The Mongols Before Genghis Khan

With today's sponsor, Odoo, it's fast, free, and absurdly easy to create a professional website, but more on that later. With many cold nights and miles behind them, the party approaches a Chinese city with a gift. The captive Ambagai Khan, ruler over a confederation of nomads in the barren northern realm. Beyond the gates, the prisoner is led through the peering streets of Zhongdu, capital of the Jurchen Jin dynasty. A generation ago, his predecessor, Habu Khan, ravaged the Jin and showed contempt for its emperor. And now the Jin emperor makes known the esteem in which he holds this lord over the great horse riders, known as the Mongols. He has Ambagai Khan nailed to a wooden donkey and so executed. Before his demise, Ambagai managed to dispatch a final command to his Mongols. A messenger now rides north, carrying forthwith the last will of the Khan. At the northern edge of the Gobi, the dunes give place to dry grassland. The green expanse ahead shimmers pale gold as the sun drifts across and drapes shadow over the mountains. Here and there are yurts or gers, the wood and felt dwellings of the steppe, disassembled or transported whole when the nomads move to new pastureland. The people believe that the happenings of this world are shaped by those of an ever-looming domain of spirits, who inhabit the mountains and rivers, dark clouds, and many other places. The arcane veil of this netherworld may only be lifted by shamans, who chant and shroud their faces as they seek wisdom and purge malevolent spirits. Though the people of the Mongolian plateau worship Tengri, the Will of Heaven, they are often subject to the designs of their neighbors to the south. Just three decades ago, much of the steppe remained under the long rule of the Liao dynasty. The Liao rulers, the Khitans, were then driven west by the Jurchen, who established the Jin dynasty. The distant garrisons and forts of the Liao were abandoned, and power on the eastern steppe fell into the hands of a litany of Mongolic and Turkic ruling houses, who variously forge alliances by marriage and trade, and brutalize each other for plunder and revenge. This region once spawned great empires, including the Xiongnu in ancient times and great Turkic Haganates. Those are now withered memories. The Jurchen-Jin dynasty secures its frontier by inflaming divisions on the steppe. Indeed, Ambagai Khan had been arranging the marriage of his daughter to a leader of a fellow steppe nomad people, called the Tatars, who in turn captured and delivered him to their Jin allies for execution. Such treachery will not be forgiven. The messenger reaches the Mongols with the final orders of Ambagai. To take up their bows and arrows, and until the nails of your five fingers are ground down, until your ten fingers are worn away, strive to revenge me. The man elected to succeed him, to enact this vengeance on the Tatars and the Jin, is a warrior of terrifying strength, Uthula Khan. Of him, they say, he springs from the earth of Gorkhonis-Jabur, the abode of demons, and in comparison to his voice, the rumbling of tall mountains is weak. Answering the call of Uthula are allied Mongol clans and the noble men of his house, the Borjigin, including his roguish nephew, Yesugai. All men, adolescent and aged, can be summoned. While those of means may possess padded metal and leather armor, most go into battle in their common robes, with self-crafted arrows and mighty composite bows backed with horned sinew and wood. The peoples of the Mongolian plateau are not soldiers equipped and trained in barracks, but warriors born of a harsh world. Winters here are perilously cold and long. The hardy people tend constantly to their livestock, which include sheep, goats, yaks, and oxen, and occasionally camels. With duties loosely divided between men and women, Mongol families cultivate a diet of largely dairy, cheeses, yogurt, and erag, or fermented mare's milk, while commonly consuming mutton and game for meat. The power of these people, however, derives from the horse. Tied into the saddle from infancy, the Mongols ride as naturally as they walk. Beyond falconry, hunting with a bow on horseback hones accuracy, as would archery games and training. Battlefield tactics are sharpened in mass hunts or nerga, during which riders encircle a vast area and coordinate a synchronized advance to trap all the game therein. Thus life on the steppe day by day confers on each Mongol an intuitive command of mounted archery. But it is sporadic scenes of violence, familial loss, and indignity that bring forth a hatred of one's enemies. Stirred by the slaying of Ambagai, the