In the 1160s, on the floodplains of the
Onon River in northeastern Mongolia, a boy
named Tamujin was born. As a young man,
he organized an alliance of rival tribes among
those of the grasslands north of the Gobi
desert. Years later, as the fierce warrior-leader
Genghis Khan, he led a vast army of nomads
out ofthe grasslands, across deserts and against
societies who had the misfortune to share time
and space with the all-powerful Mongols . .
I220. Samarkand, Central Asia. From the
city’s northwest gate,the inhabitants of
Samarkand could only watch in terror as the
enormous army approached. Perhaps 80,000
riders could be seen. According to one writer,
they appeared “more numerous than ants or
locusts, [more than] the sand in the desert or
drops of rain.” Before them, the approaching
riders drove thousands of captured civilians as a
human shield.
The city they approached was the capital of
Shah Muhammad of the Khwarezm, the center
of an empire that included parts of modern-
day Afghanistan and Iran. Earlier, the Shah
had executed the Mongol ambassador and
had sent back the man’s head to Genghis
Khan, infuriating the Mongol leader. Shah
Muhammad had 110000 troops in the city,
but most were poorly disciplined and fled even
before the Mongol army arrived. After just a
day’s fighting, the city gates were opened,
and the Shah’s people were forced to beg the
Mongols for mercy, which they did not receive
Today, there is barely anything left of the
once-powerful city of Samarkand. The city was
once famed for its copper and silver artisans.
An advanced aqueduct system once brought
water to the city, making gardens bloom in the
dry lands. Today, there is only grass and some
occasional bricks. A modern-day Samarkand
has grown in its place, but of the original city’s
eat workshops and palaces, nothing remains.
The Mongols destroyed every building
in the city, killing most ofits citizens and
taking away many of the survivors to serve
as slaves. A city of over 200,000 was erased
from the earth. Where the city’s mosque once
was, archeologist Yuri Buryakov has found
the burnt bones of the mosque's defenders.
“[T]here were soldiers who did not want to
surrender,” he says. A thousand withdrew to
the mosque, hoping that the Mongols would
not kill them there. “But to Mongols it
didn’t make any difference. They would
kill anywhere.”