It is not within the scope of the present work to trace in any detail the meteor-like path of Chingiz; for we are concerned with it only in so far as it affected the internal affairs of Central Asia. His career has exercised a peculiar fascination for students of Oriental history, though by no means all the available evidence has yet been marshalled in elucidation of the controversies which still rage round that mighty name.[347]
“All that can safely be said about the early history of the Mongols,”[348] writes Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, “is that they were a clan among clans, a member of a great confederacy that ranged the country north of the desert of Gobi in search of water and pasture; who spent their lives in hunting and the breeding of cattle, lived on flesh and sour milk (kumis), and made their profit by bartering hides and beasts with their kinsmen the Khitans,[349] or with the Turks and Chinese, to whom they owed allegiance. The name Mughal was not known until the tenth century, and probably came to be applied to the whole group of clans only when the chief of a particular clan bearing that name acquired an ascendency over the rest of the confederacy, and gave to the greater the name of the less.[350] Yissugāy, the father of Chingiz Khān, if not the founder of his clan, was a notable maintainer of it, and it was probably he who first asserted the independence of the Mongols from Chinese rule. In spite, however, of conquest and annexation, the people who owned the sovereignty of Yissugāy numbered only 40,000 tents. Yet it was upon this foundation that his son, Chingiz Khān, built up in twenty years the widest empire the world has ever seen.”[351]
Temuchin,[352] known to history as Chingiz Khān, was born most probably in 1162,[353] and was therefore thirteen years of age at the time of his father’s death, in 1175.
The Mongolian, or, as they called themselves at that period, the Tatar people, were divided into a number of tribes, among which the Chinese distinguished three groups, according to the degree of their civilisation,--the white, the black, and the savage Tatars. The first, who dwelt in Southern Mongolia, near the Chinese Wall, were under the influence of Chinese civilisation. The black Tatars, who occupied the greater part of what we now call Mongolia, remained unaffected by their uninterrupted contact with more advanced races whose representatives entered their country only in the quality of merchants. The trade of barter and exchange with the nomads was in the hands of men of Turkestān, Uïghūrs, and Musulmans, who in such matters were far more enterprising than the Chinese. These Uïghūrs and Musulmans, moreover, kept in their own hands the commerce between Mongolia and China; that is to say, they bought goods in China and sold them to the nomads. By means of the knowledge thus gained, these merchants were able to influence the Khāns, and through them the people. Moreover, Buddhist, Nestorian, and Musulman merchants were always closely followed by the missionaries of their respective religions. Islām at that period had not yet obtained predominance in Central Asia, and in Mongolia its propaganda was practically non-existent. Over the Uïghūrs, the nearest neighbours of the Mongols, Buddhists and Nestorian Christians still had the upper hand. These latter even succeeded in converting some of the most powerful tribes of the black Mongols, such as the Keraits and the Naimans, to Christianity. The savage Tatars, whom the Mongols called “forest peoples,” led a roving life in the forests of the modern province of Trans-Baikal and the north-west of Mongolia. They practised Shamanism in its purest form.[354]