The history of the Mongol tribes before the rise of Genghis Khan is a history of constant movement, periodic unification, and recurrent dissolution. For centuries before 1206, the peoples of the Mongolian plateau lived in a shifting mosaic of tribal confederations, occasionally producing short-lived empires and more often splitting apart into smaller units that warred with one another across the grasslands. The empire of 1206 did not come out of nowhere; it was the most successful of a long line of steppe empires, and its success can only be understood against the background of the confederations that preceded it.
The Mongolian plateau is bounded by the Siberian taiga to the north, the Gobi Desert to the south, the Altai Mountains to the west, and the Manchurian forests to the east. Winter temperatures in the interior drop below −40°C, summer rains are unpredictable, and the carrying capacity of the land is sharply limited. Nomadic pastoralism — the herding of horses, sheep, goats, camels, and cattle across a seasonal cycle of pastures — was the only viable mode of production for most of the population. The herders’ relationship with the land was fundamentally different from that of agricultural peoples: wealth was stored in livestock, not in fields, and a family could move its entire economic base in a day’s march.
The Pre-Mongol Steppe Empires
The first great confederation of the eastern steppe, of which we have detailed knowledge, was the Xiongnu empire of the third and second centuries BC, which dominated Mongolia, southern Siberia, and parts of Central Asia and was a persistent threat to the Chinese Han Dynasty. The Xiongnu established many of the patterns that would shape steppe politics for two thousand years: the centralized khan, the assembly of tribal leaders, the practice of demanding tribute from agricultural neighbours, the use of mounted archers in warfare, and a sophisticated diplomatic vocabulary for the management of the relationship with China. The Xiongnu were also the first steppe people to establish a sustained diplomatic relationship with China, including a system of heqin marriage alliances in which Chinese princesses were given to the Xiongnu chieftain in exchange for peace.
After the Xiongnu, the eastern steppe was dominated by a succession of peoples whose names changed but whose political structures remained broadly similar. The Xianbei (1st–4th centuries AD), the Rouran (4th–6th centuries), the Göktürks (6th–8th centuries), the Uyghurs (8th–9th centuries), the Khitan (10th–12th centuries), and the Jurchen (12th–13th centuries) all built steppe empires of varying size and durability, and all left traces in the culture of the later Mongols. The Uyghur empire of the 8th and 9th centuries, in particular, contributed two enduring legacies: a writing system derived from the Sogdian script, which would eventually be adapted for the Mongolian language, and a rich tradition of steppe law and custom that the early Mongol khans consciously preserved.
The Khitan, after their fall to the Jurchen in 1125, migrated westward and established the Qara-Khitai (Western Liao) in Central Asia; the Jurchen, who displaced them, founded the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) in North China, the major southern neighbour of the early Mongols. To the southwest, the Tangut Western Xia (1038–1227) controlled the upper Yellow River, and the Qara-Khitan controlled much of Central Asia until the rise of the Khwarezmian Empire in the early 13th century. The Mongol steppe in the 12th century was thus bordered by sophisticated, militarily formidable neighbours on every side.
The Tribal Geography of 12th-Century Mongolia
By the late 12th century, the tribal geography of Mongolia had stabilized into a number of recognizable groupings. The Khamag Mongols (the “Mongol” clan in the strict sense, the tribe of the future Genghis Khan) occupied the Onon–Kerulen basin in the northeastern part of the plateau. The Kerey and the Onggirat lived in adjacent territories. The Tatars held the rivers of the eastern steppe and were the dominant power in the region. The Keraite, a people who had adopted Nestorian Christianity, controlled the upper Orkhon under the leadership of Toghrul. The Merkit occupied the Lake Baikal region, and the Naiman ruled the western steppe. Beyond Mongolia, the Tangut Western Xia held the upper Yellow River, the Jurchen Jin ruled North China, and the Qara-Khitan ruled a vast swath of Central Asia.
The political relationship between these groupings was unstable but not random. Tribes that were culturally similar — for example, those that spoke Mongolic languages and observed similar marriage customs — tended to form temporary alliances, while those that differed in language, religion, or pastoral practice were more often rivals. The largest units, like the Tatars, were not monolithic but were coalitions of smaller tribes held together by a dominant lineage; the coalitions tended to dissolve when the dominant lineage was weakened by defeat or by the failure of its leader to produce a competent heir. This pattern of large-scale fragmentation was the political background against which the rise of Temüjin played out.
