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Overview
As a teenager, Genghis was a fugitive, hiding from enemies on a remote mountainside. Yet he went on to found the world's greatest land empire and change the course of world history. Brilliant and original as well as ruthless, he ruled an empire twice the size of Rome's until his death in 1227 placed all at risk. To secure his conquests and then extend them, his heirs kept his death a secret, and secrecy has surrounded him ever since. His undiscovered grave, with its imagined treasures, remains the subject of intrigue and speculation.
This is more than just a gripping account of Genghis' rise and conquests. John Man uses first-hand experiences in China and Mongolia to reveal the khan's enduring influence. He has traveled the length of the empire. He spotlights the tension between Mongols and Chinese, who both claim Genghis' spirit. He is the first writer to explore the hidden valley where Genghis is believed to have died, and one of the few westerners to climb the mountain where he was likely buried.
This stunning narrative paints a vivid picture of the man himself, the places where he lived and fought, and the passions that surround him still. For in legend, ritual and intense controversy, Genghis lives on.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312366247 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2007 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 965,987 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.89(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SECRETS OF THE SECRET HISTORY
It is a hot summer's day in mid-July 1228 on the grasslands of central Mongolia. Most such days, a lone horseman would hear skylark song pouring from the clear blue sky, and the fizz of grasshoppers underfoot. Most such days, this apron of pasture, sloping down to a stream and a line of low hills beyond it, would be almost empty, save for a round tent or two, a herd of sheep, a few tethered horses. But on this day, other sounds drown the songs of skylarks and grasshoppers. The place is being transformed by a courtly gathering of epic proportions. Huge four-wheeled wagons rumble in, drawn by teams of a dozen or more oxen, 7-metre platforms bearing tents of felt and silk, some round in the Mongolian style, some square, each a mobile palace for a prince and his entourage. Commanders in chain-mail or armour of overlapping plates yell greetings. Family groups – most members on horses and camels, senior women in two-wheeled carts – accompany herds of sheep, goats, camels and horses, all spreading slowly over the steppe until they range out to the hills in their thousands, and downstream, southwards for several kilometres, to the banks of a broad and shallow river. From groaning camels and horse-drawn carts, Muslim and Chinese slaves unload the wall-lattices and rolls of felt needed to assemble smaller tents. Guards dressed in padded gowns and leather helmets keep order from horseback, short bows and a dozen different types of arrow slung at their waists. Herdsmen, dressed in wraparound ankle-length deels, slaughter sheep by the score for the feasting to come. Children gather dried dung for fuel and stack it in piles, while in the smoke-filled tents, blessedly free from the flies that pester on the steppe outside, women churn fermenting milk in leather bags to make milk-beer and milk-brandies.
There had been gatherings of this scale before, but never of this importance. The Mongols were now, after two decades of fighting, victors of campaigns in Central Asia, southern Russia and western China. Some of those meeting that summer in Mongolia came from Uzbekistan, some from Manchuria, from Xinjiang, from the newly conquered farmlands of northern China. Their leader, Genghis, had died the previous year, having raised his people from insignificance, founded a nation and set both on the path to empire. His 40-year rule and its triumphs proved the force of his claim that he was the chosen one, under the protection of Eternal Heaven. His will had now to be done. The gathering was needed to confirm the succession of Genghis's chosen heir, his third son Ogedei.
It would also mark a new beginning, to fulfil the grand strategy sketched out by Genghis when he was on the verge of the greatest conquest yet: the seizure of all China, something that no other 'barbarian' ruler from beyond the Great Wall had ever achieved. Yet even this was only a part of the vision inherited from him. Many of those gathering in 1228 had heard that westward, beyond Muslim lands, beyond the plains and forests of Russia, there were still other worlds to conquer: the grasslands of Hungary, and then perhaps even the ripe cities of western Europe. To achieve total victory, to fulfil their manifest destiny of world dominion, would demand a skill and ferocity to match those of their departed ruler, and utter subjection to his will. A new nation, a new empire was about to emerge as Eurasia's most powerful entity.
