On the morning of the first day of the first month of the year of the Tiger, in the year 1206 by the reckoning the Mongols would later adopt, on a grassy rise above the headwaters of the Onon River in what is now the Khentii Mountains of north-eastern Mongolia, a man in his early forties sat on a felt mat in front of a gathering of clan chiefs, tribal lords, commanders of ten thousand, commanders of a thousand, commanders of a hundred, and the standard bearers of the nine great banners of the steppe. The man was Temujin, the son of Yesugei, of the Borjigin clan, of the Kiyat tribe, of the Mongol people. He had been proclaimed, that morning, by the assembled kurultai, as the universal ruler of the Mongol people, with the title Genghis Khan, the oceanic, the universal, the khan of khans. The title was a Mongol borrowing of the Chinese word huangdi, the supreme ruler, and of the Uighur word khan, the prince. The man who took the title had spent the previous twenty years, since the murder of his father by the Tartars when Temujin was about nine, in a long, patient and extraordinarily violent campaign of unification. He had united, by 1206, the Mongol confederation, the Kerait, the Naiman, the Merkit, the Tatar, the Oirats, the forest peoples of the north, the Uriankhai, the Oyirad, the Bargu, the forest Tatars, the tribes of the Siberian forest who had been the source of Genghis Khan’s mother Hoelun, and the smaller clans of the central and eastern steppe. The assembly that gathered above the Onon that morning was, by any standard of the day, a continental event. It was also the founding moment of one of the largest land empires the world has ever seen.
The empire Genghis Khan built
The empire that Genghis Khan had built by 1206 was still small. The Mongol homeland, in the first years of the thirteenth century, was a single plateau, an area roughly the size of modern Mongolia, bounded by the Siberian forest to the north, the Gobi to the south, the Altai to the west, and the Khalkha river steppe to the east. The Mongols were a confederation of some two million people, organised into nine banners, each a tactical unit of ten thousand, drawn from the families of the clans. The confederation was, in 1206, a confederation of horsemen, a confederation of herders, and a confederation of clever craftsmen of the felt-covered yurt. The confederation was not a state in the Chinese sense. It did not have a bureaucracy, a census, a treasury, a permanent capital, a written law, a standing army, or a tax system. The confederation had a leader, a kurultai to confirm him, a customary law called the Yassa, a decimal military organisation, and a long memory of who had supported whom in the long wars of the previous twenty years.
The empire that Genghis Khan was to build between 1206 and his death in 1227 was, by contrast, an empire on the scale of China. The Mongols conquered, in roughly the order of the campaign, the Western Xia in 1209 and 1226, the Jin dynasty of north China in 1211 to 1215, the Khwarezmian empire of Central Asia and Persia in 1219 to 1221, and the various Turkic and Iranian kingdoms of eastern Iran and Afghanistan in 1221 to 1223. The Mongol armies, in this first generation, were small by the standards of the day. The main army of Genghis Khan rarely exceeded a hundred thousand men, and the average field army was closer to twenty or thirty thousand. The Mongols conquered, not by numbers, but by a combination of five factors: the tactical flexibility of the Mongol horse archers, the corps system of tumens and minghans, the discipline of the decimal organisation, the deliberate incorporation of defeated engineers, sappers and siege captains, and the use of terror as a weapon. The siege of Samarkand in 1220, the siege of Merv in 1221, the siege of Bamyan in 1221, were each accompanied by massacres of civilians that persuaded the next city to surrender without a fight. The Mongol empire of 1206 to 1227 was, in this sense, an empire of conquest by terror, but also an empire of great administrative cunning. Genghis Khan, in the last years of his life, was laying the foundations of a state, not just an army.
The state that Genghis Khan was building rested on three institutions. The first was the Yassa, a written law code in the Uyghur script, issued in 1209 and revised in 1218 and 1220. The Yassa was, in its surviving form, a body of rules covering the obligations of soldiers, the punishment of theft, the regulation of marriage and inheritance, the postal relay system, the conduct of wars, and the obligations of the various religious communities to the Mongol state. The Yassa was, in its application, severe. The Yassa was, in the standard phrase of the surviving chronicles, a law that did not bend. The second institution was the yam, the postal relay system. The yam was a network of post stations, each equipped with relays of horses, run by a hereditary class of postmasters, that carried the messages and the envoys of the Great Khan across the empire at a rate of some three hundred kilometres a day. The yam was, in the standard phrase, the spine of the empire. The third institution was the keshig, the imperial guard. The keshig was a body of a thousand chosen youths, drawn from the families of the imperial clan, who served as the household troops of the Great Khan and as the training ground for the next generation of generals, governors and administrators. The keshig was, in the standard phrase, the seed-bed of the empire.
