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Chapter 9 Travelers & Traders in the Mongol Realms

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Chapter 9 Travelers & Traders in the Mongol Realms HISTORY 2 Chapter 9 Travelers & Traders in the Mongol Realms In 1255, after his return from Mongolia, William of Rubruck (ca. 1215–1295) wrote a confidential report about his attempt to convert the Mongols to Christianity. He addressed it to his sponsor, the pious French king Louis IX (1214–1270). William’s letter runs nearly three hundred pages long in translation and contains the most detailed, accurate, and penetrating description of the Mongols and their empire that exists today. In 1206, the Mongols exploded out of their homeland just north of China and conquered most of Eurasia by 1242. For the first time in world history, it became possible for individual travelers, like William, to move easily across a united Eurasia. Such movement prompted an unprecedented exchange of ideas, goods, and technologies. William’s report is just one example of the different cultural exchanges that resulted and whose effects persisted long after different successor states replaced the Mongol Empire. His description of his trip to the Mongol Empire begins as follows: We began our journey, then, around June 1, with our four covered wagons and two others which the Mongols had provided for us, in which was carried the bedding for sleeping on at night. They gave us five horses to ride, since we numbered five persons: I and my colleague, Friar Bartholomew of Cremona; Gosset, the bearer of this letter; the interpreter Homo Dei, and a boy, Nichols, whom I had bought at Constantinople with the alms you gave me. They supplied us in addition with two men who drove the wagons and tended the oxen and horses.… Now on the third day after we left Soldaia, we encountered the Tartars [the Mongols]; and when I came among them, I really felt as if I were entering some other world. Their life and character I shall describe for you as best I can. In December 1253, after nine months of traveling—first by cart, then on horse- back—through modern-day Turkey, Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia, and Mongolia, William arrived at the court of the Mongol leader Möngke (MUNG-keh) (d. 1259), the grandson of Chinggis Khan (the Mongolian spelling; Genghis Khan in Persian). 1 Called William of Rubruck because he was born sometime around 1215 in the village of Rubrouck, France, William was educated at Paris. A follower of Saint Francis, he went to Syria, then under the control of the Crusaders in 1248, from where he departed for Mongolia. As an outsider, William writes about the appearance of Mongol men and women, their process for making fermented horse’s milk, and their worship of household spirits. No comparably detailed account by a Mongol survives. William visited the Mongols at the height of their power, during the years after Chinggis Khan had united the empire and before it broke apart. William’s gripping description allows us to understand how the Mongols created the largest contiguous land empire in world history, stretching from Hungary to the Pacific. Once they conquered a region or the local rulers surrendered, the Mongols placed a governor in charge and granted him considerable autonomy. Their loosely structured empire allowed many people, including William, to cross Eurasia and resulted in the interaction of societies and cultures that had been previously isolated. This chapter will also examine the states that succeeded the Mongols: the principality of Muscovy (Moscow) in Russia, the Ottomans in Turkey, the Yuan and Ming dynasties in China, and the successor states of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Focus Questions * How did the Mongols’ nomadic way of life contribute to their success as conquerors? * What bound the different sectors of the Mongol Empire together? What caused its breakup in the 1260s? * What states succeeded the Qipchaq and Chaghatai khanates? * What was the legacy of Mongol rule in East and Southeast Asia? 1. From Nomads to World Conquerors, 1200–1227 Founded by Chinggis Khan (ca. 1167–1227), the Mongol Empire formed between 1200 and 1250. At the time of Chinggis’s birth around 1167, the Mongols lived in modern-day Mongolia with their herds of sheep, cattle, and horses and pursued a nomadic existence, trading with their sedentary neighbors primarily for grain, tea, textiles, and metal goods. After conquering the different peoples in Mongolia, Chinggis forged them into a fearsome fighting force that conquered gigantic 2 sections of Europe, Central Asia, and China. The Mongols’ unprecedented military success was due largely to their skill with horses and their systematic use of terror. Mongol Life and Religion Nomadic peoples lived in the Mongolian grasslands even before the Mongols moved into Central Asia around 1000. The Mongols spoke Mongolian and different Turkic languages that are the basis of modern Turkish. The