When I think of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, I think of a horde of barbarians on horseback, the sound thundering of hooves echoing through the ground, an intimidating warcry, and a trail of chaos and destruction. I’m sure you had something similar in mind too. While this stereotype has some element of truth in it, there is so much more to the group of nomads of the Eurasian Steppe who united the largest land mass under a single empire known to history. During the Enlightenment, writers like Voltaire used Genghis Khan and the Mongols as an analogy to attack European leaders through metaphor to avoid being persecuted. Thanks to the broken telephone effect, these hyperbolical writings started being interpreted at face value, and so a negative connotation of the Mongols was developed.
Weatherford spends the first half of the book biographising Genghis Khan. In childhood, his father was killed, and his mother and siblings were abandoned by his tribe as dead weight. He was sold into slavery and escaped, killed his older brother to become the head of the family, and assembled a powerful network and following. He wanted to put an end to the generational grudges held between tribes that perpetuated an endless cycle of raids. He gave amnesty to his supporters, but defeated his opposition so ruthlessly that it would be impossible for them to recover. He ran a meritocracy but leveraged aristocracy to forge alliances. He declared religious freedom for all, and laws that no one, including himself, was above. He encouraged intermarriage and adoption to assimilate new tribes into his own. He was the ultimate pragmatist.
The second half of the book is a summary of the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan would be in his mid-40s by the time he united the Mongol tribes. For the remaining 20 years of his life from 1206 to 1227, and throughout the rest of the century, his Empire would grow to encompass the steppes of Eurasia, China and Indochina, India, the Middle East, and parts of Russia and Eastern Europe. The Mongols had an outsized impact on the world. Never before had so much knowledge been shared over such a long distance. Monetary policy, the decimal system, and other standards were widely adopted out of necessity. The combined wisdom of China, the Middle East, and Europe led to modernised siege weapons like the cannon that began to render city walls obsolete*. The European Renaissance would have been delayed by centuries if not for the massive exchange of knowledge under the Mongols. Likewise, gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, the three things that the world was built on (according to Francis Bacon) may not have been possible without this massive knowledge transfer.
Ultimately, the Mongol empire came to an untimely end due to the Bubonic Plague of the 1350s. But by then, the Mongols had irrevocably made their mark on the world. I know this was more of a summary than a book review, but I learned so much from the book that I can’t help but share.
IRL Update (07/09/2023): Nothing too exciting going on. The summer has been a lot busier than expected, but still enjoyable. Also, I’m starting to read every night again.
*I wonder how many more decades or centuries Constantinople could have resisted the Ottomans had modern siege weapons not existed!