The History of China - Bonus - Mongol 6: Agent of Chaos

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

It's been a hot summer, and a long break for me! Let's get back into things with a little extra Mongol action... “The imperial city was ripped open … Zhongdu was not one but four cities. We took each of them in turn, methodically killing and razing everything that dared stand upright under Tenggeri. The palaces and gardens of the King of Gold [Jin] were ransacked, revealing such riches that the tribute paid three seasons before by the Jin emperor now seem derisory and humiliating. “A whole moon was needed to collect the bodies and count them. And the city burned for another moon still, creating such a stench that even the scavengers kept away.” - Jöchi, ca. 1215 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Mongol VI, the Agent of Chaos You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan, and I turned it on itself. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. Introduce a little anarchy.

Upset the established order. Everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. We last left off in the year 1210, with Genghis Khan turning to the south and spitting on the golden Khan of the Jin. Well, not quite literally spitting, as his response to the Durchan emissary's demands for him to kowtow had been made in the depths of the Gobi, but even so his intent had been perfectly clear. Such disrespect was nothing less than a declaration of war by the Mongol Khan against the Jian Empire. There were several potential reasons for such a drastic response by the Khan, who up until this point had seemed to have no problem

performing the expected obeisance to his nominal overlords. But now, first off, and as I mentioned last time, was the prospect of loot and plunder, which Genghis's people had just had a teensy little taste of, and of which he had definitely promised them a lot more to follow. That bounty lay in just one immediate direction, the south. There were, however, other likely reasons to spit on the Golden Khan. It seems very likely that, at least rhetorically, the excuse of finally achieving vengeance against the Jurchen for their cruel execution via crucifixion of Genghis's two generations removed predecessor, Ambikai, a man he'd only ever heard of in terms of someone his father had once served with before he was even born. But in the 13th century Mongol

terms, any excuse to settle a blood debt was a good excuse, no matter how old or distant it might be. The prior few years had been something of a dress rehearsal for Genghis and his Mongols. They had spent much of 1207-1209 campaigning against the Tangut kingdom of Xisha along the Gansu corridor to the west of the far larger and stronger Jin. And despite their inability to penetrate the high city walls of the capital with their step-riders and crude siege tactics, they'd nevertheless managed to secure the Xia rulers' submission to the Khan's will, and along with it, innumerable amounts of treasure and increased access to trade that came with it. Apart from the lesson in siegecraft, many elements of the conflict had been a valuable learning experience for the Mongol force.

How to most effectively cross the hundreds of miles of Gobi Desert, the preferred tactics of the settled agricultural and semi-Chinese Tangut troops, and how best to counter them, and that, though vastly more numerous than his own steppe army, that these southern societies were not truly to be feared. They lived off the land and grazed it like animals, at least in the eyes of these Mongols, and they could mostly be treated as such. They were easy to herd, easy to terrorize, predictable and dim-witted, especially when they were in a group. So now turning to the Jin, the Mongols would use all of these lessons, but on a far larger scale than any, even Genghis himself, could have ever dreamed

possible before. The Mongol Confederation, the vast majority of those who lived in the steppes of Mongolia as of the dawn of the 13th century, numbered perhaps as many as 2 million in total, with an effective fighting force of about 70,000 or so by 1210. Western Xia had a significantly larger population, some three to three and a half million, and with a fighting force commensurately larger, approaching double that of the Mongol force. That level of power disparity had been nothing new to Genghis, as he'd been fighting his entire life against numbers thus stacked against him, and had won out time and again through his superior tactics, discipline, and the undoubted loyalty of his troops.

The Jin, however, posed an altogether different situation. Not some force that was double or triple his own population, but something 25 times larger, as high as 50 million by the 1200s. It was vast beyond reckoning. It was cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, and heir to the traditions, tactics, technology, and defenses inherited from its northern Chinese subjects. What kind of a man could possibly attempt to not just go to war with, but attack and seek to conquer through invasion such a behemoth? We already, of course, know exactly who. Yet Genghis Khan's initial plan was almost certainly not tied to the idea of overthrowing the Altan Khan of the Jin, or the total conquest of northern China. Brilliant as he was, and would yet prove to be, his was a mind and a strategy rooted in the stepway of thinking.

Ideas of world conquest or universal empire were not yet a part of his grand strategy. As of this point, Genghis had only ever taken care to fight one war at a time, and he had always held to a very traditional step rationale for each conflict, specifically blood feuds, old slights, and dispute over vassaldom. None of this would change by the beginning of the Mongol war against the Jin. They were simply the next logical target, and one out of necessity since he had promised his subjects gold and treasure. They had insulted the Mongols, betrayed them, opposed them, cruelly executed one of their predecessor Khans, and now the time for them to receive their just

desserts had arrived. Yet by the end of this conflict, a little more than two decades later, everything about Genghis himself and his vision of the Mongol place on the world stage will have undergone a complete metamorphosis. Weatherford puts it, quote, With Genghis Khan's decision to cross the Gobi and invade the Jurchen in 1211, he had begun not just another Chinese border war. He had lit a conflagration that would eventually consume the world. Starting from the Jurchen campaign, the well-trained and highly organized Mongol army

