On the Trail of Genghis Khan Read online

  At the age of thirty-nine, in 1906, he set off on a two-year ethnographic expedition from St. Petersburg through Central Asia to Beijing, the last part largely on horseback. In truth, Mannerheim was not the ethnographer he was dressed up as, but a covert spy for the Russian tsar. Nonetheless, he impressed me as someone interested in the continuity between the ethnic groups of Central Asia and the origins of the Finnish people. The Finns are part of the Finno-Ugric group of peoples, and are related to many different indigenous peoples that stretch right across the belt of forest and tundra regions of Russia and Siberia, as far as the Pacific. The story of Mannerheim’s journey inspired in me the idea that connections between cultures, based on a common environment and way of life, transcend modern state boundaries.

  After completing the wilderness course in 1999 I canceled my return ticket to Australia and set off with my friend Chris Hatherly to ride recumbent bicycles from Karelia, in European Russia, to Beijing. It was to be a fourteen-month journey during which we lived on a budget of $2 a day, surviving by camping in the forest, drinking from roadside ditches, and being rescued by kind villagers who took pity on us. The world expanded with every new challenge, from frostbitten toes to the dark clouds of mosquitoes that came with summer in Siberia. But most of all it was the people who left an impression on me. In the throes of the traumatic times of post-Soviet Russia and the more recent 1998 economic collapse, the people were resurgent with pride in their many varied origins, whether they were Buddhist Buryatians or the lesser-known Udmurtians of the pre-Urals. Above all, I found it astonishing that in the midst of an adventure I experienced more comradeship and connection with many of these people than with those where I had grown up in Australia.

  It was more by necessity than by desire—it was the most logical and shortest route from Siberia to Beijing—that Chris and I found ourselves in Mongolia in the autumn of 2000.

  While pushing our bikes through the sands of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert we would pause, exhausted, and watch as horsemen materialized from the horizon at a gallop, their long cloaks flying, eyes trained forward, and sitting so composed it was as if they were not moving at all. After stopping to take a look at the two young Australians, bogged in the sand of the only track in sight, they would remount and gallop off in whatever direction they pleased.

  I was struck by their world: unscarred by roads, towns, and cities, it was a place where even homes left impermanent marks on the land. Free of fences and private land ownership, the natural lay of the earth was unhindered, defined only by mountains, rivers, deserts, and the natural ebb and flow of the seasons. What’s more, with little more than a thin piece of felt to protect them against annual variations in temperatures that spanned more than 82°C, the nomadic people had a connection to the land I had never dreamed existed in modern times.

  Until that point of our travels, bicycles had been freedom machines for Chris and me, allowing us to break away from the pull of a conventional path in life. But it began to dawn on me that because we were confined to roads and wheel tracks, the realm of nomads was off-limits to us. I was merely a tourist passing through.

  Our journey to Beijing was over rather quickly after reaching the Chinese border, and within a month of dropping down from the Gobi Desert to China’s bustling megalopolis, my bike was gathering dust in my parents’ garage. The memories of Mongolia still burned bright, though, and from that point on I not only craved to return to Mongolia but grew enchanted by the history of the Mongolians’ ancestors, who had once ruled supreme under the leadership of Genghis Khan.

  Drawing on the same hardy qualities that enable the nomads and their steppe horses to survive in the harsh environment of Mongolia today, horsemen of the thirteenth century had trotted out of the vast Mongolian steppe and thundered into Poland and Hungary, crushing some of Europe’s most prestigious armies. I was captivated by stories of these warriors who were renowned for mounting up in the dead of winter, smearing fat on their faces against frostbite, and drinking blood from the necks of their horses when food supplies were low. The Mongolian armies were able to travel a remarkable 80 km a day, and among many military accomplishments they defeated Russia in winter—something neither Napoleon or Hitler could achieve. Later, when they conquered Baghdad in 1258, they also managed in one attempt what the Crusaders had been trying to do for more than a century, and which wouldn’t be repeated until the 2003 American invasion.

