The Mongol storm (1219-1258)

Part oneA khan and a shah

Early in the thirteenth century the tribes of the Mongolian steppe came together under one leader, Temujin, who in 1206 took the title Genghis Khan. His people were herders and horsemen. Every man rode and shot a bow from childhood, and the army moved faster than any army of the settled world.

To the west of the Mongols lay the Khwarazmian empire, a young and fast-growing Muslim state that ruled from the Aral Sea through Transoxiana and Khurasan into Iran. Its ruler, Muhammad II, held famous cities: Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur and his capital at Urgench. In 1219, after a serious political dispute in which Mongol envoys were killed on the Khwarazmian side, Genghis went to war.

The campaign was quick and terrible. The Mongols marched on Bukhara and took it, then Samarkand, then Urgench. Muhammad II fled west and died on a small island in the Caspian Sea. Between 1219 and 1222 Genghis and his sons reduced many of the thriving cities of north-eastern Iran to ruins. Bukhara and Samarkand were given terms that let city life go on in some form, but Merv and Nishapur were not spared. A chronicler wrote that Bukhara became a wasteland, its roofs fallen in, as though it had not been full of people the day before. Stories of the slaughter spread far ahead of the armies, and Genghis encouraged them, because fear opened gates.

Two historians, Ibn al-Athir and al-Juwayni, record a scene in Bukhara. Genghis entered the great mosque, climbed the pulpit and told the people that their great men had committed great sins, and that he was the punishment of God sent upon them. A man in the crowd wanted to answer him. His friend told him to stay silent, because it was the wind of God's power that was blowing, and nobody had the strength to speak against it.

Part twoThe prince at the Indus

One Khwarazmian prince kept fighting. Jalal al-Din, the son of Muhammad II, beat a Mongol force at Parwan in what is now Afghanistan and then fled east. Genghis himself, with his sons Chagatai and Ogedei, caught him on the bank of the Indus on 24 November 1221. Al-Juwayni writes that the Mongols surrounded his army in a crescent with the river behind it. Jalal al-Din charged and fought hard, and when the day was lost he rode his horse into the river and swam it to the far side. Genghis stopped his men from following and is said to have praised him.

The chase brought the Mongols to the edge of India. In 1222 a Mongol army crossed the Indus, ravaged Sindh and besieged Multan for forty days, until the extreme heat seems to have driven it off. The young Delhi Sultanate, ruled by Iltutmish, a former Turkish slave general, watched and learned. For more than a century afterwards Mongol armies came down into the subcontinent again and again, and Delhi held them off.

Genghis died in 1227, having conquered northern China and much of Iran. His sons and grandsons carried on. In 1236 a Mongol force moved against Baghdad itself and was beaten back by the caliph's army. In 1241 Mongol armies took Lahore. In the same years another grandson, Batu, swept into Russia and Eastern Europe.

Part threeMuslims in the Mongol camp

The Mongol armies were not only Mongols. Many nomadic Turks of the steppe and Central Asia were already Muslim before the invasion, and they joined the Mongols as they advanced. Early Mongol rulers had Muslim administrators and viziers, and the highest officials of their government were very often Central Asian Muslims. Craftsmen and artisans from the conquered cities were moved across the empire, and the historian al-Juzjani writes that mosques were built as far away as China and Tibet to serve them. Even in his hardest days, when Genghis was cornered at a place called Baljuna with nineteen of his closest followers, three of those men were Muslims.

Genghis set a policy of tolerance toward every religion, so long as its people obeyed the khan. The tolerance had limits. Halal slaughter and washing in running water clashed with Mongol law, and later khans forbade them on pain of death. For the first half of the century few Mongols became Muslim.

By the 1250s the Mongols ruled from China to the Caucasus. Only a handful of Muslim powers still stood between them and the Mediterranean: the Ismaili fortresses of Iran, the caliph in Baghdad, the Ayyubid princes of Syria and the new Mamluk rulers of Egypt.

In three years the cities of the Muslim east, famous for centuries, were reduced to ruins.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Otrar
• Bukhara
• Samarkand
• Urgench
• Merv
• Nishapur
• Parwan
• the Indus
• Multan

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter