Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan (in Mongolian, Chinggis Khaan) was the founder of the Mongol Empire. Born with the name Temüjin in the twelfth century, he rose from a family that had lost almost everything to become ruler of all the peoples who lived in felt tents on the Mongolian steppe. In 1206 an assembly of these peoples proclaimed him Chinggis Khan.

In the twenty-one years that followed, his armies invaded the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia, the Jurchen Jin dynasty in northern China, and the Khwarazmian Empire, which ruled what is now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Iran. When he died in 1227, his realm stretched from the Pacific coast of Manchuria almost to the Caspian Sea.

His descendants went on to conquer even more: Korea, Song China, Russia, Iran and Iraq. At its greatest extent in the later thirteenth century the Mongol Empire was the largest continuous land empire the world has ever known.

Genghis Khan is one of the most controversial people in history. In Mongolia he is honoured as the founder of the nation, a lawgiver and a unifier. In China, Iran, Central Asia, Russia and elsewhere, the invasions begun by him and his heirs are remembered as a catastrophe that killed enormous numbers of people. Both memories are part of the history.

The steppe is a vast belt of grassland running across Eurasia. In Mongolia, winters are bitterly cold and summers are short. Most people lived as pastoral nomads: they herded horses, sheep, goats, cattle and camels, and moved their round felt tents (ger) several times a year to find grass and water.

Children learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk. Men and many women could shoot a powerful composite bow from horseback. Hunting, herding and moving camp trained people to cooperate in large groups, to read the land and to travel quickly, skills that also made steppe armies formidable.

In the twelfth century the steppe was divided among many rival peoples and clans: Mongols, Tatars, Kereits, Naimans, Merkits and others, some Turkic-speaking and some Mongolic-speaking, some Buddhist, some shamanist and some Christian of the Church of the East. Neighbouring settled states, above all the Jin dynasty in northern China, often encouraged these groups to fight one another.

According to the Secret History of the Mongols, Temüjin was born by the Onon River, the son of Yesügei, a chief of the Borjigin clan, and Hö’elün, whom Yesügei had taken from a Merkit man. The story says the baby was born clutching a blood clot in his hand, a sign of a future conqueror. The birth year is uncertain: 1162 is the most common date, but 1155 and 1167 have also been argued.

When Temüjin was about eight, Yesügei took him to be engaged to a girl named Börte of the Onggirat people. On the way home Yesügei was poisoned by Tatars. His followers abandoned the widow Hö’elün and her children, who survived by gathering plants and fishing. The Secret History also tells that young Temüjin killed his half-brother Begter in a quarrel over food, and that he was later captured by the rival Tayichiud clan and escaped.

After marrying Börte, Temüjin allied himself with Toghrul, khan of the powerful Kereit people and a former sworn brother of his father. When Merkits raided his camp and carried off Börte, Toghrul and Temüjin’s own childhood sworn brother (anda) Jamukha helped him rescue her. Her first son, Jochi, was born soon afterwards; whether Temüjin was his father was later questioned by some of his family, but Temüjin accepted Jochi as his own.

Over the next two decades Temüjin built a following by rewarding loyalty and ability rather than noble birth. He fell out with Jamukha, who defeated him in battle around 1187, and later with Toghrul. In 1203 he defeated the Kereits, and in 1204 he destroyed the Naimans; Jamukha was captured and executed. By 1205 no rival power remained on the Mongolian steppe.

In 1206 a great assembly (kurultai) at the source of the Onon River proclaimed Temüjin Chinggis Khan. The meaning of the title is debated: it has often been linked to a Turkic word for “ocean”, suggesting universal rule, while others read it as “firm” or “fierce” ruler. From this point the peoples he ruled were collectively called the “Mongols”.

Chinggis reorganized society. The old clans and tribes were broken up and people were redistributed into decimal units of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 households, each owing soldiers and commanded by men chosen for loyalty and skill, many of whom had begun as ordinary followers. This weakened old tribal loyalties and bound everyone directly to the khan.

He created an imperial guard (keshig) of about ten thousand men, drawn partly from the sons of commanders; it protected the khan, ran his household and trained future officers, while also acting as a guarantee of their fathers’ loyalty. He appointed his adopted brother Shigi Qutuqu as a chief judge who recorded decisions in writing. The Mongols adopted a script borrowed from the Uyghurs, and tradition says a captured Uyghur scribe named Tatar-Tonga taught it to the khan’s sons.

Later writers spoke of a great law code, the Yasa, issued by Chinggis. Modern historians debate whether a single written code ever existed, or whether “Yasa” referred to a growing body of his orders and decisions. Similarly, the famous relay-post system (yam), with stations for fresh horses, grew under Chinggis but was systematized by his son Ögedei.

Chinggis first turned to the Tangut state of Western Xia in the northwest of present-day China. After raids beginning in 1205 and a full invasion in 1209, the Tangut king submitted in 1210 and agreed to pay tribute. In 1211 the Mongols attacked the much larger Jin dynasty of northern China. Their cavalry defeated Jin field armies and ravaged the countryside; in 1215 they captured the Jin capital Zhongdu, near present-day Beijing, and the Jin court fled south to Kaifeng. The war in China continued under Chinggis’s general Muqali and was only completed by Ögedei in 1234.

In the west, the Mongols absorbed the Uyghurs and destroyed the Qara Khitai realm. This brought them to the border of the Khwarazmian Empire of Shah Muhammad II. In 1218 a caravan of merchants under Mongol protection was massacred at the border city of Otrar, and a Mongol envoy sent to demand justice was killed. Chinggis responded with an invasion in 1219.

The Khwarazmian campaign (1219–1221) was one of the most destructive in medieval history. Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Merv, Nishapur and other great cities fell. Where cities surrendered, many inhabitants were spared but skilled craftsmen were deported to Mongolia; where they resisted, the population was often massacred, and captives were driven ahead of the army as human shields. Irrigation systems on which agriculture depended were damaged. Shah Muhammad died in flight on an island in the Caspian Sea; his son Jalal al-Din resisted until defeated on the Indus River in 1221.

Meanwhile the generals Jebe and Subutai led a reconnaissance force around the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus, and defeated an army of Rus’ princes and Cumans at the Kalka River in 1223. Chinggis returned to Mongolia and in 1226 led a final campaign against Western Xia, which had refused to send troops. He died in August 1227 while the siege of the Tangut capital was under way; the city fell soon after and the Tangut state was destroyed.

Mongol armies were made up almost entirely of mounted archers, each with several horses, which gave them remarkable speed. They used scouts, feigned retreats, encirclement and coordinated movements of separate columns across great distances. Just as important was intelligence: they gathered information from merchants and defectors, and used terror deliberately, offering cities the choice of surrender or destruction so that others would give in without a fight.

The Mongols had no siege engines at first, but they quickly recruited Chinese, Khitan and Muslim engineers who built catapults and other machines. The army became multi-ethnic, including Turkic, Khitan, Jurchen, Chinese and Iranian soldiers and officials.

The human cost was immense. Contemporary writers such as Ibn al-Athir in the Islamic world and Chinese chroniclers described massacres, famine and the depopulation of whole regions. Numbers given in medieval sources, sometimes over a million dead for a single city, are almost certainly exaggerated, and modern estimates of the total death toll of the Mongol conquests vary enormously. But historians agree that the wars caused mass killing, enslavement and forced migration, and that parts of northern China and Khorasan took generations to recover. For the victims, this was not a story of empire-building but of catastrophe.

Chinggis Khan died in August 1227. The cause is not known with certainty. The Secret History mentions that he was injured in a fall from his horse while hunting in the winter of 1226–27 and fell ill; other sources speak of illness, and later legends invented many more colourful stories. He was carried back to Mongolia and buried secretly. The location of his grave is unknown and has never been found, although it is traditionally sought near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii Mountains.

Before his death Chinggis had divided his lands and peoples among his family. His sons by Börte were Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei and Tolui. The quarrels between Jochi and Chagatai led Chinggis to choose Ögedei as his successor, and a kurultai confirmed him as Great Khan in 1229.

Under Ögedei and his successors the empire expanded into Korea, Russia and Eastern Europe, Iran and Iraq (where Baghdad was sacked in 1258), and finally all of China, where Chinggis’s grandson Khubilai founded the Yuan dynasty. By the 1260s the empire had split into four major khanates: the Yuan in China, the Ilkhanate in Iran, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia and the Golden Horde in the western steppe.

Some historians emphasize that after the conquests, Mongol rule created a zone of relatively secure travel across Eurasia, sometimes called the Pax Mongolica. Merchants, diplomats, missionaries and craftspeople moved between China, Iran and Europe; figures such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta travelled in its wake. Knowledge of medicine, astronomy, cartography, printing and gunpowder moved along these routes. The Mongols generally tolerated different religions and employed talented people of many origins.

Other historians stress that this “peace” was built on conquest and that its benefits went mainly to the ruling elite and merchants. The same networks that carried goods also spread disease; many scholars think that the Black Death of the 1340s travelled west along routes shaped by the Mongol world, although the details are still being researched.

Politically, Chinggis’s legacy was long-lasting. For centuries across Central Asia and the steppe, only his descendants, the “golden lineage”, were considered legitimate khans. Rulers from the Timurids to the Mughals and the khans of Crimea claimed connection to him in one way or another. A widely cited genetic study published in 2003 found a Y-chromosome lineage shared by about 8 percent of men in a large region of Asia and suggested that it might trace back to Chinggis Khan’s family, though this link is a hypothesis rather than proof.

Mongolia: During the socialist period (1924–1990), open veneration of Chinggis Khan was discouraged; plans in 1962 to celebrate the 800th anniversary of his birth led to political purges. Since 1990 he has become the central symbol of Mongolian national identity: his image appears on banknotes, the main airport of Ulaanbaatar bears his name, and a giant equestrian statue stands at Tsonjin Boldog. Mongolian historiography tends to emphasize state-building, law and unity.

China: Chinese dynastic historiography treats him as Taizu, posthumous founder of the Yuan dynasty, and the People’s Republic of China presents him as a hero of the Chinese nation as a whole, maintaining a mausoleum in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, which houses relics traditionally associated with him. This interpretation is contested by many Mongolians, who see him as a specifically Mongol hero.

Iran, Central Asia, the Arab world and Russia: In Persian and Arabic historiography the Mongol invasions are remembered as one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Islamic world. In Russian historical memory, the later Mongol-Tatar domination of the Rus’ principalities (the so-called “Tatar yoke”) has been seen as a cause of backwardness, a view that some Eurasianist thinkers and historians have challenged. In Europe, older images of the “barbarian” conqueror have given way, in popular works such as Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004), to portraits of a modernizing statesman; many specialists regard such portraits as overcorrected.

Historians today generally try to hold both sides together: a gifted organizer and military leader whose state reshaped Eurasia, and a conqueror whose campaigns caused suffering on a massive scale. Judgements about him often reveal as much about the national histories of those writing as about the man himself.

The Secret History of the Mongols is the only major account written by Mongols themselves. Composed in Mongolian in the thirteenth century, it survives mainly in a Chinese-character transcription with a Chinese gloss made under the Ming dynasty. Its date is debated: the colophon mentions a Year of the Rat, which has been read as 1228 (soon after Chinggis’s death), 1240, 1252 or 1264, and many scholars think the text grew in stages. It is vivid and intimate, including stories unflattering to the khan, but it mixes history with epic storytelling, and its chronology is often vague. Igor de Rachewiltz’s annotated English translation (Brill, 2004) is a standard scholarly edition.

Persian histories are the second main pillar. Ata-Malik Juvaini, who served the Mongols, completed his History of the World-Conqueror around 1260; Juzjani, writing in Delhi as a refugee, gives a hostile view. Rashid al-Din’s Compendium of Chronicles (Jami al-tawarikh), compiled in the Ilkhanate in the early fourteenth century, drew on a lost official Mongol chronicle, the Altan Debter (“Golden Book”). Chinese sources include the Shengwu qinzheng lu (Record of the Personal Campaigns of the Holy-Martial Emperor) and the History of Yuan (Yuanshi), compiled hastily in 1369–70 under the Ming.

Each tradition has its own agenda: Mongol sources glorify the lineage; Persian writers served or fled the conquerors; Chinese official histories fit the Mongols into a dynastic framework. The sources were written in more than a dozen languages, so serious research on Chinggis requires philological cooperation across Mongolian, Persian, Chinese, Arabic, Turkic and other fields. Classic modern studies include Paul Ratchnevsky’s biography Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy (English translation, Blackwell, 1991).

Newer evidence is also changing the picture. Archaeology at Karakorum and other Mongol sites, environmental studies suggesting that unusually wet years in the early thirteenth century may have produced abundant grass for horses, and ancient DNA research are adding to what can be learned from texts. Each of these methods, however, has its own uncertainties, and none can yet answer questions such as the location of Chinggis’s tomb.