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By Root 1082 0

had ever breached. Counterintuitively, Genghis Khan waited until the winter to make the crossing. He knew there would be bone-chilling winds, snow, and icy gorges to contend with. But the Mongols preferred the cold, and a summer crossing of the parched, barren desert would have been deadlier still. To this day, Genghis Khan's march to central Asia, in which tens of thousands of warriors must have died, remains one of the most remarkable military feats in history.

But for all the tenacity and fortitude of Genghis Khan's men, the Mongols could never have overcome Khwarizm's mighty stone citadels without the great siege engines that Chinese engineers designed and constructed, practically right on the spot. Unlike traditional armies, the Mongol cavalry did not travel with heavy equipment, which would have slowed them down. Instead, they were accompanied by a corps of foreign engineers who simply built whatever instruments of attack were needed, using whatever resources were available. Thus, after their desert crossing, Genghis Khan's men felled the first trees they encountered; out of them the engineers constructed retractable ladders, giant crossbows mounted on wheels, rope-pulled mangonels (single-armed torsion catapults) that hurled stones and flaming liquids, and other sophisticated weapons of siege warfare that “barbarians” were not expected to have.23

The Khwarizm Empire's main defense lay in the great oasis cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as a chain of smaller strongholds. Farther east they controlled the Persian cities of Nishapur, Tabriz, Qazvin, Hamadan, and Ardabil. One by one these cities collapsed before the Mongol juggernaut. Bukhara, with its awe-inspiring mosques and academies, and supposedly “a wall twelve leagues… in circuit,” was stormed first, then methodically plundered. Next in line was Samarkand, lush with pleasure gardens and protected by an enormous wall with “twelve iron gates flanked by towers,” “[t]wenty armored elephants and one hundred and ten thousand warriors, Turks and Persians.” When the Mongols pulled up with their great fire-spewing machines, the people and army of Samarkand surrendered, terrified by reports of inhuman Mongol cruelty: rape, torture, dismemberment, and mass slaughter.

There is no question that the Mongols killed enormous numbers and wreaked incalculable destruction. After Genghis Khan's son-in-law was killed in battle at Nishapur, the city's entire population was reportedly wiped out. It was said that the severed heads of men, women, and children rose in three piles sky high and that “not even cats and dogs survived.” Such reports of Mongol savagery were likely exaggerated, but Genghis Khan apparently encouraged their circulation as a form of wartime propaganda. Indeed, the Mongols themselves may have inflated the number of people they killed in order to terrorize their next target population.24

Although the details of each siege varied, Genghis Khan usually followed the same basic strategy. In central Asia as in northern China, he attacked and burned unfortified villages in the surrounding countryside first, taking captives, slaying many, and generating a flood of panicked refugees, who brought chaos, hunger, and tales of terror to the cities. The besieged citizens were then given a choice. Those who capitulated would be treated with leniency. Those who refused to yield, as at Nishapur, would die terrible deaths.

Not surprisingly, many civilian populations—for example, those of Bukhara and Samarkand—surrendered to the Mongols, opening the city gates. (It may also have helped that many of Khwarizm's subjects were Persians and Tajiks, with no particular loyalty to their Turkic sultan.) Aristocrats, governors, and resisting soldiers were typically executed. By contrast, religious clerics and personnel were placed under Genghis Khan's protection, and civilians of any skill were actively recruited, whether glassblowers, potters, carpenters, furniture makers, cooks, barbers, jewelers, leather workers, papermakers, dyers, physicians, merchants, or cameleers. Perhaps