Gone Medieval - The Rise of Genghis Khan

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

Genghis Khan is still considered one of the most famous and most feared warrior kings in history. But his name still divides opinion. To some, he was the ruthless conqueror of great civilisations, for others a hero who united nomadic tribes and created an enlightened empire. But who was the real Genghis Khan? In today's episode, Matt is joined by historian and author John Man who takes us through the rise, character, and conquests of Genghis, delving into the life of one of the most recognisable names of the Middle Ages.John Man, author of Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection. Published by St Martins Pr (2005).For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Genghis Khan or Chingis Khan is one of the most recognizable names of the medieval period. He would force together disparate tribes to forge the largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world. Asia and the steps fell before the Mongol horde and Europeans tremored at the stories they heard and the thought that the horde spread might continue west. But who was this man? A brilliant leader, an ambitious warlord, a brutal tyrant, or all of the above?

Well, I'm joined today by John Mann, Genghis Kahn's biographer, to tell us all about the life of this intriguing man. Thank you for joining us, John. Hi. First things first, I guess, I alluded to in my intro there. Genghis or Chingis is one of those right and one of them wrong? Genghis is wrong. We got it wrong.

English speakers got it wrong. centuries ago. The Mongolians call him Chingis. Genghis is fine, but Genghis is definitely wrong. So we have to get used to having a soft G there. It's a continual battle because, as I say, we English speakers, for some reason, got it wrong 150 years ago. It depends on how it came to us through what languages and then we just have never corrected it. Well, we'll start trying that effort again now. We'll stick with Chingis while we're talking about him during this then. So what do we know about Chingis' early life, when and where was he born? And what do we know, if anything, about his parents?

Well, we know quite a bit about his youth because it was all recorded later after his death by the stories of his youth and his rise went into the local culture and was absorbed by bards and poets and storytellers. And that was all put together after his death in a document called the Secret History of the Mongols, which tells us a good deal about where he came. from and his origins. He was born, we think, in about 1162, it's not absolutely certain. And he was from what you might call an aristocratic family, if that has any meanings in a tribal culture. There were many, many different tribes in what is today Mongolia, that is way north of the

Great Wall of China, beyond the Gobi Desert, in the steps of Central Asia. And he was a Mongol. his great-grandfather had been the chief of a unified Mongol culture, which had collapsed shortly before his birth in 1162. His father was called Yisu Guy, and his mother was called Hoelun, and we know about them because their stories are told in the secret history. And so when he was born, the Mongol tribes were at each other's throats. There was total collapse, there was anarchy, and I think this was an important element in his makeup.

because he was really born into a world of total collapse, but he did have a vision of something in the background that was possible once you had unity of the tribes. When he was nine, he was taken way across the gobi into what is now in a Mongolia and China, and because his father wanted to establish a link with a traditional tribe who provided the marriage partners for the Mongols. and he was taken into Ina Mongolia with his father and they came across somebody who had a beautiful girl, daughter, to whom he was betrothed. Yisuga his father took off for home,

but was poisoned on the way home by a bunch of tartars who were traditional enemies and one of his last acts was to summon his son back again to bury him in effect. And as a result of that, his mother was left on her own, along with a concubine of his father, which was quite common in those days to have more than one wife and several children. And because of his status, because he was of supposedly royal lineage, you might say,

although this is on a very small scale, he and his mother and the whole family were abandoned by their clan and in effect left to die. Well, it turned out that they didn't die. was a woman of supreme strength and is honoured in the secret history of the Mongols for her vision and for her abilities to look after her family. And she is credited in the secret history of putting on her hat and getting down to the business of looking after the family,

digging for plants on the steps, and making sure that they survived. Now, has anything occurred to you to ask about all that before I go on? I guess only what impact might that have had on, I mean, his name wasn't Chingis Khan at this point. That's sort of a title he acquires later, isn't it? No, I'm sorry, I should say that his birth name was Temuchin. And he was named Temujin because his father had captured a Tata chieftain whose name was Temuchin. And it was common to take on the name of your captive. Temujin means actually blacksmith. Timor is the Mongolian for iron.

