Empires Apart by Brian Landers

autocrat, whose only legitimacy was force. At the same time settlers intermarried with the native Finns and adopted some of their traditions. The result was the creation of two Russias. In time the distinction became so fundamental that the ‘Great Russians’ on the Volga and the ‘Little Russians’ around Kiev came to regard themselves as different nations. The division came to a head in 1169, when the Prince of Rostov-Suzdal became Grand Prince, and used his military might to sack Kiev and forcibly move the capital to his own seat on the Volga far to the north-east.
    Thirty-five years later the Third Crusade set off from western Europe to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel, but decided that the Byzantine Christians presented a much more tempting target. Constantinople was taken and its trade routes fell into the hands of the Italian city-states, destroying Kiev’s economic supremacy for ever. The Rus were pushed back relentlessly from the south-east, from the south-west by the descendants of Attila’s Huns and from the west by the Teutonic knights.
    Then came the single most important event in Russian history: the Mongols arrived. (The Mongols in Russian histories are often referred to as Tartars, especially in more recent times when Stalin wreaked particular revenge on them. The elision from one term to the other is confusing for foreigners, but no more so than the elision from English to British in American histories. The term Tartar itself is derived from the Chinese name of one of the Mongol tribes; it has nothing to do with tartare sauce or the tartar on teeth, which comes from an Arabic word meaning resin.) The Mongols first emerged not in what is now Mongolia but further north, where the Huns had created the first state in central Asia, Hsiung-nu, in around 200BC, before being pushed and pulled westwardsin the murderous stream of conquest ending at Châlons. Culturally the Mongols drew from both the forest traditions of Siberia and the cultures of the Turkic peoples who had replaced the Huns to control the great sweep of the steppes. Their transformation from a collection of loosely linked, nomadic clans into a unified military and political force was entirely thanks to Genghis Khan.
    Genghis Khan was born in a tent on the banks of the river Onon, east of Lake Baikal, in 1162. After the murder of his father he was taken under the wing of a Mongol leader whom he soon overpowered. He set about creating a united Mongol nation by first subduing his closest kinsmen and then extending out to other Mongol and Turkic tribes. Among people where clan connections had been all-important, Genghis Khan introduced and enforced a strictly meritocratic regime. When he had compelled the tribes of central Asia to submit he turned on China. Invasions of China had been tried and failed before; that Genghis Khan succeeded is a testament to the skill with which he waged war, and the ferocity of his troops. In 1214, 75,000 Mongols lay siege to the 600,000 defenders of Peking. The next year the city fell. The Mongols were on their way.
    The Mongols changed the world in a way unparalleled since the Romans. No individual Roman leader had anything like the impact on world history that Genghis Khan exerted. China, India, Russia and a host of other nations are as they are today because of the influence of that one man. After conquering northern China in 1215 Genghis Khan led his hordes through Persia into southern Russia. (The word ‘horde’ derives from the Mongol word for camp.) His son sacked Kiev and raided into Poland and Moravia. The Mongols withdrew only when the time came to elect a new khan, an election attended by emissaries from the Pope and the Caliph of Baghdad. If the latter was trying to curry favour he failed. The Mongols soon fell on to the Muslim world. The only favour they bestowed on the caliph was that in respect to superstitions about not shedding a caliph’s blood they wrapped him