Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

by Jack Weatherford

If one khan refused to furnish the shares to other members of the family, they would refuse to send him his share in their territories. Mutual financial interests trumped political squabbles.

The Mongol elite’s intimate involvement with trade represented a marked break with tradition.

The feudal rulers sought to have their peasants supply all their own needs—to produce their food, grow their timber, make their tools, and weave their cloth—and to trade for as little as possible. In a feudal system, reliance on imported goods represented a failure at home.

Even the most trivial items might yield a great profit, as when the new commerce sparked a rapid spread of card playing because merchants and soldiers found the light and easily transported game an entertaining and novel pastime.

Merely by studying the physical remains of a place, archaeologists can trace the growth of Hindu, Aztec, Malian, Incan, or Arab empires. By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered. They brought no distinctive architectural style with them. Nor did they seek to impose their language and religion on the conquered since in most cases they forbade non-Mongols to learn their language. The Mongols did not force cultivation of an alien crop nor impose radical change on their subjects’ collective way of life.

Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.

The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.

Across the intervening century, the Mongols had come to represent sumptuous trade goods and luxurious rarities to the Europeans. The word Tartar no longer signified unbridled terror; instead, the Italian writers Dante and Boccaccio and the English writer Chaucer used the phrase Panni Tartarici, “Tartar cloth,” or “Tartar satin,” as terms for the finest cloth in the world.

As early as 1620, the English scientist Francis Bacon recognized the impact that changing technology had produced in Europe. He designated printing, gunpowder, and the compass as three technological innovations on which the modern world was built.

The fictional Tatar in the debate echoed precisely the words of Mongke Khan to the French envoy when he denounced the pernicious enmity among the religions of the world: “It is proper to keep the commandments of God. But the Jews say they have received these commandments from Moses, the Arabs say they have them from Muhammad, and the Christians from Jesus. And there are perhaps other nations who honor their prophets, through whose hands they assert they have received the divine precepts. Therefore, how shall we arrive at concord?” The Mongol answer had been that simple religious concord could only be produced by subsuming all religions under the power of the state.

Whereas writers used the Muslims to represent everything that the Europeans despised, they saturated the Mongol story with romantic images of a much better world, which in some ways was considered a utopia, the ideal society. The imagery of Mongol greatness received its clearest statement around 1390 by Geoffrey Chaucer, who had traveled widely in France and Italy on diplomatic business and had a far more international perspective than many of the people for whom he wrote. In The Canterbury Tales,

In 1331, chroniclers recorded that 90 percent of the people of Hopei Province died. By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million.

China functioned as the manufacturing center of the Mongol World System, and as the goods poured out of China, the disease followed, seemingly

One of the few effective measures was taken by the city of Milan. As soon as plague broke out in a house, officials raced to seal up the entire house with everyone—sick and well, friends and servants—sealed inside.

Despite a papal bull from Pope Clement VI in July 1348 protecting the Jews and ordering the Christians to stop their persecutions,

The plague not only isolated Europe, but it also cut off the Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia. The Mongol rulers in Persia could no longer procure the goods from the lands and workshops they owned in China. The Golden Family in China could not get its goods from Russia or Persia. With each group cut off from the other, the interlocking system of ownership collapsed. The plague had devastated the country, demoralized the living, and, by cutting off trade and tribute, deprived the Mongol Golden Family of its primary source of support. For nearly a century, the Mongols had exploited their mutual material interests to overcome the political fault lines dividing them. Even while sacrificing political unity, they had maintained a unified cultural and commercial empire. With the onslaught of plague, the center could not hold, and the complex system collapsed.

Deprived of their two advantages of military strength and commercial lucre, the Mongols in Russia, central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East searched for new modes of power and legitimacy by intermarrying with their subjects and consciously becoming more like them in language, religion, and culture.

purged the remaining elements of shamanism, Buddhism, and Christianity from their families and strengthened their commitment to Islam, which was the primary religion of their subjects, or, in the case of the Golden Horde in Russia, the religion of the Turkic army that helped keep the family in power.

