14.2.2 The Conquest Movement of Chinggis Khan

The yassa and the social-military organization put in place by Chinggis Khan removed many sources of strife from the Mongol Empire. But they also prohibited traditional activities, such as raiding other clans, that had led to social mobility. Chinggis Khan believed that without new sources of wealth and glory, people might grow restless and reject the peace he tried to create. His life experience had given him no concept of settled economic development or ways to redirect his people’s energy to that goal. From the time he joined Ong Khan’s attack on the Tatars and saw the luxuries acquired from the Jin and the Song, Chinggis knew settled peoples were a source of wealth ripe for the Mongol Empire to take, and for him as their leader to distribute. In his eyes, conquering these peoples or intimidating them into giving tribute was the next logical step.

As word spread of Chinggis Khan’s coronation, some warriors in the settled kingdoms between the steppe and Song China left to join the Mongol Empire. The Kara-Khitan, assuming resistance would not go well, offered tribute to Chinggis Khan. After a coup in 1210, the new Xi Xia ruler accepted tributary status on terms similar to those of the Kara-Khitan.

The Jin, however, were another matter. In 1210, a new Jin emperor demanded Chinggis Khan submit to him and send tribute, so Chinggis marched his smaller but superior army south to invade (Figure 14.9). A master at exploiting his opponents’ weaknesses, he realized that his linguistic cousins, the Khitan, resented the rule of the Jurchen Jin dynasty, so he portrayed his army as a liberating force for them. With their army swelling with Jin defectors, the Mongols were able to lay siege to Zhongdu, the Jin capital, and eventually seize the starving city. Chinggis Khan ordered the city thoroughly looted, tens of thousands enslaved, and untold numbers of others massacred.

A map is shown with land highlighted beige and water shown in blue. The Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Dead Sea, and the Caspian Sea are labelled in the west while the Persian Gulf (Arabian gulf), Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Aden, and Arabian Sea are labelled in the southwest. The Sea of Okhotsk is labelled in the northeast while the Sea of Japan (East Sea), Yellow Sea and East China Sea are labelled in the east. The Taiwan Strait is labelled in the southeast. In the middle east of the map, a dark green oval area is highlighted indicating “The Mongol Empire at the ascension of Genghis Khan, c. 1207.” Inside this area there are labels for these areas, from west to east: Naimans, Kyrgyz, Merkits, Karakorum (indicated with a black-bordered white dot), Keraits, and Tatars. Surrounding this dark green area and heading more east is a light green area indicating “The Mongol Empire at the death of Genghis Khan, c. 1227.” Inside this area at the west is a label for “Jin dynasty” and at the south for “Kara-Khitan Khanate.” In the east of this light green is an area labelled “Khwarazmian Empire.” This western area as well as land to the southwest is highlighted with black dots indicating “Khwarazmian Empire.” Black arrows fill the image. An arrow begins in the Khwarazmian Empire and heads west under the Caspian Sea and splits off into three – the first heading northwest to an area labelled Georgia south of the Black Sea. The second heads a short distance to the northeast, and a third arrow labelled with “1222” heads north. This arrow splits into two – one heading into the Black Sea just south of an area labelled “Kipchaks” and the other heading east under an area labelled “Russian Principalities” and into an area labelled “Volga Bulgaria” which is littered with black dots. The arrow in this section is labelled with “1223.” The arrow then heads southwest and then southeast to an area by the Aral Sea. An arrow begins just south of Karakorum and heads west toward the Khwarazmian Empire. It is labelled with “1211, 1218.” It splits into two – one arrow labelled “1221” heading northwest toward the Caspian Sea while the other arrow heads southwest and then southeast. It splits into two and a single very short arrow begins between them and heads southeast. An arrow begins east of the Kara-Khitan Khanate labelled “1225” and ends just east of Keraits. Six arrows begin between Karakorum and Tatars and all head south. Two are labelled “1207” and “1226-27” toward an area in the southwest labelled Xi Xia dynasty. Three with the labels “1209,” “1213,” and “1211, 1215” head southeast toward the Yellow Sea and an area in the south labelled “Southern Song dynasty.” The last one heads east toward an area labelled “Korea” with the label “1218.” An area in the south is labelled “Tibet.”
Figure 14.9 This map shows the areas conquered by the Mongol Empire under Chinggis Khan’s leadership from 1207 to 1227. The black arrows depict the paths his army took, including exploratory campaigns outside the empire’s boundaries to the west. In areas of northern China, Chinggis Khan had to invade areas he had already conquered that rebelled. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Once the spoils from Zhongdu had been gathered, Chinggis Khan and his army headed back to the steppe, leaving the campaign against the Jin mostly in the hands of his Khitan allies. Forces loyal to Chinggis Khan continued to subdue the Yellow River basin and expanded north into the Jurchen homeland, even venturing to the Korean Peninsula. By 1223, these areas were pacified and providing tribute to the Mongol Empire and its allies who occupied them. Ironically, this vast amount of looted goods forced Chinggis Khan to build the first permanent structures on the steppe, a warehouse complex to hold war booty so it could be preserved and distributed or traded over time.