  Just as impressive as the military prowess of the Mongols was the ability of Genghis Khan and his successors to make the transition from conquering and pillaging to governing and administration. They established an empire that remained more or less intact for a century, and which left a sophisticated model of government and military that long outlived the Genghisid dynasty. Many contemporary historians point out how taxes levied by the Mongols during their reign were by and large used to serve the diverse people they ruled. They implemented legal codes, funded public works projects, patronized the arts and religion, and promoted international trade and commerce. Under their stewardship, trade routes and communication lines across Eurasia were perhaps safer and more efficient than they had ever been, enabling the first direct relations between China and Europe.

  It is remarkable to think that at the zenith of Mongol power nomad herders of the little-known steppes of East Asia ruled an empire that included some of the most populous cities on earth and stretched from Korea in the east to Hungary in the west, the tropics of South East Asia in the south—the Mongols even campaigned in Java, Indonesia—and the sub-Arctic in the north. Western Europe could have become yet another corner of their lands if it weren’t for a stroke of fate. In 1242 when Mongolian scouts reached Vienna, the great khan in Mongolia died—at that time it was Genghis Khan’s son and heir, Ogodei—and the army packed up and went home to elect a new leader. Ambitions to rule western Europe were never revisited.

  As I learned about the scale and significance of the Mongol Empire, I began to think the only thing more astonishing than the achievements of the Mongols was how little I’d known about them, not to mention my ignorance of the broader history of mounted nomads on the steppe.

  When Chris and I were en route by bicycle to Mongolia, many ethnic Russians we met had hardly been enlightening. We’d been warned time and time again that Mongolia was an impoverished and backward country where the “primitive” and “uncivilized” people who still relied on horses would surely bring an end to our journey. There was a permeating sense of disbelief that these people who “didn’t even know how to build a house” could ever have ruled Russia, let alone many of the great civilizations of China, Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. And yet at a time in history when most medieval Europeans were still limited to the distance they could walk in a day—the original meaning of the word journey in English—these Mongolian horsemen had been galloping across the globe, expanding their knowledge as rapidly as their empire assimilated the religions, technologies, and cultures of those they conquered.

  Significantly, the Mongols were not some kind of isolated nomad phenomenon. To the contrary, they reflected a historic trend of nomadic empires that had begun thousands of years earlier with one of human history’s most significant yet unheralded turning points: the domestication of the wild horse.

  Recent discoveries suggest that this revolution began around 3500 BCE in what is now the northern steppe of Kazakhstan. There on the primeval plain where the steppe mingles with the southern edge of Siberian forests, hunter-gatherers first began to tame, breed, milk, and ride this four-legged creature with which they had shared the land since time immemorial.

  On the sweeping, largely waterless tracts of land on the Eurasian steppe the marriage of human intelligence and equine speed enabled flat-footed hunter-gatherers to gallop beyond the known horizon and prosper in ways previously unimagined. Free to search out better pasture, water, and game, they rapidly expanded their concept of the world and revolutionized the way they communicated, farmed, traded, and waged warfare.
As Bjarke Rink puts it in his book The Centaur Legacy, the union between man and horse represented “a qualitative leap in human psychology and physiology that permitted man to act beyond his biological means.” In other words, the horse liberated humankind from its own physical limitations.

  Over time the domesticated horse gave rise to nomadic societies from Mongolia to the Danube River in modern Hungary. The Greek historian Herodotus dedicated his “fourth book” to one of the first such known horseback people, the Scythians, who rose to prominence in the eighth century BCE and ruled the steppe from the Danube to the Altai Mountains.

  The realm of the Scythians was at the very heart of what would become the platform for the countless nomadic empires that followed them—the ocean-like plain in the heart of Eurasia, where the horse had evolved over millions of years. On the northern shores of this land lay the boreal forests and tundra of Russia and Siberia, while to the south it was rimmed by the baking deserts of Central Asia and Persia, the great walls of the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges, and, farther to the west, the Caucasus and the shores of the Black Sea. Some areas of the steppe were rich grasslands and others semi-arid zones, deserts, high plateaus, and even forests, but far away from the moderating effect of any ocean, it was all characterized by a harsh continental climate.

