Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire

Between 1219 and 1221,

Both belligerents, although large, had been formed recently: the

Muhammad II became Khwarazmshah after his father Tekish died in 1200. Despite a troubled early start to his reign, which saw conflict with the Ghurids of Afghanistan, he followed his predecessor's expansionist policies by subjugating the Qarakhanids and taking their cities, including Bukhara.^[7] In 1211, Kuchlug, a prince of the Naimans, managed to usurp the Qara-Khitai empire from his father-in-law Yelü Zhilugu with Muhammad's help, but alienated both his subjects and the Khwarazmshah with anti-Muslim measures.^{[8]: 30–31} As a Mongol detachment led by Jebe hunted him down, Kuchlug fled; meanwhile, Muhammad was able to vassalize the territories of Balochistan and Makran, and to gain the allegiance of the Eldiguzids.^[7]

Following the defeat of Kuchlug, their shared enemy, relations between the

In 1218, the Khan sent a large caravan of Mongol merchants to Khwarazmia; it seems probable that a large proportion of the Mongol elite had invested in the expedition, and thus had a personal interest in its success. However, Inalchuq, the governor of the Khwarazmian city of Otrar, seized the caravan's goods and executed its members on charges of espionage.^[12] The validity of the accusations has been debated, as has the Shah's involvement; it is certain, though, that he rejected the Khan's subsequent demands that Inalchuq be punished, going so far as to kill one Mongol envoy and humiliate the other two. This was seen as a grave affront to the Khan himself, who considered ambassadors "as sacred and inviolable" as the Great Khan himself.^[13]: 80 He abandoned his war against the Jin, leaving only a small army to pursue it, and gathered as many men as possible to invade Khwarazmia.^[11]

Opposing forces

Genghis' army was commanded by his most able generals, with the exception of Muqali, who was left behind to continue the war against the Jin. Genghis also brought a large body of Chinese siege and construction experts, including several Chinese who were familiar with gunpowder.^[30] Historians have suggested that the Mongol invasion had brought Chinese gunpowder weapons, such as the huochong, to Central Asia.^[31]

Campaign

Early movements

The Khwarezm Shah and his advisers assumed that the Mongols would invade through the

Unlike most of the other cities, Otrar did not surrender after little fighting, nor did its governor march its army out into the field to be destroyed by the numerically superior Mongols. Instead the garrison remained on the walls and resisted stubbornly, holding out against many attacks. The siege proceeded for five months without results, until a traitor within the walls (Qaracha) who felt no loyalty to the Shah or Inalchuq opened the gates to the Mongols; the prince's forces managed to storm the now unsecured gate and slaughter the majority of the garrison.[34] The citadel, holding the remaining one-tenth of the garrison, held out for another month and was only taken after heavy Mongol casualties. Inalchuq held out until the end, even climbing to the top of the citadel in the last moments of the siege to throw down tiles at the oncoming Mongols and slay many of them in close quarters combat. Genghis killed many of the inhabitants, enslaved the rest, and executed Inalchuq.^[35][36]

Bukhara

At this point, the Mongol army was divided into five widely separated groups on opposite ends of the enemy Empire. After the Shah did not mount an active defence of the cities on the Syr Darya, Genghis and Tolui, at the head of an army of roughly 50,000 men, skirted the natural defence barrier of the Syr Darya and its fortified cities, and went westwards to lay siege to the city of

Bukhara was not heavily fortified, with a moat and a single wall, and the citadel typical of Khwarezmi cities. The Bukharan garrison was made up of Turkic soldiers and led by Turkic generals, who attempted to break out on the third day of the siege. Rashid Al-Din and Ibn Al-Athir state that the city had 20,000 defenders, though Carl Sverdrup contends that it only had a tenth of this number.[38] A break-out force was annihilated in open battle. The city's leaders opened the gates to the Mongols, though a unit of Turkic defenders held the city's citadel for another twelve days. The Mongols valued artisans' skills highly and artisans were exempted from massacre during the conquests and instead entered into lifelong service as slaves.^[39] Thus, when the citadel was taken survivors were executed with the exception of artisans and craftsmen, who were sent back to Mongolia. Young men who had not fought were drafted into the Mongolian army and the rest of the population was sent into slavery. As the Mongol soldiers looted the city, a fire broke out, razing most of the city to the ground.

