Joraaver Chahal

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World: Book Summary

Jul 30, 2024

Reading Time: 21 minutes

Before I discuss the book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, I must regale you with a hilarious story about why I read this book.

In the waning afternoon heat of the first Thursday in June, my friends and I enjoyed dinner at Farmhouse Kitchen in Menlo Park. One of these characters likes to probe our minds with interesting but somewhat nonsensical questions during our social gatherings. What follows next is an exemplary case of me entertaining her questions.

“If you could learn any language in the world, but had to eat a person to learn that language, would you do it, and who would you eat?” she asked during a lull in our conversation. For the sake of brevity, I skip our discussion about the difficult morality surrounding cannibalism in the pursuit of knowledge.

“Anyone, dead or alive, past or present?” I inquired. This was an innocent question. I had no ill-intent.

“Uhh, okay yes. Anyone. But you also inherit their memories,” she responded. This stipulation was strictly added in anticipation of me picking a heinous being like Jack the Ripper. From her perspective, as a lover of languages, the torment of living with those memories would greatly outweigh the desire to know any language, let alone … Old English, for this example. Unfortunately for her, it’s difficult to anticipate me. For the record though, she started it.

I exclaimed that I would want nothing more than to consume Genghis Khan and know everything about the largest land empire that ever existed. And of course, to learn the Mongol language. Of course.

A relentless stream of questions and statements followed. Can you live with yourself after seeing how he killed millions of people? You can’t possibly stay sane after witnessing the rape and looting! Are you okay with having multiple wives? Honestly, with such a hypothetical question, I wasn’t giving it that much thought (besides, it’s not me who did it, I just have his memories! And yet, who are we but our current interpretations of our memories?). I might become a raving lunatic, but at least I’d know what it was like.

What was the outcome of our serious academic discussion? That we didn’t know diddly-squat about Genghis Khan, and whatever we were saying during the discussion was us parroting our vague memories about his exploits in a 7th grade textbook. It reminded me of how I believed that Malcom X started the Black Panthers movement because that’s what I recalled from my history textbook. A year ago, after reading Malcom X’s autobiography, I discovered that two activists started the movement a year or two after Malcom X’s passing.

A day or two later, one friend at that dinner messaged me about spotting a book about Genghis Khan at Costco. Within a few texts, we discovered her father had a copy of the book and that she could loan it to me. Another day went by and I was finally in possession of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Without the ultimate primary source of his memories, this book and its collection of primary sources would suffice.

Now that the entertaining bits are out of the way, let’s dive into what truly memorialized Genghis Khan.

I’ve split this summary into three:

I do not wish to write about “the rise, the expansion, and the fall” of the Mongol Empire because that is a chronological retelling of the book in a way I will not do justice. Instead, it is my hope that from my summary of abstract topics, you will be intrigued enough to pick up the book and devour the details. Weatherford has painstakingly covered every facet of Genghis Khan’s life and his impact in the modern world. Right from the introduction, he entices you to revel in a piece of history that remained shrouded in so much secrecy for 500 years that I’m surprised it wasn’t the center of an Indiana Jones film.

The Military Prowess of Genghis Khan

I have always said regarding sports or athletic endeavors that all else being equal, “speed kills.” It is the entity that hits faster, feints quicker, and adapts sooner that will win the day. There is so much more to Genghis Khan’s military IQ than speed, but it is the start of everything.

On the steppes of Mongolia, men were warriors and provided for their family. As expected of nomads, they made splendid use of the land’s resources and were adept bowmen and horsemen. These skills that came naturally to the Mongols are what made them renowned throughout Asia and Europe.

As his campaigns took him further into the Middle East, Genghis Khan and his army would often travel up to than eighty miles in one day. Normal armies of the day required vast supply chains of food and water and moved at a snail’s pace because of the number of foot soldiers. But the Khan’s army was swift. His soldiers moved entirely on horseback, carried what little they needed with them, and hunted as necessary. Their only roadblock to quick traversal was often stifling climate, which they experienced as they trekked across the Gobi and further into China and India. For most of their initial campaigns, however, climate did not impede them. On average, Genghis Khan’s men were fresher and more capable in combat than another army traveling an equal distance.

Genghis Khan was one of the first innovators of tactical yet swift army maneuvers courtesy of his cavalry-only army. He introduced the decimal system into his army, with units of 10, 100, and 1000 troops, as well as organizational techniques to ensure a chain of command that could relay messages tens of miles in the blink of an eye. Remember, before his reign, the tribes of Mongolia had never come together, let alone formed a standing army. Without any formal training, Genghis Khan had to lay out a new military system to unify the tribes.