would charge out of its highland home and overrun everything from the Indus River to the Danube, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. In a flash, only 30 years, the Mongol warriors would defeat every army, capture every fort, and bring down the walls of every city they encountered. Christian, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus would soon kneel before the dusty boots of illiterate young Mongol horsemen. End quote. But first things first, the Jin. As I brought up in our last episode on the free feed, the Jin Dynasty was by 1210 deep, like 20 years deep, in the throes of ongoing crop failures and famines. The internal chaos thus sown within the Jurchen state

had certainly been one of the compelling reasons for the Southern Song to attempt an offensive war in 1205. And likewise, such information had certainly reached the Mongol Khan if in abrogated form, intelligence that undoubtedly factored into his decision to strike when and where he did in 1210. Crossing the Gobi was an arduous prospect for even people as hardy and desert-prepared as the Mongols, and doing so at all, much less in force and preparing for a large scale fight on the far side, was something virtually no one could have hoped to pull off. The distances were too vast,

the terrain too harsh, and the supply trains that almost any army would have needed to trail behind them to feed them and supply their troops would have been nigh on bankrupting even for the wealthiest and most prosperous southern force. Every Chinese dynasty across time who had ever attempted such a fool's errand had either never returned or returned defeated and humbled by the attempt. In the end, the best solution any of them had ever been able to come up with had been a variation on the earliest, static defenses, namely an interconnected series of fortifications and, that's right, walls, to discourage and direct the steppe raiders to more predictable and manageable regions under heavy permanent guard.

But as we're well aware, the Mongol force under Genghis Khan was no southern army, and unlike the southern troops composed primarily of infantry and reliant on the long supply lines to maintain their strength, the Mongol horsemen were self-sufficient to an almost unimaginable degree to one of the southern soldiers. Each man carried on his person precisely what he himself needed for long-distance travel and little else. His clothing, the traditional heavy woolen robe known as the deal, was ideal for keeping out even the harshest weather, as was the heavy ear-flapped hat, the malgai, and heavy felt-lined riding boots. Apart from the clothing designed for long journeys on horseback through harsh weather, a man on campaign would have with him flints for creating fire, several leather canteens

for water and milk, a lasso, a sewing kit, arrowhead file, knife and hatchet, and a leather satchel to carry it all in. As per the formation of Genghis's army, each ten-man Arvan squadron carried with it a single gur tent, in which all would share nightly quarters when possible. The supplies, therefore, traveled on the persons of the individual soldiers. The food and drink traveled alongside them, in the form of the herds of horses each man was required to bring on campaign with him. The mares could be milked and that drank fresh, or fermented into the ever-popular airag,

or even dried into cheeses which could last virtually indefinitely. Each soldier would of course have been foremost a lifelong and accomplished tracker, trapper, and hunter of game, which was expected to be supplemented through the looting of enemy supplies and even in the more dire situations, for instance that of tamaging the Thabalgenal water, could potentially slaughter some of his horse herds for sustenance. Marco Polo would later allege in his writings that while in the service of Genghis's grandson, the Yuan Emperor Kublai Khan, he'd learned that the Mongol cavalry carried enough food supplies to last each man up to

ten days of riding without stopping. Ten pounds of dried milk paste to mix with water, strips of dried meat to chew on while on the move. From Weatherford again, quote, when he had fresh meat but no time to cook it, he put the raw flesh Mongol cavalry almost supernaturally self-sufficient and mobile, but almost invisible to indirect tracking by an opponent. Unlike other armies, which could be reliably tracked from far-off scouts by little more than looking for the telltale smoke of daily cooking fires or the nighttime glow of those fires, the Mongol armies were uniformly disciplined in their a single fire. And even when they were permitted to cook, such flames were only used in the early pre-dawn or right at dusk, when neither the smoke nor the firelight would be easily seen from a distance. This sort of lifestyle confounded and terrorized the people south of the Gobi, but at least as much, it also disgusted them. What kind of a semi-human monster subsisted

on nothing more than raw meat and horse milk and blood. It's ironic, then, that such a step diet, heavy as it was in protein and calcium, also made the Mongols considerably hardier and healthier than the quote-unquote more civilized southerners. The Han Chinese had, of course, subsisted on grain for millennia, both wheat and rice as well as others, and their Jurchchen overlords in the north had likewise become more and more dependent on such an agrarian staple. From Weatherford, the southerners were, quote, men who lived on gruel made from various grains. The grain diet rotted their teeth and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier

ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones. Unlike the Jurchen soldiers, who were primarily of Han Chinese stock, who were dependent on a heavy carbohydrate diet, the Mongols could more easily go a day or two without food. And that's a truism that can be attested to by any of us who've had a big bowl of rice only to feel our blood sugar drop and the pangs of hunger creep in mere hours later. The formation of the Mongols in the army, both in motion and encamped, must have been a true sight to behold. While Chinese, Jurchen, and even Western armies

would have almost uniformly stretched back miles in a long line, appropriately called a train, making it both conspicuous and very vulnerable to ambush while on the move, the Mongol forces, by both strategy and necessity, did not. All elements of the army could move at the speed of a horse, but that did mean that those horses required vast tracts of grassland on which to graze, so too did their riders require sufficient land to hunt their own game. Thus, the force that Genghis Khan brought down from the steppes and across the Gobi would have,

especially along its edges, ranged far and wide, not unlike a highly mobile version of the German First World War Army's concept of defense in depth. Quote, Most of the common warriors broke up into their small bands and spread out over the countryside to camp at night. After eating, they did not linger or sleep by the fire. They dispersed into yet smaller groups of three to five men, whose leptin's hidden recesses spread throughout the area. As soon as daybreak broke the next morning,

they began the day with a careful reconnaissance of the right, the left, the back, and the front. End quote. And also like that Bundeswehr defense in depth, or looking at an ant hill from the outside, that seeming scatter of soldiers belied the deeply complex makeup and nature of what was going on at the center. In marked contrast to the scattershot nature of the army's periphery, the center of the Mongol army was a clockwork structure that would have rivaled any Roman legion's camp. Genghis Khan moved at the center, flanked by the army of the right to the west and the army of the left to the east. A smaller unit took positions as advanced guard and another as guard of the rear.

Each unit of 10,000 Tumen functioned like a miniature version of the Great Khan's camp. The commander of the Tumen moved at the center of his unit of 1,000, the Mingan, and he stationed the other nine Mingan around him as needed." This was repeated at every further unit demarcation down the line. Thus, rather than a Roman-like focus on the square, the Mongol camp was organized into an exquisitely arranged series of concentric circles. Moreover, and again evocative of the regularity of the legions of old, was that the Great Khan's war camp was always arranged and constructed in precisely the same fashion, night after night, so that newly arriving soldiers always knew where to

report and how to find whatever they needed. Each Mongol Mingan traveled with its own medical unit, usually composed of Chinese doctors to care for the sick and wounded. The tents were lined up in a specific formation, each with its name and purpose, and even the insides of the tents were lined up in a specific formation, each with its name and purpose, and even the insides of the tents were arranged in precisely the same way. This was an obvious extension of the ancient custom of always having a gurr aligned to face due south, so that any passerby would instantly know which way he might be headed. But it also served the necessary military purpose of having everything exactly where everyone knew it already was in the event of a surprise attack or a raid on the camp. Though such precautions would prove entirely unnecessary in this war against the Jin, they had been born, like so many of Genghis's stratagems, out of a lifetime of harsh lessons about the necessity of constant preparedness for the worst. The Mongol force would proceed in two branches, left and right armies,

respectively in the west and the east, given the Mongol orientation being southward rather than northward. The army of the right was personally commanded by the Great Khan, while the army of the left was commanded by his Nukhur companion, Jeb the Arrow. They would ride out of the Gobi and proceed to cross the Djin borders in the spring of 1211. In his choice of Jeb as the commander of half of his 65,000-man force, Genghis gave a hint as to intent over the course of this campaign season. Unlike some of his other commanders who moved methodically and with care, and could thus shepherd their army over extended assignments, Jeb's talents were best suited, as his given name implied,

to strike with force, speed, and unpredictability. He would, quote, fight fast and furiously, taking unusual chances and inspiring resolute courage among his men in battle, end quote. So this was not to be some extended, drawn-out war of conquest. Instead, it was a smash-and-grab raid, just writ large. Genghis knew, as he'd learned in his dress rehearsal campaign against the Tanguts of Xisha, that as of yet his men, courageous though all undoubtedly were, could not hope to breach the fortified city walls of the southerners, and to attempt so would be ruinous folly.

It would play to his enemy's strengths while nullifying his own, and the Great Khan was not about to commit such an error. Instead, he would use his most powerful weapon, one he'd learned time and again could defeat an enemy before the first arrow was even knocked. Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the status quo. And everything becomes chaos. Genghis Khan would be an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos.

It's fair. The border fortifications that the Jian had constructed and manned against such an assault were easily overrun. It's fair. modern Beijing, cutting it off from further reinforcements from the north. Those reinforcements that were dispatched were easily routed and slaughtered by the steppe horsemen. Though the Jin had a similar number of cavalry as the Mongols' 65,000, they were like any conventional army, able to proceed only at the pace of the 85,000 infantry they accompanied, all of which meant that unless the Mongols were willing to offer up a set-piece battle, which they most assuredly were not, the Jin force was eternally on the defensive, harried and harassed from their flanks, and boxing effectively at shadows,

