19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe (Part 2)

Introduction

0:00Part 2 After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire went into a state of some shock, and its wars of conquest were largely put on hold. But the immense

0:32respect he had won during his life carried over into his death, and the plan he had put in place for his succession was carried out. For the next two years, the empire was held in a kind of regency by his youngest son, Tolui, and at the end of that period, once the time of mourning had passed, Ogaday took his position as Great Khan on the 13th of September, 1229, as the secret history records.

1:11In accordance with the decree of Genghis Khan, they installed Ogaday as Khan. The night guards, the quiver-bearers, and the 8,000 day guards who had been protecting the precious life of their father, Genghis Khan, the personal slaves and the 10,000 guards who had been in close attendance on the person of his father, the Khan, were all handed over.

Ogaday's Reign

1:41In fitting with his character, one of Ogaday's first acts as Khan was to hold a grand celebration.

1:55At this festival, feasts were held, songs were sung and games played, wrestling and hunting, archery and riding, and of course, enormous quantities of alcohol would have been consumed. The Iraq and Black Kumis, the Chinese rice wines and fine Persian grape wines, would have flowed from silver goblets, and the revelry would have lasted for days.

2:25Ogaday loved to be liked, and he had always had a generous streak. To celebrate his coming to power, he opened his father's treasuries and distributed gifts and wealth to all the influential families of the Mongol steppe. This generosity gained him many friends, but the Persian scholar Atta Malik Chuvaini recounts his profligate behavior with a note of disapproval. He was ever spreading the carpet of merrymaking and treading the path of excess, in constant

3:01application to wine and the company of angelic women. Being by nature extravagantly bountiful, he gave away everything that came in from the farthest and nearest parts of the empire without its being registered by accountant or inspector. No mortal returned from his presence without his lot or share, and no petitioner heard from his tongue the word, no.

Ogaday's Vision

3:34Ogaday was for the most part a successful ruler, but he also had a quite different vision for the Mongol Empire to that of his father. Chinggis Khan had always maintained his dislike and distrust of settled peoples and city dwellers. He had envisioned his empire as the people of the felt walls, a pure confederation of nomadic peoples that would stand up for the pastoralist lifestyle against the corruptions of the settled world.

4:06But Ogaday had seen the great cities of China and Persia. He had looked with envious eyes upon the great walls of Beijing and Samarkand, and had brought advisors from northern China to help him rule.

4:23One of these, a Khitan man named Yalu Chukai, is said to have given Ogaday the following piece of advice. An empire won on horseback cannot be ruled on horseback.

4:42For this reason, Ogaday now dreamed of departing from his father's policy and building a proper capital for the empire he had inherited. This capital would be complete with all the things a great city needed. Buildings, streets, temples, workshops, and palaces. He ordered that this new city be built out in the middle of the steppe, at the same spot where his father had set up his main camp, a site where the canyon-like Orkon River Valley

5:14spills out into the pastures below, right in the heart of Mongolia.

Karakoram City

5:20Construction of this city happened quickly, with architects and craftsmen being brought primarily from the conquered regions of China. But Ogaday also brought some Persian builders to Mongolia to work on his palaces.

5:39Atamalik Juvayani gives an account of the new Mongol city. There had previously been no town or village in that place except for the remains of a wall. The Khan caused a town to be built on it, which they called Ordu Balik, though it is better known as Karakoram. Karakoram in Mongolian means black castle or black stones.

6:14The city rose out of the bare steppe grasslands, with earthwork walls and four gates, and buildings lined with wooden pillars, built in the Chinese style with swooping pagoda roofs. At the four corners of the city, he had four stone tortoises carved, facing out in each direction.

6:38The tortoise was a symbol of stability and protection, and with their incredibly long lives, had become representations of eternity. These stone guardians watched over the city and formed a statement in stone that Karakoram was built to last.

7:00With the help of his foreign craftsmen, Ogaday built Karakoram into what he hoped would be a fitting capital for the world's largest empire, and a fitting venue for the world's most impressive parties.

7:19Above the town, a garden was built for the Khan with four gates, and in the midst of that garden, artisans reared up a castle, and inside it a throne having three flights of steps for the Khan alone. The utensils were of gold and silver and studded with jewels. Twice in the year would the Khan alight in this pleasant abode. Whenever the sun entered the sign of Ares, and the world was glad,

7:51he would feast for a month in this residence. And as the bounty of the rain reaches both herbs and trees, so both great and small took part in the feasting.

