific problems facing critical points along the curve. Inside the bend needs a material that compresses and recoils sharply without breaking. Horn is ideal for that. The curved outside of the bend needs an elastic material that stretches without losing its snap. That would be sinew, the tough connective tissue joining muscle and bone. Then bind all of the parts tightly with glue (from boiled hooves) that can take the repeated strain, and you’ve got a composite bow, made entirely from materials the Mongols could get from their herds.¹⁰

      Why didn’t the whole world field armies trained and equipped along the Mongol model? Since archery and horsemanship take years of training to master, it took years to replace each lost soldier on the Mongol side. Also, campaigning exhausted and killed horses faster than most societies could replace them.^c In addition, the food surplus of farming societies was useful for producing huge, expendable infantry regiments armed with easy weapons like pikes, axes, and crossbows. To these solid lines of infantry, a sedentary, civilized nation could add a mobile strike force of armored knights on heavy warhorses, who might not have been as fast or as numerous as a nomadic horde but could usually chase them out of the neighborhood before they did too much damage.

       China

      China at this time was split in half. The southern part was still under the Song dynasty, a purely Chinese manifestation renowned for its art, poetry, and justice. It didn’t get conquered until the onslaught of Chinggis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, so it doesn’t concern us here.^d Northern China was under the relatively benign rule of alien conquerors from the north, Jurchen warlords ruling from Beijing as the Jin dynasty.

      In 1211, about 100,000 Mongols with 300,000 horses crossed the Gobi desert and overwhelmed the Jin cavalry at the pass known as Badger’s Mouth on the northern edge of Chinese territory. One Mongol column swept down quickly enough to take the secondary Jin capital at Mukden (now Shenyang), but the primary capital at Beijing held against their first attack and subsequent siege. While waiting for the city to surrender, the Mongols devastated the countryside. Although Chinggis Khan had no siege machines, he discovered another way to take some of the other walled cities scattered across northern China. He rounded up every civilian he could find and herded them ahead of his assault teams as human shields while the Mongols advanced safely behind them. Either the defenders wasted all of their arrows killing noncombatants, or they refused to shoot and surrendered instead—a win-win for Chinggis Khan.

      After a year, the Jin paid him off, and Chinggis Khan abandoned his siege of Beijing. Feeling dangerously exposed to the frontier, the Jin emperor moved the court south from Beijing to Kaifeng, behind the Yellow River. Some Chinese army units, however, took this as a sign of weakness and betrayal and then defected to the Mongols, bringing many alien but useful military skills into the Mongol camp, such as siegecraft for taking fortifications. Now that the Mongols had the ability to take Beijing, they resumed the attack. The city was taken, looted, and burned in May 1215, but Chinggis Khan was so indifferent to the value of cities that he didn’t even attend the capture, leaving it to a turncoat Chinese general instead.

      Reportedly, 60,000 women flung themselves from the walls of Beijing to avoid rape. That number is probably an exaggeration, but the full extent of the devastation was obvious. A year later, a scout from Khwarezm, the next land on Chinggis Khan’s to-do list, investigated the site to confirm the horrible fate of this great city. “He reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat, that some of his entourage died from the diseases spread by rotting bodies.”¹¹

      The Mongol attempts to conquer the remnant of the Jin empire beyond the Yellow River failed as Mongol resources were stretched thin and Jin resources were easily concentrated, but this bothered Chinggis Khan not at all. For the next several years, he regarded northern China more as a no-man’s-land to be ruthlessly plundered rather than as a conquered province to be administered and taxed. He hadn’t quite learned to appreciate the value of urban economies.¹²

       Death of Khwarezm

      Long ago the barren desert region now covered by all of the ’stans of Central Asia hosted a string of oasis cities along the caravan routes between Persia and China. Supported by irrigated orchards and gardens, this was the thriving cultural center of Islam known as Khwarezm. The city of Bukhara is said to have had a population of 300,000 and a library of 45,000 volumes, among them 200 written by a native son, Ibn Sina, the greatest scientist of medieval Islam.¹³ Merv, the hometown of poet Omar Khayyam, had ten libraries containing a total of 150,000 handwritten volumes.¹⁴ Today, if you look on a map, you won’t see Khwarezm anymore. Here’s why.

      For a few years after the fall of northern China, Chinggis Khan and Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm played diplomatic games, exchanging gifts, envoys, embassies, and pleasant letters in order to shame one another with their own unsurpassed magnificence. Certain gifts or forms of address would imply superiority, which meant the other had to reply with more splendor or admit defeat. Finally, in 1219, the sultan tired of this one-upmanship. When a splendid caravan of Mongol envoys and merchants arrived at the Khwarezmi city of Utrar, the local governor, with the connivance of the sultan, accused them of being spies and had them all killed. When Chinggis Khan sent ambassadors to the court of the sultan of Khwarezm in the city of Bukhara to demand compensation and punishment, the sultan killed one ambassador and plucked out the beards of the other two, which was even more insulting in central Asian culture.¹⁵ Chinggis Khan then rode west with an army numbering between 100,000 and 150,000. The forward scouting units were traveling at sixty miles per day.

      In the first clash of armies, the Khwarezmians were routed, leaving a reported 160,000 dead on the field. Utrar, site of the first insult, was besieged for five months. Finally, one of the besieged commanders tried to flee through a side gate. The Mongols caught him and executed him for treachery, but this opened the gate for the Mongol army to rush in. The governor barricaded himself in the inner fortress, which held for a further month. When he was captured, Chinggis Khan had molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.¹⁶ The city was looted and burned. The eradication of the city was so complete that archaeologists did not discover its exact location until very recently.

      The city of Balkh surrendered without a fight, but Chinggis Khan slaughtered the inhabitants anyway so his troops wouldn’t have to watch their backs when they moved on to the next town.¹⁷

      Then Bukhara fell. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir described it as “a day of horror. There was nothing to be heard but the sobbing of men, women, and children torn apart forever, the Mongol troops sharing out the population. The barbarians did violence to the modesty of the women under the eyes of all their unfortunate menfolk, who in their powerlessness could only weep.”¹⁸

      Gurganj withstood a five-month siege, beginning in 1220. Finally, prisoners taken in previous conquests were forced to fill the moats with dirt and debris and undermine the walls. After the walls crashed down, the city was overrun quarter by quarter, street by street, in slow, desperate combat. The defenders threw buckets of flaming petroleum onto the buildings in the path of the invaders. Three thousand Mongols tried to cross the river, but Muslim soldiers on the bridge held against them, and the Mongols were killed to a man. When the city finally fell in April 1221, the river was diverted through broken dikes to erase every trace of the city.¹⁹ The women and children were sold into slavery, and 100,000 captives with useful skills were sent back to China. Everyone else was herded out onto the plain and killed. According to the historian Juvaini, 50,000 soldiers killed twenty-four people apiece, for a total of 1.2 million dead.

      At city after city, rather

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