Genghis Khan: The Man Who Built the Mongol Empire

Podcast Transcript

Born into hardship on the Mongolian steppe, a boy named Temujin rose from exile, betrayal, and captivity to unite the fractured tribes of Mongolia under a single banner.

Having been granted the title of Genghis Khan, he built an army unlike anything the world had seen and launched an empire that would reshape Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Learn more about Genghis Khan, the Man Who Built the Mongol Empire, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The man the world knows as Chinggis Khan, or Genghis Khan in English, was born as Temujin around 1160 to 1162 near the border between what is today Mongolia and Siberia.

Legend holds that Temujin was born under an auspicious sign. The British historian Peter Frankopan noted: Genghis Khan came from a leading family within the tribal union, and his destiny had been foretold from the moment he was born clutching in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knucklebone.

Seers within the Mongol community interpreted this as a sign of the boy’s greatness.

Historians often grasp at straws when it comes to the Mongols, as facts about early leaders are scarce. The Mongols did not have a writing system until Temujin introduced one after conquering Central Asia.

Historians depend on the writings of outsiders to shape their understanding of the Mongols. Much of our information on the early life of Temujin comes to us from the “Secret History of the Mongols”, which was written after the end of Temujin’s life. The source is complicated, as it is a compilation of Arab and Chinese accounts that rely largely on rumor and innuendo.

It’s hard to know what to believe about Temujin’s life. We have no idea what he looked like, as every image of him was created after his death by someone who never met him.

Outsiders depicted Temujin as ruthless and obsessed with violence. However, the reality surrounding him is far more complex. Temujin was born to a noble family of the steppes. Temujin’s father, Yisugei, was poisoned by a rival under a flag of hospitality, leaving his clan leaderless and vulnerable.

Yisugei’s death was devastating to Temujin and his mother, Hoelun. The clan abandoned Temujin and his mother, leaving them to die on the steppes with only their will to survive.

Temujin learned a brutal truth: on the steppes, death settled all political scores. Legend states that Temujin killed his older brother while hunting to consolidate his rising power.

Temujin seemed to have had considerable political acumen. Historical stereotypes portray him as impatient, quick to act, and slow to judge; the reality of his accumulated power suggests otherwise.

As his power and influence grew with each victory, Temujin eventually won over his rival chieftains at a kurultai, a meeting of the leaders of the Mongol Confederacy. Temujin accepted the title that would define him for the rest of his life: universal ruler, or Genghis Khan. He was 46 years old and just getting started.

The Secret History of the Mongols claims that a spiritual revelation drove Genghis Khan to conquer the known world.

As a leader, his actions suggest he was quick to reward bravery and to provide handsome rewards for loyalty. He kept his most loyal associates as his inner circle, establishing an inner council of warriors known as the “Nokurs”.

Mongol society traditionally tied leadership to aristocratic bloodlines. Genghis turned that system upside down, revolutionizing the Mongol social system into one based on warriors’ skill.

Before Genghis, Mongol society operated on a rigid two-tiered system: the ‘white bones,’ who claimed ancestry from the original leadership clans, and the ‘black bones,’ who possessed no noble lineage.

A member of the “black bones” could expect to remain powerless, with no hope of rising in status. By promoting and extending patronage via battle performance, every soldier now had a stake in the military’s success. Genghis Khan’s system enabled him to build a fiercely loyal army.

As the Mongols expanded outward and began conquering their neighbors, they faced a huge problem: there just weren’t many Mongols. Without a census or any writings, it is difficult to determine the size of the Mongol army.

Historians estimate that at the time of Genghis Khan’s ascension, there were approximately 700,000 Mongols in total. Only a fraction of that number were fighting men. A common estimate is that he may have had roughly 100,000 to 130,000 warriors available after uniting the Mongol tribes.

Because the population base was too small for Khan’s mission, they expanded the army by recruiting non-Mongols. To do this, Genghis devised a cunning strategy.

A conquered soldier entered a unit called an arban, a group of 10, with mostly Mongols and possibly another foreign recruit. Foreign soldiers were divided up and never allowed to be in an arban with another soldier from their region.

According to the Mongol military organization, if anyone in a unit of 10 refused to cooperate or fled a battle, the entire unit of 10 was executed. Collective responsibility enforced absolute discipline.

One of Genghis Khan’s highest priorities was an invasion of China. Conquering the world’s most advanced society required the Mongols to adapt their traditional nomadic cavalry tactics. Adaptability and flexibility were two of Genghis Khan’s great strengths.

When facing heavily fortified walled cities, as they did in Zhongdu, Genghis Khan created a new Mongol strategy, one built on patience and brutality. Faced with fortified walls and not yet having acquired Chinese siege technology, the Mongols simply blockaded the city.

Determined to wait out the defenders, the Mongols maintained the blockade for more than a year. The situation in Zhongdu reached apocalyptic proportions as the citizenry inside the city resorted to cannibalism.

When the gates finally opened, Genghis Khan’s forces massacred the population, sparing only those with specific skills the Mongol state could exploit.

