Ch 5 - Koryo and the Mongols

Building an Empire

With an emerging empire that straddled the famed Silk Road, Genghis Khan began his relentless and bloody march across Asia by conquering the rich Tangut state of Xi Xia. After defeating the Tatars, he set his sights on the Chin Empire in northern China. He drove the Song Dynasty leadership south of the Yangtze River, conquered the Khitan on the Manchurian Plain and put Koryo in the position of submitting to Mongol overlordship.

To the east and southeast of Genghis Khan's empire, hidden behind China's northern frontier defense line, lay the perpetual stimulus for the nomad's lust for plunder, the ancient Empire of China. The fine textiles, laces, weapons, and utensils that had been the age-old target of casual thieving raids paled in comparison to the rich cargoes that regularly passed through the Mongol Empire along that overland artery of heavily worn trails and paths known as the Silk Road. Massive trade caravans loaded with furs, lustrous silks, gold, and silver traveled this fabled trade route across the vast landscape of central Asia between China and the coastal cities of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean.

The Silk Road threaded its way between China and India and the prosperous Middle East trade centers of Samarkand, Bukhara and Baghdad, providing a communication and trade link that spanned a continent. Clever merchants and traders passing through the Mongol domain presented gifts of tribute to the Khakan and enjoyed perfectly satisfactory relations with the Mongol ruler. Genghis Khan enjoyed talking with the caravan merchants about the outside world. Whenever he asked them about the Jin Empire, he heard stories of inconceivable splendor and wealth. He questioned caravan after caravan. They all told him the same story.

Because the Mongols knew nothing about architecture or sailing, the words of caravan merchants evoked strange images in Genghis Khan's mind. He heard tales of roads paved with great slabs of stone laid atop arches that crossed rivers (bridges) and stories of great floating houses that traveled both up and down stream (boats). Chinese nobles did not ride horses, but were carried in gilt chairs slung on poles. The cities and towns of China were surrounded by walls so high that no horse could ever leap them, nor could any man climb them. These walled camps were so large that all of the Mongols could live in just one of them.

More disturbing, Genghis Khan learned that the Jin emperor's army far outnumbered his own, and that his soldiers fought with bows so sturdy it took twenty men to draw them. China had war chariots drawn by as many as twenty horses;  mighty engines that could hurl fire at an enemy;  missiles which burst with the sound of thunder and tore everything in the vicinity into fragments. The more Genghis Khan learned about China, the more his curiosity became deep concern. Thoughts of plunder gradually turned to thoughts of protection. For centuries, the Chinese displayed great skill in pitting one nomad tribe against another and the Chin's principal policy had been to prevent any attempt among the steppe nomads to unite. Deeply scarred by Jin oppression and their persecution of his ancestors, Temujin always knew that he would eventually have to fight them. With all the skill, caution and thoroughness in his nature he began to contemplate a decisive war of conquest against China.

South of the Gobi desert lay the large Tangut state of Xi Xia, a vast kingdom of nearly five million subjects protected by fortress cities and a 150,000 man force modeled after the Chinese army. Xi Xia became the perfect training ground for Genghis Khan's armies and the touchstone of his strength. In 1207, Genghis Khan's battle hardened warriors rode nearly 600 miles (965 kilometers), surviving the crossing of the Gobi desert by drinking milk and the blood of their horses. Caught in the open, the disorganized warriors of Xi Xia were easy prey for the highly disciplined Mongols. The heavily fortified defenses of Xi Xia were another matter. This was the Mongol's first clash with a settled agricultural urban state and Genghis Khan soon learned the futility of using cavalry against a highly fortified position.

The first large-scale Mongol attack in Xi Xia happened at the mighty fortress at Volohai. Unable to breach the walls of Volohai, Genghis Khan resorted to a clever trick. He sent a message from his encampment to the Tangut general announcing that he would end his siege in exchange for a gift of one thousand cats and ten thousand swallows. Astonished by the unusual request, the fortress commander gratefully complied. After the animals arrived in the Mongol camp, Genghis Khan ordered his men to tie a small cotton-wool tuft to the tail of each creature then set the tuft afire. When the panicked and frightened animals were turned loose, they made directly for their nests and lairs inside Volohai, igniting hundreds of small fires. While the panicked defenders were preoccupied with putting out fires, Genghis Khan's warriors stormed the city in conquest.

