Social, Political and Military Organisation

The Core Idea

Genghis Khan did not merely conquer — he dismantled the old steppe social order and rebuilt it around loyalty to himself. The army was the engine of this transformation, and through it, tribe, clan and lineage were deliberately broken apart and re-fused into new units. The result was a military machine that was also a social revolution, and an empire held together by communication, collective rule, and a carefully cultivated memory of its founder.

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The Army as a Social Melting Pot

Among the Mongols — and in many nomadic societies — every able-bodied adult male bore arms. The tribe itself was the army; when the occasion demanded, the men simply became the armed forces. There was no separate, professional military class in the old order.

The unification of the Mongol tribes and the subsequent campaigns changed this. New members poured into Genghis Khan's army, and what had been a small, undifferentiated body became an incredibly heterogeneous mass. Some groups, like the Turkic Uighurs, joined willingly and accepted his authority. Others, like the defeated Kereyits, were accommodated into the confederacy despite their earlier hostility.

Genghis Khan then set about systematically erasing the old tribal identities of everyone who joined. The army was organised on the old steppe system of decimal units — divisions of 10s, 100s, 1,000s and, notionally, 10,000 soldiers. In the old system, clan and tribe had coexisted within these units. Genghis Khan stopped this. He broke up the old tribal groupings and distributed their members into new military units. Anyone who tried to move from their allotted group without permission received harsh punishment.

The largest unit, the tuman (approximately 10,000 soldiers), now contained fragmented groups from a variety of tribes and clans. This altered the old steppe social order entirely: different lineages and clans were integrated, and given a new identity derived from their progenitor, Genghis Khan himself.

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The New Aristocracy: Anda and Naukar

The new military contingents served under Genghis Khan's four sons and specially chosen captains called noyan. But alongside them stood a band of followers who had served him loyally through grave adversity for many years. Genghis Khan publicly honoured some of these as his blood-brothers (anda). Others, freemen of humbler rank, were given special ranking as his bondsmen (naukar), a title that marked their close relationship with their master.

This ranking did not preserve the rights of the old clan chieftains. The new aristocracy derived its status entirely from a close relationship with the Great Khan. Loyalty to the person of Genghis Khan, not birth into a particular clan, was now the route to power.

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The Four Ulus and Collective Rule

Genghis Khan assigned the responsibility of governing newly conquered people to his four sons. These comprised the four ulus — a term that did not originally mean fixed territories. His lifetime was still an age of rapid conquest and expanding domains, where frontiers were extremely fluid.

• Jochi (eldest son) received the Russian steppes, but the farthest extent of his territory was indeterminate — it extended as far west as his horses could roam.
• Chaghatai (second son) was given the Transoxianian steppe and lands north of the Pamir mountains, adjacent to his brother's lands. Presumably these would shift as Jochi marched westward.
• Ogodei (third son) was indicated by Genghis Khan as his successor as Great Khan. On accession, Ogodei established his capital at Karakorum.
• Toluy (youngest son) received the ancestral lands of Mongolia.

Genghis Khan envisaged his sons ruling the empire collectively. To underline this, military contingents (tama) of the individual princes were placed in each ulus. The sense of a dominion shared by the family was reinforced at the assembly of chieftains, the quriltai, where all decisions relating to the family or state for the coming season — campaigns, distribution of plunder, pasture lands and succession — were taken collectively.

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The Yam: Communication and the Qubcur Tax

Genghis Khan fashioned a rapid courier system connecting the distant areas of his regime. Fresh mounts and despatch riders were placed in outposts at regularly spaced distances. For its maintenance, the Mongol nomads contributed a tenth of their herd — horses or livestock — as provisions. This was the qubcur tax, a levy the nomads paid willingly for the multiple benefits it brought.

The courier system (yam) was further refined after Genghis Khan's death. Its speed and reliability surprised travellers. It enabled the Great Khans to keep a check on developments at the farthest end of their regime across the continental landmass.

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The Cost of Conquest: Devastation and Ecological Collapse

The conquered people hardly felt a sense of affinity with their new nomadic masters. During the campaigns of the first half of the thirteenth century:

• Cities were destroyed
• Agricultural lands laid waste
• Trade and handicraft production disrupted
• Tens of thousands killed — the exact figures lost in the exaggerated reports of the time
• Even more people enslaved

All classes, from elites to peasantry, suffered. In the resulting instability, the underground canals called qanats in the arid Iranian plateau could no longer receive periodic maintenance. As they fell into disrepair, the desert crept in. This led to an ecological devastation from which parts of Khurasan never recovered.

