A Mongol emperor and military leader who founded the Mongol empire and promoted trade with Europe.
Originally named Temuchin and born into a Mongol clan decimated by enemy raiding and premature death, Genghis Khan restored his family’s prestige and following by raiding against the Tatars and organizing his growing following to serve as mercenaries for the Jin empire in China. Genghis slowly constructed a great army composed of the various nomadic tribes of the steppe, either by making alliances with them or by conquering them, until in 1206 the Mongols and their vassal tribes named him their “King of Kings” at the Great Council. He then launched attacks against the Jin empire, perfecting techniques of siege warfare against walled cities and accumulating captives, supplies, and intelligence from the world that bordered the steppes.
Although the Mongol campaigns were incredibly ruthless and destructive, the damage was not random or capricious. Resistance by an enemy was met by total annihilation, but surrendering regions were carefully managed, with trade preserved and skilled craftsmen singled out for Mongol control. The Mongols patrolled the Silk Road and used the Kwarezm Shah’s inability to control banditry as a pretext for invading his lands and seizing the trade cities of Bukhara and Samarkand as Mongol possessions. In 1223, the Mongols moved northwest into the trade cities of the Rus’, capturing Kiev and installing Mongol tax collectors and advisors to the surviving Rus’ princes, insisting that the Rus’ reform their system of royal inheritance to avoid civil war and ensure order.
Known for their prowess on the battlefield, the Mongols—led by Genghis Khan, shown here in a fourteenth-century European manuscript—helped consolidate political power in Central Asia, encouraging trade between Europe and Asia. (The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford/The Bodleian Library)
Advised by a captured Confucian scholar who became his personal secretary, Genghis oversaw the construction of a Mongol civil service, the maintenance of efficient postal routes (called yam) for government messages, and the codification of Mongol law—the Yasa. At his death in 1229, Genghis left his sons the foundations of a great empire stretching from China to eastern Europe. The Mongols, as advised by their great leader, cultivated trade between their subjects, oversaw a sophisticated internal passport system and intelligence-gathering network using Muslim and Chinese merchants, and placed a high value on the safety of the major trade routes from rival nomadic tribes and bandits. Genghis and his successors encouraged the embassies of west Europeans like the Polo family, and the efficient infrastructure of their vast empire cut the transit time from China to the Mediterranean substantially, allowing the flow of both luxury trade goods and less desirable travelers, like the bubonic plague.
Margaret Sankey
See also: Mongol Invasions; Polo, Marco; Silk Road.
Cleaves, Francis Woodman, ed. The Secret History of the Mongols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Hartog, Leo de. Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Hoáang, Michel. Genghis Khan, trans. Ingrid Cranfield. London: Saqi, 1990.
Marshall, Robert. Storm from the East: From Ghengis Khan to Khubilai Khan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.