  For settled people who lived beyond the boundaries of this realm—clinging to the safety and protection of more-fertile soils, river systems, and plentiful forests—the steppe was a mysterious, inhospitable, and almost impenetrable world. For nomads such as the Scythians, however, who relied on grazing their herds of sheep, goats, cattle, camels, and horses, the steppe formed a corridor of pasturelands that linked Asia with Europe, and Russia and Siberia with Asia Minor and the Middle East. Apart from the Altai Mountains in the east and the Carpathians in the west, it was largely free of natural obstructions, and the east-west axis meant that despite vast distances the conditions varied comparatively little. Nomads could therefore apply very similar principles of pastoral farming in Mongolia as they could in Hungary.

  It was inevitable that, once domesticated, the horse would carry nomads beyond the shores of the steppe and into conflict with sedentary society. Nomads, after all, could not survive exclusively on the milk, meat, and skins of their animals, but to a degree were dependent on trade with, and plunder of, the earth-tilling societies in the lands that bordered theirs. The horse gave the nomads a crucial military advantage, and a pattern of conflict began that would endure as late as the seventeenth century: nomads would make raids on settled lands and retreat to the steppe with their spoils.2

  Among the many nomad powers to follow in the wake of the Scythians were the Sarmatians, Huns (who under Attila rocked the foundations of the Roman Empire), Bulgars, Avars, and eventually the Magyars, who founded the modern nation of Hungary in 896. Two hundred and fifty years later the greatest nomad force of all time, the Mongols (also known in the west as Tatars), were at the height of their powers.

  Even after the breakup of the Mongol Empire in the fourteenth century, Turkic-Mongol peoples with nomad heritage took over much of the fallen Genghisid dynasty. The much-renowned Tamerlane modeled himself on the Mongols and went on to carve out his own empire of historical renown.

  It wasn’t until the advent of the musket in the seventeenth century that nomads began to go into permanent decline. The last great migration of nomads across the steppe took place in 1771, when the ethnically Mongolian Kalmyks migrated from the Caspian region in Russia to China and Mongolia. The final descendant of Genghis Khan to hold power was Alim Khan, emir of Bukhara, who was deposed in 1920.

  Over the months and years following my bicycle journey I continued to read about the Mongols, and nomads more generally, and became struck by two disparate and rather extreme images of the steppe people.

  On one hand, there was the entrenched stereotype of Mongols as primitive barbarians who, in their time of power, had senselessly pillaged, raped, and murdered before returning on their horses to the east. It is a reputation that, it should be acknowledged, is not without some justification. The Mongol tactic of conquest was brutal, designed both to decrease the population to prevent rebellion and to instill fear so that future enemies would surrender without a fight. There are, consequently, cities across Central Asia, Persia, the Middle East, Russia, and China that suffered irreparable devastation. When the city of Merv surrendered, historical sources suggest, nearly the entire population was put to death. Urgench was famously submerged by the waters of the Amu Darya after the Mongols broke dam walls. In Iran, the Mongols are still bemoaned for the destruction they wreaked on life-sustaining irrigation networks that took centuries to rebuild; the famines caused by the devastation probably caused more people to die than did the initial conquest. There is even evidence to suggest that the early destruction by the Mongols under Genghis Khan left a problematic legacy for his successors. In China, Khubilai Khan—Genghis’s grandson, who went on to become both grand khan and emperor of China—spent decades struggling to reconstruct towns, cities, and agricultural lands that had borne the brunt of the initial Mongol invasion.

  Passing moral judgment on the Mongols based on their violent conquests is nevertheless not a fair way of interpreting the nature of the Mongol Empire or the Mongols as a nomadic people and culture. As historian Charles J. Halperin writes, “Empire building is an invariably destructive process, unwelcome to the conquered,” and in this regard the Mongols were “no more cruel, and no less,” than empire builders before or after them. It is important to consider that the history of the Mongol Empire was predominantly recorded by the vanquished, and filtered by religious ideology. Nomads were often judged on the premise of being pagan infidels and presented as harboring some kind of innate depravity. In 1240, the year before the Mongols crossed the Carpathians into Hungary, the renowned English monk of St. Albans, Matthew Paris, described the Mongols as “the detestable people of Satan” who were “inhuman and Beastly, rather Monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of Dogges and Men.”3