until such a time as the Mongols chose to drive their arrows home, cutting their foes down. With any meaningful resistance across the countryside destroyed, Genghis made no attempt to storm or besiege Zhongdu or its high walls, but instead ordered his forces to fan out across the country and begin wreaking all of the havoc they possibly could. Plundering, ravaging, raping, looting, and burning wherever they went. Meanwhile, Jeb's army of the left had proceeded westward to Shanxi, which bordered Xisha, to strike at the border garrisons there and prevent them from attempting to relieve their eastern forces from the Khan's assault. But again, conquest was not the objective of this war against the Jin, not yet at any rate. Rather, this was the appetizer, a way of so destabilizing the political and social order

that the Jurchen Altan Khan would have no choice but to acknowledge the supremacy of Genghis and his Mongols. To that end, then, the end being chaos itself, Genghis directed his efforts at fomenting unrest among the minority populations who lived under Jurchen rule, with special attention paid to that people who had undoubtedly lost the most to the empire of black and gold, the Khitan of the late Liao dynasty. Genghis and his Mongols initially gained the interest of the subjugated peoples of the Jin by declaring, as they would go on to do time and time again in later conquests, that they were in fact a liberating rather than conquering force who were seeking to free the people under the Jurchen yoke

from their oppression, and of course to restore the Khitan to their proper place at the top of that social order. The Mongols and the Khitan had a close ethnic and linguistic root, both had initially come from the shores of the Amur River, the Heilong in Chinese. The Jurchen, on the other hand, had only migrated to the region in the past few centuries. They were relative newcomers, and therefore outsiders. They didn't share kinship, language, or cultural ties that the Mongols were now able to exploit among the Khitan. In order to make a strong show of this case's bely, of ethnic liberation then,

when Jeb had returned from the Western Front, successful in his mission to disrupt and sow discord among the Jin border defenses, the Great Khan dispatched him once again, this time alongside his younger brother, Khasar. They were to take an army and ride now east into the heart of Manchuria, into the banks of the Amur. Once arrived, they were tasked by their Khan to find a living member of the Yelu clan of the Khitan, that ancient house that had once been the kings and khans of the Liao

in their own right. In this, the wild dog and the arrow found great success. Not only were they able to find a suitable Yelu clansman, but also found themselves and their stated cause attracting scores of the Khitan to their side and deserting the Jurchen en masse. With both the Noh-Lomin and a great number of willing Khitan warriors in tow, the Mongol force returned to Genghis as he encamped outside of Zhongdu and allowed his forces to raise and pillage the farmlands surrounding the capital to report their success. The Khan was, of course, greatly satisfied, but his next step might have come as a surprise, at least to those who did not know him very well. As 1211's days grew shorter and colder, he ordered the totality of his army to begin breaking down

their camps and to return north, back across the Gobi to Mongolia for the winter. He'd done everything he set out to do in his campaign. He'd greatly enriched his tribesmen through pillage, terrified and confused the Jurchen in so doing, and most importantly, learned a great deal about his enemy. Namely, that they were weak, disorganized, suffering from ongoing effects of the floods and droughts that had gripped the Yellow River Valley for 20 years, and that its constituent elements were easily fractured off from the Jurchen Emperor's central command. There was no use overwintering in North China. His men had plundered all they could, and his horses had consumed the bulk of the grass and grain from the surrounding regions. No, better to return home, better to allow the Jin and their populace to face the cold darkness of winter on empty stomachs

and the eerie silence of an enemy who had seemingly vanished for no reason whatsoever. After all, what could be more confusing and frightening than an enemy you can no longer see? For Genghis and the Mongols, the winter and spring of 1211-1212 was one of revelry, and of preparation for the second phase of the assault that would renew come the following year. It would also prove a suitably momentous location for the Great Khan to declare the restoration of the Liao monarchy of the Yellow Clan, and its hegemony over all the territories illegally occupied by the Jurchen usurpers, a restoration not only slightly muffled by the fact that it was under the direct protection, and therefore vassaldom, of the Mongol Khan, or that it was

as of yet just a nominal claim. Genghis assured the Khitan Yellow Emperor that in short order his lands would be restored in full full so long as he always remembered just who he had to thank for such magnanimity for the time being that would be more than enough and even the whisper of a renewed leo kingdom free from church and control was enough to electrify even more of the khitan people who defected and yet larger numbers to the Mongol cause. For all the damage wrought to their farms, fields, garrisons, and morale, the Jin were quick to reoccupy and re-fortify the mountain passes that the Mongols abandoned at the end of 1211, and thereafter did all they could to ensure that the walkthrough of

the previous campaign would not repeat itself. This preparation paid dividends when the Mongol army renewed its invasion of the Jin Empire in the autumn of 1212 and attempted to retake those positions. Surprisingly, they would find themselves in a difficult position this time. Difficult enough, at least, that by early 1213, Genghis Khan was forced to concede that perhaps these Jurchen-led Chinese soldiers had some fight in them after all, and diverted additional troops to reducing and reclaiming the fortified passes. In spite of their valor, in due course they fell again to Mongol might, leaving the plains once more open to steppe rider exploitation.

