Part II: Outsiders 79princes into exile. Eventually other Turkic groups conquered Anatolia and
formed the Ottoman Empire, which dominated much of the Middle East and
Eastern Europe until it formally ended after World War I.
Meanwhile, back in Central Asia, Mongol clans in the late twelfth century
unified under the brilliant Genghis Khan (aka Chinggis Khan 1162–1227), a
man of humble origins who became the undefeated conqueror of the largest
empire ever. The Mongols were not Muslims, at least for the first century, but
adopted the cultures of the lands they conquered, becoming Persianized in
Iran, Indianized in India, and Sinicized in China. Under Genghis’s sons and
grandsons, the Mongols occupied China, Russia, Poland and Hungary, and
Persia. In 1526, a descendant of Genghis Khan and the Turkish conqueror
Timur (Tamurlane) founded the Mughal dynasty in India. (Mughal is the Per-
sianized form of Mongol.) In China, meanwhile, Mongol armies overran much
of North China, and eventually founded the Yuan dynasty (in 1279) under
Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan.
Among the many peoples conquered by Genghis Khan were the Tibetans.
The territory of the Tibetans included their current location in the People’s
Republic, plus areas to east and north of the Tibet Autonomous Region some-
times referred to as “ethnographic Tibet” (Goldstein 1997). Tibetans were war-
riors, too; during the Tang dynasty they conquered some of China’s vassal
states and even briefly captured Chang’an, China’s capital. But by the time of
Genghis Khan they barely avoided invasion by agreeing to pay tribute to the
Mongols. After Genghis Khan died, the Tibetans again had to be forced into
submission by the sacking of their monasteries. Here we reach a tricky point of
disagreement between modern China and Tibet. A famous Tibetan Buddhist
lama was summoned to the Mongol court in Gansu Province. The Mongol
prince proposed that “if we Tibetans help the Mongols in matters of religion,
they in turn will support us in temporal matters. In this way, we will be able to
spread our religion [Buddhism] far and wide” (Goldstein 1997:3). When Kub-
lai Khan became supreme khan in 1260 and conquered China in 1279, he
became a patron of Buddhism and installed the Tibetan lama Phagpa as his
spiritual tutor. Phagpa insisted that Kublai show deference to his superior reli-
gious stature. The quarrel was resolved with the agreement that Kublai would
sit on a throne lower than the lama when he was receiving religious instruc-
tion, and the lama would sit lower than Kublai in all other settings. Today,
China considers this the point when Tibet became part of China. Nationalist
Tibetans claim they only submitted to the Mongols, not to China for all time.
These three Central Asian groups—Turks, Mongols, and Tibetans—thus
have had enormous impact on the rest of Asia, conquering north, south, east,
and west, not only carrying their cultures with them but adopting and trans-
forming local cultures and shaping the modern world far beyond anything that
might have been expected from the vantage point of 1000 C.E. These were “out-
siders” who emphatically and portentously got inside. Chapter 3 takes up these
processes in greater detail.