«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Mongol Warfare and the Creation of the Mongol Empire m 157 n important part of the army ...This system of complex armies ... remained basic in the military organization of all later [barbarian] conquest armies 1 . Such a system could reinforce the exiguous manpower of the “barbarians” with some or much of the vast population of China — and perhaps of other countries. An improvement in weaponry, probably in Chinggis’ own times 2 , added a new and much better Chinese catapult, the counterweighted type described above, without which the Mongols, even with their abundant arrow-fodder, might not have waged successful siege warfare. The late twelfth century political constellation in the southern part of East Inner Asia (approximately modern China’s Inner Mongolia) also favored the Mongols — if they could unite. The fringes of the southern steppe were popu- lated by nomads similar in most respects to, but probably more numerous than those of Temüchin’s “Outer” Mongolia. But these southerly nomads were di- vided between the states of Xi Xia (Tangquts) in the west and the Jin (Jurch- ens) in the central and eastern parts and in North China, and within the Jin by antipathies between the ruling Jurchens and their Kitan subjects (and former Liao overlords). The divisions diminished Inner Mongolia’s military potential. After Temüchin united the Outer Mongolian nomads (thereby becoming Ching- gis Khan), he was able severally to defeat these states, absorb their surviving nomads and sedentary troops into his armies, and replicate the Sino-barbarian symbiosis pioneered by the Kitans. But first he had to achieve unification. Episodes fromTemüchin’s early years show some of the process. Temüchin’s father, Yesügei, was murdered by Tatars when Temüchin was nine years old 3 . He and his family were expelled by their camp associates, who disliked Temüchin’s mother, Hö’elün. Temüchin thus grew up an orphan and outcast, with marginal subsistence — his mother had to feed her children vegetables! 4 — and great insecurity: he was kidnapped (and escaped); the family’s [ponies] were rus- tled (he retrieved them); his wife, Börte, was carried off, raped, and bore the rapist’s child (he rescued them, treated the child, Jochi, as his own, and later 1 Wittfogel K. A., Fêng Chia-shêng, History of Chinese Society: Liao (Philadelphi: Ameri- can Philosophical Society, 1949), 18–19. 2 See: Needham J. Science and Civilization in China , section 30, vol. 5, part 6: Military Technol- ogy: Missiles and Sieges (Cambridge UP, 1994), 218; and Herbert Franke, “Siege and Defense of Towns in Medieval China”, in Chinese Ways in Warfare, F. A Kierman, Jr. and J. K. Fairbank eds. (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1974), 167–68. 3 SH , § 53, 61, 66–67, 71. 4 SH , § 72–74.