Chin is the personalisation of it. And blacksmiths were terribly important because, they needed swords for weapons and it was a traditional name. And so that was how he was called up until the time he became Jenghis. So forging an empire is actually quite a good analogy for him, given that his name's blacksmith. And so do you think this almost expulsion from Mongol society affected his view of Mongol society? Did that impact his desire to forge this empire? Yes, I think it was an essential part of his character because he knew that his great-grandfather had managed to get the Mongol tribes together and create some sort of a unity, which was pretty powerful at the time. But when he experienced what it was like to be really down and out, I mean,

he should have died, really. He and his family should have died out had it not been for his mother's strength of character. And I think that being down and out showed him the absolute vital need for something bigger than a family, something bigger than a clan. In fact, the unity of the tribes and that was an initial starting point for his leadership. So how does he go on to start to build from that sort of exclusion and almost isolation? How does he start to bring together some of those disparate tribes? He had a friendship, and this is absolutely crucial part of the story, with his best friend was called Jamukhar,

and they played together on the ice and in the summertime on the steps, and that was an important part of his growing up. How he started that was by surviving and by being acknowledged as the true leader of his small clan. And from this base, he began to make alliances with other clans of his own tribe and build a backing. And this was really down to his character. The whole story of the empire is really one of being driven by the character of Jenghis Khan, because nobody else achieved what he managed to achieve. It started to forge alliances with other clan leaders and then turned on other tribes in the area.

And this was probably the most important part of his acts as a young man, because forging the unity of the tribes took him 20 years. And it was at the end of that time, he emerged as leader not only of the Mongols, but also of a dozen other tribes in the area who had each of these conquest of these tribes is a campaign in itself. So it took a long time to forge what is in effect, a nation state, and has looked back on now as the foundation of Mongolia as we see it today. The Mongols adore Jenghis Khan because he was in effect the founder of the nation. And was there a will amongst the tribes to come together? Was there a desire to be united again? Or was Temujin fighting against

their desire to be independent? Was he conquering or was he bringing them together politically? This was conquest, basically. All tribes were against all other tribes, each after booty, cattle, women, whatever it took to assert the status of the tribe. Each of them had to be conquered individually. So you were talking about half a dozen quite big campaigns. And crucial part of the story is that one of his great rivals was his childhood friend, Jamuka, who joined in alliance with enemies against him because he was also wishing. to lead the clans in his own way. And he was eventually defeated in a big battle. Jamaka was brought as a prisoner to Chengis. Jengis offered him life in exchange for his loyalty. Jamika says, no, I'd just be a thorn in your collar. Kill me, but don't spill my blood, which was the way of dealing with aristocrats on the step. And this makes Jamaka seem to die heroic death, if you like, and to justify Jengis's original

judgment in befriending him in the first place. It was all part of the epic that we're beginning. And how and when does Temergyn become Jenghis Khan? What does Jenghis Khan mean and how does he acquire that title? It's pretty vague because the term itself was apparently pretty familiar and the origins were not recorded. But it happened when he became head of the Mongol tribes in about 1189 and he was awarded the title, Jengis, which is apparently from a...

Turkish root meaning fierce. There had been a great deal of controversy about what it actually meant and why it was chosen, but the best solution is that it was a Turkish term. Turks were one of the many groups that were living locally. In fact, some of the tribes that he conquered were Turkic speaking. So Jenghis means fierce. Khan means king. And so he was the fierce king, the fierce ruler. And it seemed a good title at the time when he was just on the verge of conquering not just Mongols, but other tribes. And that's how he's been known ever since. And so how then does Jenghis go about spreading the Mongol Empire beyond those tribes?

