Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

by Jack Weatherford

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.

In Europe, the Mongols slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent, but, disappointed with the general poverty of the area compared with the Chinese and Muslim countries, turned away and did not bother to conquer the cities, loot the countries, or incorporate them into the expanding empire.

As part of the second oath-swearing ceremony, boys often swallowed a small amount of each other’s blood, thereby exchanging a part of their soul.

Learning of what had taken place outside by the horses, the drunken guests began fighting among themselves. As was customary, they had entered the feast without their weapons; so the guests began throwing the dishes of food at one another, and clubbing each other with the paddles used to stir the fermented mare’s milk that had been consumed in great quantity.

No one had ever defeated Buri, but in his fear of Temujin’s wrath, he allowed Belgutei to throw him. Normally, at this point the match would have been finished, but Temujin and Belgutei apparently worked out a different plan. Belgutei seized Buri’s shoulders and mounted his rump like a horse, and upon receiving a signal from Temujin, he plunged his knee into Buri’s back and snapped his spinal cord. Belgutei then dragged Buri’s paralyzed body outside the camp, leaving him to die alone.

Before the battle, the rival shamans foretold the future by reading the cracks in the burned shoulder bones of sheep.

The shamans added to the occasion by climbing up on a promontory to pound their drums and beat magical rocks with which they could summon supporting spirits and control the weather.

“Have you seen these?” she demanded angrily of Genghis Khan as she held up her withered breasts with both hands. “These are the breasts that you sucked!” She then launched into a long tirade against her son.

The young Mongol knelt “reverently upon the ground” and, “with the deepest gratitude,” acknowledged himself “to be a Mongol slave of inferior ability, perfectly unable to repay in the slightest degree the Imperial favours of which his family have been the recipients for generations past, he declares his intention of performing his duties to the best of his feeble powers.” He then “turned himself toward the Palace and beat his head upon the ground . . . in grateful acknowledgement of the Imperial bounty.”

He attracted Mongol attention because of his training in astrology and the esoteric art of scapulimancy, divining the future by reading the cracks in the heated shoulder blade of a sacrificed sheep or goat.

Although Persian and other Muslim chroniclers recorded the episode in tremendous detail, the Secret History summed up the entire campaign in one simple sentence. “Jebe pursued Guchlug Khan of the Naiman, overtook him at the Yellow Cliff, destroyed him, and came home.” From the Mongol perspective, that is probably all that mattered.

The Germans then gathered captive children and strapped them into their catapults, which were normally used to batter down walls and break through gates. With the power of these great siege machines, they hurled the living children at the city walls.

No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

While the clerics debated at Karakorum, their religious brethren were hacking at each other and burning one another alive in other parts of the world outside the Mongol Empire. At almost the same time of Rubruck’s debate in Mongolia, his sponsor, King Louis IX, was busy rounding up all Talmudic texts and other books of the Jews. The devout king had the Hebrew manuscripts heaped into great piles and set afire. During Rubruck’s absence from France, his fellow countrymen burned some twelve thousand handwritten and illuminated Jewish books. For these and other great services to the furtherance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his church canonized him as Saint Louis, thereby making him a figure of veneration that good Christians could emulate and to whom they could pray as an intermediary between humans and God.

The Mongols offered no counterpart to the common public entertainment of burning people alive that occurred so frequently in western Europe wherever the Christian church had the power to do so.

Prior to the Mongol era, the area that today composes the countries of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia had been decisively Indian in culture and followed the architectural styles, religious practices, and mythology of Hindu India. The Mongols and the Chinese immigrants whom they had brought created a new hybrid culture that thereafter became known as Indo-Chinese.

The next morning, to recover from the excessive drinking, eating, and indulging of every appetite, the khan’s mobile unit of doctors and pharmacists served him a tea made from orange peel, kudzu flowers, ginseng, sandalwood, and cardamom. Sipped on an empty stomach, the tea was guaranteed to overcome a hangover and make the khan fit for another day of hunting, eating, and drinking.

The Spirit Banner led him on a frivolous round of entertainments that ultimately meant nothing and ended nowhere.

A particularly smooth and glossy type of silk became known in the West as satin, taking its name from the Mongol port of Zaytun from which Marco Polo sailed on his return to Europe.

He also notes the Mongol puzzlement at Christian ritual and theology, in particular that “among these various forms of sacrifice there is the Christian sacrifice, in which they offer bread and wine, and say it is the body and blood of Christ. That they eat and drink this sacrifice after the oblations seems most abominable. They devour what they worship.”

Inside and outside the cities, the closed and polluted environments of monasteries and convents provided an ideal opportunity for the disease to kill everyone, a tragedy from which European monasticism in particular, and the Roman Catholic church in general, never recovered.

In 1867, Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, Medical Superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, England, formalized the new system of categories in “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots” in the British Journal of Mental Science.