Part One: Reflections and Conclusions

Summary

It was inevitable that once Chingiz Khan’s armies crossed the Oxus into Persia that the Mongols would eventually have to administer the land. Charles Tilly discerned:

the wielders of coercion find themselves obliged to administer the lands, goods, and people they acquire; they become involved in extraction of resources, distribution of goods, services, and income, and adjudication of disputes. But administration diverts them [Mongols] from war, and creates interests that sometimes tell against war.

The obligations of administering an ancient sedentary civilization such as Persia’s would have distracted the Mongols from the pursuit of portable wealth. Settling could have been perceived as sedentarization, and antithetical to steppe ethos. Pillaging and returning to Inner Asia to enjoy the social, political, and economic fruits of expeditions were possibly preferable to settling and ruling. An alternative to settling and governing is (1) to deport to Inner Asia certain captives of economic or social value (craftsmen, artisans, women, etc.); and (2) to slaughter the remaining population. This calculus, conceivably, undergirded the mass deportations and exterminations perpetrated by the Mongols in Persia.

The roving bandit/stationary bandit thesis as propounded in Chapter Three should be qualified for the Mongol circumstances. In its early years, Chingiz Khan’s polity “was in its essence a booty distribution system.” After “endemic civil war,” peace came to the steppe; therefore, “the only permissible objects of plunder lay beyond the confines of Mongolia,” its sedentary neighbors. Mongols, with conquests near home (bits of North China, Qara Khitai, and such), and Chingiz Khan’s establishment of the structures of law and administration for his nascent polity, had become acquainted with the instruments of administration. Employment of Chinese and Persian bureaucrats in conquered lands would become the norm. Mongols acquired Persia in unplanned circumstances: Chingiz Khan was compelled to conquer the Kh^wārazm-Shāh’s realm sooner than he would have wanted to because of the Utrār massacre. He died in 1227 without leaving a plan for Persia, which was considered joint imperial property; not part of a patrimony or princely appanage. “Joint ‘satellite’ administration” became the practice.

In 630/1232f., Ögödei (r. 1229–41) appointed Chin-Temür (d. 633/1235f.) as the governor of Khurasan, in part due to prevailing anarchy.