About three-quarters of the way through his compendious and thoughtful book, Frank McLynn pauses to wonder whether Genghis Khan might ever have considered calling a halt to his invasions. But what then would have become of his unpaid followers, who lived by pillaging the lands they conquered?
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Given the bare terrain and harsh climate of the steppe from which they had come, how could they possibly have been accommodated, had they returned home? And what, for that matter, did “home” mean to people so relentlessly mobile that they reckoned each man needed five horses if he was to live well? “Like the shark,” writes McLynn, “or Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen,” the Mongols could not but advance.
And advance they did, with a speed and efficiency that astonished. The ancient Scythians were “invincible,” Herodotus wrote, because they “have no cities: they shoot with bows from horsesback; they live off herds of cattle, not from tillage, and their dwellings are on their wagons.” Fifteen hundred years later Genghis Khan led another nomadic people out of central Asia to prove him right.
As a boy, Genghis early demonstrated his ferocity and his resourcefulness. Hearing of the power of the Jin empire, he asked why, if the Chinese were so mighty, they bothered with trade. Why not take by force whatever they wanted? When his half-brother tied a fish he had caught, he shot him full of arrows. He was taken prisoner by a rival clan and disabled by a cangue – a horribly ingenious thing made of two heavy boards locked together around a man's neck, and too wide for him to bring his hand to his mouth. In a cangue, most men starved. The 14-year-old future khan jumped into a river and, using his as a float, made his escape. Half a century later, still illiterate, still failing to see the point of peaceful coexistence with neighboring peoples, he had made himself master of Asia from the China Sea to Bokhara.
McLynn offers a “sober estimate” of 37.5 million as the number of people for whose deaths Genghis Khan was responsible. Repeatedly he promised his opponents he would spare them, only to slaughter them once they had laid down their arms. He has permitted his armies to loot and destroy great cities. After their victories, thousands of women were raped and thousands of men captured and used as a human shields in battle – being pushed to the front and killed by the arrows of their next opponent, allowing the Mongol horde to wait, unscathed, until the moment came for the decisive charge.
Genghis declared that he had been divinely appointed to rule the world, but his idea of divinity was crudely utilitarian. Towards the end of his life he summoned a Chinese sage, Chang Chun. Chang set out reluctantly on a three-year journey, finally catching up with the conqueror near Kabul. I have preached to him against drinking, hunting and sex. Genghis, who had female prisoners paraded before him after battle so that he could pick out the prettiest for himself, took little notice, and abruptly asked Chang for the elixir of life. When the sage told him there was no such thing he modified his demands of him. If not immortality, then could not Chang and his disciples of him, “praying continually on my behalf,” at least procure him longevity? Yet his lack of interest in religious nuance made him tolerant, unlike his opponents. Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, Muslim, I have slaughtered them all, but not for their faith.
What can we learn from this terrible man? The Mongols left no fine buildings, no artefacts. Their genius was for killing. They could fill the sky with a cloud of arrows while riding at full gallop, guiding their tough little horses with their legs, a skill that allowed them to conquer large parts of the world but whose only trace is one of ruined cities, burnt libraries and house-high pyramids of human skulls. Yet McLynn makes a case for Genghis as a brilliant political innovator. Archery and horsemanship, however prodigious, could not have been made in an empire, had it not been for the masterful way he reinvented Mongolia, transforming a chronically unstable society of warring clans into a unified and disciplined war machine.
The world in which he grew up was one of tribes riven by vendetta. There was a code of honor, but not one of social responsibility. Any man could become a clan leader, so every other candidate to the position was his rival. Always on the move with their immense herds, the pastoralists became cattle rustlers, initiating yet more feuds. Punishment for disloyalty or betrayal was instant death. Blood was venerated, so the Mongols didn't use their knives, preferring to strangle their victims or roll them in carpets and stomp on them until their backs broke.
Once Genghis had achieved dominance, he broke up the old loyalties, and the old hostilities, by a system that McLynn calls “supertribalism”, organizing all Mongols into units of ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, all answerable to him. It was a military hierarchy for an aggressive new nation and