Download PDF | Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men, By Harold Lamb (Author), New York: Garden City Publishing Co. ,Inc, 1927.
271 Pages
GENGHIS KHAN, FOREWORD, THE MYSTERY
Seven hundred years ago a man almost conquered ^ the earth. He made himself master of half the known world, and inspired humankind with a fear that lasted for generations.
In the course of his life he was given many names — the Mighty Manslayer, the Scourge of God, the Perfect Warrior, and the Master of Thrones and Crowns. He is better known to us as Genghis Khan.
Unlike most rulers of men, he deserved all his titles. We Americans, raised in the European tradi¬ tion, have been taught the roster of the great that begins with Alexander of Macedon, continues through the Csesars, and ends with Napoleon. Genghis Khan was a conqueror of more gigantic stature than the well known actors of the European stage.
Indeed it is difficult to measure him by ordinary standards. When he marched with his horde, it was over degrees of latitude and longitude instead of miles j cities in his path were often obliterated, and rivers diverted from their courses ; deserts were peopled with the fleeing and dying, and when he had passed, wolves and ravens often were the sole liv¬ ing things in once populous lands.
This destruction of human life bewilders the modern imagination — enriched though it be by the con¬ cepts of the last European war. Genghis Khan, a nomad chieftain who emerged from the Gobi desert, waged war upon the civilized peoples of the earth and was victorious.
We must turn back to the thirteenth century for a realization of what this meant. We find the Muham¬ madans convinced that such an upheaval of earthly things could only be caused by a supernatural visita¬ tion. The end of the world, palpably, was at hand. “Never,” cries the chronicler, “was Islam in such case, divided between the inroads of the Nazarenes and the Mongol.”
And consternation filled all Christendom, a genera¬ tion after the death of Genghis Khan, when the ter¬ rible Mongol horsemen were riding over western Europe, when Boleslas of Poland and Bela of Hun¬ gary fled from stricken fields, and Henry, Duke of Silesia, died under the Mongol arrows with his Teutonic Knights at Liegnitz — sharing the fate of the GrandDuke George of Russia — and fair Queen Blanche of Castile cried to Saint Louis, “My son, where art thou?”
A cooler head, Frederick II of Germany, wrote to Henry III of England that the “Tatars” must be no less than the punishment of God, visited upon Chris¬ tendom for its sins, and the Tatars themselves the descendants of the missing ten tribes of Israel who had worshiped the golden calf and had been penned up for their idolatry within the wastes of Asia.
Worthy Roger Bacon expressed his opinion that the Mongols were soldiers of Antichrist, come to reap the last, dreadful harvest.
This belief was strengthened by a curious prophecy attributed by mistake to Saint Jerome, that in the day of Antichrist a race of “Turks” would emerge from the land of Gog and Magog behind the mountains of Asia, a race polluted and unwashed, using neither wine nor salt nor wheat, and would cause universal disaster.
So the Pope called the Council of Lyons partly to devise means of stemming the Mongol tide, and stout and venerable John of Plano Carpini, friar of the order of minorities, was sent forth as legate of the apos¬ tolic See to the Mongols, “Because we dreaded that the nearest and most imminent danger to the Church of God arose from them.”
And prayers were offered up in the churches for deliverance from the fury of the Mongol.
If this devastation, this arresting of human prog¬ ress, had been the whole of his story, Genghis Khan would have been no more than a second Attila, or Alaric — a formidable wanderer without a purpose. But the Scourge was also the Perfect Warrior and Master of Thrones and Crowns.
And here we are face to face with the mystery that surrounds Genghis Khan. A nomad, a hunter and herder of beasts, outgeneraled the powers of three empires j a barbarian who had never seen a city and did not know the use of writing drew up a code of laws for fifty peoples.
In the matter of military genius Napoleon would appear to be the most brilliant of Europeans. But we cannot forget that he abandoned one army to its fate in Egypt, and left the remnant of another in the snows of Russia, and finally strutted into the debacle of Waterloo. His empire fell about his ears, his Code was torn up and his son disinherited before his death. The whole celebrated affair smacks of the theater and Napoleon himself of the play-actor Of necessity we must turn to Alexander of Macedon, that reckless and victorious youth, to find a conquer¬ ing genius the equal of Genghis Khan — Alexander the god-like, marching with his phalanx toward the ris¬ ing sun, bearing with him the blessing of Greek cul¬ ture. Both died in the full tide of victory, and their names survive in the legends of Asia to-day.