The fortified capital of Xi Xia, situated near the Yellow River on the arid Ningxia Plain near modern Yinchuan, presented the Mongols with another challenge. Unable to take the city by direct attack, the Mongols tried to divert the Yellow River into the surrounding moat to flood the city and drive its inhabitants into the open. It didn't work. After a devastating three year campaign however, Genghis Khan finally subdued the Tanguts in 1209, forcing the Xi Xia emperor Tiansheng to accept overlordship under the umbrella of Genghis Khan's growing empire.

The decisive victories of Genghis Khan cannot be ascribed solely to speed, surprise, or the unbridled terror and fury of his Mongol armies. While they were terrifying and fought with great fury, and often played ghastly tactical tricks on their opponents with horrific effect, the Mongols succeeded in battle principally because they were careful planners. They organized with great detail and used a level of cunning unmatched in all Asia.

In the spring of 1211, about 200,000 battle-hardened Mongol warriors gathered along the Kerulen River for a great quriltai at Genghis Khan's encampment. He told them the Jin Empire no longer had allies among the nomads. The time had finally come to exact vengeance. Temujin had the mind of a herdsman, a keeper of goats and sheep, and now he would collect nations in the same manner. The noblest of the Mongol chiefs belatedly came to the realization they had not chosen a ruler who would modestly steward their interests, but a harsh, strong-willed sovereign.

With the immense wealth of China beckoning them southward, the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan traveled some 450 miles between their Kerulen River encampment and the Chinese frontier in 1211 without losing a man. When the first news of the advancing Mongols reached Emperor Yuenji, the former prince envoy to Genghis Khan, he readied his army and laid plans to entrap the Mongols in the mountain passes leading down from the steppes. After feigning a strike from the north, Genghis Khan diverted his army to the west, where they penetrated a lightly defended region of China's northern defenses. The fast moving Mongol cavalry descended onto the rich agricultural lands of northern Shanxi Province without having struck a blow.

Genghis Khan's ultimate goal was the Jin capital of Zhongdu (located where Beijing now stands), a formidable fortress-city surrounded by three moats. Walls forty feet in height stretched for twenty-six miles around the city. Chinese troops watched the countryside from some 900 guard towers atop the walls. Tens of thousands of soldiers defended the city from behind twelve closely guarded gates. Subterranean tunnels linked Zhongdu with four smaller cities nearby, each about a mile square in size and well-supplied with food and weapons. Zhongdu's impregnability left Genghis Khan undecided as to how he could take the fortress. Rather than attack the city, he ordered his army northward for the winter where he could keep close watch on the Chinese.

As Genghis Khan's armies marched northward beyond China's defensive perimeter during the autumn and winter months to practice the art of siege warfare, they were surprised to find herds of imperial brood mares grazing in the lands between the inner and outer frontier line. In a single fortunate stroke, the Mongols not only solved their need for remounts, but cut off the supply of horses for the Jin army. Without the competition of Chinese cavalry, the Khakan no longer feared the Jin and felt the Chinese army could be dispensed with at his leisure.

As the Mongols withdrew, the Jin sent a Khitan army general to parley with the Mongol leader. Genghis Khan, ever-suspicious of Jin intentions, carefully questioned the Khitan general, who revealed himself to be a member of the Liao family. More importantly, the general divulged the true internal condition of the Jin Empire. The Khakan learned that although the Jin had unified northern China and adopted the culture and customs of China, they were, in truth, the same Manchurian Jurchen who had conquered the Khitan Liao dynasty and menaced the Korean kingdom of Koryo. The Khitan general offered his personal services to Genghis Khan in exchange for Mongol help in driving the Jin from the Liao kingdom. Quick to see the potential benefits of the general's offer, Genghis Khan decided to let the Jin capital wait.

The following spring, imperial Chinese troops crushed an uprising of Khitan rebels in the Liao state and threatened the Liao prince. Genghis Khan sent one of his sons across the Liaodong Peninsula at the head of an army to take the eastern capital at Liaoyang. In a harsh winter campaign in 1212, the cunning Mongol leader sent to relieve the Khitan prince successfully breached the Liaoyang fortress and took the city by storm. The Khitan prince, once fearful for his future, now declared himself king of the Liaodong and gratefully placed his entire kingdom under the vassal protection of the Mongols. At approximately the same time, the Khitan general sent to negotiate with Genghis Khan a year earlier honored his former pledge by bringing various Jin generals of Khitan lineage and their entire command of forty-six Chinese divisions under the Mongol banner.

