Ruler of Prosperous Empire Needlessly Insults Genghis Khan – Then Dares Him to Do Something About It
“Life’s greatest joy is to rout and scatter your enemies, and drive them before you. To see their cities reduced to ashes. To see their loved ones shrouded and in tears, and to gather to your bosom their wives and daughters” – Genghis Khan.
The kind of person who drops chilling quotes like the preceding is probably not somebody a wise ruler would go out of his way to insult. Yet that is precisely what Shah Muhammad II, ruler of the Khwarezmian Empire from 1200 to 1220, did. And as if to double down on the stupid, Muhammad II then dared Genghis Khan to do something about it.
Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227) founded the Mongol Empire, the world’s largest contiguous empire, and was one of history’s most terrifying figures. His conquests were often accompanied by widespread massacres, even genocide. As a percentage of global population, the estimated 40 million death toll of the Mongol conquests initiated by him would be equivalent to 278 million deaths in the 20th century.
In 1218, Genghis Khan was busy fighting the Chinese, when he sent an embassy and trade mission to Muhammad II. In addition to diplomatic emissaries, it included numerous merchants with valuable trade wares. Genghis had hoped to establish diplomatic and trade relations with the Khwarezmian Empire, which encompassed most of Central Asia, and stretched from today’s Afghanistan to Georgia. The Khwarezmian ruler, however, was suspicious of Genghis’ intentions. So he had one of his governors halt the Mongol embassy at the border, accuse it of spying, arrest its members, and seize its goods.
Despite the insult, Genghis tried to keep things diplomatic, and sent three envoys to Muhammad II, requesting that he disavow the governor’s actions, and hand him over to the Mongols for punishment. Muhammad executed the envoys, and followed it up by ordering the execution of all members of the earlier embassy and trade mission. Those turned out to be bad decisions.
Genghis interrupted his campaigning in China, and concentrated a force of over 100,000 against the Khwarezmian Empire. It was smaller than Muhammad II’s forces, but the Mongols struck in 1218 with a whirlwind campaign that caught Muhammad off balance, and he was never given an opportunity to recover. Genghis’ invasion was a military masterpiece that overwhelmed Muhammad’s empire, and extinguished it by 1221.
As to the unfortunate Muhammad II, he was forced to flee, but the Mongols never gave him a chance to find sanctuary and recover for a comeback. Genghis put two of his best generals, Subutai and Jebe, in charge of hunting the Khwarezmian ruler. Muhammad 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, Khwarezm 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“.
There was nothing funny about that, of course. But the fate of Muhammad II, who brought catastrophe upon himself by insulting somebody he assumed was just another upstart barbarian nomad chieftain from the Steppe, was. He discovered, too late, that he had challenged history’s greatest conqueror. Muhammad’s subsequent flight, as he was chased across his ever shrinking domain by relentless Mongol pursuers, could probably be set to chase scene music from Benny Hill.