152 DESTINY DISRUPTED
this region, one could offer a man no more grievous insult than to pluck
out his beard. Alaudin knew this full well, but he wanted to give offense,
because he was spoiling for a fight-and he got one. In 615 AH {1219
CE) the great catastrophe began.
We often hear about the Mongol "hordes," a word that evokes pictures
of howling savages swarming over the horizon by the millions to over-
whelm their victims with sheer numbers. In fact, horde is simply the Tur-
kic word for "military camp." The Mongols did not actually field
incomparably huge armies. They won battles with strategy, ferocity, and,
yes, technology. For example, when they attacked fortified cities, they em-
ployed sophisticated siege machinery acquired from the Chinese. They had
"composite" bows made of several layers of wood glued together, which
could shoot harder and further than the bows used in the "civilized" world.
They fought on horseback, and their riding skills were such that some of
their victims thought the Mongols were some new species of half-human,
half-horse creature previously unknown to civilization. Their horses were
hardy and fast but rather small, so a Mongol warrior could grip his horse
with his legs, hang off on one side, and fire his arrows from under the
horse's belly, thus using the body of the beast itself as a shield. Mongols
could ride their horses for days and nights on end, sleeping in the saddle
and taking nourishment from veins they opened on their horse's necks, so
that after sacking one city they might suddenly appear at some distant
other city so fast they seemed almost to have supernatural powers. Some-
times, the Mongols did bring along extra horses with dummies mounted
on them to convey an impression of overwhelming numbers: it was just
one more of their many military tricks.
In 615 AH {1219 CE) Alaudin Mohammed commanded far more
troops than Chengez, but his immense army did him no good. Chengez
smashed it and sent Alaudin fleeing for his life. Fragments of the
Khwarazmi Turkish armies turned into gangs of thugs who rolled west,
disrupting law and order, and even helped dislodge the last Crusaders from
their fortresses, a foretaste of things to come. Chengez scorched Transoxi-
ana, the lands on either side of the Oxus River and destroyed famous cities
such as Bokhara, where the renaissance of Persian literature had begun two
centuries earlier. He razed the legendary old city of Balkh, known to the