The History of the Renaissance World (64 page)

Samurai warriors hastily assembled to fight off the invasion, but when the Goryeo contingent scented bad weather, they talked the Mongol commanders into withdrawing after a single day of fighting. Even so, the ships were caught by a storm on their way out of the bay, and perhaps a third of them were lost.

The armies on the Chinese mainland had better fortune. The war against the Song began to draw to an end. Kublai’s general Bayan led his armies along the Yangtze river; city after city fell to them; and by the end of 1275, they had reached the southern Song capital of Hangzhou.

By then, the emperor Duzong was dead; his five-year-old son had been aclaimed as the Emperor Gong, with the child’s mother as regent. In the face of the Mongol horde, she agreed to surrender the city. In January of 1276, the city’s gates were thrown open and the Mongols marched in. The boy emperor and his mother surrendered; Bayan treated them well and sent them to Shangdu, where Kublai Khan’s empress settled them into new quarters; Gong would live the rest of his life as a Buddhist monk in the north of China.
⁹

Even then, Southern Song resistance did not end. The little boy had two brothers, both of whom were offered, by various partisan groups, as emperor in exile. The middle son, Duanzong, died not long after his acclamation. The youngest, six-year-old Bing, had been concealed in a Buddhist temple far to the south. Guarded by his mother (a younger concubine of Duzong), her father, and the mother of the dead Duanzong, Bing survived until 1279. Pursued by a Mongol detachment, his guardians finally dragged him with them into the sea, drowning the child as they committed suicide to avoid capture. His death brought a final end to the Southern Song; Kublai Khan’s dynasty, the Yuan,
*
now controlled China.
¹⁰

Kublai had not forgotten about Japan.

Two years after the initial invasion, he had sent another embassy demanding surrender. The
shikken
Hojo Tokimune beheaded them and began to prepare for war. He summoned samurai from across western Japan to defend the coast. They built eight-foot stone walls along the beaches of Hakata Bay and other likely ports, to trap landing Mongol troops between the water and the fortifications; they assembled a special navy of small, very fast boats.

At the same time, Kublai Khan had recruited an admiral from the Song prisoners and begun construction of nine hundred new warships. Once again, the navy launched from both Goryeo and the southeastern Chinese coast; this time, 140,000 men on over four thousand ships sailed towards Japan in early June.
¹¹

The defending samurai were hugely outnumbered, but the stone walls temporarily halted the Mongol advance. The first men on the beach were stalled by the samurai defense, with the main bulk of the navy still anchored off Kyoto. The small Japanese ships launched constant quick strikes against them, keeping them on perpetual alert. Packed together, the soldiers on board began to suffer from an epidemic that killed thousands and weakened more.

For seven weeks, the samurai defenses held. And then, on August 15, a typhoon blew down on the Mongol fleet. For two full days, it battered the anchored ships. According to some accounts, 90 percent of the vessels sank. Nearly a hundred thousand more men were drowned. Thirty thousand soldiers, left stranded on the beach, were massacred.
¹²

The great Buddhist monk Eison, who spent the invasion praying earnestly in the Otokoyama Shrine near Kyoto, chalked the storm up to divine intervention: it was a
kamikaze
, a divine wind sent to protect the island. Others were less certain. The philosopher Nichiren Shonin, a fierce critic of Japan’s government, snapped, “An autumn gale destroyed the enemy’s ships, and . . . the priests pretend that it was due to the efficacy of their mysteries. Ask them whether they took the head of the Mongol king?”
¹³

Kublai Khan’s head was still firmly on his shoulders. He contemplated a third invasion, but he had lost too many of his Goryeo seamen; he decided instead to turn his attention back the mainland.

55.1 The Yuan Dynasty

S
OUTH OF THE
S
ONG
, Champa and Khmer and the Dai Viet now lay exposed to the Mongol front.

The Khmer king, Jayavarman VIII, decided to act with prudence rather than valor; he sent Kublai Khan tribute and submitted as a vassal to buy peace. The king of Champa, Indravarman V, tried to chart a middle road. He sent an embassy to Kublai’s court to negotiate a treaty, hoping to both avoid war and subjection. Kublai chose to regard the embassy as a surrender, and at once appointed two Yuan vice-regents to rule Champa on his behalf.

When the Champa king refused to recognize their authority, the Khan sent a five-thousand-man invasion force around by sea to storm Champa’s coast. It arrived without difficulty at the capital city of Vijaya, but meanwhile Indravarman and his court had retreated to the mountains. From there, they carried on a forest guerrilla war that the Mongols could not easily resist. The damp unfamiliar heat, so far south from their native lands, did not help; sickness thinned their ranks. In the summer of 1285, a Cham ambush managed to wipe out almost all of the remaining invaders.
¹⁴

Kublai Khan had no better luck in the land of the Dai Viet. Back in 1258, the Mongols had retreated from Dai Viet without capitalizing on their capture of Thang Long. In 1284, with the Champa expedition still underway, Kublai sent an even larger army under the command of one of his sons, Prince Toghan, by land through the north of the country. He won an initial victory and managed to establish a front close to the capital city, Thang Long. But once again the Mongols were stumped by a guerrilla army, this one led by the fervent nationalist Prince Tran Quoc Toan, cousin of the ruling emperor. Under his guidance, the Dai Viet soldiers tattooed “Death to the Mongols” on their arms and continued the grueling, inch-by-inch repulsion of the invading forces.