The Kara-Khitan kingdom caught Chinggis Khan’s attention in 1213 when the son of the Naiman leader he had defeated a decade earlier took control. The Kara-Khitan were already not meeting tribute expectations, and now a once-defeated rival led them. The Mongols quickly triumphed over the Kara-Khitan and absorbed them into the empire. Their conquests were wide, however, and not limited to China and the East. Mongol armies moved westward and likely seemed an unstoppable force to many.

The vast amount of wealth seized from the Jin fundamentally changed the mindset of the Mongol leadership, which demanded ever more goods, food, grazing lands, and raw materials. These new needs prompted Chinggis Khan to seek trading and raiding opportunities farther west. The absorption of the Kara-Khitan into the Mongol Empire had provided a direct border with the Islamic world through Khwarazmia, a realm stretching from Persia through central Asia. Around 1218, Chinggis Khan sent a caravan of a few hundred of his Muslim subjects to the leader of Khwarazmia, Allah al-Din Muhammad, with a letter requesting the establishment of trade relations and a great many valuable goods to show what he could offer.

Before the caravan reached the Khwarazmian ruler, however, his governor of Otrar confiscated the goods and killed the traders. In a grave miscalculation, Allah al-Din Muhammad then killed most of the emissaries Chinggis Khan sent to demand compensation, returning only a couple of them, disfigured. This did not just mean war to Chinggis Khan; it meant a war of revenge of the utmost brutality. This included the decimation of the cities of Herat, Merv, and Nishapur, which for centuries had been three of the most important and prominent cities of the eastern Islamic world. By 1223, Allah al-Din Muhammad had been killed while fleeing Mongol troops on an island in the Caspian Sea. Chinggis Khan divided the Khwarazmian state up to be administered by his sons and generals.

The Past Meets the Present

World Trade

In the present day, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has seen countries from around the world join together with the support of the United Nations to develop and expand trade over long distances. Recognizing that the world is becoming increasingly globalized and that goods are moving across borders and between people more than ever before, the WTO has played a major role in streamlining, regulating, and supporting international commerce since its founding in 1995. But can we view the WTO as a contemporary version of Chinggis Khan’s vision for world trade?

Chinggis Khan’s messages to the ruler of Khwarazmia indicate that he genuinely sought trade, not tribute. In one he notes, “I have no need to covet other dominions. We have an equal interest in fostering trade between our subjects.” In a second letter, after the sultan had responded by sending a trade caravan, Chinggis Khan notes, “Merchants from your country have come among us . . . we have likewise dispatched to your country in their company a group of merchants in order that they may acquire the wondrous wares of those regions; and that henceforth the abscess of evil thoughts may be lanced by the improvement of relations and agreement between us, and the pus of sedition and rebellion removed.”

Both Chinggis Khan’s messages convey that trade promotes peace among countries and people. While the sultan did not see it that way, this idea is now the basis for many actions in international relations, where the concept of liberalism—which contends that the way to a peaceful world is to promote economic growth by barrier-free economic exchange between countries—holds great sway. While the WTO works through collaboration rather than by edict, the logic and intent are the same: allow goods to be exchanged throughout the world with a single set of rules, and people will live in harmony with one another.

  • What benefits might Chinggis Khan have seen in supporting a free flow of trade between his empire and the Khwarazmians, even when they fought one another?
  • Should we consider the formation of an organization like the WTO an innovation of the twentieth century or an outcome directly connected to the trade networks of the past? Why?

Reconnaissance for launching surprise attacks against Khwarazmia brought the Mongols into unfamiliar territory. To the south, they discovered India’s Delhi Sultanate in one of its rare periods of unity and growth. These Muslims were not part of the Khwarazmian realm, however, so attacking them would have been an unnecessary distraction. Seeking a route to surprise the Khwarazmians from the north, two of Chinggis’s most trusted generals, Jebe and Subutai, had crossed through the Georgian Kingdom, then the lands of the Rus, Slavic ancestors of modern Russians who had ruled the agricultural lands east of Hungary and Poland. They quickly annihilated the Khwarazmian and Rus forces, forcing both groups to become tributaries to Chinggis Khan.

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The content of this course has been taken from the free World History, Volume 1: to 1500 textbook by Openstax