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the Mongols swept through the Caucasus and into the Ukraine and the Crimea. They wintered on the Black Sea, among the mound tombs of their nomadic predecessors, the Scythians, before galloping northward early in 1223 to defeat three Russian armies. Then they rode home, across the width of Asia, as casually as commuters, for a quriltai, a great gathering of Mongol chieftains. The world had had its first taste of a military campaign which for speed and mobility was not equalled until the modern mechanized age. The idea that the Mongols were merely a flood of horsemen overrunning entire lands by sheer force of numbers has been rightly debunked. They were a disciplined and highly organized force, usually outnumbered by their enemies by more than two to one, whose success depended on their extraordinary mobility as well as on sophisticated military strategies; both Patton and Rommel studied the tactics of the Mongol general Subedei. Mongols were born in the saddle, and their conquests represent the greatest cavalry campaigns in history. Time and again columns of Mongol horsemen appeared as if from nowhere, having crossed vast distances and impossible natural barriers at speeds that easily outpaced their enemies’ intelligence. This was blitzkrieg, seven centuries before the invention of the tank or the aeroplane.

      In the summer of 1227, in the middle of conquering China, Genghis Khan died after a severe attack of fever. It is believed he was about seventy years of age. On his deathbed he was said to have gathered his sons and to have handed them a bunch of arrows, instructing them to break them. When they could not, he handed them each arrow separately. His lesson was that they must remain united. Separately, like the arrows, they were weak. He bequeathed his empire to Ogedei, his third son, who would rule as Great Khan. Under him, his second son, Chaghadai, would govern Central Asia; Batu, his grandson, whom Friar William met on the Volga, would rule the Russian steppes which became known as the Golden Horde, and his youngest son, Tolui, was given the Mongol homelands. Thus all of Asia was parcelled out like a series of pastures in accordance with traditional Mongol grazing rights. The eldest son (in this case grandson, as Genghis’s first son had predeceased him) received the pastures furthest from home while the youngest was granted the ‘heartlands’.

      The body of the Great Khan was taken home to Mongolia and buried in the Khentii Mountains near the place of his birth at a spot he had chosen himself. All of the bearers of the funeral cortege, and all those who encountered it on its way, were put to death to guard the secret of its location. To this day no one knows where his tomb lies.

      At the time of his death, Genghis’ empire was four times the size of Alexander’s and twice the size of the Roman Empire. But the Mongols were still far from their zenith and under the new khan, Ogedei, the campaigns of conquest continued apace. By 1234 the whole of northern China had been subdued. Famously and no doubt apocryphally, Ogedei had considered massacring the entire Chinese population, some forty-five million people. ‘They are of no use to us,’ a Chinese historian reported him as saying. ‘It would be better to exterminate them entirely, and let the grass grow so we can have grazing for our horses.’ Wiser counsel prevailed when they were reminded of the taxes they might expect from all those hardworking Chinese.

      Having dealt with the traditional enemy, the Mongols now turned westward once more to new horizons, intending to push the frontiers of the empire well into Europe. In the winter of 1237–8 they crossed the frozen Volga and launched what would prove to be the only successful winter invasion of Russia, a campaign that so alarmed the people of the Baltic that they cancelled their annual trip to Yarmouth with dire consequences for the English herring market.

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