The period of relative unity (1227–60)
- Date:
- 1206 - 1368
After the death of Genghis Khan, a kuriltai (also spelled kurultai; “general assembly”) of Mongol nobles was convoked in order to elect the new great khan according to traditional custom. Jöchi, the eldest of Genghis’s heirs, had predeceased his father by six months, and the law of primogeniture was usually observed by the Mongols. Chagatai, the oldest surviving son, was passed over, however, and Ögödei was eventually appointed great khan (1229–41). His residence was Karakorum, on the Orhon River in central Mongolia, whence he directed his campaigns. Yelü Chucai continued to act as his chief adviser, and Chinkai, a Kereit Nestorian Christian, served as head of chancery. Ögödei himself is described in contemporary sources as a man of stern temper, energetic but given to pleasure, and a heavy drinker. His campaigns, like those of his father, were carried out simultaneously under generals acting independently in the field but always directed by orders emanating from the khan himself and transmitted by a messenger system covering practically the whole of Asia.
In east Asia a war was launched against the remnant of the Juchen Jin state in north China. The Jin emperor found himself in a hopeless position because he was attacked from both sides. During the preceding century, the Jin had taken north China from the Song, but the Song subsequently allied themselves with the Mongols. In 1234 the Jin capital of Kaifeng fell through a combined attack by Mongols and Chinese; Aizong, the last Jin emperor, committed suicide.
Campaigns in the west
In 1236 new campaigns were launched against the west, apparently with the intention of subjugating Russia and even eastern Europe and adding them to the ulus allotted to Batu Khan. The empire of the Volga Bulgars was annihilated in 1237/38, a victory which opened the way to Russia proper. Central and northern Russia at this time consisted of city-states and independent princedoms which fell one by one to the fierce attacks of the Mongol armies. The Mongol advance toward the Baltic Sea was brought to a standstill only by the Russian winter; the rich trading centre of Novgorod was thus one of the few Russian towns not to be sacked. Resistance in Russia ceased after the fall of Kyiv (December 1240). Further raids hit Poland, Galicia, and Volhynia; advance parties even reached Breslaù (Wrocław) in Silesia. A joint force of German and Polish knights under Duke Henry II of Silesia suffered a crushing defeat near Legnica (April 9, 1241), but the Mongols preferred not to penetrate farther into central Germany. Instead, they turned south in order to join forces with their armies operating in Hungary.
The attack on Hungary did not come as a surprise to King Béla IV. The Kipchaks, a Turkic nomad people in southern Russia, had been subject to Mongol rule, but under their chieftain Kuten a great part of them had fled from the Don and Dnieper steppes into Hungary and placed themselves under the protection of the Hungarians. Batu claimed that the Kipchaks were his vassals and asked the king of Hungary to send them back to Russia, announcing his intention to fight Hungary if his request was not granted. When he received no reply, he sent his southern army against Hungary.
This army, led by Subutai, an able general, succeeded in defeating the Hungarians at Mohi in April 1241. King Béla IV was forced to flee into Croatia. It does not seem that the Mongols ever intended to establish themselves permanently in Silesia and Moravia. In Hungary, however, they began to create a nucleus of Mongol administration and even struck coins, some of which have survived. The Hungarian plains may have appealed to them as possible pasturelands because of their similarity to the grasslands of southern Russia where the Mongols installed themselves permanently (as the later Golden Horde).
During the preceding years Mongol armies had also been operating in Iran, Georgia, and Greater Armenia. The Khwārezm sultan, who had fled before Genghis Khan’s attacks, became ruler of a kingdom in northwestern Iran and tried in vain to defend himself against the Mongols. He was murdered in 1231. Georgia had to recognize Mongol sovereignty in 1236. The advance of the Mongols in Europe and the Near East was, however, stopped by the death of the great khan Ögödei (December 11, 1241). The necessity to be present at the kuriltai, which had to elect a successor, and the necessity to assert their claims made some of the descendants of Genghis change their plans. Batu and his generals gave up whatever territory they had held in eastern Europe. The year 1241 therefore marks a turning point of the greatest importance in European history because in all probability Hungary at least would have become a Mongol dominion but for the sudden death of Ögödei.
Electing a new khan
The election of a new great khan proved difficult because no agreement could be reached. In the meantime Töregene, Ögödei’s widow, ruled by common consent of the Mongol nobles (1242–46). She wished the appointment of her son Güyük but met with bitter opposition from Batu, who believed he had a better claim, as a descendant of Genghis’s eldest son. She succeeded in securing Güyük’s election in 1246. There is an eyewitness account of this election by Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, who happened to be in Karakorum at that time as papal envoy. Güyük himself was, as a person, very different from his rival Batu. He was strongly influenced by Nestorianism and favoured Christian advisers, whereas Batu still adhered to traditional Mongol shamanism and was entirely indifferent to any outside religion. The two rivals began to prepare for war against each other, but Güyük’s premature death (1248) ended both the family feud with Batu and the chance of a Mongol court dominated by Christian influence.
