Genghis Khan

Mongol ruler, r. 1206–1227

• Born: Between 1155 and 1162
• Birthplace: Delyun Boldog, near the Gobi Desert (now in Mongolia)
• Died: August 18, 1227
• Place of death: Ordos area in northern China

A military genius, Genghis Khan united the clans and tribes of peoples later collectively known as the Mongols, leading them on conquests to the east, south, and west and organizing the Mongol Empire which under his grandson, Kublai, came to dominate most of Eurasia.

Early Life

Temüjin, as Genghis Khan (GEHN-ghihs kahn) was first named, was born in the village of Delyun Boldog on the Odon River in the northeastern borderlands between Mongolia and China on the fringes of the Gobi Desert between 1155 and 1162. It is said that there were great “signs” at the time of Temüjin’s birth. Stars fell from the sky (possibly a meteor shower), and he was born clutching a blood clot in the shape of a human knuckle. The great-grandson of Khabul Khan, Temüjin was born into the elite Borjigin clan, the son of a Mongol lord, Yesügei, and his captive Merkit wife, Oyelun. According to Mongol custom, at the age of nine, Temüjin was betrothed to his first wife, Börte. After the treacherous poisoning death of Yesügei at a banquet hosted by a rival, Temüjin and his family fell on hard times and were periodically held captive by the Merkits. Temüjin often had to survive by hunting, fishing, and even scrounging for rodents in the desert.

Gradually, he rallied around him a group of followers from various clans and tribes, and, using his natural military ability, Temüjin emerged as a bandit-mercenary leader under the protection of Toghrïl Khan, the Nestorian Christian leader of the Kereits, sometimes linked in the West to the legendary Prester John . As an ally of Toghrïl and the Chinese in 1194, Temüjin and his band helped to defeat the Tatars. In this campaign, he clearly demonstrated his ability as a military strategist, especially in the use of the cavalry for which his Mongols became so famous and so feared.

Life’s Work

After the death of Toghrïl, Temüjin soon turned on his Kereit allies and subjugated them and then also the Naimans and Merkits. In 1206, he organized these diverse nomadic groups whose principal occupations had been herding horses and sheep, banditry, mercenary soldiering, and warring with one another into a militaristic Mongol confederacy based on kinship and personal loyalty. He assumed the title of Genghis Khan and emerged as this new state’s divine ruler. He governed with skill, strength, and wisdom, but also relied heavily on popular fear of his awesome power. Quickly, Genghis Khan added to his Central Asian domains in the years 1206 to 1209 by conquering the neighboring Oyrats, Kirghiz, and Uighurs.

At the center of this state was the superior Mongol army under the brilliant command of Genghis Khan himself. Eventually, he perfected traditional Mongol cavalry and archery tactics and skillfully combined them with the use of gunpowder and siege technology adopted from the Chinese and Muslims. To keep this army in its numerous campaigns well supplied, a modern, logistic system of support was created. Effective communication between the various military groups and parts of the growing empire was maintained by a Pony Express-like postal system. Intelligence was gathered from itinerant merchants, wandering the empire, who came under the personal protection of Genghis Khan. By Börte and other wives, he had four sons: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogatai, and Tolui. They and other relatives became the leading generals and administrators of the increasingly feudal empire.

Genghis Khan established the first Mongol (Uighur-based) written language to unify his people further and promulgated the first Mongol law, a prescriptive law code that was eventually employed from China to Poland. In return for absolute obedience to Genghis Khan and his successors, the law allowed for local political autonomy and religious toleration. Under this code, a system of governance developed in the Mongol Empire similar to the satrapies employed by the ancient Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. The law also became a basis for the law codes of many of the successor states to the Mongol Empire.

The Mongol Empire rose out of Central Asia under its dynamic leader to fill a power vacuum created by the decline of China in the east almost simultaneously with that of the Muslim states to the south and the Byzantine Empire and Kiev Rus in the west. Beginning with Xi Xia, from 1209 to 1215, Genghis Khan conquered northern China. His armies finally entered Beijing after severely devastating it in 1215. In China, as elsewhere, Genghis Khan readily adapted aspects of the civilization and its human talent to strengthen his position and the Mongol Empire. He conversed extensively with the renowned Daoist monk Zhang Zhun but remained a shamanist. Genghis Khan also made the Chinese Yeliu Zhu his chief astrologer and a principal civil administrator. (Later, in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan employed the Venetian Marco Polo and Polo’s father and uncle as ambassadors and administrators.)

Although some historians believe that China was always the prime objective of Genghis Khan’s expansionism, southern China, ruled by the declining Song Dynasty , seems to have held little appeal for Genghis Khan; after taking Beijing, he turned his attention to the West. From 1218 to 1225, he conquered the Persian Khwarizm Empire and thereby gained control of the critical trade routes between China and the Middle East. The caravans that traveled these and the other trade routes of the Mongol Empire were absolutely essential to its economic life and well-being. Eventually, Mongol-Turkish domination of these trade routes forced European navigators such as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus to seek alternative ocean routes to the spices, silks, and other riches of Asia.

