In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads

Night fell and the lamps came on in the compartments. Somewhere in the past hour or two we had crossed into Kazakhstan untroubled by border inspection. I stood by an open window in the passage and watched the moon sailing in and out of view as the train curved back and forth. A scarf of smoke from the engine flapped away over a great silver emptiness.

The village street of the carriage passageway was almost deserted now. Two windows along an elderly gentleman in heavy cotton pyjamas and slippers was reading a book by one of the carriage lights. He was a tall ramshackle figure with a bony face and unruly thatch of hair. He looked like the village eccentric. In the dim light he pressed his face so close to the page, he might have been smelling the print. He looked up and saw me watching him.

‘Pushkin,’ he murmured. His nose was a beak, and his hair falling over his brow gave his face a startled appearance.

‘Do you know Eugene Onegin?’ he asked in French.

I said I did, then went on to tell him that I had named my cat Pushkin. The old man’s face darkened at this frivolity, and his long hands encircled the book protectively.

‘Russia’s Shakespeare,’ he said under his breath, as some reprimand to my cat.

‘Onegin was a traveller,’ the man went on. His voice held some note of accusation. He peered at me as if I too was indistinct print he was trying to decipher. There was something strange about his eyes. They looked at me individually, first one then the other. ‘He was never satisfied,’ the man said. ‘He needed always a new horizon.’ The clatter of the rails crescendoed as we passed over a stretch of bad track. The train bucked and we swayed in unison against the windows. Over the noise words surfaced like pieces of wreckage – ‘Un romantique … unable to form attachments … a nomad … emotional dilettante … only wanted what he had lost …’ – until the roar of the wheels overwhelmed us completely and the man drifted away, still mouthing complaints about the lovelorn Onegin.

I retired to my bunk. The women were already asleep. All night the long whistle of the train echoed through my dreams, a mournful solitary note, a traveller’s complaint, trailing uneasy notions of movement and displacement.

The morning brought further emptiness. The landscape had been reduced to cruel simplicities – a white sky and a flat scaly plain over which clouds and their shadows sailed without distraction. In places the tough hide of the desert was softened by a spring glaze of green, a brief interlude between the twin extremities of winter and summer. The only buildings seemed to be government projects which appeared occasionally in the distance, a cluster of tin-roofed cement barns, a collection of silos, yards of antiquated tractors, a ploughed field as big as Wiltshire, then nothing again. How the Mongols must have loved these regions. Riding towards Europe, they could do a thousand miles out here without having to cross a ditch, or deal with the impediment of cities. Friar William was less happy. It took him almost seven weeks to cross the deserts of Kazakhstan.

‘The most severe trial,’ William reports. ‘There was no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.’ What little habitation they encountered belonged to Mongols newly arrived in this recently conquered wilderness. All were keen to know about the sheep, cattle and horses in France and whether the Pope was really five hundred years old.

In the next compartment was a Russian family of three lumbering ursine figures – Father Bear, Mother Bear and Little Bear, a girl of eight. Father Bear was a colonel in the army. He took an interest in me, and emerged every time he saw me in the corridor to tell me things in passable English. He told me about the workings of drilling equipment on distant oil wells, about camel breeding, about the navigational systems of space craft, about the train schedules on our line. You name it, Father Bear was an expert on it. Through the open door of the compartment I could hear him droning on to his wife. Marriage to Father Bear had made the long-suffering Mother Bear a professional listener. She listened for hours at a stretch to his interminable discourses as we drifted through this flat emptiness, including a good hour and a half on the subject of baling equipment.

They invited me for lunch. The main course was a three-foot dried fish which they kept beneath one of the seats. Father Bear was telling me about Russian motorcars, of which he had an unaccountably high opinion. We passed a vast factory, one of the government projects abandoned in this bleak place. The empty buildings showed windows of sky.

