III.

Wars of Conquest

Genghis Khan was now in a position to embark upon foreign conquests. Hostilities with China commenced in the spring of 1211, and by the end of that year the Mongols had overrun northern China. By the beginning of 1214 all China north of the Huang He (Yellow River) was in the Mongols’ hands, and they were closing in on the Jin capital at Beijing. Peace was purchased by the Chinese emperor at the price of an immense dowry for a Jin princess as Genghis Khan’s bride, and the invaders began to withdraw northward. However, fighting broke out again almost at once. Beijing was besieged and sacked in the summer of 1215.

Although the war was not yet over—indeed the conquest of North China was not completed till 1234—Genghis Khan now decided to relinquish personal command of operations, and in the spring of 1216 returned to Mongolia in order to give his attention to events in Central Asia. Genghis Khan’s western territory abutted the state of Khwarizm, a vast but poorly organized empire, ruled by Sultan Muhammad, covering the present-day countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan and most of Iran. War between the two empires became inevitable when Genghis Khan’s ambassadors were murdered at Otrar on the Syr Darya River.

Setting out from Mongolia in the spring of 1219, Genghis Khan passed the summer of that year on the Irtysh River and by autumn had arrived before Otrar. He left a force to besiege and ultimately capture the town and, continuing west at the head of the main army, attacked Bukhara (Bukhoro) in February 1220. The city, deserted by its garrison, surrendered after only a few days’ siege. The Mongols then advanced on Samarqand, which likewise offered little resistance and was captured the same year. Genghis Khan dispatched his two best generals in pursuit of Sultan Muhammad, who had fled to the west. The sultan finally sought refuge on an island in the Caspian Sea but was found and killed there. The generals, continuing their westward sweep, crossed Caucasia and defeated an army of Russians and Kipchak Turks in the Crimea before turning back to rejoin Genghis in Central Asia.

In the autumn of 1220, Genghis Khan captured Termiz on the Oxus River (present-day Amu Darya) and in the early part of the winter was active in the upper reaches of that river in what is today Tajikistan. At the beginning of 1221 he crossed the Oxus into northern Afghanistan and captured the ancient city of Balkh. Soon after the fall of Samarqand he had dispatched his elder sons north into Khwarizm to lay siege to Muhammad’s capital. He now sent his youngest son into eastern Persia to sack and destroy the great and populous cities of Merv (now Mary, Turkmenistan) and Nishapur (now Neyshābūr, Iran).

In the meantime, Sultan Jalal al-Din, the son of Sultan Muhammad, had made his way into central Afghanistan and inflicted a defeat on a Mongol force at Parvan, north of Kābul. Genghis Khan, rejoined by his sons, advanced south in the autumn of 1221 and defeated this new adversary on the banks of the Indus River. With Jalal al-Din’s defeat the campaign in the west was virtually brought to its conclusion, and Genghis Khan proceeded by easy stages on the long journey back to Mongolia. In the autumn of 1226 he was again at war, with the Chinese Tangut tribal confederation, but he did not live to witness the successful outcome of this, his last campaign. He died in August 1227, in his summer quarters in the district of Qingshui south of the Liupan Shan (Liupan Mountains) in Gansu, China.