How does he go in so many directions with such success? Well, the key to his expansion, the key to conquest on the steps was cavalry and the short, extremely powerful bow that the Mongols had to hunt wolves, to hunt prey and to hunt each other. And the key to cavalry is grass. And these are the two key elements that started on his way. If you've got a cavalry, a galloping, as it were, over your own fuel. You don't have to have fuel supplies. And as soon as he had united the tribes, he turned on the traditional enemy, which was the neighboring empire of Jin, which is, in effect, North China and Manchuria, as we have it today. In order to do that, he had to take out...

another empire which lay to the south, which was called Western Shia, which is now northwest China, which is the Xinjiang region. And so that in about 1209, he made his first attack south to take out Western Shia. After that, he was going to go for Jin. And he was on his way to do this when he was interrupted, as it were, by news from the far west, namely that a trade delegation with which he was trying to, to establish contact with the Islamic world had been killed en masse, at least 100 and perhaps 400 people, killed by an extremely foolish local governor in the far west. And it was this that turned him away from his conquests in China to the Islamic world. And so then he starts to move west. Is there an element here of having got control of all of the tribes?

him project, so I guess foreign war has always been a good way to bring about internal peace and harmony or distract from internal division. Was he using conquest as a way to cement his control of the tribes as well? Yes, what he needed having conquered the tribes in Mongolia, was a way to assure his dominance over them. And for that he needed basically booty, loot. And this comes from abroad, because on the steps, there is very little surplus. The only surplus really is herds, and there's a limit to how much you can use that as a form of wealth. And they liked his elite, he himself liked the luxuries that you could get,

in his case, from China. So he needed that sort of wealth flowing into Mongolia from the outside, and the only way to get it was by conquest. Now, the big problem with conquest of Jin was that that was a city-based culture. He was a step-based culture, cavalry-based, without traditional ways of living in cities and certainly without traditional ways of taking them. So the big step forward for him was the conquest of northern Jin and of what is now Beijing. Beijing was an absolutely massive fortified city and it took two years of siege warfare in order to take it.

There was many deaths on both sides. There was starvation. There was disease. There was plague. and eventually Beijing fell and the emperor fled down to Way South to a city called Kai Feng, and leaving Beijing free for him. The city was robbed, but as far as his conquests of concern, what he gained out of that capture of the city were more troops and siege warfare weapons.

And so that by the time he was able to head west, he had a whole complete juggernaut army, which consisted not just of his cavalry, but also of the foot soldiers and extra cavalry and weapons which he got from Beijing. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishments? And would man have ever got to the moon? Without the bra.

You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from History Hit, patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. So as they move west, as you say, they come into contact with the Islamic world,

also the Christian world, I guess particularly in the Ruslan's as we move up towards what is modern day, sort of Russia and Eastern Europe. And I think we have an impression there of the Mongol Horde, very much like a steamroller, moving across the land, delivering wholesale destruction. Is that fair, or are we hearing the stories and perhaps the excuses of those who have been beaten by the Horde? What kind of tactics did they use? How brutal were they? They were extremely brutal. The aim was conquest. But it's quite interesting that Jenghis himself, one part of his character, was that he was extremely generous-hearted in all. way. That is, he was happy to accept talent wherever he found it. The artisans were saved,

top officials were saved, as long as they agreed to serve him. And indeed, in his court, as it now was, were many foreigners and of all religions. He was not a fundamentalist in the sense that he expected other people to adopt his beliefs. He certainly didn't adopt theirs. What he wanted was service and loyalty and skills. and talent, I should say that the extraordinary thing that he did learn along the way was that if you're going to have an empire, there's no point in having a hostile population. So his main aim, after conquest, was to make sure that he was properly served and that he could take full advantage of his victims, but that they should live in some sort of peace so that they were no longer

a challenge to him. He employed Chinese, he employed Muslims and Muslims. And, he employed, indeed anyone who showed talent enough to serve him. So was he operating effectively a meritocracy? He was willing to take talent wherever he found it, if it would improve. It was a meritocracy, indeed. And it was a religious terms, a tolerant one. The Mongols had been shamanistic. They believed in the spirits of place and nature,

but they didn't wish to impose this on anybody else and had a belief that there was no particular virtue in any other religion. So they were tolerant of it, not in a positive way, but simply because it was of no great significance to them. And so did Jenghis seem to prefer a method of taking places over almost by consent? Like he was happy to leave them alone to live their lives as long as they served him. But if they stepped out of the line, they were in trouble. The tactic was what I would call is herbicide. You attack a city.