These western conquests also for the first time incorporated large numbers of Muslim subjects into the Mongol Empire. In the following decades and centuries, most of the Mongols from Transoxiana and westward into Russia were converted to Islam and naturally allied themselves with the emerging Ottoman Empire. In 1223, Genghis Khan sent his brother-in-law and greatest general, Subatai, to attack the Cumans, Byzantines, and Russians and therewith begin the invasion of Europe. (In 1240, the Mongols of the Golden Horde under Batu Khan would take the Russian capital city of Kiev and eventually help to found a new Russian state under the leadership of Moscow.)

However, while Genghis Khan was in the West, his Chinese domains went into revolt. He returned east and ruthlessly resubjugated northern China from 1225 to 1227. On his return journey to the Mongol heartland, one month after the death of his son Jochi, Genghis Khan died in the Ordos region in 1227.

Significance

Genghis Khan was succeeded by his son Ogatai, who died in 1241. Under Ogatai Khan and his successors, Mongol power and influence swept into Russia, Poland, India, southern China, Indochina, and Korea, culminating in Kublai Khan’ failed invasions of Japan from 1274 to 1281. Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) in China, and Mongol dynasties came to power in Persia, India, and elsewhere.

The Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan was never really overthrown. The diverse Mongols were generally less culturally defined than the peoples they conquered and gradually were absorbed by them; they became Chinese, Indian, Muslim, or Russian. Thus, with the weakening of the power and attraction of the Mongol capital, Karakorum, and the heartland and declining leadership, the once-great Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan first fragmented into numerous autonomous khanates (for example, Khanate of the Golden Horde) and finally, after several centuries, disappeared. Yet its legacy, and that of Genghis Khan, lives on in its successor states and those descended from them.

Genghis Khan remains one of the most controversial figures in the human past. He was a brutal man in a brutal time and environment. He also was one of the most brilliant military and political leaders in history, and his strategies had lasting military significance. The victims of his relentless drive for personal power number in the hundreds of thousands and maybe into the millions, causing many also to judge him as one of the greatest monsters in history. He took a shattered and disparate, primitive people and unified them to form the core of the Mongol Empire, which was, in effect, the personification of his own intellect, ability, and drive. This Eurasian state he created in two short generations became one of the mightiest empires the world has yet known.

Most significantly, the Mongol Empire facilitated cultural, political, economic, and technological transfer across Eurasia and thereby helped to revitalize civilization in China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. From horsemanship, the use of gunpowder, communications, military tactics and organization, and government and law to the broadening of the human biological pool, the Mongol input into human history, instigated by Genghis Khan, is long and profound.

Major Rulers of the Mongol Empire, 1206-1294

Reign

• Ruler

1206-1227

• Genghis Khan

1227-1229

• Tolui (son of Genghis Khan), regent

1229-1241

• Ogatai Khan

1241-1246

• Toregene (wife of Ogatai), regent

1246-1248

• Güyük

1248-1251

• Oghul Qaimish (wife of Güyük), regent

1251-1259

• Mongu

1259-1260

• Arigböge (brother of Mongu and Kublai), regent

1260-1294

• Kublai Khan

Bibliography

Chambers, James. Genghis Khan. Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1999. A concise biography of the Mongol ruler. Bibliography.

Hoang, Michael. Genghis Khan. Translated by Ingrid Cranfield. New York: New Amsterdam, 1990. A biography for the general reader, without footnotes, but which quotes extensively from the primary sources.

Juvaynī, Alā al-Dīn Atā Malik. Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror. Paris: UNESCO, 1997. An annotated translation of a thirteenth century Arabic source on Genghis.

Komaroff, Linda, and Stefano Carboni, eds. The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. A catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2002-2003. Illustrations, maps, and index.

Lister, R. P. Genghis Khan. 1969. Reprint. Lanham, Md.: Cooper Square Press, 2000. A biography of the Mongol ruler. Contains genealogical tables, bibliography, and index.

Marshall, Robert. Storm from the East: Genghis Khan to Khubilai Khan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. A popular history of the Mongol Empire, from its beginning to the invasion of Europe and later China, to its ultimate fall. Contains dynastic tables, illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index.

Nicolle, David. The Mongol Warlords: Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Hülegü, Tamerlane. Poole, England: Firebird, 1990. An examination of the major Mongol rulers. Bibliographies and index.

Onon, Urgunge, trans. The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan. Rev. ed. Richmond, England: Curzon, 2001. A literal and annotated translation of a work written only a generation after Genghis Khan’s death.

Ratchnevsky, Paul. Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy. Translated and edited by Thomas Nivison Haining. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. A scholarly monograph on Genghis Khan. Contains a chronological survey of the conqueror’s life, and the last two chapters concentrate on his personalty and on the political and administrative structure of his empire.

Roux, Jean-Paul. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. An examination of Genghis Khan and the empire that he created.

Togan, Isenbike. Flexibility and Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate and Chinggis Khan. New York: Brill, 1998. A study of the Mongol tribes living in the area, particularly the Kereits, and their interactions with Genghis Khan.