Tit for tat
1218: The murder of Genghis Khan’s envoys
By 1218, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan had expanded his territory to the border with the Khwarezmid empire, which encompassed modern-day Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkestan. Genghis saw the potential in a commercial partnership with the Khwarezmians so he sent a caravan comprising 500 merchants to establish official trade ties with his neighbour.
However, Inalchuq, governor of the city of Otrar, murdered all the merchants and seized all their goods – silk, silver, gold, weapons – claiming that their presence was a part of a plot against the empire (although he could equally well have been motivated by greed). When Genghis sent an ambassador to the Khwarezmid leader Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad with a polite request to right this wrong, the shah replied by killing the envoy and burning the beards of his military escorts. Considering an attack on his ambassadors as tantamount to an attack on himself, Genghis declared war.
Despite being outnumbered by more than three to one, the Mongols defeated the Khwarezmians and invaded the empire. Otrar was conquered and many of its inhabitants killed. Inalchuq, against whose actions the Mongols were taking revenge, was captured, brought alive to Mongolia and then executed by having molten silver poured into his ears and eyes. Learning that the shah had escaped, Genghis sent 20,000 troops in pursuit, only to discover that Muhammad had already died on an island in the Caspian Sea. By 1220, the Khwarezmians had been taken over by the Mongol empire, which soon reached from the China Sea to Vienna.
One beneficial consequence of Genghis’s act of vengeance has come to be known as the Pax Mongolica, a time of relative peace that enabled Marco Polo and others to penetrate East Asia along the Silk Route.
These events were dramatised in the 1991 Soviet/Kazakhstani film Gibel Otrara (The Fall of Otrar).
