After the unification of Mongolia, northern China became Genghis Khan's next target for conquest. Present-day Ningxia, Gansu, and western Inner Mongolia
He first attacked the Western Xia kingdom established by the nomads in Gansu, northeastern Qinghai, Alxa, and Ordos, as well as northern Shaanxi.
Dangxiang people belong to the Tibetan nationality, believe in Buddhism, and are influenced by the civilization of the Central Plains, and their writing is derived from Chinese characters.
In order to test the quality of the Mongol army and take the opportunity to control the passage to the Central Plains and facilitate a more favorable siege of the Jin State, Genghis Khan took the Western Xia Kingdom as the first target, which was also his first conquest of the settled civilized peoples.
However, the Mongol army attacked undefended areas like an autumn breeze sweeping away leaves, but attacking fortified areas was completely impossible.
Between 1205~1207, Genghis Khan swept the Western Xia Kingdom several times, but failed to capture Ningxia and Lingzhou. However, due to the situation, Li An, the king of Western Xia, had to submit to the Mongols as a subordinate to Nagong, so that he could temporarily retain the throne.
In 1209, the reluctant Genghis Khan returned and once again besieged Ningxia. He tried unsuccessfully to divert the Yellow River to flood the city and seize Zhongxing Province. This time, in order to seek peace, the king of Western Xia offered his daughter to Genghis Khan.
After the ownership of Western Xia, Genghis Khan set his next target on the Jin Kingdom. The Jin Kingdom was a vast country and ruled Manchuria and northern China north of Hanshui and Huaishui.
It has Beijing as its first capital, Dading and Liaoyang in Rehe, Datong in Shanxi and Kaifeng in Henan as its second capital.
When King Ma Dage of Jin (Jin Zhang Zong finished Yan Jing) died, Genghis Khan still maintained a vassal relationship with him. But Yongji, the successor to the golden king Madag, was a meditant man, and Genghis Khan took a contemptuous attitude towards him. At this time, the Jin Kingdom was only a weak and arrogant enemy for Mongolia.
Guarding the northwestern border of Shanxi for the Jin Kingdom were the Wangubu Turks, who believed in Nestorian religion and guarded the northern region leading to the Great Wall.
As early as the Mongol Civil War, the Wangu Turkic leader Ah Thorn was an ally of Genghis Khan.
This time, the Wangubu Turks once again sided with the Mongols, opening the northern gate to attack the Jin kingdom to them, and in 1211 they offered the border to him. In return, Genghis Khan married his daughter to Bo Yaohe, the son of Aja Shu.
Genghis Khan turned this invasion into a national war. Shouting slogans of avenging the Mongol khans crucified on wooden donkeys by the Jin State, he began his invasion with a banner of shame on behalf of the Khitans, the former monarch of Beijing.
For this, he received strong support from the Khitans. In 1212, the heir of the former Khitan royal family, Yeluliuge, represented Genghis Khan in the territory of the former Khitan state in southwestern Manchuria, along the Liao River, to rebel against Jin. Genghis Khan sent Zhebel to lead the army to support him. In January 1213, with the help of Zhebei, Liuge recaptured Liaoyang from the Jin state, while recognizing the Mongol suzerainty and ruling the ancestral territory as the "King of Liao".
At this point, the Mongols relied on their allies in the northwest, Wangubu, and the unswerving vassal Khitans, to open a gateway to the northwest and northeast of the Jin Kingdom.
Genghis Khan's conquest of the Jin kingdom began in 1211 and remained unsuccessful at the time of his death in 1227. Although the Mongol cavalry was nimble and brave in battle, they were invincible when plundering the countryside and undefended towns, they were still novices in attacking defended cities.
There are several reasons for this:
As a result, they had to repeatedly capture some cities.
Third, they were accustomed to massacres, total expulsions, or the use of consolidated prisoners under the white flag, but for the populous Jin Kingdom, massacres had little effect.
Fourth, the Jin people still retain all the vitality of the Jurchen bloodline, and the brave Jurchens have been strong opponents of the Mongols since ancient times.
1211~1212 Genghis Khan's imperial conquest. He concentrated his forces on attacking the border of Datong in Shanxi, Xuanhua in Hebei, and security. With the exception of the forts that were set up, the area was razed to the ground.
