Travels in Siberia (19 page)

V—— replied without hesitation. “Yes, that’s correct, bribes.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at her, mildly curious about what the point of such an obvious question might be.

In the year 1220, a Taoist monk named Ch’ang ch’un received a summons from Genghis Khan. The Mongol emperor, ruler of more earthly territory than any human before him, had a curiosity about spiritual things. He had heard of Ch’ang ch’un’s reputation for wisdom and he wanted the monk to come to him so he could ask some questions. The rumor that the monk possessed medicine of immortality especially interested him. Ch’ang ch’un replied modestly, “I have grown old and am not yet dead. My repute has spread over all kingdoms; but as to my sanctity, I am not better than ordinary people, and when I look inwards, I am deeply ashamed of myself.” Any request from the khan had to be obeyed, however, so with an entourage of disciples, the seventy-three-year-old monk set out from Peking in 1221 on a journey to Genghis’s encampment far to the west.

Ch’ang ch’un and his companions went across much of Asia. Maybe they were in southern Siberia part of the way, maybe not. The disciples kept a diary; here is a sample: “There was a stony river, more than fifty
li
long, the banks of which were about a hundred feet high. The water in the river was clear and cold, and bubbled like sonorous jade.” (One of the best river descriptions ever:
bubbled like sonorous jade
.) Crossing hot deserts in the cool of the night, they feared being charmed by goblins. The foods of the master’s diet—rice, meal, vegetables—could not always be found. By the time winter came on, they had reached the city
of Samarkand, north of the pass through the mountains that led down to present Afghanistan. Genghis Khan and his army were there, camped on a plain between Kabul and Andarab. The chroniclers note that in those years Genghis was fighting “the Mohammedan rebels in the mountains.” The Mongols would not be the last army to give that exercise a try.

In May 1222, about a year and a half after leaving Peking, Ch’ang ch’un reached the camp of Genghis Khan. Out of respect for the Taoists, the Mongol courtiers did not make them fall to their knees and bow their foreheads to the floor—the practice called kowtow—as was customary. Genghis asked the monk about the medicine of immortality. Ch’ang ch’un replied, “There are means of preserving life, but no medicine of immortality.” Genghis praised him for his honesty. The monk also got away with refusing to drink koumiss (fermented mare’s milk), the Mongols’ favorite alcoholic beverage and a part of their court ceremonies. Eventually Ch’ang ch’un explained Taoist doctrine to the khan, who was “highly edified” by this, and “the discourse of the sage pleased his heart.” Ch’ang ch’un asked Genghis if he could go home now, and Genghis said they would travel together, since he was headed eastward also and had more questions in mind. After keeping the monk close at hand for almost a year, the khan finally let him begin his trip home in April 1223. Ch’ang ch’un was back in Peking by 1224. Genghis ordered a monastery to be built for him there. Ch’ang ch’un died three years later at the age of seventy-nine.

People think of the Age of Exploration as beginning in the fourteen hundreds, with various well-known voyages. In fact, its stirrings may be seen two centuries earlier, in epic pedestrian journeys like Ch’ang ch’un’s. Other monks—Christian rather than Taoist though no less intrepid—traversed Asia in that time to visit the Mongol khan. The Christians, of course, started from the west rather than the east. John of Plano Carpini, a Franciscan and a companion of St. Francis, traveled from Lyons in April 1245 on a missionary journey in the pope’s name. Carpini endured a hard trip, reached the khan in Mongolia, definitely did not convert him to Christianity, and arrived back in France in the fall of 1247. Six years after that, King Louis the Pious of France, hearing a report that some of the Mongols were Christians, sent another Franciscan, William de Rubruquis, with official letters requesting that Rubruquis be allowed to settle in Mongol lands and preach the gospel. Rubruquis took another
couple of years in his travel and, like Carpini, did not succeed at all in winning souls. The most famous pedestrian explorer of the age, Marco Polo, made his trip to the court of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, in 1271–75. In Polo’s book, many in Europe would read about travels in Asia for the first time. None of these journeys would have been possible without the Mongols. Genghis’s global conquests, and those of his sons and grandsons, not only opened up Asia but provided enough order so that people could travel there.

