The Great City of Karakourum
"And here he assembled everything that a nomad could desire. A strange city, Karakorum, a metropolis of the barrens. Wind-swept and sand-whipped. The dwellings, dried mud and thatch, arranged without any thought of streets. Around it, the domes of black felt yurts.
"From the south came Arab and Turk merchants. With them Genghis Khan establoshed his own method of dealing. He did not like to haggle. If the merchants tried to bargain with him their goods were taken without payment; if, on the other hand, they gave everything to the Khan, they received in return gifts that more than paid them.
"Beside the district of the ambassadors was the quarter of the priests. Old Buddhist temples elbowed stone mosques, and the small wooden churches of Nestorian Christians. Every one was free to worship as he pleased as long as he obeyed the laws of the Yassa, and the rules of the Mongol camp.
[Genghis Khan] held his court within a high pavillion of white felt lined with silk. By the entrance stood a siver table set with mare's milk, fruit and meat, so that all who came to him could eat as much as they wished . On a dais at the far end sat the Khan on a low bench with Bortai or another wife below him on the left side.
"Karakorum-- now vanished under the encroaching sands of the Gobi-- was ruled by an iron will...
"The pavillion of the Khan always faced wouth, and a space was left clear on this side. To right and left, as children of Israel had their appointed places around the Taberbacle, the people of the horde had their fixed stations.
--Genghis Khan, by Harold Lamb
"Two years after the destruction of the Kin, Ogodei called together an assembly of the Mongol leadership comparable to that which Chingis Khan had summoned in 1206. The setting was, however, different: Ogodei's gathering was held at the new city of Karakorum, on the Orkhon river in central Mongolia. For his people, much to their suprise, now posessed a capital of brick and stone. Its building had started during Chingis' lifetime, at the insistence of Yelui ch'u ts'ai [prime minister through much of the span of the Mongol empire]. There could not be an empire, he had declared, without a focus. There must be a permanent point from which administration could radiate, to which missions could bring their homage and tribute...By Ogodei's time Karakorum boasted a palace, audience-chambers, treasure-vaults and warehouses-- gaunt, static rectangles in a world of round, wind-whipped tents and melting movement. Chingis had avaoided it; and succeeding Mongol generations seem to have regarded it with an equal lack of enthusiasm. They graced its environs with shifting suburbs of felt, leaving its rigid, clausterphobic rooms to the literate foreign officials-- Uighurs, Persians, Khitans, Chinese-- who managed their empire for them.
[Friar Caprini, envoy from Pope Innocent IV, recorded the investiture of Kuyuk Khan, son of Ogodei, in the station of Emperor-- the Khagan.] Caprini marvelled at the huge white marquee accomodating two thousand people; at the nobles and generals riding in state around it in splendid robes of different colors, white and red and blue, for each day's ceremonies; at the gold plating on the horse's saddles and the rider's armour; at the gargantuan drinking bouts that quickly followed the deliberations of the Khaghan's councillors. But what impressed him more profoundly were the foreign delegations. More than four thousand envoys, laden with trubute, were gathered before Kuyuk's throne...Karakorum, it seemed, was the center of another planet where he, representing the occupant of the Throne of Peter, was a person of little moment.
[Kuyuk's answer to the two papal bulls delivered by Caprini, the first calling the Khagan to Christ, the second castigating the Khagan for the razing of Christian lands throughout Europe, was as follows:]"'From the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me: who could have done this contrary to the command of God?'"
--Barbarians of Asia, by Stuart Legg