The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

When Genghis Khan heard the news he was outraged, but had sufficient self-control to send another ambassador to the sultan to ask for the extradition of the governor of Otrar. Mahomet made the miscalculation of his life – the miscalculation that released the ‘yellow peril’ on Europe. He had the ambassador put to death.

There is no rage like that of a Right Man who has been insulted – and Genghis Khan was, beyond all doubt, a Right Man. This is the only way in which we can explain the appalling revenge he took for the death of his hundred caravaneers and his ambassador. He marched into Turkestan with his full forces. Just before setting out, his rage was inflamed by another insult. The Tanguts had been the first people of China to swear allegiance to Genghis Khan; now, as he prepared for war, he sent to them for a contingent of soldiers. With astonishing stupidity, a minister who detested the Mongols sent back a reply which said, in essence: If you don’t have enough troops, perhaps you’d better call off the expedition. Genghis Khan ground his teeth, but had to put off revenge until a later date.

The Turkish sultan had, in fact, a far larger army than Genghis Khan – he could undoubtedly have marched into Mongolia and conquered it. But now he had no idea where the Mongols would attack. He had to dispose his army at strategic points over a long frontier. Otrar, of course, was an obvious guess – which probably meant Genghis would avoid it. But the great khan, in his fury, did nothing of the sort. He crossed the mountains to the north and appeared before Otrar, on the north bank of the Syr Darya River. The governor defended the town with a courage born of the grim certainty of the horrible death that awaited him; it was a difficult siege; even when the Mongols broke in, the governor took refuge with his best troops in the citadel and it took another month to starve and storm them out. The Turks had run out of arrows; as the Mongols broke in, the governor and his women took refuge on the roof and the women tore bricks from the walls and handed them to the governor, who hurled them down on the Mongols. It was useless; he was captured, still fighting frenziedly, and dragged in front of Genghis Khan. Now was the moment the conqueror had dreamed about. He ordered the man to be executed by having molten metal poured into his ears and eyes.

And so it went on, the grim business of mass slaughter of innocent people whose only crime was to be the subjects of a king who had dared to insult Genghis Khan. In fact, the Mongols spared any town that voluntarily threw open its gates to them. The inhabitants were merely ordered to move outside the walls while the Mongols pillaged for days. Anyone found still in the town was killed. If a town resisted and then surrendered, clemency was doubtful; Benaket, west of Tashkent, asked to surrender after three days and the defenders were promised their lives. In fact, all the soldiers were executed. The craftsmen were given to the Mongol chiefs – in the Middle Ages, a craftsman was a more valuable commodity than ten horses – and all the young males were taken away to help the Mongols in other sieges. The Mongol method was to drive the hostages ahead of them as they besieged a town, as a living shield. It was a trick they had discovered in China: taking hostages from the surrounding countryside and using them as ‘shock’ troops – troops who received rather than administered the shock.

Bokhara resisted, but its mercenaries tried to make off during the night; the Mongols caught them and killed them. Then they marched into the town and ordered all the inhabitants outside while they looted. But they were not to escape with this punishment. Women were raped in front of husbands who did not dare to intervene; the few who did were committing suicide. Some women did commit suicide rather than submit. Then the town was burnt to the ground.

Samarkand was besieged in May 1220. There was a very large Turkish force there – fifty thousand. The walls looked impregnable. So Genghis Khan drove prisoners in front of him as he attacked. The townspeople came out to fight. The Mongols pretended to break and flee. The defenders poured after them – and the Mongols suddenly turned and hacked them to pieces – fifty thousand of them. Half the mercenaries in the town deserted to Genghis Khan, and the townspeople decided to surrender. The remaining mercenaries were besieged in the citadel, starved out and killed to a man. Then the men who had deserted to the Mongols were also executed – Genghis Khan loathed treachery. Thirty thousand craftsmen were taken away; another thirty thousand men had to accompany the Mongols as ‘shock’ troops. Other prisoners were allowed to ransom themselves.

