It is not necessary here to record the story of the Mongol’s progress of conquest. Khwārazm soon succumbed, and Khorāsān was overrun by his hordes. The Sultan himself took no active part in the hopeless effort to stay the advance of Chingiz, but fled across Khorāsān[376] to an island in the Caspian named Ābasgūn, not far from the modern Astarābād, where in A.H. 617 (1220) he died in utter destitution.[377] A manful struggle to revive the glory of his house was made by Sultan Mohammad’s heroic son Jalāl ud-Dīn, whose career forms one of the most exciting narratives in history.[378] This last representative of the Khwārazm Shāhs, after having boldly faced death on a hundred battlefields, was brutally murdered in A.H. 628 (1231) by a low-born Kurd.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Line of Chaghatāy
“The Mongol armies,” writes Mr. S. Lane-Poole, “divided into several immense brigades, swept over Khwārazm, Khorāsān, and Afghanistān, on the one hand; and on the other, over Āzerbāyjān, Georgia, and Southern Russia; whilst a third division continued the reduction of China. In the midst of these diverging streams of conquest Chingiz Khān died in A.H. 624 (1227), at the age of sixty-four. The territory he and his sons had conquered stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Euxine, and included lands or tribes wrung from the rule of Chinese, Tanguts, Afghans, Persians, and Turks.
“It was the habit of a Mongol chief to distribute the clans over which he had ruled as appanages among his sons, and this tribal rather than territorial distribution obtained in the division of the empire among the sons of Chingiz. The founder appointed a special appanage of tribes in certain loosely defined camping-grounds to each son, and also nominated a successor to himself in the Khānate.”[379]
In this division of the newly founded Mongol Empire,—i.e. Transoxiana, with part of Kāshghar,—Badakhshān, Balkh, and Ghazna fell to the lot of Chingiz Khān’s second son, Chaghatāy, the founder of the Khānate of that name, which existed for 146 years, till its overthrow by Tīmūr in A.H. 771 (1370).
The annals of his branch of his dynasty have hitherto been obscurer than those of the other descendants of Chingiz.[380] He appears to have profited by the lessons of the Naiman chancellor,[381] and to have developed into a just and energetic ruler, capable of preserving order among the heterogeneous population under his charge.
He scrupulously observed the Yasāk, or Civil Code, established by his father, and, like him, was tolerant towards all religions and creeds. He fixed his capital at Almāligh,[382] in the extreme east of his dominions. His Mongol ministers, loving the life of the steppes, probably induced him to choose this locality rather than Samarkand or Bokhārā.[383] They would serve no Khān who did not lead a life worthy of free-born men; and Chaghatāy and his immediate successors saw, as did his later descendants, that the one way of retaining the allegiance of his people was to humour their desires in this respect and live with them a nomad’s life.[384]
In the year A.H. 639 (1241) both Ogdāy and Chaghatāy,[385] the great Khāns of the Mongolian Empire, died, and the successors of Chingiz fell to disputing the succession.
We do not propose to enlarge on the struggles and disorders which existed almost without cessation in Turkestān during the whole period of the Chaghatāy Khān’s rule, and will confine ourselves to a consideration of the social conditions of that country under his successors.[386] The Mongols in contact with communities possessed of a comparatively high standard of civilisation lost none of their passion for their boundless steppe. In their eyes the town, the settled abode, were abominations, indicating deep-seated effeminacy and corruption: the only life worth living was that of the herdsman, roving free as air, with his tent of white felt.