The business of war
World domination with horse and bow
The collective memory of Asia remembers the apocalyptic advances of the
Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, who rode out of the steppes
and eventually dominated the Euro-Asian landmass from Poland to the
southern tip of Korea, Siberia to India.
Le Monde diplomatique
November 2004
By Christian de Brie
We usually agree that the 20th century was the most murderous in human
history. Certainly the death toll amounted to many millions in two world
wars and other conflicts. War crimes and crimes against humanity
culminated in the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Weapons of mass
destruction, including the nuclear bomb, were used against civilians who
had come to be regarded as legitimate targets. It seems logical to call
the century the “age of extremes” given the scale of devastation, the
number of victims and the barbarity of their killers (1).
But extreme compared to what? Surveying the past millennium, it is
possible to discover short periods of peace in specific areas or at
least to subscribe to the myth that war was once clean. But examining
the whole globe over the same time produces a less appealing overview.
In all of those thousand years, there was not one when the whole world
was at peace. We find instead a list of conflicts: invasions and
conquests; tribal, ethnic, feudal, dynastic, nationalist, colonial and
imperialist struggles; civil and religious wars; peasant revolts;
guerrilla campaigns; wars of liberation; revolts and revolutions;
banditry and piracy. Most of the estimated 40 billion human beings who
lived during the past millennium would have had to endure at least one
war in their short lives (2) The shared experiences of all – and 90% of
that 40 billion have been peasants (3) – were exploitation, poverty,
ignorance and subjection. They lived in permanent insecurity, burdened
by toil and taxation, scraping a living between one destructive conflict
and the next, the prey and the booty of a minority of greedy predators:
feudal lords, landowners and money-lenders.
A succession of tyrants rode on their backs: kings and emperors,
sultans, shahs and shoguns, generalissimos and caudillos, desirous of
glory, power and riches, and prepared to commit any atrocity to secure
or hang on to them; there were presidents, princes, barons, ministers
and viziers, popes and caliphs driven by unappeasable hatreds. All of
them perpetually at war in the name of God, civilisation, flag or party.
Nothing was different then from now. Peace and relative prosperity have
always been the fleeting privilege of the few. The fortunate 10% of
humanity who have lived in western Europe and North America during the
past 50 years should have no illusions; even during that time more than
100 wars have raged over the rest of the planet. Some have been savage
(4); others of what we choose to call “low intensity”. All have spared
the westerners who so often instigated and participated in them and who
should ask themselves what “low intensity” really means when half a
family has been killed and the other half brutally exiled, left to rot
in a refugee camp with no hope of return to a destroyed home.
Despite 200 wars and a 200 million bodycount – 2% of world population
(5) – the 20th century did not differ much from those that went before.
The whole millennium shared what we regard as the unique characteristics
of the 20th century: massacres of populations; deportations and death
marches; extermination camps and the systematic murder of prisoners;
rape, torture and summary executions; the use of terror to extinguish
resistance; the subjection and enslavement of survivors. Towns,
villages, fields and means of production were looted and burned.
Survivors, prey to banditry and civil war, fled from famines and
epidemics more deadly than the initial carnage.
In the West many of these horrors were perpetrated in the name of
messianic and racist ideologies, following a precedent set by the god of
the Judaeo-Christian Old Testament, who might today be liable to
prosecution before the International Criminal Tribunal (6).
At any time and in any place, war and mass death were the common
denominators of an inhuman history that did not have to wait for
industrialised warfare, improvements in lethal technology and the
invention of factories of death to make fast and easy the killing of so
many. The last genocide of the 20th century was that of 900,000 Rwandan
Tutsis, which lasted 90 days between April and June 1994; 10,000 a day
exterminated by the machete just as efficiently as by the gas chamber.
