Genghis Khan
“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see those who love him shrouded and in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters” – Genghis Khan.
Temujin, later Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227), must have gathered to his bosom many conquered enemies’ wives and daughters: a 2003 genetic study revealed that 1 in 200 of the world’s population is descended from him – about 38 million people. He founded the Mongol Empire, the world’s largest contiguous empire, and was likely the most terrifying figure to emerge from the Steppe. His conquests were frequently accompanied by huge massacres, even genocide. The estimated 40 million deaths toll of the Mongol conquests initiated by him, viewed as a percentage of global population, would be equivalent to 278 million deaths if adjusted for the 20th century.
When Temujin was nine, his father, a minor Mongol chieftain, was poisoned. Rivals in the tribe then expelled the widow and her family to fend for themselves on the harsh Steppe. Temujin endured extreme poverty and want alongside his family for years, during which he killed one of his brothers for refusing to share a rodent. Growing up hard, Temujin grew into a hard man.
And a charismatic one. By the time he was a young man, he had amassed a small and devoted following, which he parlayed into bringing the Mongol tribes under his sway, one after another. He erased intra-tribal distinctions by exterminating each tribe’s nobility and combined the commoners into a unified entity henceforth known as the Mongols, united by their personal allegiance to Temujin.
Having united the Mongols, he took on the formidable rival Tatar tribe, defeated them, and executed all males taller than a wagon’s axle. By 1206, Temujin had destroyed all Steppe rivals, and the formerly squabbling tribes had been united into a Mongol nation. So a grand assembly was held that year, where he revealed a vision, endorsed by shamans, in which the heavens had ordained that he rule all under the sky, and the Mongols proclaimed him “Genghis Khan“, meaning Universal Ruler.
Genghis organized the Mongols for war. He was a good judge of men and an excellent talent spotter, and his system was a meritocracy where the talented could rise, regardless of origins. He imposed strict discipline in a military structure based on decimals, from squads of 10, to companies of 100, to minghans of 1000, and tumans of 10,000. Then he set out to conquer the world, beginning with China, which was fragmented at the time into various dynasties. He started with the Western Xia, and reduced them to vassalage, before turning to the more powerful Jin in 1211, capturing and sacking their capital in 1215 after a victory in which hundreds of thousands of Jin troops were massacred.
That forced the Jin emperor to abandon the northern half of his empire. Genghis, who found himself ruling a domain that included tens of millions of Chinese peasants, at first planned to simply kill them all and transform the land into pasturage suitable for Mongol herds, until taxation was explained to him, and he was persuaded that many live peasants translate into a steady stream of income and wealth.
Genghis interrupted his campaign against the Jin after a city governor in the powerful Khwarezmian Empire to the west executed Mongol envoys sent by Genghis to its emir. The emir’s refusal to surrender the offending governor was one of history’s direst errors. Genghis launched a brilliant invasion of Khwarezim in 1218 that overwhelmed the empire and extinguished it by 1221, while its fleeing emir was relentlessly chased across his domain to his death, abandoned and exhausted, on a small Caspian island as his pursuers closed in. It was in this war that the Mongols gained their reputation for savagery. Millions of Khwarzmians died, as Genghis ordered the massacre of entire cities that offered the least resistance, and sent thousands of captives ahead of his armies as human shields.
By the time Genghis was done, Khwarezm had been reduced from a thriving and wealthy empire to an impoverished and depopulated wasteland. At the grand mosque in the once-thriving but now smoldering city of Bukhara, Genghis told the survivors that he was the Flail of God, and that: “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you“.
Genghis died in 1227, after falling from his horse while campaigning in western China.