A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

friendly reply. So Genghis ordered a caravan to set out for Turkestan, loaded with treasures - all
stolen - and money to buy Turkish goods. It reached the border town of Otrar; but through some
failure of communication - or perhaps simply out of contempt for these upstart barbarians - the
governor ordered it to be seized. All the Mongols - a hundred of them - were killed.
When Genghis Khan heard the news he was outraged, but had sufficient self-control to send
another ambassador to the sultan to ask for the extradition of the governor of Otrar. Mahomet made
the miscalculation of his life - the miscalculation that released the ‘yellow peril’ on Europe. He had
the ambassador put to death.
There is no rage like that of a Right Man who has been insulted - and Genghis Khan was, beyond
all doubt, a Right Man. This is the only way in which we can explain the appalling revenge he took
for the death of his hundred caravaneers and his ambassador. He marched into Turkestan with his
full forces. Just before setting out, his rage was inflamed by another insult. The Tanguts had been
the first people of China to swear allegiance to Genghis Khan; now, as he prepared for war, he sent
to them for a contingent of soldiers. With astonishing stupidity, a minister who detested the
Mongols sent back a reply which said, in essence: If you don’t have enough troops, perhaps you’d
better call off the expedition. Genghis Khan ground his teeth, but had to put off revenge until a later
date.
The Turkish sultan had, in fact, a far larger army than Genghis Khan - he could undoubtedly have
marched into Mongolia and conquered it. But now he had no idea where the Mongols would attack.
He had to dispose his army at strategic points over a long frontier. Otrar, of course, was an obvious
guess - which probably meant Genghis would avoid it. But the great khan, in his fury, did nothing
of the sort. He crossed the mountains to the north and appeared before Otrar, on the north bank of
the Syr Darya River. The governor defended the town with a courage born of the grim certainty of
the horrible death that awaited him; it was a difficult siege; even when the Mongols broke in, the
governor took refuge with his best troops in the citadel and it took another month to starve and
storm them out. The Turks had run out of arrows; as the Mongols broke in, the governor and his
women took refuge on the roof and the women tore bricks from the walls and handed them to the
governor, who hurled them down on the Mongols. It was useless; he was captured, still fighting
frenziedly, and dragged in front of Genghis Khan. Now was the moment the conqueror had
dreamed about. He ordered the man to be executed by having molten metal poured into his ears and
eyes.
And so it went on, the grim business of mass slaughter of innocent people whose only crime was to
be the subjects of a king who had dared to insult Genghis Khan. In fact, the Mongols spared any
town that voluntarily threw open its gates to them. The inhabitants were merely ordered to move
outside the walls while the Mongols pillaged for days. Anyone found still in the town was killed. If
a town resisted and then surrendered, clemency was doubtful; Benaket, west of Tashkent, asked to
surrender after three days and the defenders were promised their lives. In fact, all the soldiers were
executed. The craftsmen were given to the Mongol chiefs - in the Middle Ages, a craftsman was a
more valuable commodity than ten horses - and all the young males were taken away to help the
Mongols in other sieges. The Mongol method was to drive the hostages ahead of them as they
besieged a town, as a living shield. It was a trick they had discovered in China: taking hostages
from the surrounding countryside and using them as ‘shock’ troops - troops who received rather
than administered the shock.