This time, though, the Great Khan was not here south of the Gobi simply to plunder. He had assessed the key fracture points and weaknesses of the Jurchen, and would now drive deep through them to force them to capitulate. He had seen the effectiveness with which his forces had wrought pain and panic on the Jin by devastating their countrysides, and how the Jin commanders were loath to send their troops out of their fortified cities to save their farms or the populace trapped outside. Well, let the soldiers stay inside the cities. Let them subsist as long as they could behind their walls, with whatever provisions they'd manage to stalk away there.

In fact, the Mongols would go so far as to help them along, bypassing such strong points as much as they could. Instead, they rampaged across the country once again in three distinct armies, one in Shanxi, one around the central capital region, and one across the flatlands of Shandong, driving the rural populace out of their villages with fire and terror and herding them like so many cattle toward their precious high city walls. This was a tactic adapted wholesale from the old steppe method of warfare, which was to drive an enemy's cattle through their camp just before an attack, to increase the confusion and terror just before the killing blow came. So, let these people who lived like animals, and seemed to graze the land like animals, eating grasses like animals, well let them serve a similar purpose now. Let them clog the roads, block the movement of troops and supplies,

disrupt the djinn lines of communication like the stampeding herd of panicked cattle that they were. Let them stream into their high-walled cities and devour the food stored within like the useless mouths of vermin that they appeared to be. A population estimate by Tertius Chandler in his 4,000 years of urban growth logs the urban population of Beijing, or Zhongdu, as of the year 1200 as about 130,000, making it the largest city by far in the Jin Empire, albeit a far cry from southern Song's capital at Hangzhou, recorded at being roughly double that at 255,000. But the regions surrounding the urban center held far more than the city itself. By the Jin's own 1207 census, reports were that the municipalities surrounding Zhongdu

numbered some 1.6 million people, more than a million of which would soon make a break for the perceived safety of the nearest fortified city as soon as the Mongols appeared on the horizon. It was all a part of the plan. Weatherford writes, Instead of being followed by mobs of refugees, as was typical for the armies of the time, the Mongols were preceded by them, and the Mongols also used the displaced peasants in a more direct way as shields and as living battering rams against city gates. The Mongols showed little concern for loss of enemy life, so long as it preserved Mongol life. As the captives fell in battle, their bodies helped to fill in the moats and

formed pathways over defensive holes and structures made by the enemies. Trapped inside their cities, the church head and their subjects starved. In one city after another, they resorted to cannibalism. Discontent grew, and urban mutinies and peasant rebellions broke out against the church head officials, and proved unable to protect, feed, or manage the massive numbers of refugees. In the worst such rebellion, the Drijdhid army ended up killing some 30,000 of their own peasants." In some cases, it was reported that city defenders would recognize in the masked faces of those forced up against the city walls by their Mongol captors the faces of people they knew, even family members, and refused to harm them or fight, thus ensuring the Mongols had an even

easier time of victory. This go-round, Genghis would invest Zhongdu in a siege, but he saw little need to commit his entire force to such an endeavor. The city defenders, numerous though they were, showed little interest in leaving their protective walls or garrisons to face the Mongols on the field, even as their own resources dwindled within. As such, Genghis gave his generals wide leave to do as they would to the rest of the countryside, preferably in ways that would enhance the Mongols' already near superhumanly fearsome reputation and further squelch the Jin Empire's willingness to resist them. Weatherford writes that a common tactic, sometimes called the Falling Stars Attack, would proceed

like this. At night, and by the beat of drum or the lighting of a distant torch, Mongol raiders would sweep down on an unsuspecting force in the darkness, with great clamor and force, like as one Chinese survivor put it, as though the sky was falling and they disappeared like the flash of lightning. Before the damaged and unprepared Jin troops could even properly figure out what exactly was happening or mount a counterattack, the Mongols had disappeared once more into the darkness, leaving only silence and death behind them, and the survivors thoroughly demoralized. Another tale that quickly spread was that a Mongol commander besieging the Manchurian city of Ningjiang,

when asked by an emissary what he required to lift the siege and reach peace, demanded that the residents gather up their birds, cats, rats, and dogs, and give them to the Mongols. Do this, he promised, and he would lift his siege and retreat. The residents nearly clambered over one another, rounding up and gathering all of the animals demanded of them, and then delivered them as instructed, whereupon the Mongols tied banners and small torches to their tails and released them to flee right back into the city they'd just come from, quickly reducing it and everyone inside to cinders. Another story from this campaign tells of the Mongols taking possession of a convoy carrying a high-ranking official to relieve the besieged city of Dading.