In one example maneuver that took advantage of his army’s unique traits, Genghis Khan would bait the enemy into chasing his men into a chaotic-looking retreat. Then, as the enemy horses tired, Genghis Khan’s troops would reach an outer circle where soldiers kept fresh horses waiting. In an extremely violent turn of the tables, the Khan’s soldiers, with bow skills on horseback the rest of the world had yet to witness, slew the enemy in a matter of minutes. It was often total annihilation.

Genghis Khan had never seen a city before his conquest, let alone a fortified one, but not only was he fast of pace, he was fast of mind as well, rapidly understanding the nuances of city warfare. He would ravage villages outside the city first to drive as many refugees as possible into the city walls. This increased the pressure on resources that the city did not maintain. Tension and panic within the walls skyrocketed as the refugees spread news of a terrifying force that launched attacks at breakneck speeds. He would take advantage of the land’s terrain as well. It took him several tries, but he learned how to dam nearby rivers to flood cities (one try involved accidentally flooding his own camp). Eventually, the people inside would starve, and his army would be victorious. To the Mongol, there was no concept of a “noble” way to win. You fought, you retreated, and you used whatever means necessary to win. What others recorded in their history books as barbaric and ignoble, Genghis Khan viewed as an adaptation to a new style of warfare.

The conquest of nations afforded Genghis Khan new techniques in his arsenal. He learned about battering rams and mobile attack towers, and the destructive might of catapults and trebuchets. However, his army did not lug such heavy equipment around. Instead, after scouting and strategizing, his men would build them if necessary. Genghis’ army always remained mobile and burden-free.

One question my dinner table posed: was he a front-line fighter, or a king who sent his armies off to battle? He was the leader of a nomadic people, with a standing army of all capable men. It seems ridiculous to answer this question now, but even till the age of sixty, he fought on the front lines, away from his homeland for up to five years at a time. He had trusted individuals in key positions closer to home, and the women back home handled most of the administrative affairs.

I’ll wrap up this section with a small blurb on geography, because war and geography are inseparable.

Courtesy of Freeman-pedia

This is the peak of the Mongol empire in 1294, sixty-seven years after Genghis Khan passed away. His sons did what they could to expand the empire, but their interests would never align in a singular vision the way Genghis Khan intended. For example, the son that took over his position insisted on building a capital city that he would occupy, rather than constantly be on the front lines. The idea of a central city for the Mongol Empire flew in the face of Genghis Khan’s operating style and what made his conquest viable. Still, they grew the empire where possible, even challenging Japan from the shores of Korea. The four corners that marked the edge of the Mongol Empire are the southern edge of China, the shores of Korea, the tip of Egypt, and just beyond the Crimea in current day Ukraine.

There is always more to be said about Genghis Khan at war. After all, even the Germans and Russians sought to decipher the Secret History that best summarized his exploits in order to better understand total war. The German blitzkrieg is named after techniques Genghis Khan invented. 1900s tank formations are inspired by the Mongol’s cavalry-centric warfare. Ghenghis Khan understood how to use propaganda to “become more than just a man in the mind of your opponent” (thank you Batman Begins) by letting scholars spread overexaggerated news about his people and his conquest to the rest of the mostly literate Middle East.

Genghis Khan’s warfare is a well-known and always excellent subject to study.

The Geopolitcal and Socioeconomic Impact of the Mongol Empire

Waves of contact and isolation amongst nations often demarcate periods of progress or stagnation. Isolation, which inhibits the exchange of ideas and innovation, solidifies cultural practices and the homogeneity of identity. I would argue this is the default state of nations, and as history progressed, becoming an economic powerhouse, or conversely, not being left behind in the race for globalization, required nations to move from full isolation to full contact. I introduce this as a “thesis sentence” to illustrate how I view the overarching impact the Mongol Empire had on today’s society.

Genghis Khan quickly realized that uniting people of different backgrounds was no simple task, even amongst the different tribes across the steppes of Mongol. One of the first “innovations” he implemented was a rule of law that no one superseded. An idea we take for granted (though tested again and again in today’s U.S. political climate) had its original implementation tried on a grand scale 900 years ago. Standardizing law required a written implementation, but the illiterate Mongols had no written word. Genghis Khan ordered the invention of a written language so that they could not only have the law recorded but also to better improve communication within his empire.

The Khan, and most of the Mongols, had no sense of pride that demanded a continuous identity throughout the empire. That meant there was no coercion of religion; the Mongols were spiritual people, and though the different rulers adopted Christianity or Buddhism through the years, there was no persecution of people for practicing different beliefs. The Mongols were illiterate, and so had no attachment to a written word. They relied on Chinese intellectuals to invent a character set that would make the most practical sense. One of the biggest takeaways from Genghis’ style of rule was that a conquered nation did not need their pride trampled on, and identities could continue to exist as long as they weren’t incongruent to the point of revolt.