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Pax Mongolica and the Silk Route

Once the dust from the campaigns settled, Europe and China were territorially linked. In the peace ushered in by Mongol conquest — the Pax Mongolica — trade connections matured. Commerce and travel along the Silk Route reached its peak under the Mongols. But unlike before, the trade routes did not terminate in China. They continued north into Mongolia and to Karakorum, the heart of the new empire.

Communication and ease of travel were vital to retain the coherence of the Mongol regime. Travellers were given a pass (paiza in Persian; gerege in Mongolian) for safe conduct. Traders paid the baj tax for the same purpose. All thereby acknowledged the authority of the Mongol Khan.

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The Shift Towards Sedentary Life

The contradictions between nomadic and sedentary elements within the Mongol empire eased through the thirteenth century. In the 1230s, during the successful war against the Chin dynasty in north China, a strong pressure group within the Mongol leadership advocated massacring all the peasantry and converting their fields into pasture. But by the 1270s, when south China was annexed after the defeat of the Sung dynasty, Genghis Khan's grandson Qubilai Khan (d. 1294) appeared as the protector of the peasants and the cities.

In the 1290s, the Mongol ruler of Iran, Ghazan Khan (d. 1304), a descendant of Toluy, warned family members and generals to avoid pillaging the peasantry. It would not lead to a stable, prosperous realm, he advised — in a speech whose sedentary overtones would have made Genghis Khan shudder.

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Civil Administrators from Conquered Societies

From Genghis Khan's reign itself, the Mongols recruited civil administrators from the conquered societies. They were sometimes moved around — Chinese secretaries deployed in Iran, Persians in China. They helped integrate the distant dominions, and their backgrounds and training were always useful in blunting the harsher edges of nomadic predation on sedentary life.

The Mongol Khans trusted them as long as they continued to raise revenue. These administrators could command considerable influence:

• In the 1230s, the Chinese minister Yeh-lu Ch'u-ts'ai muted some of Ogodei's more rapacious instincts.
• The Juwaini family played a similar role in Iran through the latter half of the thirteenth century.
• At the end of the century, the wazir Rashiduddin drafted the speech Ghazan Khan delivered to his Mongol compatriots, asking them to protect rather than harass the peasantry.

The pressure to sedentarise was greater in the new areas of Mongol domicile — areas distant from the original steppe habitat of the nomads.

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The Breakup of the Common Patrimony

By the middle of the thirteenth century, the sense of a common patrimony shared by all the brothers was gradually replaced by individual dynasties, each ruling its separate ulus — a term that now carried the sense of a territorial dominion. This was, in part, a result of succession struggles, where Genghis Khanid descendants competed for the office of Great Khan and prized pastoral lands.

The resulting dynasties:

Noticeably, nomadic traditions persisted longest among the steppe dwellers in Central Asia (descendants of Chaghatai) and Russia (the Golden Horde).

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The Fashioning of Memory: The Yasa

The gradual separation of Genghis Khan's descendants into separate lineage groups implied that their connections with the memory and traditions of a past family concordance also altered. At an obvious level, this was the result of competition among the cousin clans. The Toluyid branch was more adept at presenting their version of the family disagreements in the histories produced under their patronage — a consequence of their control of China and Iran and the large number of literati they could recruit.

At a more sophisticated level, the disengagement with the past meant underlining the merits of the regnant rulers as a contrast to other past monarchs. This exercise in comparison did not exclude Genghis Khan himself. Persian chronicles produced in Il-Khanid Iran during the late thirteenth century detailed the gory killings of the Great Khan and greatly exaggerated the numbers killed. For example, an eyewitness report said 400 soldiers defended the citadel of Bukhara, but an Il-Khanid chronicle reported 30,000 soldiers killed in the attack. Although Il-Khanid reports still eulogised Genghis Khan, they also carried a statement of relief that times had changed and the great killings of the past were over. The Genghis Khanid legacy was important, but for his descendants to appear as convincing heroes to a sedentary audience, they could no longer appear in quite the same way as their ancestor.

Following the research of David Ayalon, recent work on the yasa — the code of law Genghis Khan was supposed to have promulgated at the quriltai of 1206 — has elaborated on the complex ways in which the memory of the Great Khan was fashioned by his successors. …