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 to . 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 , 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 . 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 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, , 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, , 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 . 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. When he was nine, a rival poisoned his father, and his widowed mother and her children were able to eke out a living only by grazing a small herd of nine horses and eating wild plants. Soon, though only a teenager, Temüjin skillfully forged alliances with other leaders and began defeating other bands. He eventually formed a confederation of all the peoples in the grasslands of modern Mongolia. In 1206, the Mongols awarded the thirty-nine-year-old Temüjin the title of universal ruler: Chinggis (literally “oceanic”) Khan (“ruler”). The Mongols used a political process called tanistry to choose a new leader. Its basic rule was that the most qualified member of the chief’s family led the band. In practice, each time a chief died or was killed by a challenger, all contenders for power fought to defeat their rivals in battle. Then the warriors gathered at an assembly, or khuriltai, to acclaim the new leader. When this leader died, the destabilizing and bloody selection process began again. Conquest and Governance Once he had united the Mongols, Chinggis reorganized his armies. Each soldier belonged to four units: a unit of ten was part of a unit of one hundred, within a larger unit of one thousand, which finally belonged to one of ten thousand men. All able-bodied men between the ages of fifteen and seventy fought in the army, and women did so if necessary. Scholars estimate the total population of the Mongols at 1 million, far less than the populations of the lands they conquered and governed. Numbering only one hundred thousand in 1206, the Mongol forces reached several hundred thousand at the height of Chinggis’s power in the 1220s.

5 The Mongols started with only one significant advantage over the European and Asian powers they conquered: horses. Their grassy homeland provided them with an unending supply of horses, from which highly skilled Mongol riders could shoot with their compound bows of wood, horn, and sinew. The Mongols also relied on speed. It was much cheaper and faster, they realized, to take a city whose occupants surrendered without a fight than to lay siege to a walled, medieval settlement that could take months to fall. The Mongols placed captives on their front lines to be killed by their own countrymen, in the hope that the rulers of the cities on their path would surrender. If the enemy submitted voluntarily, the Mongols promised not to destroy their homes and limited their plunder to one-tenth of all the enemy’s movable property. Because the ruler shared the spoils with his men whenever he conquered a city, his followers had a strong incentive to follow him, and the ruler had no reason to stop fighting. Under Chinggis’s leadership, the Mongols built one of the most effective fighting forces the world had ever seen. At first Chinggis led his troops into north China, which was under the rule of the Jin dynasty, and conquered the important city of Beijing in 1215. In 1219, Chinggis turned his attention to Transoxiana, the region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers, then under the rule of the Islamic Khwarazmian empire. In rapid succession the Mongols conquered the region’s glorious cities (see the chapter- opening map). The Persian historian Juvaini (1226–1283) quotes an eyewitness: “They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered, and they departed.” After conquering Bukhara, Chinggis summoned all the local notables to explain how the new regime would work. He appointed one man, usually a Mongol, to be governor, or darughachi (dah-roo-GAH-chee), of the conquered region. The darughachi’s main responsibility was to collect the required taxes. Conquered peoples staffed the lower branches of government and were permitted to continue their own religious practices. Religious institutions did not have to pay taxes. Since the Mongols allowed the local governments to rule as they had before conquest, the darughachi resembled the satraps of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. The Mongols’ willingness to leave much of the local government and customs intact meant that they could conquer enormous swaths of territory quickly without having to leave behind a large occupying force to rule the conquered lands.