Mongols flock to Khutula and ride to war. Their horses, while stout and unremarkable at first reckoning, are well trained, toughened to extreme weather, and of excellent stamina. Each warrior possesses several, rendering him dauntless in attack and elusive in retreat. Hooves drum the earth under the camps of the Tatars. The advancing Mongols perch in their saddles and bristle enemies with arrows, capture the helpless and plunder what they find. Hostilities with the Tatars renewed, Khutula and the Mongols also move against the Jin Dynasty. Likely striking vulnerable border regions, the Mongols will have trampled through settlements, killing some and tearing others from their homes into slavery. Livestock would be stolen and the houses and farms of sedentary peoples fed to the flames after being gutted of their treasures and goods. The Mongol trail of ash and blood will provoke reprisal from their enemies. Allies are ever needed on the steppe. One day, Khutula and Yesugei happen upon the ousted prince, Tokurul, of the Kheriot people. The Kheriot Khan style themselves supreme overlords of the Mongolian plateau. Although their actual dominion is more modest, their power is great. Tokurul covets the throne of his late father, and to this end recently executed two of his brothers. His uncle Gurkhan has in turn attacked and driven him off. Yet Yesugei sees something worthy in the fratricidal Tokurul, perhaps only the sort of heartless will to power that befits an ally. Khutula warns Yesugei, Friendship with him is not advisable. This man killed his own brothers and sullied his lands with their blood. Yesugei disregards these words. He and Tokurul become Anda, or blood brothers, an allegiance that will hereafter bind the destiny of their two houses. Rallying his own warriors, Yesugei attacks the encampments of Gurkhan, and in so doing aids Tokurul to the Kheriot throne. Some of the ruling Kheriots have been Christians of the Nestorian or Eastern Church, a lasting mark of old missions from the West. Yet the people of the Mongolian plateau, even the few professing faiths from afar, retain a belief in the divinations of shamans and the abiding will of heaven. And it is heaven, according to later tradition, that decrees that Yesugei should play a part in the cosmic plan. After plundering the families and herds of the Tatars, Yesugei rides back to his pregnant wife. At least a year before Yesugei had come across a newlywed couple, and struck by the beauty of the young bride Hoelun, he violated the sanctity of wedding parties, attacked the groom, and abducted the crying girl as his own bride. He now returns to Hoelun, who bears him a son said to have been born ominously clutching a blood clot. It is later written of this child's birth, When the divine will decreed from all eternity that a fortunate, mighty, and powerful one be garbed in the raiment of existence at a specific time, the hand of divine power gradually nourished the pearl of his being in the shells of his ancestors and ancestresses' loins and wombs, until stage by stage he was brought near the level of perfection. Having just captured a Tatar leader called Temujin Uga, Yesugei names his son Temujin. The birth of the child is not followed by fortune. Around 1164, Uthula Khan falls to the blades and arrows of the Tatars. The loyalties he possessed die with him. The Mongols wane in power. Blood spills in battles with the Tatars, during which Yesugei proves himself a valiant warrior, but he is no great and prosperous Khan. He must offer the labor of the nine-year-old Temujin to secure the boy's future marriage to a chieftain's daughter named Borte. This arrangement and order, Yesugei makes his way home, along the way joining a feast held by the Tatars. The hosts recognize their guest and poison his food. In the days following, Yesugei weakens and dies. What is known of Yesugei is largely owed to later records scrawled by the Mongols and their liegemen. And histories which extol the virtue of his house reduce the standing of its foes and imbue these years with a sense of fate. Mists of legend thus surround these days before the dawn of the empire. The Mongols, in truth, are not a burgeoning power. Many are the common slaves of the Jin Dynasty, seized and sold in the course of regular warfare. And the two wives of Yesugei are left widowed with Temujin and six of his siblings, then abandoned by their clan. Alas, it might have seemed that here would end the line of Yesugei, claimed by the wilderness and forgotten, and that the Mongols would remain a mere subject people on the outskirts of a Chinese dynasty. 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