A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy
to sally out to fight. The conquest of Jin China required siege equipment, so Genghis recruited Chinese experts to supplement his large cavalry army. Much of the frontier area was conquered in rapid and devastating raids, but Genghis knew it was necessary to seize the Jin capital at Zhongdu to complete the conquest. The vast capital, surrounded by 15 kilometres (10 miles) of walls, 12 metres (40 feet) high, protected by 900 towers and a triple moat, was larger than any city the Mongols had captured. It was defended by an estimated 36,000 men, including 20,000 inside the walls and 4,000 stationed in each of four subsidiary towns where stores were kept, connected to Zhongdu by underground tunnels. Genghis and his army arrived outside the walls early in 1214. Two attempts to storm the city were beaten off. On the first occasion, it seems likely that the Chinese let some of the attackers break through a gate, only to set fire to the street behind them, trapping the Mongols and slaughtering them. Genghis knew when to stop. A truce was called and the Chinese emperor paid over a Jin princess, 500 boys and girls, 3,000 horses and 10,000 liang of gold to get the Mongols to leave.
Genghis almost certainly planned to return and when he heard in July that the emperor Xuanzong had decided to abandon Zhongdu as his capital and move it further south to Kaifeng, he took this as a sign of treachery and sent a large army of Mongols, Khitans and renegade Chinese to blockade the city. Blockade was not a usual Mongol strategy, but in this case it did what Genghis wanted. Xuanzong sent two large relief armies with supplies to break the blockade, but the first was surprised by a Mongol raid and its leader, the drunken Li Ying, was captured along with 1,000 wagons. The second suffered the same fate, ambushed at the River Yongding and destroyed by a much smaller Mongol force. The situation in Zhongdu became critical. One story has it that due to the shortage of stone or metal shot for the cannon in the city, among the first recorded uses of artillery with gunpowder if true, the ammunition was substituted with balls made of melted-down gold and silver. Genghis waited for the defenders and the population to starve. Cannibalism was later reported among both the besieged and the besiegers. The whole Mongol army now invested the city, preventing further supplies for the stricken capital. In late spring, the Jin commanders abandoned the city, Wanyen Fuxing choosing to commit suicide, while the army commander Mojan Chinchung smuggled himself at night through the Mongol lines, only later to be executed by the emperor in Kaifeng.
In June, the abandoned garrison opened the gates and surrendered. Although Genghis had wanted to prevent the usual bloodbath, his angry and impatient soldiers looted the city (this was their only source of payment for military duty) and butchered thousands of the inhabitants, though not as mercilessly as in later sieges – at Urgench in 1220, the entire population would be decapitated and pyramids built of their heads. The capital, with its vast walls, was now a Mongol city, signalling the rapid decline of Jin rule. By 1234, the rest of Jin China was subject to the Mongols. Genghis Khan proved himself a shrewd commander, whether fighting on an open plain or besieging vast cities. According to his published Bilik (Maxims), he saw warfare as the finest of activities: ‘A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed.’ Warfare was the breath of life for Genghis Khan, a fact that helps to explain his remorseless pursuit of battle and the single-minded quality of his leadership.
| No. 7 | BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN 23–24 June 1314 |
The famous battle in June 1314 at the small river of Bannock Burn, near Stirling in Scotland, was fought between two leaders whose presence on the day made all the difference between victory and defeat. The English army, large and well-trained, should have defeated a Scottish force less than half its size, but its commander-in-chief, King Edward II, chose to flee the field. His opponent, Robert Bruce, who had declared himself King of Scotland in 1306, knew he was at a disadvantage fighting his powerful neighbour in open battle, but he stayed, rallied his men and won a victory that opened the way to full Scottish independence fourteen years later, with a treaty that acknowledged Robert as Scotland’s true king.
The battle came at the end of a long period of almost twenty years of violence between the two kingdoms following the death of the last heir to the Scottish throne in 1290. By the early fourteenth century, the English king, Edward I – ‘the Hammer of the Scots’ – had forced Scotland to submit to English government, but in 1306 Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, supported by defiant Scottish noblemen, was chosen as the new King of Scotland and crowned at Scone. He was almost immediately defeated by Edward I. Legend has it that he hid in a cave, where he watched a spider struggling to climb its gossamer thread until it finally reached its goal; this, so it is said, inspired Bruce to return to the fight for a free Scotland. Whether the story is true or not, Bruce was a remarkable military commander and over the seven years that followed Edward I’s death in 1307, he succeeded in retaking many of the English strongholds, including Edinburgh Castle. In the summer of 1313, Bruce’s brother, Edward, agreed with the English commander of Stirling Castle, Sir Philip Mowbray, that if no English army had come to rescue him after exactly one year, the castle would be surrendered to the Scots. This was a challenge the new English king, Edward II, could not ignore. He gathered together a large army, numbering an estimated 18,000 cavalry, archers and foot soldiers, and marched north to restore English rule.
© duncan1890/iStock
This nineteenth-century engraving shows the Scottish king, Robert Bruce, at the moment when he brought his axe crashing down on the head of the English knight Henry de Bohun at the start of the Battle of Bannockburn, which secured his rule in Scotland.
The English army arrived near Berwick-upon-Tweed on 10 June 1314. Edward was an unpopular king, famous for his male favourites, and five of the eight English earls failed to join him. He nevertheless mustered an impressive military force, led by around 2,500 heavily armed and armoured knights, whose giant warhorses, the destriers, acted like tanks on a modern battlefield. Bruce summoned his supporters to the forest of Tor Wood, close by Stirling Castle; they included perhaps 1,000 men from Argyll and the Scottish islands under Angus Óg MacDonald, and a further 6–7,000 foot soldiers. Bruce had only 500 light cavalry under Sir Robert Keith, Marischal of Scotland, and a body of archers. The Scottish army generally avoided pitched battles against a larger enemy, but on this occasion Bruce, warmly supported by his other commanders and his men, decided that a stand had to be made. The battle tactic of the Scots was simple and thoroughly rehearsed. In front of where Bruce expected the battle to take place, the soldiers dug deep pits almost half a metre in diameter, close together and concealed with grass and twigs. Behind the traps, the army relied on the shield ring or ‘schiltron’, 500 men formed in a tight circle, several deep, with long 16-foot (5-metre) iron-tipped spears pointing outwards and upwards to ward off attacking horsemen. These human fortresses were carefully constructed, the outer ring kneeling, the ring behind with spears at chest height, both designed to stop oncoming horses.
The problem for the Scots was the sheer number of the enemy. On 23 June, one day before Stirling Castle was to be surrendered, Edward moved his vast force north from Falkirk. They arrived at the small river, Bannock Burn, where the Scottish army had been drawn up for battle on New Park, a slope of land beyond the river, which dominated the road to Stirling. The Park had forest behind, through which the Scots could escape, and swampy ground to both the south and east, making a flanking attack by the English difficult. Bruce’s army might nevertheless have succumbed to a frontal assault. Instead the English attacked in the order they arrived, without waiting to assemble a full field of battle. The vanguard under the Earl of Gloucester, seeing what they mistakenly thought was a Scots army withdrawing from an encounter, charged across the pits and swamp. Among those who succeeded in getting across was the young Sir Henry de Bohun. He made straight for Bruce, who was clearly marked out by his golden coronet. Bruce in turn charged on his small grey horse at de Bohun, dodged the lance, and in a deft movement split open de Bohun’s skull with his axe. The vanguard hesitated and withdrew. Another 300 horsemen under Sir Robert Clifford attempted to break through to Stirling Castle, but they were obstructed by a schiltron led by the