HAVOC 151Chengez's father was a chieftain among the Mongols but was murdered
when Chengez was nine. His supporters drifted away, and the family fell
upon hard times. For several years, Chengez, his mother, and his younger
siblings were forced to live on berries and small game, such as marmots
and field mice. Even so his father's killers felt they would be safer if the son
never grew up, so they hunted him throughout his teenage years, and even
captured him once, but the boy escaped and did grow up, and lived to
make his father's enemies sorry.
Along the way, he attracted a posse of close companions called nokars.
In Persian-speaking lands, the word later came to mean "hired help," but
in Chengez's day it meant "comrade in arms." Significantly, Chengez's
nokars did not belong to any single clan or tribe. What held them together
as a group was one man's charisma, so Chengez had, in his nokars, the
seeds of an organization that transcended tribal loyalty and eventually
helped him unite the Mongols into a single nation under his rule.
In 607 AH (1211 CE), Chengez's Mongols attacked China's decrepit
old Sung Empire and cut through it like a knife into warm cheese. Seven
years later, in 614 (1218 CE), the Mongols entered the history of the Mid-
dle World.
What sort of world did they come upon? Well, after the Seljuks con-
quered the Muslim world, other Turkish tribes followed them, gnawing
away at the earlier Turkish victors' holdings, and carving out frontier king-
doms of their own. One such kingdom had just started to emerge in Tran-
soxiana, and was looking very much like the next big thing in the region.
It was the kingdom of the Khwarazm-Shahs. Their king Alaudin Mo-
hammed considered himself quite the military mastermind, and in his ar-
rogance decided to teach the Mongols a lesson. He started by intercepting
450 merchants traveling through his kingdom under Mongol protection.
Accusing these poor merchants of spying for the Mongols, he had them
killed and took their goods, but he quite deliberately let one man escape so
that he would take news of the massacre back to Chengez. He was looking
for trouble.
The Mongol lord sent three envoys west to demand reparations. It was
probably the last time Chengez would show himself so forbearing. And
now, Alaudin Mohammed made his really big mistake. He executed one of
the envoys and sent the other two home with their beards plucked out. In