the most powerful tribes of the black Mongols, such as the Keraits and the Naimans, to Christianity. The savage Tatars, whom the Mongols called “forest peoples,” led a roving life in the forests of the modern province of Trans-Baikal and the north-west of Mongolia. They practised Shamanism in its purest form.[354] Authorities are in disagreement as to which of these Mongol clans claimed Temuchin as its own. The Chinese aver that he belonged to the black Tatars; while Mongolian tradition[355] would enrol him among the savage tribes. Rashīd ud-Dīn tells us that Yissugāy married a woman belonging to the white Tatars, who became the mother of Temuchin and his brothers; and that the lads were adepts as hunters and fishermen. Whatever may have been Yissugāy’s position among his tribe,[356] it seems clear that on his death in battle his eldest son, Temuchin, then thirteen years of age, was not recognised as a chief, and supported a miserable existence with his mother on roots, game, and fish. Such a life probably served to develop his genius, signs of which, not less than the memory of his father’s military prowess, attracted round him a band of young nobles who afterwards formed his bodyguard. The growing power of the Mongols in the twelfth century alarmed the Manchurian dynasty of the Tsin, then reigning in Northern China, who incited the Buyr-Nūr Tatars to attack them. It was in this war that Yissugāy perished. As soon as they had crushed the common enemy, the Buyr-Nūrs turned against their former allies and invaded China. The Tsin emperor now sent other nomad chiefs to oppose the Buyr-Nūrs, of whom the mightiest was Toghrul, the Khān of the Christian Keraits,[357] whose habitat was on the shores of the Tola. Temuchin allied himself with this tribe, and in the final campaign against the Buyr-Nūrs, when the Tsin emperor himself led his forces into Mongolia, Temuchin so distinguished himself as to gain an honorific title.[358] This occurred in 1194. The next ten years Temuchin spent in struggles with confederacies of hostile tribes whose jealousy he had incurred by his uninterrupted successes. Having reduced all who dwelt north of the desert of Gobi, from the Irtish to the Khinggan Mountains,[359] he found himself in the year 1202 engaged in a war against his former ally Toghrul, Khān of the Keraits. He was at first defeated, and compelled to retire; but in the following year (1203) he collected another army and inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Keraits, reducing them to abject submission. In 1206[360] he summoned a Kurultāy,[361] or Diet of the Nobles, and, in the presence of all the tribal chieftains, formally adopted the title of Chingiz Khān, or “The Very Mighty King.” His ambitions were now aroused, though they were as yet bounded by the narrow horizon in which they had found scope; and he could not have foreseen the goal to which they would carry him. CHAPTER XXII MONGOL INVASION OF CENTRAL ASIA