Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (9 page)

By moving his small group away from the protection of the mountains and out onto the steppe with Jamuka, Temujin was trading the life of a hunter for that of a herder. Although he loved hunting throughout his life, Temujin’s family never again depended exclusively on it for their subsistence, enjoying a higher standard of living with a more consistent supply of meat and dairy products as part of Jamuka’s group. Temujin had much to learn from Jamuka’s people about the herding way of life, in which well-established customs governed all aspects of the yearly routine, and rightly specialized knowledge of the animals revolved around the management of cows, yaks, horses, goats, sheep, and camels, which the Mongols called the Five Snouts, since they counted yaks and cows together. Every animal provided crucial subsistence materials in addition to food, with the horse being the aristocrat of them, not being used for work other than riding.

Of course, given the constant feuding among the clans, in joining with Jamuka, Temujin was also electing to assume the life of a steppe warrior, a role at which he would come to excel. Their
anda
relationship allowed Temujin a special status within the larger hierarchy, so that he did not join as a regular follower, and for a year and a half, so the
Secret History
says, Temujin seemed content to follow Jamuka’s lead and learn from him. But perhaps for the young man who had killed his older half brother rather than submit to his dominance, any such arrangement would inevitably become irritating, and in this case, old steppe customs of caste hierarchy also came into play.

Under the kinship hierarchy, each lineage was known as a bone. The closest lineages, those with whom no intermarriage was allowed, were known as white bones. More distant kin with whom intermarriage was allowed were the black-boned lineages. Since they were all interrelated, each lineage claimed descent from someone of importance, but the strength of the claim depended on their ability to enforce it. Temujin and Jamuka were distant cousins, but of different bones, because they traced their ancestry back to a single woman but to two different husbands. Jamuka descendéd from her first husband, who was a steppe herder. Temujin descended from the forest hunter known in their oral history as Bodonchar the Fool, who had kidnapped the woman after killing her husband. According to this descent, Jamuka could claim that because he descended from the firstborn son and had been fathered by a steppe man, his lineage was higher. Such stories are used in steppe society to emphasize bonds when needed, but they may also provide the pretext for animosity, and in the relationship between Temujin and Jamuka, the story of their kinship would play both ways. Kinship was not so much the determinant of relationships as it was a general idiom through which people made, negotiated, and enforced their social claims.

As long as Temujin was a part of Jamuka’s band, then Jamuka’s family ranked as a white bone, and Temujin was a part of the distant, black-boned kin. Only if he established his own band with himself and his lineage at the center could he be considered white-boned. As the months passed with Temujin following Jamuka’s leadership, the account in the
Secret History
suggests that Jamuka began to treat Temujin less like an
anda
and more like a younger brother, also emphasizing that Jamuka’s clan descended from the eldest son of their common ancestor. As already evidenced in his family relations, Temujin was not one to accept being treated as an inferior for long, and soon enough this situation proved unacceptable to him.

The
Secret History
recounts that in the middle of May in the year 1181, Jamuka called for the breaking of winter camp and headed toward more distant summer pastures. Jamuka and Temujin rode together, as usual, at the front of the long train of their followers and animals. But that day Jamuka decided that he was no longer willing to share his leadership position with Temujin. Perhaps Jamuka realized that Temujin had proven very popular with the other members of the band, or perhaps Jamuka had simply grown tired of his presence. Jamuka told Temujin that he himself should take the horses and camp closer to the mountains, while Temujin should take the less prestigious sheep and goats and set up another camp closer to the river. The white-boned Jamuka seemed to be asserting his authority as the horse herder and was treating Temujin as the black-boned shepherd boy.

