While Chinggis Khan was hosting Changchun, he was also personally leading Mongol forces into the lands of the Persian Empire, then ruled by the Turkic Khwarazmian dynasty. The thirteenth-century Persian historian Juvaini, himself a high official in the Mongol government of his homeland, wrote an account of the creation of the Mongol Empire titled The History of the World Conqueror. This excerpt from that work describes the conquest of the city of Bukhara, a major commercial and intellectual center of the Persian Islamic world.

JUVAINI

The History of the World Conqueror

1219

[Chinggis Khan’s] troops were more numerous than ants or locusts, being in their multitude beyond estimation or computation. Detachment after detachment arrived, each like a billowing sea, and encamped round about the town. At sunrise twenty thousand men from the Sultan’s [Muslim ruler of Bukhara] auxiliary army issued forth from the citadel together with most of the inhabitants…. When these forces reached the banks of the Oxus, the patrols and advance parties of the Mongol army fell upon them and left no trace of them.

On the following day when from the reflection of the sun that plain seemed to be a tray filled with blood, the people of Bukhara opened their gates and closed the door of strife and battle. The imams and notables came on a deputation to Chingis-Khan, who entered to inspect the town and citadel. He rode into the Juma Mosque…. Chingis-Khan asked those present whether this was the palace of the Sultan; they replied it was the house of God. Then he too got down from his horse, and mounting two or three steps of the pulpit he exclaimed: “The countryside is empty of fodder, fill our horses’ bellies.” Whereupon they opened all the magazines in the town and began carrying off the grain. And they brought the cases in which the Qurans were kept out in the courtyard of the mosque, where they cast the Qurans right and left and turned the cases into mangers for their horses. After which they circulated cups and sent for the singing-girls of the town to sing and dance for them; while the Mongols raised their voices to the tunes of their own songs. Meanwhile, the imams, shaikhs, sayyids, doctors and scholars of the age kept watch over their horses in the stables…. After an hour or two Chingis-Khan arose to return to his camp…. [T]he leaves of the Quran were trampled beneath the dirt beneath their own feet and their horses’ hooves.

When Chingis-Khan left the town he went to the festival muhalla and mounted the pulpit; and, the people having assembled, he asked which were wealthy amongst them. Two hundred and eighty persons were designated (a hundred and ninety of them being natives of the town and the rest strangers, i.e., ninety merchants from various places) and were led before him. He then began a speech, in which, after describing the resistance and treachery of the Sultan, he addressed them as follows: “O People! know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed these great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” When he had finished speaking in this strain, he continued his discourse with words of admonition, saying, “There is no need to declare your property that is on the face of the earth; tell me of that which is in the belly of the earth.” … [A]lthough not subjecting them to disgrace or humiliation, they began to exact money from these men; and when they delivered it up they did not torment them by excessive punishment or demanding what was beyond their power to pay.

Chingis-Khan had given orders for the Sultan’s troops to be driven out of the interior of the town and the citadel…. [H]e now gave orders for all quarters of the town to be set on fire; and since the houses were built entirely out of wood, within several days the greater part of the town had been consumed, with the exception of the Juma mosque and some of the palaces, which were built with baked bricks. Then the people of Bukhara were driven against the citadel. And on either side the furnace of battle was heated. On the outside, mangonels [catapults] were erected, bows bent, and stones and arrows discharged, and, on the inside, … pots of naphtha [a flammable liquid] were set in motion. It was like a red hot furnace…. For days they fought in this manner; the garrison made sallies against the besiegers…. But finally they were reduced to the last extremity; resistance was no longer in their power; and they stood excused before God and man. The moat had been filled with animate and inanimate and raised up with levies and Bukharans; … their khans, leaders and notables, who were the chief men of the age and the favorites of the Sultan who in their glory would set their feet on the head of Heaven, now became captives of abasement and were drowned in the sea of annihilation…. Of the Qanqli [Turkic defenders of the city] no male was spared who stood higher than the butt of a whip and more than thirty thousand were counted amongst the slain; whilst their small children, the children of their nobles and their womenfolk, slender as the cypress, were sold to slavery.

When the town and the citadel had been purged of rebels and the walls and outworks levelled with the dust, the inhabitants of the town, men and women, ugly and beautiful, were driven out onto the field of the musalla [an open space outside of a mosque]. Chingis-Khan spared their lives, but the youths and full-grown men that were fit for such service were pressed into a levy for the attack on Samarqand and Dabusiya.

Source: Juvaini, The History of the World Conqueror, translated by John Boyle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 103–6.