Let’s discuss trade for a moment. Genghis Khan brought enormous wealth to his people. So much so that later on it became part of the reason for the empires’ collapse, as his people back home lost the ability to cope with their once spartan lifestyle. Nonetheless, exposure to new materials like silk and cotton, inventions such as gunpowder, crafting techniques such as those for shipbuilding, and the simplest of all, new styles of food, became a quintessential part of the Mongol Empire. However, trade initially relied on a system of valuation that changed from post to post. During his campaign Genghis Khan had witnessed the value of paper in its ease of distribution and carry. He sought to establish a reliable paper currency backed by all the stored wealth in his home nation, the way the dollar used to be backed by gold, and issued paper currency within his empire. For a brief moment, the Mongol Empire introduced a system of stabilizing money across vast distances.

Genghis Khan realized a need for time standardization as well because of trade. Traders could not reliably communicate times and dates because of the differences in calendars and our much beloved time zone challenges. The Khan ordered his best astronomers to understand the shifts in time and construct a calendar that could establish a moment in time in one location, and its corresponding time in a different location. This concept did wonders for improving trade relationships.

I mentioned freedom of religion before, but I must stress it again. Genghis Khan was adamant about his implementation of freedom of religion. When he conquered the Middle East, he did not force the Muslims or the Jews to adopt different lifestyles. When presented with Christianity at the edges of Europe, his people could not understand their ways, but he did not see them as wrong. In fact, once the Mongol Empire was well established, regular debates were often scheduled between different religious scholars as intellectual exercises.

And what of culture? I stated that contact between nations necessitates the intermingling of culture. As much as the Mongols were influenced by the cultures of the people they conquered, with the lavish new lifestyle they enjoyed and the rapid progress in different sectors, the Mongols left their mark on the people they conquered, not in what they did, but in who they were.

One remarkable example is China, which the Mongol Empire annexed during Genghis Khan’s son’s reign. Due to the rivalry amongst sons and the desire to hold on to power, the son in control of eastern Asia fully immersed himself in Sung history, even giving himself a Sung name. He was also responsible for building the city that today is Beijing. He did his best to appear Chinese on the outside, even though he couldn’t let go of basic Mongol traditions such as ensuring his children were born in a ger (the Mongol tent used while living on the steppes), which was done within the walls of the Forbidden City to avoid prying eyes. This looseness with identity had the intended effect of elevating his name as favored by the heavens, and future generations would rewrite the history books as necessary to ensure said association.

“What could have been” is always a question pondered by historians about the winners and losers in war. Regarding Genghis Khan, historians aimed this question at the potential of the Middle East. The Middle East had some of the brightest minds and finest art at that point in time, and most agree with how far Genghis Khan’s conquest setback the independence and innovation in those countries. It is akin to how the layperson knows Anglo-Saxon artists, poets, scientists, and mathematicians well, when many of the founding principles in math and science, as well as the inspiration for many a poet and artist are the creation of brilliant but forgotten Middle Eastern minds.

The Mongol Empire’s demise is worth studying too. As I have mentioned, the sons of Genghis Khan could not maintain unity amongst the Mongol people, and rifts soon formed. However, the Mongol Empire could not risk true division, as the very trade that made it wealthy was also its only lifeline. What it couldn’t handle was a force majeure that changed the course of history in the 1300s: the bubonic plague.

The Black Death tore through the Mongol Empire, leaving city after city struggling to understand what it did to deserve such treatment. Some recognized early on that it was a matter of contact with diseased people and closed their doors to outsiders. Others, like the Christians, blamed the Jews, and began bloody persecutions. In one such fight, and perhaps an exaggerated tale, the Christian armies flung dead bodies into closed cities to ensure the plague continued to spread.

As a result of the widespread fear and death, cities cut all contact with one another, and trade collapsed. The Mongol Empire, divided and unable to raise a military campaign for control of its empire over such a large scale, could no longer sustain its lavish lifestyle. The empire split, with each ruler ingratiating himself with the culture they ruled more than ever before to avoid being ostracized by their own subjects. The Mongol lineage promptly dispersed itself amongst much of the Asian continent. As a final example, the Mughal Empire, which fought many bloody battles in India, claimed a lot of its heritage from the Mongols.

The Symbol that is Genghis Khan

A rhetorical question to set the stage. Do you think the largest contiguous empire the world had ever seen ruled strictly by fear (I must mention contiguous because otherwise the British Empire claims the title)? Of course not. People feared Genghis Khan’s abilities, but after being conquered, it’s difficult to attribute their continuous subjugation out of fear alone. None of his conquest occurred out of malice, and yet, as described by my very table of jokers, all we know is the Mongol Empire’s malice. How did we get here?