One of the Mongol officers donned the official's garb and took his papers, then proceeded to the city in disguise. The Mongol army encamped outside the city, having been let in on the ruse beforehand, thereafter decamped and rode out of sight, to the disbelief of the starving residents and defenders within. The official was let inside the city and proceeded to convince its commanders that the war was over. The Mongols had been defeated and were in full flight back across the desert, and now was the time to dismantle the meticulously constructed

city defenses and allow the brave troops to return to their homes. Over the weeks to come, he would oversee exactly this carried out to completion. And then, when it was done, sent word to his Mongol brethren just over the next hill, who showed right back up to easily seize the now defenseless city. Did these episodes happen as I just told them? Probably not. With even a cursory critical analysis of these stories, major plot holes are revealed. How, for instance, would a Mongol warrior have spoken Chinese or Jurchen passively enough to fool an entire city

for the weeks upon weeks that the dismantling of Dading would have required? Wouldn't anyone have wondered why this guy had shown up alone? Surely there are better ways of lighting a city on fire than the tales of birds and cats? They're, at the very least, vast exaggerations, and almost as likely outright falsehoods generated by the Mongols themselves and then spread across the Jin Empire. Not to win the hearts and minds of their opponents, but to break their hearts and minds. Genghis had discovered long ago that the most powerful weapon he could ever possess was control over information and the ability to use it to infiltrate the minds and therefore wills of his foe. They thought him a monster?

Great! But let's go one better. Let's make them think that we're not just monsters, but immortal, unkillable, shapeshifting, teleporting demons from hell. If they believe even some fraction of that, it'll save us the trouble of having to fight them. It'll save lives in the end. Well, you know, some lives. The lives that matter. Mongol lives. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures.

Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture, from the legendary days of creation and the gods, all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between. The History of Egypt podcast is written and produced by a trained Egyptologist. We go much deeper than your average documentary or magazine article to uncover tales of life, great endeavours, and the amazing arc of a mighty kingdom. The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. By August 1213, circumstances in the J imperial palace had deteriorated to the point of a

palace coup. The emperor, posthumously known by the non-imperial name of Prince Wei Shao, was killed in a conspiracy by the defeated commandant of the now-Mongol-occupied western capital, Da Ding, and replaced him with the elder brother of the late Emperor Zhangzong. This situation, however, did not improve with a new monarch on the throne. A contemporary Christian historian would write that in 1214, "...everywhere north of the Yellow River there could be seen dust and smoke, and the sound of drums rose to heaven." By the year's end, the imperial court had been convinced to send emissaries to the Mongol Khan,

who sat outside their starving, surrounded city walls to seek terms of peace. It would be nothing short of a victory so complete that it's likely Genghis himself could scarcely have believed the terms on offer. Silks, gold, silver by the wagonload, more than anyone could hope to spend in multiple lifetimes, and yet only the first of what was to be annual tribute payments. In addition, the Mongols were gifted 3,000 of the Jin's finest warhorses, along with 500 young men and women sent as servants, musicians, performers, and actors for the Khan, and, if need be,

hostages for the Jains continuing to honor the bargain thus struck. And finally, formal recognition by the Golden Khan of the Jain that he and his empire were vassals of the Mongols, and Genghis Khan was his overlord in perpetuity. In the fashion that had marked all of Genghis's conquests to this point, the agreement, no, the relationship, was sealed with the marriage of one of the princesses of the Jin imperial house to Genghis Khan himself, binding the two peoples together through their respective monarchs as father and son-in-law. In return, Genghis duly lifted the siege of Zhongdu and made north, well away from the Jin population centers. It was already too hot and dry for even the hardy Mongol warriors to attempt to cross the Gobi at this point in the year. Instead, they made camp at a place called the Seven Lakes, or in Mongolian, Dolonur, on the southern edge of the Great Desert. There, as they awaited the cooler days of autumn to return to their homeland on the steppes,

the Mongols availed themselves of the riches, treasure, and pleasures that they had won for themselves in this unprecedented victory over the Jurchen. Games, feasts, music, and great parties lasting into the depths of night went on unendingly at the Seven Lakes campsite. The Khitan king had the greater part of his territory restored to him, and the royal name of Liao given a new lease on life within the greater Mongol nation, while the Jin emperor was forced to accept the loss of the northern territories with all the grace that he could possibly muster, and instead content himself with a much reduced kingdom in the south, also within the borders of, and under the protection of, the Yekemongos.

Genghis Khan himself saw little reason to remain in the south. The climate was too hot and humid for his tastes, nor did his soldiers like it, and they tended to get sick. And the people, the people down there were as unsettlingly numerous as they were strange and apparently useless. How could humans just sit in one spot their whole lives and eat… grass? Seeds? These farmers did tend to animals, but of a variety very few Mongols had likely seen or well understood. Pigs, in particular, were noted to have disgusted the Mongols, what with their apparent propensity to live and root in their own filth. In fact, come to think of it, these ludicrously

wealthy, so-called civilized people seemed to live a lot more like the animals they lorded over than anything truly human could possibly ever tolerate. Genghis had not yet stepped foot inside the great city of Zhongdu, but he'd surely been, and smelled, enough of it and the millions upon millions of southerners in the course of his campaign to be thoroughly disgusted at such an unclean, filth-covered existence. Throughout his entire life, the great Khan would only rarely step foot inside a city that he'd conquered, and would almost always leave as quickly as he thought possible for the fresh, clean air of the open spaces, and well away from the open sewers these southerners called civilization.

