The History of the Renaissance World (52 page)

On July 22, the battle began, and ended quickly. “Our folk,” writes Jean de Joinville, “that had the castle on their side, strove with much ado and crossed perilously by boats and [pontoon] bridges and fell upon the English.” Henry III fled; the few noblemen who had accompanied him, among them Simon de Montfort the Younger (son of the notorious Crusader), fought a desperate rearguard action, but finally were forced to scatter and flee. Hugh de Lusignan and Isabella were taken prisoner. Louis IX allowed them to apologize, and then took most of Marche for himself, plus all the Count’s money.
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Henry III took up a new position at Bordeaux, but he had no strength left; Simon de Montfort, exasperated almost beyond words, told him that he ought to be locked up like Charles the Simple before he did any more damage. But the damage was already done. The defeats in France rankled; and in the next century, the seeds Henry had planted would blossom into a century-long war.
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*
An “indulgence” was an official pronouncement, validated by the authority of the pope, that reduced the amount of punishment a sinner would have to undergo in the afterlife.

Chapter Forty-Five

The Mongol Horde

Between 1229 and 1248,
the Mongols terrify the world

T
HE
U
NIVERSAL
K
HAN
was dead, and his conquests had been divided up between his sons: his youngest, Tolui, in the heartland, the flat grassy Mongolian steppes; his second, Chagatai, in Central Asia between the Amu Darya river and the northwestern edge of the steppes; the two sons of his dead oldest son Jochi in the western lands, beyond the Aral Sea. And as the overlord of all of them, his third son Ogodei: the Great Khan, presiding (at least in theory) over the entire realm from his homeland near the Kherlen river.

The Mongol armies had backed away from the west, at Genghis Khan’s death; a token force remained north of the Caspian Sea, where the Kiev warriors had fallen, but most of the Mongol strength was now turned towards the east. A decade and half before, the north of the Jin empire had fallen into their hands fairly easily. But the subjugation of the rest, to the last corner, was a different proposition. The Jin had moved their capital from the ransacked Zhongdu to Kaifeng, farther south, and there had reestablished their government. Their territory was shrunken, much of their farmland in the hands of the enemy; so for the last years, they had been mounting campaigns against the Song land below them.

Once Ogodei was firmly on the Great Khan’s seat, he dispatched additional troops to press the invasion of the Jin. The Mongols were fierce fighters, but not invincible; in both 1230 and 1231, Ogodei’s great general Subotai was beaten back by Jin counterattacks.

While he fought his way doggedly forward, another Mongol division, commanded by the general Sartaq, made its way towards Goryeo. In the summer of 1231, they reached the Yalu river and prepared to attack.

It was not the first time that the Mongols had been to the Yalu. Back in 1218, during Genghis Khan’s push westward, a Mongol detachment had chased fleeing steppe peoples known as the Khitan into the peninsula. When the Khitan holed up at the Goryeo city of Kangdong, the Mongols asked the military dictator Choe Chung-heon to send them aid.

Choe Chung-heon had agreed, cautiously; as one of his officials pointed out, the Mongols were known to be “the most inhuman of the northern barbarians.” But another advisor, the Commissioner of Men and Horse, warned, “If we disregard them, I believe we will regret it later.” To prevent reprisals, Chung-heon sent troops and provisions: a thousand men and a thousand bags of rice.
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Once they had defeated the Khitan, the Mongols demanded tribute as payment for delivering Goryeo from the Khitan menace, and then left; most of them, anyway. Forty-one men, according to the
Goryeo-sa
, were left at the border town Uiju. “Practice the language of Goryeo,” they were instructed, “and wait for our return.”
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Now, in 1231, the Mongols were back. On August 26, General Sartaq ordered his men to cross the Yalu, and the war to swallow Goryeo began.

By 1231, Choe Chung-heon was dead; his son Choe-U headed the military state that had enfolded Goryeo’s civil government. A figurehead monarch, King Gojong, still sat on the throne, but Choe-U was responsible for facing the Mongol threat.

