Genghis Khan And the Making of the Modern World
August 12th, 2009
One of the greatest Khan books on our bookshelf (there are many, infact) is by Jake Weatherford, and does a great job of showing Khan and his family's full impact on the world.
If you're looking to pick up his family biography where ours leaves off, this is the book for you.
From Publishers Weekly:
Apart from its inapt title, Genghis Khan dies rather early on in this account and many of the battles are led by his numerous offspring. This book is a successful account of the century of turmoil brought to the world by a then little-known nation of itinerant hunters.
In researching this book, Weatherford (Savages and Civilization), a professor of anthropology at Macalaster College, traveled thousands of miles, many on horseback, tracing Genghis Khan's steps into places unseen by Westerners since the khan's death and employing what he calls an "archeology of movement." Weatherford knows the story of the medieval Mongol conquests is gripping enough not to need superfluous embellishments "the personalities and the wars they waged provide plenty of color and suspense."
In just 25 years, in a manner that inspired the blitzkrieg, the Mongols conquered more lands and people than the Romans had in over 400 years. Without pausing for too many digressions, Weatherford's brisk description of the Mongol military campaign and its revolutionary aspects analyzes the rout of imperial China, a siege of Baghdad and the razing of numerous European castles.
On a smaller scale, Weatherford also devotes much attention to dismantling our notions of Genghis Khan as a brute. By his telling, the great general was a secular but faithful Christian, a progressive free trader, a regretful failed parent and a loving if polygamous husband. With appreciative descriptions of the sometimes tender tyrant, this chronicle supplies just enough personal and world history to satisfy any reader.
Review From School Library Journal:
Adult/High School–An interesting, thought-provoking account of the conqueror's life and legacy. From his early years as the son of a widow abandoned by her clan, he showed remarkable ability as a charismatic leader and unifier.
In 25 years, his army amassed a greater empire than the Romans had been able to achieve in 400. Whether judged on population or land area, it was twice as large as that of any other individual in history. This colorful retelling discusses many of the innovations that marked Khan's rule and contributed to his success.
Although his name is now erroneously associated with terror and slaughter, he showed surprising restraint during a time when few others in power did. He allowed freedom of religion, encouraged free trade, developed a paper currency, and observed diplomatic immunity.
As he encountered new cultures, he adopted or adapted their best practices, and constantly updated his military strategies. Although Khan's death occurs at the midpoint of this book, the tales of his survivors' exploits and the gradual fall of the Mongol dynasties are engaging and informative.
Weatherford's efforts to credit Genghis Khan and his descendants with the ideas and innovations that created the Renaissance are a bit bewildering, but readers will be left with a new appreciation of a maligned culture, and a desire to learn more.–Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
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When Genghis Khan and his armies exploded out of the steppe in the early thirteenth century, no one on the Eurasian continent was prepared for his innovative style of warfare. Through years of what was essentially civil war, the Mongols of that period, as well as the surrounding tribes, had already refined various elements of shock warfare. But Temujin – Genghis Khan’s birth name – added much to the Mongols’ arsenal that was previously missing. He integrated surrounding tribes into his Mongol army; he ensured looting was strictly controlled and that shares of it were divided on a pre-assigned basis; he killed off the aristocracies of the tribes, cities, and empires he defeated, thereby ensuring they would not rally their people to turn on him at a later time; he organized his armies, and even his society, through a decimal system that smoothed the functioning of his eventual empire; he instituted laws that even he, a great khan, must obey.
What resulted from these innovations was unprecedented: an army with the same benefits of speed and maneuver that had always been a part of the traditional tactics of the tribes of the steppe melded together with an effective bureaucratic leadership that was very different from the typical kin-based and ad hoc tribal relationships. This was Temujin’s creation, and he perfected it in numerous battles to unify Mongolia under his leadership. In 1206, two years after the final battle to assume control of all Mongolia, he took the name Genghis Khan, and prepared to take his army out into the world.
Jack Weatherford’s remarkable narrative of these events captures the creativity of Genghis Khan and the Mongols in a way that no book I’ve read before ever has. Whereas most histories of the Mongols have long emphasized their unprecedented success in war, Weatherford builds a solid case that shows the social and economic achievements of the Mongols may have been even more remarkable than their adaptations to warfare. The author makes the argument that the Mongols were fairly civilized by the standards of the thirteenth century, almost never engaging in torture, mutilation, or maiming. While they were quick to kill, and left an unprecedented path of destruction in their path, especially to those who resisted their rule, conquest and loot were their goals, not gratuitous death and injury.
After making himself the undisputed ruler of the steppes, an area about the size of Western Europe, Genghis Khan began moving south and west, conquering the Jurched (Manchurian) tribes ruling Northern China and the kingdom of Khwarizm, an empire under the rule of a Turkic sultan that stretched from what is modern Afghanistan to the Black Sea. Khwarizm was an important catch, as the Muslims there were noted for their steel- and glass-making, as well as numerous exotic commodities. As each conquest was assimilated, Genghis Khan took what was special and distinctive about the place and employed it productively. Craftsmen, miners, artisans, interpreters, and specialists in warfare were all absorbed into the Mongol Empire and tasked according to their specialty. The Mongols were nomads, but the genius of Genghis Khan was to recognize the value of even the smallest and most foreign of civilized talents and to use it to his empire’s advantage.
