Möngke, who had fought in Hungary and Poland, had the acumen to direct a Eurasian world conquest and govern it – commissioning a tax census in territories from Korea to Ukraine. At the centre, Karakorum, he held court in a basic palace, hung with gold cloth, warmed by a brazier burning wormwood roots and cattle dung. He would be ‘seated on a little bed dressed in a rich furred robe which glistened like the skin of a seal’ while showing off his gyrfalcons.
Still obsessed with the loss of Jerusalem, and the fantasy of Prester John, European potentates sent envoys to Karakorum: Willem van Ruysbroeck, Flemish envoy of Louis IX of France, arrived to convert Möngke to Christianity or at least to negotiate an alliance between the Mongols and the Crusaders against Islam.
Möngke was the son of a Christian married to a Christian wife whom he sometimes accompanied to chapel, reclining during the service on a golden bed. ‘We Mongols believe in one God,’ he told Willem. ‘Just as God gave different fingers to my hand, he’s given different ways to men.’ But when it came to sacred power he was as severe as his grandfather: ‘If, when you hear the decree of the eternal God, you’re unwilling to pay attention and send an army against us, we know what we can do.’ The world was now about to see what he meant.
Möngke ruled in partnership with Big Brother Batu, whose khanate, known as the Golden Horde and based at Sarai on the Volga, covered much of European Russia and Ukraine. Batu was ‘genial and good-natured’ but ‘cruel in war’. He used the Rurikovichi as enforcers. The ablest of his Mongol vassals was the twenty-five-year-old Alexander, son of the prince of Vladimir, who understood the benefits of appeasement. His father Yaroslav II had been poisoned in Karakorum by Khatun Töregene, after which Alexander travelled there, bent the knee to his father’s murderers and was granted Kyiv. Now Batu was in charge, he often visited Big Brother and his son Sartuq at Sarai to bend the knee. Strapping and shrewd with a voice like a trumpet, Alexander impressed Sartuq so much that they became blood brothers. He needed the Mongols: Novgorod, a mercantile republic,* was under attack from the west. A new rising power, the pagan duchy of Lithuania, was expanding into Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Sweden threatened Novgorod, which invited Alexander to defend it. In 1240 he defeated the Swedes on the Neva River (much later earning the sobriquet Nevsky). Then he faced the Teutonic Knights and other Germanic crusaders who had taken Prussia, Livonia and Semigalia before turning on the Orthodox Russians. In 1242, Alexander’s cavalry charging across the ice of Lake Peipus defeated the Livonian Brothers of the Sword.
In 1252, threatened by his rebellious brothers, Alexander won Batu’s backing to defeat his own blood and was appointed paramount prince of Vladimir; in return he enforced Mongol control and collected the khagan’s taxes. When in 1258 Novgorod and other Russian cities rebelled, Alexander gouged out the eyes and cut off the noses of the rebels, riding into the city accompanied by Mongols: his status as patriotic Russian hero is thus dubious. For reasons unknown, the khans became displeased. In 1263, Nevsky, still only forty-three, died while under arrest in Sarai, probably poisoned. His brothers and sons bid for the succession, the start of almost two centuries of submission to the Golden Horde.
Daniel, Alexander’s youngest and weakest son, was left the most meagre portion – Moscow* – but it was from him and the princes of Muscovy that the tsars and Russia would descend.
As Batu secured Russia, Möngke ordered his brothers to continue their world conquest – Kublai to take Song China, and Hulagu to suppress Persia, then conquer Iraq, Israel and Egypt. Kublai, viceroy of northern China, was already at war. A frontal assault on the Song was perilous, so Möngke ordered him to encircle the empire by conquering the independent kingdom to its south, Dali. As Kublai prepared a multipronged assault on the Song, Möngke, learning that an Assassin hit squad was on its way to kill him, ordered Hulagu to destroy the Assassins and then the caliphate of Baghdad: ‘Establish the laws of Genghis Khan from the banks of the Amu Darya [central Asia] to Egypt. Those who submit, treat gently; those who resist, exterminate.’
HULAGU AND SAADI: ENTERTAINING AN ELEPHANT, SLAUGHTERING A CITY