The Mongols were the last of the great solar-powered scourges who gathered strength on the grassland steppes of Central Asia and emerged in search of plunder and destruction. The invention of the bronze bit in about 800 BCE put the steppe dweller on horseback, and his mobility let him find new pastures to fuel ever-larger herds. Later advances in ironworking and weaponry made him a terrifying foe. The Greeks called these barbarians Scythians; Herodotus said they descended from Hercules’ son, Scythes, inventor of the bow and arrow. Another name for the barbarians—Sarmatians—came from the Greek for “lizard-eyed.” (Going by that description, there are still many Sarmatians in Russia today.) The Roman poet Ovid wrote of the dangerous steppe barbarians during his Black Sea exile in the first century
AD:
“When the fierce strength of the mighty Boreas fetters the waters, then at once the barbarian enemy rides along the Ister [Danube] . . . The enemy, mighty with horses and his swiftly flying arrows, lays waste the countryside far and wide.”

Scythians, Goths, Huns, Magyars, Avars, Khazars—the waves of nomadic peoples of the grasslands came and went. The ever-renewing Central Asian pastures, and their wild horsemen, constituted one of the hazards of the planet for more than a thousand years. Attempts to fence the steppe barbarians out by means of walls, of which the Great Wall of China was only the most dramatic example, never did solve the problem. In the end, all that really worked was shooting the mounted invaders with guns. By the fifteenth century, fortunately for civilization, the improved battlefield efficiency of firearms had moved military advantage to the defenders’ side.

But before the steppe barbarians receded into history forever, they produced a final, world-shaking spasm with the Mongols and Genghis
Khan. The Mongols were originally one of many tribes on the eastern steppes and Genghis only a local tribal leader. He was born with the name Temuchin in 1167 on the banks of the Onon River in the grasslands between Lake Baikal and the Great Wall. His mother, Alan-Koa, was said to have been impregnated by the sky god Koko Tengri entering her tent on a moonbeam and penetrating her womb with a ray of light. The clot of black blood the baby was holding in his fist at birth augured his future and the world’s. By young manhood, Temuchin had fought and maneuvered his way to a chieftainship, employing remarkable gifts of organization and a knack for judging his comrades’ character and inspiring loyalty. In 1206, the
kuriltai
, or gathering of tribes, elected him the Great Khan; “Genghis” means something like “oceanic.” From that point his armies grew and added new and more-distant conquests every year.

Almost the only not-horrible thing about the Mongols was if you happened to be one yourself. Within the group they treated one another generously and fairly, following the legal code called the
yasaq
, laid down by Genghis Khan. Plus, there was the comradely fun of destroying and pillaging civilizations from Peking to Bukhara. A Muslim eyewitness to the invasion of the Irano-Mesopotamian borderlands told a Persian historian how the Mongols cheerfully mocked the Islamic cry “
la ilaha illa allah
,” shouting it when they were about to kill someone. “The massacre over, they plundered the town and carried off the women,” the witness said. “I saw them frolicking on their horses . . . they laughed, they sang in their own language, and they said: ‘
la ilaha illa allah.
’” After victories, the Mongols sometimes put boards on top of their prisoners and had drinking contests on them.

Genghis Khan told the peoples he conquered that he was their punishment for the soft, luxurious lives they had been leading. Certainly, the Mongols’ existence on the steppes had been the opposite of that. Physically, the Mongols were narrow waisted, small footed, with large heads; many had the bowlegs nomads acquire from growing up on horseback. The men shaved the crowns of their heads and left bangs hanging down in front and two long locks in back, which they braided and tied to their ears. They had thick eyebrows. Much of their lives was spent outdoors in the steppes’ fierce climate, almost always on horseback. They would mount up and ride whenever they had to go a distance farther than a hundred paces. Observers said the Mongols would eat just about
anything—mare’s milk curds dried on rocks, roots, lice, dogs, rats, meat tenderized by being ridden on all day beneath a saddle. Marco Polo said they ate a lot of hamsters, which were plentiful on the steppes. Other observers noted that on long journeys Mongol riders would open a vein in their horse’s neck and fill a small bowl with blood, or drink directly from the vein. They could endure extreme cold or heat while riding, Friar Carpini said, and after two days with no food “sing and make merry as if they have eaten their bellies full.”

