“From insult to instability: How an Insult Topple the shah’s Kingdom”
In the early part of the thirteenth century, Muhammad, the shah of Khwarezm, managed after many wars to forge a human empire, extending west to present-day Turkey and south to Afghanistan. The empire’s center was the great Asian capital of Samarkand. The Shah had a powerful, well-trained army, and could mobilise 200,00 warriors. Within days.
In 1219 Muhammad received an embassy from a new tribal leader to the east, Genghis Khan. The embassy included all sorts of gifts to the great Muhammad, representing the finest goods from Khan’s small but growing Mongol empire. Genghis Khan wanted to reopen the silk Route to Europe, and offered to share it with Muhammad, While promising peace between the two empires.
Muhammad did not know this upstart from the east, who,it seemed to him, was extremely arrogant to try to talk as an equal to one so clearly his superior. He ignored Khan’s offer. Khan tried again: This time he sent a caravan of a hundred camels filled with the rarest articles he had plundered from china. Before the caravan reached Muhammad, however, Inalchik, the governor of a region bordering on Samarkand, seized it for himself, and executed its leaders.
Genghis Khan was sure that this was a mistake – that Inalchik had acted without Muhammad’s approval. He sent yet another mission to Muhammad, reiterating his offer and asking that the governor be punished. This time Muhammad himself had one of the ambassadors beheaded, and sent the other two back with the shaved heads – a horrifying insult in the Mongol code of Honor. Khan sent a message to the Shah: “You have chosen war. What will happen will happen, and what it is to be we know not; only God knows”. Mobilising his forces, in 1220 he attacked Inalchik’s province, where he seized the capital, captured the governor, and ordered him executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.
Over the next year, Khan led a series of guerrilla – like campaigns against shah’s much larger army. His method was totally novel for the time – his soldiers could move very fast on horseback, and had mastered the art of firing with bow and arrow while mounted. The speed and flexiblility of his forces allowed him to deceive Muhammad as to his intentions and the direction of his movements. Eventually he managed first to surround Samarkand, then to seize it. Muhammad fled, and a year later he died, hid vast empire broken and destroyed. Genghis Khan was a sole master os Samarkand, the silk Rout, and most of the Northern Asia.
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