On the Trail of Genghis Khan Read online

  From the beginning of my planning I was very conscious that I wasn’t the first traveler to attempt a ride by horse across the Eurasian steppe. Apart from the untold thousands or perhaps millions of nomads who had crisscrossed the steppe through time, there were several standout examples of intrepid Europeans who had made the journey at the peak of Mongol power.5

  Among the more intriguing of these was a mysterious Englishman employed by the Mongols as a chief diplomat and intelligence adviser. A renowned linguist, he had accompanied the Mongol army during the conquest of Hungary in 1241 and was eventually caught by the Austrians during the Mongolian siege of Wiener Neustadt—where, remarkably, he was recognized by Austrian royals from the arena of the Holy Crusades more than twenty years earlier.6 Had the Englishman been given an opportunity to write about his experiences, he would have been uniquely qualified to present history from the point of view of a nomadic regime at the height of its power. Unfortunately, he was hanged in Vienna, and the only glimpse we have of his life is from the writings of a heretic French priest who survived the siege of Wiener Neustadt.

  Shortly after the death of the Englishman came the first two European travelers to make it to Mongolia and back to Europe and write accounts of their experiences—Italian friar Giovanni di Plano Carpini and, later, Franciscan friar William of Rubruck.

  Carpini, who set out in 1245 from France with the Pope’s blessing, traveled first to Kiev, where he was told to leave his European-bred horses because “Tartars have neither straw nor hay nor fodder, and they would all die.” With various Mongolian entourages he carried on east through the steppes of what is Russia and Ukraine today, then onward to Mongolia through the Kazakh steppes, traveling an astonishing 3,000 km in just 106 days. No doubt still wrapped in the bandages that had apparently helped keep his body intact for such an exhausting ride, he arrived in the “Golden Tent” of the Khan in July 1246 and wrote:

  So great was the size of the tent which was made of white fabric that we reckon it could hold more than 2,000 men … they called us inside and give us ale because we did not like mares milk in the least: and so did us a great honor. But still they compelled us to drink so much that we could not stay at all sober, so we complained that this bothered us, but still they continued to force us.

  Only five years after Carpini’s miraculous return to Europe, William of Rubruck—on a mission to convert the Mongols to Christianity—set out on a route similar to Carpini’s and became the first European to reach the capital of the Mongol Empire, Kharkhorin. His description of an animated debate that he participated in between representatives of the Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian faiths—and which was hosted by the khan—has gone down in legend.

  Upon returning to Europe, both William and Carpini brought a wealth of information about the mysterious Mongolians, and their accounts are still a valuable resource offering historians and anthropologists a firsthand look at the inner workings of Mongolian society of the thirteenth century. It is also true, however, that as Dominican friars traveling from west to east, they inevitably interpreted the nomads and their way of life through the prism of their Catholic faith and their upbringing in sedentary Europe.

  What I wanted to do on my journey was, in effect, the reverse. Leaving my Western baggage behind as much as possible, I wanted to start in Mongolia as an impressionable novice horseman, immerse myself in the lands and ways of the nomadic people, and travel steadily west to arrive at the far end of the steppe in Hungary, where I would try to view Europe firmly through a nomad’s eyes.

  In the twenty-first century a westward trajectory was all the more important for another crucial reason: the Eurasian steppe, and the western half in particular, was no longer the realm of nomads it once had been. In recent centuries the Russian Empire had reversed the trend of their subjugation to nomads and had come to dominate the vast bulk of steppe societies. The land between Kharkhorin and the Danube, albeit fenceless and much of it wild and remote, was now carved into modern states. In the west they included Hungary, Ukraine, and southern Russia, and in the east Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and those regions less relevant for my journey, western China and the Central Asian nations of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. With the exception of China these were countries emerging from the shadows of Soviet rule, during which the people had been largely uprooted from their traditional way of life.7 Only Mongolia, as a satellite Communist state, had been spared the full brutal effects of Stalin’s collectivization policy. Partly by virtue of this, and the inherently isolated nature of Mongolian geography, the Mongols had managed to retain a vibrant nomadic culture, whereas their cousins in countries to the West had lost theirs.

  Given this reality, the purpose of my journey wasn’t just to understand how nomad life had once been on the steppe. I wanted to know whether there were still living, breathing connections between the nomadic and formerly nomadic peoples now scattered across Eurasia. Were Hungarians, for example, conscious of their nomad roots at all?

  Even more important, what had happened to the nomadic societies during the violent upheaval of Stalin’s industrialization campaign, and what did the future hold for them in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union? In the long run, would the nomadic way of life survive?

  To have any hope of recognizing living traces of nomad heritage, I first had to come to understand it. And in reality, that was what had led me to Mongolia in the first place.

  It was hard to know how many hours had passed since the horses had been stolen, but eventually my faith in the journey, like the dullest of predawn light, began creeping back into the world. Still, I needed to do something. So I did what any modern adventurer might when in a bad situation: I picked up the satellite phone. The person I called for advice was my longtime friend Tseren in Ulaanbaatar.

