Genghis Khan
Charismatic, dynamic, ferocious, violent and ambitious, Genghis Khan was a military genius, brilliant statesman and world conqueror who united the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppes to create the Mongol empire, the largest land empire in history. But the triumphs of this heroic monster had a terrible price—a reign of terror and mass killing across Eurasia on a scale never before seen.
Genghis Khan was born between 1163 and 1167 in the mountainous terrain of Khentii province in Mongolia, reportedly clutching a blood clot—a supposed portent of his future greatness as a warrior. He was named Temujin, after a tribesman recently captured by his father. The third son of Yesukhei—a local chieftain—and Hoelun, Temujin was soon to experience at first hand the dangerous world of Mongolian tribal politics. When Temujin was just nine years old, his father arranged for him to marry Börte, a girl from a neighboring tribe. He was sent to live with Börte’s family, but, shortly afterward, Yesukhei was poisoned by vengeful tribesmen, and Temujin was obliged to return home. Deprived of their protector, Temujin’s family was forced out into the wilderness, where they survived by eating berries, nuts, mice and other small animals. At thirteen, Temujin murdered his own half-brother.
Several years of wandering followed, marked by intertribal kidnapping and feuds, during which time Temujin—who soon became known and feared for his leadership, intelligence and military ability—built up a sizeable following. A tall, strong and hardened young man, with piercing green eyes and a long reddish beard, he finally married Börte at the age of sixteen and was taken under the wing of Toghril Ong-Khan, ruler of the Kerait tribe (and his father’s blood brother). When Börte was later kidnapped by the Merkit tribe, Temujin and Toghril joined forces with Jamuka, a childhood friend of Temujin and now a Mongol chieftain, sending a large army to rescue her. (Börte turned out to be pregnant, and Temujin brought up the child, Jochi, as his own son.) The three-way alliance enabled the Mongols and Keraits to force other tribes into submission.
Following this success, in 1200 Toghril declared Temujin his adoptive son and heir—a fateful decision that enraged both Toghril’s natural son, Senggum, and the ambitious Jamuka, leading ultimately to a war in which Temujin defeated first Jamuka and then Toghril to establish his dominance over the Mongol tribes. In 1206, a council of leading Mongolian tribesmen—called the Kurultai—met and recognized Temujin’s authority, giving him the name Genghis Khan, meaning Oceanic Khan or Ruler of the Universe.
Before 1200, the Mongols had been a scattered people, but Genghis—claiming a mandate from heaven—was swiftly to transform them into a powerful and unified nation. “My strength,” he declared, “was fortified by Heaven and Earth. Foreordained by Mighty Heaven, I was brought here by Mother Earth.” His soldiers were mainly nomadic warriors, including deadly archers who traveled on small but sturdy Mongolian-bred ponies capable of covering great distances. Genghis turned them into a disciplined and brilliantly coordinated war machine that swept all before them.
In 1207—having secured an alliance with the Uighurs and subjugated the Mongols’ old rivals, the Merkit tribe—Genghis immediately began expansionist operations, eating into the Xi Xia territory in northwest China, as well as parts of Tibet. His target was the Silk Road—a key trade route between east and west and the gateway to wealth. In 1211, after refusing to pay tribute to the Jin dynasty in northern China, he went to war again, besieging and destroying the Jin capital, Yanjing, now Beijing, and securing instead tribute for himself. He returned to Mongolia in triumph, taking with him booty, artisans and, above all, guaranteed trade with China.
In 1219, Genghis turned his attentions west after an attack on a caravan of traders he had sent to establish trading links with the Khwarazm empire—a realm including most of Uzbekistan, Iran and Afghanistan under the rule of the sultan Muhammad Khwarazmshah. Genghis showed restraint, but when members of a second Mongolian delegation were beheaded, he raised 200,000 troops and marched into central Asia, with his four sons, Jochi, Ogodei, Chaghatai and Touli serving as commanders. Over the next three years, he subjected the Khwarazm people to a terrifying campaign of shock and awe, taking the cities of Bokhara, Samarkand, Herat, Nishapar and Merv—his troops lining up the civilians of the latter and, in a cold-blooded killing spree, slitting their throats.