The four khanates and the Blue Horde
The empire of Genghis Khan, in 1227 at the time of his death, was divided, by a yarlig, an imperial decree, among his four surviving sons. Jochi, the eldest, had died in 1227, possibly in a hunting accident, and the patrimony of Jochi was divided between his sons Batu and Orda, who were given the western steppe, the western Siberia, and the western march of the empire, the lands that would become the territory of the Golden Horde. Chagatai, the second son, was given the territory of the old Karakhanid and Khwarezmian empires, the Central Asian lands from the Amu Darya to the Ili. Ögedei, the third son, was given the Mongol homeland. Tolui, the youngest, was given the Mongolian heartland, the home country, which his sons were to inherit after his death. The division of 1227 was a division of the spoils, a division of the pastures, and a division of the rights to future conquest. The division was, in the standard phrase, a blueprint for the four khanates that were to emerge in the next generation.
The four khanates emerged in the course of the next thirty years, as the empire expanded west, south and east, and as the rights of conquest were partitioned between the four lines. The first of the four to become de facto independent was the khanate of the House of Jochi, the western khanate, which was held by Batu and his successors, and which was in due course divided into two wings: the Blue Horde, the western wing, the right wing, the White Horde, the eastern wing, the left wing, the senior wing. The Blue Horde was, in this sense, the western wing of the House of Jochi, and the Golden Horde, the senior khanate of the Jochi line, was the federation of the Blue and the White. The second was the khanate of the House of Chagatai, the Central Asian khanate, which held the lands from Transoxiana to the Ili. The third was the khanate of the House of Tolui, which Tolui’s sons divided between themselves in 1251: Möngke took the western half, the Mongol heartland, and Hulagu took the western march, the Persian khanate, the Ilkhanate. The fourth was the khanate of the House of Ögedei, the Mongol homeland, which was to be held by the Ögedeid line until the death of Kaidu in 1301. The four khanates were, by 1260, the four great divisions of the Mongol world, and the holder of the imperial title of Great Khan was, in this sense, the senior khan of the four.
The Yuan Dynasty, 1271 to 1368
The Yuan Dynasty was the dynasty of the Mongols in China. The dynasty was founded in 1271 by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan through Tolui, who had taken the title of emperor in the Chinese fashion and who had, in 1271, declared the dynasty’s name to be Yuan, the primordial, the original, in conscious echo of the Chinese classical tradition. Kublai Khan had been proclaimed the Great Khan at the kurultai of 1260, in the aftermath of the death of his elder brother Möngke, and had, in the years between 1260 and 1279, completed the conquest of southern China, the Song Dynasty’s last stand, the Song capital Hangzhou, the Song loyalist court at Yamen, the last Song emperors, the child emperors Bing and Shi, the last prince of the Song, the last loyalist of the Song. The Yuan Dynasty was, by 1279, the dynasty of the Mongols in all of China, and the dynasty of the Mongols in Korea, in Tibet, in Mongolia, in Manchuria, in the Tarim Basin, and in the western marches. The Yuan Dynasty was, in the standard phrase, the Mongol century in China.
The Yuan Dynasty was, in its administration, a Chinese dynasty in form and a Mongol dynasty in substance. The dynasty used the Chinese bureaucracy, the Chinese six ministries, the Chinese examination system, the Chinese provincial structure, the Chinese capital, the Chinese court rituals, the Chinese court language, the Chinese calendar, the Chinese weight and measure, the Chinese coin, the Chinese salt monopoly, the Chinese tea monopoly, the Chinese iron monopoly, the Chinese granary system. The dynasty was, in this sense, a Chinese dynasty. The dynasty was also, at the same time, a Mongol dynasty. The dynasty reserved the highest offices for Mongols, kept the Mongol customary law in force for Mongols, organised the army by the Mongol decimal system, kept the Mongol postal system in place, and gave the Mongol religious establishment, the Mongol shamans, the Mongol lamas, the Mongols of the four great ordos, a privileged place in the ritual life of the capital. The dynasty was, in this sense, a dual administration: a Chinese administration in the Chinese provinces, and a Mongol administration in the Mongol homelands, both under the same emperor. The duality was, in the standard phrase, the secret of the Yuan.