And if they give up, so much the better. if they don't, they get hammered. The cities that he took were taken with great brutality. But the purpose of that was a very expensive thing to do, to invest a city and use up all your men in horses and weapons in siege warfare. Far cheaper to terrify one city in order for the others further down the line to give up peacefully. And that's pretty much what happened. There were some cities that resisted and they were totally destroyed. Baghdad was perhaps the most infamous. one, when the siege of Baghdad by the Mongols is still remembered by the people who live there to this day. In fact, they call the Americans the new Mongols when they made the invasion of Iraq.

So it's very well remembered. And it did severe damage to the Muslims' belief in themselves. And the main historian of all this was a man called Giovanni who wrote in Persian. And he, I think, exaggerates the figures of the deaths in order to prove that the Muslims were not good enough Muslims and had in effect invited this terrible fate upon themselves. The actual numbers of deaths in the Islamic world are much disputed and very hard to establish, but there was certainly over a million and the Mongols were extremely good at killing not just human beings but cattle and from this they learned the art of killing. A soldier was reputed to have been able to deal with 24 civilians in the space of an hour. And you add up the numbers that must have been involved,

and it does indeed add up to a million or so plus. Pretty terrifying. And no wonder, I think, that some of the courts in Europe were getting worried as they moved over closer. Yes, that didn't happen until later. What happened was that before Jengis invaded the Muslim world, one of his wives, you remember his mother was an extremely strong personality. And he always respected women, which is one of his perhaps more remarkable traits. And he was very much in love with his first wife, who's been found by his father for him, and he gained other wives along the way. And one of them, before he invaded the Muslim world, told him in no uncertain terms that he better look after his heir, because what happens if he gets ill, what happens if he gets

killed, who's going to look after the empire, who's going to look after the family? And he agreed to that, and that is why he appointed his third son, Ugaday, as his heir. The first two were at loggerheads with each other, so the third one was chosen, and it was he who, after his death, took over. But the fact that it was Agaday himself, who picked up the reign sometime after Denghis' death and restarted the campaign westwards, took the Mongol Empire to its fullest extent, which was the Mediterranean and, in fact, the gates of Vienna. That was beyond Syria. I was talking about grass as the fuel. This was, in fact, something which they never properly appreciated,

that you could go as far as your horses could gallop. And where the fuel ran out, so the big advantage of having cavalry also ran out, which was why it came to a dead stop at the Mediterranean, because that's where the grass ran out. It's a vast amount of grassland which stretches all the way across to Hungary. And the campaign was from Hungary. It was from Hungary that the need. spread of the Mongol conquest and the fear spread in Europe that they were coming for the rest of

Europe. But they were leaping ahead of ourselves a little bit, but the Mongol conquest of Europe was stopped because back in Mongolia, one of Jenghis' heirs died and everyone had to retreat in order to look after the succession. So we've got to Jengis himself. The furthest he got was Afghanistan. In fact, probably North India, because he was in pursuit of one of his enemies who escaped across the Indus. Jenghis then retreated, and having made his mark in the Muslim world in a big way, left commanders in charge there

and headed back to Central Asia to continue his conquest of North China. And it was on his way to the conquest of Jin and Western Shia when he became ill and died. And he dies in 1227, as the Mongol Empire is still expanding, as you mentioned then, his heirs would go on to take it to its fullest extent. Did he leave structures behind that continued to work after he'd gone? Or you mentioned at the start that the story of the Mongol Empire is really the story of