The empire was entrusted to Güyük’s widow Ogul-Gaimish, who ruled as regent for three years before the nobles could reach agreement. Batu himself still showed some eagerness to assume the supreme power of great khan but gave up in the end because of old age and persuaded the Mongol nobles to give their votes to Möngke Khan, son of Tolui. This meant that the overlordship of the empire passed away from the house of Ögödei and went to the descendants of Genghis’s youngest son. The Chagatai branch of the family felt slighted after Möngke’s election (1251), and bitter hostility soon developed between the two families.
The reign of Möngke
Möngke himself had won fame during Batu’s western campaigns and distinguished himself in the field. He was a benevolent monarch and continued Güyük’s policy of universal tolerance toward all religions. In his reign the capital Karakorum reached a splendour which reflected the vastness of the empire. A European guest at the court in January 1254, the French friar Willem van Ruysbroeck left an interesting account of the Mongol capital, where Christian churches, Muslim mosques, and Buddhist temples flourished and envoys from the whole known world met. At the same time, Möngke continued to expand the empire and prepared for the conquest of hitherto unsubdued neighbouring countries. In this he was assisted by his two brothers Hülegü and Kublai. To Hülegü he entrusted the campaign against Iran, of which only a northern province had come firmly under Mongol control.
In 1255 Hülegü started his offensive. He wiped out the resistance of the powerful Assassin sect in 1256 and advanced toward Iraq. Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate, fell to the Mongols in 1258, and the last Abbasid caliph was put to death. These events had a far-reaching influence on the religious situation in the Near East. Christians and Shiʿis welcomed the Mongols because they had been antagonized by the Sunni orthodoxy of the caliphate. In Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor the Christians hoped for a further advance by Hülegü, who was regarded as a protector against their Islamic rulers and whose wife was a Nestorian Christian. In 1259 Hülegü’s armies moved into Syria, took Damascus and Aleppo, and reached the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The road to Egypt seemed open, but in 1260 the Mamluk army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt. Egypt was saved and the further expansion of the Mongol empire was blocked.
Election of Kublai
At the other end of Asia a campaign with similar success took place against China. The leader was Kublai, whose generals outflanked the Chinese defenses by moving toward Annam via the southwest of China which was occupied by the independent Tai kingdom of Nan-chao. Later on Möngke himself took command of the China campaign (1257). Again, as in 1241, fate intervened and brought Mongol operations to a temporary standstill. Möngke died in August 1259 in the field during the siege of a provincial town in Sichuan. There followed, as usual, an internal feud between various claimants to the title of great khan. Kublai secured his own election while still in the field (1260), but his younger brother Arigböge proclaimed himself khan in Karakorum. Hülegü was too far away and moreover too immersed in his Syrian campaign to exert any influence over the election. He seems, however, to have favoured Kublai, and these two brothers at least remained friendly, although (or because) Kublai’s dominion was so distant and his overlordship therefore more or less nominal.
The year of Kublai’s accession to the throne marks, in any case, a turning point in the history of the Mongol empires. In theory Kublai was, as grand khan, the ruler of an empire stretching from China and Korea to Iran and southern Russia, but the diversity of the subjugated countries made itself more and more felt. Kublai came to regard himself as a Chinese emperor more than anything else, and similarly the other dominions developed on lines which were less and less Mongol. This tendency may be regarded as concomitant with the conversion of the various khans to other religions, chiefly Islam and Buddhism. In Kublai’s case this conversion from Mongol to Chinese civilization was accentuated by the transfer of his capital to Beijing (1260), which he began to rebuild in 1267. Mongolia was no longer the real centre of the empire, not even of Kublai’s dominions.
The Yuan dynasty in China (1279–1368)
Kublai Khan was one of China’s greatest emperors. He achieved the unification of that country by annihilating the national Song empire (1279). Contrary to former custom, he treated the deposed imperial family well and forbade his generals from resorting to indiscriminate slaughter. After 1279 no new territories were added to the Mongol-Chinese empire, and a pair of attempts to expand Mongol rule to Japan were thwarted by the Kamikaze of 1274 and 1281. None of the later Yuan emperors reached the stature of Kublai. His immediate successor was his grandson, Temür (1295–1307), who was able to keep Mongol rule intact and maintain his position against repeated attacks from the Ögödei branch of Genghis Khan’s family. The rival khan Kaidu was defeated in 1301 and peace was restored in the northwestern parts of the empire.