With the departure of the Great Khan and his terrifying, demonic armies back north, the Jin Emperor and his entire court decided that it was time to get out while the getting was good. Yes, yes, they'd bought that stinking barbarian off with shiny baubles and honeyed words and pretty girls, one that they'd even dressed up as a princess. All that was regrettably necessary at the time. But now that those uncivilized subhumans had ridden their stinking horses back off to the ass-end of nowhere they came from, one thing took precedence above all others. It was time to get the hell out of Chengdu.

The central capital had now twice been harassed by these marmot-eating, fur-clad centaur cosplayers, and the royal court did not plan on sticking around for whenever this king wannabe Gil-galad decided to pay another visit. Where to go, you ask? Well, I hear the weather is just lovely in the south capital, Kaifeng, this time of year. It's right in the middle of what's left of the empire, nestled nicely in the heart of the Yellow River Valley. It's got nice, high, strong walls, almost as good as Zhongdu. And oh, here's a fun fact, it puts the entire Yellow River between us and those super scary Mongols. Yes, yes, Kaifeng sounds like a fantastic vacation destination.

Let's go! As in, like, right now! Thus, the imperial court packed themselves up and headed south for Kaifeng, leaving the rest of the northern population, and that of Zhongdu, to, eh, probably be fine. I'm sure it'll be fine. It's fine. In relatively short order, before autumn had sufficiently set in enough for the Mongols to decamp from Dolonor and brave the Gobi yet again, word reached Genghis

Khan of what the Jin Emperor had just done. Flee his capital? Head to the far south? Put himself out of my vision and reach? We had made a deal. There had been an arrangement, and the Jin Emperor running south to go scheme or whatever he was doing was not a part of it. Thoroughly enraged and frustrated by this betrayal, Genghis wheeled his army around and made once again for Zhongdu. And this time, he was playing for keeps. Time and again, I refer to the high walls of the central capital, but let me take a moment to give a slightly more

detailed look. Constructed out of stamped clay rendered as hard and as impermeable as modern concrete, the outer walls of Zhongdu towered over the landscape at 40 feet high and ran around the city for more than 18 miles in circumference. Twelve heavily defended gates gave access to the city at all directions of the compass, when they were opened. But when they were closed, they provided a nigh-impenetrable set of barriers, as they were now. Every 100 feet across this 18 miles rose a manned guard tower, some 900 in total, and outside of that lay not just one, but three lines of moats to stave off assault. Genghis Khan was ever the student of warfare, and no two battles were ever fought in quite the same way. He'd learned in his failed siege of Xiangqing, the Xisha capital, that he

would need the ability to effectively besiege cities if he was going to conquer them. In his last two invasions of Jin, he discovered that the stories about the Han Chinese populace were, in fact, true, that they had remarkably gifted engineers with a panache for crafting elegant and effective siege equipment. Those captives, who had been especially impressive to him and his commanders, and who had then managed to survive the assault they'd often been herded into once these siege works were completed, were subsequently hired on, as it were, as the Mongols' full-time siege engineer corps, and they'd spent the rest of the war adapting and perfecting their craft. By 1214, it's written that several Jin cities, upon learning that they had

been targeted for a Mongol attack, took the preemptive steps of not just raising the surrounding countryside to the bare earth, but actually removing every single large stone that could potentially be fired from a catapult or trebuchet for a radius of some four to five miles all around the city. Unfazed, the Mongols had their engineers fashion large balls of wood, harden them by soaking them in water, and then hurled those at the city until it capitulated. The Mongols of Genghis Khan didn't care how the war was won,

whether it was pretty or honorable or fair. No, they cared about victory itself. The ugliest win was better than the prettiest defeat. As the Great Khan would supposedly tell his sons later in life, there's no good in anything unless it's finished. The renewed Mongol siege of Zhongdu recommenced on the autumn of 1214. Though the imperial court had fled, they'd left behind the city's garrison of some 20,000 to maintain its defense, albeit in a rather muted fashion given the unmistakable knowledge that they had been left behind and From Dion, quote, became demoralized. Many of the battalions accompanying Xuanzong to Kaifeng turned back in order to camp near the frontiers and wait until Mongol troops returned so that they could

surrender to them. Within the city, however, the central garrison proved significantly more resolute. They had been relying on reinforcements from the numerous sub-garrisons, some 5,000 soldiers apiece, and only a kilometer and a half from the capital, along straight roads leading directly to each of Chengdu's gates. These reinforcements, however, were one and all cut off, and quote, their lifeless bodies were tossed into the bones of their pig brothers who had ventured out of the city in previous seasons, end quote. Genghis himself would arrive once more at Chengdu early in the new year of 1215 to take personal command of the operation. He brought with him not only his hard core of Mongol