When the emperor asked him whether it might not be better to surrender and end the difficult and bloody war, Tran Quoc Toan is said to have answered, “Your Majesty, if you want to surrender, then cut off my head first, for while it remains on my shoulders the kingdom shall stand.” His dogged resistance paid off. In 1287, Prince Toghan was forced to return to his father for reinforcements. When he came back with a massive army of both men and river craft, Tran Quoc Toan lured him into a battle at the Bach Dang river, the site of the great Dai Viet defeat of the Song in 1076.

This time, the Dai Viet army had prepared by staking the bottom of the river with bronze spikes. When the tide began to run out, the Mongol river barges were caught. So many Mongols were slaughtered on the river that the water ran red.
¹⁵

Prince Toghan fled. Tran Quoc Toan, the hero of the resistance, was later worshipped as divine, under his posthumous name, Tran Hung Dao.

B
OTH
J
APAN
and the southeast remained unconquered when Kublai Khan died in 1294: the last Great Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty of China.

He had been born the grandson of a nomad, but he ended his life as one of the greatest emperors in the world. He kept a personal guard of twelve thousand horsemen; he could seat forty thousand of his subjects at a festival banquet and serve them all from gold and silver vessels; he could mount a hunt for his friends with ten thousand falconers and five thousand hunting dogs. He printed his own money, accepted by traders from Shangdu to Venice; he could send messages through a network of post offices and riders that webbed his entire kingdom. He welcomed to his court, says Marco Polo, “kings, generals, counts, astrologers, physicans, and many other officers and rulers” from all over the world.
¹⁶

His grandson inherited his rule, not as Great Khan but as Emperor Chengzong of the Yuan dynasty. Kublai, the last Great Khan, had become the first Yuan Emperor.

But after decades of war with the Mongols, the population of the empire now ruled by the Yuan had shrunk by fifty million. Graves, heaps of corpses, and river-washed skeletons marked the Yuan dynasty’s birthplace.

*
The Yuan dynasty, which lasted until 1368, is variously considered to have begun in 1263 (Kublai’s foundation of a new capital city), 1271, 1279 (the death of the last Song heir), and 1280.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The Sicilian Vespers

Between 1274 and 1288,
the parts of the Holy Roman Empire
go in different directions

R
UDOLF OF
H
APSBURG
, now king of Germany, had been crowned in Aachen in some disorder. The ceremony was already underway when someone realized that the royal regalia, the scepter and crown of Frederick II, had disappeared sometime during the anarchy of the previous decade. Forced to improvise, Rudolf grabbed a nearby crucifix: “The symbol of our redemption secures us heaven,” he told the electors, “it will certainly confirm to us a parcel of earth.”
¹

The chaos of the ceremony was only a foretaste. Germany was wrecked. The treasury was empty, the countryside afflicted by roving bandits, the dukes engaged in private warfare. One of the most powerful electors, Ottocar II of Bohemia, was in open revolt. Since early in the century, the Dukes of Bohemia had been granted the right by the emperor to claim the title of king of Bohemia, a lesser monarch subject to the German throne; this had only confirmed their desire to push back against imperial demands on their loyalty. Summoned to an imperial diet in 1274 to do homage to his new overlord, the King of Bohemia refused to show up, and instead fortified his boundaries for war.

For the next four years, Rudolf was forced to defend himself against Ottocar’s intermittent attacks, while destroying the headquarters of robber bands, reestablishing the rule of law in Germany, and reorganizing a kingdom that had been left in shambles by its boy king and the challenger for the imperial throne. By 1278, he had managed to do all three. Ottocar had finally been killed, fighting his lord on the banks of the Danube. Rudolf had destroyed sixty castles occupied by bandits and private warlords; he had whipped the troublesome kingdom of Moravia into line; he had made a marriage alliance between Ottocar’s son Wenceslaus and his own daughter, and made another treaty with the king of Hungary. He had restored Frederick’s laws, and spent countless months traveling through Germany, visiting each local court. He took as his motto the Latin
Melius bene imperare, quam imperium ampliare:
Better to govern the empire well than to enlarge it.
²

Meanwhile, Charles of Anjou was ruling his double kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily (“The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”) with equally close attention to detail. In Charles’s case, though, the attention was paid to his own power.

In 1280, after the sudden death of the current pope (Nicholas III, who had lasted all of three years as pontif
f
), Charles meddled directly in the papal elections. He favored the election of the Franciscan Simon de Brion, a native of Tours. When the Italian cardinals objected to the election of another Frenchman, Charles imprisoned two of them. The rest, properly intimidated, elevated Brion to the papal seat. The new French pope, who took the name Martin IV, was so unpopular in Italy that he did not dare enter Rome; he had to be consecrated at Orvieto, north of Saint Peter’s city.