Jenghis Khan's personality. Was it him that drove it, or did he leave behind structures that could support what he'd built? He drove it. His aim was conquest. There was no grand vision. But it was Ogaday, his heir, who came up with an, ideology based on the conquests. And the argument was this, that if the Mongols were so wonderfully successful as they were and had established the world's biggest empire that anyone knew about, they couldn't possibly achieve this without the backing of heaven. And therefore, the aim,

what could possibly be heaven's aim, God's aim, if you like, in backing the Mongols in the way that they did? Well, it was pretty incomprehensible that they should choose a small tribe in the middle of nowhere for world conquest, but they had to accept the truth that the conquests were there and proof that the whole vision of Mongolian rule from then on should be world conquest. Now, of course, this is completely ludicrous idea in our terms, but from their point of view, not so ludicrous, because nobody had a clue what the full extent of the world was then. They knew about China. They had news of the Islamic world, which they'd taken. They had sent enough troops into Russia to learn about the rest of Europe. And that seemed to be their destiny,

if you like. In fact, I should say that the beginning of the secret history was written in order to tell the story of Jenghis's rise. It says, this is the story of Jenghis Khan, his destiny written by heaven above, and that was after his death. But he himself, I don't think, had a grand vision of heaven-backed conquest. It was conquest itself. That was in his mind. And the great thing about Jenghis was that at each stage in his rise, he became a master of the next level of success. So that as he conquered, he saw that there was no point in conquest unless you were going to have good government.

And that was why he employed talent wherever he could find it. And one of the most remarkable things about him was that having realized that he needed government, he not only employed talent, but he saw that what was necessary was to have records, No Mongol had not kept records because they had no writing. So it was he who introduced the idea of a script into the growing Mongol bureaucracy. And he found this script in the form of a scribe who is a Uyghur.

The Uyghurs we now know live in Xinjiang, but the Uyghurs then were the sort of the Secretariat of Central Asia. And this guy knew how to write Uygh, and it comes from farther west. It's a script that comes from far west called Sogdian, and it's written vertically and it's alphabetical. Now, this is very important because Chinese, as we all know, is extremely difficult. It has several thousand ideograms, all of which have to be learned. It's a really tough job to learn Chinese.

But if you have an alphabetical script, you can learn it in a few days, if you set your mind to it. And the Jengis saw this was a terrific adjunct to government, introduced it, got his print, got the scribe to teach it to his princes. and from then on it became the royal script, if you like, in which records were kept. And so he had the basis of government, talent, and he had records, and finally, taxation as opposed to conquest. And this is what he was able to impose. That was a great idea for gaining wealth from his victims. So do you think he was almost accidentally building a really well-governed empire

by taking it in stages, by getting so far and then realizing he needed structures around it to support it, whether that was a script or a bureaucracy. And he was creating all of those things before he moved on to the next step, and that helped to sustain the growth. It did indeed. It was quite extraordinary from where you think he was, a down and out nothing on the steps of Mongolia, to at each stage realize what was necessary for what was going to become world conquest. And he also saw that he could not keep his victims oppressed and expect to retain their loyalty. And loyalty was the key to his empire. So how do you think we should view Jenghis Khan's legacy in Mongolian terms and perhaps in wider Asian terms, but also in world terms?

He has still the biggest contiguous land empire in history. How should we view his legacy? I think the quality of his leadership is beyond doubt. He was a genius at it. There's a guy called Daniel Goldman who writes about leadership today in political and economic terms. And he lists various what he calls competencies, that is things like, generosity, emotional intelligence, vision, skill, and administration. And there are 18 of these, and Jengis stacks up with about 15 of them. And it makes him an absolutely exceptional leader. I mean, of course he was ruthless, but everybody was ruthless if they could.