Two apocalyptic progressions in the past millennium deserve special
mention for their duration, extent and cruelty. From the 13th to the
15th centuries, the armies of Genghis Khan and Timur Lenk – Tamerlane –
successfully globalised misery across Eurasia from the Pacific to the
Danube, and through China, India and the Middle East, where the biggest
populations and the most advanced civilisations were concentrated. The
Mongols do not haunt western European history: but Chinese, Hindu,
Persian, Arab and Slav chroniclers and historians all described their
contribution to the collective memory of the East (7). (The second
apocalypse, just as destructive, accompanied the conquest of the world
by great European powers between the 16th and 20th centuries.) Genghis
Khan took almost 30 years to force Mongolia’s many tribes to stop
warring with each other and unite under his iron rule, but barely 20
years, between 1205 and 1227, for his 150,000-strong unified tribal
forces to sweep from the Pacific to the Black Sea, leaving tens of
millions dead. (In fact western Europe was spared invasion only at the
last moment by his death.) The destruction began with the genocide of
the Tangut people of the Western Xia empire in northwest China. The
Mongols razed many prosperous towns and reduced provinces to arid
steppes, killing as they passed through: eventually they slaughtered
some 600,000 Tanguts.
Then they threatened the Jin empire in northeast China. In the spring of
1211 the Mongols destroyed a Jin army of 500,000 north of the Great
Wall; their sun-bleached bones could still be seen stretching to the
horizon a decade later. The Mongols descended upon the empire itself,
massacring the inhabitants of its capital and driving terror-stricken
refugees before them as they devastated its provinces.
In 1215 the Mongols besieged and captured Beijing; 60,000 women were
said to have jumped to their deaths from the 50km walls that encircled
the vast city. Tens of thousands, weakened by famine and even reduced to
cannibalism, were butchered, while just as many died in epidemics,
particularly of typhus. The invaders stopped only long enough to loot
and burn the city before abandoning it, leaving encumbered by their
stolen women, boys, gold, precious stones and silks. The few citizens
left alive struggled to survive among ashes and corpses, without food,
water or shelter.
Famine spread to other provinces. Millions of Chinese joined those who
had fled the Mongols. The chaos bred corruption, banditry and guerrilla
warfare. Peasant risings were put down viciously. For decades
afterwards, the area under cultivation in China shrank, towns and
villages were ruined and insecurity and force dominated social
relations. The pattern had been set and repeated itself across the world
to the present day.
Genghis Khan’s third campaign was the worst. It was directed against the
vast empire of Khwarizm that covered Iran, Uzbekistan, southwest
Kazakhstan and Afghanistan and included magnificent cities: Samarkand,
Bukhara, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Herat and Ghazni. Khwarizm was an
advanced civilisation 1,000 years old, but it took the Mongols a mere
two years, 1220-22, to obliterate it. They destroyed long-established
irrigation systems, looted and burned flourishing cities, eradicated
trade and industry, enslaved and deported populations and massacred
millions.
Mongols did not take prisoners. Armies or garrisons who did not die in
battle were executed, usually decapitated. The inhabitants of besieged
cities that had not capitulated quickly enough were dispatched the same
way; their bodies were left as carrion and their heads stacked in huge
pyramids – men in one, women and children in another – a practice
continued by the Ottoman empire (there were echoes of this in the recent
Balkan conflicts). In Nishapur and Herat it was recorded that no head
was left attached to its body; no body retained its head. Every living
being had been killed, even the cats and dogs.
Another Mongol horde rode west to lay waste to Azerbaijan and then they
extirpated the cities of Qom, Zanjan and Qazvin. All the citizens of
Hamadan had their throats cut. Georgia was destroyed, its armies cut to
pieces; a coalition of Russian princes was annihilated at the Battle of
the Kalka River on 31 May 1222. Common prisoners were executed as usual;
captive princes were trampled to death by the Mongols’ horses. Russian
history remembers the battle as the beginning of two centuries of
subjection to the Golden Horde.