  Such typecasting was not limited to the Mongols. The Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus described the Mongols’ predecessors, the Huns, as “so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two legged animals, or the figures crudely carved from stumps which are seen on the parapets of bridges.” Of the nomadic way of life, he wrote: “They have no home or law, or settled manner of life, but wander like refugees in the wagons in which they live. In these their wives weave their filthy clothing, mate with their husbands, give birth to their children and rear them to the age of puberty.”4 As late as the seventeenth century some Europeans still believed the myth—as recounted by the French traveler Beauplan—that Tatar babies were born with their eyes closed, like dogs.

  On the other hand, the achievements of the Mongols, military and otherwise, have been widely lauded as evidence of a highly sophisticated and worldly people. The Mongols created not only the largest contiguous land empire in history but an empire that, despite the terror it raised, initiated broad social programs, showed remarkable religious and cultural tolerance, and ushered in a relatively stable era of economic prosperity. During Khubilai’s reign over China he attempted to introduce public schooling, encouraged the widespread use of paper money (which was later used as a model by his Mongol counterparts in the Ilkhanate of Persia and the Golden Horde in Russia), provided grain to widows and orphans, and instigated the development of granaries across the country to ensure against famine and natural disasters. He set up governmental institutions to protect and promote the interests of traders, artisans, farmers, and religious faiths, and he used some of the tributes collected from conquered lands for state projects, such as the extension of the Grand Canal—a venture that never fully succeeded but employed an estimated three million laborers.

  Mongols also administered urban centers of culture and commerce that are inconsistent with assumptions that Mongols—as uncultured “barbarian” nomads—conquered and r
uled exclusively from the saddle. The purpose-built capital of the Golden Horde, Sarai, which lay on the Volga River, was a flourishing city exhibiting paved streets, mosques, palaces, caravansaries, and running water supplied by aqueducts. Khubilai’s capital in China, Khanbalikh (also known as Ta-tu or Dadu), was symbolic of the way Mongol rulers amalgamated the diverse cultures, beliefs, and skills of their domains. In it were built a shrine for Confucians, an altar with Mongolian soil and grass from the steppes, and buildings of significant Chinese architectural influence. As historian Morris Rossabi points out, Khubilai “sought the assistance of Persian astronomers and physicians, Tibetan Buddhist monks” and “Central Asian [Muslim] soldiers.” One can only imagine it must have been a city of grand cosmopolitan dimensions.

  To me, these two somewhat conflicting portraits—the cruel barbarians bent on wanton destruction versus the empire builders with governing and administrative genius—were surely two sides of the same coin. But time and again I reflected that neither image bore relation to the hospitable herdsmen and herdswomen I had met in the Gobi.

  Whenever a map of the world was in front of me, I couldn’t help but be beguiled by the vast swath of fenceless land at the heart of Eurasia that stretched from Mongolia to the Danube River in the heart of eastern Europe. The history of empires aside, who were the people who had once roamed across this land? What must their lives have been like? What would it have been like for a young Mongol man to climb into the saddle and ride halfway across the world into Europe?

  It was in 2001, about six months after arriving back home from my cycling expedition, that it first occurred to me to ride a horse across the steppe. Over time, the idea took shape and form, and I was excited by what appeared to be a very simple concept: using packhorses to carry my equipment, and camels where necessary, I would start from the former capital of the Mongol Empire, Kharkhorin (also called Karakorum), and make my way west through the heart of the Eurasian steppe until I reached the Danube. While this was a similar route to that taken a thousand years earlier by the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors, it wasn’t my intention to follow any one trail, and I was not interested in visiting old battlegrounds, following a warpath, or even venturing to cities in the sedentary nations that once had been vassals of the Mongols. By climbing into the saddle, I wanted to discover the human face of the nomadic cultures, which seemed to have been lost in so many of the superlative-filled histories. The end goal of my journey, the Danube, represented the western boundary of the Mongol Empire, but more important, it was the very western fringe of the steppe, and therefore the end of the traditional nomad world.