Genghis Khan: the Steppe Conqueror and Empire That Outlived Its Founder

The most important account of Genghis Khan's life was written inside his own household and then withheld from everyone outside it. The Secret History of the Mongols is the only surviving narrative of the founder of the Mongol empire composed by Mongols in their own language, and it reaches the modern reader through a Chinese manuscript in which the Mongol text survives only in transcription. Every other substantial account of him was written by outsiders, in Persian, Chinese, Arabic, Armenian, and Latin, by men who watched the Mongols from the position of the conquered or the frightened.This book follows the man from a boyhood on the Mongolian plateau, through the poisoning of his father, the years of poverty and captivity, the wars of alliance and betrayal that unified the steppe, and the campaigns that carried Mongol armies from northern China to the Indus and into the Caucasus. It describes the decimal army and the guard that turned a coalition of tribes into a state, the government built on conquered administrators and a postal relay, and the religious policy that granted privileges to the clergy of the cities that submitted. The destruction of the cities of Central Asia and Persia is treated as part of the story, and the numbers the sources attach to it are weighed rather than repeated.The documented Genghis Khan is also separated here from the legends built around him: the blood clot in the newborn's fist, the secret burial, the thousand horses, the mother camel, and the many incompatible accounts of how he died. Drawing on the Secret History, on Juvaini and Rashid al-Din, on the Chinese records, and on the reports of the friars who reached the Mongol court after his death, this is an account of the man and the empire that outlived him, not a study of conquest as a spectacle.