The other Mongol states were the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia ca. The Mongols were remarkably quick in transforming themselves from a purely nomadic tribal people into rulers of cities and states and in learning how to administer their vast empire. They readily adopted the system of administration of the conquered states, placing a handful of Mongols in the top positions but allowing former local officials to run everyday affairs. This clever system allowed them to control each city and province but also to be in touch with the population through their administrators.
The seat of the Great Khanate in Dadu Beijing was the center of the empire, with all its pomp and ceremony, whereas the three semi-independent Central and western Asian domains of the Chagatai, the Golden Horde, and the Ilkhanids were connected through an intricate network that crisscrossed the continent.
Horses , once a reliable instrument of war and conquest, now made swift communication possible, carrying written messages through a relay system of stations. A letter sent by the emperor in Beijing and carried by an envoy wearing his paiza , or passport, could reach the Ilkhanid capital Tabriz, some 5, miles away, in about a month. The political unification of Asia under the Mongols resulted in active trade and the transfer and resettlement of artists and craftsmen along the main routes.
New influences were thus integrated with established local artistic traditions. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Mongols had formed the largest contiguous empire in the world, uniting Chinese, Islamic, Iranian, Central Asian, and nomadic cultures within an overarching Mongol sensibility.
After their rapid gain of power in the Muslim world, the Mongol Ilkhanids nominally reported to the Great Khan of the Yuan dynasty in China, and in the process imported Chinese models to better define their tastes. No contemporary portraits or sculptures of him have survived, and what little information historians do have is often contradictory or unreliable. Most accounts describe him as tall and strong with a flowing mane of hair and a long, bushy beard. Perhaps the most surprising description comes courtesy of the 14th century Persian chronicler Rashid al-Din, who claimed Genghis had red hair and green eyes.
The Great Khan had a keen eye for talent, and he usually promoted his officers on skill and experience rather than class, ancestry or even past allegiances. One famous example of this belief in meritocracy came during a battle against the rival Taijut tribe, when Genghis was nearly killed after his horse was shot out from under him with an arrow. When he later addressed the Taijut prisoners and demanded to know who was responsible, one soldier bravely stood up and admitted to being the shooter.
One of his most famous campaigns of revenge came in , after the Shah of the Khwarezmid Empire broke a treaty with the Mongols. Genghis had offered the Shah a valuable trade agreement to exchange goods along the Silk Road , but when his first emissaries were murdered, the enraged Khan responded by unleashing the full force of his Mongol hordes on the Khwarezmid territories in Persia.
He followed up on his victory by returning east and waging war on the Tanguts of Xi Xia, a group of Mongol subjects who had refused his order to provide troops for his invasion of Khwarizm. After routing the Tangut forces and sacking their capital, the Great Khan ordered the execution of the entire Tangut royal family as punishment for their defiance.
Unlike many empire builders, Genghis Khan embraced the diversity of his newly conquered territories. He passed laws declaring religious freedom for all and even granted tax exemptions to places of worship. This tolerance had a political side—the Khan knew that happy subjects were less likely to rebel—but the Mongols also had an exceptionally liberal attitude towards religion. While Genghis and many others subscribed to a shamanistic belief system that revered the spirits of the sky, winds and mountains, the Steppe peoples were a diverse bunch that included Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and other animistic traditions.
The Great Khan also had a personal interest in spirituality. How was this possible for a land of 2 million illiterate nomads? The answer was a quantum leap in military technology, which brought mounted archery to its acme. As the military historian Basil Liddell Hart pointed out, Genghis was a military innovator in two important respects: he realised that cavalry did not need to have infantry backup, and he grasped the importance of massed artillery barrages.
Most historians claim that this astonishing achievement was the result of massacre and bloodshed not seen again until the 20th century. One school of thought would make the Mongols culpable for every military atrocity that has ever occurred; the opposing one would make them harbingers of world peace and security, beset by a few regrettable excesses.
Military historian Sir John Keegan made Genghis responsible for the savagery of the Spanish Reconquista against the Moors in the late 15th century and their massacre of the Aztecs and Incas. These divergent modern views are a projection across the centuries of diametrically opposed views of the Mongols entertained in the 13th century.
For the English chronicler Matthew Paris, the Mongols were Gog and Magog aroused from their slumber; they were the demons of Tartarus, the myrmidons of Satan himself. For the great Franciscan thinker Roger Bacon, the Mongols represented the triumph of science and philosophy over ignorance. Since one version of Genghis Khan is that of a cruel despot who raised mountains of human skulls, we should first ask: how many died as a result of his wars and conquests?
The answer can only be guesswork, however sophisticated, for three main reasons. Estimates of fatalities can be made only when we have accurate population statistics, but medieval census figures are unreliable.
And the assessment of war casualties is a notorious minefield, even in the modern age scholars cannot agree on the figures for deaths in the Second World War. The European conquest of —42 probably accounted for a million deaths while the subjugation of modern Iran and Afghanistan from —22 cost 2.
The real problem of historical interpretation comes in the great campaign to conquer the Jin regime of northern China, which lasted from — We can have only the haziest idea of the population of northern China at the time, but it was probably somewhere in the 60—90 million mark.
Medieval and early modern demography of China is an inexact science, to put it mildly. A distinguished Sinologist has concluded that, depending on which model you use, the population of China in could have been 66 million, million or million. What is clear is that sustained warfare in China always generates massive casualties.
The An-Lushan convulsion caused 26 million deaths and the Taiping 30 million. We should also note that 27 million were killed in the Sino-Japanese conflict of — Using these statistics as a lodestone, scholars argue that the likely fatalities from —34 were 30 million.
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