Samarkand

After the fall of Bukhara, Genghis headed to the Khwarezmian capital of Samarkand and arrived in March 1220. During this period, the Mongols also waged effective psychological warfare and caused divisions within their foe. The Khan's spies told them of the bitter fighting between the Shah and his mother

Samarkand possessed significantly better fortifications and a larger garrison compared to Bukhara. Juvayni and Rashid Al-Din (both writing under Mongol auspices) credit the defenders of the city with 100,000–110,000 men, while Ibn Al-Athir states 50,000.[41] A more likely number is perhaps 10,000, considering the city itself had less than 100,000 people total at the time.^[42][43] As Genghis began his siege, his sons Chaghatai and Ögedei joined him after finishing the reduction of Otrar, and the joint Mongol forces launched an assault on the city. The Mongols attacked using prisoners as body shields. On the third day of fighting, the Samarkand garrison launched a counterattack. Feigning retreat, Genghis drew approximately half of the garrison outside the fortifications of Samarkand and slaughtered them in open combat. Shah Muhammad attempted to relieve the city twice, but was driven back. On the fifth day, all but a handful of soldiers surrendered. The remaining soldiers, die-hard supporters of the Shah, held out in the citadel. After the fortress fell, Genghis reneged on his surrender terms and executed every soldier who had taken arms against him at Samarkand. The people of Samarkand were ordered to evacuate and assemble in a plain outside the city, where many were killed.^{[citation needed]}

About the time of the fall of Samarkand, Genghis Khan charged

Meanwhile, the wealthy trading city of

The assault on Gurganj proved to be the most difficult battle of the Mongol invasion. The city was built along the river Amu Darya in a marshy delta area. The soft ground did not lend itself to siege warfare, and there was a lack of large stones for the catapults. The Mongols attacked regardless, and the city fell only after the defenders put up a stout defence, fighting block for block. Mongolian casualties were higher than normal, due to the unaccustomed difficulty of adapting Mongolian tactics to city fighting.

The taking of Gurganj was further complicated by continuing tensions between the Khan and his eldest son, Jochi, who had been promised the city as his prize. Jochi's mother was the same as his three brothers': Genghis Khan's teen bride, and apparent lifelong love, Börte. Only her sons were counted as Genghis's "official" sons and successors, rather than those conceived by the Khan's 500 or so other "wives and consorts". But Jochi had been conceived in controversy; in the early days of the Khan's rise to power, Börte was captured and raped while she was held prisoner. Jochi was born nine months later. While Genghis Khan chose to acknowledge him as his oldest son (primarily due to his love for Börte, whom he would have had to reject had he rejected her child), questions had always existed over Jochi's true parentage.^{[44][full citation needed]}

Such tensions were present as Jochi engaged in negotiations with the defenders, trying to get them to surrender so that as much of the city as possible was undamaged. This angered Chaghatai, and Genghis headed off this fight between siblings by appointing Ögedei the commander of the besieging forces as Gurganj fell. But the removal of Jochi from command, and the sack of a city he considered promised to him, enraged him and estranged him from his father and brothers, and is credited with being a decisive impetus for the later actions of a man who saw his younger brothers promoted over him, despite his own considerable military skills.

As usual, the artisans were sent back to Mongolia, young women and children were given to the Mongol soldiers as slaves, and the rest of the population was massacred. The Persian scholar

Then came the complete destruction of the city of Gurganj, south of the Aral Sea. Upon its surrender the Mongols broke the dams and flooded the city, then proceeded to execute the survivors.^{[citation needed]}

Khorasan

As the Mongols battered their way into Urgench, Genghis dispatched his youngest son Tolui, at the head of an army, into the western Khwarezmid province of Khorasan. Khorasan had already felt the strength of Mongol arms. Earlier in the war, the generals Jebe and Subutai had travelled through the province while hunting down the fleeing Shah. However, the region was far from subjugated, many major cities remained free of Mongol rule, and the region was rife with rebellion against the few Mongol forces present in the region, following rumours that the Shah's son Jalal al-Din was gathering an army to fight the Mongols.

Tolui's army consisted of somewhere around 50,000 men, which was composed of a core of Mongol soldiers (some estimates place it at 7,000^[22]), supplemented by a large body of foreign soldiers, such as Turks and previously conquered peoples in China and Mongolia. The army also included "3,000 machines flinging heavy incendiary arrows, 300 catapults, 700 mangonels to discharge pots filled with naphtha, 4,000 storming-ladders, and 2,500 sacks of earth for filling up moats". Among the first cities to fall was Termez then Balkh.