8:06Ogaday encouraged the empire's elites to build houses near his palace. But for the most part, Karakoram remained something of a halfway point between a Mongol camp and a true city. Much of the Mongol nobility continued to live in their Ghir tents, often pitching them outside the walls, and treated the city as something of an eccentric novelty. At its heart was the Central Secretariat,

8:37the main civilian governing body of the empire. This contained a large body of scribes who assessed tax registries and tribute, and translated orders to be sent to the various provinces of the empire. Other than this administrative hub and the palaces of the Khan,

Mongol Postal System

8:57the city contained mostly warehouses for the vast treasures looted from all over Asia, and workshops where captured craftsmen toiled, as well as various houses of worship for all the different religions of the empire. The Flemish monk William of Ruebrook, who passed through in the middle of the 13th century, was less than impressed with this imperial capital, and compared it unfavorably to the small town of Saint-Denis,

9:29just north of Paris. Regarding the city of Karakoram, you should know that, discounting the Khan's palace, it is not even as fine as the town of Saint-Denis, and the monastery of Saint-Denis is worth ten of the palace. It contains two quarters, one for the Saracens, where there are bazaars and where many traders gather, the other is the quarter of the Chinese,

9:59who are all craftsmen.

10:03Set apart from these quarters, lie large palaces, belonging to the court secretaries. There are twelve idol temples, belonging to different peoples, two mosques, where the religion of Muhammad is proclaimed, and one Christian church, at the far end of the town. The town is enclosed by a mud wall and has four gates.

10:29But despite its somewhat humble appearance, Karakoram was an expensive city to maintain. Sitting out in the middle of the steppe, its land was not fertile, and its people could grow few crops. For this reason, it was never self-sufficient, and its population had to be sustained by food brought over long distances from crop-growing regions in northern China. Ogadei had hoped that Karakoram would become a trading hub

11:03in its own right, and that its economy would become self-sustaining.

11:11To encourage this, he had trees planted along the roads that were used by trade caravans to help shelter them from the sun and rain, and to show where the roads were when the steppe was covered in winter snows.

11:26Ogadei also expanded one of the Mongols' most impressive achievements, their extensive postal system. This system, which became known as the Jam in Mongolian and Yam in Turkic, connected every corner of the empire with a system of postal stations where fresh horses and supplies were always kept. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo describes the remarkable functioning of this enormous piece of public infrastructure.

12:01From each city proceed many roads and highways, leading to a variety of provinces, one to one province, another to another, and each road receives the name of the province to which it leads. The messengers of the emperor find at every 25 miles of the journey a station which they call Yam, in which they find all the rooms furnished with fine beds and all other necessary articles in rich silk.

12:32If even a king were to arrive at one of these, he would find himself well lodged.

12:40At each of these stations, a full complement of fresh horses would be kept. When a messenger approached one of these stations, he would bang a drum so that the people working there would know to get his horse ready and he could continue his journey with the minimum amount of delay. At some of these stations, moreover, there shall be posted some 400 horses standing ready for the use of the messengers.

13:10At others, there shall be 200. On all these posts taken together, there are more than 300,000 horses kept up, especially for the use of the messengers. The thing is on a scale so wonderful and costly that it is hard to bring oneself to describe it.

13:32The Mongols issued passports to travelers in the form of tablets called paisa, made of wood, bronze, silver, or gold, depending on the rank of the person carrying it. These conferred status on the traveler and allowed them to access the services of the Jam postal stations. But despite these measures to bring the vast empire closer together, the capital of Karakorum was some way off

14:02the main arteries of the Silk Road, and traders saw little reason to make the long journey out into the steppe, unless it could be made worth their while. To encourage them to keep coming to his new city, Augaday decreed that they would be paid above the usual price for their goods, sometimes even twice as much as they were worth elsewhere. For a time, this strategy worked, and the merchants kept coming.

14:32But this system was obviously unsustainable, and soon the money began to run dry. By the year 1235, six years into Augaday's rule, much of the vast wealth that had been amassed by Chinggis Khan had already been frittered away by his son. The dream of turning the nomadic empire of conquest into a settled empire of trade and commerce was looking

15:03ever more unlikely, and facing a potential bankruptcy in his future, Augaday knew that the Mongol Empire would have to find new sources of gold. The Mongols would once more go to war. It's during Augaday's reign that the Mongol Empire's

15:33ambitions grew. From the conquest of its neighbors and subjugation of other steppe peoples to a much more expansive vision, a belief that the whole world had been destined to live under Mongol rule and that there was nowhere on earth that would escape their conquests. To decide where the Mongol armies should next descend, Augaday summoned another Kurultai, a gathering of the clans,

16:04bringing together the entire family of Chinggis Khan, their wives and vassals and key commanders. Here, a number of different options were raised. Some argued that the Mongols should march south to the lands of India. Others, that it was the turn of southern China and the Song dynasty who had watched with such glee as the northern Jin were destroyed. Others wanted to march into the Muslim lands and seize the great cities of Baghdad,

16:35Aleppo, and Damascus. But there was one final option that was raised by the general named Subodai. He had been one of Chinggis Khan's closest generals and was now the last surviving member of that old guard, something that gave him immense respect. He suggested that the Horde ride west and toward a previously unexplored land that sat on the periphery of the world,

17:05a great peninsula jutting out of the Asian landmass about which the Mongols knew little.