The Culture and Religion of the Pre-Imperial Mongols
The cultural and religious life of the pre-imperial Mongols was diverse. The dominant religious tradition was Tengriism (or Tenggeriin mörgöl), a shamanic belief system centred on the worship of the eternal blue sky, called Tengri, and the earth mother, called Eje. The shaman, called bökö (male) or uduyan (female, the more common), was a powerful figure who could communicate with the spirits, predict the future, and intercede with the unseen powers. Among the Keraites, Nestorian Christianity had been the dominant religion for at least a century, and the Keraite prince Toghrul was a Christian — a fact that opened the door to the famous correspondence between the Mongol khans and the Pope in the 1240s and 1250s. The Tatars practiced a mixture of Tengriism and Tibetan Buddhism. The Uyghurs were Manichaean in the 8th–9th centuries and Buddhist from the 9th century on. Islam had spread into the southern steppe through trade and missionary activity but had not yet penetrated the central plateau.
The pre-imperial Mongols thus lived in a world of considerable cultural complexity, with multiple languages, multiple religions, and multiple political traditions in close proximity to one another. The genius of Genghis Khan was not to invent a new culture but to find a way to weld these diverse elements into a single political and military framework. He built on the legal traditions of the steppe, the administrative experience of the Uyghurs, the diplomatic practices of the Keraites, and the military tactics of the various tribes, and he used them to construct the largest empire the world had ever seen.
The Tribal Economy
The economy of the pre-imperial Mongols was a pastoral economy, supplemented by hunting, fishing, trade, and limited agriculture in the river valleys. The most important unit of wealth was the horse, which provided transport, milk, meat, and the mobility that was the basis of military power. A wealthy Mongol family might own several hundred horses, plus a similar number of sheep, goats, and cattle. The nomadic lifestyle of the Mongols required a constant cycle of movement between summer and winter pastures, and the yurt, the portable felt-covered dwelling that could be assembled and disassembled in an hour, was the characteristic form of shelter.
Trade was an important but secondary component of the pre-imperial Mongol economy. The Mongols exchanged horses, furs, and slaves for the manufactured goods of their neighbours: Chinese silk and grain, Central Asian textiles, Persian metalwork. The trade was carried out at border markets and at great seasonal fairs, and the merchants who conducted it were often foreign — Uighur, Sogdian, Chinese, Khitan — rather than Mongol. The pre-imperial Mongols had no urban centres, no merchant class of their own, and no significant manufacturing tradition; their economy was, in essence, a tributary of the agricultural civilizations that surrounded them.
The economic structure of the steppe had important military consequences. Because pastoral wealth was stored in livestock, and livestock could be moved at short notice, the economy of the steppe was inherently mobile. A Mongol army could travel light, live off the land in many cases, and remain in the field for months at a time. A Chinese or European army, by contrast, had to maintain long supply lines, secure depots of grain and fodder, and operate within a much shorter time horizon. This asymmetry of mobility was one of the keys to the success of the Mongol conquests in the 13th century.
The Social Structure of the Pre-Imperial Mongols
The social structure of the pre-imperial Mongols was based on the concept of the patrilineal clan, the oboq, which traced descent from a common male ancestor and was the basic unit of identity and obligation. Within the clan, families held their own property, and the clan’s authority was exercised by a council of elders, the kishi, who decided questions of war, marriage, and migration. Above the clan stood the tribe, a looser grouping of related clans that shared a common territory and a common chieftain, and above the tribe stood the confederation, an even looser grouping of tribes held together by the charisma of a particular leader. The Borjigin clan, the clan of Genghis Khan, was a particularly prestigious lineage that claimed descent from a legendary common ancestor called Bodonchar (the “half-livered boy” of Mongol tradition, born miraculously in a cleft in a tree and adopted by a chief’s family), and the Borjigin pedigree would be the basis of the right of Genghis Khan and his descendants to rule the empire.
The pre-imperial Mongols thus combined a high degree of cultural and political complexity with a relatively simple economic and social structure. The genius of Genghis Khan was to take this complex but disorganized inheritance and to build a state from it. He did so by recognizing that the key to steppe power was the loyal army rather than the loyal clan, and he built that army by carefully rewarding talent and ruthlessly eliminating opposition. The empire that resulted was the largest the world had ever seen.
Sources
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007), ch. 1.
- Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy (Oxford, 1991), ch. 1.
- Igor de Rachewiltz, ed. and trans., The Secret History of the Mongols (2 vols., Brill, 2004–2013), vol. 1 commentary.
- John Man, Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Legacy (London, 2004), ch. 1–4.
- Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton, 2009), ch. 4–5.
- Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Oxford, 1989) — the standard treatment of steppe–China relations.