He just had the ability to become ruthless on a far wider scale than anybody had dreamed of previously. After his death, what happened was that the empire went on growing until it could grow no further. the empire was divided between his heirs. They all inherited various parts of the empire. But in order to rule there, they had to adopt local modes, the local culture, so that in an Islamic world they became Islamic, for instance. And the big boss of the whole empire for a time was his grandson, Kubla Khan. In Zanadu did Kubla Khan. Everybody knows the poem. A stately pleasure to dame decree. Well, Zanadu was a real place, and that was his first capital.

and he moved to Beijing later on and later conquered, fulfilled his grandfather's vision, or rather Ogadha's vision, conquered all of China and so that the Mongol Empire stretched from over what is today all of China right across briefly to beyond Syria. And indeed, it remains the most stupendous achievement, many times bigger than the empires of Alexander and the Roman world, for instance. How should we view it? Well, that's a remarkable achievement.

you can't tell the history of about a dozen countries all across Eurasia without mentioning the Mongols. And the Kubolai Khan established a dynasty in China, the Yuan dynasty. It was the Mongol dynasty which got thrown out in 1368. They weren't there for very long, but they were a Chinese dynasty. And the Chinese regard this as absolutely crucial part of their history now. For a long time, the Yuan, the Mongols were ignored, but now they're, seen as a thoroughly Chinese dynasty. This does something extremely strange in that it turns Kublai Khan into a Chinese, and he was born a Mongol, obviously. But as Kublai said, the founder of the Iran

dynasty was actually Jenghis Khan. And this, in Chinese eyes, makes him Chinese. So the Mongols are a Chinese minority, and it is part of their outlook on life that the Mongols themselves, all of them, that is Mongolia itself, really Chinese. Now that is going to be highly significant in the world to come, I think, in that the Chinese have now turned on the Wigul minority, as we know from the news, and they've now turned on the Mongol minority in Inner Mongolia. And it may well be that in years to come, we're talking decades, but the Chinese have very long memory, that they will be interested in Mongolia itself. And do you think that will be part of an effort to claim Chengx Khan and Mongolia? Goldenian history as Chinese, they believe it's Chinese history really? Yes, they've always claimed Jengis.

In fact, I was at a place in Inner Mongolia. It was an outdoor museum, and it portrayed all the scenes in the secret history as sort of diaramas, and you could wander around here in North China. And it was obviously a claim to the whole history of Jengis and the whole history of the Mongols, claiming it as Chinese. And the Mongolians are very nervous about these ambitions, but who never is. is how it will all turn out. I suppose perhaps the most telling thing about Jenghis Khan's legacy then is that it still exists in the world today. It's very, very much alive.

In fact, in northern China, Jenghis Khan is an extremely big deal because he's a big tourist attraction so that he has his supposed mausoleum is in China and it draws a couple of million tourists every year. There are Jenghis sites all over the place and wherever they can possibly use him, they will, as a tourist attraction. And of course, he's still the founder of the nation in Mongolia itself, which became independent of China in the early 20th century. It's now been independent for a very nearly a century. The centenary will be coming up fairly soon. It'll be interesting to see what they make of that. But yes, Jengis is very much alive in many ways, spiritual, in his mausoleum, his virtual founder of a new religion. In fact, prayers were said,

on my behalf when I was doing my research to the spirit of Jenghis Khan. And you offer tea and you offer vodka to his statue, which is there, very heavily alive all over, North China and Mongolia. That's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for all of that, John. I felt we've barely scratched the surface of Chengis' story, but also covered decades and square miles and do go out and find John's book and we can all learn an awful lot more about Jenghis Khan. It's called Jenghis Khan, life, death and resurrection. and you'll find it in a bookshop near you

or just order it online these days. As we say, if he has a legacy and an impact in the world today, then he's an important figure for us all to know a little bit more about. And hopefully, we've given you a bit more information about this fascinating and important figure of the medieval period today. So thank you so much for that, John. Well, thank you for having me. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode.

Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcast, from and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.