‘Look,’ Father Bear said. ‘Perestroika. Gorbachev’s restructuring.’ And he launched into a lengthy rant about the last Communist leader. The intense hatred for Gorbachev in Russia is a puzzle to most Westerners, particularly in the light of the directionless governments which succeeded him. Having abandoned dictatorship Russians seem to have gone straight for the basest features of democracy. Yeltsin’s appeal was based on his image as the man in the street. He reflected the Russian character with all its virtues and faults – tenacious, romantic, put-upon, alcoholic. He was prostonarodny, a difficult Russian term to translate, which means earthy or folksy. Gorbachev by contrast was a pedagogue, never happier than when he was lecturing the nation about its shortcomings. Most curious was the universal loathing for Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. Father Bear believed that she was personally to blame for the country’s decline. She had dismantled Communism, he said, in order to buy her hats in Paris.

We rattled on across the flat unrelenting steppe. The grass was thinning, revealing patches of earth like pale raw-looking skin. Beyond Celkar the sand started to take over, and the grass was reduced to tufts in the drifting dunes. Bactrian camels strayed listlessly into the middle distance, their humps still sagging after the long winter. Crusted eddies of salt now wound across the baked sand, and the air seemed to have acquired a bitter acrid taste.

‘Salt from the Aral Sea,’ Father Bear announced, tasting his lips. ‘It is dying.’

At midday we passed through Aralsk, once an important fishing port on the Aral Sea. We gazed out at an emaciated town. Many of its bleaker buildings were boarded up and whole districts were abandoned. In the drifts of sand at the far end of empty streets we could see the rusting hulks of fishing boats tipped on their sides beneath the skeletal forms of cranes where the docks had once been.

A monument to the folly of centralized planning, the death of the Aral Sea is one of the great ecological disasters of our age. Like so many Soviet tragedies, it began with Stalin who decreed in the 1920s that the Soviet Union must become self-sufficient in cotton. The vast spaces of Central Asia were to be the arena for this grand project, and in particular the basins of the two great rivers which fed the landlocked Aral Sea, the Amu Dariya and the Syr Dariya, the ancient Oxus and Jaxartes. Vast irrigation networks, constructed to feed King Cotton, bled the rivers into the surrounding desert, and the level of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world, began to fall. The problem was compounded as the population of Central Asia grew and the thirst for water increased with modern facilities. The Karakum Canal was constructed, carrying off almost a fifth of the waters of the Amu Dariya, so that southern Turkmenistan could be brought into the cotton belt.

By the 1980s the inflow into the Aral was one tenth of the rate of the 1950s; by 1993 the sea had shrunk to half its original size. It largest port, Muynak in Uzbekistan, was now almost sixty miles from the shore, and the dunes around the town, like those at Aralsk, are littered with the carcasses of dead ships. By 2020, a sea the size of Ireland may have disappeared altogether.

The dying sea has blighted the entire region. The fish stocks have disappeared and an industry that once supported 60,000 people is now dead. The climate of the area has changed dramatically with rainless days multiplying four-fold. Winds have carried the thick salt deposits left on the dry lake-bed hundreds of miles into the surrounding country, devastating agriculture and causing a litany of health problems from respiratory illness to throat cancers. The irrigation methods in the cotton fields, with high levels of evaporation, have led to further salination, while the chemical fertilizers used on the fields have been washed back into the two rivers, the chief source of drinking water for the region.

For millennia the Kazakhs were a nomadic people, moving with their flocks according to the waxing and waning of the thin pastures of their vast land, following a lifestyle perfectly suited to its marginal vegetation and arid climate. The arrival of the Russians spelt the end of pastoralism. The railway brought hordes of settlers, towns were built, and farms disrupted the pasture lands and the delicate patterns of migration. Gradually the Kazakhs abandoned the nomadic life for the lure of cash incomes and permanent houses. The grandsons of herders became employees on state farms, and the proud world of the Kazakh Hordes withered to an unnecessary eccentricity. The ecological disaster of the Aral Sea has been the vengeance of nature on a system of sedentary agriculture that ignored geographical realities.

