Tarikh-i Jahangushay-i Juvaini

"Tarikh-i Jahangushay-i Juvaini" ("The History of The World Conqueror") is a detailed historical account written by the Persian Ata al-Mulk Juvayni describing the Mongol, Hulegu Khan, and Ilkhanid conquest of Persia.

It is also considered an invaluable work of Persian literature.

This account of the Mongol invasions of his homeland Iran, written based on survivor accounts, is one of the main sources on the rapid sweep of Genghis Khan's armies through the nomadic tribes of Tajikstan and the established cities of the Silk Road including Otrar, Bukhara, and Samarkand in 1219, and successive campaigns until Genghis Khan's death in 1227 and beyond.

His writing is sometimes inflated, as when he estimates the strength of the Mongol army at 700,000, against other accounts that put the number between 105,000 and 130,000. His descriptions are often written from a sense of drama: of the fall of Assassin castle Maymun-Diz in November 1256, where he was present at the siege, he desrcibes the effect of
trebuchet (catapult) bombardment on the battlements:

The first stones which were discharged from them broke the defenders' trebuchet and many were crushed under it. Fear of the quarrels from the crossbows overcame them so that they were in a complete panic and tried to make shields out of veils [i.e. they did best to defend with very indadequate equipment.] Some who were standing on towers crept in their terror like mice into holes or fled like lizards into the crannies of the rocks.

Juvayni's descriptions are however a very valuable resource for contemporary Mongol history, along with the work of Rashid al-Din, and the Secret History of the Mongols.

One of his convincing descriptions is that of the Mongol hunt or "nerge" as an army training exercise for the nomadic Mongols. In a nerge the whole army rounded up all the animals over a large region, in order to obtain dried meat before the onset of winter. In the time of Genghis Khan, the nerge was converted into an exercise in discipline with severe punishments for commanders of tens, hundreds, or thousands, who let animals escape. Once rounded up, the animals were ruthlessly massacred, first by the Khan, then by princes, and finally, only after so commanded, by all the army. This was to form a model for the ruthlessness of Mongol attacks on well-established human settlements.

Much of this record of ruthlessness may however, have been exaggerated, possibly because there was no stigma against killing of resistors in the Mongol ethos. For example, after the fall of
Merv in Turkmenistan, the people were rounded up and distributed among the soldiers in tens, hundreds and thousands, and each man in the remaining Mongol army was assigned the execution of "three to four hundred people." However, there is no doubt that this type ofsavagery was part of the terror spread by the Mongol army.

References

* Mongols, Huns, and Vikings, by Hugh Kennedy, 2002.