What I’m writing about this week, #17: Genghis Khan’s vengeance
This is a cautionary tale of greed and power, reckless disrespect and brutal revenge. And the catastrophic results of underestimating your opponent in war.
Today Otrar is a ghost town in the dusty wilds of Kazakhstan, but 800 years ago, at the beginning of the 13th century, it was a wealthy, bustling, well-fortified merchant city of fifty thousand souls on the Silk Roads, irrigated by the wide Syr Daria river. It was the most northeasterly outpost of the mighty Khwarazmian Empire, a huge dominion that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea (Sea of Ravens on the map below) and east as far as Kabul in Afghanistan. Life was good in Otrar, its wealthy Persian, Tajik and Uzbek merchants traded everything from precious jewels and delicate pottery to embroidered Chinese silk; from gold ingots and silver coins to two-humped Bactrian camels and fine Arabian horses, grain, apples and peaches and the sweet red wines from the southern Iranian heartlands.
Life was good for the merchants of Otrar, and then their leader did something incredibly stupid . . .
The fate of Otrar
Genghis Khan, having successfully united the various warring tribes of the great Asian steppe under his horse-tail banners, and re-named them Mongols, now found himself in control of the eastern ends of the Silk Roads that carried goods to and from the Chinese lands all the way to Christian Europe. Naturally he wished to make good use of these lucrative trade routes, which ran through the Khwarazmian Empire. He sent a camel train of five hundred merchants (mostly from Muslim lands he has conquered) to Otrar, with instructions to open negotiations for a trade deal with the Shah of Khwarazmia, which would be brokered by the Governor of Otrar, a man named Inalchuq, who was the Shah’s cousin (or possibly his uncle).
The camel train sent by Genghis Khan contained many treasures including a nugget of gold the size and shape of a camel’s neck – worth millions in today’s money. Unfortunately, Inalchuq was a greedy man, and he knew little about the young Mongol nation in the far north. He welcomed the five hundred traders, fed them, gave them wine and when their guard was down he massacred them all – all except one man, a cameleer, who hid in a bath house during the mass slaughter of his colleagues, and later escaped from Otrar to report back to his Mongol master. Inalchuq then took possession of their camel train of goods.
Quite why Inalchuq did this is unclear. Perhaps he had the backing of the Shah – he would certainly have sent some of his rich haul of booty to his lord in tribute – and with the might of the Khwarazmina Empire behind him, he felt that the Great Khan would not dare do anything. Perhaps he was just using his initiative, grabbing loot, and hoping his high walls would protect him. Either way it was a fateful decision.
Somewhat surprisingly, Genghis Khan reacted with restraint. He wrote a letter to the Shah demanding that Governor Inalchuq be punished and that his valuable goods be restored to him – including the camel’s neck-sized gold nugget. He sent three envoys to Otrar, two Mongol noblemen, who were his relatives, and a respected Muslim cleric, to discuss this vexed matter with the Khwarazmians. However, Inalchuq simply had the venerable Muslin cleric publicly executed, and he shaved the heads and singed the beards off the Mongol ambassadors to humiliate them, then he sent them packing.
This was the last straw for Genghis Khan. For the Mongols, ambassadors were considered sacred, untouchable. The Great Khan wrote a final letter to the Shah of Khwarazmia: “You have murdered my men and my merchants; you have stolen from them my valuable property. Therefore, prepare yourself for war, for I am coming against you soon with a mighty host that you cannot hope to withstand.”
It took a while for the Great Khan to disentangle himself from his wars in China, and to gather a host of suitable size, but in the autumn 1219 he descended on Otrar with an army of perhaps as many as a hundred thousand men, in three columns. His generals besieged Otrar – which was valiantly defended by Governor Inachuq and a strengthened garrison of the Shah’s soldiers. And, after several months, and many bloody assaults on its walls, the city was finally taken in the spring of 1220. Inalchuq was brought before the Great Khan and, so the story goes, his execution was particularly barbaric: his mouth was filled with molten gold and his ears with molten silver until he choked or burnt to death. The city of Otrar was completely destroyed. Every single living thing within its walls – men, women, children, dogs, cats, horses, camels – was exterminated. But the Great Khan was still not satisfied with his vengeance. He also wanted to punish the treacherous Shah, and take his glittering empire from him, too.
Genghis Khan’s generals subdued city after city across Khawarazmia, region after region, giving the occupants this ultimatum: surrender immediately and you will be spared; but resist us and you will be destroyed like Otrar. It was a brutal way of making war – considered extreme even in the medieval period. But it was unquestionably effective. Within two years the whole of the Khwarazmian Empire had been conquered, and the Shah had been hounded to death by the relentless Mongol horsemen. On a small island in the Caspian Sea, sick, broken, and abandoned by all his servants and soldiers, he died in 1221. Like Otrar, the Khwarazmian Empire faded from history. Genghis Khan had taken his terrible revenge.
In other news . . .
This story is told in much more detail in my forthcoming novel Templar Traitor (Mongol Knight 1), which is based the real adventures of an Englishman who fought for Genghis Khan in the Khwarazmian campaign.
Templar Traitor will be the first book in a trilogy about this Englishman, and it is being published by Canelo on 28 August, 2025. You can pre-order it – and I wish you would, since it really helps me – from Amazon, or any good bookshop. It will be available as a paperback, eBook and in an audio version.
If Templars and Mongols are not your thing, The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1), the first book in my Viking series, is now only £1.99 from Amazon. And, just FYI, I am working on my 11th Robin Hood novel at the moment. Robin Hood and the Heretic Prince should be out in late May or early June. If you don’t know the Outlaw Chronicles, my bestselling and long-running Robin Hood series, it’s best to start with Outlaw.