Warband Mongol Mod

[Frida Kosofsky]

TheMongol nomads lived on the move; however, this changed in the 12th century when the various tribal groups coalesced around a charismatic leader - the man known to history as Genghis Khan. He brought peace to the warring noads and established a political and military body. He also revelled in his status as a bogeyman: "All cities," he said, "should be razed so that the world may once again become a great steppe in which Mongol mothers shall suckle free and happy children."

Since ancient times a tide of warlike nomadic peoples had drifted westward out of Central Asia to bring terror to the civilizations of the Middle East and Europe. The Huns, headed by the fearsome Attila, had sent a shockwave through the Roman world; the Seljuk Turks had thrown Christendom into confusion; but the Mongols were surely the most terrifying yet - a fact made worse by Genghis Khan's voracious bloodlust.

Almost extinct in the modern world, the nomadic-pastoralist lifestyle was an unusual one and those people who lived it developed an extraordinarily specialized set of skills. Time after time, in both ancient and medieval history, these aptitudes had translated seamlessly from the open steppes of Central Asia to the field of war. Superlative horsemanship; skills with the bow and arrow and other weapons; all but unimaginable toughness and endurance: the Mongol people were equipped with all of these. For generations, though, they went to war only with one another, tribe against tribe - except when an enterprising warlord fostered a larger warband for an assault on a settled community reasonably close at hand. Thus it was from small beginnings that Genghis Khan and his sons created the biggest land empire ever seen, ranging all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Central Europe.

In the scattered, ever-mobile tribal communities, the Mongols were not the most promising material for nation-building. Certainly, many of the tribal leaders resented Genghis Khan's rise to prominence. But, but coaxing some and forcing others, by giving a promise here and administering a little pressure there, Genghis Khan slowly fashioned the Mongols into a coherent people. By 1206, when he was about 40 yeras old, Genghis Khan could at last claim to be the Khagan, or "Great Khan", the undisputed ruler of the Mongols.

This freewheeling warrior of the steppe had already shown himself a cunning and calculating politician. Now he revealed his infallible instincts as a politician and administrator. He broke up the old hierarchies in Mongol society, marginalizing the traditional elite. Instead, he gave leadership positions to his most trusted friends - or to promising fighters plucked from the ranks. Having humbled the powerful, he won the gratitude of more vulerable groups by outlawing the sale of wives and by excusing the poorest people of taxes. Genghis Khan divided his warriors up into groups of ten (arbans), a hundred (zuuns), 1,000 (myangans), and 10,000 (tumens) - taking care to cut across tribal lines of loyalty. That way he introduced a degree of regimentation to the anarchic warfare of the steppe. While he had no wish to tame his fighters' ferocity, he took careful steps to control it: rape and plunder without his sanction were strictly barred.

Genghis Khan hardly needed to train his men in archery and close-quarters fighting, however, he ensured that they practiced daily to hone their skills. Maneuvers on horseback were an essential part of herding and hunting life, but there was always scope to iron out imperfections. Rigid regimentation might have been alien to his approach, but discipline was not. Time after time, his horsemen caught out enemy forces when they appeared to break formation and flee in disorder - prompting mad pursuit - only to regriup at an instant's notice, wheel around, and fall upon their helpless enemy. (Western European cavalry forces were to adopt this trick in the centuries that followed.) Many of his warriors were to fight as armored lancers; in fact, Genghis Khan himself developed particular mounted maneuvers for these men, drilling them tirelessly until they became second nature. Mongol soldiers traveled light: most had only layers of seasoned leather, sewn onto a fabric support, by way of armor, although the lancers' wound be stiffened with plates of iron or bone. Agility in the saddle kept the soldiers safe for the most part; their diminutive horses possessed stamina and speed, and were able to travel considerable distances in a relatively short time. So much so that settled peoples who recieved news of Mongol attacks some distance away frequently underestimated just how quickly the brutal invaders would arrive.