Genkhis Khan’s first blood was his stepbrother. The decision was simple. He could not fathom yielding to his older sibling, whose decision-making he considered inane. It would earn him the curses of his mother, for the Mongol culture did not take death lightly, especially inter-family killing. However, this moment illustrates a separation in thinking by Genghis Khan from the rest of his kin. To others, family was the highest social structure, and betraying it was sacrilege. To Genghis Khan, family would be a blessing and a curse, but ultimately nothing more than a tool. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” is an apt phrase, capturing how Genghis Khan developed his empire because it allowed him to exit the traditional mindset that kept his people so divided.

As you may have guessed, the trait he held in highest regard was loyalty. Loyalty demonstrated in the past, and loyalty that continued every day. I make this distinction because while growing up, Genghis Khan had formed a brotherly bond with another warrior whom he held in equal regard. However, that friendship would turn to betrayal, and if one did not demonstrate loyalty to the Khan, one chose death.

I will return to loyalty in a moment, but I must first explain how Genghis Khan expanded his rule to further develop his person. Imagine a man who wanted only the best for his people, but every time he sought connection with others in hopes of trade and the exchange of ideas, his people were hurt, leaving him no choice but to fight. That is Genghis Khan. He looked after his people, and if an envoy he sent was met with execution, then his executioners would endure the same fate. While my retelling is perhaps a tad exaggerated, the truth remains that other empires were ruthless and mocked the envoys he sent, executing them without hesitation. Retaliation was the only recourse.

Knowing this, whenever he conquered, whether it was a tribe, a city, or a nation, he would let the conquered peoples live as they were, but under his authority. That meant no further disruption of life, no barbaric mass execution, and no chaotic pillaging (to be clear, they looted the city of its riches, but in a strict and orderly fashion after clearing out all noncombatants). If he discovered his armies acting in such shameful ways, he showed them no mercy. But for newly conquered cities, this is when loyalty mattered the most. An unfortunate city sometimes misunderstood his lax rule and revolted. That city soon saw swift and utter destruction; there were no second chances.

To his people, Genghis Khan represented true warrior leadership. One that ensured fierce protection of their people while ushering in a new era of luxury. To be associated with or descended from the Khan was to inherit the same blessings he possessed from the Eternal Blue Sky or the Mountains of Burkan Khaldun.

However, as Genghis Khan reached old age, and sought to pass on his empire to his children, he realized that none of his children knew how to handle such a monumental task. He may have broken out of the social norms to unite his people, but his people still expected social norms to be followed as he passed on. Weatherford does not explicitly state this, but I like to think this regret lingered with Genghis Khan. That despite everything he accomplished, it was family that enabled his journey to the top, and it would remain family that were his problems to the very end.

But what were the opinions of the conquered peoples? What did they see in Genghis Khan?

At first, when nobody knew his name, the word in the air was about the looks of him and his army. Of wide eyes, rugged bodies, taut skin. Denigrating descriptions that instilled fear of a barbaric race from the northeast that were killing machines.

But that attitude changed as Genghis Khan conquered nation after nation, and each nation experienced trade and innovation. To the literate folk, Genghis Khan was not only a military giant, but a thought leader. Nobody could deny his knack for gathering minds brighter than his in the domains of math, science, art, religion in order to change how business occurred on a day-to-day basis. After all, before this point in time, no empire this large existed, and implementing systems to manage groups of people across different time zones, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and currencies was unheard of.

However, there is a reason me and my friends only knew Genghis Khan for his ferocious and inhuman behavior. What we know today is history written by the victors, unless we choose to find alternate material than the ones that dominate modern society.

Voltaire published a play using Genghis Khan and the Mongol people as a way to attack the French royalty without specifying them. He abused points about brute strength and violence while once again returning to the initial descriptions of the Mongols in his attempts to slander those in power.

Later, during the Enlightenment Period in Europe, scientists started classifying everything, including humans. If the Caucasian features ranked the highest in terms of intelligence and beauty, the Mongol features became associated with everything ugly and stupid. Don’t assume this is an idea far removed from our time period. Here is a ngram chart for the term “mongoloid” which is classified as “offensive” and defined as “an old-fashioned term for a person with Down syndrome”:

What Genghis Khan represents is a beautiful illustration of the arc of history and knowledge. He is well-known for his military ferocity and for the empire he once ruled. I now know him for his willingness to break social norms, his leadership skills as a uniter of people, and his innovation in military, law, politics, economics, religion, and writing. But for the uneducated, it is the single paragraph or two about terror and violence in a history textbook on world history that is remembered. The usage of the offensive word previously defined indicates that although the belief about Mongol facial features and intelligence may not be as pervasive as it once was, it still holds root and reminds us that the words we use reflect beliefs, even ones we do not consciously support or maintain.

That wasn’t too long a summary, was it? Thanks for reading this to the end if you did. As always, I write these essays to consolidate my knowledge, hoping I retain half of what I’ve written and an eighth of what I’ve read. If you want to know more, I urge you to pick up the book to fill in all the gaps about the coming and going of the man named Genghis Khan.