In the spring of 1213, Genghis Khan organized a far more serious assault against the Jin Empire. Once the Chinese realized that the Mongol incursion was no mere raid for wealth, but a carefully planned invasion of conquest, a sense of heightened danger enveloped the throne in Peking. During a palace revolt that erupted behind the city walls, an army commander settled a personal vendetta against the throne by murdering Jin Emperor Yuenji. He immediately proclaimed himself commander-in-chief of the Jin army and installed the Jin prince Xuanzong as emperor. When news of the palace revolt reached Genghis Khan, he quickly ordered his troops to break off their engagements in the countryside and rush south to Zhongdu.

Genghis Khan hoped to find the throne in the hands of Liao supporters and the gates of the city wide open. The Mongols rushed headlong to the capital. Just outside the city of Zhongdu, Jin troops launched a sudden surprise attack against the Mongols and caught them completely off guard. Genghis Khan had misjudged the nature of the revolution. He discovered the new ruling elite in Zhongdu were as anti-Khitan as they were anti-Mongol. Following the first Mongol defeat in their two-year campaign against China, Genghis Khan called up his reserves and returned to Zhongdu. He personally commanded a savage twenty-four hour long battle that drove the Jin army back into the suburbs of the city. The Jin army's failure to take advantage of its initial victory and the resulting Mongol counterattack against the city fueled yet another palace revolt.

As the Jin government tore itself apart behind Zhongdu's walls, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army sat outside the gates, still faced with the impregnability of the city's defenses. The absurdity and frustration of the situation soon fired a wrath in Genghis Khan that triggered the most vicious Mongol campaign to date. During the autumn and winter of 1213, the Mongols murdered, pillaged and burned their way across the Jin kingdom, venturing eastward into southern Manchuria, southward across the Shanxi plateau, and southeastward across the low-lying plains to the Yellow River and the Shandong Peninsula. Genghis Khan cared little whether the Chinese lived or died, and although he spared the lives of skilled craftsmen, artists, and men of learning, he commanded the rest be put to death. No city, large or small was overlooked, and the Mongols spared few of the Jin garrisons that surrendered. They destroyed the rest. Mongol horsemen laid waste to the entire countryside, leaving little in their wake except flaming houses, depopulated towns, and smoking ruins;  corpses of the dead lay unburied in the fields or floating in creeks and rivers. Famine and pestilence followed close on the heels of the Mongol invaders.

China exacted its revenge the following spring, when the Mongol armies returned to the lush plains surrounding Zhongdu. The Mongols were set upon not by troops of the Jin army, but by the disease and filth they had wrought the year before. Zhongdu finally realized he could no more take Zhongdu than he could conquer the nearly 50,000,000 people of the Jin dynasty. Even if he could, he would never be able to hold it. With China weakened and humiliated in his eyes, he sent an envoy to Emperor Xuanzong to announce his withdrawal from China. Emperor Xuanzong sweetened the agreement by presenting gifts of gold, silver, horses, slaves, and a princess (who became one of Genghis' many wives) to the Mongol ruler. In 1214, after three years of savage fighting, Genghis Khan signed a peace agreement with the Jin emperor. Genghis Khakan, the Ruler of Rulers, retired with his armies to the oasis of Dolon-nor on the edge of the Gobi desert and never again set foot on Chinese soil.

The Mongols had barely completed their withdrawal from China when Emperor Xuanzong decided to get as far away from the Mongols as possible. He directed the removal of his throne from Zhongdu to Kaifeng, south of the Yellow River. The Song dynasty rulers in southern China saw the Mongol defeat of the Jin as just punishment for previous Jin wars against them. With the Mongol threat removed however, the Song dynasty viewed Emperor Xuanzong's move south to Kaifeng with great apprehension. His proximity made them all quite nervous. The Song court sent an emissary to the Mongol camp at Dolon-nor to discover Genghis Khan's intentions, hoping to point out the danger of letting the Jin reassert their power in China. The emissary's message neither impressed the Khakan, nor moved him to respond. The Song envoy spent days vainly trying to glean the smallest bit of information about Mongol intentions. He gave up only when he learned the sad truth that they had none. Genghis Khan had made peace with Xuanzong and that was that.

