At his supreme moment, his shaman Kokochu accused Genghis’s brother Qasar of treason: ‘The Spirit has revealed to me – Temujin will rule first, then Qasar. Unless you remove Qasar, you’ll be in danger.’ Kokochu had inviolable status – as the son of the khagan’s oldest adviser Munglik who was married to his mother Hoelun, he was Genghis’s stepbrother. Genghis arrested Qasar, but his mother harnessed a white camel, drove her carriage through the night and arrived to appeal to her son, baring her breasts and crying, ‘These are the breasts that suckled you both!’ But his wife Börte warned him that Kokochu could threaten their own sons. Releasing Qasar, Genghis ordered his brother Temüge to kill Kokochu by breaking his back. ‘He was no longer loved by Heaven,’ said Genghis, warning Kokochu’s family, ‘You were beginning to think you are my equals.’ He appointed another shaman. ‘Heaven has ordered me to rule over all men,’ said Genghis. ‘The protection and promotion of Blue Heaven has enabled me to destroy my enemies and achieve this elevated dignity.’
The exceptional talents of Genghis combined with the blessings of good harvests and equable climate, the large human and equine population of the steppe and the division of China meant that the khagan now deployed 80,000 horse archers who regarded victory, adventure and loot as the essential prizes of loyalty and proof of sacred leadership. The prizes were the three kingdoms of the Song, the Tanguts and the Jurchens.
In 1209, Genghis defeated the Buddhist Tangut empire of Xi Xia in north-western China,* but, unable to take their walled capital, he accepted their emperor’s submission. Next he turned to the Jurchen empire of Jin that ruled forty million people in north-eastern China, sneering to their envoy, ‘I thought the emperor was appointed by Heaven.’ This, he said, was revenge for the killing of his forefathers Kutula and Ambagai. Reaching the walls of Zhongdu (Beijing), he found he lacked siege machines, so he raided the south. In 1214, Genghis reassembled his armies north of Zhongdu, but they were now suffering from an epidemic of unknown pathology. The Jurchen emperor made peace, sending a daughter as the khagan’s bride, plus 500 boys and girls, 3,000 horses and 10,000 bolts of silk – but the Jin dynasty was falling apart. Genghis hired Chinese engineers to build his siege engines, shoot firebombs and rockets, originally developed by the Song, and employed a Chinese prince to advise on strategy. In 1215, he took Zhongdu, sacking it, killing thousands, their corpses rotting in heaps. Then Genghis turned west, leaving his general Muqali with a smaller force of around 23,000 Mongols to reduce the shattered empire.
In 1218, switching eastwards, Genghis swallowed the Kara-Khitai (Kazakhstan) khanate, where he captured the famously svelte Empress Juerbiesu. She mocked the stink of Mongols, an affront which was reported to Genghis. He cross-examined her but, dazzled by her looks, kept her for the night. She became his third-ranking wife.
These movements in remote lands would reverberate across Eurasia, unleashing a new pathogen that would become the Black Death. Tiny but mysterious changes in global climate and human nourishment can lead to outbreaks of diseases that have been present but dormant for centuries. The plague has been discovered in an ancient Swedish tomb from 3000 BC, suggesting it may have originated in Europe long before it appeared in the east. The bubonic plague had for a long time been enzootic, commonly carried by the fleas in the fur of marmots, in camels and in the rats that thrived wherever humans left the detritus of their daily life. Marmots were a staple of Mongol life, given that the tribesmen wore marmot fur and leather, and ate their meat. The plague did not flare up in the west for another century, but new research proves that it began much earlier.
Somewhere on the slopes of the Tian Shan mountains, the fatal transfer between humans and animals took place – with a Mongol eating the flesh of an infected marmot or being bitten by a flea from one of the rodents. Infected with the pathogen
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