(Continued from yesterday.)
...Now, there is a terribly interesting angle to the Russian attitude toward the Tatar-Mongols at the time of the invasion, which officially started in 1237 and culminated in the destruction of Kiev in 1240. The unbelievably barbaric atrocities perpetrated upon their Russian quarry by the invading Asiatic hordes could not possibly endear the plundering, civilization-wrecking heirs of Genghis Khan to the Russian heart. But this seeming truism is not quite as simple as it looks at first sight.
The Genghis Khan phenomenon, coming out of nowhere and sweeping half of the world in an unstoppable typhoon, a violent force of nature, more than a carefully engineered brainchild of one exceptional man, has several dimensions to it. If the hallowed Russian warrior saint Alexander Nevsky found nothing wrong in his close association with the invaders, and even became a pobratim, blood-brother, of Genghis’ grandson Batu Khan’s son Sartak, by taking the Mongolian oath anda, things could not be all ‘black and white’ there, bringing to mind a similar situation, in which the Jewish prophet Jeremiah virtually6 bonded with the fearful Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, seeing him not as a pagan invader from hell but as an instrument of God Himself. In Russia’s case, the Mongol invasion would help St. Alexander Nevsky defeat several dangerous threats from the West, namely, the Swedes in 1240 (the same year in which Kiev was burned to the ground by his new allies) and the Livonian Knights in 1242, where Tatar and Mongol blood was spilled as well, in a remarkable display of Russian "knowhow," to ensure the Russian victory. Furthermore, by formally submitting to the invaders’ supremacy, Alexander was able to mitigate their plunder of Russia, redirecting their destructive energy westward, where they would defeat combined European forces in several bloody battles at Legnica, Mohi, Budapest, Breslau, etc., terrifying the rest of Europe; before they suddenly stopped, and retreated, following Genghis Khan’s famous strategy of never being stretched too thin, and always securing the rear.
St. Alexander’s unlikely alliance with the heirs of Genghis Khan directly led to the spectacular rise of Moscow: Russia’s Third Rome, by demolishing the power of Kievan Russia’s natural capital Kiev, thus strongly suggesting, in retrospect, a truly supernatural act of Destiny. (The reader needs to realize however that there was no “United Russia” at the time, but a multitude of principalities vying for power, thus, St. Alexander’s personal elevation among the other Russian Princes was a step forward in the eventual Russian unification.) No wonder, then, that Saint Alexander Nevsky was canonized as a saint, and has recently been voted “the Greatest Russian.” He obviously had nothing to do with the fall of Kiev, but he was definitely the smartest of all Russian Princes at the time. No wonder either that the name of Genghis Khan and his heirs is shrouded in a mystique in Russia, bordering on admiration, despite the horrific memory of the invaders’ atrocities, and the ensuing two-plus centuries of the much-lamented “Tatar-Mongol yoke”! Here is yet another of your “riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma…”
In my case, there are more than one personal connections to the name of Genghis Khan. Alexander Nevsky, Genghis’ great-grandson’s blood-brother, happened to be, of course, my patron saint, in whose honor I was named and baptized by my parents. Alongside that connection, goes my ever-memorable 1954-1956 trip to China with a grand total of four deliciously lengthy Moscow-Peking-Moscow-Peking-Moscow journeys on board the legendary Trans-Siberian train via the steppes of Manchuria, where, to my great delight, the train would be making a short stop at the station by the name Genghis Khan, where the Chinese authorities were building the Genghis Khan Mausoleum at the time, to commemorate not so much his “technical” birthplace (historians normally point to a different place in Inner Mongolia to the West from there, south of the Lake Baikal) or even the purported place of his death, in Outer Mongolia, during his last military campaign, and actually not far from this place at all. It was more a symbolic place where his foot may have stepped, and where his tent may have once stood, and so this kind of symbolism would not escape from me even at that very young age, so that I insisted on getting off, even if for a short time, at this unique and so precious train stop to touch the ground saturated with the great warrior’s memory. Needless to say, that literally firsthand life experience would play an enormous role in my subsequent childhood development.
Whether Genghis Khan was indeed born in Manchuria, and not in Mongolia as one reasonably expects, has no relevance here. He and his kin were nomads, always on the move. There is an element of homelessness in the life of a nomad, but, apparently, a born wanderer has no desire to find for himself a permanent home, but keeps his homelessness as a feature of his lifestyle. Manchuria, like Mongolia, provided a well-familiar landscape for these nomads, to be considered their “home,” in a larger sense. Having so many comfortable places to choose from, Genghis would hardly have preferred to end his days in their foreign luxury. In fact, he died in a military camp, during his last campaign of plunder and conquest, now passing the fiery torch to his capable sons and even more capable grandsons, whose own belligerence had been, by then, already well groomed and tested.
As I observed before, it wasn’t so much the historical opinions of his contemporaries and of the subsequent generations, but his phenomenal overall achievements, that are objectively testifying to his world-historical greatness and to his undeniable personal genius. Practically ex nihilo he created for himself and his Mongol nation a name and an indelible front-row place in world history. In his conquests, he was not seeking solely personal glory. He was happy to retreat at the right time and to change the main thrust of his effort, in order to ascertain the enduring strength of his rear. In the language of the Three Little Pigs, he was “building his Imperial house out of brick.” The Mongol Empire did not reach its uttermost limits on his personal watch, but he was surely the one who made it possible for his successors, of whom his grandson Kublai Khan has, arguably, been the most brilliant. The magnificent ruler of China for nearly forty years, he became a sort of apotheosis for his brilliant grandfather, on the one hand, consolidating Mongol power over one of the great civilizations of the world; on the other hand, assimilating much of the Chinese culture into his lifestyle, so that eventually the Mongol period of the Chinese history would end without leaving as much as a speck on the temporarily conquered people. Ironically, in just a couple of centuries, the roles of the conquerors and the conquered would be reversed, and the history of the Mongols would become that of a long subjection to the Chinese rule. Even in the historical glow of achieving national independence Mongolia would no longer be claiming an exceptional status among the world’s nations. But, by the same token as the paltry status of modern Greece shall never cast a shadow on the glory of Ancient Greece, the woefully diminished stature of the modern-era Mongolia has no relevance on the exceptional role played in world history by Genghis Khan and by his immediate heirs. In fact, modern Mongolia cannot possibly make an exclusive claim on the person of Genghis Khan, and even less so, on the persons of his famous grandsons Batu and Kublai. All of them are part of world history, and not of separate national histories. (Even those which like Napoleonic France would produce the strongest possible impact on the others, fall into a different category, summarized in the next paragraph.)
After the homeless Genghis Khan and his displaced grandson Kublai Khan, come other great rulers, but, as we are now entering the modern age of strong national identity, all of these belong to the nations that claim them as their own, and thus, to a totally different category.
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