According to the
Secret History,
when Temujin received the order, he dropped back where his own family and animals were traveling in the rear of the train, and consulted with Hoelun. He seemed confused and unsure how to respond. Upon overhearing Temujin describe the situation to his mother, however, Borte interrupted and insisted angrily that her husband break with Jamuka and that they and whoever wished to follow them set out on their own. Later in the day, when Jamuka stopped to pitch camp and rest for the night, Temujin and his small entourage fled in secret and continued moving throughout the night in order to put as much distance as possible between them and Jamuka in case he decided to pursue them. Either by plan or spontaneous choice, many of Jamuka’s followers fled with Temujin, taking, of course, their animals. Despite this fission of the band, Jamuka did not pursue them.

The rift between the two young men on that early summer night in 1181 evolved into two decades of warfare as Temujin and Jamuka both rose in stature as leading Mongol warriors and hardened into the bitterest of enemies. After his split with Jamuka, at the age of nineteen, Temujin seems to have determined to become a warrior leader of his own, to attract his own followers and build a base of power, eventually aiming to become a khan, the leader and unifier of the unruly Mongol tribe. In that pursuit, his chief rival would be Jamuka, and their feud would gradually engulf all of the Mongols in a civil war. The two rivals spent the next quarter of a century stealing animals and women from each other, raiding and killing each other’s followers, and struggling to see which one would eventually rule all the Mongols.

Over the coming years, Jamuka and Temujin each acquired a following of families and clans among the Mongol people in a constantly shifting set of ephemeral alliances and pragmatic loyalties; yet neither proved able to unite all the lineages into a single tribe like the more powerful Kereyid, Tatars, and Naiman. According to Mongol oral history, they had once before been united under a single khan; but in recent generations, no one had been able to reunite them. In the summer of 1189, the Year of the Cock, and eight years after his break from Jamuka, twenty-seven-year-old Temujin decided to make a play for the title of khan, the chief of the Mongols, with the hope that once he claimed the title, he would attract more of Jamuka’s followers and make the claim into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If not, the claim might, at least, provoke a final struggle between the two and lead to a more definitive solution to the rival claims.

He summoned his followers to a steppe beside the Blue Lake at the foot of the Heart-Shaped Mountain where they held the traditional council called a
khuriltai
. Families, lineages, and clans voted merely by showing up. Their presence served as an official endorsement of Temujin as khan; not appearing counted as voting against him. Merely attracting a quorum constituted a victory. On such an occasion, a list would usually be made and memorized as a form of election verification, but no tally survives, possibly indicating a modest turnout. A large number of the steppe lineages, perhaps even a majority, still supported Jamuka.

Temujin’s tribe, which now consisted of his family, a loyal coterie of friends, and scattered families, was small by comparison to the other steppe tribes, and he was still a vassal to Ong Khan. To show that his new office was not meant as a challenge to Ong Khan, Temujin sent an envoy to the Kereyid leader to reassert his loyalty and to ask his blessing. Temujin’s envoy explained carefully that all he sought was to unite the scattered Mongol clans under the leadership of Ong Khan and his Kereyid tribe. Ong Khan agreed and seemed to worry little about the unification of the Mongols so long as they remained loyal. Ong Khan kept the subservient Mongols divided. By encouraging the ambitions of both young men, Ong Khan was playing the two leaders against each other in order to keep both weak and under his control as the khan of the Kereyid.

Having received the support he deemed sufficient to function as the khan of a minor group, Temujin began a radical process of erecting a novel power structure within his tribe, calling on the lessons of his youth for guidance. A chief’s complex of
gers
that served as his tribal center or his chiefly court was called an
ordu
, or
horde
. In most steppe tribes, the khan’s
ordu
consisted of his relatives and served as a sort of aristocracy over the tribe, managing it and leading it. Temujin, however, assigned some dozen responsibilities to various followers according to the ability and loyalty of the individual without regard to kinship. He gave the highest positions as his personal assistants to his first two followers, Boorchu and Jelme, who had shown persistent loyalty to him for more than a decade. Temujin Khan exercised a decisive ability to assess a man’s talents and assign him to precisely the right task based on his ability rather than his genealogy.

