In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads

Dedication

A Cinzia,

con amore.

Epigraph

There in the vast steppe, flooded with sunlight, he could see the black tents of the nomads, like dots in the distance. There was freedom … there time itself seemed to stand still as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed …

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is no such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspire that dream.

Henry David Thoreau

Maps

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Prologue

1 Our Lady of the Mongols

2 The Voyage Out

3 The Kazakhstan Express

4 A Detestable Nation of Satan

5 The Birthday Party

6 Some Other World

7 The Naadam Wrestlers

8 The Shaman’s Journey

9 On the Edge of the Gobi

10 Riding to Zag

11 Fishing with the Librarian

12 The Company of Old Men

13 The Wedding Battle

14 Another Country

15 In Search of Genghis Khan

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

When I was a child my grandmother used to call me a Mongolian. In memory the word evokes the scent of grass and of fallen leaves, some atmosphere of twilight and of horses.

My grandmother lived at the top of an Irish village with views southwards to the Mountains of Mourne. In the evenings, in the long dusk that my grandmother called ‘daylegone’, I played on a raised pavement that ran along the churchyard wall, beneath an arch of lime trees. They were solitary and elaborate adventures involving horses and culprits. My stallion pranced through swathes of freshly mown grass and piles of autumn leaves. We leapt the wall in a single bound.

When it grew dark my grandmother would call me home, her voice looping in the lingering twilight like a rope. I resisted as long as I could, galloping between the trees in the thickening gloom, against the tug of her voice. When she stopped calling I sat in thrones of leaves gazing to the south where the Mountains of Mourne shouldered the horizon. The mountains were dark and mesmerizing, the frontier to the wide world of County Down. My father said that beyond the mountains lay the sea.

When the long lasso of my grandmother’s voice came again my horse was already melting away between the graves. I turned home, and presented myself in the back hall with skinned knees and leaves in my hair. As my grandmother bent over me to brush and straighten my clothes, she always said the same thing. ‘Like a Mongolian,’ she sighed. ‘Just like a little Mongolian.’

I never heard anyone else speak of the mysterious Mongolians, and I had no idea who they were. I recognized the word was an admonition of sorts but I sensed it also contained a note of praise. I liked its unruliness and its ambiguities, and I wanted to live up to the idea of recklessness that it seemed to imply.

Long before I had any clear sense of Mongolia as a place, the word belonged to those intense adventures played out each evening in the slow descent of an Irish twilight, as I tugged against the mooring of my grandmother’s voice calling me home.

It was in Iran, twenty-five years ago, that I first saw nomads. I was part of an expedition looking for the Persian Royal Road. Led by a charming charlatan who was a cross between Rommel and W.C. Fields, our small and happily deluded team spent eighteen months in the field, rattling around Anatolia and the Zagros mountains with a couple of Land Rovers, a leaky tent and a copy of Herodotus. It was the best of journeys. The landscapes were magnificent, the people hospitable and we had the alibi of historical purpose.

In the Marv Dasht plain beneath the ruins of Persepolis the Qashga’i tribes were trooping north to their summer pastures in the mountain valleys around Hanalishah. Skirting fields of new wheat, they passed like a medieval caravan, a whole society set in motion, moving northward to new grass. The layered skirts of the women flashed with gold and silver thread as they ran after straying lambs. Riding slim, leggy horses, the men trotted back and forth along the perimeter of the caravan shouting to one another in a language that had come with them from Central Asia. Camels bearing tent poles and rolled carpets and wide-eyed children swayed through veils of dust. On the edge of the village of Sivand, an old man hoeing vegetables in a walled garden straightened to watch them pass, his face darkening with an ancient antipathy.

I had never seen such glamorous people. They owned not a square inch of land but they strode across the province of Fars towards the mountain passes as if it were their private estate. Passing beneath the stone palaces of Persepolis, they were oblivious to their allure.

Some weeks later we penetrated the mountains around Ardekan where Alexander had defeated the last Achaemenian defences at the Persian Gates on his way to the prize of Persepolis. In these narrow valleys we paid a visit to a Qashga’i chief. It was June, the best month, when the grass was rich and the flocks were fat.

‘Nomad tents have big doors,’ the khan said as we arrived, referring to Qashga’i hospitality. We sat inside enthroned on splendid kilims and bolsters, looking down over a stony slope where his son was herding goats towards the green line of a river. Piled along the rear wall of the tent were embroidered sacks and chests and saddle-bags, the furniture of nomads. The khan’s daughters left their looms at the other end of the tent to bring us glasses of tea and water pipes.

We talked of politics, and the government pressure on the tribes to settle.

‘It was always thus,’ the khan said. ‘The people of the towns, the peoples of the fields, worry they cannot control us. They think of us as barbarians.’ He smiled, sensitive to the irony of this, a gracious host with elegant manners, a man whose tribal pedigree went back three centuries. ‘They want us to settle in one place. They want to make us part of the life of the towns.’