Why meet here? There is another element in this scene, an unlikely one for a culture of wandering herdsmen and far-ranging cavalry, but central to this particular gathering. It is a collection of stone buildings running in a rough line, like one side of a street, for about half a kilometre. The buildings are overlooked by a flattened mound, surmounted by pillars supporting an open-sided roof. Steppe-dwelling herdsmen have no need for buildings. Yet these sturdy structures have obviously been standing for many years. They are in fact the permanent core of a military headquarters, surrounded on occasion by arrays of tents and carts and men-at-arms and horses by the thousand. The pavilion on the mound does threefold duty as a reviewing stand, conference centre and shamanistic temple.
The place, originally named Aurag, was the Mongols' first fixed capital, founded when they began to dream of unity and conquest, some time in the twelfth century. It was chosen for its strategic position, guarding a route into the northern mountains that were the tribe's womb, yet also looking southward, the auspicious direction to which Mongols turn their tents. It also offered the benefits of healing waters from an ancient spring nearby – aurag is an old Mongol word meaning 'source'. To the south, for 600 kilometres beyond the river, lay open steppe giving way gradually to the gravelly expanses of the Gobi desert – one vast highway for those prepared to cross – and then the Yellow River, the final barrier before that source of wealth and danger: China. From Aurag, the Mongols could raid, gather reinforcements, conquer and, if necessary, flee to the protection of their mountain heartland.
Though Aurag has always been known to the Mongols themselves, few outsiders have ever heard of it. It has hardly rated a mention in history because it was abandoned shortly after this gathering occurred. Genghis had ordered a new capital further west, in a place better suited to dominate his growing empire. Soon, it would become famous as Karakorum, and its rise in the mid-thirteenth century would leave Aurag to collapse and vanish from history, if not from folk memory. Over the centuries, even its original name was lost. When the old Mongol word aurag fell from use, popular etymology seized upon something that sounded similar and had equally suitable connotations – Avraga, meaning both 'huge' and 'champion' (a term given to top-level wrestlers). Mongol orthography has its vaguenesses, so the central ra may be inverted. On maps, if it's there at all, you see it both ways: Avarga, Avraga. Neither properly represents its pronunciation, avrag, because the final a is an historical appendix. Let's go with 'Avraga'.
Over the centuries, Avraga's stones sank into the soil and it became a Mongolian Camelot, a place of legend with no material substance to it. But in 1992 a team of Japanese-backed archaeologists arrived with ground-penetrating radar. The Three Rivers Project, named after the three rivers that drain the Khenti mountains, aimed to find Genghis's grave. It failed; but its members made many important finds (and many claims, some of them pretty wild and contradictory, to which we shall return later in our story). Using their radar to survey Avraga's dozen enigmatic mounds, the Three Rivers team recorded echoes that suggested the presence of ditches and the remains of walls. Their report was superficial, and actual excavation amounted to no more than a single pit that revealed some undatable stonework. Still, this was the first hard evidence that Avraga had once been a reality.
*
The gathering in Avraga in 1228 marked more than a strategic and political turning-point; it was an inspiration. The Mongols knew they were in the midst of great events. They were already a greater people than they had ever been, greater than any they had yet encountered except the Chinese, and they had every intention of setting their bounds wider still and wider. How had this miraculous change come about? Many of those now meeting in Avraga had been with Genghis since the start of his conquests, and a few of the oldest had known him in his childhood, almost 60 years before. Together, as a collective memory, they could surely explain the transformation to themselves and to future generations.
