The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [69]
The returned Mongols and their foreign guard began eating up everything they could find without regard to season or weather. They slaughtered the animals indiscriminately, and they grazed them without concern for the survival of the pasture for another year. They chopped down the forests and fouled the landscape. They still had their passionate love of horses and tried to maintain their large herds even if sheep, goats, cows, and yaks proved more efficient at converting grass into meat.
Within only a few years, the returning Mongols ate up their homeland, destroyed the pasture, and burned the wood. To survive, they had to move ever farther north into the Siberian forests, west on the mountains and plains around the Altai, or back toward the south, to China from whence they came. The north was colder, harsher, and held fewer resources. The west was still inhabited by the steppe tribes that had not settled in China, and they maintained all the vigor and hostility of the old Mongols.
Though the Ming had chased them from the capital city, the Mongols did not consider themselves to have been overthrown. They had merely lost some territory. The newly emerging Ming Dynasty now controlled the agricultural parts of China, essentially the areas occupied by the dominant Han ethnic group. In victory they changed the name of the Mongol capital to Peiping, meaning “the North Is Pacified,” but many areas still lay beyond their reach. The Ming forces did not take Sichuan until 1371 and Yunnan until 1382. Other areas such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, eastern Turkestan, and Tibet remained permanently beyond the effective control of the Ming, leaving them with a far smaller China than the Mongols had held. Backed by the loyalty of many of these other areas, the Mongols still considered themselves to be the legitimate, though temporarily exiled, rulers of all China. They controlled vast but empty territories, with few subjects, no cities, and only minor trade routes connecting China with the forest tribes of Siberia.
Even when the Ming soldiers hunted down the Mongol khans and killed the last ruling descendant of Khubilai Khan in 1388, the Mongols found other members of the Borijin clan to claim the office. Because of the continuing respect for the memory of Arik Boke Khan as the defender of Mongol values against the Chinese administration of his brother Khubilai, some of Arik Boke’s descendants now came to the fore to claim the office. In thirteenth century, Arik Boke had wanted to keep the imperial capital in Mongolia, and now his distant heirs resurrected that possibility. They no longer had the option of locating their capital in another country, since they had lost all the territory that Genghis Khan’s army had conquered, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Now 150 years after the founding of the nation in 1206, they found themselves right back on the high, dry, cold Mongolian Plateau where Genghis Khan had started, and they were about to lose that. More precisely, they were about to lose their power over their ancestral territory and to become prisoners in their own homeland.
The Mongol Empire ended abruptly on a snowy day in 1399 when the sex-crazed spirit of a rabbit jumped on Elbeg Khan and captured his soul. Some observers may point to a more gradual decline of the empire from other causes, such as the outbreak of plague earlier in the century or the triumph of the Ming rebels in 1368, but the Buddhist chroniclers clearly saw the role of the rabbit as an intimate but secret protector of Genghis Khan’s clan.
The rise of the Borijin family stemmed from another snowy day two centuries earlier, around the year 1159, the Year of the Earth Rabbit. Genghis Khan’s father was out hunting a rabbit, and the rabbit lured the hunter on a path past a patch of freshly deposited urine. The yellow splash pattern of the urine in the fresh snow indicated that