  “Well, Tim,” she told me, “here in Mongolia we say that if you don’t solve your problems before sunrise, then you will never solve them. You better get on that last remaining horse of yours and start looking!”

  At 5:30 A.M. I pointed Bor into the pale hues of the eastern sky. Smoke had begun curling its way out from the outline of the nearest ger, and people were already emerging to milk the goats. Sitting high and straight in the saddle, I put on the most intimidating look I could muster and willed the horse into what I imagined was a gallop but was probably no more than a trot. As we approached the first ger, a large dog shot out, Bor reared, and I struggled to hold on as we followed it back the way it had come. Visits to other camps proved more elegant, but all brought little more than shrugs.

  Then, around 8 km from camp, a woman waving from her ger caught my attention.

  “Hello!” she called in English.

  No sooner had I dismounted there came a herd of horses thundering over a rise, throwing clouds of dust into the path of the sun. Squinting hard, I could just make out the shape of two horses trailing behind, and beyond them a horseman. As he maneuvered the herd down toward us, I looked closer. My horses!

  The herder, who was in fact the husband of this woman, approached, and I explained that two of those horses were mine.

  “I know,” he said. “They came to me themselves this morning. You must have tied them really badly.”

  In my poor Mongolian I asked him to explain how it was that my horses no longer had any halters or lead ropes. He shrugged. It was irrelevant now.

  I was invited in to share a drink of fermented mare’s milk while new halters were made from rawhide. The herder sat on the dirt floor looking me over, then said something in Mongolian: “Tanilgui hun algiin chinee. Taniltai hun taliin chinee.”

  With the help of a pocket dictionary I was able to translate: A man without friends is as small as a palm. A man with friends is as big as the steppe.

  It was an old Mongolian adage, and in hindsight I would be left to wonder whether indeed the whole drama had been an intentional lesson. Gansukh even suggested that it could have been the original owners of my horses who had tracked me down and stolen them jus
t to prove the truth of their warnings. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter now.

  With the horseman from the family riding by my side, I cut a trail through the lingering dew of morning in high spirits. Somewhere during the search for my horses I had left my worries of the past twelve months behind. What mattered now was that my family was intact—I had been given a second chance—and I was returning to Kathrin and camp with two bits of newfound wisdom: if I camped alone I was fair game, and if I was to have any hope of making it another 100 km, let alone 10,000 km, my horses were not to be taken for granted.

  2

  THE LAST NOMAD NATION

  “To the mounted nomads who rode and resided along the Equestrian Equator [Eurasian steppe], possessions were for using, not hoarding. Life to them was a bridge; one should cross over it, not build a house on it.”

  —CuChullaine O’Reilly, F.R.G.S.,

  Founder of the Long Riders’ Guild

  As I came riding back into camp with the reclaimed mounts, Kathrin emerged from the tent, her blond hair all wispy and her blue eyes aglow in the morning light. It was those eyes that had caught me off guard some nine months earlier. Two years older than I, she was a schoolteacher from Germany who had been living in Australia for a year to work and travel. We shared a passion for travel, and I’d been drawn at once to her down-to-earth humor and warmth. Our relationship got off to a quick start after she responded to an advertisement to rent one of the two bedrooms in the Melbourne apartment where I was living. For me, then twenty-four, it was the beginning of the most serious and important relationship of my life until that point, and in the time since we had met she had become the person who knew me better than anyone else probably ever had.

  At the same time, it remained the case that our paths had crossed after I had set my sights on riding from Mongolia to Hungary. I had also long dreamed of traveling alone. Solo, I reasoned, I would be able to render myself more vulnerable, and therefore pledge a much greater trust in the humanity of strangers. With no familiar companion or culture to lean on, I would be forced to appeal to the better side of human beings no matter who they were. Doing so would offer me the kind of immersion—in the landscape and in the lives of people—that I craved.

  Kathrin was aware of my plan and initially did not intend to join me, but she probably didn’t expect the degree of my preoccupation in the intense six months of planning leading to departure. Kathrin felt neglected, and questioned at times what she was doing living with me, commenting that she might have been better off traveling around Australia, as had been her original plan.

  Eventually we had decided to travel together for the first two months, until the end of August, when she was due to return to Germany to start a teaching job. It would be an opportunity to share this first part of the adventure and spend some precious time together after my prolonged “absence” at home.

  Beyond these first two months together lay what I expected to be another sixteen months to Hungary, during which time we had rough plans for her to join me during her summer holidays. In the end, that’s not what prevailed. The following summer Kathrin would be diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, Cushing’s syndrome, triggered by a brain tumor that required surgery, and it would take me three and a half years to reach the Danube. By the time I was riding the last kilometres in the saddle, she would already be married. For the time being, though, that was all in the future.

