Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan the founder and first great khan of the Mongol Empire (c. 1162-1227), who united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe and led them in campaigns that created the largest contiguous land empire in history. His conquests transformed the politics of Eurasia and opened new routes of trade and communication between East and West.

Birth, Childhood and the Making of a Leader

Temujin, as he was first named, was born around 1162 into a noble family of the Borjigin clan on the Mongolian steppe. His father was poisoned by rival Tatars when he was still a boy, and the family was abandoned by its followers, leaving Temujin, his mother and his brothers to survive by hunting and gathering on the margins of the tribe.

These years of poverty and danger forged his character. He learned to endure hardship, to command loyalty and to think strategically, and he re-established himself among the clans by a mixture of personal courage, marriage alliances and the steady accumulation of sworn companions, the nokor, who bound themselves to him personally.

By his early forties he had defeated or absorbed the rival tribes of the plateau, the Tatars, Kereit and Naiman among them, and in 1206 a great assembly of the Mongol chiefs proclaimed him Genghis Khan, a title usually interpreted as universal or oceanic ruler. The scattered tribes had been welded into a single disciplined people.

The Mongol Military System

Genghis Khan reorganised his people for war. He broke up the old tribal divisions and formed his followers into units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, appointed officers on the basis of merit and loyalty, and created a personal guard of exceptional soldiers drawn from the sons of commanders.

The army was mobile, disciplined and superbly organised for communication. Its soldiers lived on horseback and moved with remarkable speed, carrying with them remounts and a supply of dried provisions. Messengers and a system of relay posts linked the far corners of the empire, and scouts gathered detailed intelligence on the lands ahead.

The Mongol tactics of manoeuvre, feigned retreat, encirclement and coordinated attack were formidable, and they were combined with a deliberate policy of terror designed to induce surrender. Cities that resisted were destroyed by the method of collective punishment, a policy whose reputation often induced others to submit without a fight.

The Great Conquests

Campaigns against the Jin dynasty of northern China began in 1211 and by 1215 the Mongols had taken the Jin capital of Zhongdu, the site of modern Beijing. Genghis Khan then turned west, where the Khwarazmian empire, provoked by the murder of Mongol envoys, was destroyed in a series of brilliant campaigns between 1219 and 1221, laying waste to the great cities of Central Asia.

A flying column under his generals Subutai and Jebe rode around the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus and into the steppes of Russia, defeating the Rus and the Cumans at the river Kalka in 1223. This reconnaissance in force demonstrated the reach of Mongol arms and foreshadowed the invasions of later decades.

Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia and died in 1227 during a campaign against the Tangut kingdom of Xi Xia. His empire was divided among his sons and descendants, but the framework he had built and the army he had created allowed them to extend Mongol rule from Korea to Hungary and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.

Government, Law and the Yassa

Genghis Khan gave the Mongols a code of law known as the Yassa, which regulated the conduct of war, the administration of the army and the customs of the people. It dealt with matters of discipline, hospitality, marriage and theft, and it imposed severe penalties for offences that threatened the cohesion of the community.

He appointed judges and administrators, encouraged literacy by adopting the Uyghur script for the Mongol language, and recruited clerks and officials from the conquered peoples, especially Chinese and Muslim advisers, to run the government. He exempted the clergy of the various religions from taxation and respected the religious practices of the peoples he ruled.

He established the principle that all land belonged ultimately to the khan and his family, and he distributed the conquered territories as appanages to his sons and commanders. This arrangement preserved the unity of the empire during his lifetime, though it later contributed to its division among rival lines.

Influence and Legacy

The Mongol conquests were devastating in their immediate cost, destroying cities, depopulating regions and ending dynasties from China to Persia. Historians have estimated the loss of life in the tens of millions, and the destruction of irrigation systems in Central Asia and Mesopotamia had consequences for centuries.

Yet the unification of Eurasia under Mongol rule also had profound consequences of another kind. The peace that followed the conquests made the Silk Road safer than it had ever been, encouraged the movement of merchants, missionaries, envoys and craftsmen, and transmitted technologies and ideas across the continent, including gunpowder, paper and printing toward the West.

Genghis Khan is remembered in Mongolia as the father of the nation and the greatest of its heroes, and his image and name are central to Mongolian identity. In world history he stands as the creator of a vast empire and of a system of trade and communication that linked the settled civilisations of Eurasia as never before.

See also

• Mongol Empire
• Yassa
• Subutai
• Silk Road