But Father Bear didn’t see it that way. To him the death of the Aral Sea was simply the fault of the Communists. When I mentioned the nomadic traditions of these regions he frowned, and misunderstood my comment as another example of the difficulties Kazakhstan had endured.

‘Nomads,’ he shrugged. ‘People without education. They cannot plan for the future.’

‘Perhaps they are satisfied with the present,’ I said.

‘Where are they now?’ he asked, gazing out at the empty prairie, as if the lack of horsemen and sheep out the train window was an argument in itself.

I mentioned Mongolia and the fact that the most of the population there still adhered to a nomadic lifestyle.

‘Mongolia,’ he snorted. ‘Why speak of barbarians?’

Chapter Four A DETESTABLE NATION OF SATAN

In 1238 the bottom fell out of the herring market in Yarmouth. Ships from the Baltic ports, which normally converged on the port to buy fish, never arrived and the sudden glut sent prices tumbling. Fishermen and merchants went bankrupt, and even in the Midlands you could buy fifty pickled herrings for as little as a shilling.

In the same year a strange mission appeared at the court of Louis IX of France; later they came on to London where they were received by Henry III. They declared themselves the envoys of a mysterious eastern potentate, known to Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountains. From a fortress in the Elburz Mountains of northern Persia, this reclusive figure dispatched young fanatical disciples to kill his political enemies. The disciples were known as hashashin, or hashish eaters, from which our word assassin is derived. With their cloak and dagger methods the Ismaili Assassins had wielded considerable political power throughout the Middle East for almost two centuries. But now suddenly a new threat had arisen, from a people whose leaders were too distant and too unpredictable for assassination squads. The Ismailis had come to Europe to seek alliances against the advancing threat of the Mongols.

It is a measure of the narrowness of European horizons in the early decades of the thirteenth century that they remained in almost total ignorance of the cataclysmic events then unfolding in Asia. Under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, the Mongols had embarked upon a series of conquests that were taking them across the breadth of the continent. Ancient dynasties collapsed, empires crumbled, great cities were levelled and their inhabitants butchered while Europe slumbered on, unaware that the Mongol horsemen were advancing ever westward.

In a reverse of the usual historical pattern, the history of the Mongol campaigns was written by the vanquished not by the victors. The apocalyptic language that has come down to us reflects the terror and the prejudices of the defeated. Invariably the Mongols are forces of darkness, barbarian hordes, the scourge of God, a pestilence that was destroying civilization. It is this tradition, the stories told by his enemies, that has cast Genghis Khan as one of history’s great villains.

To Mongols Genghis was a great and sophisticated leader, disciplined, incorruptible, politically astute. A lawgiver of considerable wisdom and foresight, an efficient administrator and a master of military strategy, he managed to unite the Mongol tribes for the first time in generations. It was this rare unity that allowed them to turn their eyes outward to the rich but degenerate cities that lay beyond their grassy homelands. Early conquests came with surprising ease, and in the terrible momentum that began to build, the Mongol Empire was born.

Genghis Khan could hardly be expected to respect cities or their inhabitants. He was a man of the steppes, a nomad who viewed settled societies from a position of cultural and moral superiority, with suspicion, with horror, and ultimately with pity. To nomads, men and women who lived in cities suffered a kind of debasement, while farmers who spent their lives on their knees tilling the soil were hardly of more regard than a flock of sheep. Their destruction did not bother the Mongols any more than the slaughter of the Incas bothered the Conquistadors, or the fate of Africans troubled the early slave traders. By the standards of medieval Asian warfare Genghis’ methods were not especially brutal. His terrible reputation is a measure of his success, and of the monopoly that the vanquished cities have enjoyed over the historical sources.