  Five days prior to the horse theft, Kathrin had emerged from a dusty van and dropped her bags onto the dirt in the town of Kharkhorin—the once proud capital of the Mongol Empire that lies in the upper Orkhon River of Central Mongolia. The following morning her humor helped me through a rather shaky start when my horse, Bor, went into a spin as I tried to mount. In front of a crowd assembled to send us off, I fell forward with my butt up and my face planted in Bor’s mane. When the horse calmed down I leaped to terra firma and followed Kathrin’s lead in towing my horse on foot out of town. Since then I had come to appreciate her presence and optimism, which made the trip’s initial problems somewhat easier to bear.

  The misadventures of our beginnings were hardly becoming of a journey in the spirit of the great horse people of the steppe. We could take heart, however, that we were setting out from a region of esteemed nomad heritage.

  Even before the time of Genghis Khan, the upper Orkhon River valley—in which Kharkhorin was built—had been the fabled seat of imperial power for successive steppe empires. Such was the veneration felt for the Orkhon that the Turkic Gokturks, who reigned over much of Mongolia and Central Asia between the sixth and eighth centuries, believed that he who controlled the Orkhon region had a divine right to be grand leader of the Turkic tribes. Later the Uighurs—who at one stage claimed to rule from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria—usurped the Gokturks and built their own capital, Khar-Balgas, on the same site, the remains of which still lie just 30 km from Kharkhorin.

  Part of the significance of the Orkhon lay in a belief that a special power resided in the sacred mountains through which the Orkhon meandered. A glimpse of a map provides a more obvious strategic importance. Draining the gentle foothills of the Khangai Mountains, the upper reaches of the Orkhon lie near the geographic heart of Mongolia, where the main east-west and north-south routes pass and the three dominant land types of the Eurasian steppe very nearly intermingle—the deserts of the south, the forests of the north, and the grasslands of the center. With a plentiful supply of water and its own relatively mild microclimate, the Orkhon River valley transforms in late spring and early summer into a carpet of olivegreen grasslands where all five of the prized types of steppe livestock—horses, bovines (yak, cattle), sheep, goats, and camels, the five known collectively in Mongolian as tavan tolgoi mal—are grazed in abundance. In particular, the horse has always thrived here, roaming in the kind of free-running herds that one might imagine existed before its domestication. As such, the Orkhon has always been a cradle of the quintessential nomadic, pastoralist way of life once aspired to by peoples across the steppe.

  Befitting a man who would create an empire that overshadowed all others on the steppe before it, Genghis not only designated the upper Orkhon the administrative capital but fought here one of the most important battles of his long path to consolidating power.1

  In 1204, as the ruler of the tribes in the eastern half of Mongolia, Genghis had become aware of a plot against him by enemies in the west—the powerful Naiman tribe, which had formed an allegiance with, among others, his childhood friend turned archenemy, Jamukha. In anticipation of attack, Genghis rallied an army in the spring and set out west in a daring preemptive campaign. To reach the vicinity of modern-day Kharkhorin, they had ridden across vast distances, risking their horses becoming fatigued at a time of year when pasture was scarce and all livestock were at their weakest. His men were also greatly outnumbered by the enemy, who were under command of the leader of the Naimans, Tayang Khan.

  Using tactics that would become associated with the Mongol Empire for centuries to come, Genghis ordered that every man light several campfires at night, therefore fooling the enemy as to the true size of his army. In the future, the Mongol army would also go to the additional effort of placing human-like dummies on reserve horses, thereby appearing to be at least two or three times their real number.

  When scouts brought word of Genghis’s advance to Tayang Khan, the Naiman leader considered retreating to the more familiar territory of the Altai Mountains in the west. Had the Naimans followed through, Genghis and his men would have had to pursue them for about 1,000 km, which could have proven disastrous given the weakened condition of their horses. However, Tayang Khan’s son, Kuchlug, dismissed the idea as cowardly and convinced his father to commit to battle.

  It was a fatal decision. The Naimans were cut down in vast numbers, Tayang Khan was mortally wounded, and Kuchlug, together with Jamukha, fled west into what is modern-day eastern Kazakhstan, where they were eventually hunted down.

  Following defeat
of the Naimans and the subsequent folding of the western tribes, Genghis Khan, now forty-three years old, was both reaching the end of a lifetime of struggle to unify the tribes of the Mongolian plateau and on the cusp of founding the Mongol Empire.2 To come this far Genghis had overcome almost unthinkable odds. Twelfth-century Mongolia, into which he had been born, was a land engulfed in perpetual conflict as nomad tribes of mixed Mongol and Turkic origin engaged in an age-old series of tit-for-tat raids, as well as broader power struggles that were defined by ever-shifting alliances and an endless narrative of revenge and betrayal.

  Genghis, originally known as Temujin, was a member of the Borjigin clan, which practiced a mix of hunting and pastoralism in the northern reaches of Mongolia where the southern rim of the vast Siberian taiga, the coniferous belt of subarctic forest, greets the open steppe.3 Around the time of Genghis’s birth, his father, Yesugei, was known to have killed a chief from an enemy tribe, the Tatars—in fact, it is believed Yesugei named his newborn Temujin after the slain Tatar.4