And this was the perfect opportunity. For among the princes, officers, guards and family members there were those whose task it was to entertain assemblies with tales drawn from legend and history. Like all societies dependent for communication on word of mouth, the Mongols had bards, poets and storytellers who commuted between grassland camps and tent-palaces. They even became the subject of their own stories:
How Tales Originated among the Mongol People
Once upon a time, plague struck the Mongols. The healthy fled, leaving the sick, saying 'Let Fate decide whether they live or die.' Among the sick was a youth named Tarvaa. His spirit left his body and came to the place of death. The ruler of that place said to Tarvaa, 'Why have you left your body while it is still alive?' 'I did not wait for you to call me,' he replied, 'I just came.' Touched by his readiness to comply, the Khan of the Underworld said, 'Your time is not yet. You must return. But you may take anything from here you wish.' Tarvaa looked around, and saw all earthly joys and talents – wealth, happiness, laughter, luck, music, dance. 'Give me the art of storytelling,' he said, for he knew that stories can summon up all other joys. So he returned to his body, only to find that the crows had already pecked out its eyes. Since he could not disobey the Khan of the Underworld, he re-entered his body, and lived on, blind, but with the knowledge of all tales. For the rest of his life, he travelled across Mongolia telling tales and legends, and bringing people joy and wisdom.
If later traditions are anything to go by, the performances of bards, poets and storytellers brought more than joy and wisdom. They were crucial in moulding a sense of identity. Mixing legend and history, they explained traditions, recollected origins and portrayed the deeds of heroes. The repertoire was huge, as was the range of instruments and styles. In some areas, it still is. Mongols have epics, 'long songs', 'short songs' and many in between; songs for every occasion, songs in praise of landscapes, battles, heroes and horses – especially horses. They have pipes, drums, jaw's harps and horse-head fiddles with as many sizes as western orchestral ones. Women may sing in powerful strident voices crammed with trills and turns, similar to Bulgarian and Greek styles familiar to fans of 'world music'. Men often adopt the same technique, but if they come from western Mongolia or the reindeer-herding areas to the north they also specialize in overtone singing, the astonishing two- or even three-tone technique that produces flute-like nasal notes floating like birdsong above a deep chesty drone. For epics, the men adopt a low-pitched guttural voice. And style and content alike vary from area to area. Some claim that song reflects landscape, pointing to west Mongolian tunes as contoured as their mountains, and to steppe melodies that flow like undulating grassland. And no performance should be undertaken lightly. Performance is – and surely always was – attended with ritual and formality, because music and song have powerful effects. Some songs can exorcise demons; others invoke the spirits of forest and mountain and weather (it is bad form to whistle in a tent, because whistling calls up a wind-spirit, and there are too many spirits in tents already). Little that is current now can be dated back to the thirteenth century; but there is no reason to doubt the depth and variety of material from which later traditions evolved.
The bards gathering in Avraga in the summer of 1228 no doubt had a rich repertoire of traditional material in the form of legends about their people's origins. Now there was also a new subject to be explored – the rise of Genghis, the birth of the nation, the foundation of empire. But these were early days. The events and stories already being written into folklore were still part of living memory. Fact was in the process of being recast as poetry and legend, and perhaps distorted. Some of the older men and women at Avraga must have been muttering about the ignorance of young people. Yes, yes, it makes a good story, but it wasn't like that at all. We know. We were there.
The brightest and best of this Mongolian Camelot also commanded another novelty. Twenty years before his death, Genghis the nomad chief had emerged as Genghis the imperial ruler. He had realized that a realm that included cities and settled populations could not be administered by word of mouth alone. There had to be laws, and a system to administer them, and records. To produce these, the Mongols needed to write. For an illiterate chieftain it was a brilliant insight, since it meant admitting his own ignorance. That raised a question: what script should be adopted? The Chinese wrote, but their system took years to master; and anyway, no Mongol would willingly adopt the ways of a despised nation of farmers and urbanites, destined for conquest. Some neighbouring Turkish tribes also wrote, as their ancestors had; indeed, Genghis himself may well have seen one of their inscribed stone monuments. Luckily, one of Genghis's newly conquered Turkish-speaking vassal groups, the Naimans, had a script, which they had adopted from the Uighurs of what is now western China. The script, written vertically, had a venerable ancestry, having been taken some 300 years before from Sogdian, a script and language that served as a lingua franca in Central Asia from about the fifth century. This in its turn had been adapted from Aramaic, itself an offshoot of old Hebrew. It thus had the advantages of being alphabetically based and easily learned. Genghis ordered his sons to adopt it for Mongolian, and to use it to form a bureaucracy. It is still used today in Inner Mongolia.