The Yuan Dynasty was, in its economy, an economy of paper, of silver, of credit, of the Silk Road, and of the maritime trade. The Yuan issued the world’s first state-backed paper money, the jiaochao, in a series of denominations, with a sophisticated system of reserves, with exchange rates against silver, with a centralised minting authority. The Yuan also reopened the Silk Road, in the form of the kaftan road, the road of the mounted couriers, the road of the merchant caravans, that ran from Hangzhou through Karakorum to Sarai and to the Crimea. The Yuan also opened the maritime trade, the trade of the Chinese junks, the trade of the South China Sea, the trade of the Indian Ocean, the trade of the Persian Gulf, the trade of the Red Sea, the trade of the East African coast. The Yuan was, in the standard phrase, the first global economy. The Yuan was, by the time of Kublai Khan’s death in 1294, the largest economy the world had ever seen.
The Yuan Dynasty began to weaken in the fourteenth century. The succession disputes, the financial crises, the floodings of the Yellow River in the 1340s, the famine of 1354, the plague of 1358, the rise of the Red Turban rebels, the rise of the White Lotus, the rise of the various rebel commanders, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming, the rebel who was to capture Nanjing in 1356, the rebel who was to take Dadu in 1368, the rebel who was to proclaim the Ming Dynasty in Nanjing in 1368, the rebel who was to drive the Mongol court back to the steppe. The Yuan Dynasty fell in 1368, after a hundred and seven years, in the same way that so many Chinese dynasties had fallen, in the same way that the Song had fallen, in the same way that the Tang had fallen: a cascade of small rebellions, a cascade of incompetent emperors, a cascade of natural disasters, a cascade of administrative failures, a cascade of military failures, culminating in the loss of the capital, the flight of the court, the proclamation of a new dynasty, the resumption of the imperial cycle.
The Northern Yuan, 1368 to 1635
The Northern Yuan was the name given by the Chinese to the Mongol empire in Mongolia after the loss of China. The Northern Yuan was, in form, a continuation of the Yuan Dynasty in the homeland, a steppe empire that retained the Yuan administrative forms, the Yuan court rituals, the Yuan titles, the Yuan ceremonial, the Yuan capital at Karakorum. The Northern Yuan was, in substance, a different kind of state from the Yuan Dynasty, a state that was no longer a dynasty of the Mongols in China, but a state of the Mongols in the homeland, a state that was forced to live within the narrower confines of the Mongolian plateau, a state that was increasingly squeezed between the rising Ming Dynasty in the south, the rising Oirats in the west, the rising Cossack and Russian settlements in the north. The Northern Yuan was, in this sense, a residual empire, an empire that retained the forms of empire but had lost the substance of empire.
The Northern Yuan was, in its first century, a vigorous state. The first Northern Yuan emperor, Biligtü Khan, the last of the legitimate Yuan emperors, attempted a counter-invasion of China in 1370, with the help of the loyalist Chinese general Xu Da, who had defected to the Ming. The counter-invasion failed. Biligtü Khan was succeeded by a series of khans, Uskhal, Tögüs, Engke, who held the steppe together by the careful use of marriage alliances, the careful use of hostage exchanges, the careful use of the kheshig, the imperial guard. The Northern Yuan reached its high point under Dayan Khan, who ruled from 1464 to 1517, who was to re-unite the eastern and western Mongols, who was to reform the kheshig, who was to defeat the Oirats, who was to drive the Ming garrisons out of the Ordos, who was to give the Northern Yuan another century of stability. The Northern Yuan survived, in a recognisable form, until the reign of Ligden Khan, the last khan, who died in 1634, who was defeated by the rising Manchu state of the Later Jin, and whose death marked the end of the Mongol empire in any formal sense.