Mongol Invasion

17:13These

Mongol Invasion

17:13were the lands of Europe.

17:26Europe, around the year 1200, was something of a backwater. It was home to about 70 million people, but although it produced textiles and fine metals, compared to other areas of the world, much of medieval Europe had low levels of urbanism. Other than the huge Byzantine capital of Constantinople, Europe had only a handful of cities that had even 50,000 inhabitants and even fewer outside of Italy.

17:59Its position, somewhat removed from the Silk Road trading routes, meant that it was not a great beneficiary of the vast wealth that flowed along them. As a result, Europeans were also among the last to hear news coming out of the East.

18:18For this reason, Europeans also had a somewhat confused idea of what the world beyond their borders looked like. It was widely believed in Europe at the time that a great Christian king ruled far in the East, a man that they called Prester John. It was supposed that this Christian emperor would one day ride west to help the Christians retake Jerusalem from the Saracens. When Mongol armies first arrived in Europe,

18:49there was at first some excitement. This was perhaps the coming of the great Prester John, but the reality would be quite different. The late 13th century Chronicle of Novgorod, one of the oldest Russian histories, describes the first arrival of these nomadic horsemen about 14 years earlier, in the year 1223.

19:17The same year for our sins unknown tribes came. No one exactly knows who they are, nor whence they came, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is, but they call them the Tatars. We have heard that they have captured many countries, slaughtered a quantity of the godless peoples, and scattered others.

19:50These perplexing foreigners were in fact a pair of Mongol armies, led by the generals of Chinggis Khan, Subodai, and Jebe. They had been sent to destroy any remains of the Kipchak people, a large confederation of steppe nomads who occupied the area of the Volga River and who had fought on the side of the Khwarezmian Empire just a couple of years earlier. These were some of the last holdouts among the peoples of the steppe

20:21who had not yet bent the knee to the Mongols. Now, a large force of Kipchak Turks fled west to Russia and begged the help of the major power in that region, the settled kingdom of Kievan Rus.

20:45Centered around the city of Kiev in modern Ukraine, Kievan Rus was less of a kingdom and more a fractious collection of princely city-states that formed a belt across the European peninsula from the Arctic White Sea in the north to the shores of the Black Sea in the south. Like the Khwarezmians, its people had often employed Kipchak nomads as mercenary cavalry in its armies. When the Kipchaks

21:16fled into Russia, they warned the Russians in no uncertain terms about what was coming. As the Novgorod Chronicle records, to all the Russians they brought many gifts, horses and camels, buffaloes and girls, and they came saying this, our land they have taken away today and yours will be taken tomorrow.

21:48Frightened into action by this warning, the princes of Kievan Rus put together a grand coalition and massed a force of 80,000 men under the command of Grand Prince Mustislav III of Kiev. Together, they marched out to meet these barbarians.

22:10On the way, they encountered some Mongol envoys who told the Grand Prince that they meant him no harm, that they were only there to destroy the last remnants of the Kipchaks, who they contemptuously referred to as their slaves and horse herders. But the Kievan ruler would make exactly the same mistake as the Shah of Khwarezm, as the Chronicle of Novgorod recalls.

22:39The Tatars sent envoys to the Russians, saying,

22:45Behold, we hear that you are coming against us, but we have not occupied your land, nor your towns, nor your villages, nor is it against you we have come. But we have come sent by God against our rebellious horse herders. But the Russians did not listen to this, but killed all the envoys. Still confident

23:16of victory, the Russians advanced to crush the Mongol invaders. At the site of the European army, with its mass of peasant infantry, supported by colorful columns of heavily armed knights, their pennants flying and helmets gleaming, the Mongols appeared to retreat in panic. The Russians were encouraged, and so they gave chase. They pursued the Mongols for a whole day,

23:47and then another, and then another, but whenever they thought they were getting close, their quarry just managed to pull away. They became perturbed by the almost supernatural speed and endurance of these foreigners, how they never seemed to stop or slow down, never seemed to need supplies, never slept or lit campfires.

24:12Gradually, the Europeans ran out of steam. Their horses grew tired, and their foot soldiers too. It was at this point that the Mongol trap swung shut.

24:26On the 1st of April 1223, without warning, a second Mongol army swept out of the forests. and began a massacre on the banks of the Kalka River, as the Novgorod Chronicle recalls.

24:42There was a terrible and savage slaughter, and Mstislav, Duke of Kiev, seeing this evil, set up a stockade of posts about him and fought with them for three days, and of the rest of the troops, only every tenth returned to his home.

25:04A countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages.