only source in Mongolian about the Mongols’ early history is The Origin of Chinggis Khan, an anonymous oral epic that took shape in 1228 and was committed to writing a century or more later. The Origin of Chinggis Khan gives a vivid sense of how the Mongols lived before they were unified. The Mongols’ traditional homeland occupies much of the modern-day Mongolian People’s Republic as well as the Inner Mongolian autonomous region just northwest of Beijing. This steppe region consists largely of grasslands, watered by a few rivers. Few trees grow there. While the soil and limited rainfall could not support a sedentary, farming population, the extensive grasslands perfectly suited pastoral nomads grazing their herds. The Mongols worshiped a variety of nature spirits. Each of the Mongols’ tents, William noticed, contained several felt figurines representing protective spirits. The supreme deities of the Mongols were the skygod Tengri and his counterpart, the earth-goddess Itügen. Certain people, called shamans, specialized in interceding with these gods, sometimes traveling to high mountains thought to be their residence. On other occasions, shamans burned bones and interpreted the cracks as indicators of the gods’ will, much like Shang dynasty diviners in ancient China. The Mongols in central and western Mongolia had some contact with Christian missionaries from the Church of the East. These missionaries, the Christians most active in Central Asia, spoke the Turkic language Uighur when they preached among the Mongols. William called them Nestorians after Nestorius, a Syrian patriarch in Constantinople in 428, but in fact the Church of the East did not accept the teachings of Nestorius, whom successive church councils had declared a heretic. William gradually realized that the Mongols saw no contradiction between worshiping their traditional deities and praying to the Christian God. They also saw no significant differences between Western and Eastern teachings about Jesus. 3 Mongol Society Mongol society had two basic levels: ordinary Mongols and the families of the chiefs. The chief’s sons and grandsons formed a privileged group from which all future rulers were chosen. Differences in wealth certainly existed, but no rigid social divisions or inherited ranks separated ordinary Mongols. Below them in rank, however, were slaves who had often been captured in battle. The chiefs periodically collected a 1 percent tax simply by taking one of every hundred animals. The Mongols lived in felt tents that could be put up and dismantled rapidly. While the men led their herds to new grazing areas, the women packed up their households and organized the pitching of tents at the new campsite. William described the Mongols’ traditional division of labor: It is the women’s task to drive the wagons, to load the dwellings on them and to unload again, to milk the cows, to make butter and curd cheese, and to dress the skins and stitch them together, which they do with a thread made from sinew. They never wash clothes, for they claim that this makes God angry and that if they were hung out to dry it would thunder.… The men make bows and arrows, manufacture stirrups and bits, fashion saddles, construct the dwellings and the wagons, tend the horses and milk the mares. churn the khumis (that is, the fermented mare’s milk), produce the skins in which it is stored and tend and load the camels. Both sexes tend the sheep and goats, and they are milked on some occasions by the men, on others by the women. Because Mongol women ran their households when their menfolk were away and often sat at their husbands’ side during meetings, they had much more decision- making power than women in sedentary societies, William realized. Living in close proximity to their animals, the Mongols used the products of their own herds whenever possible: they made their tents from felt, wore clothes of skins and wool, ate meat and cheese, and drank fermented horse’s milk, or khumis. William describes his first reaction to this drink with unusual frankness: “on swallowing it I broke out in a sweat all over from alarm and surprise, since I had never drunk it before. But for all that I found it very palatable, as indeed it is.” The Mongols, however, could not obtain everything they needed from their herds and depended on their agricultural neighbors to provide grain. They also relied on 4 settled peoples to obtain silks and cottons and metal objects like knives, daggers, and spears. Before 1200, an uneasy peace prevailed among the Mongols and their neighbors. Individual Mongol groups might occasionally plunder a farming community, but they never expanded outside their traditional homelands. Under the powerful leadership of Chinggis Khan, all that changed. The Rise of Chinggis Khan Sometime around 1167, The Origin of Chinggis Khan reports, a chieftain of a small Mongol band and his wife gave birth to a son they named Temüjin, the future Chinggis Khan.
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