The Northern Yuan was, in the longer run, a state that was slowly dissolved. The Ming Dynasty, in the second half of the fourteenth century, was to construct the long walls, the stone walls, the signal towers, the garrison towns, the guard posts, the lines of the inner and outer walls, that were to define the Ming-Mongol frontier for the next three centuries. The Northern Yuan was, in the second half of the sixteenth century, to be caught between the rising power of the Oirats in the west, the rising power of the Manchus in the east, and the slow contraction of the steppe economy. The Northern Yuan, in this sense, was a state that was squeezed by three forces, and that was, in the end, dissolved. The dissolution was not a single event but a long process, a process of the redistribution of the Mongol peoples, a process of the resettlement of the Mongols in the four great leagues of the Qing, a process of the slow conversion of the Mongol aristocracy to Tibetan Buddhism, a process of the slow incorporation of the Mongols into the Qing imperial system. The Northern Yuan was, in the standard phrase, the last of the Mongol empires in the homeland.
The Golden Horde, 1242 to 1502
The Golden Horde was the khanate of the House of Jochi in the western steppe. The khanate took its name, in the standard phrase, from the colour of the royal tent of the ruling khan. The Golden Horde was, in its territory, the largest of the four khanates. The Golden Horde held, in its prime in the late thirteenth century, the whole of the western steppe from the Carpathians to the Irtysh, the whole of the Russian principalities in vassalage, the whole of the Caucasus, the Crimean peninsula, the Kuban, the Volga Bulgaria, the western Siberia, the Khwarezmian marches. The Golden Horde was, in its capital, the city of Sarai Batu, founded by Batu Khan in 1242 on the lower Volga, near the modern site of Tsarev in the Astrakhan oblast, a city of some seventy-five thousand people in the late thirteenth century, a city of mosques, of markets, of imperial palace, of postal stations, of the great tent-city of the ruling khan. The Golden Horde was, in its administration, a federation of the two wings: the Blue Horde, the western wing, the right wing, which held the lands west of the Yaik, the Ural river, the elder wing, the wing of the senior khan; and the White Horde, the eastern wing, the left wing, the lands east of the Yaik, the lands of the younger khan.
The Golden Horde was, in its economy, an economy of the steppe, an economy of the long-range pastoral nomadism, an economy of the horse, the sheep, the camel, and the slave. The Golden Horde controlled, in its prime, the trade routes from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Volga to the Khwarezm, from the Crimea to the Mongol court at Karakorum. The Golden Horde collected, from the Russian principalities, the tribute of furs, of honey, of wax, of grain, of silver, the tribute of the so-called Tatar yoke, a tribute that was to last, in some form, until 1480. The Golden Horde issued, in the late thirteenth century, its own coinage, the silver dirham, with the tamgha, the seal of the ruling khan, in imitation of the coinage of the Ilkhanate and the Chagatai. The Golden Horde was, in the standard phrase, the most commercial of the four khanates.
The Golden Horde began to weaken in the late fourteenth century, in the same way that the Yuan was weakening, in the same way that the Chagatai was weakening, in the same way that the Ilkhanate had already broken up. The Golden Horde was weakened by the succession disputes of the late fourteenth century, by the rise of the White Horde as an independent power, by the rise of the Crimean Tatar aristocracy, by the rise of the Lithuanian and Muscovite Russian principalities, by the slow conversion of the ruling elite to Islam, by the Black Death of the 1340s. The Golden Horde was, in 1380, defeated at the Battle of Kulikovo, by the Muscovite prince Dmitry Donskoy, a battle that was to mark the beginning of the end of the Mongol yoke over Russia. The Golden Horde was, in 1395, sacked by Timur, who had just completed the conquest of the Chagatai and was now extending his reach to the western steppe. The Golden Horde was, in 1478, replaced, in the Crimea, by the independent Crimean Khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. The Golden Horde was, in 1502, finally destroyed, by the Crimean khan Mengli Giray, who was to take the last Great Horde khan and to end the dynasty. The Golden Horde was, in the standard phrase, the longest of the four khanates, and the slowest to fall.
