Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford [157]
Following their purge of Mongol influence in public life, the Ming rulers went to great effort searching for the official seal of the Mongols, and they preserved the use of the Mongol language in diplomacy as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. As late as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Chinese court sent its letters in the Mongol language. In turn, the Manchu, who overthrew the Ming in 1644, strategically intermarried with the descendants of Genghis Khan so that they could claim legitimacy as his heirs in blood as well as in spirit.
At the heart of central Asia, the descendants of Genghis Khan continued in power in the area known as Moghulistan, the Persian name for the Mongol territory. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol holdings in central Asia had fallen under the control of Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, a Turkic warrior who claimed, with flimsy evidence, descent from Genghis Khan. He sought to revive the Mongol Empire, and he conquered much of its former territory from India to the Mediterranean. In an effort to closely associate himself with Genghis Khan, Timur sponsored a variety of books that linked them. To ensure that his lineage would acquire the blood of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, his family intermarried with some of Genghis Khan’s true descendants. Despite all that Emir Timur sought to do in restoring the Mongol Empire, he did not follow the ways of Genghis Khan. He slaughtered without reason and seemed to find a perverse but persistent pleasure in torturing and humiliating his prisoners. When he seized the sultan of the Ottoman kingdom of Turkey, he forced him to watch as his wives and daughters served Timur naked at dinner and, in some reports, satisfied his sexual demands. It was said that Timur harnessed the sultan like an animal and made him pull the royal chariot, and then exhibited him in a cage.
Because Timur claimed to be a Mongol, and was legitimately a son-in-law to the dynasty of Genghis Khan, his deeds became inextricably intertwined with those of the original Mongols in the minds of the people who had been conquered by both. One Mongol was hard to distinguish from another. When Timur delighted in public torture or piled up pyramids of heads outside his conquered cities, it was assumed that he was carrying on the traditions of his Mongol people. The practices of Timur were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan.
The descendants of Timur became known in history as the Moghuls of India. Babur, the founder of the new dynasty in 1519, was thirteen generations descended from Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai. The Moghul Empire reached its zenith under Babur’s grandson Akbar, who ruled from 1556 until 1608. He had Genghis Khan’s genius for administration as well as his appreciation of trade. He abolished the hated jizya tax, the tax on non-Muslims. Akbar organized his cavalry along the traditional Mongol units of ten (up to five thousand) and instituted a civil service based on merit. Just as the Mongols made China into the most productive manufacturing and trading center of their era, the Moghuls made India into the world’s greatest manufacturing and trading nation and—contrary to both Muslim and Hindu traditions—raised the status of women. He continued the universalist attitude toward religion and tried to amalgamate all religion into one Divine Faith, Din-i-Illah, with one God in Heaven and one emperor on earth.
With so many empires striving to maintain the illusion of the Mongol Empire in everything from politics to art, public opinion seemed obstinately unwilling to believe that it no longer existed. Nowhere was the belief