6 2. The United Mongol Empire After Chinggis, 1229–1260 Chinggis Khan died in 1227. From 1229 to 1260, the Mongols, still united but led by different rulers, continued their conquests and took eastern Europe and northern China. During this time, they also introduced important innovations, such as the postal relay system, and began work on the Mongol capital at Khara Khorum. The postal relay system, the requirements for receiving envoys, and the court-financed merchant networks were the only institutions holding the different parts of the far- flung Mongol Empire together, as William of Rubruck discovered when he traveled to Khara Khorum in the . His trip exemplifies the ease of movement across Eurasia and the resulting cultural exchanges that came with the Mongol conquest. The Reign of Ögödei, 1229–1241 Before he died, Chinggis had divided his entire realm into four sections, each for one of his sons. If the Mongols had followed the traditional election process, the succession dispute could have been protracted. Instead, at a khuriltai held two years after Chinggis’s death, they acquiesced to Chinggis’s request that his third son, Ögödei (r. 1229–1241), govern all four sections of the Mongols’ realm. In the 1230s, the Mongols attacked Russia repeatedly and subdued the Russian principalities. With nothing now standing between the Mongols and Europe, western European rulers, including the king of France and the pope, belatedly realized how vulnerable they were to Mongol attack. Ignorantly assuming that any enemy of had to be Christian and so a natural ally of theirs, the Europeans hoped to enlist the Mongols in the Crusades. Each European envoy returned with the same report: the Mongols demanded that the Europeans submit to them and give up one-tenth of all their wealth. The Europeans refused. In 1241–1242, the Mongols attacked Poland and crossed the Danube until only a few miles from Vienna, Austria. There, on the brink of overrunning western Europe, the Mongols suddenly halted. News of Ögödei’s death reached the troops, and, according to custom, all the warriors returned home to attend the khuriltai. They never returned to eastern Europe, and the western European powers were spared invasion. The Postal Relay System The warriors in Europe learned of Ögödei’s death fairly quickly because of the postal relay system, which took shape during his reign and which allowed the ruler to communicate with officials in the furthest regions of the Mongol Empire. The

7 Mongols established fixed routes, with regular stops every 30 or so miles (50 km). Official messengers carried a silver or bronze tablet of authority that entitled them to food and fresh horses. The riders could cover some 60 miles (100 km) a day. The Mongols also used the postal relay stations to provide visiting envoys with escorts, food, and shelter and, most important, to guarantee their safe return. William of Rubruck began his journey in 1253, two years after the Mongols had finally settled on Möngke, one of Chinggis Khan’s grandsons, as Ögödei’s successor. William wore a brown robe and went barefoot because he was a Franciscan missionary, not a diplomat. Just before he entered Mongol territory, however, he learned that if he denied he was an envoy, he might lose his safe- conduct guarantee and the right to provisions and travel assistance. He decided to accept the privileges granted to envoys. The system for receiving envoys functioned well but not flawlessly, as William discovered. When he crossed the Don River, local people refused to help. To his dismay William found that the money he brought from Europe was useless: in one village, no one would sell him food or animals. After three difficult days, William’s party once again received the mounts to which they were entitled. For two months, William reported, he and his compatriots “never slept in a house or a tent, but always in the open air or underneath our wagons.” On July 31, 1253, they arrived at the court of Sartakh, a great-grandson of Chinggis. Earlier envoys had reported that Sartakh was an observant Christian, and William hoped that Sartakh would permit him to stay. In his quest to obtain permission to preach, William personally experienced the decision-making structure of the Mongol government. Although the Mongols respected envoys, they feared spies. Sartakh said that, to preach, William needed the approval of Sartakh’s father, Batu, a grandson of Chinggis Khan who ruled the western section of the empire. Batu in turn decided that William needed the approval of the highest ruler of all, Möngke, before he could preach among the Mongols. Each ruler chose to send William in person to see his superior. William and his companion Bartholomew departed for Khara Khorum with a Mongol escort who told them: “I am to take you to Möngke Khan. It is a four month journey, and the cold there is so intense that rocks and trees split apart with the frost: see whether you can bear it.” He provided them each with a sheepskin coat, trousers, felt boots, and fur hoods. At last, taking advantage of the postal relay

8 system, William began to travel at the pace of a Mongol warrior, covering some 60 miles (100 km) each day: On occasions we changed horses two or three times in one day; on others we would travel for two or three days without coming across habitation, in which case we were obliged to move at a gentler pace. Out of the twenty or thirty horses we, as foreigners, were invariably given the most inferior, for everyone would take their pick of the horses before us; though I was always provided a strong mount in view of my very great weight. William’s reference to his bulk provides a rare personal detail. The Mongols ate solid food only in the evening and breakfasted on either broth or millet soup. They had no lunch. Although William and Bartholomew found the conditions extremely trying, the speed at which they traveled illustrates the postal relay system’s crucial role in sending messages to officials and orders to the armies throughout the Mongol Empire. At Möngke’s Court On December 27, 1253, William arrived at the winter court of Möngke on the River Ongin in modern Mongolia. On January 4, 1254, the two entered the ruler’s tent, whose interior was covered with gold cloth. Möngke “was sitting on a couch, dressed in a fur which was spotted and very glossy like a sealskin. He is snub-nosed, a man of medium build, and aged about forty-five.” William asked Möngke for permission to preach in his territory. When his interpreter began to explain the khan’s reply, William “was unable to grasp a single complete sentence.” To his dismay, he realized that Möngke and the interpreter were both drunk. His interpreter later informed him that he had been granted permission to stay two months, and William ended up staying three months at Möngke’s court and another three at the capital of Khara Khorum, where he arrived in the spring of 1254. Khara Khorum was home to a small but genuinely international group of foreigners, who introduced important innovations from their home societies to the Mongols. Although they had originally come as captives and were not free to go home, these Europeans possessed valuable skills and enjoyed a much higher standard of living than the typical Mongol warrior. Whenever the Mongols conquered a new city, they first identified all the skilled craftsmen and divided them into two groups: siege-warfare engineers and skilled craftsmen. These

