The Mongols and Genghis Khan's career

Who were the Mongols? They were a varied people, related in language to the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus to the east and the Turkic tribes to the west. They lived in the area of modern Mongolia: wide grassy plains ringed by the Altai mountains to the west and the Gobi desert to the south, watered by the Onon and Selenga rivers.

• Pastoralists herded horses and sheep (and some cattle, goats and camels), moving between winter and summer pastures. Hunter-gatherers in the Siberian forests to the north lived by trading furs.
• Winters were long and harsh, summers short and dry. The Mongols did not take up farming, and the land could not support dense settlement, so there were no cities. People lived in tents called gers.
• Society was divided into patrilineal lineages (family lines traced through fathers); richer families had more animals, pasture and followers.
• Bad winters or droughts drove families to fight over pasture and raid for livestock. Families sometimes allied around powerful lineages, but these confederacies were usually small and short-lived.

Nomads and China depended on each other. Mongols traded horses, furs and game for grain and iron tools from China. But trade mixed with pressure and plunder: united Mongol groups forced better terms or raided; when they were divided, China pushed into the steppe. From very early times Chinese rulers built fortifications against nomad raids, and from the third century BCE these were joined into what we now call the Great Wall of China.

The career of Genghis Khan. He was born around 1162 near the Onon river and named Temujin, son of Yesugei, a chieftain of the Kiyat group.

• His father was murdered when he was young, and his mother Oelun-eke raised the children in great hardship. Temujin was captured and enslaved, and his wife Borte was kidnapped; he had to fight to win her back.
• He made important friends: Boghurchu, his first ally, and Jamuqa, his blood-brother (anda). He renewed his father's alliance with Ong Khan (Tughril), ruler of the Kereyits.
• With Ong Khan's help he defeated Jamuqa, who had turned into a bitter enemy. Then he overcame the Tatars, the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself (1203), and finally the Naiman and Jamuqa (1206).
• At an assembly of Mongol chiefs, a quriltai, in 1206, he was proclaimed Genghis Khan, the 'Oceanic Khan' or 'Universal Ruler'.

Conquests. China was then split into three kingdoms. The Hsi Hsia were defeated by 1209; the Great Wall was breached in 1213 and Peking sacked in 1215. In the west, after the ruler of Khwarazm executed Mongol envoys, Genghis Khan's campaigns of 1219 to 1221 took the great cities of Central Asia: Otrar, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Herat and others. Cities that surrendered were spared; those that resisted were devastated, and very large numbers of people were killed. Genghis Khan reached the Indus but turned back, and died in 1227.

Military innovation explains much of his success:

• Mongol and Turkish horsemen gave the army speed and mobility, and were expert archers on horseback, skills sharpened in regular hunting expeditions that doubled as training.
• They fought winter campaigns, using frozen rivers as highways to enemy cities.
• Nomads had usually been helpless against walled towns, but Genghis Khan quickly learnt to use siege engines and naphtha (fire) bombardment, with light, portable equipment.