During the reign of Oljeitu, the most committed of the Shiites, a severe persecution of minority groups such as Buddhists and Jews was unleashed. The universal principles of Genghis Khan’s empire disappeared like ashes in the wind.

In the mounting paranoia, Mongol authorities ordered the confiscation not only of all weapons from the Chinese people, but their iron agricultural tools as well, and limited the use of knives. They forbade the Chinese to use horses, and in fear of secret messages being passed, they stopped performances of Chinese opera and the traditional storytelling and other public and private gatherings. In the face of such extreme measures, the Chinese subjects, in turn, became increasingly discontented and still more mistrustful and fearful of their Mongol rulers. Rumors circulated regarding the mass extermination of Chinese children by the Mongols or of plans to kill everyone bearing specific Chinese family names.

In their new effort to be as un-Chinese as possible, the Mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to its Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese.

The Tibetan Buddhist monks in particular became the object of hatred, since local people along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligation not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for them as well. The monks, often armed, acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them.

The Tibetan clergy encouraged new forms of religious practice in their Tantric rites that proclaimed the path of enlightenment via sexual acts. This movement not only produced a vigorous display of sexual art, but it also encouraged the royal family to engage in elaborate sexual dances and rituals that centered on the eager participation of the Great Khan himself under the watchful eye of the lamas.

Those that managed to return to Mongolia resumed their nomadic way of pastoralism, almost as if the entire Chinese episode from 1211 until 1368 had been merely an extended stay at their southern summer camp. The Golden Horde of Russia broke into smaller hordes that declined steadily in power through four long centuries. During such an extended interaction, the Mongols and their Turkic allies amalgamated with each other into several different ethnic groups of Turco-Mongols that maintained a separate identity from one another as well as from the larger Slavic society.

They expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders whom the Mongols had encouraged to settle in China,

After an abortive effort to revitalize the Mongol trade system, the new rulers burned their ocean vessels, banned foreign travel for Chinese, and spent a large portion of the gross national product on building massive new walls to lock foreigners out and the Chinese in. In so doing, the new Chinese authorities stranded thousands of their citizens living in the ports of Southeast Asia.

Instead of returning to the control of Arabs who had been the traders, the intermediaries, the bankers, the shippers, and the caravan drivers who connected Asia and Europe, a new cultural hybrid emerged that combined a Turco-Mongol military system with the legal institutions of Islam and the ancient cultural traditions of Persia. The eastern part of the Muslim world had found a new cultural freedom in which they could still be Muslims but without the domination of Arabs, whom they never allowed to regain power. New dynasties, such as the Ottoman of Turkey, the Safavid of Persia, and the Moghul of India, sometimes called Gunpowder Empires, relied primarily on the vast innovations in Mongol weaponry, a military organization based on both a cavalry and an armed infantry, and the use of firearms, to fight foreign enemies and, perhaps more important, to maintain domestic power over their ethnically varied subjects.

Following their purge of Mongol influence in public life, the Ming rulers went to great effort searching for the official seal of the Mongols, and they preserved the use of the Mongol language in diplomacy as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. As late as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Chinese court sent its letters in the Mongol language. In turn, the Manchu, who overthrew the Ming in 1644, strategically intermarried with the descendants of Genghis Khan so that they could claim legitimacy as his heirs in blood as well as in spirit.

Because Timur claimed to be a Mongol, and was legitimately a son-in-law to the dynasty of Genghis Khan, his deeds became inextricably intertwined with those of the original Mongols in the minds of the people who had been conquered by both. One Mongol was hard to distinguish from another. When Timur delighted in public torture or piled up pyramids of heads outside his conquered cities, it was assumed that he was carrying on the traditions of his Mongol people. The practices of Timur were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan.

Columbus, therefore, insisted that although the Muslims barred the land route from Europe to the Mongol court, he could sail west from Europe across the World Ocean and arrive in the land described by Marco Polo.