A peerless strategist, Genghis recognized the value of fear in building an empire, often sending out envoys to cow enemies into submission through tales of his exploits: civilians slaughtered, money and booty stolen, women raped, molten silver poured into people’s ears. For all this brutality, however, Genghis did not indulge in killing for the sake of it. He was loyal to his friends and generous to supporters, a shrewd manager of men, who promoted an elite of top generals, giving them enormous powers. He spared those who surrendered, reserving wholesale slaughter to make an example of those who resisted. Nor did the Mongols wantonly maim, mutilate or torture—their chief interest was in booty rather than barbarism. Indeed, in some ways Genghis showed himself to be an enlightened ruler, combining political acumen with economic shrewdness. He used divide-and-rule tactics to weaken enemies and promote loyalty. He recognized the importance of good administration, fostering the spread of a unified official language across his empire and a written legal system called Jasagti. He was also tolerant of religions and gave priests an exemption from taxation. Believing in the importance of providing a safe passage of trade between the east and the west, he forbade troops and officials to abuse merchants or citizens, his reign becoming a period of cultural interaction and advancement for the Mongolian people. He was also a patron of artists, craftsmen and literature.
After his early triumphs over the Khwarazm empire, Genghis pressed on, eager to consolidate his gains. He pushed into Russia, Georgia and the Crimea, defeating the forces of Prince Mstitslav of Kiev at the Battle of Kalka River in 1223, in which, after a feigned retreat, his forces turned on their pursuers and routed them. He now ruled a vast empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific, his people enjoying ever-increasing wealth. In 1226, however, he died after he fell from his horse hurrying back to Xi Xia, where a rebellion had erupted in his absence.
The Great Khan left his empire to his son Ogodei, though it was soon divided amongst the descendants of his sons, who founded their own khanates which ruled the Near East, Russia and China (where his grandson Kublai Khan founded his own dynasty). The Mongol empire thus expanded even further, until it stretched from the Pacific coast of Asia in the east to Hungary and the Balkans in the west. The Crimean khanate, longest-lasting of the successor states of the Mongol empire, would survive up until 1783.
A Y chromosomal lineage in an astounding 8 percent of men in Asia is descended from one source. Most likely this was Genghis himself.
FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN
1194–1250
He was an adroit man, cunning, greedy, wanton, malicious, bad-tempered, but at times when he wished to reveal his good and courtly qualities, consoling, witty, delightful, hard working.
Salimbene di Adam, Chronicle (1282–90)
The author of a book on falconry called The Art of Hunting with Birds, Frederick was the most powerful ruler in Europe—Holy Roman Emperor, king of Sicily, later king of Jerusalem and heir to vast German-Italian lands. Green-eyed, ginger-haired, son of the German Emperor Henry IV and the Norman heiress of Sicily, Constance, he was raised in Sicily, a court that blended Christian and Islamic, Arab and Norman culture. If his upbringing—speaking Arabic and at home with Jews and Muslims—made him seem exotic, his eccentricity was his own. He traveled with Arab bodyguards, a Scottish magician, Jewish and Arab scholars, fifty falconers, a zoo and a sultanic harem of odalisques. He was said to be an atheistic scientist who joked that Jesus, Muhammad and Moses were frauds and was portrayed as a proto-Dr. Frankenstein who sealed a dying man in a barrel to see if his soul would escape.
Yet he was actually an effective and ruthless politician with a clear vision of his own role as universal Christian e
mperor. In 1225, he married Yolande, fifteen, heiress to Jerusalem, making him king of the Holy City. He seduced one of her ladies at the wedding and she died at sixteen. But, after many false starts Frederick set off in 1227 on crusade, even though already excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX for his delays. Backed by his Teutonic Knights, Frederick offended the crusader barons with his imperial air, seduced local ladies and marched down the coast—all the time, negotiating with Saladin’s nephew, Sultan Kamil of Egypt, who, faced with his own rebellions as well as this new crusader threat, agreed a most unconventional peace deal.
The sultan agreed to share Jerusalem with the emperor. Like a modern peace deal in the Middle East, the Muslims kept the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), the Christians got the rest of Jerusalem. Frederick arrived in Jerusalem to reclaim the Holy City, where he showed his unusual respect for Islam. In the church of the Holy Sepulcher, he held a crown-wearing ceremony to promote his vision of himself as Christian emperor. But he then had to flee—pursued by the papal ban. He ruled Jerusalem from afar for ten years—but the majority of his life was devoted to his war against the papacy.
