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The prestige and power of the Tang rulers declined throughout the ninth century. Regional warlords came to rule their own kingdoms, and the central government lost fiscal control. Between 875 and 884, another series of uprisings shattered the empire. The final collapse of the Tang dynasty was protracted and bloody. Changan was looted and ravaged. In Canton, rebels massacred 120,000 foreign merchants, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. In 904, a regional commander named Zhu Wen captured the emperor, executing him along with his entire imperial entourage, including servants. The dismantled palaces of Changan were floated down the Wei River to Luoyang, where Zhu Wen had set up his own capital. The end of the Tang dynasty is usually dated as 907, when Zhu Wen slaughtered the last boy-emperor of the house of Tang.36

After the fall of the Tang Empire, China turned increasingly insular and xenophobic. Chinese in staggering numbers migrated from the north, where the barbarian threat was greatest, to the south, which would henceforth be home to the great majority of China's enormous population. Ironically, it would be the barbarians who a few centuries later would be tolerating the Chinese and creating history's next world-dominant power.

FOUR

Cosmopolitan Barbarians

Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men.

— MONGKE KHAN, CIRCA 1250

By the arms of Zingis and his descendants the globe was shaken: the sultans were overthrown: the caliphs fell, and the Caesars trembled on their throne.

— EDWARD GIBBON, 1776

Seven and a half centuries ago, on a high plateau in the Mongolian steppe, where today there is nothing but wild grass, herders, and the occasional Canadian mining convoy, there stood the royal tent city of Karakorum. From their yak-felt yurts— circular white tents that the Mongols call gers—illiterate Mongol khans ruled over an empire far larger than the Romans ever conquered. The nomadic Mongols had no science, engineering, or written language of their own. They had no agriculture and could not even bake bread. Yet they ruled over half the known world, ineluding the most magnificent cities of the time: Baghdad, Belgrade, Bukhara, Kiev, Moscow, Damascus, and Samarkand.1

In 1162, seventy years before Karakorum was erected, a boy named Temujin was born on a desolate hill in a harsh part of the steppe. At the time, the Mongols were a fragmented collection of kin-based tribes and clans, locked in cycles of attack and retribution, killing each other's men, kidnapping each other's women, and stealing each other's animals. Temujin's mother, Hoelun, was herself “stolen”: Temujin's father had abducted her shortly after her marriage to a man from a rival tribe. When Temujin was nine, his father was killed, but not before betrothing Temujin to a girl named Borte. Shortly afterward, Hoelun and her five hungry children were abandoned by their clan. As the harsh winter set in, the family survived by eating berries and roots and wearing “the skins of dogs and mice.” By the time he was sixteen, Temujin had killed his half brother, a taboo act under Mongol codes, and was a renegade on the run.2

How did this outcast, who became Genghis Khan, unite the warring tribes of the steppe and conquer more territory and people than any other man in history? How did the Mongols, lacking any sophisticated technology of their own, come to wield the massive siege engines—catapults, trebuchets, explosives, portable towers—that allowed them to defeat the great walled cities of medieval China, Persia, and eastern Europe? How did a relatively small band of nomads maintain and govern for 150 years an empire that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Sea of Japan?

Undoubtedly, Genghis Khan was a brilliant military tactician. The Mongols were also utterly ruthless in battle. They poured molten silver into the eyes and ears of their enemies. They killed treacherous women by sewing up their orifices. Genghis