Genghis died in 1227. But after carving up his empire, his successors
expanded it through the same methods. For a century and a half local
feudal lords, collaborators keen to serve their new masters, helped them
impose their dominion upon subject nations and exact tribute. Between
1237 and 1241 the Mongols rode across central Europe. Elite knights and
formidable armies could not save the kings and princes of Bulgaria,
Hungary, Russia, Poland and Germany. The Mongols swept north into
Russia; half the citizens of fallen Ryazan had their throats cut, the
rest were burned. Belgorod, Moscow, Vladimir, Suzdal, Rostov, Yaroslavl
fell and were destroyed.
Western Europe had remained indifferent until the refugees brought their
stories of a race of cruel monsters from the other side of the world;
they responded by mobilising 40,000 soldiers and Teutonic knights. The
Mongol army outnumbered them two to one and wiped them out near Legnica
in southwest Poland. The Mongols paraded the head of the western leader,
Henry of Silesia, on a lance and sent the Khan Ogedei 500 sackfuls of
ears. In just three weeks the Mongols reduced the countryside to
infertility and killed much of its population. King Bela IV of Hungary
had sent 100,000 warriors; they all died, and half Hungary’s population
perished in months. The Mongols were within striking distance of the
Rhine, Vienna and Venice, when they paused to gather their forces for a
final offensive. History would have been different but for the death of
Ogedei and the dynastic disputes that ensued.
The Mongols invaded the powerful Seljuk empire and laid waste to
Anatolia. From conquered Khwarizm they launched devastating expeditions
against Kashmir and Punjab, although they did not manage to subdue the
sultanate of Delhi, despite a 25-year campaign.
The Abbasid caliphate was next. In 1258, after destroying its armies,
the Mongols besieged its capital Baghdad, a wealthy city of almost 1
million inhabitants. Once inside they looted for eight days, killed the
citizens and tortured the caliph, leader of the faithful and descendant
of the Prophet. (Christendom rejoiced to see Islam defeated.) The
Ayyubid dynasty of Syria fell in 1259-60. The Mongols burned their way
from Aleppo to Gaza by way of Damascus and its Great Mosque, with the
enthusiastic support of Christian troops from Armenia and the complicity
of the vestigial crusader kingdom (8) along the Mediterranean coast. The
only country to escape was Egypt, the last bastion of Islam, where Saint
Louis (9) had been captured by the Mamluks 10 years earlier.
However, the Mongols’ success in southeast Asia was limited; despite
destructive campaigns, they were unable to hold Burma, Cambodia, Champa
or Annam. Korea mobilised every man aged between 16 and 60, a force of
300,000. The Mongols destroyed this drafted army, but it took them
another decade to subdue the guerrillas and suppress Korean national
resistance.
In 1234 the remnants of the Jin empire in northern China finally
collapsed; famine and plague had killed a million people. The Mongols
stormed on south to attack the Song empire, cradle of Chinese culture
and the densest concentration of people on the planet. The Mongols
occupied its great cities. But it took them decades to unify all China
under their rule; the resulting Yuan dynasty lasted only from 1279-1367
and was never accepted by a constantly rebellious population, which was
reduced from 100 million to 60 million during 75 years of war. A former
Buddhist monk, Zhu Yuanzhang, led a revolt that started in the south and
finally, after years of guerrilla warfare, expelled the Mongols. He
proclaimed himself emperor and inaugurated the Ming dynasty, which
lasted three centuries. His own 30-year reign was one of the most
tyrannical and bloody in China’s history.
Although the decadent Mongol empire then became locked in internal
disputes and dynastic murder, its role was taken by a new horde: the
nomadic Turkish riders led by Timur Lenk (Timur the Lame, known in the
West as Tamerlane, or Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowe’s play
Tamburlaine the Great) after 1370. They followed the route of another
scourge, the Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague that had
originated in the steppes of the northern Crimea in 1347, spread through
the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to Byzantium, Syria, Egypt, North
Africa and western Europe.
In two years the plague killed between a third and a half of affected
populations; even Timur, who was a master of treachery, took 35 years to
achieve a body count equal to the bacilli. His black legend surpassed
even that of the Mongols, from whom he claimed descent. He combined
their savagery with the fanaticism of a proclaimed warrior for Islam.
