The Destroyer of Worlds 1219-1233
For centuries the warlike people of the East Asian Steppe had been divided into many different tribal confederations locked in constant competition with one another. While through history the power of the nomads had occasionally been harnessed to establish great empires and threaten the settled peoples of Eurasia, the increasingly advanced societies of the High Middle Ages felt more secure than many of their forebears had. In the coming decades, this sense of security would be annihilated by a new enemy of unimaginable ferocity. In the late twelfth century the Mongol lands north of China were locked in long struggle for supremacy as a tribal leader named Temujin sought to unify the scattered peoples of the region into a single state. By the turn of the century he had been successful in this aim – adopting the title Genghis Khan and assuming authority over all the nomads east of the Altai Mountains. He then proceeded to spend the first two decades of the new century making war against the Chinese – gradually conquering all of China north of the Yangtze and cutting a path of untold destruction in his wake.
Through this period, the Mongols appeared to have be largely focussed on East Asia, with little desire to make war against the lands to their west. Their principle interest with the powers of Central Asia was in trade – with the silk road route travelling from their lands through Persia. In 1219 the Great Khan sent an emissary Kashgar, the centre of Persian power in the Tarim Basin, and beseeched the Shahanshah as an equal to cooperate in defending the trade routes in the region from raids by the Turkic Karluks – who dominated the lands east of the Urals and west of the Mongol empire – and requesting exemptions from various tolls for Mongolian merchants. The Persian response to this emissary deeply insulted the Khan – offering to meet Mongol requests only on the condition that he swear fealty to Baghdad and allow Zoroastrian missionaries to preach in his lands. Enraged, Genghis Khan cut off his campaigns in China and gathered his armies to ride west to restore Mongol honour. This was a decision that would shake the world.
In 1220 as many as 100,000 Mongol rides swarmed into the Tarim Basin – overrunning Persian territory and forcing the independent rulers of the region to submit to the Great Khan. Much of the local elite, mostly Persianised Muslims leftover from the Saminid-period, welcomed the invaders while Baghdad’s ability to project power in this far flung province was so weak that military resistance was light. As such, most of the territory fell to the Mongols within a few short months and with shockingly little bloodshed in comparison with events that were to come. When a sizeable Persian army did finally arrive in the region to face the Mongols, it found itself badly outnumbered and was almost completely destroyed at the battle of Tumshuk in 1221. With war breaking out on Persia’s western frontier with the Byzantine Empire the same year, Persia abandoned its attempts to regain the Tarim Basin after this battlefield defeat – instead establishing a defensive position around the Tian Shan Mountains with the aim of preventing the Mongols from advancing into Transoxiania.
Facing down the old enemy proved a far simpler task than addressing the new threat in the east. The Romans’ first target was the wealthy city of Tabriz, where they hoped to take advantage of a city’s Christian Armenian population to seize a foothold from which to begin a larger campaign of conquest. Coordinated by Kurosh Roshni and the Immortals, the Persians were able to mobilise their forces faster than expected to block the Byzantine advance west of the city at Khoy. Possessing a numerical advantage, the Byzantines opted to go on the offensive despite this disruption to their plans and faced a heavy defeat that sent them into retreat back across the border. Fighting would continue for several more months, but the Byzantines failed to deploy another invading army on this scale until agreeing to a white truce in 1222.
While they had fended off the Romans in the West, the Persians’ Mongol enemy had paused their operations through most of 1221 as they gathered their forces for the next stage of their campaign. Genghis Khan approached the problem of the Persians’ strong defensive position on the passes of the Tian Shan Mountains with typical cunning and brutality. Making agreements with the Karluks, Genghis led one column of his army through the deserts to the north of the mountains, hitherto believed to be impassible for a sizeable military force, before descending on the civilian population. The Mongols destroyed towns and villages throughout the region, slaying thousands, taking many more as slaves and despoiling the lands and infrastructure in a deliberate campaign of destruction. Unable to ignore these horrors, the Persians moved to confront the Great Khan’s column – thereby weakening their defences of the mountain ranges and allowing the larger part of the Mongol army to sweep into Transoxiania. The incredible speed with which the Mongolian armies could move, their nomadic military tactics and the skills of their generals left the Persians disorientated and dismayed in their efforts to confront the invaders on the open field. Despite their many victories in recent times over settled empires, they lost a string of battles in the region and being forced to rely on the high walls of the mercantile cities.