Only after death the measure of their achievements differs beyond comparison. Alexander’s generals were soon fighting among themselves for the kingdoms from which his son was forced to flee.
So utterly had Genghis Khan made himself master from Armenia to Korea, from Tibet to the Volga that his son entered upon his heritage without protest, and his grandson Kubilai Khan still ruled half the world.
This empire, conjured up out of nothing by a bar¬ barian has mystified historians. The most recent gen¬ eral history of his era compiled by learned persons in England admits that it is an inexplicable fact. A worthy savant pauses to wonder at “The fateful per¬ sonality of Genghis Khan, which, at bottom, we can no more account for than the genius of Shakespeare.”
Many things have contributed to keep the personality of Genghis Khan hidden from us. For one thing the Mongols could not write, or did not care to do so. In consequence the annals of his day exist only in the scattered writings of the Ugurs, the Chinese, the Per¬ sians and Armenians. Not until recently was the saga of the Mongol Ssanang Setzen satisfactorily translated.
So the most intelligent chroniclers of the great Mon¬ gol were his enemies — a fact that must not be for¬ gotten in judging him. They were men of an alien race. Moreover, like the Europeans of the thirteenth century, their conception of the world as it existed out¬ side their own land was very hazy.
They beheld the Mongol, emerging unheralded out of obscurity. They felt the terrible impact of the Mongol horde, and watched it pass over them to other lands, unknown to them. One Muhammadan summed up sadly in these words his experience with the Mongols, u They came , they mined , they slew — trussed U'p their loot and departed.”
The difficulty of reading and comparing these various sources has been great. Not unnaturally, the orientologists who have succeeded in doing so have contented themselves mainly with the political details of the Mongol conquests. They present Genghis Khan to us as a kind of incarnation of barbaric power — a scourge that comes every so often out of the desert to destroy decadent civilizations.
The saga of Ssanang Setzen does not help to explain the mystery. It says, quite simply, that Genghis Khan was a bogdo of the race of gods. Instead of a mystery, we have a miracle.
The medieval chronicles of Europe incline, as we have seen, toward a belief in a sort of Satanic power invested in the Mongol and let loose on Europe.
All this is rather exasperating — that modern his¬ torians should reecho the superstitions of the thirteenth century. Especially of a thirteenth century Europe that beheld the nomads of Genghis Khan only as shad¬ owy invaders.
There is a simple way of getting light on the mystery that surrounds Genghis Khan. This way is to turn back the hands of the clock seven hundred years and look at Genghis Khan as He is revealed in the chronicles of his day. Not at the miracle, or the incarnation of barbaric power, but at the man himself.
We will not concern ourselves with the political achievements of the Mongols as a race, but with the man who raised the Mongols from an unknown tribe to world mastery.
To visualize this man, we must actually approach him, among his people and on the surface of the earth as it existed seven hundred years ago. We cannot measure him by the standards of modern civilization. We must view him in the aspects of a barren world peopled by hunters, horse-riding and reindeer-driving nomads.
Here, men clothe themselves in the skins of animals, and nourish themselves on milk and flesh. They grease their bodies to keep out cold and moisture. It is even odds whether they starve or freeze to death, or are cut down by the weapons of other men.
“Here are no towns or cities,” says valiant Fra Carpini, the first European to enter this land, “but every¬ where sandy barrens, not a hundredth part of the whole being fertile except where it is watered by rivers, which are very rare.
“This land is nearly destitute of trees, although well adapted for the pasturage of cattle. Even the emperor and princes and all others warm themselves and cook their victuals with fires of horse and cow dung.
“The climate is very intemperate, as in the middle of summer there are terrible storms of thunder and lightning by which many people are killed, and even then there are great falls of snow and such tempests of cold winds blow that sometimes people can hardly sit on horseback. In one of these we had to throw our¬ selves down on the ground and could not see through the prodigious dust. There are often showers of hail, and sudden, intolerable heats followed by extreme cold” —
This is the Gobi desert, a.d. 1162, the Year of the Swine in the calendar of the Twelve Beasts.
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