The Blue Horde
The Blue Horde was, in the standard phrase, the elder wing of the House of Jochi. The Blue Horde was, in its territory, the lands of Batu and his successors, the western wing of the House of Jochi, the lands west of the Yaik river, the lands that are now the southern Ukraine, the Crimea, the Kuban, the lower Volga, the western steppe, the eastern Caucasus. The Blue Horde was, in the standard phrase, the elder khanate, the khanate of the senior khan, the khanate of the ruler of the Golden Horde. The White Horde was, in this sense, the khanate of the younger brother, the khanate of the heir apparent, the khanate of the cadet branch. The two khanates were, in their internal structure, identical. The two khanates were, in their external relations, a single khanate, the Golden Horde, the federation of the two wings, under the senior khan of the Blue Horde.
The Blue Horde was, in its history, the more powerful of the two wings. The Blue Horde held the imperial capital at Sarai Batu, the imperial postal system, the imperial markets, the imperial mints, the imperial mosques. The Blue Horde was, in the late thirteenth century, the senior partner of the Golden Horde, and the holder of the title of Great Khan of the West. The Blue Horde was, in the early fourteenth century, to lose this seniority to the White Horde, in the great succession dispute of 1313, when the White Horde, under Töle-Buka, was to depose the Blue Horde khan and to take the title of Great Khan of the West. The Blue Horde was, after the dispute, to continue as a separate khanate until the early fifteenth century, when the two khanates were, in the standard phrase, reunited, briefly, under the last Great Horde khans, before the slow disintegration of the Golden Horde into the successor khanates of the Crimea, of Kazan, of Astrakhan, of the Nogai, of the Sibir. The Blue Horde was, in the standard phrase, the western wing of the House of Jochi, and the elder wing of the Golden Horde.
The Blue Horde was, in the longer view, the khanate of the western steppe, the khanate that was to give the Golden Horde its commercial importance, its urban culture, its mosque architecture, its mamluk slave-soldier system, its trade with the Mamluk Sultanate, its trade with the Byzantine Empire, its trade with the Italian city-states of the Crimea, its trade with the Muscovite principality. The Blue Horde was, in the standard phrase, the commercial wing of the Golden Horde, the western wing, the maritime wing, the wing that was to give the Golden Horde its historical importance as the intermediary between the European and the Asian worlds. The Blue Horde was, in the standard phrase, the elder khanate of the House of Jochi.
The Chagatai Khanate, 1226 to 1370
The Chagatai Khanate was the khanate of the House of Chagatai in Central Asia. The khanate was, in its territory, the lands of the old Karakhanid khanate, the lands of the old Khwarezmian empire, the lands of the old Samanid, the Ghaznavid, the Ghorid, the Ghurid, the lands from the Amu Darya to the Ili, from the Aral Sea to the Pamirs, from the Hindu Kush to the Tarim Basin. The Chagatai Khanate was, in its capital, the city of Samarkand in the west, and the city of Almaliq in the east, and the city of Qarshi in the south, and the city of Yulduz in the Tien Shan. The Chagatai Khanate was, in its administration, the most divided of the four khanates, the most tribal, the most riven by the old tribal politics of the steppe. The Chagatai Khanate was, in this sense, a federation of two wings: the western wing, the sedentary wing, the Transoxianan wing, the wing of the cities, of the irrigation systems, of the Persian-speaking Muslim population; and the eastern wing, the nomadic wing, the Moghulistani wing, the wing of the steppe, of the herdsmen, of the Turkic-speaking population. The two wings were, in the standard phrase, perpetually at odds.
The Chagatai Khanate was, in its first century, a vigorous state. The Chagatai khanate was, in the late thirteenth century, the most Islamic of the four khanates, the khanate of the Persian-speaking Muslim population, the khanate of the Timurid-influenced urban culture of Bukhara and Samarkand. The Chagatai khanate was, in the early fourteenth century, the khanate of the great khan Kebek, who was to introduce the first Chagatai khanate coinage, the first Chagatai khanate silver dirham, the first Chagatai khanate urban administration, the first Chagatai khanate system of tax farming, the first Chagatai khanate system of land grants, the first Chagatai khanate system of postal stations. The Chagatai khanate was, in the early fourteenth century, a settled, Islamic, Persian-speaking khanate, a khanate that was to give the Timurid Empire its bureaucratic inheritance.