Urgenj also decided to fight. The Mongols made their prisoners fill in the moat, which took ten days. Then they began to mine the walls -it is possible that gunpowder was used here. Inside the town, they used buckets of oil to set fire to the houses. Poor relations between two of the khan’s sons led to some early defeats in this siege, and the Mongols were now determined to take revenge – they regarded it as an insult when people defended themselves. District by district, house by house, they took the town, killing everyone. Women and children helped the defenders, knowing they would die in any case. Finally, when a few thousand defenders were left in one fortified area, they asked for mercy. The reply was ambiguous – which should have made anyone acquainted with the Mongols suspicious. The population was made to stand outside the city walls, then all the men were massacred – with the exception of the craftsmen. The women and children were taken as slaves. Then the Mongols breached the dykes holding back the river and submerged the charred ruins.

The Turkish sultan was appalled at the total ruin brought about by his own stupidity. He fled, and Genghis Khan ordered Jebe the Arrow to hunt him down. The sultan was too panic-stricken to do the sensible thing and collect troops. He still had millions of loyal subjects. Instead, he fled south into Persia, hoping to get to Baghdad, changed his mind and doubled back towards the Caspian Sea and was only one step ahead of his pursuers as he leapt into a boat – arrows followed him out to sea. He reached the island of Abeskun and died soon after – probably of exhaustion.

Meanwhile, Genghis Khan was slaughtering indefatigably. After a pleasant summer at a quiet oasis near Samarkand, he marched on a town called Termez on the Amu-Darya (Oxus) river. It refused to surrender, was stormed, and all the inhabitants massacred. As one old woman was about to be killed, she cried out that if they would spare her she would give them a pearl. They asked her where it was and she said she had swallowed it. They immediately disembowelled her and found several pearls. Genghis Khan told his men to open up all the dead to inspect their stomachs.

Balkh (Bactria) surrendered quietly – in fact, it had already made token submission to Jebe the Arrow. Its inhabitants were told to assemble outside the walls and then massacred. It seems to have been an act of pure sadism – or possibly it was intended as a warning to the other forts and towns of the region. These were also taken by the now familiar method of using local people as a kind of human shield.

And so the murder and pillage went on and on. Genghis Khan swept down through Afghanistan, and the heir to the Kharismian Empire was pursued to the border of India. With an oddly typical gesture of generosity, Genghis Khan ordered his archers not to fire as the prince plunged into the Indus near Ghazni, and told his sons that this was a man on whom they should model themselves. But then, he had by that time killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan – when his grandson was killed in one siege at the valley of Bamiyan, he ordered that every living thing there should be slaughtered, down to children in the mother’s womb and the household pets. It was the completely irrational reaction of a Right Man who has convinced himself that he is a kind of god, and that anyone who shows the least sign of defiance is unutterably wicked.

It is equally typical that as he again crossed the Oxus on his way back home in 1222, Genghis took with him Muslim scholars to explain to him the meaning of Islam, and listened with deep interest as two Muslim jurists taught him about the meaning and importance of towns and how to administer them – he made the two men administrators of a large area. It is also typical that when he returned home and found awaiting him a saintly Chinese monk called Kien Changchun (for whom he had sent three years earlier hoping he had an elixir for prolonging life), he enjoyed engaging in long conversations about Taoist philosophy. But then he was on horseback again, preparing to take revenge on the Tanguts, who had refused to send him an army before he set out to reduce the Kharismian Empire. It was the usual story, although the people in mountain areas avoided the usual torture and massacre by going into hiding before he arrived. ‘Tanguts being of an age to bear arms he slaughtered, the lords being first to die.’ But he allowed his Chinese counsellor Yelui Choutsai to dissuade him from simply laying waste the whole country, seeing the good sense of accepting taxes instead. (Similarly, in China, his general Muqali – who was still warring with the Golden Emperor – allowed himself to see the good sense of not torturing and oppressing captive populations but allowing them once again to become prosperous and productive.)