First Rulers of Asia

THE MONGOL EMPIRE (581 pp.) -- Michael Prawdin -- Macmillan ($8).

With Christendom embroiled in the Fifth Crusade, A.D. 1221, heartening dis patches reached Pope Honorius III : "A new and mighty protector of Christianity has arisen. King David of India. . . has taken the field against the unbelievers." But the Vatican's information proved faulty; "King David" turned out to be Genghis Khan, and his Mongol empire was to spread terror on the flank of Eu rope for the next two centuries.

The Mongol Empire, which tells the story of Genghis Khan and the world he made, is a splendid slice of history. First published in German in 1938, it is the work of a Russian scholar with a flair for narrative. As it courses back & forth across Eurasia, following the fierce Mon gol horsemen, the book reads less like a scholar's chronicle than a majestic folk epic.

Hot Blood. Historian Prawdin starts his story with Temuchin, son of a minor tribal chieftain, who bound the wandering nomads of Mongolia into a military state. As Genghis Khan, chieftain of chieftains, he eventually controlled an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Himalayas.

Genghis Khan succeeded because he understood that an army of primitive horsemen could defeat civilized nations only if it kept complete discipline, constant mobility and immense hardihood. In his march through western Asia, after his conquest of China, he drove his troops over mountains 20,000 ft. high. The horses were accustomed to forage beneath the snow; the men, in extremities, would open the veins of their horses, drink someof the hot blood and then close the wounds.

Before Genghis, the Mongols had fought helter-skelter; he taught them the art of maneuver, of charging and wheeling in units. Like Napoleon, he promoted officers to top rank on their merits, regardless of family lineage. Instead of enslaving captives, as was Asiatic custom, he absorbed them into his fighting ranks. And he played no favorites: when his son-in-law sacked a city he had been told to spare, Genghis broke him to private.

As Historian Prawdin describes him, Genghis Khan was a ruthless but not sadistic man--a tough old nomad who did not hesitate to destroy his enemies, yet who had no interest in pointless cruelties. Conquest was in his blood; he was never happy except on the march. "The greatest joy a man can know," he said, "is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him.''

After his death, no leader of equal stature arose to rule the immense, unwieldy empire. For a time, his grandson, Kublai Khan ruled in self-indulgent splendor over China, a conqueror who had been softened by the pleasures of the conquered. Legend does not exaggerate his luxury. Each of his four wives had a palace with 500 virgins as serving maids and retinues of up to 10,000. Kublai also maintained 10,000 spotlessly white mares for the production of his favorite tipple, fermented mare's milk (kumiss). Twice a year the country was scoured for concubines. Yet Kublai Khan was a wise ruler who brought un paralleled prosperity to China.

Cold Slaughter. Mongol power reached its final surge at the close of the 14th century with Tamerlane. A man who was known as the "hurricane of annihilation," he combined a refined taste for the arts with an appetite for cold mass slaughter unequaled in history until the 20th century. Once he had 2,000 people walled up alive for resisting his army; another time, when a city rebelled against his brutal garrison, he had his army of 70,000 men bring him the heads of 70,000 civilians.

Historian Prawdin develops a careful contrast between Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Genghis Khan, he says, was a barbaric autocrat who had a political idea: to unite the nomadic tribes and establish their dominion in Asia. But Tamerlane enjoyed power and blood for their own sake. Historian Prawdin does not draw any parallels with modern history, but he suggests at least one general conclusion: once a Genghis Khan enslaves half a world, it is almost inevitable that a Tamerlane will come along to torture it.

* Speculatively, it was thought he might be a grandson of Prester John, the legendary ruler of a legendary Christian empire in the East, stories of whom took root in the European imagination during the Second Crusade (1147-1149) and continued to crop up for more than three centuries.

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