The unification of the Mongol tribes in 1206 was the political event that made the Mongol Empire possible. The proclamation of Temüjin as Genghis Khan at the great kurultai on the banks of the Onon River marked the end of a long period of tribal fragmentation and the beginning of a new, centralized political order that would, within a single generation, come to dominate the Eurasian world. The unification is also, for modern Mongolians, a founding national event: the Naadam festival, held each July, commemorates the kurultai of 1206 and the three “manly skills” (wrestling, archery, horse-racing) that Genghis Khan is said to have codified at it.
The process of unification was carried out over almost twenty years, from the late 1180s to the early 1200s. The process was not merely military. It involved a fundamental restructuring of Mongol society, the creation of new political and military institutions, and the promulgation of a new legal code. The Genghis Khan who proclaimed the new order in 1206 was not merely the conqueror of the Mongol tribes; he was the founder of a state.
The Process of Unification
The unification of the Mongol tribes was a step-by-step process in which Genghis Khan defeated or absorbed his rivals in a carefully chosen sequence. The principal opponents, with the dates of the principal defeats, are:
- The Tayichiud, the Kerey, the Onggirat, and the other small Mongol clans that had been part of the old Khamag confederation — defeated or absorbed in 1187–1190.
- The Tatar confederation, which had been the dominant power in the eastern steppe — broken in three campaigns, in 1196 (with Jin assistance), 1200, and 1202.
- The Keraite state, ruled by Toghrul, which had been a Mongol ally for twenty years — defeated in 1203 in the aftermath of Toghrul’s surprise attack on Temüjin.
- The Naiman, the western steppe confederation — defeated in 1204, the year of the Battle of the Chakirmaut that broke the last coalition against Temüjin.
- The Merkit, the persistent western enemy — finally broken in 1198 (with the first of these major campaigns actually in 1186), with the chieftain Tokto’a killed in flight.
The details of each campaign are in the Rise of Temüjin cluster; the point for the present cluster is the sequence. The sequence was carefully chosen to prevent the formation of a coalition. The strategy is the same one Genghis Khan would use in the western campaigns a decade later (against Khwarezm in 1219–1223) and that his successors would use in the European campaigns of 1236–1242: pick off the enemies one at a time, in a sequence chosen to prevent the others from coming to their aid.
The final step in the unification was the kurultai of 1206, the great assembly of tribal leaders that proclaimed Temüjin as Genghis Khan. The kurultai was held in the spring of 1206, on the banks of the Onon River in the Khentii Mountains, the heartland of the old Khamag Mongol territory. The exact date of the kurultai has been debated, but it is conventionally placed in the spring of 1206, the Year of the Tiger by the Mongol twelve-year cycle. The Yuan Shi (the official Chinese history of the Yuan dynasty, compiled 1360–1365) gives 1205; most modern Mongolists follow the Secret History and place it in 1206.
The Institutions of the New Order
The kurultai of 1206 was more than a coronation. It was the formal institution of a new political order. Genghis Khan used the occasion to announce a series of reforms that transformed the political and military structure of the Mongol people. The four most consequential reforms:
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The decimal reorganization of the army. Genghis Khan divided his followers into units of ten (arban), a hundred (zuun), a thousand (mingghan), and ten thousand (tümen), and appointed his own commanders to each unit. The commanders were chosen for their ability and loyalty rather than for their aristocratic birth, and several of the most important commanders — Jebe, Subutai, Mukhali, and Jelme — were men of low origin who had risen through merit. Jebe had been a slave of Temüjin’s enemy and had voluntarily joined him after the Battle of the Chakirmaut; Subutai was the son of a blacksmith; Mukhali was a bahatur (hero) of the Jürkin clan. The decimal structure gave the Mongol army a flexibility and a discipline that had been lacking in the old tribal levies, and it became the model for the imperial armies of the khanates for the next two centuries.
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The Yassa code of law. The Yassa was a written body of law that bound the entire Mongol nation, replacing the patchwork of tribal customs that had previously governed the steppe. Its provisions were remarkably comprehensive: it regulated military service, hunting, hospitality, religious freedom, theft, adultery, and capital punishment, and it established a uniform system of justice throughout the empire. The Yassa was enforced with extraordinary severity (the death penalty for theft on the imperial road, the death penalty for failing to report for a campaign), and it was credited by later historians — Juvaini, Rashid al-Din, the Chinese Yuan historians — with much of the success of the Mongol military machine.
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The keshig (imperial guard). The keshig was a body of ten thousand men, drawn from the most loyal and able of Genghis Khan’s followers, who served as the personal guard of the khan. The keshig was quartered at the imperial court and served as the training ground for the future commanders of the Mongol army; many of the most famous Mongol generals, including Subutai and Jebe, served in the keshig before being given field commands. The keshig was also the centre of the imperial administration: it was the keshig that kept the imperial records, communicated the khan’s orders, and served as the first line of defense against rebellion and assassination. Under Ögedei and Kublai, the keshig grew into a 10,000-strong day guard and a 1,000-strong night guard, with separate functions.
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The imperial administration. Genghis Khan appointed his own chancellor, the Uyghur scribe Tatatunga, to keep the imperial records in the Uyghur-derived script. He also appointed two of his most trusted followers, Yelu Chucai (a Khitan) and Mahmud Yalavach (a Muslim from Transoxiana), to manage the taxation and finance of the empire. The imperial administration was small by Chinese or Persian standards, but it was highly efficient, and it allowed Genghis Khan to manage an empire that was, even in his own lifetime, much larger than the Mongol heartland.
The Meaning of the Title
The title “Genghis Khan” has been the subject of much scholarly debate. The most common translation, “oceanic ruler” or “universal sovereign,” is based on the etymology of the word Genghis (also spelled Chinggis or Jinghis) as derived from the Mongol word for “ocean” or “wide” (cf. dalai, “ocean,” in modern Mongolian). Other proposed etymologies include “firm” or “unyielding” or “made of iron” (a connection to the name Temüjin, which does mean “of iron”), but these are less well supported. The “oceanic” reading is the standard one in modern scholarship, and it has the merit of fitting the title’s evident claim to universal rule.
Whatever the precise etymology, the title clearly conveyed a claim to universal rule. Genghis Khan was not merely the chief of the Mongol tribes; he was, in his own understanding and in the understanding of his followers, the ruler of all peoples under heaven. This claim was not merely symbolic. It was enforced, in the following two decades, by the conquest of much of Eurasia, and it became the basis of the imperial ideology of the Mongol state for the next century and a half.
The Aftermath of 1206
The kurultai of 1206 marked the beginning of the Mongol conquests. Within a year, the Mongols were at war with the Tangut Western Xia; within five years, they were at war with the Jurchen Jin Dynasty; within ten years, they had destroyed the Khwarezmian Empire and reached the Caspian Sea. The empire that Genghis Khan had founded in 1206 grew, within the space of a single generation, into the largest contiguous land empire in world history.
The unification of the Mongol tribes in 1206 was, in retrospect, the most consequential political event of the thirteenth century. It created the conditions for the Mongol conquests that followed, and it established a model of military and political organization that was copied, in whole or in part, by every state that the Mongols encountered. The institutions created at the kurultai of 1206 — the decimal army, the imperial guard, the Yassa code, the imperial administration — survived the death of Genghis Khan and continued to define the Mongol state for the next century and a half.
Sources
- Igor de Rachewiltz, ed. and trans., The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2004–2013).
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007), ch. 1–2.
- John Man, Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Legacy (London, 2004), ch. 5–8.
- Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 2004), ch. 4–5.
- Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London, 2012), ch. 2.
- Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).