M. was a great emperor and a great statesman. The
three branches were closely related and led the same life, with the same customs, in the steppes north of the Gobi towards the Altai and Khangai Mountains. The Mongols proper led a nomadic life in the north-eastern zone of present-day Outer Mongolia, between the Onon and the Kerulen. Peoples of Mongolian speech (Proto-Mongols) had already appeared in history earlier: thus the Hsien-pei, the Juan-Juan, the Avars. The name of Mongols appears in Chinese texts of the T’ang dynasty (7th century A.D.) under the form Mong-wu.
In the 12th century, in the above-mentioned area, the tribes of the Tatars, the Merkits, and the Kereits were in turmoil; further west, in the regions of the Ili, the Issyk-Kul, and Kashgaria, the Khitai had created an empire called by Muslim sources Qara-Khitaï. Some Mongol tribes were pastoral, others were hunters. Attempts to reduce these nomadic and anarchic populations to unity are recorded at various times in the 12th century, but the true great unifier of the Mongol people was Tämügün, son of Jäsügäi, a minor chief of a clan of the Qiyat, born, it seems, about 1167, according to Pelliot, in the region of Dulun-Boldag. He lived a harsh youth due to the dispersal of the clan after his father’s death; in 1196 some Mongol clans proclaimed him Khan (hān), i.e., king of the Mongols. Tämügün then took the name Genghis Khan (Khan the Strong).
After a series of successful struggles against the Tatar and Kereit tribes, in 1206 Genghis Khan was proclaimed Kaghan, i.e., supreme khan, at a Kuriltai (assembly) of all the Mongol tribes; his banner was a white cloth with nine yak tails; an old priest declared that Genghis Khan was consecrated by the eternal blue sky, an emanation of the Tangri, the divinized sky.
Having united all the Mongols under his authority, in 1209 he led them to the conquest of China, giving the struggle the character of a national war to avenge the ancestors defeated by the Jurchen. In 1213 they finally succeeded in crossing the Great Wall and in 1215 they occupied Peking; subsequently they occupied northern China as far as the Huang-ho (1225). But Genghis Khan left these operations to his lieutenants; in 1218 he began the attack on the empire of the Qara-Khitaï and in 1219 he invaded the empire of the Khwārizmian Turks. Afghanistan and Khurāsān were reduced to deserts: the flourishing cities of Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Herat were destroyed and their populations massacred. The Mongols were shepherds and wild hunters at the first stage of civilized development; they were ignorant of agriculture and even more of urban life; and their ideal was to destroy the sown fields and turn the lands into grazing steppes. To this they joined the most vulgar cruelty and had the greatest contempt for human life. Genghis Khan died on 18 August 1227, during a resumption of the struggle in China. He was above the moral level of his people; he was prudent, had a sense of governmental responsibility, and was capable of noble sentiments. He found Mongol society in full anarchy; he left it ordered and at peace, thanks to his just and severe justice. As early as the Kuriltai of 1206, Genghis Khan had proclaimed his yasa, a regulation for all his subjects: the death penalty for the most serious crimes, such as theft, lying, adultery, etc.; disobedience, in peace as in war, was declared a crime punishable by death. The yasa of Genghis transformed the Mongols and for centuries influenced all the peoples of the Mongol Empire. To organize his conquests, he therefore resorted to Mongol elements already semi-civilized, such as the Kereits, among whom Nestorian Christianity had long since spread, though shrouded in veils of animistic and superstitious origin.
The four sons of Genghis divided the old lands of Mongolia with their steppes and pastures, leaving the conquered lands undivided. At the Kuriltai of 1229, the third son of Genghis, Ögödei, was elected Kaghan; he was intelligent and convinced of the necessity of state organization. Under him, the conquest of northern China was completed and that of southern China began (1235); two expeditions were made into Korea. To the west, Persia was occupied and the Russian steppes were entered decisively; in 1240 Kiev was occupied and Poland and Hungary were invaded, threatening Italy and central Europe. At the death of Ögödei, the western Mongol onslaught withdrew behind the Carpathians in 1242. In 1246 Güyük was elected Kaghan, but in 1248 he was succeeded by Möngke, son of the fourth son of Genghis, Tolui. Meanwhile, news had reached the West that Genghis and his sons held Christianity in great esteem, that various princesses, such as the wife of Tolui, were Nestorian Christians, as were ministers and court officials. In 1265 Pope Innocent IV sent the Franciscan John of Pian de Carpine to the court of Güyük, in the hope of securing his alliance against Muslim princes and resolving the question of the Holy Land. Shortly afterward, Louis IX sent the Franciscan William of Rubruck to the court of Möngke. The Mongols, however, were induced to respect all religions only out of the necessity of securing the favor of the deities, however they might be truly conceived, placing Christianity on a par with Buddhism and Confucianism. Kaghan Möngke, however, in organizing his empire, had decided to destroy the ‘Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and the sect of the Assassins. He entrusted this task to his brother Hülegü, who in 1257 destroyed Baghdad, massacring its population. The sect of the Ismā‘īlīs was also exterminated. Hülegü, however, failed to overcome the resistance of the Turkish Mamluks of Egypt, who defeated one of his lieutenants in 1260. To the east, Möngke entrusted his brother Qubilai with the conquest of southern China.