25:18As the infantry was slaughtered, the princes of Kiev tried to flee the battlefield, but they were easily hunted down by the Mongols. A great part of the kingdom's aristocracy was wiped out in that single day of battle. It's recorded that several Kievan nobles were captured, and as a punishment for killing the Mongol ambassadors, they were stuffed under the floorboards of one of the Mongol tents. All night, the Mongol

25:49warriors feasted and celebrated their victory, their weight steadily crushing to death the nobles beneath the floor.

26:02Then, with their mission complete, the Mongols vanished. They had appeared, wiped out an entire army with ease, and then disappeared without a trace. The Novgorod Chronicle records the confusion that the event sowed. The Tatars turned back from the river and we know not where they came from nor where they hid themselves again.

26:33Only God knows where he fetched them against us for our sins.

26:42To the medieval European mind, the meaning of this event was clear. It was a punishment from God, but little did they know that worse was on its way.

27:11It was the winter of 1237, on the frozen expanse of the Russian steppe, when the first Mongol horseman once more appeared on the edge of Europe. But this time they came to stay.

27:28In his Chronica Majora, or Great Chronicle, the English writer Matthew Paris wrote about these newcomers in terms of utter condemnation. An immense horde of that detestable race of Satan, the Tartars, rushed forth like demons loosed from hell. They are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than man,

27:59thirsting after and drinking blood and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings. They are invincible in battle, they have no human laws, know no mercy and are crueler than lions or bears.

28:19The Mongols had waited until the winter set in for their invasion so that the great rivers Volga and Dnieper would freeze over, turning them into a highway for their horses. Moving fast over the frozen ground, they once more easily encircled the Russian armies and utterly destroyed them.

28:44It wasn't just the speed of the invasion that took the Europeans by surprise. For people in Europe, the technologies that the Mongols brought with them were so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. In the city of Ryazan, the citizens were so terrified by the Mongols' incendiary weaponry, the Chinese fire lances and pots of flaming naphtha that they hurled from their catapults, that in the confusion, they believed that the

29:14Mongols had brought with them trained dragons from the east.

29:20By 1240, virtually all the major cities of Russia had fallen to the Mongols.

29:28In December, they rounded on what was then the cultural, religious, and economic heart of the region, the great city on the Dnieper, the city of Kiev.

29:47Kiev held out for nine days, during which the Mongol catapults bombarded it with stones and flaming projectiles.

29:57In terror, its population flooded towards the great stone church of the tithes that stood on the banks of the Dnieper river. They were desperate to get close to the shrine of the Virgin Mary, which they hoped would protect them, and climbed up onto the church's roof. But the weight of the crowd on the roof timbers caused them to collapse, and many of those sheltering within the church were crushed. The Mongol army soon

30:27flooded into the city and put its people to the sword.

30:32Of Kiev's 50,000 inhabitants, it's reported that only 2,000 or so survived.

30:41After the invasion, many Russian cities fell into ruin, and stone buildings stopped for many decades. Economic links between cities and nearby villages were broken, and famine spread. as the Novgorod Chronicle recounts, For what is there to say, or what to speak of the punishment that came to us from God? How some of the common people killed

31:12the living and ate them, others ate horse flesh, dogs, and cats. Some fed on moss, snails, pinebark, limebark, lime and elm tree leaves, and whatever each could think of. And again, other wicked men began to burn the good people's houses, where they suspected that there was grain.

31:42Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the Pope's envoy to the Mongol great Khan, travelled through Kiev a few years later in February 1246, and wrote the following description of the destruction.

31:58When we were journeying through the land, we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce 200 houses there, and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery.

32:25In some places, it took more than a hundred years for Russian cities to rebuild. But after devastating Russia, Ogadei's forces were just getting started. One Mongol army, perhaps 50,000 strong, headed west through the duchies of Poland, riding in the direction of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, and from there all of Western Europe was in their path.

32:55In all the cities of Europe, rumors ran rampant, and all anyone had to work with was a name, the Tatars. Some believed that the name must mean that the Mongols had actually come from hell itself, since it reminded them of the name for the deepest region of the underworld in Greek mythology, Tartarus. Others thought that the name reminded them of the biblical king of Tarshish mentioned in the Bible. Others still thought

33:26that the Mongols may have been one of the lost tribes of Israel, now returned to wreak havoc on Christendom, perhaps enraged by the theft of relics from the Holy Land during the Crusades.

33:40The English monk Matthew of Paris was especially responsible for spreading this idea, and tried to work his way around the inconvenient fact that the Mongols didn't appear to speak Hebrew or seem to be Jewish, as he wrote in his great chronicle.

34:00In the time of the government of Moses, their rebellious hearts were perverted to an evil way of thinking, so that they followed after strange gods and unknown customs. Their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational wild beast.

34:23Unable to beat the Mongols on the battlefield, people instead began to lash out against the defenseless Jewish communities in countless European cities, and a wave