The History of the Renaissance World (45 page)

Now under the rule of Tamar’s son George IV, the Kingdom of Georgia was able to field an impressive number of troops to meet the Mongol invasion. But Jebe and Subotai crushed the Georgian army near the capital city of Tbilisi, staged a fake withdrawal, and then stormed back to kill the survivors. The king, badly wounded, was forced to give up the south of his country.
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Meanwhile, Genghis and his sons had turned back eastward to conquer Samarkand and then after a brief rest had continued the devastating sweep across Khwarezm. Cities that surrendered were generally looted and then put under Mongol governorship, but their citizens were mostly spared; cities that resisted were exterminated. At Tirmidh, where the people refused to surrender, Genghis Khan ordered the entire population driven outside the city walls and put to death, giving each of his warriors the task of executing a certain number of men, women, and children. At Merv, by conservative accounts, seven hundred thousand people were massacred; some contemporary chroniclers put the total at more than a million. At Nishapur, four hundred useful artisans were spared. Everyone else was beheaded; the Mongols piled the heads of the men in one place, the heads of women and children in another. Two massacres were carried out in Balkh, one when the city first fell, a second after the false withdrawal of Genghis’s men lured survivors out of the nooks and crannies where they had hidden. “Wherever a wall was left standing,” writes the thirteenth-century historian Juvaini, “the Mongols pulled it down and for a second time wiped out all traces of culture from that region.”
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Meanwhile, Jalal ad-Din had claimed his father’s title of Shah of Khwarezm, and was gathering himself to attack the Mongol rear. Receiving word that the new Shah’s forces had managed to defeat a Mongol outpost, Genghis Khan turned and began to ride eastward, back towards India. His vendetta against the Shah was still alive; he traveled, says Juvaini by day and night, not even stopping for food. He caught up with Jalal ad-Din on the banks of the Indus river, and drove him and his men steadily backwards into the water. Most of the Shah’s men were killed by Mongol arrows as they struggled in the water; the whole river, Juvaini writes, was “red with the blood of the slain.” Jalal ad-Din himself managed to flounder through the Indus on horseback and emerged on the other side, only to flee into the distance. His wives and children, left behind, were taken captive; all of his male children were put to death.
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37.1 The Mongol Empire

After the Battle of the Indus, Genghis Khan himself returned east, to his ancestral lands in Mongolia. His task, it seems, was done.

But he left his son Jochi in charge of a substantial Mongol army in the west. This force continued to raid the lands east of the Black Sea, and eventually a coalition of worried peoples, including Georgians and detachments from the Turkish tribes who had settled north of Georgia, assembled on the banks of the Kalka river in an attempt to drive the invaders out.

The coalition was shortly joined by the Grand Duke of Kiev, a prince from the Rus’ tribes who occupied the cold lands just southeast of the Baltic Sea.
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The Rus’, Christian since the tenth century, had been mostly occupied with internal matters since their conversion. Each major city of the Rus’ was ruled by a prince who (like the Turkish sultans) paid lip service to the overall rule of a Grand Duke, but protected his own power, sometimes viciously. The ruler of Kiev had most often claimed the title Grand Duke, but for the last half century, his authority had been constantly challenged by the rulers of the city of Novgorod.

The current Grand Duke of Kiev, Mstislav III, had no worries about the Mongols; they were still far to the south. But the fight against the Mongols would most certainly increase his standing among his own people. In response to appeals from his southern neighbors, he recruited the nearby princes of Galich, Chernigov, and Smolensk, and led a force of eighty thousand Russian warriors south to the Kalka river.

The joint army was disorganized, the command divided, and half of the troops advanced towards the waiting Mongols before the Kievans even knew that battle had begun. The contemporary Russian history known as the
Chronicle of Novgorod
says that his first wave, instantly repelled by Jochi’s men, panicked and stampeded back through Mstislav’s camp, leaving him to fend off the advancing Mongol front. He held out for three days before the Mongols overwhelmed his position and took him captive. He was put to death, the
Chronicle
tells us, by suffocation; the Mongols forced him and his captive men to lie beneath boards and then “took seat on the top to have dinner. And thus they ended their lives.”
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Jochi chased the retreating Rus’ survivors westward, raiding and killing as he went. But when he reached the shores of the Dnieper river, he halted and turned back eastward, ready to travel home. He had carried out his orders; the Khwarezm had been punished, the west successfully raided, and Genghis Khan had no further intentions in this direction.