The major city to fall to Tolui's army was the city of Merv. Juvayni wrote of Merv: "In extent of territory it excelled among the lands of Khorasan, and the bird of peace and security flew over its confines. The number of its chief men rivaled the drops of April rain, and its earth contended with the heavens."^[22] The garrison at Merv was only about 12,000 men, and the city was inundated with refugees from eastern Khwarezmia. For six days, Tolui besieged the city, and on the seventh day, he assaulted the city. However, the garrison beat back the assault and launched their own counter-attack against the Mongols. The garrison force was similarly forced back into the city. The next day, the city's governor surrendered the city on Tolui's promise that the lives of the citizens would be spared. As soon as the city was handed over, however, Tolui slaughtered almost every person who surrendered, in a massacre possibly on a greater scale than that at Urgench.

After finishing off Merv, Tolui headed westwards, attacking the cities of Nishapur and Herat.^[45] Nishapur fell after only three days; here, Tokuchar, a son-in-law of Genghis was killed in battle, and Tolui put to the sword every living thing in the city, including the cats and dogs, with Tokuchar's widow presiding over the slaughter.^[22] After Nishapur's fall, Herat surrendered without a fight and was spared.

Encouraged by Jalal al-Din's success against the Mongols, the Khwarazmians started an insurgency. Kush Tegin Pahlawan lead a revolt in Merv and seized it successfully. After recapturing Merv, Kush Tegin Pahlawan made a successful attack on Bukhara. People in Herat also rebelled and disposed the Mongol vassal leadership. An insurgency leader named Muhammad the Marghani twice attacked the camp Genghis Khan accommodated at Baghlan and returned with some loot. As a response, Genghis Khan sent a large army Ögedei Khan back to Ghazni.^[48] Genghis Khan appointed Yelü Ahai to restore Mongol sovereignty order in Samarqand and Bukhara, Yelu Ahai managed to restore the order in the cities in 1223.^[49] Shikhikhutug dealt with the revolt that dethroned the Pro-Mongol governance of Merv.^[50]

Aftermath

Further information: Khwarazmian army between 1231 and 1246

After the defeat of the Khwarazmian Empire, Genghis Khan gathered his forces in Persia and Armenia to return to the Mongolian steppes. Under the suggestion of Subutai, the Mongol army was split into two forces. Genghis Khan led the main army on a raid through Afghanistan and northern India towards Mongolia, while another 20,000 (two tumen) contingent marched through the Caucasus and into Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan under generals Jebe and Subutai.

In the following years

Diyarbakir in 1231.^[52] The Mongols under Chormaghun established themselves in northwestern Iran, from where they were able to raid the neighbouring territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Mosul during the next ten years, culminating with the invasion of Georgia in 1236.^[52]

The destruction and absorption of the Khwarezmid Empire would prove to be a sign of things to come, for the Islamic world as well as for Eastern Europe.^[53] The new territory proved to be an important stepping stone for the Mongol armies when they invaded Kievan Rus' and Poland during the reign of Genghis' son Ögedei, and future campaigns brought Mongol armies to Hungary and the Baltic Sea. For the Islamic world, the destruction of Khwarezmia left Iraq, Turkey and Syria wide open. All three regions were eventually subjugated by future Khans.

The war with Khwarezmia also brought up the important question of succession. Genghis was not young when the war began, and he had four sons, all of whom were fierce warriors and each of them had their own loyal group of followers. Their sibling rivalry almost came to a head during the siege of Urgench, and Genghis was forced to rely on his third son, Ögedei, who ended the battle. Following the destruction of Urgench, Genghis officially selected Ögedei to be his successor, and he also ruled that future Khans would be the direct descendants of previous rulers. Despite Genghis's establishment of this practice, the four sons would eventually come to blows, and those blows revealed the instability of the Khanate that Genghis had created.

Jochi never forgave his father, and he essentially withdrew from future Mongol wars, he moved to the north, and he refused to come to his father when he was ordered to.

sacked Baghdad in 1258, was unable to avenge that defeat when Berke Khan, his cousin, (who had converted to Islam) attacked him in the Transcaucasus in order to aid the cause of Islam, and Mongol battled Mongol for the first time.^[55] The seeds of that battle began in the conflict with Khwarezmia when their fathers struggled for supremacy.^[53]

See also

• Feigned retreat (battle of Samarkand, 1250)