Papal policy had dictated his upbringing. His father, Emperor Henry VI, had challenged the popes for leadership of Christendom. After Henry’s sudden death, the curia ensured the division of his lands: two other candidates were installed in the German kingdom, while the infant Frederick was left with Sicily. His mother died shortly afterward, and the four-year-old king of Sicily became a ward of the papacy. After his German replacements had proved too territorially ambitious, Frederick was reinstalled as a teenager in his northern titles, but not before his erstwhile guardian, Pope Innocent III, had extracted from him promises of extensive papal privileges and numerous vows never to reunite Germany and Sicily under one ruler.
Frederick, however, refused to be a puppet. He saw the Holy Roman Empire as sacred and universal. His conception of imperial sovereignty drove him to extend his authority into the Italian states that lay between his northern and southern lands.
Frederick’s conflict with his former guardians overshadowed European politics for half a century. On one level the gigantic struggle was simply a personality clash between the piously intellectual Pope Gregory IX, elected in 1227, and the witty and worldly Frederick. When Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick in 1227 for apparently malingering rather than going on crusade, Frederick’s decision to go anyway, and in the process crown himself king of Jerusalem, did little to improve relations.
At the heart of this bitter conflict lay the question of who would dominate Christendom: pope or emperor. With each side buoyed up by a messianic belief in his cause, Italy became the battleground of papal troops and imperial forces. Missives, manifestos, papal bulls and insults flew across Europe. Frederick was again excommunicated. If he was the Wonder of the World to his admirers, he was henceforth Beast of the Apocalypse to his enemies. Two different popes, Gregory IX and Innocent IV, fled Rome, the former dying in exile. In 1245 Innocent IV fired the papacy’s ultimate salvo: he announced the emperor was deposed. For the next five years it was all-out war. In the end it was death, not the papacy, that defeated Frederick. Fighting on against the almost insurmountable twin obstacles of excommunication and deposition, Frederick was regaining ground in both Italy and Germany when he died suddenly in 1250.
ISABELLA & ROGER MORTIMER
1295–1358 & 1287–1330
The tongue devises mischiefs, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. You love evil more than good, and lies more than honesty.
Psalm 52, read to Roger Mortimer by his executioner
They were the couple—an adulterous French queen and her English baronial lover—who invaded England, overthrew her husband the king, and ruled the country for three tumultuous years. Mortimer was the first son of Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Wigmore, and his wife, Margaret de Fiennes, second cousin to Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I. His grandfather had been a close ally and friend of King Edward I, and in return for their service to the crown the family had enjoyed royal patronage ever since. Roger married Joan de Geneville, the daughter of a neighboring lord, in 1301, when he was just fourteen, her eventual inheritance, coupled with his own, helping to swell the already vast family estates in the so-called marcher lands on the border of England and Wales.
In 1307, King Edward I died and his son became Edward II. Cowed by his terrifying father as a boy, young Edward, though outwardly imposing, was timid and easily led—a weakness that others eagerly exploited. First to do so was Piers Gaveston, a onetime companion to the prince who may have been his lover and was certainly his best friend. The king showered him with privileges. In 1308, Edward traveled to France to marry Isabella, sister of the king of France. Isabella was a stunning creature, described by one contemporary as “the beauty of beauties.” But her life was fraught with humiliations and triumphs, and in the end Edward’s neglect led her to betray him.
Isabella was the only surviving daughter of Philip IV of France. When she was no more than an infant, Philip proposed her as the future wife of the heir to the English throne, with the aim of easing tensions between the two countries. The marriage duly took place in Boulogne in 1308. Isabella was only twelve years old; the lackluster Edward II was twice her age.
