Don’t Make the Mongols Mad
Muhammad II fled, but the Mongols never gave him a chance to find sanctuary and recover for a comeback. Genghis ordered two of his best generals, Subutai and Jebe, to hunt down the Khwarazmian ruler. Muhammad, reduced to a pitiful loser, was chased and hounded across his domain to his death, abandoned and exhausted, on a small Caspian island as his relentless pursuers closed in. It was in this invasion that the Mongols gained their reputation for savagery. Millions died, as Genghis ordered the massacre of entire cities that offered the least resistance, and sent thousands of captives ahead of his armies as human shields.
By the time Genghis was done, Khwarazm had been reduced from a thriving and wealthy empire to an impoverished and depopulated wasteland. At the grand mosque in the once thriving but now smoldering city of Bukhara, Genghis told the survivors that he was the Flail of God, and that: “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you“. Muhammad II ended up as a tragic loser who brought catastrophe upon himself and his realm when he insulted somebody he assumed was just another upstart barbarian nomad chieftain from the Steppe. He discovered, too late, that he had challenged history’s greatest conqueror.