At Avraga in 1228, scribes and sources were present together. Someone saw that this was a perfect opportunity to capture legend and recent events in writing, with particular reference to the most momentous happening in Mongol history, the rise of Genghis. And so it was that Mongolia's first written work was commissioned: the book now known as The Secret History of the Mongols. It was completed, as its final paragraph records, 'at the time of the Great Assembly, in the Year of the Rat and the Month of the Roebuck, when the palaces were being set up at Seven Hills, Countryside Island on the Kherlen River'.
*
Kherlen, Khenti: these are not familiar names outside Mongolia. You can see both river and mountains on the flight from Beijing across the Gobi to Mongolia. If you glance out of a right-hand window a few minutes before touchdown in Ulaanbaatar, you will be looking north and east across an infinity of grassland marked only by the faint scribbles of car-tracks and the mushroom dot of a felt tent. In the distance the flanks darkened by fir forests and summits still whitened by snow are the Khenti mountains, the last outpost of the Siberian ranges that roll southward across the Russian frontier. This is a geographical borderland, where mountain gives way to grass, and rivers racing from high ground lose their force in gentle meanders.
One particular river runs due south from the mountains, sweeping round to head away northeast. This is the river, commonly spelled 'Kerulen' on western maps, which Mongols call the Kherlen, one of the three great rivers that drain their traditional heartland. The broad, 100kilometre bend in the Kherlen cradles the southern tip of Countryside Island (Khödöö Aral), 4,000 square kilometres of tangled hills hemmed by the Kherlen and the Tsenkher, which flow parallel for 100 kilometres or so. Then the hills fall into grasslands, and the Kherlen swings east and north in the great bend I asked you to see in your mind's eye, and the two rivers meet around Avraga. From here a broad valley leads north-east into the heart of Genghis country. The mountains, the rivers, the valley and this particularly significant piece of pasture form the heartland of the Mongols, the region which, a little over 800 years ago, was the fount and origin of the tribe, of their greatest leader and of their nation – which was why, in the summer of 2002, I drove out to see it.
The vehicle of choice for Mongolian drivers is the Russian, or rather Ukrainian, UAZ (pronounced wuzz, to rhyme with buzz). The UAZ minibus or jeep – the basics are the same – is the workhorse for those without a horse, a quintessence of 4×4s. There was no power steering. Driving her was like wrestling an ox. But the driver, Khishig, a cheery character with bad burn-marks on his neck and arms, was her master, churning through mud, breasting rivers, climbing banks, riding fast over open steppeland.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Genghis Khan"
by .
Copyright © 2004 John Man.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Epigraphs,
Dedication,
List of Maps,
A Note on Spelling,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction: On Death and How to Survive It,
Part I: Roots,
1. Secrets of The Secret History,
2. The Coming of the Mongols,
3. A False Dawn for a New Nation,
4. The Roots of Ambition,
5. The Rise to Power,
Part II: Empire,
6. The Great State of White and High,
7. Into China,
8. The Muslim Holocaust,
9. The Great Raid,
10. Searching for Immortality,
11. The Last Campaign,
Part III: Death,
12. The Valley of Death,
13. To a Secret Grave,
14. The Outer Reaches of Empire,
Part IV: Resurrection,
15. The Making of a Demi-God,
16. The Grave-hunters,
17. On the Holy Mountain,
18. The Prophet of Eternal Heaven,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Also by John Man,
Copyright,
