Steppes towards the future describes some of Genghis Khan’s exploits:
Genghis Khan conquered more people than Napoleon or Alexander. He ordered and inspired more massacres than any other tyrant before Hitler and Stalin. He destroyed more states, razed more cities, demolished more monuments, uprooted more fields than any predecessor. He left at his death an unequalled reputation for lust and bloodlust. “My greatest joy,” he was remembered for saying, “is to shed my enemies’ blood, wring tears from their womenfolk and take their daughters for bedding.’
Genghis, what is good in life? To shed my enemies’ blood, wring tears from their womenfolk and take their daughters for bedding.
If recent research in Oxford’s biochemistry department is to be believed, he was one of history’s most philoprogenitive studs, with 16 million living descendents. Meanwhile, he made the streets of Beijing — according to an imaginative eye-witness — “greasy with the fat of the slain”. His tally of victims in Persia amounted to millions.
A real man’s man, that Genghis.
In the long run, however, he was a constructive destroyer. His empire, at his death in 1227, spanned Eurasia, creating havens of peace around the silk roads and steppelands. Accelerated contacts enriched Eurasian civilisations. Technologies that trans- formed Europe’s future — gunpowder, the blast furnace, paper money — arrived in the West. Traditions of scientific empiricism, dormant in Europe since antiquity, revived as Westerners began to share attitudes to nature formerly confined to China. Italian merchants, French craftsmen and Franciscan missionaries met in the depths of the Gobi.It all might have happened anyway: trans-Eurasian trade had begun to grow in the previous century. Europe’s “scientific renaissance” might have thrived on unaided stimulation from contacts with the Muslim world. But Genghis Khan’s “Mongol Peace” made cultural cross-fertilisation possible on an unprecedented scale.
Pax Mongolia?