9 engineers made catapults to propel large stones that cracked holes in city walls, and Chinese and Jurchen experts taught the Mongols how to use gunpowder. Mongol commanders sent all the other skilled craftsmen to help build Khara Khorum. The Mongols’ willingness to learn from their captives prompted extensive cultural exchange. The Mongol rulers designated a group of Central Asian merchants as their commercial agents who would convert the Mongols’ plunder into money and then travel caravan routes and buy goods the rulers desired. As a nomadic people, the Mongols particularly liked textiles because they could be transported easily. Instead of a fixed salary, rulers gave their followers suits of clothes at regular intervals. The Mongols’ tents could be very large, holding as many as a thousand people, and could be lined with thousands of yards of lavishly patterned silks. Understandably, William writes much about the European residents in Khara Khorum, including a French goldsmith named William. Captured in Hungary and technically a slave, the goldsmith worked for Möngke, who paid him a large amount for each project he completed. The goldsmith generously offered his bilingual son as a replacement for William’s incompetent interpreter, and the son interpreted for William when Möngke invited him to debate with Nestorian, Muslim, and Buddhist representatives at court. Möngke invited William to debate with Nestorian, Muslim, and Buddhist representatives at court, illustrating the Mongols’ tolerance for and interest in other religious beliefs. (See the feature “Movement of Ideas: A Debate Among Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims at the Mongol Court.”)Yet even William realized that he made no converts in the debate. William returned to Acre, the city in the Holy Land from which he departed, and then proceeded to France, where, in 1257, he met (ca. 1214–1294), who preserved William’s letter. After 1257, William disappears from the historical record, leaving the date of his death uncertain. The Empire Comes Apart, 1259–1263 William’s letter to his monarch reveals that only the postal relay stations bound the different parts of the Mongol Empire together. The Mongols granted the darughachi governors wide latitude in governing, and they never developed an empire-wide bureaucracy. During William’s trip, the different sections of the empire continued

10 to forward some taxes to the center, but the empire broke apart after Möngke’s death in 1259. A year earlier, Möngke’s brother Hülegü had led the Mongols on one of the bloodiest campaigns in their history, the conquest of Baghdad, in which some 800,000 people died. In 1258 Hülegü also ordered the execution of the caliph, thereby putting a final end to the Abbasid caliphate, founded in 750. In 1260, the Mamluk dynasty of Egypt defeated the remnants of Hülegü’s army in Syria at the battle of Ayn Jalut. This defeat was the first time the Mongols had lost a battle and also marked the end of a united Mongol Empire. One khuriltai named Möngke’s brother Khubilai (KOO- bih-leye) (d. 1294) the rightful successor, while a rival khuriltai named his brother Arigh Boke (d. 1264) the new khan. After 1260 it was impossible to maintain any pretense of imperial unity.