The Mongol army swept like a storm through East Asia, invading Xi Xia, the kingdom in northwestern China, in 1207. The Mongols sacked Beijing in 1215, before heading south into the heartland of the "Middle Kingdom". Moving west, their armies attacked hte cities of the Central Asian Silk Road, and by 1222 they were making a diversion into northern India. The following year they ventured into the southern Russian steppe. By the time their enigmatic leader died in 1227, the empire of the Mongols extended from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, and Khan's successors were menacing the Arab countries of the Middle East. The pace of the Mongols' progress was dizzying, yet their military prowess depended on a great deal more than speed. Genghis Khan had never stopped learning - ande never stopped improving his fighting force. Wherever he had gone, along with his other plunder, he had captured talent: weapons-makers, armorers, and above all, engineers. This most nomadic of armies had become supreme in the most static form of warfare: the Mongols were renowned for their skill in siegecraft.

They could fill the deepest moats at speed with sandbags; their giant catapults (feats of engineering that could conveniently be taken apart for transporting on horseback, only to be reassembled quickly when needed) could hurl anything from flaming naptha to putrid animal carcasses over the highest battlements; and they had engines that could shoot dozens of fire-arrows at a time. They also had another weapon: sheer terror. When Samarkand in Uzbekistan fell after a siege in 1220, the Mongol leader had the inhabitants rounded up and led to a plain outside the city walls. The hapless people were then slaughtered and their skulls arranged into a pyramid - a sign of victory and a warning to those who might have been tempted to resist.

The conquests continued under Genghis Khan's son, Ogedei. His forces invaded Russia in 1237, leaving a trail of devastation wherever they went. In 1240 Mongol troops sacked the city of Kiev afer a gruesome siege. Ogedei's armies continued westward, separate warbands making exploratory forays into Poland and Hungary. On April 9, 1241, at Liegnitz, in Poland, a small subsidiary unit led by Mongol general Subedei, smashed the Silesian army of Duke Henry II. Just two days later, Subedei's main military force defeated the Hungarians at Mohi: the way to Western Europe, with all its riches, now lay wide open.

Then from the east came the news that Ogedei Khan had died. All the Mongol chiefs were called back for a conclave to elect his successor. By the time his successor, Gyuyuk Khan, was in place, the Mongols were preoccupied with other campaigns in the eastern regions of their realm. Much the same happened later, in 1259, when Hulegu Khan's armies were ravaging the Middle East en route to Egypt: the region was reprieved by the death of his brother, Mongke Khan. Not, however, before Baghdad had been taen, Hulegu's Mongols literally outdoing themselves in wanton cruelty. Anything up to half a million people may have been slaughtered in the bloodletting that followed the Iraqi city's fall, as the world's most beautiful metropolis was razed to the ground.

Only in China, conquered by Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan, did the nomadic Mongols put down real roots. Kublai Khan wholeheartedly embraced the civilized culture he found there - though his Mongol antecedents showed clearly in his aggressive foreign policy, most notably in his attempts to invade Japan.

In Russia the Mongol empire endured in the shape of the "Golden Horde". This semi-independent arm of the empire lasted into the 16th century and for much of the time - after all all of the carnage of its creation - the Golden Horde enjoyed a great deal of peace and prosperity.

China had a long history of nomadic incursions: the Central Asian Hsiung Nu had made periodic incursions into the "Middle Kingdom" in ancient times. Next had come the Khitan, the Tanguts, and in the 12th century, the Jurchen's Jin empire occupied the north.

The advent of the Jin empire forced the Song dynasty to transfer its capital from northernly Kaifeng to Li'nan (present-day Hangzhou). The armies of this "Southern Song" managed to hold back the Jurchen raiders and so an uneasy equilibrium was maintained.

Kublai Khan had come into contact with Chinese culture as a young man, while working as governor of the Mongols' southern territories. The Jin empire and Xi Xia were regions of China under nomad rule. The young Kublai was an ardent admirer of Chinese civilization and covetous of Chinese wealth and technology, and so was keen to add the "Middle Kingdom" to the Mongol empire. He had been fighting against the Southern Song in China when he got news of his brother Mongke's death in 1259, and he faced a bitter struggle for succession with his younger brother, Ariq Boke. It was not until 1264 wthat Kublai Khan was able to return to his long-term plans. But his courage and determination to carve out a new Chinese empire for himself that may well have been bolstered by this period of feuding.

While Kublai Khan had emerged the victory, he had lost a degree of support in the Mongol heartlands and an oppositional faction had grown up around his nephew, Kaidu. By 1271 he had committed himself tso far to his project that he declared himself Huangdi, or "emperor" - the founder of a new Chinese "Yuan" dynasty.

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