The heads of Mongol arrows were four fingers broad, to cause bigger wounds, and they kept them sharp with files. No Mongol soldier was without a file. Their arrows had very thin notches, too small for their enemies’ bowstrings, so the arrows could not be picked up and shot back at them. Their bows were of horn and sinew on a wood frame and took two men to string. They wore iron helmets and armor made of polished iron sewn on leather; one observer described an army clad in this armor shining like the sun. On the open steppes, they tended to get hit by lightning. Thunder terrified them. During their long campaigns they carried all kinds of belongings with them—whole houses made of felt, on giant carts—with their immense herds of horses and oxen providing the transport. In the summers, when the grazing was the best, they journeyed most widely. A historian has written that in battle the Mongols “made the fullest use of the terror inspired by their physique, their ugliness, and their stench.” Considering that in summer their diet consisted almost entirely of mare’s milk, and that the
yasaq
had strictures against ever washing their clothes, that last point sounds plausible.

By the time of Genghis’s death in 1227, the Mongols had subdued northern China, middle Asia, the Crimea, and the northern Caucasus; their empire stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. In the process, they had killed tens of millions of people—more than eighteen million in China alone, over one and a half million in the Central Asian city of Herat, according to contemporary historians. A Persian chronicler said that in the Muslim countries Genghis invaded, “not one in a thousand of the inhabitants survived.” These estimates are perhaps exaggerated, but they give an idea of how contemporaries saw the calamity. Rashid ad-Din, a Persian who is considered to be perhaps the best ancient authority on Genghis Khan, quotes Genghis’s saying that the greatest pleasure in life is “to cut my enemies in pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions,
witness the tears of those who are dear to them and to embrace their wives and daughters.” This, more than any Taoist precepts he might have acquired from Ch’ang ch’un, is the enduring wisdom of Genghis Khan.

And on the subject of embracing those wives and daughters: Genghis had hundreds of wives and concubines among different harems around his empire. Whenever women were captured, the most beautiful were presented to the soldiers’ immediate superiors, who passed the most beautiful to their superiors, and so on up to the khan. The very fairest were called “moonlike girls.” Genghis’s sons and the subsequent princes in his line continued this practice. Of course, Genghis and his heirs fathered many children. A Persian historian writing about the Mongols in 1260 said that by then the Mongol leader had twenty thousand descendants living; the historian added that he knew he would be accused of exaggerating.

Recently, geneticists from Oxford University working with colleagues from China, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan spent ten years taking blood samples from men in Central Asia to study the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son. The geneticists found that a distinctive cluster of Y chromosomes in the DNA of 8 percent of the men indicated descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The geneticists believed that the ancestor was Genghis Khan (or rather, an eleventh-century ancestor of Genghis Khan). From this study they concluded that in Central Asia, about sixteen million men—or about one-half of 1 percent of the world’s entire male population—is descended from Genghis Khan.

During Genghis’s lifetime, the Mongols took only a passing interest in Russia. As I mentioned in chapter two, Genghis gave the western part of his empire to his eldest son, Jochi. In 1237, ten years after Genghis’s death, Jochi’s son Batu, whose name meant “hard or durable” in Mongol, set out at the head of a great army to bring Mongol rule to the Russian principalities. Batu chose winter for his campaign, and with horses and carts and men made his way along Russia’s central rivers, obligingly level and hard frozen. As the army advanced, steaming, the prince of
the city of Ryazan sent his son Feodor to meet them with presents. Batu accepted the gifts and told Feodor that he had heard that the prince of Ryazan had a beautiful wife, a princess named Euphrasia. Batu informed Feodor that he would like to see this wife. Feodor said Christian princes were not in the habit of showing their wives to infidels. Batu then beheaded Feodor, and at the news of this Euphrasia jumped from an upper room in the palace to her death.