A Mongol emperor who honoured his predecessor's debts astonished his chroniclers
When Möngke became Great Khan in 1251, merchants held paper drafts issued under his predecessor Güyük that local officials refused to honour. Möngke paid every one, reasoning that trade would dry up otherwise. The Persian historian Juvayni marvelled that any king would settle another king's debts.
Born on 11 January 1209, Möngke was the eldest son of Genghis Khan's son Tolui and the formidable Sorghaghtani Beki. A shaman named him for the Mongolian word meaning eternal, and a Persian scholar taught him to write. At fifteen, after his first hunt, he and his brother Kublai had fat from their kills smeared on their fingers by their grandfather in a traditional rite. He fought in campaigns against the Jin dynasty from 1230 and later across the steppe and into Rus' and Hungary.
His path to the throne ran through intrigue. After Güyük died in 1248, the powerful Batu backed Möngke, but the first assembly that chose him was too small to be convincing, so a second was staged in Mongolia on 1 July 1251, organised by his mother and Batu's brother Berke. A plot by rival branches of the family soon surfaced, and Möngke crushed it with trials stretching from China to Iraq before declaring a general amnesty.
He governed with unusual rigour. He drafted his own decrees, turned lavish gifts to princes into fixed salaries, taxed merchants and banned them from exploiting the imperial relay stations. In 1253 he set up a department to control paper money, which nobles had been over-issuing since Ögedei's reign. His staff was strikingly diverse: his chief scribe was a Christian, and nine of his 16 senior provincial officials were Muslims. Between 1252 and 1259 he ordered a census from North China to Russia, counting men aged 15 to 60, fields, herds and orchards, to support a more predictable tax, though it provoked riots in the west.
Under him the Mongols took Iraq, Syria and the Dali Kingdom in modern Yunnan, with his brothers Hulagu and Kublai overseeing Iran and North China. When auditors found 142 breaches in Kublai's administration, the brothers reconciled in tears. Möngke died on 11 August 1259 without naming an heir, and the four-year war between Kublai and Ariq Böke that followed effectively split the empire for good.
Source: Möngke Khan
