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By Root 1089 0

the Jurchens through trickery, psychological warfare, and, perhaps most important, by ruthlessly using the Jurchens’ own population and technology against them. Before taking on the great Jurchen cities, the Mongols typically attacked the surrounding villages first, setting them on fire. The terrified peasants fled toward the cities for refuge, clogging the roads and cutting off the Jurchen supply convoys. The sudden influx of more than a million refugees overcrowded the walled cities, producing havoc and disease. Food supplies were quickly exhausted. As starvation set in, looting, rebellion, and cannibalism broke out. In one instance, Jurchen soldiers ended up slaughtering 30,000 of their own villagers. Meanwhile, outside the city walls, the Mongols conscripted thousands of peasants, who were forced to labor under the command of Mongol soldiers, hauling water, digging ditches, and maneuvering enormous wooden and stone battering rams. Often displaying utter disregard for their captives’ lives, the Mongols also used them as human shields. When these human shields died, the Mongols would use their corpses as moat-fill.

At the same time, Genghis Khan eagerly recruited men with skills and technological expertise the Mongols themselves lacked. After every battle, the Mongols carefully examined their captives and impressed any engineers found. At the same time, they offered generous rewards to engineers who voluntarily defected. In these ways, Genghis Khan brought into his service numerous Chinese engineers who knew how to construct powerful siege engines— portable towers, arrow-spraying ballistas, flame-hurling catapults, fire lances, trebuchets, explosives—that could bring down seemingly inviolable walled cities. These weapons became part of the Mongol arsenal, and the Chinese engineers who designed them were incorporated into the Mongol army. With each new victory, the Mongol war machinery grew more sophisticated and deadlier.18

Even so, conquering the heavily garrisoned Jurchen kingdom was no small feat. To make matters worse, northern China's hot, muggy summers were almost unbearable for the Mongols, who repeatedly fell ill in the densely populated urban areas. It took Genghis Khan's men many campaigns over a period of three years before they finally, in 1214, surrounded the imperial city of Zhongdu. Rather than fight the Mongols, the besieged Jurchen emperor agreed to a settlement proposed by Genghis Khan. In exchange for the Mongols’ withdrawing, the Jurchens would acknowledge the supreme rule of Genghis Khan. As “gifts” of appeasement, the Jurchen emperor presented Genghis Khan with large quantities of gold, silver, and silk, three thousand horses, five hundred youths, five hundred slave girls, and the hand of a Jurchen princess in marriage.19

Genghis Khan kept his end of the bargain. He and his men headed back to the Mongolian steppe. As with the Uighur, Tangut, and Khitan kingdoms, he left the Jurchens with great autonomy, as long as they acknowledged their vassal status and continued to pay tribute. The truth was that the Mongols had neither the interest nor the wherewithal to govern the sedentary civilizations they had conquered. However, shortly after the Mongols withdrew, the Jurchen emperor fled south and set up a new court in the city of Kaifeng. Genghis Khan viewed this as an act of betrayal and immediately returned to China. This time, he had Zhongdu sacked, razed, burned, and plundered mercilessly. According to one contemporaneous source, “The bones of the slaughtered rose mountain-high, the earth was fat with human fat and the rotting corpses gave rise to a plague.” According to another, “[S]ixty thousand Chinese maidens flung themselves down from the city walls…rather than fall into the hands of the Mongol soldiery.”20

The conquest of northern China, finally completed in 1215, proved immensely lucrative for the Mongols. Genghis Khan's men returned to the steppe, their crude carts overflowing with some of the most exquisite artisanship then in existence: silk robes alive with embroidered gold peonies, jade