In 1212, Zhebei suddenly captured Liaoyang in southern Manchuria by feigning a retreat, but Genghis Khan in northern Shanxi did not capture Datong.
After Genghis Khan captured Xuanhua in 1213, his troops attacked in three ways:
In 1214, after the Third Route Army advanced on horseback, Genghis Khan joined his army under the city of Beijing, intending to blockade Beijing, the capital of the Jin state.
At this time, the Jin Dynasty court had just set off a civil strife, and the general Hu Shahu killed the Jin Emperor Yongji, and installed the equally weak and incompetent Wu Jian as the new emperor.
However, due to the lack of siege tools and siege techniques, Genghis Khan once again cautiously accepted Wu Jian's request for peace despite the opposition of his generals, and while receiving a large tribute from the golden people, he also brought back a Jurchen princess by the way.
After Genghis Khan left, Wu Jianfu felt the insecurity in Beijing and decided to move the capital to Kaifeng. His move effectively abandons Beijing.
In Genghis Khan's view, the Jin people moved the capital undoubtedly to restart the war prematurely. So, he unilaterally tore up the truce and once again sent troops to Hebei to surround Beijing. A reinforcement army of the Jin State carrying food and food was defeated at Bazhou, and the Beijing defender Yan Chenghui committed suicide in desperation to run out of ammunition and food. Mongolian troops occupied Beijing, looted and massacred residents for a month, and finally set fire to the city.
The Mongols were fortunate enough to occupy the highly civilized city of Beijing, but they did not understand the value of the big city, let alone how to use it to consolidate and expand their political power. They did not take the time and mind to understand the function of the city, and ended up following the usual practice of burning and looting everywhere - what they thought was the best way to dispose of it.
Undoubtedly, their ignorance has brought devastating disasters to civilization. From the point of view of the Mongols of Genghis Khan, they did nothing wrong, they simply obeyed Zasa - a code of honor and honesty.
However, if you compare them with the Khitans of the 10th century and the Jurchens of the 12th century, they are obviously much sluggish. After a small-scale slaughter, the Jurchens were at least able to quickly inherit the former dynasty and never again destroy the property that would belong to them.
Genghis Khan's Mongols, although not as cruel and destructive as their predecessors, compared with the Huns, Rouran, Turks and Huihe before them, cultural gaps made them appear more barbaric, and their actions could constitute a collection of barbaric styles.
The historical significance of Genghis Khan and the Mongols should be viewed in two:
After the capture of Beijing, Genghis Khan selected from among his captives the imposing Khitan prince Yelü Chucai, who was not only integrated into China's high civilization, but also had a statesmanly temperament.
Genghis Khan appointed him as an important auxiliary, just as he appointed the Uighur minister Tata Tong'a. Yelü Chucai benefited Genghis Khan and his successor Wokuotai by familiarizing them with the administration and political activities of the settled civilized state.
In addition to the new capital Kaifeng, the territory of the current Jin State is only a few fortified border areas in Henan and Shaanxi that surround it.
In 1216, the Mongol Taichi Uti tribe captured Tongguan by Sanmuhe Bald, cutting off the connection between Shaanxi and Henan.
However, because Genghis Khan was distracted by Turkestan affairs and did not maintain consistency in the Jin dynasty's wars, the Jin dynasty took the opportunity to recover most of the region except Beijing.
However, before Genghis Khan dealt with the Karachitanic state in Central Asia, he sent his henchman, the most prominent general, Mu Huali, to command the war against Jin.
Despite being a tired division, Mu Huali's excellent command skills, after seven years of arduous fighting and careful planning, his 23,000 Mongol army and some auxiliary troops once again confined the territory of the Jin State to Henan Province.
In this densely populated area, natural fortresses were everywhere, and the war turned into an endless siege. After summarizing the shortcomings of the initial war, the Mongols incorporated a large number of Khitan auxiliary troops, Jurchen supporters, and Central Plains engineers, so that they could adapt to the new type of warfare by learning the techniques of siege and uprooting cities.
While Genghis Khan was waging war against Western Xia and the Jin Kingdom, the fugitive prince Qu Chulu of the Nabaran Province stole the Karachitan state in Central Asia and became the monarch of that country.
