Meet Genghis Khan
You may wonder: “Why Genghis Khan? “
Well, I just finished “GENGHIS KHAN and
the Making of the Modern World” and I found it pretty amazing. But then its
history, and I wonder just how much we can trust history of any sort. I sort of
approach history with the idea that it may be half true and half propaganda of
some sort. But we do know that Genghis Khan was a pretty amazing guy, and even if
this book is only half true, or even less, it is still a great read, and very
enlightening. In any event, I feel that he has gotten a raw deal from modern
history, and that the people he conquered were on the whole a lot better off under
his rule than before. Anyway, here is an excerpt from the book, which I hope will
cause you to get the book and read the whole thing (I'll try to insert some images of
him, but remember, nobody ever painted his portrait or made an image of him, so
these are all done by imagination only):
From the Introduction to “GENGHIS KHAN and the Making of the Modern World”
by Jack Weatherford - Crown Publishers
In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the
Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons
and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth
century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the
countries annexed, or by the total area occupied,Genghis Khan conquered more than
twice as much as any other man in history. The hooves of the Mongol warriors' horses
splashed in the waters of every river and lake from the Pacific Ocean to the
Mediterranean Sea. At its zenith, the empire covered between 11 and 12 million
contiguous square miles, an area about the size of the African continent and
considerably larger than North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico,
Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean combined. It stretched from the
snowy tundra of Siberia to the hot plains of India, from the rice paddies of Vietnam
to the wheat fields of Hungary, and from Korea to the Balkans. The majority of people
today live in countries conquered by the Mongols; on the modern map, Genghis Kahn's
conquests include thirty countries with well over 3 billion people. The most astonishing
aspect of this achievement is that the entire Mongol tribe under him numbered
around a million, smaller than the workforce of some modern corporations. From this
million, he recruited his army, which was comprised of no more than one hundred
thousand warriors—a group that could comfortably fit into the larger sports stadiums
of the modern era
In American terms, the accomplishment
of Genghis Khan might be understood if the
United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy
planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of
personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united
the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious
freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil,
and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the
continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis
Khan's accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of
scholarly explanation.
As Genghis Khan's cavalry charged across the thirteenth century, he redrew the
boundaries of the world. His architecture was not in stone but in nations. Unsatisfied
with the vast number of little kingdoms, Genghis Khan consolidated smaller countries
into larger ones. In eastern Europe, the Mongols united a dozen Slavic principalities
and cities into one large Russian state. In eastern Asia, over a span of three
generations, they created the country of China by weaving together the remnants of
the Sung dynasty in the south with the lands of the Jurched in Manchuria, Tibet in
the west, the Tangut Kingdom adjacent to the Gobi, and the Uighur lands of eastern
Turkistan. As the Mongols expanded their rule, they created countries such as Korea
and India that have survived to modern times in approximately the same borders
fashioned by their Mongol conquerors.
Genghis Khan's empire connected and amalgamated the many civilizations around him
into a new world order. At the time of his birth in 1162, the Old World consisted of
a series of regional civilizations each of which could claim virtually no knowledge of
any civilization beyond its closest neighbor. No one in China had heard of Europe, and
no one in Europe had heard of China, and, so far as is known, no person had made the
journey from one to the other. By the time of his death in 1227, he had connected
them with diplomatic and commercial contacts that still remain unbroken.
As he smashed the feudal system of aristocratic privilege and birth, he built a new
and unique system based on individual merit, loyalty, and achievement. He took the
disjointed and languorous trading towns along the Silk Route and organized them into
history's largest free-trade zone. He lowered taxes for everyone, and abolished them
altogether for doctors, teachers, priests, and educational institutions. He established
a regular census and created the first international postal system. His was not an
empire that hoarded wealth and treasure; instead, he widely distributed the goods
acquired in combat so that they could make their way back into commercial circulation.
He created an international law and recognized the ultimate supreme law of the
Eternal Blue Sky over all people. At a time when most rulers considered themselves
to be above the law, Genghis Khan insisted on laws holding rulers as equally
accountable as the lowest herder. He granted religious freedom within his realms,
though he demanded total loyalty from conquered subjects of all religions. He insisted
on the rule of law and abolished torture, but he mounted major campaigns to seek out
and kill raiding bandits and terrorist assassins. He refused to hold hostages and,
instead, instituted the novel practice of granting diplomatic immunity for all
ambassadors and envoys, including those from hostile nations with whom he was at
war.
Genghis Khan left his empire with such a firm foundation that it continued growing for
another 150 years. Then, in the centuries that followed its collapse, his descendants
continued to rule a variety of smaller empires and large countries, from Russia,
Turkey, and India to China and Persia. They held an eclectic assortment of titles,
including khan, emperor, sultan, king, shah, emir, and the Dalai Lama. Vestiges of his
empire remained under the rule of his descendants for seven centuries. As the
Moghuls, some of them reigned in India until 1857, when the British drove out
Emperor Bahadur Shah II and chopped off the heads of two of his sons and his
grandson. Genghis Khan's last ruling descendant, Alim Khan, emir of Bukhara, remained
in power in Uzbekistan until deposed in 1920 by the rising tide of Soviet revolution.
History has condemned most conquerors to miserable, untimely deaths. At age
thirty-three, Alexander the Great died under mysterious circumstances in Babylon,
while his followers killed off his family and carved up his lands. Julius Caesar's fellow
aristocrats and former allies stabbed him to death in the chamber of the Roman
Senate. After enduring the destruction and reversal of all his conquests, a lonely and
embittered Napoleon faced death as a solitary prisoner on one of the most remote
and inaccessible islands on the planet. The nearly seventy-year-old Genghis Khan,
however, passed away in his camp bed, surrounded by a loving family, faithful friends,
and loyal soldiers ready to risk their life at his command. In the summer of 1227,
during a campaign against the Tangut nation along the upper reaches of the Yellow
River, Genghis Khan died—or, in the words of the Mongols, who have an abhorrence
of mentioning death or illness, he "ascended into heaven." In the years after his
death, the sustained secrecy about the cause of death invited speculation, and later
inspired legends that with the veneer of time often appeared as historic fact. Piano
di Carpini, the first European envoy to the Mongols, wrote that Genghis Khan died
when he was struck by lightning. Marco Polo, who traveled extensively in the Mongol
Empire during the reign of Genghis Khan's grandson Khubilai, reported that Genghis
Khan succumbed from an arrow wound to the knee. Some claimed that unknown
enemies had poisoned him. Another account asserted that he had been killed by a
magic spell of the Tangut king against whom he was fighting. One of the stories
circulated by his detractors asserted that the captured Tangut queen inserted a
contraption into her vagina so that when Genghis Khan had sex with her, it tore off
his sex organs and he died in hideous pain.
Contrary to the many stories about his demise, his death in a nomad's ger, essentially
similar to the one in which he had been born, illustrated how successful he had been
in preserving the traditional way of life of his people; yet, ironically, in the process
of preserving their lifestyle, he had transformed human society. Genghis Khan's
soldiers escorted the body of their fallen khan back to his homeland in Mongolia for
secret burial. After his death, his followers buried him anonymously in the soil of his
homeland without a mausoleum, a temple, a pyramid, or so much as a small tombstone
to mark the place where he lay. According to Mongol belief, the body of the dead
should be left in peace and did not need a monument because the soul was no longer
there; it lived on in the Spirit Banner. At burial, Genghis Khan disappeared silently
back into the vast landscape of Mongolia from whence he came. The final destination
remained unknown, but in the absence of reliable information, people freely invented
their own history, with many dramatic flourishes to the story. An often repeated
account maintains that the soldiers in his funeral cortege killed every person and
animal encountered on the forty-day journey, and that after the secret burial, eight
hundred horsemen trampled repeatedly over the area to obscure the location of the
grave. Then, according to these imaginative accounts, the horsemen were, in turn,
killed by yet another set of soldiers so that they could not report the location of the
site; and then, in turn, those soldiers were slain by yet another set of warriors.
After the secret burial in his homeland, soldiers sealed off the entire area for
several hundred square miles. No one could enter except members of Genghis Khan's
family and a tribe of specially trained warriors who were stationed there to kill every
intruder. For nearly eight hundred years, this area— the Ikh Khorig, the Great Taboo,
deep in the heart of Asia—remained closed. All the secrets of Genghis Khan's empire
seemed to have been locked up inside his mysterious homeland. Long after the Mongol
Empire collapsed, and other foreign armies invaded parts of Mongolia, the Mongols
prevented anyone from entering the sacred precinct of their ancestor. Despite the
eventual conversion of the Mongols to Buddhism, his successors nevertheless refused
to allow priests to build a shrine, a monastery, or a memorial to mark his burial.
In the twentieth century, to assure that the area of Genghis Khan's birth and burial
did not become a rallying point for nationalists, the Soviet rulers kept it securely
guarded. Instead of calling it the Great Taboo or using one of the historic names that
might hint at a connection to Genghis Khan, the Soviets called it by the bureaucratic
designation of Highly Restricted Area. Administratively, they separated it from the
surrounding province and placed it under the direct supervision of the central
government that, in turn, was tightly controlled from Moscow. The Soviets further
sealed it off by surrounding 1 million hectares of the Highly Restricted Area with an
equally large Restricted Area. To prevent travel within the area, the government built
neither roads nor bridges during the Communist era. The Soviets maintained a highly
fortified MiG air base, and quite probably a storehouse of nuclear weapons, between
the Restricted Area and the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. A large Soviet tank
base blocked the entrance into the forbidden zone, and the Russian military used the
area for artillery practice and tank maneuvers.
The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote
few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture.
Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery, or even bake
bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built
no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and
passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next.
The only permanent structures Genghis Khan erected were bridges. Although he
spurned the building of castles, forts, cities, or walls, as he moved across the
landscape, he probably built more bridges than any ruler in history. He spanned
hundreds of streams and rivers in order to make the movement of his armies and
goods quicker. The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only
in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge. The Mongols brought German miners to
China and Chinese doctors to Persia. The transfers ranged from the monumental to
the trivial. They spread the use of carpets everywhere they went and transplanted
lemons and carrots from Persia to China, as well as noodles, playing cards, and tea
from China to the West. They brought a metalworker from Paris to build a fountain
on the dry steppes of Mongolia, recruited an English nobleman to serve as interpreter
in their army, and took the practice of Chinese fingerprinting to Persia. They financed
the building of Christian churches in China, Buddhist temples and stupas in Persia, and
Muslim Koranic schools in Russia. The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,
but also as civilization's unrivaled cultural carriers.
The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan's empire exercised a determined drive to
move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced
entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled
engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim
flamethrowers and applied European bell-casting technology, they produced the
cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast
modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some
significance, the larger impact came in the way the Mongols selected and combined
technologies to create unusual hybrids.
The Mongols displayed a devoutly and persistently internationalist zeal in their
political, economic, and intellectual endeavors. They sought not merely to conquer the
world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law,
and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages. Genghis Khan's grandson,
Khubilai Khan, introduced a paper currency intended for use everywhere and
attempted to create primary schools for universal basic education of all children in
order to make everyone literate. The Mongols refined and combined calendars to
create a ten-thousand year calendar more accurate than any previous one, and they
sponsored the most extensive maps ever assembled. The Mongols encouraged
merchants to set out by land to reach their empire, and they sent out explorers
across land and sea as far as Africa to expand their commercial and diplomatic reach.
In nearly every country touched by the Mongols, the initial destruction and shock of
conquest by an unknown and barbaric tribe yielded quickly to an unprecedented rise
in cultural communication, expanded trade, and improved civilization. In Europe, the
Mongols slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent, but, disappointed
with the general poverty of the area compared with the Chinese and Muslim countries,
turned away and did not bother to conquer the cities, loot the countries, or
incorporate them into the expanding empire. In the end, Europe suffered the least
yet acquired all the advantages of contact through merchants such as the Polo family
of Venice and envoys exchanged between the Mongol khans and the popes and kings
of Europe. The new technology, knowledge, and commercial wealth created the
Renaissance in which Europe rediscovered some of its prior culture, but more
importantly, absorbed the technology for printing, firearms, the compass, and the
abacus from the East. As English scientist Roger Bacon observed in the thirteenth
century, the Mongols succeeded not merely from martial superiority; rather, "they
have succeeded by means of science." Although the Mongols "are eager for war," they
have advanced so far because they "devote their leisure to the principles of
philosophy."
