In May 1162 AD, a young woman of 19 gave birth. In the preceding months she had fallen in love and married, but she was later abducted by a rival tribe. On the banks of the Onon River, at a place widely considered to be Delun Boldog, Temüjin, later known as Genghis Khan, was born.
In the West, the name of Genghis Khan is now synonymous with rape, pillage and violence. This is to a large extent due to his portrayal during the European Enlightenment, notably in Voltaire’s “L’Orphelin de la Chine” (The Orphan of China). In it, Voltaire casts Khan as an ignorant, cruel despot and one who “lays the fertile fields of Asia to waste”. This is the prevailing narrative that has largely defined our perception of Genghis Khan as a society. Whilst elements are true, this narrative has been warped and misrepresented by political and social motivations.
Genghis Khan’s atrocities are well documented. Cities that resisted Mongol conquest and refused to surrender were massacred indiscriminately. Notably this occurred at the city of Nishapur in 1221, with the historian Juzjani remarking that Khan “martyred every person, razed the walls of the City, had a pair of oxen driven over the city that not a vestige of the buildings thereof remained”. His tactics in siege warfare were similarly merciless. In the siege of Bukhara in 1220, Mongol forces diverted a nearby river to flood the entire city. Outside of the battle Mongol forces employed Scorched Earth tactics. In their campaigns against the Khwarezmian Empire the Mongols systematically destroyed crops, irrigation systems, and infrastructure, defacing the landscape and fuelling famine. In 1204, Genghis Khan committed genocide against the Naiman Tribe, ordering the killing of all males over the age of three years. Further, the use of psychological warfare proliferated. When attacking a city they would begin by taking the small settlements around the city, so that refugees would flood the city walls, bringing news of the terror and breaking the city’s capacity before the fight had even begun.
This information alone would seem to justify the prevailing perception of Genghis Khan. Interestingly however, contemporary writers paint a very different picture. 1392 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, commonly regarded as the first work of English literature. He devotes the longest section, The Squire’s Tale, to Genghis Khan, whom he describes thus:
“This noble king was called Genghis Khan, Who in his time was of so great renown that there was nowhere in no region so excellent a lord in all things”.
In this vein, it is necessary to investigate the more “positive” aspects of Gengis Khan’s reign. Firstly, he established the Pax Mongolica, an unprecedented period of relative peace, prosperity and security. This allowed for increased trade, cultural exchange, and the spread of ideas across the empire. The historian Juvaini described the safety along the Silk Road: “a woman with a golden vessel on her head might walk alone without fear or dread”.
Secondly, Genghis Khan adopted a policy of religious tolerance, contrary to the persecution prevalent in most medieval societies. Often the Mongols would hold meetings at the court between leaders of different faiths, with Genghis Khan even seeking guidance from each leader. This tolerance allowed the exchange of ideas to flourish in an era of multiculturalism.
The Mongol Empire was further famed for its meritocracy. Whilst nepotism prevailed in other parts of the world, Genghis Khan promoted his officers based on prowess and experience rather than class, ancestry, or past allegiances. As a result, his one-time enemies became some of his most trusted generals. For example, in a 1201 battle against a rival tribe, Genghis Khan supposedly demanded to know who had dared to shoot his horse with an arrow. A soldier bravely stood up. Impressed by his boldness, Genghis made him an officer in the army, and renamed him “Jebe” (“arrow) in honour of the encounter. Jebe allegedly went on to become Genghis’ most formidable general in his conquest of Asia and Europe.
In addition, the infrastructure that the Mongols put in place had a legacy that long outlasted the fall of the empire itself. Genghis Khan built an extensive network of roads and postal stations, which together became known as the Yam system, with the result that transportation and communication drastically improved. What’s more, this increased the interaction and cultural connectivity between Europe and the Far East, enabling the trade of goods such as silk, which in turn made the Italian states of Genoa, Florence, and Venice wealthy enough to finance the European Renaissance.
Whilst previously the Far East and the West had remained two separate worlds, the Mongols changed this. For example, gunpowder, invented in Han Dynasty China in 140 AD, appeared in the Middle East in 1240, only 10 years after the Mongols took the city of Khwarazmia. In Europe, Roger Bacon mentioned gunpowder in his 1267 text Opus Majus.
Whilst Genghis Khan is best known for plunder and terror, there is more to his story than this. Whilst not diminishing the scale of the atrocities committed by the Mongols, in order to better understand the world we live in today it is necessary to understand all the ways in which the Mongols helped shaped it. From creating the trade routes that facilitated the Renaissance, to developinh a true meritocracy centuries ahead of its time, the Mongols’ impact on the world was massive. Thus, while our picture of the Mongols is not entirely untrue, it is not entirely complete.
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Voltaire. 2013. L’ Orphelin de La Chine. Nabu Press.
Mazumder, Dipanjan. “RETHINKING THE MONGOL-SULTANATE ‘FRONTIER’ (1241-1327).” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 76 (2015): 207–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44156584.
Juvaini A A (n.d.) The History of the World Conqueror. Translated from Persian by Boyle J A (1958) Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 272
Yamin, Saira. “INCLUSIVE GOVERNANCE: LESSONS FROM HISTORY.” Edited by Alexander L. Vuving. HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT: Thinking About Security in the Indo-Pacific. Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep26667.13.
Hill, Jane. n.d. “Genghis Khan Hero or Villain?” https://carolinaasiacenter.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/8684/2018/11/Genghis-Khan-.pdf.
Brinkhof, Tim. 2023. “How the 1223 Mongol Invasion of Europe Still Impacts Us Today.” Big Think. April 10, 2023. https://bigthink.com/the-past/mongol-invasion-europe/.