While films and video games like Ghost of Tsushima often show the Mongol conquests
undertaken by forces entirely consisting of the Mongols, this is a gross simplification.
The majority of the army serving the Great Khans was multi-ethnic and not made up only of nomads.
Today we will detail the importance of these non-Mongolian troops in aiding the
Mongol conquests, generally taking the roles the Mongols could not fulfill themselves.
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Even during his war for the unification of Mongolia, the warlord Temujin was relying on
troops of different backgrounds. While all were nomads practicing the same horseback archery,
not all were speakers of Mongolian languages. Many were Turkic peoples, some of whom were
even Eastern Christians, popularly called Nestorians. For horsemen of the steppe,
these sorts of ‘ethnic’ distinctions were fluid; tribal names generally served to mark lineages
both real and imagined, and political loyalties which could shift as necessary. So once these
Turkic groups submitted to Temujin, and especially once he took the title of Chinggis Khan, these
tribes would signify their loyalty by deeming themselves Mongols as well, usually involving
the adoption of Mongolian hairstyles and clothing. For any nomadic steppe confederation, this is not
a unique process: from the Huns to the Gokturks, such an approach can be seen again and again.
Following the declaration of the empire in 1206, Chinggis Khan rapidly began to expand
the Mongol ulus, incorporating neighboring peoples into his army, many of whom were
speakers of Turkic languages, who were nomadic, semi-nomadic, and even agriculturists; the forest
peoples around lake Baikal, the Kirghiz of the Yenisei River Valley, the Uighurs of Xinjiang,
the Qarluqs of Almaliq and the Onggut in what is now Inner Mongolia. Some, like the Uighurs,
had a great role in the emerging administrative system. It was from the Uighurs that Chinggis
Khan adopted a script for the Mongolian language, still in use today in Inner Mongolia.
While Chinggis was incorporating these peoples into his army,
it was fundamentally not changing the army itself, for it was their cavalrymen he incorporated.
For his early campaigns in the steppe, infantry was too great a liability.
However, once Chinggis Khan began to take his war to the more powerful sedentary kingdoms
in what is now China, he required a shift in his operational thinking. Fighting against the
Tangut Kingdom, his horsemen had little offensive capability against city walls.
Dominating in the field battle, they lacked the knowledge to besiege cities effectively.
For this, he would need to incorporate sedentary peoples into his forces.
While Chinggis Khan won his first significant field battles against the Jurchen Jin Dynasty
through the might of his horsemen and their arrows, he understood that to make
any lasting gains, he would need to utilize the very inhabitants of the Jin
Empire against their Jurchen masters. Within the Jin Dynasty were three primary groups:
the Jurchen, a Tungusic people hailing from Manchuria and ancestors of the Manchu, who made
up the ruling elite of the dynasty; the Khitans, a people related to the Mongols who a century prior
had ruled north China and Mongolia during the Liao Dynasty, until being conquered by the Jurchen;
and the Northern Chinese, who made up the vast majority of the population.
Even before the invasion began, the Khitans, who made up much of the Jin Dynasty’s military,
were defecting to Chinggis Khan, providing intelligence and horsemen. Having been treated
as second-class since the Jurchen conquest and denied advancement in the military,
there was long-simmering antagonism between the Khitan leaders and the Jin.
The Jin rulers, fearful of a Khitan revolt in the face of the Mongol attacks in 1211,
had sent Jurchen colonists among them in an attempt to subdue them;
the effort backfired monstrously, creating the revolt they so feared and resulting in a restored
‘Liao Dynasty,’ which immediately submitted to Chinggis Khan and provided more Khitan forces
to aid in his conquest. Not only were they men and horses for the Great Khan, but they
also took the same resources away from the Jin Emperor and stretched their forces even thinner.
While they were undoubtedly important for the fighting in China, we know Khitan horsemen
would accompany the Mongols in the west. In late 1218 or early 1219, when Jochi and Sübe’etei were
returning through Kazakhstan from hunting down Merkit refugees near the Caspian Sea, they were
attacked by the Khwarezm-Shah Muhammad II. In the fighting Jochi was injured and nearly overtaken
by Khwarezmian troops, until he was rescued by a timely charge of a Khitan Prince in his keshig.
