The Secret History of the Mongols

he Secret History of the Mongols

The Secret History of the Mongols
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A general council of all the chieftains was called, and the three most notable men among them, Prince Altan, Khuchar, and Sacha Beki, came forward. They addressed Temujin formally, in the following manner:
We will make you Khan; you shall ride at our head, against our foes. We will throw ourselves like lightning on your enemies;
We will bring you their finest women and girls, their rich tents like palaces.
From all the peoples and nations we will bring you the fair girls and the high-stepping horses;
When you hunt wild beasts, we will drive them towards you; we will encircle them, pressing hard at their heels.
If on the day of battle we disobey you, take our flocks from us, our women and children, and cast our worthless heads on the steppe.
If in times of peace we disobey you, part us from our men and our servants, our wives and our sons;
Abandon us and cast us out, masterless, on the forsaken earth….
Mongol Conquest of Tatars
… Temujin came up against the Tatars at Dalan Namurgas. . .and defeated them in battle. They fell back; the Mongol armies pursued them, slaying and capturing them in large numbers.
The princes, Altan, Khuchar, and Daritai, were less assiduous in the pursuit. Finding a great number of animals roaming the steppes in the absence of their Tatar owners, they followed the usual custom of rounding them up, and collecting anything that took their fancy in the abandoned Tatar camps.
Temujin, having issued a clear order [against looting], could not tolerate their disobedience. He detached portions of his army, placed them under the command of Jebe and Khubilai, and sent them off after the disobedient princes, with orders to take away from them everything they had captured. The outcome was what might have been expected. Prince Altan and Khuchar, retiring in haste with as much of their booty as they could take with them, departed from their allegiance to him. They re-established themselves as independent chieftains, entering into such arrangements with Ong Khan, Jamukha, and other rulers as seemed desirable.
Daritai, however, seeing a little more clearly than the others, submitted to having his booty taken away from him.
Owing to his determined pursuit of the Tatars, Temujin found that he had a very considerable number of Tatar prisoners. They were kept under guard in the Mongol camp, and for the most part they were not greatly perturbed by their situation. Some of the chieftains might expect to be executed, but the lesser men had a reasonable hope of surviving. Some might have to serve as warriors under the Mongols, or even be enslaved, but a slave of talents could always hope to become a warrior again. . .
Mongols Conquer the Naiman
. . .Temujin . . . broke off the hunt, set the army in motion, and camped near Ornu’u on the Khalkha. Here he paused for a time while he carried out a swift reorganization of the army. A count was held of the people; they were divided up into thousands, hundreds, and tens, and commanders of these units were appointed. Also at this time he chose his personal bodyguards, the seventy day-guards and eighty night-guards….
Having reorganized the army, he marched away from the mountainside of Ornu’u on the Khalkha, and took the way of war against the Naiman. . .
The Mongol army rode out on to the Saari steppes, and began to deploy themselves for the forthcoming battle…. Dodai Cherbi, one of the newly appointed captains, put a proposal before the Khan.
“We are short in numbers compared to the enemy; besides this, we are exhausted after the long march, our horses in particular. It would be a good idea to settle in this camp, so that our horses can graze on the steppe, until they have had as much to cat as they need. Meanwhile, we can deceive the enemy by making puppets and lighting innumerable fires. For every man, we will make at least one puppet, and we will burn fires in five places. It is said that the Naiman people are very numerous, but it is rumored also that their king is a weakling, who has never left his tents. If we keep them in a state of uncertainty about our numbers, with our puppets and our fires, our geldings can stuff themselves till they are fat.”
The suggestion pleased Temujin, who had the order passed on to the soldiers to light fires immediately. Puppets were constructed and placed all over the steppe, some sitting or lying by the fires, some of them even mounted on horses.
At night, the watchers of the Naiman saw, from the flanks of the mountain, fires twinkling all over the steppe. They said to each other: “Did they not say that the Mongols were very few? Yet they have more fires than there are stars in Heaven.” . . .
Then he [Temujin] issued his general battle orders. “We will march in the order ‘thick grass,’ take up positions in the ‘lake’ battle order, and fight in the manner called ‘gimlet.’ ” He gave Kasar the command of the main army, and appointed Prince Otchigin to the command of the reserve horses, a special formation of great importance in Mongol warfare.