Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

by Jack Weatherford

The Tayichiud did not know of Temujin’s wound, and during the night many of them began to sneak off the battlefield. By the next morning, most of the warriors had fled, and Temujin sent his warriors in pursuit. As he had done with the defeated Jurkin, Temujin killed off most of their leaders but accepted the rest as his own followers.

Temujin sought an end to the constant fighting between such groups, and he wanted to deal with the Tatars the same way that he had dealt with the Jurkin and the Tayichiud clans—kill the leaders and absorb the survivors and all their goods and animals into his tribe.

Once again, as a counter to the killing, Temujin wanted the surviving Tatars taken in as full members of his tribe, not as slaves. To stress this, he not only adopted another Tatar child for his mother, but also encouraged intermarriage. Until this time he had only one official wife, Borte, who bore him four sons and an unknown number of daughters, but he now took the aristocratic Tatar Yesugen and her elder sister Yesui as additional wives.

Intermarriage and adoption would not suffice, however, to achieve Temujin’s goal of merging the two large groups into one people. If kin groups were allowed to remain essentially intact, the larger group would eventually fragment. In 1203, therefore, the year after the Tatar conquest, Temujin ordered yet another, and even more radical, reformation of the Mongol army and tribe.

He organized his warriors into squads, or arban, of ten who were to

be brothers to one another. No matter what their kin group or tribal origin, they were ordered to live and fight together as loyally as brothers; in the ultimate affirmation of kinship, no one of them co...

by forcing them into new units that no man could desert or change, under penalty of death, he broke the power of the old-system lineages, clans, tribes, and ethnic identities.

integrated by means of the army. Under this new system, all members of the tribe—regardless of age or gender—had to perform a certain amount of public service.

Only about one day’s ride from Ong Khan’s court, Temujin learned that the wedding invitation was a plot against him. Ong Khan had assembled his army secretly and intended to kill him and wipe out his family.

The men shared in drinking the muddy waters and swore eternal allegiance to him. In the retelling of the episode in oral history, it became known in history as the Baljuna Covenant, and acquired a

mythic aura as the lowest point in the military fortunes of Temujin Khan

After hiding at Baljuna, Temujin formulated his plan to counterattack. He knew that he had to move quickly while Ong Khan was still basking in his false confidence of having permanently rid himself of Temujin’s threat.

Meanwhile, to celebrate his victory over Temujin, the still unsuspecting Ong Khan organized a large feast

Suddenly, Temujin, who was thought to be several days’ ride away, swooped down on the revelers; his men had surrounded the entire camp. Over the next three days of hard fighting the Kereyid retreated before the advancing army of Temujin.

Ong Khan’s army was not so much defeated as swallowed by Temujin’s forces. The Kereyid court fled in different directions, with each man for himself.

Propaganda and control of public opinion were quickly emerging as Temujin’s primary weapons of choice.

Rather than committing to an all-out battle, which he might easily lose because of his smaller numbers, Temujin picked at the Naiman with small and unpredictable hit-and-run skirmishes.

After attacking, the squads fled in different directions, leaving the enemy wounded but unable to

retaliate before the attackers disappeared.

forces easily defeated the few remaining Naiman and “finished Tayang Khan.” Among the warriors who had successfully

outcast bandit with a small number of followers who fed themselves on wild animals. In an odd reversal of fate, the once aristocratic Jamuka had been reduced to the same state of existence that the young Temujin had faced when his father died.

Jamuka’s followers, desperate and resigned to defeat, seized him and delivered him to Temujin. Despite the animosity between the two men, Temujin valued loyalty above all else. Rather than reward the men who brought Jamuka to him, Temujin had all of them executed in front of the leader whom they had betrayed.

But rather than asking for mercy in the end, Jamuka asked for death, with a single request—that they kill him in the aristocratic way without shedding his blood on the earth or exposing it to the sun and sky.

In Temujin’s long quest for control of the Mongol clans, Temujin had defeated every tribe on the steppe and removed the threat of

every aristocratic lineage by killing off their men and marrying their women to his sons and other followers.

Temujin now ranked as undisputed ruler of a vast land, controlling everything from the Gobi in the south to the Arctic tundra in the

north,

Temujin allowed another year to restore peace and mend relations before he called the khuriltai to install him in office.

Temujin controlled a vast territory roughly the size of modern western Europe, but with a population of about a million people of the different nomadic tribes under his control and probably some 15 to 20 million animals.

Like most successful rulers, Genghis Khan understood the political potential of solemn ceremony and grand spectacle.

In order to maintain peace in this large and ethnically diverse set of tribes that he had forged into one nation, he quickly proclaimed new laws to suppress the traditional causes of tribal feuding and war.

Genghis Khan’s first new law reportedly forbade the kidnapping of women, almost certainly a reaction to the kidnapping of his wife Borte.

Concomitant with an end to kidnapping, he forbade the abduction and enslavement of any Mongol.

Based upon his own experiences over the disruptions that surrounded questions of the legitimacy of children, he declared all children legitimate, whether born to a wife or a concubine.

Because haggling over the

value of a wife as though she were a camel could provoke lingering dissension among his men, he forbade the ...

For the same reasons, he outlaw...

adultery applied to relations between married people of separate households. As long as it did not cause a public strife between families, it did not rank as a crime.

Genghis Khan made animal rustling a capital offense.

Any person who found such goods, money, or animals and did not turn them in to the appropriate supervisor would be treated as a thief; the penalty for theft was execution.

In probably the first law of its kind anywhere in the world, Genghis Khan decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone.

Genghis Khan made a number of laws designed specifically to prevent fighting over the office of khan. According to his law, the khan must always be elected by a khuriltai.

Genghis Khan ordered the adoption of a writing system.

This close association between writing and the keeping of the law in Genghis Khan’s administration probably accounts for why the Mongolian word for book, nom, was derived from the Greek nomos, meaning “law.” In the Mongol world of the thirteenth century, the law and the written word were one and the same.

Peace and prosperity bred their own problems for Genghis Khan. Six years of peace allowed, or possibly encouraged, the intrigues and the petty rivalries that threatened to undo Genghis Khan’s hard-fought unification of the tribes.

With a steadfastly loyal army and without family or old aristocrats as rivals, new trouble arose from an unexpected source: Teb Tengeri, Genghis Khan’s shaman.

humiliation of his youngest brother, Borte angrily explained to Genghis Khan that by allowing Teb Tengeri so much power, Genghis Khan’s own sons were in danger. Just as she had been the one to advise Temujin to break with Jamuka back when they had combined their followers, she now demanded that he break with Teb Tengeri and his family.

Teb Tengeri was the last rival Genghis Khan had to face from the steppe tribes. What he could not control he had destroyed. He had neutralized the power of his own relatives, killed the lineages of aristocrats and all rival khans, abolished the old tribes, redistributed the people and, finally, allowed the most powerful shaman on the steppe to be killed.

into the drama with Jamuka and Ong Khan that without them, his large tribe seemed to lack an objective or purpose. Without enemies, they lacked a reason to hold together.

The visit of the Uighurs highlighted the contrast between the wealth of the agricultural civilization and the poverty of the steppe tribes. Genghis Khan commanded a great army but presided over a largely impoverished people, while to the south, beyond the Gobi, there flowed an intermittent but impressive stream of goods along the Silk Route. He was ready for the opportunity to redress this imbalance of goods