The tone was set with the siege and destruction of Bukhara. ‘They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed,’ a historian of the period wrote. Yakut, the famous Arab geographer, who fled from the city of Merv as the Mongols advanced, reported that its noble buildings ‘were effaced from the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper’. Pausing only to water and pasture their horses, the Mongols swept onward and one by one the great cities of Transcaspia and Oxiana, of Afghanistan and northern Persia were sacked: Samarkand, Khiva, Balkh, Merv, Herat, Kandahar, Ardebil, Qazvin, Tabriz, Qum. Typical of their fate was that of Nishapur in the Persian province of Khurasan, the home of the poet, Omar Khayyám. Not a dog or cat was spared. The only monuments left standing in the city were pyramids of human skulls.

Pushing westward the Mongols swept through the Caucasus and into the Ukraine and the Crimea. They wintered on the Black Sea, among the mound tombs of their nomadic predecessors, the Scythians, before galloping northward early in 1223 to defeat three Russian armies. Then they rode home, across the width of Asia, as casually as commuters, for a quriltai, a great gathering of Mongol chieftains. The world had had its first taste of a military campaign which for speed and mobility was not equalled until the modern mechanized age. The idea that the Mongols were merely a flood of horsemen overrunning entire lands by sheer force of numbers has been rightly debunked. They were a disciplined and highly organized force, usually outnumbered by their enemies by more than two to one, whose success depended on their extraordinary mobility as well as on sophisticated military strategies; both Patton and Rommel studied the tactics of the Mongol general Subedei. Mongols were born in the saddle, and their conquests represent the greatest cavalry campaigns in history. Time and again columns of Mongol horsemen appeared as if from nowhere, having crossed vast distances and impossible natural barriers at speeds that easily outpaced their enemies’ intelligence. This was blitzkrieg, seven centuries before the invention of the tank or the aeroplane.

In the summer of 1227, in the middle of conquering China, Genghis Khan died after a severe attack of fever. It is believed he was about seventy years of age. On his deathbed he was said to have gathered his sons and to have handed them a bunch of arrows, instructing them to break them. When they could not, he handed them each arrow separately. His lesson was that they must remain united. Separately, like the arrows, they were weak. He bequeathed his empire to Ogedei, his third son, who would rule as Great Khan. Under him, his second son, Chaghadai, would govern Central Asia; Batu, his grandson, whom Friar William met on the Volga, would rule the Russian steppes which became known as the Golden Horde, and his youngest son, Tolui, was given the Mongol homelands. Thus all of Asia was parcelled out like a series of pastures in accordance with traditional Mongol grazing rights. The eldest son (in this case grandson, as Genghis’s first son had predeceased him) received the pastures furthest from home while the youngest was granted the ‘heartlands’.

The body of the Great Khan was taken home to Mongolia and buried in the Khentii Mountains near the place of his birth at a spot he had chosen himself. All of the bearers of the funeral cortege, and all those who encountered it on its way, were put to death to guard the secret of its location. To this day no one knows where his tomb lies.

At the time of his death, Genghis’ empire was four times the size of Alexander’s and twice the size of the Roman Empire. But the Mongols were still far from their zenith and under the new khan, Ogedei, the campaigns of conquest continued apace. By 1234 the whole of northern China had been subdued. Famously and no doubt apocryphally, Ogedei had considered massacring the entire Chinese population, some forty-five million people. ‘They are of no use to us,’ a Chinese historian reported him as saying. ‘It would be better to exterminate them entirely, and let the grass grow so we can have grazing for our horses.’ Wiser counsel prevailed when they were reminded of the taxes they might expect from all those hardworking Chinese.

Having dealt with the traditional enemy, the Mongols now turned westward once more to new horizons, intending to push the frontiers of the empire well into Europe. In the winter of 1237–8 they crossed the frozen Volga and launched what would prove to be the only successful winter invasion of Russia, a campaign that so alarmed the people of the Baltic that they cancelled their annual trip to Yarmouth with dire consequences for the English herring market.

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