3. Successor States in Western Asia, 1263–1500 After this breakup the Mongol Empire divided into four sections, each ruled by a different Mongol prince. The eastern sector consisted of the Mongolian heartland and China (discussed later in this chapter). In the western sectors, each time a ruler died his living sons divided his territory, and succession disputes were common. Three important realms dominated the western sector: the Il-khanate in Iran; the Qipchaq khanate or the , north of the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas; and the Chaghatai khanate in Central Asia. Border disputes often prompted war among these three realms. The Mongol tradition of learning from other peoples continued as each of the three ruling families converted to Islam, the religion of their most educated subjects. The Il-khanate, the Qipchaq Khanate, and the Rise of Moscow Since the Mongols had conquered Iran in 1258, only two years before the empire broke apart in 1260, they were not well established there. The Iranian Il-khanate was ruled by Hülegü (1256–1335), who, like his brother Möngke, was primarily a believer in . Five of Hülegü’s sons and grandsons ruled Iran between 1265 and 1295. They, like other Mongol rulers, allowed Muslims, Buddhists, and Nestorian Christians to continue to worship their own belief systems. When Hülegü’s great-grandson Ghazan (r. 1295–1304) took the throne in 1295, he

11 announced his conversion to Islam, the religion of most of his subjects, and his fellow Mongols followed suit. The Il-khanate never succeeded in establishing an efficient way to tax Iran, frequently resorting to force to get Iran’s cultivators to pay. The end result was severe impoverishment of the countryside, which had already been devastated in the 1250s during the Mongol invasions. The Il-khanate had regular contact with the Yuan dynasty in China (covered later in this chapter), and in the the government introduced paper money (using the Chinese word for it). The paper money failed completely, bringing commerce to a standstill, but the experiment testifies to the Il-khanate’s willingness to borrow from neighboring peoples. The Il- khanate ended in 1335 when the last of Hülegü’s descendants died, and Iran broke up into many small regions. To the north, in the Qipchaq khanate, individual rulers converted to Islam as early as the 1250s, but Islam became the official religion only during the reign of Muhammad Özbeg (r. 1313–1341). The Qipchaq ruled the lower and middle River valley, the home of the Bulgars, who had converted to Islam in the tenth century. Many Qipchaq subjects in Russian cities to the north and west continued to belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Before the Mongols conquered the region in the 1230s, the descendants of Prince Vladimir of Kiev had governed the various Rus principalities. Unable to mount a successful defense against the Mongols, the different Russian princes surrendered, and the conquests devastated Kiev. The Russian princes of various cities paid the Mongols tribute, and the Qipchaq khanate, in turn, gave certain princes written permission to govern a given territory. The principality of Muscovy (Moscow) eventually emerged as Kiev’s successor, partially because the rulers of Moscow were frequently better able to pay their share of tribute and so were favored by the Qipchaq khanate. Ivan III (r. 1462– 1505) defeated other Russian families to become the undisputed leader of the region; in 1480 he stopped submitting tribute to the Qipchaq khanate, and in 1502 he brought the khanate to an end. The Chaghatai Khanate and Timur the Lame Straddling the Amu Darya and Syr Darya River valleys, the Chaghatai khanate included the eastern grasslands in what is now modern Mongolia and a western half that included the great cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

12 Starting around 1350, a Turkish-speaking leader of Mongol descent took power in Samarkand and the western section of the Chaghatai khanate. This leader, known to his Persian enemies as Timur the Lame (1336?–1405), succeeded in forming a powerful confederation and conquered much of modern Iran, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and the Anatolian region of Turkey. Like Chinggis Khan, he used terror to reduce resistance. Timur was famous for setting his enemies on fire or throwing them off cliffs. Like the Mongols, Timur the Lame forcibly resettled artisans and architects from among the conquered townspeople of India, Iran, and Syria. In his capital of Samarkand, these crafts-people built foreign-influenced buildings with elaborate mosaic tilework that is still visible today. Samarkand became one of the most beautiful of all Central Asian cities. Continuing the Mongol legacy of patronizing learning, Timur’s grandson Ulugh Beg (1394–1449, r. 1447–1449) built an enormous astronomical observatory and compiled a star chart based on ancient Greek and Islamic learning. Ulugh Beg ruled for only two years before his son ordered him killed and took over as ruler, in keeping with the Mongol tradition of tanistry. Timur’s empire soon fragmented because the different members of the royal house, unable to decide on a successor, simply divided it among themselves.