When Möngke died in 1259, the Genghisid Empire shattered under its own immensity. Qubilai had himself proclaimed Kaghan but settled in China, and his empire came under Chinese influence: the Venetian travelers, the Polo brothers, witnessed this phenomenon, and Marco Polo recorded his impressions of the Mongol-Chinese Empire in his *Il Milione*.
MONGOLIA - Coin in Mongolian script, issued under the emperor Wutsung (China) - Paris, Deveria collection.
MONGOLIA - Coin of King Abaqa. Inscription in Mongolian, Chinese, and Arabic characters (1265–82) - Paris, National Library, Medals Cabinet.
Tamerlane (Timur Lenk), a Muslim of Turkish extraction, arose in the ruins of the Genghisid Empire. He launched himself at the conquest of all the regions where the Genghisid principalities had crumbled. Khwārizm, Turkestan, and Iran were successively conquered; in 1391 he invaded the Kipchak, in 1398 he invaded India as far as Delhi, then attacked the Egyptian Syrian coast, then the Ottoman sultanate of Anatolia, and took Sultan Bāyezīd prisoner at Ankara (1402); but he died during the expedition against China (1403). The activity of Tamerlane was fragmentary: wherever he went he massacred and destroyed, but he did not organize, unlike the activity of Genghis Khan, for whom alongside the destructions one cannot forget the opening of much of Asia to trade, the linking of Mongolia to Europe on one side and to China on the other. By the end of the 15th century, the last Timurids were but modest princes of Transoxiana and Khurāsān.
BIBL.:
R. Grousset, Histoire de l'Extrême Orient, Paris 1920; id., L'Empire des steppes, ibid. 1948; works in which the results of the latest research are collected. Still important, though outdated, is the work of C. d'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, 4 vols., The Hague 1834. For relations with the papacy V. P. Pelliot, Les Mongols et la papauté, in Revue de l'Orient chrétien, 3rd series, 3-4 (1922-24); G. Soranzo, Il papato, l'Europa cristiana ed i Tartari, Milan 1930. On the Nestorianism V. J. C. Chabot, Histoire de Mar Taballah III patriarch of the Nestorians, Paris 1898. On Genghis Khan V. B. J. Vladimirtsoff, Chingiz Khan, London 1931. Francesco Cognasso
III. Evangelization
With the collapse of the Mongol dynasty in China in 1368, the Franciscan mission also came to an end, and Mongolia, having become a vassal state of China, remained closed to Christianity until the 18th century. Jesuit missionaries accompanying Emperor Kang-hsi arrived there toward the end of the 17th century, but true Christian communities were formed only in the 18th century by Chinese Christians who had taken refuge or been exiled. Their ministry was exercised, at least temporarily and intermittently, by Jesuits of the Peking court, by their successors, the Lazarists, and by Chinese priests of the Franciscan mission in Shensi. In 1829 the Chinese Lazarist Mattia Huse settled in Siwantze; the city later became the center of the Lazarist mission and of the diocese of Peking itself, which transferred its seminary there. In 1835 the Lazarist Giuseppe Marziale Moulay arrived, and in 1840 he was appointed the first apostolic vicar of the newly established vicariate of Mongolia. At that time there were about 2,000 Chinese Catholics.In 1865 the first missionaries of the Belgian Society of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scheut, recently founded, arrived; in 1864 the vicariate of Mongolia had been entrusted to them. In 1874 they began missionary work among the true Mongols, the Ordos of western Mongolia. Since the faithful had reached about 15,000 by 1883, Mongolia was divided into three vicariates: southwestern, eastern, and central. During the Boxer Rebellion, Monsignor Ferdinando Hamer, 9 Scheut fathers, 2 indigenous priests, and about 3,000 Christians were massacred. Subsequently, the mission made great progress, especially among the Chinese population, less so among the Mongols. The mission is confined to Inner Mongolia. Outer Mongolia was detached in 1922 as an independent mission of Urga, but since Outer Mongolia fell under Soviet influence, missionaries were unable to enter.
Inner Mongolia currently comprises 5 dioceses and 1 apostolic prefecture: the archdiocese of Suiyūan (in 1883 an apostolic vicariate under the name of southwestern Mongolia, subdivided in 1922 into two vicariates: Ninghia and Suiyūan, a diocese in 1946); diocese of Ninghia (an apostolic vicariate in 1922, a diocese in 1946); diocese of Siwantze (in 1840 an apostolic vicariate under the name of Mongolia; in 1883 under the name of central Mongolia; in 1922 under the name of Chagar; in 1924 under the name of Siwantze, a diocese in 1946); diocese of Tsinning (an apostolic vicariate in 1929, separated from Siwantze and entrusted to the Chinese secular clergy, a diocese in 1946); diocese of Jehol (in 1883 an apostolic vicariate under the name of eastern Mongolia;
(from G. Pelli, Viaggio a Tartari di I. Giovanni da Pian del Carpino, Milan 1885, too, between pp. 12-13) Mononita - Excerpts from the Historia Mongalorum, by Fr. John of Pian de Carpine (1st half of the 14th century) - Lcida, university, ms. 104, f. 150r.
In the old Mongol lands an empire formed