In the annals of history, few names inspire as much awe and fear as Genghis Khan. And that’s for good reason: he was arguably the greatest conqueror in history, building what would become the largest continental empire ever seen out of a group of squabbling nomadic tribes in central Asia.
That’s not the kind of resumé you get by sheer luck. So what made Genghis and his army so incredibly successful? The truth is more complex than you might realize.
The war machine
From the very moment he was born, Genghis Khan was marked for greatness. At least, that’s what his most contemporary biographers tell us (and why would they lie?): according to the oldest-surviving literary work in the Mongolian language, The Secret History of the Mongols, he was born clutching a blood clot – a sure sign that he would become a brave warrior.
But before he became Genghis Khan – back when he was just Temujin, the tribeless semi-orphan who survived out on the Mongolian steppe by foraging for berries and hunting rats and birds – you probably wouldn’t have guessed how his story would end up.
So how did he get from one extreme to the other? At first, it was through the shrewd establishment of alliances – the earliest of which was to his first wife, Börte. The second-earliest, forged after Börte was kidnapped by a rival tribe, was with a powerful fellow Khan named Toghrul.
Temujin now had an army. And, as he was about to prove, he had an almost preternatural sense for how to use it.
“The strength of the Mongol army lay in its ability to conduct combat operations with an efficiency and effectiveness that far surpassed the abilities of their enemies to resist,” described military historian Richard Gabriel in his 2006 book Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant.
“The Mongols seem to have been the first army to conceive of military command in a manner that stressed objectives while leaving the choice of ways and means to the unit commander,” Gabriel explained. “Stress was placed on initiative, innovation, and flexibility of execution.”
The army under Genghis Khan was unusually well-connected both internally and externally: they employed an innovative system of communication couriers, and embraced the tactics of subterfuge and espionage. And when it was finally time to strike, the enemy wouldn’t know what hit them: the Mongols were nothing short of professional shock troopers, sending in tightly packed lines of horse-mounted archers – fighters who represented a “quantum leap in military technology,” according to historian Frank McLynn, as reported by History Extra.
It wasn’t long before the little Temujin had become ruler of an empire spanning from China to Iran. But that only explains how he got the land – not how he stayed there.
A benevolent tyrant
When you rule over one of the largest empires in the history of the world, you’re going to come into contact with some pretty diverse peoples. For many imperial forces, this has been seen as a problem: consider, say the forced Christianization of the indigenous South and Mesoamericans by the conquistadors, or the Indian Removal Act in the USA.
It may surprise you, given his reputation, that Genghis Khan wasn’t really interested in any such violent measures against different identity groups. “Generally, the Mongols were tolerant of religious differences,” writes Stanford University Professor of History Norman Naimark in his cheerily-titled 2017 book Genocide: A World History, “and, as such, [they] promoted the interaction between the culturally rich communities of faith in Central and South Asia, Europe and the Middle East.”
“The Mongols also held little interest in racial, ethnic, or linguistic distinctions, which in the end fostered communications and the mixing of peoples and cultures in their vast empire,” Naimark continued. “Many of the khans’ most trusted generals and officials represented a wide variety of nationalities and religions from Eurasia.”
Indeed, you need only think back to Genghis Khan’s lasting impressive lineage to see how, ahem, enthusiastically the Mongol occupiers intermingled with the people they conquered. They married locals; hired their craftspeople and took their military advice; they even absorbed and promoted the philosophy and art of the cultures they defeated.
“The widely held image of the Mongols [is of] barbaric plunderers intent on slaughter and destruction,” wrote Morris Rossabi, a Columbia University historian of China and Central and Inner Asia, in 2002. “Little attention has been paid, however, to the significant contribution these steppe peoples made as patrons of the arts during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”
Far from destroying everything they came into contact with, Genghis Khan and his descendants oversaw the building of great cities and infrastructure. They funded the development of medicine and astronomy, and sponsored ambitious engineering projects.
In the arts, they promoted theater and historical scholarship. They “gave employment to Confucian scholars and Tibetan Buddhist monks, encouraging the construction of temples and monasteries,” Rossabi pointed out, and had a “policy of support for trade and the crafts.”
“Though the brutality of their military campaigns cannot be ignored, neither should their impact on Eurasian culture be overlooked,” Rossabi said.
It was, to be honest, a better deal than many were offering at the time – and it was especially enticing when compared to the alternative. And that’s because…
Surrender or die
As open-minded as Genghis Khan was, you wouldn’t like to get on his bad side. His rule for conquered peoples was simple and unwavering: submit, or be destroyed.
“Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used,” wrote Charles Bawden, Emeritus Professor of Mongolian at the University of London, in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “His practice of summoning cities to surrender and of organizing the methodical slaughter of those who did not submit has been described as psychological warfare […] Resistance brought certain destruction.”
Indeed, so extreme was the Mongol policy of razing to the ground those who opposed them that they are frequently described as genocidal by today’s standards. Contemporary Mongol accounting of the number of survivors in conquered Middle Eastern lands show populations only one-tenth of what would be expected had they not arrived; Hungary and China are both said to have had their populations halved by their occupation. Kyiv, according to one European envoy to Genghis Khan’s grandson in 1246, was reduced by the Mongols from “a very large and thickly populated town” to “almost […] nothing, [with] scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery.”
Other conquered lands fared better, but not necessarily by much. Those who attempted to resist militarily – not usually a sensible option, since the Mongols were usually far superior in numbers, ability, and equipment – may have escaped with their lives if the Khanate deemed them useful: “Once the enemy was vanquished, the defeated men were usually separated into distinct groups,” Naimark writes. “Highly valued craftsmen were often spared and sent back to the Mongolian capitals to ply their trades.”
“Women and children were given over to the Mongolian soldiers as slaves and wives and incorporated into Mongolian society,” he continues. “Everyone else was killed, often in groups of victims assigned for execution to individual Mongol soldiers.”
Even a minor perceived slight against Mongol honor could be enough to trigger what would nowadays be considered a genocide. Basically, while the Mongols wouldn’t kill you for your religion or your race, they would destroy everyone in your city right down to your beloved cats and dogs if you didn’t show them unwavering loyalty. And when you put it like that, it’s not much of a choice, is it?
“The Mongolian empire spread through sheer terror,” Naimark writes. “What prince and population would be willing to resist the Mongols knowing that the fate of extermination awaited them?”
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