The Chagatai Khanate was, in its last century, a state in slow dissolution. The Chagatai was, in the 1340s, divided into a western half and an eastern half, the western half nominally a vassal of the Qa’an, the Great Khan at Dadu, the eastern half a confederation of the Moghul khanate. The Chagatai was, in the 1350s, the object of the rising power of the western Chagatai, the rising power of the Turko-Mongol confederations of the Mawarannahr, the rising power of Timur, the rising power of the Amir of the Jagatai, the rising power of the Jagatai warlords. The Chagatai was, in 1370, replaced, in Mawarannahr, by the Timurid Empire, the empire of Timur, who was to take Samarkand, to take Bukhara, to take Balkh, to take Herat, to take Baghdad, to take the eastern Chagatai, the eastern wing, in his long campaigns. The Chagatai was, in this sense, the khanate that was to be replaced by the Timurid Empire, the khanate that was to give the Timurid Empire its Mongol heritage, its Mongol claims, its Mongol legitimacy, its Mongol administrative forms, its Mongol postal system, its Mongol tax farming, its Mongol coinage.
The Ilkhanate, 1256 to 1335
The Ilkhanate was the khanate of the House of Tolui in the west, the khanate of Hulagu, the brother of Möngke, the grandson of Genghis Khan. The khanate took its name, the Ilkhanate, the khanate of the Ilkhan, the subordinate khan, the khan who was the deputy of the Great Khan at Karakorum, the khan who was to give the dynasty of Hulagu its name. The Ilkhanate was, in its territory, the lands of the old Khwarezmian empire, the lands of the old Seljuk empire, the lands of the old Ghaznavid empire, the lands of the old Abbasid Caliphate, the lands of the old Fatimid Caliphate, the lands of the old Atabegate of Azerbaijan, the lands of the old Ayyubid sultanate, the lands from the Amu Darya to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Strait of Hormuz, from Anatolia to the Helmand. The Ilkhanate was, in its capital, the city of Tabriz in the north-west, the city of Maragheh in the east, the city of Sultaniyya in the south, the city of Baghdad in the south, the city of Hamadan, the city of Isfahan, the city of Shiraz. The Ilkhanate was, in the standard phrase, the most urban of the four khanates.
The Ilkhanate was, in its first century, a state of extraordinary cultural ambition. The Ilkhanate was, in the late thirteenth century, the khanate of the great khan Hulagu, who had taken Baghdad in 1258, who had ended the Abbasid Caliphate, who had been visited by the Nestorian Christians, by the Catholic missionaries, by the Jewish scholars, by the Persian astronomers. The Ilkhanate was, in the early fourteenth century, the khanate of the great khan Ghazan, who was to convert to Islam, who was to reform the tax system, who was to introduce the jiaochao paper money, who was to commission the great history of the Mongols, the Jami al-Tawarikh, the Compendium of Chronicles, the great work of Rashid al-Din, the most ambitious universal history that the medieval world had ever seen. The Ilkhanate was, in the early fourteenth century, a state of the great Ilkhanid painting, the Ilkhanid ceramics, the Ilkhanid metalwork, the Ilkhanid manuscript illumination. The Ilkhanate was, in the standard phrase, the great khanate of the Persian Renaissance.
The Ilkhanate was, in its last half century, a state in slow dissolution. The Ilkhanate was, in the 1330s, divided by the disputes of the late Ilkhanid princes, the disputes of Abu Sa’id, the disputes of the Chobanids, the disputes of the Jalairids. The Ilkhanate was, in 1335, at the death of Abu Sa’id, without an heir, and was to be divided, in the standard phrase, into a number of successor khanates: the Jalairid sultanate in Baghdad, the Chobanid khanate in the north, the Muzaffarid khanate in the south, the Sarbedar khanate in Khorasan, the Kartid khanate in Herat, the Inju khanate in Fars, the Afrasiyab khanate in Transoxiana. The Ilkhanate was, in the standard phrase, the khanate that was the first to break up, the khanate that was the most culturally accomplished, the khanate that was to give the Timurid Empire its Persian inheritance, its Persian administrative forms, its Persian painting, its Persian architecture, its Persian coinage.
