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According to Bayan, one of Toghon Temur's ministers, the root cause of all these problems was excessive sinicization. As a solution, he reportedly proposed that all Chinese throughout the empire surnamed Chang, Wang, Liu, Li, and Chao be executed. This plan, which would have eliminated 90 percent of China's population, was never carried out, but it illustrates the intolerant atmosphere that marked the Yuan dynasty in its last years.

Toghon Temur was China's last Yuan emperor. Anti-Mongol uprisings erupted across southern China, and a charismatic ethnic Chinese rebel by the name of Zhu Yuanzhang asserted his claim to the Mandate of Heaven. In 1368, after his forces drove Toghon Temur's army from China, Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty.

Over the next three hundred years, China would sink ever deeper into ethnocentric isolationism. When it became clear to the Ming emperors that they could not subjugate the “barbarians” surrounding them, they built massive walls to seal the Chinese in. Foreign merchants were expelled, and travel abroad was prohibited. At the same time, there was a crackdown on non-Chinese customs, religions, and ideas. Foreign languages were banned, while traditional Confucianism and Taoism were reinstated as official orthodoxy. Not until the twenty-first century would China again be as open, cosmopolitan, and outward-reaching as it was during the Mongol era.46

It was Genghis Khan's genius to create a single people out of the warring tribes of the Mongolian steppe. Unlike the Achaemenid Persians, Genghis Khan succeeded in establishing a new political identity—the Great Mongol Nation, or “People of the Felt Walls”—but this identity embraced only the nomadic peoples of the steppe. It was not intended to include, and had no appeal whatsoever to, non-Mongol peoples and nations, who regarded their Mongol conquerors as the crudest of barbarians.

As Genghis Khan's descendants went on to annex huge swaths of Persia, China, India, Russia, and eastern Europe, the peoples of these lands never remotely saw themselves as Mongols, “People of the Felt Walls,” or proud subjects of the Great Mongol Empire. On the contrary, a fascinating thing happened.

Instead of imposing a Mongol identity on their vast empire, the Mongol rulers increasingly took on the culture of their more “civilized” subjects. In China, Khubilai Khan adopted a Chinese title, established a Chinese dynasty, and surrounded himself with Chinese art, music, and drama. In central Asia, the Mongol khans became Muslim and made Persian their official language. No “glue” held these increasingly divergent kingdoms together. Within a short time, the once world-dominant Mongol empire broke into four large chunks, each turning increasingly intolerant and religiously fanatic. Before long, the Great Mongol Empire had disintegrated.

THE

ENLIGHTENING OF

TOLERANCE

FIVE

Inquisition, Expulsion, and the Price

of Intolerance

[W]e are informed by the inquisitors and many other people, religious, churchmen, and laymen, of the great harm suffered by Christians from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith…[We] decree that all Jews male and female depart our kingdoms and never return…And if they do not observe this and are found guilty of remaining in these realms or returning to them, they will incur the death penalty.

— EXPULSION DECREE, MARCH 1492

On October 19, 1469, in a private ceremony shrouded in secrecy and intrigue, the seventeen-year-old heir to the crown of Aragon married the eighteen-year-old heiress of Castile. From the union of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had first met just four days earlier, a unified Spain would ascend to great heights of glory. At the time of the wedding, and for much of the preceding two hundred years, Spain was one of the most religiously diverse societies in Christian Europe. Ferdinand