Perhaps the most significant addition to the Mongol war effort in China
was the mass incorporation of Northern Chinese into the Khan’s army. It was the adoption of
Chinese infantry and siege engineers which allowed the Mongols to learn the ways of siege warfare,
and have the manpower to experiment with it. The Mongol leadership always wanted to avoid expending
the valuable lives of their nomadic horsearchers. Each one was a lifetime’s investment and hugely
effective in the open field; to use them to push siege equipment was simply to waste them.
The Mongols recognized this early on, and it was for these tasks they employed
their ever-growing new Chinese army. From pushing siege equipment to filling in moats,
to manning catapults and scaling ladders, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,
of Chinese were brought into the Mongol army within years of the start of the conquest.
Many were undoubtably forced, driven before the Mongols as a veritable human wave to absorb
the arrows of the defenders. But it cannot be dismissed that many willingly joined the Mongols,
particularly once it seemed the Jin Dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven,
the right to rule China, when they abandoned their capital of Zhongdu in 1215.
By the time Chinggis Khan took his forces west in 1219 against the Khwarezmian Empire,
there were more Chinese fighting on behalf of the Mongols in China, than there were Mongols fighting
in China. While some of these Chinese forces were under the command of Mongol, Turkic, Khitan or
Uighur officers, many were led by Chinese warlords and militia leaders who sided with the Khans,
like Shih Tienzi or Cheng Jou. These were men who not only willingly served the Khan of Khans,
but did so with extraordinary loyalty; Shih Tienzi and his family
would remain prominent military leaders under the Mongols until the reign of Khubilai Khan,
and Cheng Jou was the most trusted lieutenant of the brilliant Mongol commander Mukhali.
With Chinggis Khan absent fighting the Khwarezmian Empire, Mukhali was left as a viceroy to keep the
Jin Dynasty occupied until the Khan should return. From 1217 until his death in 1223,
Mukhali led a stunning, highly mobile campaign throughout the reduced Jin Empire. Cities after
cities were taken and retaken, while Mukhali drove his armies to within striking distance of the
new Jin capital at Kaifeng. While Mukhali’s main force was Turkic and Mongolian horsemen augmented
by Tangut cavalry, in other provinces in China Mukhali left command to officers like Cheng Jou,
who fiercely fought against the Jin to expand the Mongol Empire. Neither the Jurchen nor
the Mongols were Chinese; yet in much of the increasingly ruined Jin Empire, the fighting
was being undertaken almost exclusively between the Chinese subjects of both states.
In the area around the Shandong peninusla this became particularly confusing.
Here, an uprising against Jin rule broke out, known as the Red Coats. Here, loosely aligned
warlords -some independent, some aligned with the Mongols, some aligned with the Song Dynasty,
and all hating the Jin- fought themselves, the Mongols, the Song and the Jin. Some,
like Li Quan, joined the Mongols and on their behalf, fought the Jin and the Song for decades,
earning high status and rewards from the Mongol government. Li Quan’s son, Li Tan,
lasted as a prominent regional warlord until he revolted against Khubilai Khan in 1262,
likely on account of Song bribes and their empty promises. Only in reaction to this,
did the Mongols crack down on the power of the Chinese warlords in their service.
Despite the restriction of their independence, the Chinese in Mongol service only increased in
importance as their war into the more humid, less horse friendly climate of southern
China advanced. Against the Song Dynasty, a vast army and riverine navy of Chinese was assembled,
serving alongside a core of Mongol horsemen and often under the command of Mongols and Central
Asian Persians and Turks. By the end of the war against the Song Dynasty, during the pursuit
of the fleeing boy emperors to the island of Yaishan, the combined Mongol-Chinese army was
under the supreme command of a northern Chinese, Zhang Hongfan, assisted by a Uighur, Ariq Khaya,
and a Central Asian Muslim, Omar. The Mongol conquest of China could not have been completed
without the manpower of the Chinese, or their military skill for taking cities.
The Mongols made heavy use of Chinese manpower; cities in Mongolia like Karakorum and Chinqai
Balasaghun were built using labourers from China. Chinqai Balasaghun served
as an industrial and farming hub, manned by Chinese, to help supply Mongol armies as they
passed through western Mongolia on campaign. When planning the great western invasion in the 1230s,
the Mongols consdered sending west a vast army of Chinese infantry with them. This was dismissed
early on in the proceedings, deeming them unsuitable to such a journey. However, Chinese
siege engineers were brought with the Mongol armies on Chinggis Khan’s invasion of Khwarezm,
almost certainly with Batu and Sübe’etei’s 1230s western campaign, and with Hulegu in the 1250s-
thousands of them and their families to assist him in taking the remaining fortresses of the islamic
world. But the Chinese were not the only ones brought into use in the Mongol armies in the west.
