Genghis Khan (1162 - 1227), born Temüjin, was the founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. After uniting the nomadic tribes of the eastern steppe he directed campaigns across northern China, Central Asia and Persia that created the largest contiguous land empire in history and caused destruction and loss of life on a scale rarely matched in the pre-modern world. [1][2]
Early life
Temüjin was born about 1162 at Delüün Boldog, near the Onon river in present-day Mongolia, into a clan of the Borjigin. His father Yesügei, a minor chieftain, was poisoned by Tatars while Temüjin was still a boy, after which the family was abandoned by its followers and survived in poverty on the steppe. [1]
He was captured and enslaved by a rival clan in his youth and escaped, an episode preserved in The Secret History of the Mongols, the principal Mongol-language source for his life. He married Börte, whose abduction by the Merkits and subsequent rescue marked an early stage in his rise. [3]
Unification of the Mongols
Temüjin built power through alliance with Toghrul, khan of the Kereit, and his sworn brother Jamukha, and later through war against both. He rewarded loyalty and ability over lineage, redistributed captured peoples among his own units, and dismantled tribal structures in favour of a decimal military organisation of tens, hundreds, thousands and ten thousands. [2]
At a great assembly, or kurultai, in 1206 he was proclaimed Genghis Khan, ruler of all the peoples of the felt-walled tents. He promulgated the legal code known as the Yassa and adopted the Uyghur script for written Mongolian. [1]
Conquests
From 1209 Mongol forces attacked the Western Xia state and then the Jin dynasty of northern China, taking its capital Zhongdu, near modern Beijing, in 1215. The Qara Khitai were absorbed in 1218. [2]
The execution of Mongol envoys by the Khwarazmian shah prompted an invasion of Central Asia and Persia between 1219 and 1221. Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Merv and Nishapur were stormed in succession, and the massacres of their populations were reported by contemporary Persian and Arabic chroniclers as near total. Irrigation systems on which the region's agriculture depended were destroyed, and some cities never recovered. Modern estimates of the dead across the Mongol campaigns run into the millions and, on the highest assessments, the tens of millions. [1]
Government
Within the territories he controlled, Genghis Khan established the yam relay system for messengers, guaranteed the security of trade routes across Eurasia, and exempted religious institutions of several faiths from taxation, recruiting administrators from among conquered peoples. These arrangements underpinned the exchange of goods, technologies and disease across the continent in the following century. [2]
Death and legacy
Genghis Khan died on 25 August 1227 during a final campaign against the Western Xia. The circumstances are disputed among the sources, and his burial place is unknown. [1]
His sons and grandsons extended the empire into Russia, eastern Europe, the Middle East and the whole of China, where his grandson Kublai founded the Yuan dynasty. He remains a national symbol in Mongolia, while in the regions his armies devastated he is remembered chiefly for the scale of the killing. [4]