brethren, but even larger forces of allied Khitan and Ongud warriors, along with some 30,000 Jin rebels. On this, Weatherford writes, In the traditional Chinese view, victory in war came to those whom heaven favored. And with an increasingly long list of victories to his credit, it became apparent to Chinese peasants and churchhead warriors alike that Genghis Khan fought under the clear mandate of heaven, and to fight against him risked offending heaven itself. Behind them came the siege works. Heavy catapults towed by a hundred slaves apiece,

captured from the Jin themselves who had successfully used them against their southern neighbors, the Song. The catapults, though formidable, would prove insufficient against the great walls of Zhongdu. And so, once again Genghis and his armies settled in for an extended siege, to let starvation do what flying boulders couldn't, open the gates. Just as before, the Great Khan knew that he did not need the entire Mongol army to maintain the siege, and so now dispatched other contingents led by his generals to rip the rest of the north asunder, capturing the north, east, and supreme capitals, all as yet untouched by the invaders, in short order. As starvation set in once more, morale plummeted and people turned

increasingly to desperate measures. Cannibalism was reportedly widespread, as were suicides. Reportedly thousands or even tens of thousands of young women flung themselves off of the city walls or into deep wells in order to speed things along and to avoid the inevitable capture by the monsters waiting outside. Yet for two more months, the city held out, before its defenders finally reached their breaking point. After holding for some six months under the direst possible conditions, they finally opened the city gates, hoping against hope that they would be allowed to surrender to the conqueror. Chinggis Khan, however, was a fool-me-once-shame-on-me, fool-me-twice-I'll-kill-each-and-every-one-of-you kind of guy. Zhongdu would not be given the opportunity to offer tribute or to surrender. It was to be punished for its insolence and serve as

a dire warning for everyone, everywhere, about the price of betraying one's word to the great Khan. Genghis's eldest son, Zhou Qi, a commander in these battles, would later tell of the sacking of Zhongdu in a way that only a Mongol really could. He said, The imperial city was ripped open two moons later. The Khan left the business of sacking to Mukhali. He headed northwards again in search of cooler mountain air at the foot of the great Khingon chain. Zhongdu was not one, but four cities.

We took each of them in turn, methodically killing and raising everything that dared stand upright under Tangri. The palaces and gardens of the King of Gold were ransacked, revealing such riches that the tribute paid three seasons before by the Jin Emperor now seemed derisory and humiliating. A whole moon was needed to collect the bodies and count them, and the city burned for another moon still, creating such a stench that the scavengers kept away. End quote.

Not quite everyone was slaughtered in the sack of Zhongdu. In fact, quite apart from the gold and gems, potentially the greatest treasure seized of all would be a middle-aged Khitan man, distantly of the Yelu clan, by the name of Yelo Chuzai. His knowledge of both the Khitan Mongol language, as well as Chinese, as well as the southern civilization's customs, laws, and sciences would prove invaluable to Genghis Khan and his Mongol Empire in the years and decades to follow.

But we'll get to that in time. For now, back to the sacking of the city. Lest we think that such a grandiose telling just be more Mongol myth-making, there would prove more than sufficient confirmation of this gruesome reality for the city. Several months later, a merchant caravan that had braved the dangers of the Silk Road from the Khwarazmian Empire in modern Persia to peddle their wares from afar approached the great city of gold, and to learn what they might on behalf of their own monarch, the Amir, or Shah, about this strange far-off land and certain odd reports that his government had been hearing

about some new power rising and threatening to destabilize the old order that he knew only as Kitei and had so enriched his kingdom of Khwarizmia to this point. Yet as the caravan neared the city, they noted that something was, well, off. In the distance, they spotted hills of white and gray, which they took to be covered in snow. Yet it was the height of summer, and there was no snow on any other hill or bluff that they had yet passed. Something was off, too, in the air. And the closer they got to the city's location, the clearer that smell, that stench, became. The unmistakable odor of death and decay. The hills they had spied from so far off were, in fact, the skeletal remains of the stacked human bodies of the defenders and citizens of Zhongdu, stacked one atop the next in order to be counted,

and then left to rot in the elements. The roads and surrounding countryside were so saturated with the fats, oils, and grease of these hundreds of thousands of bodies that the road became impassable to the Persian carts and slowed their progress to a crawl until they could find a suitable way around. The rot permeating the air also sickened the troop, and several reportedly even died as a result of breathing in the unhealthy miasma. This would all, in time, be reported back to the Amir of Khwarazmian, and he would

take it all into due consideration. His agents reported that the single greatest, largest city any of them had ever even heard of, much less seen with their own eyes, had been when they arrived little more than a smoldering ruin, surrounded by hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million bodies, and was otherwise completely abandoned. Something, or someone, had done that to a civilization the likes of his own the emir could not hope to match or even emulate.

And next time, the emir of Kwarizmia, a bold, young, rash man full of self-confidence and a perhaps unjustifiable certitude of his own invincibility, will make the greatest mistake of his life. He will gain the full attention of the man commanding the force who destroyed Jong-do, and it will be in the most suicidally stupid way possible. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression.

It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.