Empires Apart (9 page)

The lust for empire goes back to biblical times and beyond. The lust for land, power, resources, or simply for conquest has consumed tribes and nations for millennia. Imperialism is not a recent invention, nor is it a European one: empires have existed in the Americas, in Africa and on a gigantic scale in Asia.

One empire in particular exceeded any that had gone before, and crossed from Asia into Europe in an orgy of violence and destruction. The Mongols brought terror to Europe on a scale not seen again until the twentieth century. They left a particular mark on Russia, where all traces of nascent democracy, of which there were very few, were obliterated. The murderous methods of the Mongols survived them as the grand dukes of Muscovy took over the reins of power and began themselves to lust after empire. Ivan IV gave himself the new title of tsar and set out to turn that dream into reality; what the world witnessed was not a dream but the nightmare empire of Ivan the Terrible.

When, nearly four centuries after the Mongol invasion, Michael Romanov founded the dynasty that would rule Russia until the revolution, the guiding principles of autocratic imperialism were firmly established. They were principles that the handful of Englishmen by then settled on the coast of Virginia could choose to ignore or follow as they started to build their own empire.

The bows and arrows of the North American natives were powerless before the microbes and muskets of the Europeans, but those of the Mongols rapidly overcame the Rus.

The Rus were not used to being on the receiving end of such aggression. From their earliest days the Slavs were an expansionist people. In this they prefigured the early Americans, but it is dangerous to draw too many parallels. There were two striking differences between the early American and Russian models of colonisation: the new American colonies had local assemblies with varying degrees of power, and the Rus had no policy or practice of ethnic cleansing.

Before the Mongols had a chance to shoot their arrows at them, the Kiev Rus took the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot. Yaroslav the Wise ruled for thirty-five years of unprecedented glory, but in death showed none of his famed wisdom. In dividing his kingdom among his five sons Yaroslav guaranteed conflict within and disunity without. Principalities fought each other, and barbarian tribes raided with increasing impunity. In one season alone, in 1160, Cuman tribesmen carried off 10,000 slaves from the region of Smolensk in an uncanny parallel with Governor Moore's raids into Florida half a millennium later.

The pre-Mongol inheritance rules, where titles and land could pass to the eldest relative rather than the eldest child, meant that at one point there were estimated to be four or five times as many princes as there were principalities to fill. As a consequence there were always nobles available for war parties or the founding of new settlements. To the north and east of the early Russian state were the Finns, scattered thinly over a large and relatively attractive territory. Being dispersed so widely, they were easy prey for the far more numerous Rus, and were constantly pushed back by the advancing tide of Russian settlement. This was particularly true along Europe's longest river, the Volga. The Kievan Rus state continued an old tradition of the more or less gradual pushing out of its frontiers, down the Volga and to the east and north. Slowly the primacy of the Dnieper, with Kiev guarding its passage down to the Black Sea, gave way to the Volga as
the heartland of the Russian people, with the 2,300 mile river linking the far north to the Sea of Azov on the borders of Asia.

The frontier moved through a process of military colonisation. Princes seized parcels of land by force and their armed bands, or drujinas, then protected settlers arriving from further west. The new settlements on the frontier were quite different from the traditional societies of Kiev. The prince was the undisputed autocrat, whose only legitimacy was force. At the same time settlers intermarried with the native Finns and adopted some of their traditions. The result was the creation of two Russias. In time the distinction became so fundamental that the ‘Great Russians' on the Volga and the ‘Little Russians' around Kiev came to regard themselves as different nations. The division came to a head in 1169, when the Prince of Rostov-Suzdal became Grand Prince, and used his military might to sack Kiev and forcibly move the capital to his own seat on the Volga far to the north-east.

Thirty-five years later the Third Crusade set off from western Europe to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel, but decided that the Byzantine Christians presented a much more tempting target. Constantinople was taken and its trade routes fell into the hands of the Italian city-states, destroying Kiev's economic supremacy for ever. The Rus were pushed back relentlessly from the south-east, from the south-west by the descendants of Attila's Huns and from the west by the Teutonic knights.