The first appointments went to trusted men to serve as cooks, a job that consisted largely of slaughtering animals, butchering meat, and moving large cauldrons for boiling it, but which Temujin also considered his first line of defense because of a fear he had developed of being poisoned as his father had been. Other followers became archers, and several received responsibility for guarding the herds, which often had to be taken great distances from the main camp. He appointed his large and strong brother Kasar as one of the warriors charged to protect the camp, and he placed his half brother, Belgutei, in charge of the large reserve of geldings that always stayed close to the main camp for use as mounts. He also created an elite bodyguard of 150 warriors: 70 day guards and 80 night guards to surround his camp at all hours. Under Temujin, the administration of the nascent Mongol tribe became an extension of Temujin’s own household.

Despite Temujin’s success in becoming recognized as a khan and in establishing his administrative court, Jamuka still commanded his own following, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge Temujin as the khan of all the Mongol clans. For Jamuka and the aristocratic white-boned lineages, Temujin was no more than an insolent upstart whom the black-boned people idolized but who needed to be taught a lesson and put back in his place. In 1190, only one year following Temujin’s election, Jamuka used the killing of one of his kinsmen by one of Temujin’s followers during a cattle raid as an excuse to summon all of his followers to battle. Each side rallied an army, probably numbering no more than several hundred on each side, but estimates of size are only conjectures at this point in the story. In the ensuing battle, Jamuka’s forces routed Temujin’s followers across the steppe. To prevent their regrouping against him, Jamuka then perpetrated one of the cruelest shows of revenge ever recorded on the steppe. First, he cut off the head of one of the captured leaders and tied it to the tail of his horse. The spilling of the blood and the disgrace to the head, the most ritually sacred part of the body, defiled the dead man’s soul, and tying it to the most obscene part of the horse shamed his whole family.

Reportedly, Jamuka then boiled seventy young male captives alive in cauldrons, a form of death that would have destroyed their souls and thus completely annihilated them. Since seven represents an unlucky number for the Mongols, this story of seventy cauldrons may well have been an embellishment for dramatic effect, but the
Secret History
makes clear that whatever he really did, in the wake of this victory, Jamuka horrified people greatly and harmed his image. This display of unwarranted cruelty by Jamuka further emphasized the divisions between the old aristocratic lineages based on inherited power and the abused lower-ranking ones based on ability and personal loyalty. The episode proved a decisive turning point for Temujin, who had lost the battle but gained public support and sympathy among the Mongols, who were increasingly fearful of the cruelty of Jamuka. Temujin’s warriors had been routed, but they would slowly collect together again behind their young khan.

His rivalry with Jamuka was not yet resolved, but in 1195, when Temujin was thirty-three, an unexpected opportunity arose for a foreign raid and substantial plunder that would greatly increase his military prestige and his economic power among the Mongols. The civilized Jurched rulers of Cathay, to the south of the Gobi, frequently delved into steppe politics as a way of keeping the tribes at war with one another and thus too weak to threaten their own power. Although traditionally the allies of the Tatars, the Jurched feared the Tatars were growing too strong, and they instigated Ong Khan to raise an army to attack them. Ong Khan again enlisted the aid of Temujin in a quickly arranged alliance with the Golden Khan of the Jurched so that they might jointly attack and plunder the much richer Tatar tribe.

In the winter of 1196, the Kereyid ruler Ong Khan and Temujin with his Mongol followers set out on their campaign against the Tatars; their raid, carried out according to the same tactics used in typical steppe raids, but on a larger scale, brought quick and easy success. Temujin was profoundly impressed by the sumptuous booty that warfare could yield. Because of their proximity to the Jurched kingdom and the more sophisticated manufactured goods of the Chinese empire, the Tatars owned more trade goods than any other tribe on the steppe. Among the goods seized, the
Secret History
mentions the impression made on the Mongols by a cradle embossed with silver and covered by a silken blanket embroidered with golden threads and pearls. Even captured Tatar children wore satin clothes decorated with golden threads; in one case, a young boy wore a gold ring in his nose and one in each ear. The ragged Mongols had never seen such luxurious goods worn by anyone, much less a child.