A diplomat from the Central Asian kingdom of Khwarazm reported the ghastly results from the Mongols’ siege of Zhongdu: When we arrived at one stage of the city, we saw a high hill which was entirely white… they told us that it was the bones of the people whom the Mongols had slain.

Perhaps Genghis Khan’s most brilliant strategy during the invasion of China was the systematic capture and assimilation of thousands of Chinese engineers, who taught the Mongols how to build and use siege weapons. The Mongol’s employment of foreign technologies strengthened their military in ways they could never have developed on the Asian steppe.

What Genghis Khan did provide was the framework for the Mongols to use the tactics of other states against them.

According to historian Mark Cartwright: On top of that, the Mongols never turned down an opportunity to employ enemy tactics and technology themselves. They not only brought ferocious mobility to Asian warfare but they were, thanks to their flexibility, quickly adept at other types of battle, too, like siege warfare and the use of gunpowder missiles and catapults.

A prime example of this technological assimilation was the Mongol’s use of Chinese silk. Before Genghis Khan’s ascension, the Mongols treated silk as a rare luxury, restricting its use to the tribal elite. As Genghis Khan marched deeper into China, he prioritized the acquisition of silk. Understanding its value as armor, Khan encouraged his generals to obtain as much of it as possible.

The Mongols developed a unique use of silk. The fiber’s strength allowed them to wear multiple layers and to twist it to pull out arrowheads. Historical accounts suggest that the Mongols acquired enough silk to outfit thousands of warriors.

Blanket images of Genghis Khan as a barbaric destroyer are often overblown or at least misunderstood. As Peter Frankopan noted: The Mongols cultivated such fears carefully, for the reality was that Genghis Khan used violence selectively and deliberately. The sack of one city was calculated to encourage others to submit peacefully and quickly; theatrically gruesome deaths were used to persuade other rulers that it was better to negotiate than to offer resistance.

By projecting an image of overwhelming power through violence, the Mongols successfully concealed their primary strategic vulnerability: their limited manpower.

The view of Genghis Khan as a bloodthirsty tyrant tends to hide the skill with which he administered his growing empire. Governing an empire of diverse cultures, religions, and languages is a daunting task, particularly without a central administration or a language to anchor it.

To oversee the administration of his empire, Genghis needed a written language, which he adopted in 1204, after capturing a Tatar official in Western Mongolia. The captured official carried an array of documents that intrigued the Khan. He interrogated him until the man delivered a comprehensive introduction on how a written language could manage a state.

Genghis commanded the official to stay and instruct the Mongol princes in the art of reading and writing the new script. The script originated among the Uyghur nomadic peoples of Western Asia. From there, traders carried it across the Silk Roads, where it dominated commerce for centuries.

Scholars and merchants across vast tracts of Eurasia recognized the Uyghur script immediately, allowing the Khan’s decrees to move seamlessly across borders.

Genghis Khan knew his empire needed a capital as well. In 1220, he established Karakorum as his administrative city, located in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley.

Karakorum was not your typical capital. Many Mongol elites still lived in gers, or felt tents, around or within the city, so Karakorum was a hybrid: part fixed capital, part imperial camp, and part international trading and administrative center.

Genghis Khan established the yam system to ensure communication among Mongol leaders. The Yam system was a series of interconnected postal and rest stops about 20-30 miles apart. Think of it as the Mongol version of the Pony Express. At the Yam, Mongol leaders and sanctioned non-Mongol officials could travel to obtain a new horse, exchange information, and rest.

During the age of Genghis Khan, caravans traversed the Silk Roads with complete security as the Mongols had extinguished the threat of theft and banditry. The Pax Mongolica was engineered by Genghis Khan and was a direct result of their conquests, as paradoxical as it might seem.

Genghis Khan died in 1227, around the age of 65, while campaigning against the Tangut kingdom of Xi Xia in northwestern China. His exact cause of death is unknown. Later accounts offer several possibilities, including illness, injuries from a horse fall, wounds in battle, or more legendary stories involving a Tangut princess.

The most likely explanation is that he died from illness or injury during the campaign, but the Mongols kept the news quiet until the campaign was completed.

His tomb is one of history’s great unsolved mysteries. According to tradition, his body was returned to Mongolia and buried in a secret location, likely near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun.

The burial party supposedly killed anyone who saw the procession, and horses were driven over the grave to hide all traces of it. Whether those details are true or legend, the location of Genghis Khan’s tomb has never been confirmed.

At his death, the Mongol Empire covered roughly 12 to 14 million square kilometers, or about 4.6 to 5.4 million square miles. Yet, this was far from its peak. It would be another 50 years until his descendants ruled an empire that stretched from Korea to Eastern Europe.

Genghis Khan began life as Temujin, an outcast on the Mongolian steppe, but through force, strategy, and an extraordinary ability to command loyalty, he created an empire that changed the course of world history.

His conquests brought devastation on a staggering scale, yet they also connected East and West in ways that reshaped trade, warfare, diplomacy, and culture for centuries.

Genghis Khan was not just the founder of the Mongol Empire. He was one of the rare individuals whose life altered the trajectory of the entire world.