The canvas walls filled with wind and the tent creaked like a ship. On the tent poles the saddle-bags swayed.

‘The tribes were powerful once in Iran. But those days are gone. I do not know what the future holds for nomads. But I fear that we are seeing the end of a way of life.’ He gestured to the valley as if the landscape itself was in retreat. ‘We have migrated through these mountains for centuries. We came to these lands in the train of Genghis Khan.’

The Qashga’i are a remnant of one of the innumerable nomadic peoples who emigrated from the great grasslands of Central Asia. Iran was a civilization prone to exhaustion and Persian history was shaped by these nomadic incursions. When dynasties weakened, when art became decadent, when the officials grew corrupt and the aristocrats soft and cowardly, they knew the barbarians would soon be coming, a scourge and a salvation.

This pattern of untamed horsemen, bursting forth from the steppes to prey on their more suburban neighbours, was repeated throughout Asia. They came with a bewildering variety of names: the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, the Tocharians, the Xiongnu, known in Europe as the Huns. Russia was not free of the ‘Tartar yoke’ until the sixteenth century. In India the great Mughal Empire was founded by a nomadic barbarian from beyond the Oxus. In China, they built the Great Wall in the vain hope that they could keep the nomads at bay.

The high-water mark of nomadic power were the Mongols of the thirteenth century. In the course of a single generation, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, they rode out of the steppes of Central Asia to forge the largest land empire the world has ever seen. From the South China Seas to the Baltic they stepped from the nightmares of townsfolk onto their doorsteps. Suddenly the Mongols seemed to be everywhere at once, threatening to gatecrash Viennese balls, carrying off princesses in Persia, over-throwing Chinese dynasties, sacking Burmese temples, putting Budapest to the torch, launching seaborne invasions of Japan. Even in a distant England they were front-page news. Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century chronicler, sounded the last trumpet: the Mongols were coming and the End was nigh. Hysterical congregations crowded into their parish churches to pray for deliverance.

The folk traditions of the Qashga’i insist on their connection to the Mongols and the great figure of Genghis Khan as village chiefs in remote corners of northern Pakistan insist on their descent from Alexander the Great.

‘The Mongols were a race of heroes,’ the khan said. ‘Nomads who ruled the world. And what has become of them? Vanished like all the others.’

‘They have gone home to Mongolia,’ I said.

The khan looked at me quizzically. With their legendary aura it had not occurred to him that they were a real people with a real homeland.

‘Where is Mongolia?’ he asked after a time.

‘Beyond China,’ I said.

‘Have you been there?’

‘I haven’t,’ I said.

In the early evening air the whistling calls of shepherds driving the flocks towards the tents drifted from the opposite slopes like birdsong. The women had left their looms and were heading out to the milking with pails and goatskins.

‘What do you think Mongolia is like now?’ the khan asked.

‘They are still nomads,’ I said. ‘Not like here where most people are settled. Mongolia is a nation of nomads, the last in Asia.’

The khan weighed this news carefully.

‘I would like to go to Mongolia,’ he announced at last. ‘To see the people of Genghis Khan. To see their tents and their flocks, to see the way they are living.’ He was seized by the idea and the camaraderie of our shared interest. ‘We will go together,’ he declared. ‘It will be good for you – a man with no wife and no sheep. We will go to Mongolia together and visit the sons of Genghis Khan.’

Basking in the glow of this mythical expedition we shared bowls of lamb stew flavoured with apricots and talked long into the twilight about horses. In the morning the khan hitched a lift with us to Shiraz. He was going to visit the district commissioner to put the tribe’s case in a dispute about winter pastures. ‘This is how things are now,’ he sighed. ‘We must plead for what is ours, the grass on which we have pastured our flocks for generations, with a government bureaucrat.’

He had already forgotten about the journey to Mongolia.

But I had not forgotten. I have nurtured the idea of Outer Mongolia for twenty-five years. I longed to travel the width of Asia to this last domain of nomads. I saw it as a journey across the uneasy frontiers between the sedentary and pastoral worlds, between the builders of walls and the inhabitants of what the Chinese called ‘a moveable country’, people for whom settlement and the commitment of cities was a kind of betrayal. I longed to travel to Mongolia, and once there, I wanted to cross the country by horse, a ride of a thousand miles.

This ride was the central ambition of the journey. In Mongolia children learn to ride before they can walk, and the country offered the rare opportunity to make a journey by horse without feeling you were engaging in some unnecessary eccentricity. It was a question of loyalty, to the careless boy in the Irish twilight. This was the journey of his choosing.

