Emperor Xuanzong of Jin

Emperor Xuanzong of Jin ruled the Jurchen dynasty of northern China from 1213 to 1224, and made the decision that turned a lost war into a destroyed state. He came to the throne by a coup, put on it by the general who had just murdered his predecessor, at a moment when Genghis Khan's armies were already inside the Great Wall. He bought a truce in 1214 with a Mongol princess, gold, silk, horses and five hundred servants, and then immediately abandoned the northern capital at Zhongdu and moved his court south to Kaifeng behind the line of the Yellow River. Genghis treated the move as proof of bad faith and returned. Zhongdu fell in 1215 after a siege in which the defenders were reported to have eaten each other, and the sack lasted a month. The relocation also lost the dynasty the loyalty of the north it had left behind, and the Khitan and Chinese populations there went over to the Mongols in numbers. Rather than seek peace, Xuanzong opened a second war against the Song in the south in an attempt to replace the territory he had lost, and a third against the Western Xia. He was therefore fighting three states at once with a fraction of his revenue. He died in 1224 leaving his son Aizong a rump around Kaifeng and no allies at all. The Jin lasted another ten years. Kaifeng fell in 1233 and the dynasty ended in 1234, when Aizong hanged himself in a small town on the border and the Mongol and Song armies divided what was left.

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