As we mentioned earlier, a group of Khitan people in the northern Central Plains, historically known as Kara-Khitan or Hei-Khitan, established the Khitan state in the Ili River, Chu River, Taurus River Valley and Kashgar.
They were a Mongol ethnic group that absorbed Han culture and ruled over Turkic regions that embraced Islam. They took Balasagon west of Lake Issyk-Kul and upper reaches of the Chu River as their capital, and their ruler took the Turkic emperor's name - Gul Khan, that is, "Khan of the World".
During the reign of the Gul Khan Yelü Zhilugu, the Karachitan state began to decline. Although this monarch was brave and strategic, he did not do government affairs all day long, only for pleasure, and finally caused the empire to fall apart.
In 1209, the Uighur king also betrayed Gul Khan and became a vassal to Genghis Khan, and the northeastern gate of the Karakhitan state was opened to the Mongols.
In 1211, Arslan the King of Geralu and Buzar the King of Alimari also joined Genghis Khan and no longer recognized the suzerainty of Yelüzhiluku.
The renegade Karakhitan state gasped until it was dealt a fatal blow.
After the defeat of the Naimanbu by the Mongols, Qu Chulu fled to East Turkistan, where he was taken in by the elderly Gul Khan Yelu Zhiluku of the Karakhitan. Yelü Zhiluku trusted and valued him so much that he married his daughter to him.
However, Qu Chulu had great ambitions and desperately wanted to seize power in the Karachitan state.
In 1210, he ungrateful colluded with the Sultan Mahamat of Huathorn Zimo in an attempt to overthrow the Gul Khan and divide the land of Karakhitan.
Gul Khan Yelu Zhiluku rose up to the rebellion, defeated the Huathorn Zimo people, and captured Samarkand. At this time, Qu Chulu rebelled in the Ili River valley, looted the treasure hidden by Gul Khan in Fergana, and then attacked the capital city of Balasagon with his army.
The awakened Gul Khan Yelu Zhiluku defeated Qu Chulu in a counterattack. However, on another battlefield near Danros, Jerü Zhiluku's general Tayengu was captured by the Khorezm.
When the Karakhitan army retreated from the battlefield of Taros, they found that the gates of their capital had been closed by rebellious residents, who must have been Turks who wanted to take the opportunity to escape the Khitan rule. The angry Karakhitan army stormed the city of Houtu in Balashagon.
During this upheaval, Qu Churu attacked and captured the Gul Khan Yelu Zhiluku (1211). But he still had great respect for his father-in-law, and until the death of Gul Khan, he ruled the Karakhitan state in the name of the old man.
After the death of Gul Khan, Qu Chulu, who had stolen the throne of the Karakhidan Khan, immediately turned against his ally Khorezm and fought each other. As a precaution, the Sultan of Khorezm moved its inhabitants from the defensible north bank of the Syr Darya River to the south of the Syr Darya River.
Qu Churu's rule over the Karachitanate state lasted from 1211 to 1218. At that time he already ruled most of the sedentary peoples, but due to his lack of experience, he did not know how to rule the nomadic tribes to which he belonged.
He brutally persecuted local Muslims in an attempt to get them to abandon Islam and accept Buddhism or Christianity, which paved the way for Yuwen, Kashgar, Alimali and other tribes to defect to him when the Mongols came to invade him in the future.
But at this time, the law of Qu Shuo did not realize the seriousness of what he had done, and he still did it. He executed Buzar, the king of Alimari, who had defected to Genghis Khan, and made his son Sughai more firmly sided with the Mongols and vowed to fight him to the death.
In 1218, he sent Zhebei to lead more than 20,000 men to attack Qu Chulu. Qu fled to Kashgar, where Zhebel captured Balasagon without much effort. Jebel chased Qu Chu to Kashgar, where the Muslim inhabitants treated him like a savior. Qu Churu continued to flee in the direction of the Pamirs, and was finally overtaken and killed by Zhebel's retinue on the banks of the Sari Chule River (1218).
At this point, the entire East Turkistan - the valleys of the Ili River, Lake Issyk-Kul, the Chu River and the Gangros River were incorporated into the territory of the Mongol Empire.