Swept up by these grand designs, I had rather overlooked the fact that I had only ever ridden a horse once in my life. It was in Wyoming where a perceptive rancher had given me a horse so quiet it tended to fall asleep in mid-stride. It was enough to convince me that I was a horseman. Occasionally well-meaning friends would touch upon the question of my riding experience. Gently they tried to point out the difference between a ranch holiday and a thousand miles of Mongolia, but I didn’t let them put me off.

In the hurried days before departure I decided to buy my own saddle. Mongolians ride on wooden saddles, and I felt that was probably a technique that you needed to start young to have any hope of surviving. I decided on a Western saddle, with a reassuring pommel to hang onto should the horses prove frisky. In Herefordshire in a splendid equestrian supplier’s I spent a happy afternoon choosing my rig. In the horsey atmosphere of the place I got rather carried away and bought a confusing array of ropes, a halter, a grooming brush, a splendid hoof pick, a felt pad, saddle-bags, a pair of spurs, a hip flask, stirrup leathers, a pair of chaps, and a curious tool rather like a cheese knife whose purpose I never discovered. My pleasure was spoiled only by the scepticism of the young assistant who was obviously struggling to square the challenge of my proposed expedition with the naiveté of my questions.

On the way back to London I stopped at Hereford Cathedral to see the Mappa Mundi. The map hangs in a modern suite of exhibition rooms whose subdued light, after the bright slabs of sun in the cloisters, felt like the dim uncertainties of the past. It dates from the late thirteenth century when the Mongol Empire was at its height.

Over the centuries most of the original surface pigment has flaked away – the bright green seas, the blue rivers – leaving only its weathered base, the colour of old leather. In the religious hush of this place, it felt like a ritual artefact, a piece of ancient hide covered with symbols and obscure passages of text, a geography of spells and wonders.

In thirteenth-century Europe geographical knowledge had sunk to its lowest ebb, and the Mappa Mundi is not so much cartography as storytelling, a compendium of all the tales and marvels gathered from the Bible, from classical authors and from medieval myths, deployed across the continents. The alarums of Matthew Paris, penned just over forty years before, found their unreliable echo here in the frights of Asia. While Europe is full of reassuring cities represented as small line drawings of castles and spires, the rest of the world is portrayed as a landscape of fabulous characters. It was a rattle-bag of tall tales and obsessions, of hopes and fears about the dark beyond one’s own borders.

In Africa there are unicorns and men who ride crocodiles like horses. In the exhilarating provinces of the Upper Nile are the Blemyes whose heads were in the middle of their chests. Beyond are the Satyrs, the Hermaphrodites, the Troglodytes, and a splendid race with protruding lower lips which they deploy like umbrellas to shield themselves from the fierce equatorial sun.

With east at the top, according to the convention of the time, Asia occupies the upper half of the map. India was packed with legendary birds like the Alerion and alligators lurking on the banks of the Hydaspes. Dragons swarm across the island of Ceylon while dog-headed men patrol the regions east of the Carpathians.

My journey to Mongolia lay past the eastern end of the Black Sea where Jason’s Golden Fleece was pegged out like a drying hide. To the north lay Scythia, the barbarian hinterland of the ancient Greeks, where two rather belligerent looking fellows could be seen threatening one another with knives. To the west are the Grifones, part of the nomadic traditions of these regions. They were said to use the bodies of their enemies as horse-trappings; a human skin can be seen thrown over a stallion as a saddle. Beyond the Oxus lies Samarkand, a rare city in these parts, looking like an Elizabethan sketch for the Globe Theatre. On the far bank of the Jaxartes are the Essedenes respectfully devouring their deceased parents, a practice they believed preferable to leaving them for the worms to eat. On a blunt peninsula enclosed by a turreted wall, a long and rather garbled account in dog Latin identifies it as the place where Alexander imprisoned the sons of Cain, a fearsome tribe who will break out at the time of the Antichrist. Not far away, on the island of Terraconta, was the race descended from Gog and Magog, ‘a monstrous brood’, the enemies of God, who would one day invade his kingdom.

I stood on tiptoes to examine my destination on the outer edges of Asia. In the top left corner of the map, at the furthest extremities of the known world, where Mongolia should be, between the borders of China and the dark Outer Ocean, the parchment grew darker and the figures fainter in zones that seemed to fade into twilight. A sketch showed men with horses’ hooves: the land of the Hippopodes.

Since the days of ancient Greece it has been the conceit of settled people confronted with the horsemen of the steppes that their extraordinary equestrian prowess was not quite human, that the riders were in fact part horse. If any rumour of the Mongols had reached the map-makers perhaps it was here with a race so fleet, so unruly and reckless, that they pranced like horses.

That was my destination, pale markings at the far end of Asia, on an atlas of the imagination.

Chapter One OUR LADY OF THE MONGOLS

On the evening flight to Istanbul the plane bucked in rogue winds. Dark clouds piled up from the east. Tipping beneath the wings, Asia looked black and thunderous.