References

Citations

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2. ^ May, Timothy (2016). The Mongol Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa-Barbara, CA: ABС-СLIO. p. 162. ...he (Genghis Khan) led his main army over 1,000 miles to invade the Khwarazmian Empire in 1219. Within two years, a once dynamic and powerful empire has been erased from the map and largely forgotten in history.
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9. ^ al-Nasawi, Shihab al-Din Muhammed (1241). Sirah al-Sultan Jalal al-Din Mankubirti [Biography of Sultan Jalal al-Din Mankubirti] (in Arabic).
10. ^ Hildinger, Eric (1997). Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1700. Da Capo Press.
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13. ^ ^{a b} Juvaini, Ata-Malik (c. 1260). Tarikh-i Jahangushay تاریخ جهانگشای [History of the World Conqueror] (in Persian). Vol. 1. Translated by Andrew Boyle, John.
14. ^ Shah 1980, p. 86.
15. ^ Hillenbrand 2010, p. 118, note 10.
16. ^ Contadini 2012, pp. 126–127 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFContadini2012 (help): "Official" Turkish figures wear a standard combination of a sharbūsh, a three-quarters length robe, and boots. Arab figures, in contrast, have different headgear (usually a turban), a robe that is either full-length or, if three-quarters length, has baggy trousers below, and they usually wear flat shoes or (...) go barefoot (...) P.127: Reference has already been made to the combination of boots and sharbūsh as markers of official status (...) the combination is standard, even being reflected in thirteenth-century Coptic paintings, and serves to distinguish, in Grabar's formulation, the world of the Turkish ruler and that of the Arab. (...) The type worn by the official figures in the 1237 Maqāmāt, depicted, for example, on fol. 59r,67 consists of a gold cap surmounted by a little round top and with fur trimming creating a triangular area at the front which either shows the gold cap or is a separate plaque. A particular imposing example in this manuscript is the massive sharbūsh with much more fur than usual that is worn by the princely official on the right frontispiece on fol. 1v."
17. ^ Shah 1980, pp. 84–88, Maqāma 21, "The encounter at Rayy al-Mahdiyeh".
18. ^
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19. ^ al-Din, Rashid (c. 1300). Thackston, W. M. (ed.). Jami' al-tawarikh جامع التواريخ [Compendium of Chronicles] (in Arabic and Persian). Vol. 2. p. 346.
20. ^ Juzjani, Minhaj-i Siraj (1260). Tabaqat-i Nasiri طبقات ناصری (in Persian). Vol. XXIII. Translated by Raverty, H. G. p. 968.
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32. ^ Juvayni, Rashid al-Din.
33. ^ Sverdrup 2017, p. 148, citing Rashid Al-Din, 107, 356–362.
34. ^ Juvayni, pp. 83–84
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36. ^ Juvayni, p. 85
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38. ^ Sverdrup, Carl. The Mongol Conquests: The Military Operations of Genghis Khan and Sube'etei. Helion and Company, 2017. Page 148.
39. ^ Christopher P. Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolian and the Mongol Empire (Facts on File, 2004), 24.
40. ^ Frank McLynn.
41. ^ Sverdrup 2017, p. 148.
42. ^ Sverdrup, p. 151
43. ^ McLynn, p. 280
44. ^ ^{a b} Nicolle, David. The Mongol Warlords
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50. ^ Boyle, John Andrew (June 1963). "THE MONGOL COMMANDERS IN AFGHANISTAN AND INDIA ACCORDING TO THE ṬABAQĀT-I NĀṢIRĪ OF JŪZJĀNĪ". Islamic Studies. 2, No. 2: 241 – via Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, Islamabad
51. ^ Irwin, Robert (1999). "Islam and the Mediterranean: The rise of the Mamluks". In Abulafia, David (ed.). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 5, c.1198–c.1300. Cambridge University Press. p. 611.
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    . The new Khan Ögedei decided to complete the conquest of Khorazm and entrusted the general Chormaghun (fl. 1221–1241) with three tümen to accomplish the task. The Mongol army arrived in Khorasan in the winter between 1230 and the following year. Jalal ud-Din heard the news and fled. He was probably pursuing a defensive strategy, aware of the effectiveness of the adversary. The flight to inaccessible places could have been a boost for his troops as they were indigenous, while perhaps he hoped that the Mongols did not have this knowledge. After running through a quite extensive territory, he arrived near Amid (Diyarbakir) where he died under strange circumstances in August 1231.
53. ^ ^{a b} Morgan, David The Mongols
54. ^ Chambers, James. The Devil's Horsemen
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Sources

• Chambers, James. The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, Atheneum, 1979. (
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• Hillenbrand, Robert (January 1, 2010). "The Schefer Ḥarīrī: A Study in Islamic Frontispiece Design". Arab Painting: 117–134.
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• Morgan, David. The Mongols, 1986. (
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• Nicolle, David. The Mongol Warlords: Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Hulegu, Tamerlane, Brockhampton Press, 1998. (
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• Saunders, J.J. The History of the Mongol Conquests, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1971. (
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• Shah, Amina (1980). The assemblies of al-Hariri : fifty encounters with the Shaykh Abu Zayd of Seruj. London : Octagon Press.
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External links

• A Map of Events mentioned in this article.