As the Mongols advanced, the towns in front of them emptied, the people surrendering or fleeing. Choe-U called the standing army of Goryeo out to face the enemy. Unexpectedly reinforced by five thousand outlaws, sent by the notorious bandit chief Yu-ke-hsia from his hiding place near the Yalu, the Goryeo army put up a startlingly fierce resistance. The northwestern city Kuju held out so stubbornly that the Mongols themselves paid grudging respect: “I am accustomed to seeing the cities of the world fought over,” General Sartaq is reported to have said, afterwards, “but I have never seen anyone being attacked like this and, to the end, not surrendering.” The Mongols attacked Kuju with catapults, with siege towers, with tunnels, with flaming fagots soaked in human fat; only when Choe-U himself authorized the surrender of the city did the commander, Pak So, open the gates. Sartaq, in admiration, spared his life.
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The Mongol invasion pushed through the north of the country, getting closer and closer to the capital city Kaesong, until by the end of the year Choe-U had decided to appeal for a peace. He managed to swap an enormous tribute (twenty thousand horses, ten thousand bolts of silk, and numerous other riches) for a halt in the Mongol progress. Most of the Mongol troops withdrew, leaving military commanders in charge of the captured territory. They were supposed to cooperate with the Goryeo court in Kaesong. But, feeling unsafe, King Gojong, Choe-U, and all the top officials sneaked out of Kaesong, crossed the strip of water between the Goryeo coast and the nearest island, Kanghwa, and reestablished themselves on the island. The Mongols demanded their return; but they refused, able to supply themselves quite well by sending ships farther south to the unconquered coast. The Mongol commanders had no experience with water; they were reduced to shouting threats across at the king, fruitlessly ordering him to come back.
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For the next few years, Goryeo and the Mongols existed in this state, half peace, half war, half occupied; while on the mainland, the Mongol conquests continued.

45.1 Mongol Conquests in the East

S
UBOTAI AND HIS MEN
had almost reached Kaifeng, the Jin capital. They had been helped, in their advance through the Jin territory, by the Southern Song. Subotai, knowing that the Jin (still in possession of a strong army) would have their most formidable defenses erected to block an approach from the north, had negotiated, with the Song, passage through the lands below Kaifeng, so that he could send part of his attack force around to assault the city from its more vulnerable southern side.

The massive circular detour soon attracted the attention of the Jin. The Jin emperor Aizong sent an appeal south to the Song, reminding them of an old Chinese proverb: When the lips are gone, the teeth will soon become cold. The Mongols had destroyed “forty kingdoms,” he warned, and if the Jin fell, the Song would be next.
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But the Song declined to intervene. The bulk of the Jin army hastily shifted from the Yellow river, where it had gathered to ward off the expected northern attack, to the far side of the capital city. But Subotai had held more than half of his troops back. As the southern Mongol force appeared on the horizon, the reserve troops descended from the north. Trapped, the Jin army was slaughtered. The Jin emperor, Aizong, was pinned inside Kaifeng along with hundreds of thousands of his subjects.
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The siege went on for over a month, in summer heat; inside the city, the Jin ate their horses, then grass, then boiled their saddles and the skins covering the military drums to make soup. Soon, they ate the dead. Weakened by hunger and then by plague, the defenses finally collapsed. As Subotai’s men poured into the city, Aizong killed himself.
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Subotai did not immediately turn on the Southern Song. He had been summoned north by Ogodei to take charge of the next offensive: three thousand miles in the opposite direction, all the way over on the western side of the Mongol territory.

These were the lands awarded to Batu and Orda, the two sons of dead Jochi. Orda, the oldest, had been given already-conquered territory on the lower Syr Darya river, south of the Aral Sea. Batu’s portion had been the lands across the Volga river, beyond the Caspian Sea: an inheritance that had not yet been conquered by the Mongols, and was not yet theirs to give. Now the Great Khan intended to help his nephew lay hold of his promised lands.
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Subotai, now in his midfifties, had been serving the khans since the age of seventeen. He had fought in the west already, helping Jochi to shatter the Kievan forces at the Kalka in 1223. He had absorbed the lessons of western warfare and practiced them in the east. Now, heading back towards Europe, he was at the apogee of his profession. Batu, nominally the leader of the campaign, was a straw boss; the European campaign had Subotai’s fingerprints all over it. Unrelenting sieges, crafty maneuvering of light and highly mobile troops, calculated ferocity intended to terrify the next foe into surrendering: the patterns practiced in Goryeo and the Jin empire were repeated again and again, stamping Subotai’s mark into European land.

Late in 1237, Subotai and Batu crossed the Volga; the Mongols were accustomed to fighting in the bitter cold, and the frozen countryside posed no challenge to them. A breakaway strike force, commanded by the veteran general Chormaghan, veered to the south and crossed the Caucasus range into Georgia. Already battered by the Mongols in 1219, Georgia now lost its capital city, Tbilisi, and most of its eastern reaches; the Georgian nobles were pressed into the Mongol ranks.
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Meanwhile, Subotai and Batu had terrified the first Rus’ city in their path. They captured Riazan’ on December 21, just before the Christmas Mass. “They burned it all,” says the contemporary
Voskresensk Chronicle
, “and killed its prince and his princess, and seized the men, women, and children, and monks, nuns, and priests; some they struck down with swords, while others they shot with arrows and flung into the flames.” Moscow fell, as did Kiev after a ten-week siege; so many panicked Kievans crowded into the Church of the Tithe, hoping for safety, that the second floor gave way and the church collapsed inward. Six years later, a traveler passing through Kiev made note of the skulls and bones still piled on the deserted streets.
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