Okay, it was grandsons (I did write “and heirs”). You may be right about the power and support bit, but that’s not the point — my point is that Genghis’s _loyalty_ system did not survive him very long. It sort of kept working, or rather was not strained much, while his sons were conquering more territory and had no great cause for rivalry, but once the empire hit the natural limits beyond which Mongol tactics and forces became less useful, like Russian and Polish forests, the Arabian desert and the sea, normal family politics was back. Even though the tribes may now have been “synthetic” and not the old Naymans, Tatars, Kereits etc.

First though, I think a distinction must be made between what Temujin did as uniter of the steppe and what he was then able to do as Chinggis Khan, conqueror of the world. I did not go into this at length in the essay, but the most important difference between Chinggis’ empire and other nomadic polities is that it was not an alliance of tribes led by the extended lineage of the leading family. Most steppe leader’s strongest source of support was this extended lineage. But this was not the case with Temujin. Thomas Barfield speculates that this was because Temujin was betrayed as a young man by some of these family members, and I suppose that this guess is as good as any. What is clear, however, is that Temujin did not trust what should have been his naturally allies. He warred against some, killed others, and rarely gave any of them anything close to a position of power.

This was not how he treated his sons, however. There was no fighting, no killing, no murders and no permanent demotions there. Even Jochi, whom the Secret History reports had a tense relationship with his father, was bestowed great commands and honors. (I suspect the SH exaggerates this anyways–the house of Tolui had strong reasons to discredit the oldest son of Chinggis Khan).

Temujin was a fierce opponent of family politics. Opposing his family allowed him to create his empire. But once his empire was set up and he became Chinggis Khan he had never had to question the loyalty of the family he did promote, his sons.

Even in 1224, when both Jin and Khwaresm were mostly lying in ruins, Western Xia still found fit to spend resources casting about for allies among the Mongol tribes, many of whom had been only recently subjugated and hated Genghis bitterly.

This does not fit the evidence. (As an aside: Do you know what primary source he uses to make the claim? I’d be interested in tracking it down).

The problem is that by 1224 there were no bitter Mongol tribes to bribe against the Khan. I’ve called Chinggis Khan a ‘social engineer’ and that he was–he utterly destroyed the tribes that existed before the unification. Here is the ten second version of how it worked: when he conquered a tribe he forcibly broke it apart, would divide up its families by putting them into new military units that were composed of people pulled from dozens of tribes. From that point forward this unit was, for all intents and purposes, their “tribe.” (As the centuries went on many of these units actually became tribes. That process is a fascinating story in and of itself). They were not allowed to leave these units and they had little contact with their old support networks. Leaders who opposed this process were killed (if they had not all been slaughtered during the process of conquest itself). The only tribes that escaped the total reorganization of steppe society were the few that had declared allegiance to Chinggis in the early days.

As for Muqali, his loyalty to Genghis was personal; with Genghis gone, his sons and heirs soon clashed and carved up their father’s empire.

Chinggis Khan’s sons did not fight each other. Two more Khans would rule the Mongol Empire before internal rivalries escalated to bloodshed. Things broke down more or less simultaneously in both the East and the West (between Kubilai Khan and Ariq Boke in the East, and Hulagu and Berke in the West) amongst the grandsons of the Chinggis. But by this time the Mongols had been ruling ‘civilized’ lands for forty years; men like Hulagu and Kubilai were children of urban fleshpots, not rugged steppes, and gained most of their power and support from the agricultural societies they controlled, not the system Chinggis had devised to control the steppe.