The Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century was held together by a combination of personal loyalty to the ruling khan, the institutions created by Genghis Khan, and the shared customs of the Mongol ruling class. Yet the empire had no clearly defined law of succession, and the tensions between the different branches of the imperial family eventually erupted into open war. The Toluid Civil War of 1260 to 1264, fought between the descendants of Genghis Khan’s youngest son Tolui and the descendants of his third son Ögedei, was the central political crisis of the mid-thirteenth century and a turning point in the history of the empire.
The civil war was not merely a struggle for the throne. It was a struggle for the soul of the Mongol Empire: a struggle between those who wanted to preserve the traditional steppe culture of the Mongols and those who wanted to adopt the cultures of the conquered peoples; a struggle between those who wanted to maintain the unity of the empire and those who were content to rule their own territories; a struggle between the family of Genghis Khan’s last designated heir and the family of his most able successor.
The Background: The Ögedeid Succession
The succession question had been simmering since the death of Ögedei Khan in 1241. Ögedei had been an effective ruler, but he had died without a clear heir, and the kurultai that should have elected his successor was delayed for several years by internal squabbles. The eventual choice was Ögedei’s son Güyük, who was elected in 1246 after considerable political maneuvering. Güyük’s reign was short — he died in 1248, possibly of illness, possibly of poison — and he was succeeded in 1251 by Möngke Khan, the eldest son of Tolui, in an election that was strongly supported by the Toluid princes and that has been widely regarded as a Toluid coup.
The reign of Möngke Khan (1251-1259) was a period of great expansion: the Mongol invasions of the Song Dynasty in southern China, the conquest of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Poland, and the establishment of the Ilkhanate in Persia. Möngke was an able and determined ruler, and his death in 1259, while on campaign in southern China, opened the succession question once again.
The Contestants: Kublai and Hulagu
The contestants in the civil war were Kublai Khan and his younger brother Hulagu, both sons of Tolui and grandsons of Genghis Khan. Kublai, the elder of the two, was the governor of North China and the most powerful prince in the eastern part of the empire. He had been a close adviser of Möngke and was a sophisticated, multilingual ruler with a strong interest in Chinese culture. Hulagu, the younger, was the conqueror of the Abbasid Caliphate and the founder of the Ilkhanate. He was a more traditionalist figure, with strong ties to the Mongol heartland and a more skeptical view of the Chinese and Persian cultures of his subject populations.
The contest was complicated by the geographical separation of the two brothers. Kublai was based in Karakorum and later in Khanbaliq (modern Beijing); Hulagu was based in Tabriz, in Persia. The kurultai that should have elected a new great khan was thus split, with one group of princes electing one candidate and another group electing another. Kublai was elected great khan by a kurultai at Shangdu in 1260; a rival group, including several of the Ögedeid and Chagataid princes, elected a rival khan named Ariq Böke, the youngest son of Tolui, in Karakorum.
The War
The civil war was fought in three main theaters. The first theater was the Mongolian heartland, where Ariq Böke, supported by a number of conservative Mongol princes, attempted to hold the central territories against the forces of Kublai. The second theater was China, where Kublai’s son and lieutenants fought to secure the agricultural south against the forces loyal to Ariq Böke. The third theater was Persia, where Hulagu supported his brother Kublai against Ariq Böke and against the Ögedeid and Chagataid princes who were trying to detach the Ilkhanate from the central empire.
The war was a complicated affair, marked by shifting alliances and several near-catastrophic defeats for the Kublai-Hulagu coalition. The Ögedeid prince Kaidu, a brilliant military commander who would plague the successors of Kublai for the next forty years, was one of the most dangerous opponents of the Toluid faction. The Chagatai Khanate, ruled by the conservative prince Alghu, also supported Ariq Böke. The Golden Horde, ruled by Berke Khan, was initially neutral and eventually joined the war on the side of Ariq Böke.
The decisive engagement of the war was the Battle of the Orchun in 1261, in which Kublai’s general Liu Xuan defeated the forces of Ariq Böke and forced the rival khan to retreat to the southern steppe. The war dragged on for several more years, but the Battle of the Orchun marked the turning point, and Ariq Böke’s coalition began to fall apart. By 1264, the major supporters of Ariq Böke had switched sides or had been defeated, and Ariq Böke himself surrendered to Kublai. Kublai, in a display of clemency that was widely noted, pardoned his brother rather than executing him; Ariq Böke died in captivity a few months later, possibly of illness.
The Consequences
The civil war had profound consequences for the Mongol Empire. Most immediately, it established the Toluid branch of the imperial family as the ruling line of the empire, and it effectively ended the political claims of the Ögedeid and Chagataid branches. The descendants of Ögedei and Chagatai were no longer eligible to be elected great khan, and the imperial title was henceforth reserved for the descendants of Tolui. The khanates ruled by the Ögedeid and Chagataid lines — the White Horde, the Blue Horde, and the various Chagatai principalities — were reduced to a subordinate status and were eventually absorbed by the other khanates.
The civil war also accelerated the fragmentation of the empire into four khanates. The Ilkhanate, which had been a sub-kingdom of the central empire, now became a semi-independent state under the rule of Hulagu and his descendants. The Golden Horde, which had been governed from the central Mongol heartland, became an independent state under the rule of Berke and his successors. The Chagatai Khanate, which had been contested by both sides of the civil war, became a buffer state between the two major khanates. And the Yuan Dynasty in China, which had been a sub-kingdom of the central empire, became the de facto capital of the empire, with the great khan residing in Beijing rather than in Karakorum.
The civil war also marked the beginning of the conversion of the khanates to the religions of their subject populations. Hulagu and his successors gradually converted to Islam, and the Ilkhanate became a Muslim state. Berke and his successors in the Golden Horde also gradually converted to Islam. Kublai and his successors in the Yuan Dynasty became patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. The four khanates thus developed in quite different cultural directions, and the unity of the empire, which had been partly cultural as well as political, was increasingly difficult to maintain.
The Historical Significance
The Toluid Civil War was the central political event of the mid-thirteenth century. It marked the end of the unified Mongol Empire and the beginning of the era of the four khanates. It established the Toluid line as the ruling line of the empire, and it shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the khanates for the next century. The civil war was, in a sense, the birth pangs of the new political order: the old order of a single, unified empire had proved unsustainable, and the new order of four semi-independent khanates was a compromise that allowed the Mongol ruling class to maintain its identity while adapting to the different cultures and political traditions of its subject populations.
The civil war was also a deeply traumatic event for the Mongol ruling class. The war had been fought by Mongol armies against Mongol armies, and the casualties had been substantial. The destruction of the civil war weakened the central empire, and it created a precedent for future internecine struggles that would continue to plague the Mongol world for the next two centuries. The Mongol ruling class, in retrospect, was never able to fully recover from the trauma of the civil war, and the decline of the empire that followed was in large part a consequence of the political divisions that the civil war had created.
Sources
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007).
- Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (London, 2005).
- Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London, 2012).