Edward II was tall, fair-haired, handsome—and almost certainly homosexual, favoring as he did a succession of young, good-looking male courtiers. Before he even returned to England after his marriage he had passed on Philip’s wedding gifts to Piers Gaveston. Although Isabella bore him four children, Edward rarely showed her any affection, leading her to describe herself as “the most wretched of wives.” Furious and resentful, the country’s barons eventually rebelled in 1312, and Gaveston was executed by order of the earl of Lancaster. To their dismay, a voraciously greedy, ambitious and ruthless new favorite took his place—his name Hugh Despenser. In 1306, Hugh had married Eleanor de Clare, a granddaughter of Edward I, and through the king’s patronage he secured ever more wealth, land and influence, becoming royal chamberlain in 1318 and one of the richest nobles in the kingdom. Isabella feared and loathed the thuggish Despenser.
The Despensers’ lands bordered the Mortimers’, and the families hated each other. When Hugh tried to expand his territories into south Wales, threatening Mortimer’s own interests in the region, loathing for the Despensers finally outweighed his loyalty to the king and he joined the earls of Hereford, Lancaster and Pembroke—equally disenchanted with the king’s behavior—in open rebellion. In August 1321, the Contrariants, as they were known, marched to London, where they forced Edward to banish their hated rivals. The king, however, swiftly mobilized support and a royal army, Hugh Despenser and his father among them, marched west to confront the rebels. In January 1322, abandoned by his allies, Roger surrendered in Shrewsbury.
Mortimer was imprisoned for the next two years in the Tower of London, but after drugging his jailers, he escaped from his cell, climbed out of the Tower through a chimney, crossed the Thames in a waiting boat, and rode to Dover, from where he crossed to France. He was warmly welcomed in Paris by Edward’s enemy and Queen Isabella’s brother the French king, Charles IV. The following year, in a dispute over Edward’s French territories, Edward sent Queen Isabella, accompanied by their son, the heir to the kingdom, Prince Edward, to negotiate a settlement. Isabella despised Hugh Despenser as much as Roger did: Mortimer and Isabella soon became lovers.
In 1326, having moved to Flanders, Isabella and Mortimer gathered an army of 700 men and invaded England, intent on revenge. The Despensers, caught by surprise, were routed, and, within the month, King Edward, deserted by his nobles, was captured by Mortimer’s forces in south Wales. Brutal reprisals followed. Hugh’s father was hanged and beheaded in Bristol in October 1326. The following month, at Hereford, Hugh himself was dragged behind four horses, hanged to the point of suffocation, cut down just before he died, then tied to a ladder where his penis and testicles were sliced off and burned before his eyes. While he was still consc
ious, his abdomen was cut open and his entrails and heart removed. Afterward, his head was hacked off and mounted on the gates of London, while the four quarters of his body were sent to Bristol, Dover, York and Newcastle.
King Edward, meanwhile, had been forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Edward III, who was “crowned” at a ceremony in January 1327. Though monarch in name, the new king was treated as a puppet by Mortimer, who, though taking no official position, controlled the country with Isabella for the next three years, handing out titles and lands to his family and granting himself the ostentatious title “the earl of March.” Edward II was taken in April to Berkeley Castle, home of Mortimer’s son-in-law Thomas Berkeley, and never seen again. According to a later history by Sir Thomas More, he was killed at Mortimer’s instigation by means of a red-hot poker inserted into his anus (thus leaving no marks).
Mortimer’s despotism and greed provoked fury among the country’s barons, prompting him to keep a body of armed men at court at all times, but he finally overreached himself when, in 1330, he ordered the execution of Edward’s popular uncle, Edmund, earl of Kent. Fearing that Mortimer planned to usurp the throne, prominent barons, led by his former ally the earl of Lancaster, urged Edward III to strike against Roger before it was too late, and the young king, almost come of age and determined to throw off Mortimer’s hated yoke, eagerly took his chance. While the royal household was at Nottingham Castle in October, he and his supporters, guided by two members of the royal household—Richard Bury and William Montagu—bypassed Mortimer’s guards via a subterranean passage (still known as Mortimer’s Hole) and took Mortimer and Isabella by surprise in the queen’s bedroom. Despite Isabella’s plea, “Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer,” Roger was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, where, without trial, he was condemned for treason and sentenced to death. On November 29, 1330, he was taken to Tyburn, stripped naked, and hanged—the fate usually reserved for a commoner—his body being left on the scaffold for two days before being cut down. Notorious as a femme fatale and mariticide, Isabella lived long as an honored queen mother at the court of her son, one of England’s greatest kings.