However, most of his victims were Muslims. He carved his way through
Iran, the Caucasus, Russia, India, Syria and the Ottoman empire,
levelling them all to unpeopled deserts and never stopping for a moment
to occupy or exploit the conquered territories. He had only two
interests: the combat between nomadic horsemen and settlement-based
infantry and the subsequent destruction of the latter. The conclusion
was foregone: “What”, he is said to have wondered, “can foals and
heifers do against tigers and wolves?” His hordes employed the same
methods as the Mongols. Had not both been divinely appointed to wage war
in order to proclaim a universal peace under their authority? Behind
their horses and baggage carts walked thousands of captives, looted
human beings – mostly skilled artisans, women and trainable boys, who
might be sold into slavery or killed if they proved more trouble than
they were worth; Timur once ordered 100,000 slaughtered in a session
outside Delhi. Or they might be used as human shields, driven before the
front line to cushion the enemy’s charge or pushed in waves towards the
walls of besieged cities.
Timur’s hordes used terror and rumours of terror to project themselves
as inhuman and invincible, thus destroying any will to resist. “One
day,” according to the historian Ibn al-Athir, “a single Mongol horseman
rode into a village and began to kill its inhabitants one by one. Yet
nobody dared to defend themselves. On another occasion an unarmed Mongol
instructed a man who had surrendered to him to lie on the ground and not
to move. He fetched a sabre and killed him” (10).
Herat, Sabzevar, Zahedan, Kandahar, Shiraz, Isfahan, Baghdad, Moscow,
Vladimir, Astrakhan, Sarai, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Aleppo, Homs,
Baalbek, Damascus and Izmir were looted and destroyed; anything of
beauty, animal or mineral, was plundered. Timur liked to build towers
and pyramids with human heads mortared in spaces between their stones or
bricks; 90,000 at Baghdad, 70,000 at Isfahan, 100,000 at Delhi. He
flayed Hindus alive. He amputated the hands and feet of Christians
before decapitating them or buried them alive (4,000 Armenians in
Anatolia), or burned them inside their churches. Of course we can
comfort ourselves by saying the hordes were savage outsiders; but
Genghis Khan’s European contemporaries, the Christian knights of the
Crusades, behaved no better. King Richard I, the Lionheart, was proud to
hang the heads of his enemies round the neck of his horse; at Acre he
immediately went back on his sworn word and had 5,000 Saracen prisoners
beheaded.
And the European continent was eager to take up the expansive cruelties
of Genghis and Timur, to terrifying effect. From the 16th to the 20th
centuries – just as Europe was tearing itself apart in religious,
dynastic and nationalist wars – the hordes of European Christendom laid
waste to the planet, massacring, deporting, enslaving and exploiting the
populations of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. All in the name of God
and civilisation.
NOTES
(1) See Eric J Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth
Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994, and Abacus, London, 1995.
(2) Gaston Bouthoul, Les Guerres, éléments de polémologie, Payot, Paris,
1951.
(3) This was true until the middle of the 19th century. However, by the
end of the millennium, demographic pressures and the worldwide exodus
from the countryside had reduced the figure to 50%.
(4) Three million were killed in Korea 1950-53; 3.5 million in
Indochina/ Vietnam, 1945-75; 2 million in Algeria, 1954-62.
(5) Some 10 billion individuals are estimated to have lived during the
20th century.
(6) See, in particular, the Book of Deuteronomy.
(7) See René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, A History of Central
Asia, Barnes & Noble, 1997; and Jean-Paul Roux, Genghis Khan and the
Mongol Empire, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003.
(8) The kingdom in Jerusalem had been established in 1099 after the
First Crusade. In 1187 Jerusalem fell to Saladin and by 1260 the
crusaders controlled only a narrow strip along the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean.
(9) Louis IX, king of France from 1226 to 1270, led the unsuccessful
seventh Crusade against Egypt, where he was captured and ransomed in 1250.
(10) Jean-Paul Roux, Histoire de l’empire mongol, Fayard, Paris, 1993.
Translated by Donald Hounam