The Timurid Empire, 1370 to 1507
The Timurid Empire was the empire of Timur, in the central Islamic lands, the empire of the Turko-Mongol confederations of Mawarannahr, the empire of the Barlas, the empire of the Jalair, the empire of the Yulduz. The Timurid Empire was, in its foundation, a confederation of the old Chagatai Khanate, the old western Chagatai, the old eastern Chagatai, the old Moghulistan, the old Transoxiana. The Timurid Empire was, in its founder, a man named Timur, the son of Taraghai, of the Barlas, of the Mongol heritage of the Chagatai line, born in 1336 in the city of Kesh, the modern Shahrisabz, in the mountains south of Samarkand. Timur was, in the standard phrase, a man of extraordinary military talent, a man of extraordinary ambition, a man of extraordinary brutality. Timur was, in 1370, to take Samarkand, to take Bukhara, to take Balkh, to take Herat, to take the eastern Chagatai, in his long campaigns, the campaigns that were to give the Timurid Empire its territory and its name.
The Timurid Empire was, in its territory, the lands of the old Chagatai khanate, the lands of the old Ilkhanate, the lands of the old Golden Horde, the lands of the old western steppe, the lands of the old Delhi sultanate, the lands of the old Mamluk sultanate, the lands of the old Ottoman emirate. The Timurid Empire was, in its prime in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the largest empire in the world, an empire of some three and a half million square miles, an empire of a hundred and forty million people, an empire of the old Silk Road, the old caravan routes, the old commercial cities of Central Asia, the old silk and spice trade. The Timurid Empire was, in its capital, the city of Samarkand, the city of Herat, the city of Kabul, the city of Isfahan, the city of Tabriz, the city of Baghdad, the city of Delhi, the city of Bursa, the city of Aleppo, the city of Damascus. The Timurid Empire was, in the standard phrase, the last of the great steppe empires of the inner Asian tradition.
The Timurid Empire was, in its cultural life, an empire of extraordinary brilliance. The Timurid Empire was, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the centre of the Persian Renaissance, the centre of the Timurid painting, the centre of the Timurid architecture, the centre of the Timurid metalwork, the centre of the Timurid manuscript illumination. The Timurid Empire was, in this sense, the cultural heir of the Ilkhanate, the cultural heir of the Seljuk, the cultural heir of the Ghaznavid, the cultural heir of the Samanid. The Timurid Empire was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the centre of the great Timurid miniatures, the great Timurid carpet weaving, the great Timurid tilework of the Registan, the great Timurid astronomical observations of Ulugh Beg, the great Timurid history of Hafiz-i Abru, the great Timurid histories of Shami and of Yazdi, the great Timurid verse of Jami, of Mir Ali Shir Nava’i, of Husayn Bayqara. The Timurid Empire was, in the standard phrase, the high point of the inner Asian Islamic tradition, the high point of the Turko-Mongol inheritance, the high point of the Persianate civilisation of the central Islamic lands.
The Timurid Empire was, in its last century, a state in slow dissolution. The Timurid was, in 1469, divided between the Timurid of Herat, the Timurid of Kabul, the Timurid of Samarkand, the Timurid of Bukhara, the Timurid of the western steppe, the Timurid of the eastern steppe. The Timurid was, in 1500, defeated, in the west, by the rising Shaybanid Uzbek confederation, who was to take Samarkand and Bukhara, who was to found the Khanate of Bukhara, who was to be the heir of the eastern Timurid. The Timurid was, in 1504, defeated, in the east, by the rising Mughal confederation of Babur, who was to take Kabul, who was to take Kandahar, who was to cross the Indus, who was to take Delhi, who was to found the Mughal Empire of India, the empire that was to be the last great Islamic empire of South Asia, the empire that was to last until 1857. The Timurid was, in this sense, the empire that was to give two of the great Islamic empires of the early modern world, the Shaybanid, the Mughal, the empire that was to give both of them their Mongol heritage, their Mongol claims, their Mongol legitimacy, their Mongol administrative forms, their Mongol postal system, their Mongol tax farming, their Mongol coinage.
What lasted
The Mongol empire, in the long view, was an empire of two things. The Mongol empire was, in the first place, an empire of the postal system, the yam, the relay stations, the courier system, that was to give the inner Asian world, the central Islamic world, the Russian principalities, the Chinese provinces, the Indian subcontinent, the unified system of long-distance communication that was to last, in some form, until the twentieth century. The Mongol empire was, in the second place, an empire of paper money, of the silver dirham, of the credit system, of the kaftan road, the road of the merchant caravans, that was to give the early modern world the first global economy, the first truly Eurasian economy, the first economy in which a merchant in Hangzhou could draw a bill of exchange on a merchant in Sarai, in which a merchant in Bukhara could draw a bill on a merchant in Tabriz, in which a merchant in Tabriz could draw a bill on a merchant in Genoa, in which a merchant in Genoa could draw a bill on a merchant in Bruges, in which a merchant in Bruges could draw a bill on a merchant in Venice, in which the merchants of the inner Asian world and the merchants of the European world were, for the first time, in a single commercial system. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the empire of the postal system, the empire of the paper money, the empire of the first global economy, the empire that was to give the early modern world its first global system.