Although minor rebellions against the government could be still quelled by Mongol troops, the power of the court gradually began to decline. Family feuds and court intrigues weakened the power of later emperors. In several cases boys were enthroned who were nothing but puppets in the hands of ambitious ministers. The decline of the emperors is reflected in their surviving portraits. The influence of Chinese culture made itself more and more felt at court and among some of the Mongol nobility, although other Mongols remained hostile to everything Chinese. The last Mongol emperor, Togon-temür (reigned 1333–68), had become emperor at the age of 13. He had received the rudiments of a Chinese education and was, like some of his predecessors, a pious Buddhist and a benevolent though weak ruler. During the first years of his reign, however, power was in the hands of Bayan, a minister who belonged to the anti-Chinese faction and whose measures deepened the resentment of the educated Chinese against Mongol rule.
Decline of Mongol power in China
The final decline of Mongol power in China and the chaotic conditions during Togon-temür’s reign were but one of the many “times of trouble ” in Chinese history. There was widespread unrest which often took the form of local rebellions against the Mongol authorities. The reasons for this development were chiefly economic, and it was, as usual in China, in the countryside that insurgents first ventured their attacks on the local administration. The situation of the peasantry was in many areas desperate; small farmers and tenants had to shoulder the burden of excessive taxation and corvée duties. The arbitrariness of Mongol nobles and officials caused general resentment among all Chinese.
It appears that the Mongol ruling class was never able to establish satisfactory relations with the agricultural population of China. Their lack of sympathy for agricultural problems was also reflected in the Mongol legislation on hunting: the peasants were forbidden to protect their crops against game animals and had moreover to assist the Mongols in hunting expeditions which invariably caused great damage in the fields. In the large towns, relations between Mongols and Chinese were usually better than in the countryside. Conditions became particularly strained in 1351 when the government proceeded to carry out an enormous plan for water conservation in the Huang He (Yellow River) region, which had been suffering from catastrophic floods. The leaders of local rebellions came without exception from the lower strata of society. They included salt smugglers, petty officials, sectarian leaders, monks, and shamans. In the southeastern provinces, agriculturally the richest and therefore most ruthlessly exploited region of the whole empire, rebellions were particularly numerous. The province of Zhejiang had for centuries been the greatest rice surplus area and Beijing, with its sizable population, had always been dependent on supplies from this region. When the lines of communication between north and south were cut by rebellions, the situation in the capital became precarious. The paper money on which the currency was based became entirely valueless, and the treasury was soon depleted. This again impaired the military efforts of the government.
It is a remarkable feature of the history of these years that at first the various rebellions, occurring independently of each other, were not motivated by nationalist feeling among the oppressed peasants but were directed against the upper classes regardless of their nationality. Contemporary sources provide abundant evidence that the Chinese gentry had as much to fear from the insurgents as had the Mongols. This explains why so many Chinese continued to assist the government. They apparently preferred the harsh rule of the foreigners to the violent popular movements of their compatriots. These rebels committed atrocities which for a number of years proved a great obstacle to a more widespread uprising. Gradually, however, more and more educated Chinese were won over to the cause of the rebels, who in their turn learned from them how to tackle the problems of administration and warfare.
The most successful rebel leader was the former monk Zhu Chongba. Born to a family of poor peasants, he showed more energy, patience, and military talent than his rivals. He succeeded not only in establishing himself firmly in the key economic areas but also in eliminating his rivals in the struggle for power. Zhu finally drove the Mongols out of Beijing (1368) and made himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Ming. He adopted the reign name Hongwu and, assisted by able generals, extended his rule over the whole of northern China by 1359. Mongol provincial commanders in the southwest continued their resistance, however, and Ming power was not established there until much later (Szechwan, 1371; Yünnan, 1382). The last Mongol emperor, Togon-temür, fled into the steppes and died there in 1370.
Thus ended more than a century of Mongol rule over China, The Mongols’ defeat cannot, however, be attributed to degeneracy or corruption by the mollifying influences of life in a highly civilized Chinese atmosphere. Subsequent events showed that the Mongols had lost nothing of their military vigour, and they remained a menace to the northwest Chinese frontier. A realization of this potential danger possibly made the Hongwu emperor at first establish his capital not in Beijing, which was more or less a frontier town, but in the heart of China, in Nanjing, where he had set up his residence already in 1364. Zhu Chongba’s rise to imperial power and the re-establishment of Chinese rule led to the elimination of political and economic activity not only among the Mongols but also among the many non-Mongol foreigners who had held office or made fortunes as merchants under the Mongols. Those foreigners who chose to stay in China changed their family names and gradually became assimilated. Foreign religions such as Islam and Christianity lost their privileges. Christianity was in fact completely wiped out as a consequence of the strong nationalist feelings of the Chinese.