Seemingly every aspect of European life—technology, warfare, clothing, commerce,
food, art, literature, and music—changed during the Renaissance as a result of the
Mongol influence. In addition to new forms of fighting, new machines, and new foods,
even the most mundane aspects of daily life changed as the Europeans switched to
Mongol fabrics, wearing pants and jackets instead of tunics and robes, played their
musical instruments with the steppe bow rather than plucking them with the fingers,
and painted their pictures in a new style. The Europeans even picked up the Mongol
exclamation hurray as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement.
With so many accomplishments by the Mongols, it hardly seems surprising that
Geoffrey Chaucer, the first author in the English language, devoted the longest story
in The Canterbury Tales to the Asian conqueror Genghis Khan of the Mongols. He
wrote in undisguised awe of him and his accomplishments. Yet, in fact, we are
surprised that the learned men of the Renaissance could make such comments about
the Mongols, whom the rest of the world now view as the quintessential, bloodthirsty
barbarians. The portrait of the Mongols left by Chaucer or Bacon bears little
resemblance to the images we know from later books or films that portray Genghis
Khan and his army as savage hordes lusting after gold, women, and blood.
Despite the many images and pictures of Genghis Khan made in subsequent years, we
have no portrait of him made within his lifetime. Unlike any other conqueror in
history, Genghis Khan never allowed anyone to paint his portrait, sculpt his image, or
engrave his name or likeness on a coin, and the only descriptions of him from
contemporaries are more intriguing than informative. In the words of a modern
Mongolian song about Genghis Khan, "we imagined your appearance but our minds were
blank."
Without portraits of Genghis Khan or any Mongol record, the world was left to
imagine him as it wished. No one dared to paint his image until half a century after his
death, and then each culture projected its particular image of him. The Chinese
portrayed him as an avuncular elderly man with a wispy beard and empty eyes who
looked more like a distracted Chinese sage than a fierce Mongol warrior. A Persian
miniaturist portrayed him as a Turkish sultan seated on a throne. The Europeans
pictured him as the quintessential barbarian with a fierce visage and fixed cruel eyes,
ugly in every detail.
Mongol secrecy bequeathed a daunting task to future historians who wished to write
about Genghis Khan and his empire. Biographers and historians had so little on which
to base an account. They knew the chronology of cities conquered and armies
defeated; yet little reliable information existed regarding his origin, his character,
his motivation, or his personal life. Through the centuries, unsubstantiated rumors
maintained that soon after his death, information on all these aspects of Genghis
Khan's life had been written in a secret document by someone close to him. Chinese
and Persian scholars referred to the existence of the mysterious document, and some
scholars claimed to have seen it during the apex of the Mongol Empire. Nearly a
century after Genghis Khan's death, the Persian historian Rashid al-Din described the
writings as an "authentic chronicle" written "in the Mongolian idiom and letters." But
he warned that it was guarded in the treasury, where "it was hidden and concealed
from outsiders." He stressed that "no one who might have understood and
penetrated" the Mongol text "was given the opportunity." Following the collapse of
Mongol rule, most traces of the secret document seemed to have disappeared, and in
time, many of the best scholars came to believe that such a text never existed, that
it was merely one more of the many myths about Genghis Khan.
Just as the imaginative painters of various countries portrayed him differently, the
scholars did likewise. From Korea to Armenia, they composed all manner of myths and
fanciful stories about Genghis Khan's life. In the absence of reliable information, they
projected their own fears and phobias onto these accounts. With the passage of
centuries, scholars weighed the atrocities and aggression committed by men such as
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, or Napoleon against their accomplishments or their
special mission in history. For Genghis Khan and the Mongols, however, their
achievements lay forgotten, while their alleged crimes and brutality became
magnified. Genghis Khan became the stereotype of the barbarian, the bloody savage,
the ruthless conqueror who enjoyed destruction for its own sake. Genghis Khan, his
Mongol horde, and to a large extent the Asian people in general became unidimensional
caricatures, the symbol of all that lay beyond the civilized pale.