In the brief interlude of peace that followed, the Jin Empire collected its resources and began to rebuild China's war-ravaged provinces. The Jin organized a national resistance against the Liao state and new armies virtually sprang up out of nothing and marched into the state of Liao. Within weeks, Jin troops captured the capital at Liaoyang and drove the Liao prince from the city. The Khitan became targets for retribution in China. As soon as Emperor Xuanzong reached his new capital at Kaifeng, he ordered a number of Khitan troops in the imperial guard to surrender their horses and equipment. Instead of complying, the men mutinied, murdered the guard commander, and fled north, hotly pursued by government troops and harassed by cavalry detachments from Zhongdu. The Khitan sent a delegation north to Dolon-nor to tell Genghis Khan they regarded themselves as his vassals and pleaded for his help. The Jin Empire had evidently lost neither its warlike spirit, nor its ability to strike out. Believing the Jin retreat to Kaifeng amounted to a ploy for regrouping before a counterattack, Genghis Khan decided he could not allow the Jin to grow stronger.

In the summer of 1214, Genghis Khan sent three armies against the reemerging Jin dynasty, an act that forced a major turning point in East Asian history. A Mongol army under General Samukha drove south into Shanxi Province. General Sabudei, one of Genghis Khan's most trusted commanders, led a reconnaissance force into Manchuria, home of the Jurchen and the seat of the Jin dynasty. General Mukuli commanded a third army dispatched into Liao to aid the Khitan prince. His Mongol warriors swept through the Liaodong Peninsula and took the Liaoyang fortress. General Mukuli extended clemency to the Jin rather than punishing them for subjugating the Liao prince. Although a number of Khitan towns and villages surrendered to the Mongols, many Khitan tribes responded to the offer of clemency by fleeing south across the Yalu River into Koryo, pillaging and burning as they went. The sudden onrush of Khitan bedlam reached as far south as Pyongyang before it could be halted. The Mongols soon purged the entire Liao kingdom of Jin troops.

During the brief peace of summer, Zhongdu's military commandant abandoned the city under orders from Emperor Xuanzong and returned to the capital at Kaifeng. Meanwhile, General Samukha's troops moved into Shanxi Province and fought their way to the rebelling Khitan imperial guards from Kaifeng. Soon after the two groups linked up, the combined Mongol-Khitan force captured the passes leading to Zhongdu and once again sat at the city gates. Isolated from the Jin capital, Zhongdu held out through the autumn and winter of 1214 by existing on meager provisions from the devastated countryside. The Mongols intercepted and destroyed the last of the relief armies from Kaifeng the following spring and assured the end of Jin resistance. The few remaining Jin generals fled the former capital, leaving the city and the imperial palace to be looted and ravaged by their own troops. With a small force of only 5,000 men, General Samukha virtually walked into Zhongdu unopposed. It was not the mighty Mongol hordes that finally brought down the massive fortress-city of Zhongdu, but starvation. For weeks afterward, the Mongols mercilessly looted the city and sent huge caravans northward to Dolon-nor carrying the wealth of China to Genghis Khan.

Late in the summer of 1216, Genghis Khan proclaimed General Mukuli Prince of State and Viceroy of the Jin Empire, the Kingdom of Liao, and the Korean kingdom of Koryo. Within months, the Khitan rebelled against the Mongol occupation of the Liao state. In 1217, a force of some ninety thousand Khitan rebels swarmed south across the Yalu River and plundered numerous district settlements in northern Koryo. The rebels seized several cities and established defensive positions for the winter. The private armed forces of the Ch'oe clan and units of the weaker Koryo garrison armies stationed in the Taedong basin managed to hold the Khitan in the northern districts through late winter and into summer of the following year.

Koryo received unexpected help in 1218, when a large force of Jurchen and Mongolian troops entered Koryo out of the northeast in pursuit of Khitan rebels. Koryo quickly seized the opportunity and joined forces with the Mongols. After a year-long campaign, the combined force trapped the Khitan at Kangdong Fortress east of Pyongyang and forced their surrender. After having established a strong presence in northern Korea, the Mongols the regarded themselves as Koryo's benefactors. They were not about to offer aid to Koryo without compensation. The Koryo royal court deeply distrusted Mongol intentions, but they had little recourse except to enter into a tributary relationship. This new relationship did not sit well with the Koryo government and the Mongol tribute delegations sent to Kaesong soon became a frustrating annoyance. On several occasions, the Koryo royal court simply refused to accede to the Mongol's excessive demands for tribute. Their recalcitrance soon led to an open rift between Koryo and the great Mongol Empire.