This was a foolish tactic, although many nomadic armies had historically struggled when confronted with strong fortifications, the Mongols had grown into experts in siege warfare from their long years of campaigning in China. Through the next two years, one by one the great cities of Transoxiania, Khiva, Samarqand, Bukkhara, fell to them, and on each occasion the Mongols followed the same process – completely destroying the cities, slaughtering their populace and taking those than remained into slavery. The indelible image of this phase of the war would be the fate of Urgench - where the Mongols created large towers of the severed heads of the citizenry, piled high by the thousands. The demographic impact of this invasion on Central Asia should not be underestimated – in the course of just a couple of years the urban population of the region was almost totally annihilated while it is estimated that by the 1230s at least half of the pre-war population of Transoxiania had either perished of fled. This was a level of brutality not seen in the Iranian world for generations.
As fear and anger gripped Persia, the empire fell into civil war in 1224. Varshasb the Lame, the battle-scarred Sub-Shah of Khorosan who ruled the eastern third of the empire, was incensed at the conduct of the war as his lands were flooded with refugees and their lurid tales of Mongol atrocities. Having hoped to bring down the ineffectual Shahanshah Shabaz and his domineering marshal Kurosh Roshni, Varshasb instead merely crippled the empire’s already fraying power at the most dangerous moment possible. Indeed, while Persian clashed with Persian, the Great Khan would enter the fray by advancing into Khorosan in 1225.
By the outbreak of civil war the imperial treasury was already running empty after years of intense fighting. As soldiers went unpaid, elements of the army were already laying down their arms. Nonetheless, the loyalists were determined to resist the breakup of the empire. The conflict against the Khorosanis centred around the key city of Herat – a loyalist island completely surrounded by rebel territory. From the beginning of his rebellion, Varshasb had brought the city under siege – but found its strong fortifications difficult to breach. He therefore settled into a siege while the loyalists tried to push eastwards to relieve the city and the Mongols began to the northern part of his domain. This stage of the war reached its conclusion in a dramatic three-way tussle over Herat. While the two Persian armies ground against one another, the Mongols launched a blistered campaign – first defeating the loyalist relief force that had been held up at Birjand, west of the city, before swinging eastward to face down Varshasb and his besieging army in the space of two weeks. Taking over the siege from the Khorosanis, Genghis Khan gave the defenders of Herat a choice between surrender or annihilation. Tired from a long struggle against the Khorosanis, and well aware of the fate suffered by their cousins in the north – Herat threw its gates open to the Khan.
In the aftermath of the fall of Herat, the three parties in the conflict were able to agree a truce in 1226 – with the Mongol army happy to take the chance to pause after six years of campaigning to consolidate their gains. In the south east, Varshasb established his independence over a large stretch of territory despite the loss of Khorosan itself. Less than a year after this truce the Shahanshah Shabaz died, having suffered from the pox for several painful months. This left the imperial diadem in the hands of his three year old son Vandad and brought about another ill-timed bout of internal instability. In the west, the Syrians separated themselves from Baghdad to form an independent Shahdom. In the capital, a power struggle broke out between pro and anti Immortal factions who vied for control over the regency council and the direction of the realm following the trauma of the past decade. With his enemy prostrating themselves before him, the predatory Khan saw little choice but to strike against the Iranians once more.
Despite the tremendous losses of the preceding years, the Persian empire remained a serious power capable of fielding an army approaching 30,000 strong. Assembling this host, Kurosh Roshni marched to face down the vanguard of the Mongol army at Shahriar, near the city of Rayy. Despite outnumbering their foe nearly three to two, the Persian army was nearly completely obliterated in the face of the remarkable generalship of the Great Khan’s eldest son Bujeg – suffering their worst single defeat of the entire period of invasion while Roshni himself was struck down. With their army broken and the state visibly disintegrating, the conflict was in truth already over except for the shouting. With the imperial state capable of only minimal support, one by one the great cities of the Iranian heartland fell – Tehran, Qom, Isfahan, Hamadan, Yazd, Shiraz. Gripped by fear and hopelessness, few resisted the invaders, while those who did suffered the familiar fate of massacres and destruction. By the end of 1231 the Mongols held all of central Persia, while in the north an independent Daylamite Shahdom had established itself around Tabriz and Baku.
As the Great Khan spent the next year in Persia, planning a final push to destroy the Zoroastrian empire than had so insulted him all those years before with an invasion of Mesopotamia, his health began to worsen. Now in his mid-sixties, the toll of years at war had done what no army could and forced him to withdraw back to Karakoram, followed by his army, where he passed away peacefully in 1233. From nothing, he had made the earth shake and conquered an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific Ocean, and a death toll that could be counted in the millions. The world would anxious await the outcome of the resulting Kurultai that would decide the future of this great empire.
Huge battles and enormous butchers' bills. Especially for the Muslims.