As the Mongols advanced across the western steppe, many of the local Turkic tribes
were absorbed into their forces. During Jebe Noyan’s swift conquest of the Qara-Khitai,
the local garrisons largely submitted to their new Mongol masters without issue, but there is not
substantial evidence to suggest they accompanied Chinggis Khan against Khwarezm. In the Khwarezmian
Empire, much of the military were Turkic Qipchaq tribes, a great number of whom freely abandoned
their posts to join the Mongols upon invitation and fight against their former employers.
As discussed in previous videos, we have already noted Chinggis Khan’s mass employment of forced
levies, driving the local population before his armies much as he had done in China. With his
forces now experienced in siege warfare from the fighting in China, there was less of a need for
defections, as long as the Mongols could use the locals in the most vulnerable positions.
After Chinggis’ bloody campaign ended however, the Mongols were more amenable to utilizing the
locals militarily, generally for garrrisoning cities. Regional commanders appointed by the
Mongols would not have had access to substantial numbers of nomadic troops.
Therefore when rebellions did rise up after the conquest,
the initial responding force would not be Mongols from the steppe, but locally raised militia.
The western invasion of Batu and Sübe’etei provides a few notable mentions of foreign troops
in Mongol employ; the heavy usage of catapults against the Rus’ cities suggests the presence of
Chinese siege engineers; we have Tanguts taking part in the siege of the Alan capital of Magas,
alongside many Alans newly conscripted to the Mongol army; when a Mongol raiding
party was captured in Austria, the Austrians were surprised to find an Englishman in their employ,
a man who had apparently served as interpreter and envoy on behalf of the Mongols.
Men were also taken in the opposite direction as well; Rus’, Qipchaq, and Alan men were carried
east to serve in the Mongol military, often filling the role of bodyguards. The general
assumption seems to have been that transplacing these men like this ensured their loyalty. A
young Qipchaq warrior would be unlikely to learn Chinese well enough to start taking
bribes or escape on his own, and therefore be forced to remain utterly loyal to the Khan.
After the end of Mongol imperial unity, the reliance on non-Mongols became even
greater. In the Ilkhanate made heavy usage of Georgians and Armenians from Cilicia and beyond,
largely as heavy cavalry, who often took a primary role in their many battles against the Mamluk
Sultanate. While some have suggested this was due to the superiority of the Caucasian heavy horse,
it may just be again the Mongol inclination to place their foreign,
expendable troops into the most vulnerable positions, and thus save their own men.
Khubilai Khan’s foreign ventures towards the end of his life demonstrate the reliance on
non-Mongols for roles his horsemen could not fill. Leaving many of the Mongols to guard major sites,
particularly on his border with the Central Asian Khanates, Khubilai’s famous and often
disastrous overseas attacks were usually made up of Chinese troops, augmented by the people
inhabiting the part of his empire in the closest direction to that which he wanted to strike.
For the invasion of Japan, Koreans built and manned much of the ships that made up the navy,
especially in the first invasion, while northern Chinese, Jurchens and Khitans, as well as Mongols,
made up the varied assaulting forces. For the invasions of Dai Viet, Champa and Pagan,
Mongols fought alongside former Song troops, as well as men raised
from Yunnan and the small kingdoms on the late-Song Dynasty’s southwestern border.
The navies supporting the Vietnamese invasions and attacks on Java were ships raised from
southern Chinese manned by Chinese crews; for the attack on Java, the command was just as varied.
The army was led by a former Song commander, Gao Xing, the navy commanded by a Uighur, Yiqmis,
and the total force was under the overall command of a Mongol named Shi Bi.
The Mongol army was never a homogenous body. Aside from these most obvious mentions we have made,
there were thousands upon thousands of men from across Eurasia who served the Mongols in
less exciting roles. Local scouts to show them routes; smiths and artisans from Central Asia
carried with the force to help produce and maintain weapons and supplies needed for the
daily function of the army; physicians from China who must have set broken bones and mended wounds
from Korea to Afghanistan. While the Mongols themselves provided the necessary edge in
direct warfare, it was the vast support system and ability to draw on the knowledge and traditions
of peoples across Eurasia which allowed the Mongols to expand beyond the Eurasian steppe.
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