The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [115]
If Beg-Arslan could seize this place so closely associated with the memory of Genghis Khan, he would have all the greater hold on the Mongols serving around him. Manduhai’s claim to legitimacy derived from the blood link of Dayan Khan to Genghis Khan, but if Beg-Arslan controlled such an important site, it would show that Genghis Khan and the Eternal Blue Sky supported him. Victory in battle would always surpass any other type of legitimacy. Beg-Arslan could claim the mandate of Mongol history.
Beg-Arslan’s strongholds at the Turfan and Hami oases were too far out in the desert to function as supply bases for the conquest of Ningxia and control of the Gansu Corridor. He had moved his troops much closer to his target, into a great loop in the Yellow River. The immense river, known to the Mongols as the Black River, to the Turkic people as the Green River, and to most of the world as the Huang Ho or Yellow River, begins its nearly three-thousand-mile journey toward the sea from the Kunlun Mountains in Tibet, flowing north across the Asian continent. Without an obstacle blocking its course, the river could continue northward across Mongolia and Siberia and out to the Arctic, but the giant Gobi and the massive Mongolian Plateau bar its way. The river forms a large loop before turning eastward and heading to the Pacific instead of the Arctic.
The land enclosed by the Great Loop covers about 83,000 square miles, or an area about the same size as the Korean Peninsula. The river provides for agriculture along its sides if irrigated, but the interior area can only support grazing. The topography consists of a plateau that rises up to an average altitude over three thousand feet.
The landscape offers steppes of dry gravel, salt lakes, and shifting sands that farmers and sedentary people found alien and hostile, but which the Mongols found inviting and comforting to their aesthetic sensibilities and beneficial to their pastoral way of life. In contrast to the incredibly hot deserts of the interior or the wet agricultural lands of the river plains, the inner loop offered land sufficiently fertile for grazing, but not appropriate for extensive agriculture. It formed a miniature Mongolia, only farther south and with a more benign climate; threateningly close to the Gansu Corridor, it was also the ideal strategic outpost for the Mongols, from where they could easily strike at the heart of Chinese civilization and commerce.
In a series of elegant battlefront reports that survive from the Ming commander Wang Yue, a clear picture of the issues emerges. He suggested a novel tactic of using trade to lure in the Mongols and then attacking them. Because it proved difficult for the Chinese soldiers to go out and find the Mongols, Wang Yue proposed that government officials should send out large supply trains whose movements could be easily monitored by the Mongols and which would pose tempting targets for their raids. Thus the Mongols could be lured in close and then attacked by the waiting military. Although the policy would not prevent Mongol raids entirely, it would discourage them “to dare to penetrate deeply.” Wang Yue began implementation of his policy with campaigns against the Mongols in the summer of 1470 and again in 1471. Although they produced few casualties, they succeeded in heightening the tensions along the border.
After only seven months on