By the time I got into the city it was past midnight. Istanbul seemed deserted. In the dark I was struck by how European the steep lanes of Sultan Ahmet looked – the tall narrow houses, the fanlights above the doors, the wrought-iron balconies, the curtained windows. I crossed the empty gardens of the old Augustaeum where the two great rivals of Istanbul, the Sultan Ahmet Mosque and Haghia Sophia, the victor and the vanquished, face one another across the rose beds. Sultan Ahmet was all grace and delicacy, an architectural dancer poised on the balls of its feet. Birds swam around the minarets in tall currents of light. At the other end of the square Haghia Sophia, once the greatest church in Christendom, sulked in the embrace of old plane trees.

I found the hotel in the tangle of cobbled streets falling towards the walls of Byzantium and the Sea of Marmara. I woke the bekçi, asleep on a bench in the lobby, by knocking on the window. A tall lugubrious fellow, he led me silently upstairs, showed me the room with a slow melodramatic sweep of his arm, then drew the door carefully behind him as if he was closing the lid of some precious box.

The first night is always the strangest. I went to the window and looked down on the Turkish streets. Among the litter opposite, a cat was marking its territory. Raising my gaze, above the rooftops, I could see ships lying at anchor where the Sea of Marmara narrows to the mouth of the Bosphorus. I wondered if any of them were Russian; I hoped to find a Russian freighter to take me on the first leg of the journey, across the Black Sea to the Crimea. But my mind was still full of London. I slept fitfully in the narrow bed and dreamt of packing in the familiar rooms of my own house. I woke once with the sudden idea that I needed to remember to put in carrots for the horses. Beyond the ghostly window the muezzins were calling.

I had breakfast on a roof terrace overlooking the sad florid walls of Haghia Sophia. Suddenly London was gone, and the world had a different focus. In the room I spread maps on the bed and telephoned the shipping agents to get the names of boats due to depart in the next week for Sevastopol.

In spite of the fact that Istanbul has been a Muslim city for the past five centuries, Europeans still have a proprietorial feeling about the place. For almost 2000 years it was one of us. Byzantium was a Greek city, and Constantinople, its successor, was the new Rome. In its archaeological museum the splendid Alexander sarcophagus and a relief sculpture of Euripides are the star turns in rooms packed with classical antiquities. It is the only city in the world to bestride two continents, but for a long time its heart was in Europe. Then, when we were busy elsewhere, it slipped out of the European orbit and became Istanbul, a Turkish city ruling an Asian empire, capital to both the Ottoman Sultanate and the Islamic Caliphate. To the European visitor, modern Istanbul can seem like a wayward uncle who wandered off to Araby and returned years later with a beard, a pair of satin trousers, a water-pipe habit, and a young wife dressed in a black sheet.

In antiquity Constantinople’s position exaggerated the usual anxieties about nomadic barbarians. Rumours of the mounted Scythians who roamed the Don steppes on the far side of the Black Sea echoed the Greek legends of centaurs, creatures who were half-man, half-horse, whose untamed desires were a threat to civilized order. But the city was little troubled by nomadic invasion. By the time the Turks descended on Constantinople in the spring of 1453 their own pastoral origins were all but forgotten. They had picked up Islam, the manners of the Persian court and the habit of cities generations ago.

Though the Mongols never took Constantinople, the city contains one curious remnant of the Mongol Empire, a thirteenth-century Byzantine church known as Mouchliotissa, or Our Lady of the Mongols. The church is a unique link to the Greek capital before the Turkish conquest as it is the only Byzantine church that was not converted into a mosque. I had faxed the Patriarchate from London to ask about Mouchliotissa and had received a most courteous reply from the Metropolitan of Laodicea, a city of the Byzantine Empire that was in ruins before Columbus set sail for America. He invited me to call on him when I arrived in Istanbul. He would arrange for a visit to the church. His fax concluded with the blessings of the Patriarch for my journey, and I basked momentarily in the idea that I was setting off for Outer Mongolia with an ecclesiastical blessing more ancient and more grand than that of the Pope.

The Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Vatican of the Eastern Church, remains in Istanbul as if the Turkish conquest of 1453 were a temporary aberration, unlikely to last long enough to make it worth moving house. Though Greeks continued to live and worship in Istanbul for centuries after the Turkish conquest their numbers were in continual decline. In the twentieth century, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Turkish nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism have seen a dramatic exodus of Greeks, and today less than 4000 remain in a city with a population of 12 million. Yet the Patriarch continues to inhabit his city as if nothing had happened. Though he presides over a worldwide flock of Orthodox Christians, his congregations here in Istanbul, his own seat, have withered away. This anomaly lends the Patriarchate a curious make-believe air, like the last Emperor in China’s Forbidden City, a court ruling over a vanished kingdom.