4. East Asia During Mongol Rule, 1263–1500 At the time the empire broke apart in 1260, Chinggis’s grandson Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294) controlled the traditional homeland of Mongolia as well as north China. The Mongols succeeded in taking south China, but they never conquered Japan or Southeast Asia. The Mongols ruled China for nearly one hundred years until, in 1368, a peasant uprising overthrew them. The Conquests of Khubilai Khan and Their Limits Of the Mongol rulers who took over after 1260, Khubilai Khan (1215–1294) lived the longest and is the most famous. Suspicious of classical Chinese learning, Khubilai learned to speak some Chinese but not to read Chinese characters. During his administration in China, the Mongols suspended the civil service examinations. preferring to appoint officials and to include some Mongols or Central Asians. Even so, the Mongol administration in China absorbed many local customs. For

13 example, in 1271, Khubilai adopted a Chinese name for his dynasty, the Yuan, meaning “origin.” Khubilai Khan’s most significant accomplishment was the conquest of south China, resulting in the unification of north and south China for the first time since the tenth century. Demonstrating a genuine willingness to learn from other peoples, Khubilai Khan commissioned a giant Chinese-style navy that conquered all of south China by 1276. The Mongols became the first non-Chinese people in history to conquer and unify north and south China. Like all Mongol armies, Khubilai’s generals and soldiers wanted to keep conquering to obtain even more plunder. The Mongols made forays into Korea, Japan, and Vietnam even before 1260, and they continued their attacks under Khubilai’s rule. Of these three places, Korea, under the rule of the Koryo dynasty (936–1392), was the only one to come under direct Mongol rule. In 1231, a Mongol force active in north China invaded, prompting the Korean ruler to surrender. Acknowledging the Mongols as their overlords, the Koryo rulers continued on the throne, but the Mongols forced them to intermarry with Mongol princesses, and the Koreans adopted many Mongol customs. Once they had subdued Korea and gained control of north and south China, the Mongols tried to invade Japan, then under the rule of the Kamakura, in 1274 and 1281. Later sources report that a powerful wind destroyed the Mongol ships, an event described to this day by Japanese as kamikaze or “divine wind.” (In World War II, Japanese fliers who went on suicide missions were called kamikaze pilots.) Contemporary sources do not mention the weather but describe a Mongol force of no more than ten thousand on either occasion being turned back by the fortifications the Japanese had built on their coastline. The costs of repelling the invasion weakened the Kamakura government, which fell in 1333, and Japan began three centuries of divided political rule that would end only in 1600 when the country was reunified. The Mongols also proved unable to conquer Vietnam, then under the rule of the Tran dynasty (1225–1400). Mongol armies sacked the capital city at Hanoi three times (in 1257, 1284, and 1287), but on each occasion an army staffed by local peoples regained the city and promised to pay tribute to the Mongols, who then retreated.

14 When Khubilai Khan died in 1294, a new generation of leaders took over who had grown up in China, spoke and wrote Chinese, and knew little of life on the steppes. The fourth emperor in the Yuan dynasty, Renzong (r. 1312–1321), received the classical Chinese education of a Chinese scholar and reinstated the civil service exams in 1315. A new Neo-Confucian examination curriculum tested the candidates’ knowledge of Zhu Xi’s commentary on The Four Books and remained in use until 1905. After Emperor Renzong’s death, the Yuan government entered several decades of decline. The 1330s and 1340s saw outbreaks of disease that caused mass deaths; a single epidemic in 1331 killed one-tenth of the people living in one province. Scholars suspect the Black Death that hit Europe in 1348 may have been responsible, but the Chinese sources do not describe the symptoms of those who died. Faced with a sharp drop in population and a corresponding decline in revenue, the Yuan dynasty raised taxes, causing a series of peasant rebellions. In 1368, a peasant who had been briefly educated in a monastery led a peasant revolt that succeeded in overthrowing the Yuan dynasty and driving the Mongols back to their homeland, from which they continued to launch attacks on the Chinese. He named his dynasty the Ming, meaning “light” or “bright” (1368–1644).

Chapter Review In 1253–1254, William of Rubruck traveled through a unified Mongol territory; in 1263, the empire split apart. Like Chinggis and his descendants, the rulers of the different successor dynasties led powerful armies fueled by the desire for plunder; once they conquered a given region, they proved unusually willing to learn from conquered peoples and adopt their technologies. Although their empire was short- lived, the Mongols unified much of Eurasia for the first time. They were able to conquer so much territory because their cavalry overwhelmed the various sedentary peoples they defeated. After 1400, the development of new weapons powered by gunpowder changed warfare. As we will see in the next chapter, the Europeans who landed in the Americas in the 1490s used the same gunpowder weapons with far-reaching consequences.

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