CHINGIZ KHĀN
It is not within the scope of the present work to trace in any detail
the meteor-like path of Chingiz; for we are concerned with it only in
so far as it affected the internal affairs of Central Asia. His career
has exercised a peculiar fascination for students of Oriental history,
though by no means all the available evidence has yet been marshalled
in elucidation of the controversies which still rage round that mighty
name.[347]
“All that can safely be said about the early history of the
Mongols,”[348] writes Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, “is that they were a
clan among clans, a member of a great confederacy that ranged the
country north of the desert of Gobi in search of water and pasture;
who spent their lives in hunting and the breeding of cattle, lived on
flesh and sour milk (kumis), and made their profit by bartering hides
and beasts with their kinsmen the Khitans,[349] or with the Turks and
Chinese, to whom they owed allegiance. The name Mughal was not known
until the tenth century, and probably came to be applied to the whole
group of clans only when the chief of a particular clan bearing that
name acquired an ascendency over the rest of the confederacy, and gave
to the greater the name of the less.[350] Yissugāy, the father of
Chingiz Khān, if not the founder of his clan, was a notable maintainer
of it, and it was probably he who first asserted the independence of
the Mongols from Chinese rule. In spite, however, of conquest and
annexation, the people who owned the sovereignty of Yissugāy numbered
only 40,000 tents. Yet it was upon this foundation that his son,
Chingiz Khān, built up in twenty years the widest empire the world has
ever seen.”[351]
[Illustration: NOMADS CHANGING CAMP]
Temuchin,[352] known to history as Chingiz Khān, was born most probably
in 1162,[353] and was therefore thirteen years of age at the time of
his father’s death, in 1175.
The Mongolian, or, as they called themselves at that period, the
Tatar people, were divided into a number of tribes, among which the
Chinese distinguished three groups, according to the degree of their
civilisation,--the white, the black, and the savage Tatars. The first,
who dwelt in Southern Mongolia, near the Chinese Wall, were under the
influence of Chinese civilisation. The black Tatars, who occupied the
greater part of what we now call Mongolia, remained unaffected by their
uninterrupted contact with more advanced races whose representatives
entered their country only in the quality of merchants. The trade
of barter and exchange with the nomads was in the hands of men of
Turkestān, Uïghūrs, and Musulmans, who in such matters were far more
enterprising than the Chinese. These Uïghūrs and Musulmans, moreover,
kept in their own hands the commerce between Mongolia and China; that
is to say, they bought goods in China and sold them to the nomads.
By means of the knowledge thus gained, these merchants were able to
influence the Khāns, and through them the people. Moreover, Buddhist,
Nestorian, and Musulman merchants were always closely followed by the
missionaries of their respective religions. Islām at that period had
not yet obtained predominance in Central Asia, and in Mongolia its
propaganda was practically non-existent. Over the Uïghūrs, the nearest
neighbours of the Mongols, Buddhists and Nestorian Christians still
had the upper hand. These latter even succeeded in converting some of
the most powerful tribes of the black Mongols, such as the Keraits
and the Naimans, to Christianity. The savage Tatars, whom the Mongols
called “forest peoples,” led a roving life in the forests of the modern
province of Trans-Baikal and the north-west of Mongolia. They practised
Shamanism in its purest form.[354]
Authorities are in disagreement as to which of these Mongol clans
claimed Temuchin as its own. The Chinese aver that he belonged to the
black Tatars; while Mongolian tradition[355] would enrol him among the
savage tribes. Rashīd ud-Dīn tells us that Yissugāy married a woman
belonging to the white Tatars, who became the mother of Temuchin and
his brothers; and that the lads were adepts as hunters and fishermen.
Whatever may have been Yissugāy’s position among his tribe,[356] it
seems clear that on his death in battle his eldest son, Temuchin, then
thirteen years of age, was not recognised as a chief, and supported a
miserable existence with his mother on roots, game, and fish. Such a
life probably served to develop his genius, signs of which, not less
than the memory of his father’s military prowess, attracted round him a
band of young nobles who afterwards formed his bodyguard. The growing
power of the Mongols in the twelfth century alarmed the Manchurian
dynasty of the Tsin, then reigning in Northern China, who incited
the Buyr-Nūr Tatars to attack them. It was in this war that Yissugāy
perished. As soon as they had crushed the common enemy, the Buyr-Nūrs
turned against their former allies and invaded China.
The Tsin emperor now sent other nomad chiefs to oppose the Buyr-Nūrs,
of whom the mightiest was Toghrul, the Khān of the Christian
Keraits,[357] whose habitat was on the shores of the Tola. Temuchin
allied himself with this tribe, and in the final campaign against the
Buyr-Nūrs, when the Tsin emperor himself led his forces into Mongolia,
Temuchin so distinguished himself as to gain an honorific title.[358]
This occurred in 1194. The next ten years Temuchin spent in struggles
with confederacies of hostile tribes whose jealousy he had incurred
by his uninterrupted successes. Having reduced all who dwelt north of
the desert of Gobi, from the Irtish to the Khinggan Mountains,[359] he
found himself in the year 1202 engaged in a war against his former ally
Toghrul, Khān of the Keraits. He was at first defeated, and compelled
to retire; but in the following year (1203) he collected another army
and inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Keraits, reducing them to
abject submission. In 1206[360] he summoned a Kurultāy,[361] or Diet of
the Nobles, and, in the presence of all the tribal chieftains, formally
adopted the title of Chingiz Khān, or “The Very Mighty King.”
His ambitions were now aroused, though they were as yet bounded by the
narrow horizon in which they had found scope; and he could not have
foreseen the goal to which they would carry him.