The Mongol empire, in the long view, was also an empire of catastrophe. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase of the surviving chronicles, an empire of the massacre, of the sack, of the burning. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, an empire that had killed some thirty to forty million people in the thirteenth century, an empire that had reduced the population of Central Asia by perhaps a quarter, an empire that had reduced the population of Iran by perhaps a third, an empire that had reduced the population of the Russian principalities by perhaps a tenth, an empire that had reduced the population of the Chinese provinces by perhaps a tenth. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the catastrophe of the thirteenth century, the catastrophe that was to give the early modern world its first demographic crisis, its first global demographic crisis, its first crisis of depopulation, its first crisis of the desiccation of the irrigation systems, its first crisis of the collapse of the urban systems, its first crisis of the long recession of the inner Asian world. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the catastrophe that was to give the early modern world its first long recession.
The Mongol empire, in the longer view, was the last of the great steppe empires of the inner Asian tradition. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the last of the great confederations of the steppe, the last of the great empires of the horse, the last of the great empires of the felt tent, the last of the great empires of the long-range pastoral nomadism. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the last of the great empires that had been able to project the military power of the steppe across the whole of the inner Asian world and into the sedentary world of China, the Islamic world, the Christian world, the Indic world. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the last of the great empires of the inner Asian tradition. The Mongol empire was, in the standard phrase, the last of the great empires that was, in its full territorial extent, the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen.
References
- Weatherford, Jack (2004). Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Crown. The narrative account of the Mongol conquests, the yam postal system, and the long-term demographic and economic effects.
- Allsen, Thomas T. (2001). Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge University Press. The scholarly account of the Mongol empire as a cultural system, with attention to the trade in luxury goods, the postal relay, and the patterns of conquest across Eurasia.
- May, Timothy (2018). The Mongol Empire. Edinburgh University Press. The single-volume scholarly history of the Mongol empire, the four khanates, and the successor states, with attention to the institutional inheritance of the khanates.
- Biran, Michal (2013). “The Mongol Empire and Inter-civilizational Exchange.” In: Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (eds.), The Cambridge World History, vol. 5. Cambridge University Press, 534-558. The standard scholarly synthesis of the inter-civilizational exchange under the Mongol empire.
- Manz, Beatrice Forbes (1989). The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. Cambridge University Press. The scholarly history of Timur, the Timurid empire, and the Timurid administrative inheritance.
- Jackson, Peter (2005). The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410. Pearson. The standard account of the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe, the Golden Horde, the Blue Horde and the White Horde.
- Allsen, Thomas T. (1989). “Mongol Census Taking in Rus, 1245-1275.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 13(3-4), 301-308. The Russian principalities’ tribute lists, the population of the Russian lands under the Golden Horde, and the institutional forms of the Tatar yoke.
- Halperin, Charles J. (1985). Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Indiana University Press. The standard scholarly history of the Russian principalities under the Golden Horde, the Blue Horde, and the White Horde.
- Biran, Michal (1997). Qaidu and the Rise of Independent Central Asian, 1271-1303. Brill. The history of the Ögedeid line, the western Chagatai, and the eastern Chagatai in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
- Rashid al-Din (1304-1316). Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles). The Ilkhanate universal history commissioned by the Ilkhan Ghazan, the source for the institutional history of the Mongol empire and the four khanates.
- Boyle, John Andrew (1968). The Mongol World Empire, 1206-1370. Variorum. The standard collection of essays on the Mongol empire and the four khanates.
- Secret History of the Mongols (c. 1240). The anonymous Mongol chronicle, the source for the early life of Genghis Khan and the formation of the Mongol confederation, translated by Igor de Rachewiltz (1971-1985), East Asian History Sources, Australian National University.