By the time of the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, this menacing
image appeared in Voltaire's The Orphan of China, a play about Genghis Khan's
conquest of China: "He is called the king of kings, the fiery Genghis Khan, who lays the
fertile fields of Asia waste." In contrast to Chaucer's praise for Genghis Khan,
Voltaire described him as "this destructive tyrant... who proudly... treads on the necks
of kings," but "is yet no more than a wild Scythian soldier bred to arms and practiced
in the trade of blood" (Act I, scene I). Voltaire portrayed Genghis Khan as a man
resentful of the superior virtues of the civilization around him and motivated by the
basic barbarian desire to ravish civilized women and destroy what he could not
understand.
The tribe of Genghis Khan acquired a variety of names—Tartar, Tatar, Mughal,
Moghul, Moal, and Mongol—but the name always carried an odious curse. When
nineteenth-century scientists wanted to show the inferiority of the Asian and
American Indian populations, they classified them as Mongoloid. When doctors wanted
to account for why mothers of the superior white race could give birth to retarded
children, the children's facial characteristics made "obvious" that one of the child's
ancestors had been raped by a Mongol warrior. Such blighted children were not white
at all but members of the Mongoloid race. When the richest capitalists flaunted their
wealth and showed antidemocratic or antiegalitarian values, they were derided
as moguls, the Persian name for Mongols.
In due course, the Mongols became scapegoats for other nations' failures and
shortcomings. When Russia could not keep up with the technology of the West or the
military power of imperial Japan, it was because of the terrible Tatar Yoke put on her
by Genghis Khan. When Persia fell behind its neighbors, it was because the Mongols
had destroyed its irrigation system. When China lagged behind Japan and Europe, the
cause was the cruel exploitation and repression by its Mongol and Manchu overlords.
When India could not resist British colonization, it was because of the rapacious
greed of Moghul rule. In the twentieth century, Arab politicians even assured their
followers that Muslims would have invented the atomic bomb before the Americans
if only the Mongols had not burned the Arabs' magnificent libraries and leveled their
cities. When American bombs and missiles drove the Taliban from power in
Afghanistan in 2002, the Taliban soldiers equated the American invasion with that of
the Mongols, and therefore, in angry revenge, massacred thousands of Hazara, the
descendants of the Mongol army who had lived in Afghanistan for eight centuries.
During the following year, in one of his final addresses to the Iraqi people, dictator
Saddam Hussein made similar charges against the Mongols as the Americans moved
to invade his country and remove him from power.
Amidst so much political rhetoric, pseudoscience, and scholarly imagination, the truth
of Genghis Khan remained buried, seemingly lost to posterity. His homeland and the
area where he rose to power remained closed to the outside world by the Communists
of the twentieth century, who kept it as tightly sealed as the warriors had done
during the prior centuries. The original Mongolian documents, the so-called Secret
History of the Mongols, were not only secret but had disappeared, faded into the
depths of history even more mysteriously than Genghis Khan's tomb.
In the twentieth century, two developments gave the unexpected opportunity to solve
some of the mysteries and correct part of the record about Genghis Khan. The first
development was the deciphering of manuscripts containing the valuable lost history
of Genghis Khan. Despite the prejudice and ignorance regarding the Mongols, scholars
throughout the centuries had reported occasional encounters with the fabled Mongol
text on the life of Genghis Khan. Like some rare animal or precious bird thought to
have been extinct, the rumored sightings provoked more skepticism than scholarship.
Finally, in the nineteenth century, a copy of the document written in Chinese
characters was found in Beijing. Scholars easily read the characters, but the words
made no sense because they had been recorded in a code that used Chinese
characters to represent Mongolian sounds of the thirteenth century. The scholars
could read only a small Chinese language summary that accompanied each chapter;
these offered tantalizing hints at the story in the text, but otherwise the document
remained inexplicable. Because of the mystery surrounding the document, scholars
referred to it as The Secret History of the Mongols, the name by which it has
continued to be known.
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