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herded captive men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside and suburbs ahead of his armies, where they took direct hits from the defenders’ arrows.

      One woman hoped to save herself by crying out while being attacked that she had swallowed a pearl to hide it from looters. It didn’t work. She was quickly gutted and her entrails were searched. All of the other corpses from that day forward were opened up and inspected.²⁰ At another town, the Mongol general heard that the living hid among the dead so he ordered all of the native corpses beheaded and the heads stacked up just to be sure.

      Nishapur fell to another column of Mongols in April. Its people were killed, and the town was demolished and plowed over. According to the medieval historian Sayfi, 1,747,000 people were killed at Nishapur. This is probably far more people than lived in the city, but it suggests the scale of the massacre. If a million is the medieval way for of saying “the highest number you can possibly imagine,” then the number who died at Nishapur was clearly much more than what you can possibly imagine.

      When the Mongols sent a messenger to demand the surrender of Herat, the leaders of the city had him killed, which is usually considered an unwise move when dealing with Mongols. Fortunately, the city’s governor was killed early in the subsequent siege, and the townsfolk immediately surrendered and blamed the misunderstanding on him. The people were spared, but the Mongols executed the Turkish garrison of 12,000. Unfortunately, the people of Herat pushed their luck too far. After Chinggis Khan moved on to new conquests, the Heratis rose up against the Mongol garrison, so Chinggis Khan returned and wiped them out.

      The first Mongol scouting party to reach Merv was driven off, and the prisoners taken in the skirmish were paraded through the streets and publicly executed. Then the main Mongol force arrived and camped outside the city walls. The city was swollen with refugees from the countryside, with many times its normal population of 70,000. After six days, the town surrendered, and the Mongol commander ordered the citizens to assemble outside the walls. The wealthiest were tortured into revealing the whereabouts of all their hidden treasure. Four hundred artisans and some children were kept for future use. The rest of the population was wiped out. Afterward, a cleric explored the ruins and counted the bodies, calculating the total number of dead at 1.3 million. The Mongols destroyed the dam that supplied the irrigation for the area. No city was ever rebuilt on that site.²¹

       Further Expansions

      Chinggis Khan returned to China to clean up the annoying enclaves that had survived his earlier conquest. He spent a brief period trying to resolve his ongoing war against the reduced Jin empire, but that came to nothing, so he turned instead against the Tanguts—Tibetans who had moved down from the Himalayas and founded caravan cities in the oases between China and Khwarezm. City after city fell to his hordes, and no mercy was recorded for the captives. Tanguts tried to flee to the mountains and hide in caves, but few succeeded. Bonefields littered the desert for many years afterward.

      As the king of the Tanguts tried to negotiate the safe surrender of his besieged capital, Ningxia, in 1227, the aged Chinggis Khan felt his own death approach. His last orders saw to it that the Tanguts would not outlast him. Ningxia was taken and the population exterminated.

      Meanwhile, two of Chinggis Khan’s most trusted generals, Subotai and Jebe, had chased the refugee Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm deep into Persia, but he died before they caught him. So the expedition wouldn’t be a total waste, the Mongols took the Persian city of Qazwin while they were in the neighborhood. “The inhabitants fought back in the streets, knife in hand, killing many Mongols, but their desperate resistance could not fend off a general massacre in which there perished more than forty thousand people.”²² Then the Mongols pushed northward into Azerbaijan and Georgia, destroying countless towns, and crossed the Caucasus into the steppe of Russia and Ukraine. The advance columns were closing in on Poland when word came that Chinggis Khan had died, so the attack was halted as the leaders returned to decide the succession.

      Chinggis Khan was buried in a secret tomb, somewhere deep in the Mongol homeland. Any witnesses who happened across his funeral procession were seized and killed to prevent them from reporting the location. After the body was buried with his accumulated wealth, the slaves who carried him were ambushed and slaughtered to hide the location forever. His grave has never been found, but it haunts archaeology as one of the world’s greatest career-boosting possibilities.

       Was It Even Possible?

      For now let’s forget the incredible body counts reported for individual atrocities and focus instead on overall estimates from modern demographers. By all accounts, the population of Asia crashed during Chinggis Khan’s wars of conquest. China had the most to lose, so China lost the most—anywhere from 30 to 60 million. The Jin dynasty ruling northern China recorded 7.6 million households in the early thirteenth century. In 1234 the first census under the Mongols recorded 1.7 million households in the same area. In his biography of Chinggis Khan, John Man interprets these two data points as a population decline from 60 million to 10 million. In The Atlas of World Population History, Colin McEvedy estimates that the population of China declined by 35 million as the Mongols subjugated the country during the thirteenth century. In The Mongols, historian David Morgan estimates the Chinese population (in both the north and the south) as 100 million before the conquest and 70 million after.²³

      John Man makes a rough guess that 1,250,000 people were killed in Khwarezm in two years—one-fourth of the 5 million original inhabitants. McEvedy states that the population of Iran declined by 1.5 million; the population of Afghanistan dropped by some 750,000, while European Russia lost 500,000.²⁴

      One of the most common arguments about Chinggis Khan is that he just couldn’t have been this destructive, could he? He had such primitive weapons, and there were far fewer people to kill in those days, so how could he kill more people than Stalin and World War I combined? There has been a recent trend to rehabilitate his reputation by dismissing all of the horror stories as propaganda. It’s interesting to watch the debate go back and forth over time as each expert weighs in:

      J. D. Durand, 1960: “A considerable decrease of population in the north might have been caused by the struggle between the Chinese and the Mongol invader. . . . Still the sheer magnitude of the decrease in the north, not balanced by any corresponding increase in the south, creates a suspicion that the census in the north was very defective.”²⁵

      Rene Grousset, 1972: “Courtesies having been observed in respect to strict historical objectivity, let us make no bones about our horror at the appalling butchery.”²⁶

      David Morgan, 1986: “Professor Bernard Lewis, something of a revisionist on this matter of the Mongol horrors, has suggested that in the twentieth century we are better able to judge man’s destructive capacity than were our Victorian forebears, to whom the Mongol conquests seemed terrible beyond normal human experience. . . . [H]e feels . . . we should resist the temptation to believe that the Mongols, whose apparatus of destruction was so primitive compared with what was available to Hitler, could have devastated the Islamic world so totally.”²⁷

      David Morgan, 1986 (speaking for himself): “It is true that what we hear most about is the slaughter and demolition of the great cities of [eastern Persia]. But more serious . . . was the effect of the Mongol invasions on agriculture. . . . [S]ome of [the irrigation systems] were destroyed during the invasions, and without effective irrigation much of the land would soon revert to desert. But a more long-term consideration is that [these systems], even if not actually destroyed, quickly cease to operate if they are not constantly maintained. Hence if peasants were killed in large numbers, or fled from their land and stayed away, land would suffer irreparable damage simply through neglect.”²⁸

      Jack Weatherford, 2004: “The Mongols operated a virtual propaganda machine that consistently inflated the number of people killed in battle and spread fear wherever its words carried.”²⁹ “Although accepted as fact and repeated through the generations, the numbers have no basis in reality. It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumbered the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to

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