Then came the single most important event in Russian history: the Mongols arrived. (The Mongols in Russian histories are often referred to as Tartars, especially in more recent times when Stalin wreaked particular revenge on them. The elision from one term to the other is confusing for foreigners, but no more so than the elision from English to British in American histories. The term Tartar itself is derived from the Chinese name of one of the Mongol tribes; it has nothing to do with tartare sauce or the tartar on teeth, which comes from an Arabic word meaning resin.) The Mongols first emerged not in what is now Mongolia but further north, where the Huns had created the first state in central Asia, Hsiung-nu, in around 200BC, before being pushed and pulled westwards
in the murderous stream of conquest ending at Châlons. Culturally the Mongols drew from both the forest traditions of Siberia and the cultures of the Turkic peoples who had replaced the Huns to control the great sweep of the steppes. Their transformation from a collection of loosely linked, nomadic clans into a unified military and political force was entirely thanks to Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan was born in a tent on the banks of the river Onon, east of Lake Baikal, in 1162. After the murder of his father he was taken under the wing of a Mongol leader whom he soon overpowered. He set about creating a united Mongol nation by first subduing his closest kinsmen and then extending out to other Mongol and Turkic tribes. Among people where clan connections had been all-important, Genghis Khan introduced and enforced a strictly meritocratic regime. When he had compelled the tribes of central Asia to submit he turned on China. Invasions of China had been tried and failed before; that Genghis Khan succeeded is a testament to the skill with which he waged war, and the ferocity of his troops. In 1214, 75,000 Mongols lay siege to the 600,000 defenders of Peking. The next year the city fell. The Mongols were on their way.

The Mongols changed the world in a way unparalleled since the Romans. No individual Roman leader had anything like the impact on world history that Genghis Khan exerted. China, India, Russia and a host of other nations are as they are today because of the influence of that one man. After conquering northern China in 1215 Genghis Khan led his hordes through Persia into southern Russia. (The word ‘horde' derives from the Mongol word for camp.) His son sacked Kiev and raided into Poland and Moravia. The Mongols withdrew only when the time came to elect a new khan, an election attended by emissaries from the Pope and the Caliph of Baghdad. If the latter was trying to curry favour he failed. The Mongols soon fell on to the Muslim world. The only favour they bestowed on the caliph was that in respect to superstitions about not shedding a caliph's blood they wrapped him in a carpet and had their horses trample him to death. Islam might have been destroyed but for the Mongols' defeat by Egyptian forces outside Nazareth. Even more than
Châlons this battle changed the course of world history. As it was, Islam survived and the western Mongols themselves soon converted.

The Mongols combined technology, organisation and tactics to produce a force that was almost unstoppable. The core of their technological superiority was the humble bow and arrow. Their enemies' cumbersome bows were designed for hunting, where the need was to maximise the range at which an unsuspecting animal could be brought down by the first arrow fired. A hunter would not get a second chance. The Mongols were more interested in rapid fire: their bows were small, short-range weapons. Mongol archers could dispatch arrow after arrow, using a stone attached to their thumbs to draw back the bowstring. As with modern technologies, the Mongol arrow designers were forever inventing new, more specialist applications. There were arrows for starting fires or piercing armour, whistling arrows for signalling, arrows carrying miniature grenades, arrows tipped with quicklime or naphtha. Above all, Mongol bows could be fired by fighters on horseback while at full gallop. Indeed, they could be fired accurately backwards at a pursuing enemy. The Mongols had combined artillery and light cavalry in one deadly force.

The superiority of their technology was married with the superiority of their logistics, a superiority entirely owing to the Mongol's most prized possessions: his horses. Each Mongol cavalryman had three or four horses, ensuring there was always a fresh mount when battle commenced, and allowing them to travel phenomenal distances at high speed. Riders in the Mongol postal service could cover over 120 miles a day at a time when roads were virtually non-existent. The horse provided both transport and sustenance: milk, blood and meat. Like their riders the horses originated in the frozen tundra of eastern Siberia; they were used to enduring the bitter cold, and foraged for food below layers of snow. The result was a force as mobile in winter as summer.