Genghis Khan ended the play with a question: “. . . what have I gained by all my victories, by all my guilty laurels stained with blood?” To which Voltaire answered: “. . . the tears, the sighs, the curses of mankind.” With these words, Voltaire himself began the modern cursing of the Mongols. Despite all the negative images of Genghis Khan, Voltaire’s real target was the French king, whom he was too afraid to criticize directly. Instead, he projected his France, with the Mongols representing all that was wicked.

The new critique appeared obliquely in the work of Italian poet and playwright Giovanni Casti, who spent much time in the Hapsburg court and later in the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. Unwilling to openly criticize the monarchs who supported him, he used the image of the Mongols as his foil in Poema Tartaro and in the 1778 opera Kublai, the Great Khan of the Tartars, for which Antonio Salieri, the rival of Wolfgang Mozart at the Hapsburg court, composed the music. Recognizing the potentially dangerous ideas in the play, the Holy Roman Emperor suppressed the opera in fear

The most pernicious rationale for Asian inferiority did not emerge from the philosophers and artists in Europe, however, as much as from the scientists, the new breed of intellectuals spawned by the Enlightenment.

he classified all of them under the rubric Mongols. European scientists rapidly accepted his theory, making it scientific gospel. The categories, of course, also implied an evolutionary ranking of the different races

The supposed horrors of Genghis Khan and the Mongols became part of the excuse for rule by the more civilized English, Russian, and French colonialists.

By contrast, Nehru depicted Genghis Khan as a part of an ancient struggle of Asian people against European domination.

If they could all unite the way the Mongol Empire had once been, then together they could much better fight off the growing power of the Western nations. The theory offered a way for the Asians to transcend nationalist loyalties and work together in their shared quest. In Inner Mongolia, the new spirit led to the temporary creation of a calendar based on the year 1206, when Genghis Khan created the Mongol nation, as Year 1. Under the new Mongol calendar, 1937 became the Genghis Khan Year 731.

Virtually unnoticed in 1944 during the final bellowing paroxysms of World War II, Sayid Alim Khan, the former emir of Bukhara and the last reigning descendant of Genghis Khan, died in Kabul, Afghanistan, after nearly a quarter of a century in exile from the city he had ruled as a young man. The emir, who claimed descent through Jochi and the Golden Horde, had outlasted other branches of the family.

The Soviets turned Mongolia into a buffer zone that they kept largely empty between themselves and the Chinese. Just as the British executed the sons and grandson of the last Moghul emperor of India in the nineteenth century, the Soviets purged the known descendants of Genghis Khan remaining in Mongolia in the twentieth century, marching whole families into the woods to be shot and buried in unmarked pits, exiling them into the gulag of Soviet camps across Siberia where they were worked to death, or simply causing their mysterious disappearance into the night of history.

Somewhere in the 1960s, eight centuries after the birth of Genghis Khan, his sulde, the Spirit Banner that he had carried across Eurasia, disappeared from where the Communist authorities had kept it.

The clash between the nomadic and urban cultures did not end with Genghis Khan, but it would never again reach the level to which he brought it. Civilization pushed the tribal people toward the ever more distant edges of the world. Chiefs such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Lakota Sioux, Red Eagle of the Muskogee, Tecumseh of the Shawnee, and Shaka Zulu of South Africa valiantly but vainly continued the quest of Genghis Khan over the coming centuries. Without knowing anything about the Mongols or Genghis Khan, these other chiefs faced the same struggles and fought the same battles across Africa and throughout the Americas, but history had moved beyond them. In the end, sedentary civilization won the long world war; the future belonged to the civilized children of Cain, who eternally encroached upon the open lands of the tribes.

they also arrested Lkhagvasuren’s father for being too much of a nationalist. They sent his stepmother into internal exile far out in the country, and as the children of political prisoners Lkhagvasuren and his younger siblings were turned out into the streets of Ulaanbaatar. In the months before the authorities came to take him away to the Children’s Prison, he managed to heap enough dirt over a small shed outside of town to serve as a home for his siblings through the winter while they would be alone. After spending his teen years in prison and in forced service on a distant border, he resumed the archaeological work of his mentor.