Genghis Khan died in 1227 – a mere sixteen years after he began his world conquest. With the exception of India and China, he had conquered everything he set his mind to. It would now be up to his sons and their children to finish what in the shortness of time he could not. (Genghis Khan dies about halfway through Weatherford’s book, leaving plenty of space to write about the continued expansion of the empire.) Interestingly, the empire seems to have expanded more by the momentum of its founder’s achievements, even after his death, than by the skill of his heirs. Genghis Khan had always been careful not to give his children too much power, as he sought to break away from the traditional kin-based ties of the steppe in order to more smoothly run his empire. In mediating disputes involving his sons, he sometimes took the side of non-kin against them. Until late in his life, he neglected their training as leaders. The consequences of this became immediately apparent in the actions of his son and first heir to the empire, Ogodei.
But, even with sub par and occasionally strife-ridden leadership, the empire continued to expand. Some of the Mongol leaders to follow Genghis Khan were exceptional leaders, while others were not, but the combination of unbeatable virtues in the empire was fixed in a way that it hardly mattered in the first few decades after his death. Nothing outside of the empire could stop it, only enduring struggles from within. As Weatherford details, even as the empire began to split into four quadrants, trade and other imperial activities continued. Two Mongol rulers from separate quadrants could be at war with each other and still allow trade and investments between the sides to continue unmolested. Eventually this relationship would break down, and when it did, it would spell the end of the empire. The Mongols did not create anything. They conquered and looted. And the trade routes needed to move their loot from one part of the empire to another were necessary to keep the empire strong. When those trade routes began to close down, and the economy contracted, the Mongol rulers in each area needed to depend on their local political skills to survive. Some did, but others never made the transition.
Weatherford’s book is a marvel – the best of more than half-a-dozen histories I have read on the subject. Writing about the Mongols has always been a complex task for two seemingly contradictory reasons. On the one hand, their widespread empire requires a scholar to dig through a variety of source material written by those conquered by the Mongols, which many find daunting; on the other hand, the Mongols themselves were illiterate and secretive, and so their own literature was almost nonexistent and, when found, difficult to understand. Given these odd circumstances, histories on the Mongols are usually hit-and-miss affairs. Scholars tend to be great at explaining some part of the Mongols, but fail to maintain that quality in other areas. Weatherford’s extensive experience in Mongolia, researching Genghis Khan and his empire, makes up for what he loses by not going to the source material outside of English; his accomplishment is a narrative of the highest order.
This is a revisionist history (isn’t it all?) of a truly remarkable figure, who created an empire greater even than the Romans, and he did it from scratch in just a few decades. He was a law-giver who essentially outlawed the culture he came from–transforming it from a Scots-like clan of cattle rustlers and raiders, to a monolithic, highly disciplined cavalry of conquerers. He devised entirely new military tactics that were as successful against the cities of the Chinese as against the armored knights of the West. And they started out as a people, he claims, who did not even know how to weave cloth!
Weatherford here takes up the challenge of accenting the positive impact of his brutal conquests. Among other things he makes the case for his setting the West up for the Renaissance, the introduction of paper money, the postal system, Religious tolerance, and new vegetables. He bases much of this on new scholarship, rather than the hysterical propaganda of the aristocrats whom he threatened. Partly based on the mysterious “Secret History of the Mongols,” the author’s own travels in Mongolia, and contacts with Mongolian revivalists, he makes this bit of history accessible even to the most prejudiced reader.
Strangely omitted, though, is the fascinating tale that the geneticists have discovered about his Y chromosome, which appears to show that he might just have been the most prolific lover in the last couple of millennia! Too recent, maybe.
One of the remarkable features of his style was that he hated the elite and the aristocrats, and slaughtered as many as he could. He loved the professional men, the teachers and doctors, and especially the craftsmen and engineers, and did not even tax them. My kinda guy!
Weatherford’s style of writing is lively and easy to read. The maps are just detailed enough to be informative without overburdening the reader in detail. This is not an exhaustive account of every battle, every city destroyed, which would be mind-numbing history as usually written, but rather a wide survey of events and their impact on the world to come. And I especially enjoyed his description of the military tactics employed by the cavalry, and his use of siege engines and gunpowder, which would be new to most readers.
Perhaps one of his greatest inventions, though, is that of diplomatic immunity. Any city, and there were several, who murdered or mutilated his envoys as a method of rejecting his terms of surrender, would be ruthlessly razed and the inhabitants slaughtered. Even in those days, the word got around…
This is quite a tale, well told.
This is a well-written account of Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols who conquered an amazing chunk of real estate. Weatherford debunks the nonsense about “millions” killed in cities of 100,000, and so forth, and correctly notes a lot of this came from Mongol propaganda intended to scare people into submission.
The best thing in the book, to my taste, is Weatherford’s own knowledge from anthropological on-the-ground research. He knows the steppe and the feel of a Mongol horse under him. He can thus get a real perspective on how the Mongols actually experienced the world (like the great old-timers–Pozdnyev, Curtin–but unlike many modern Mongolists). Next best is his proper crediting of the Mongols for introducing new knowledge all over Eurasia–gunpowder and printing and much else to Europe, Greco-Persian-Arab medicine and foodways to China.
The worst is his inattention to detail. He makes some astonishing errors. Some reviewers have picked out a few. He retails the old chestnut (reportedly from a romantic novel) that the Mongols introduced noodles from China to Europe. No, Europe had them 800 years earlier. Worse is his repeating (p. 87) the old nonsense about the Mongols eating raw meat warmed between their thighs and the horses’ backs. This factoid was spun by Ammianus Marcellinus, talking about steppe nomads centuries before the Mongols. It was almost certainly wrong then, and it is quite certainly wrong for the Mongols. The Mongols had the good sense to avoid raw meat, especially dirty raw meat.
So, read with caution. If this book whets your appetite, the next step is the books by Paul Ratchnevsky (on Genghis) and Morris Rossabi (on his successors and their world). And you might even tackle the Secret History, now made available (though expensive) by the indefatigable Igor de Rachewilz, who is properly acknowledged by Weatherford.