In 1237 the Mongols reached Russia. Hitler and Napoleon raced to defeat their Russian enemies before they themselves were defeated by the Russian winter. They failed. The Mongols were a different breed; they
waited for winter to arrive and then struck with unsurpassed speed and ferocity. They had passed a relaxing summer exterminating the Bulgar kingdom on the Middle Volga, massacring the 50,000 inhabitants of its largest city in the process. After waiting until the Volga froze over, the Mongol army of 120,000 simply rode across the river and melted unseen into the snow-covered forests on the other side.

Their first target was Ryazan in the east of the country. Here they immediately demonstrated not only the superiority of their military technology and strategy but the two ‘virtual' weapons that would become a feature of Russian life for centuries to come: secret intelligence and terror.

The Mongol hordes did not just charge out of Asia obliterating whatever they happened to come across. They gathered vast amounts of information on their enemies and planned their attacks in great detail. Long before the Rus realised what was happening the Mongols had identified all their weak points, both military and political. By taking the province of Ryazan the Mongols could split the Rus forces. More importantly, the province itself was ruled by four princes notoriously unable to agree on anything.

Once the city and province of Ryazan were taken the Mongols unleashed their other, not so secret, weapon. The Russians were to learn a lesson that was never to be forgotten: the power of sheer terror. The entire nobility, men, women and children, was butchered. All the city's women were systematically raped. Survivors were flayed alive in the streets.

The Grand Duke Yuri of Suzdal had been the overlord of the Ryazan princes; he became the Mongols' next target. He left his family for safety in the city of Vladimir so the Mongols headed there. When his wife refused to come out of the church where she was hiding her children the Mongols simply torched the building. Yuri himself was killed in battle a month later, along with most of his army. The Mongols then turned their focus to the far north-east and the rich trading city of Novgorod. Here they met their only serious setback.

The story of Novgorod could fill a chapter on its own. Until the time of Ivan the Terrible, centuries after the first Mongols appeared, the city developed along its own unique lines, as it had done in the centuries before the Mongols arrived. In some Russian histories it appears as an Athenian-like city state embracing democracy long before the feudal states of western Europe. Many nations have claimed to be the home of democracy. Greece can point to the glories of Athens, where government by the people, the demos, was first a reality – at least for those parts of the population who were not female, were not slaves and lived during those few periods of Athenian history when the demos held real power. France points to the liberty, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution, although the guillotine is an unlikely symbol of true democracy. America points to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, promises that rang hollow for generations of black slaves. Britain prides itself on being the birthplace of parliamentary democracy, although the parliament of Iceland is far older. And the Russians have Novgorod.

Novgorod, on the Gulf of Finland, was one of the major trading centres of Europe, and by the middle of the twelfth century it was a functioning democracy, governed by the people, the ‘veche'. The veche elected the local officials, even the local bishop. The powers of the local prince were severely limited by formal agreements with the veche, which laid down what he was allowed to do and prescribed in detail what taxes he was allowed to collect: all this well before the English barons compelled King John to subscribe to less onerous restrictions in the Magna Carta. The prince was even banned from living within the city walls; he was essentially a military leader hired by the veche to defend the city.

But to see Novgorod as a gleaming example of democracy in a region tumbling into absolutism is a considerable exaggeration. It is tempting to look back on medieval Novgorod through the prism of modern ideologies as a golden period of European proto-democracy, but the facts are somewhat different. Teleologic is no logic. The veche consisted of all male citizens. Women were not empowered
and, although slavery had largely disappeared in the city itself, it still survived in the rural areas over which Novgorod exerted its authority. Minority groups, particularly the rich German merchants, had to live in designated areas and had no formal political power. Meetings of the veche, which could be called by anyone ringing the town bell, could be heated. These meetings were open affairs, and were known on occasions to break up into competing gatherings on either side of the Volkhov river. Disputes were then settled by brawls on the bridge; the concept of the secret ballot was unknown. In practice Novgorod was governed by an assembly of some fifty wealthy merchants, boyars (landowners) and officials. Novgorod was a principality run by an oligarchy, dressed like a republic and remembered as a democracy. In addition Novgorod was an imperial power, grabbing territory as far east and north as the Urals, the upper Volga and the White Sea. No form of government that relies on military might to contain its people within an imperial framework can claim to be a true democracy.