37.2 The Battle of Kalka

Instead, the Khan had turned to finish destroying the Western Xia. He was still directing this campaign when he died. After a bad hunting fall in 1225, he had suffered from recurring fevers and muscle spasms that grew gradually worse. Sometime in 1227, in an unknown camp south of the Li-p’an Mountains, the Universal Khan of the Mongols drew his last breath. His death was kept secret, by his own wish, until his generals finished demolishing the last Xia strongholds in September of 1227.
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H
E LEFT HIS CONQUESTS
, which stretched westward to the Caspian Sea and southward to the Hindu Kush mountains, to his sons.

Jochi had died a few months before his father, so the lands awarded to him—the western territories he had himself helped reduce—were divided between his two sons. Genghis Khan’s youngest son Tolui received the Khan’s own homeland. Chagatai, the second son, was given his father’s lands in Central Asia.

The third son of the conqueror, Ogodei, received the title of Great Khan of the Mongols.

This had been Genghis Khan’s own wish. He had fallen out with Jochi repeatedly, and he suspected that his second son Chagatai was unequal to the job: “As Genghis Khan was aware that his nature was excessively sanguinary, malevolent, and tyrannical,” writes Juvaini, “he did not bequeath the sovereignty to him.”
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This created a certain amount of dissension, but by 1229 the Mongols had agreed to recognize Ogodei as Genghis Khan’s rightful successor. The new khan’s first act was to dispatch forces westward. What Genghis Khan had seen as land to be raided, his sons saw as the new battlefront. And thanks to their father’s training, they knew how to fight successfully against the settled west.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

South of India

Between 1215 and 1283,
Sri Lanka is divided between Hindu and Buddhist kings,
and the Pandyas of the south bring an end to the Chola empire

I
N
1215, the Hindu nobleman Magha fled south, along the eastern coast of India. The sultan of Delhi was bearing down on him from the north; so he left his lands in Orissa and, followed by his own private army, set out to find a new country.

Orissa, now ruled by a string of powerful Hindu kings descended from Chola royalty, was not a place where an ambitious soldier could establish his own power. Nor was the kingdom of Chola, directly south of it, shrunken from its twelfth-century height but still strong. Magha kept going south, crossing over the Palk Strait, and came to the shores of Sri Lanka.

Parakrama Bahu’s carefully constructed kingdom, well watered and prosperous, held together by the net of state-sponsored Buddhism, lay open to invasion. Three years earlier, a newcomer from the south of India had arrived and taken the throne for himself; a Buddhist newcomer who, although a foreign invader, ruled (in the words of the
Culavamsa
, the chronicle of kings written in Sri Lanka’s Pali language) “without transgressing.” But he could not raise enough support to fight back against Magha, who had swelled his private army to over twenty thousand by hiring south Indian mercenaries.

Magha stormed the north of the island with savagery. He wrecked Buddhist shrines, destroyed sacred writings, forced his captives to convert to Hinduism, confiscated the land that he overran, seized crops and livestock and treasure for his own. He was, in the words of the Buddhist
Culavamsa
, “a man who held to a false creed, whose heart rejoiced in bad statesmanship, who was a forest fire for the burning down of bushes in the forest of the good.” He captured the capital city of Polonnaruwa, burning parts of it, took the king captive and put his eyes out. He then established himself as king, using his standing army of thousands to keep power over the inhabitants.
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But he did not take the whole island.

“During this alien rule,” says the
Culavamsa
, “. . . virtuous people had founded [villages] on several of the most inaccessible mountains, and dwelling here and there protected the laity and the [Buddhist] Order so that they were at peace.” In the face of the foreign regime, the native Sri Lankans had retreated farther south into the mountains, where Magha’s mercenaries could not easily reach them. One of the refugees, a man who took the royal name Vijaya Bahu III, claimed descent from the great fourth-century king Sirisamghabodhi, a ruler revered for his moral excellence. It was a convenient lineage; Sirisamghabodhi had fought off rebels and had sacrificed himself for his people.
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Vijaya Bahu rallied together the scattered
sanghas
, the different Buddhist houses that had been dispersed throughout the safe places, and united the remaining Sri Lankans behind him. His center of operations was the mountain settlement of Dambadeniya; it became his capital. When he discovered that several monks had taken the Buddha’s Tooth
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with them in their flight from Polonnaruwa, he ordered the sacred relic brought to him, and mounted a great festival celebrating his re-enthronement as Sri Lanka’s true king. His efforts created a boundary between his conquests and those of the Hindu invaders, dividing the island into two realms: the Buddhist kingdom of Dambadeniya, and the Hindu realm of Polonnaruwa.
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