The Secret History is available in several translations today. In English, the most authoritative study of the text is by Igor de Rachewiltz, running more than 1,500 pages in two large volumes and one smaller appendix. The most easily read is a shorter translation by Urgunge Onon, a Daur Mongol from Inner Mongolia, and his ethnic background provides invaluable insights into the culture and meaning behind the text. The worst translation was made by Francis Woodman Cleaves and published by Harvard University Press. Cleaves attempted to be overly literal while at the same time writing in a Shakespearean-biblical tone. The result is an insult to the Bible and Shakespeare as well as to the Mongolian language. It is still worth reading a little of it if for no other reason than to see how a translation should not be done. Fortunately, Paul Kahn revised and abridged this text into the most literary of the English translations, and his poetic rendition is a good starting point for an initial reading of the Secret History.
Muslim accounts fell into rival pro- and anti-Mongol factions, and almost all drew their information from two chroniclers with similar names but totally opposed views. The highly sophisticated Persian Ata-Malik Juvaini, like his father and many male relatives, served the Mongols faithfully. He was born in 1226, just before the death of Genghis Khan, and he lived in the Mongol capital at Karakorum for part of his youth and eventually became the Mongol governor of Baghdad. Juvaini gave the most intimate account of the Mongol court and sought to justify Genghis Khan’s actions and those of his descendants in terms of Quranic teaching. His authoritative book was titled Tarīkh-i Jahān-gushā, or History of the World Conqueror, and it is still the best work on Genghis Khan, not only for its wealth of information but also for the rich beauty of his Persian language. His excessive use of imaginative metaphors might disturb some more picky literati, but I love it and tried to borrow as many of them as I could.
His scholarly rival, Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, fought against the Mongols and hated them with a passion. He thought of them as the vilest and most ungodly creatures on Earth. Born in 1193 in what is now Afghanistan, he was a contemporary of Genghis Khan, but never met him. Instead he fled the Mongol invasions and took eventual refuge in Delhi, where he vehemently warned the Muslim world that the Mongols were the greatest threat in the history of their religion. He attributed nearly superhuman strength to the Mongols and offered incredible statistics of millions slain in cities that never had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants.
Gregory Bar Hebraeus, born to a Jewish family in 1226, the same year as Juvaini’s birth in what is now Turkey, became a priest, a bishop, and eventually a saint in the Syriac Orthodox church. He wrote many theological and historical texts, including a work titled Chorography, meaning world history, and he consistently praised the Mongols as messengers from God sent to rescue Christians from Muslims.
Of all the chroniclers, the most extensive and probably the fairest was the Persian Rashid al-Din, who wrote a history of the world known as Jami al-Tawarikh. Fate dealt him the severest of blows. His lifetime, from 1247 to 1318, spanned almost the entirety of Mongol rule in what is now Iran and Iraq, and he became one the richest and most powerful men in the Mongol government. As a Jewish convert to Islam working for the Mongols, he acquired many opponents who mistrusted the Jews and hated the Mongols. When his patron Oljeitu Khan of the Ilkhanate died in 1316, Rashid al-Din’s enemies seized their chance to move against him, accused him of poisoning the khan, and executed him in 1318. Although he was initially buried as a Muslim, religious radicals eventually desecrated his grave and in the early fifteenth century shifted his bones to the Jewish cemetery. They probably would have destroyed his manuscripts if the Mongols, whose history he had written, had not rescued them and lavishly illustrated them with some of the most beautiful miniature paintings of all time.
Much of the work of Rashid al-Din was lost or has not yet been translated, but The Successors of Genghis Khan contains some valuable information. Although his prose fails to match that of Juvaini, the illustrated editions of his works contain some of the most magnificent and frequently reproduced of the Persian miniature paintings.
Almost all of the early information on Mongols in the West initially came from two envoys, both Catholic priests, who visited Mongolia soon after the death of Genghis Khan, while many who knew him were still alive. Giovanni of Plano Carpini, one of the early disciples of Saint Francis, was sent by Pope Innocent IV as an envoy and spy in 1245. Although fat and old at more than sixty, he managed to make it back and offered up a brief but valuable account of his trip and of the Mongols whom he encountered. Supplemented by comments from Stephen of Bohemia, who accompanied him, his report gives some interesting information, but favored criticism and condemnation over description and analysis.
The second Catholic envoy, William of Rubruck, was sent by the French king Louis IX in 1253, and he left an even more detailed account. Younger and much better educated than Carpini, William enjoyed better access to the Mongol imperial court and the capital at Karakorum, and he wrote in a more vivid style. He relished describing Mongol religious ideas and those of the other faiths so that he could demonstrate, usually unconvincingly, their errors and his superior logic.
Each account is heavily biased in some ways, usually against the Mongols, but some are fiercely defensive of them. This combination of works in Mongolian, Chinese, Latin, Persian, Armenian, Arabic, and Russian offers a rich and multifaceted view of the life of Genghis Khan and the culture of the Mongols from differing perspectives: Taoist, Muslim, Confucian, Christian, and Buddhist. Each offers unique insights.
Chinese works, particularly the reports of the first Southern Sung envoys, Chao Hung, P’eng Ta-ya, and Hsü T’ing, remain the earliest eyewitness descriptions of the Mongols at the moment of their rise and therefore offer some of the most reliable information, albeit in the form of brief and dry bureaucratic reports to the royal court. Facing the terrifying threat of Mongol invasion, the envoys stressed military information above all else. In 1370, after the fall of the Yuan dynasty, its Ming successors produced the Yuan Shi, the official authoritative encyclopedia of the Mongols from the time of Genghis Khan. Despite the constraints of being written in a short time, having to balance contradicting claims, and find a way to transliterate difficult Mongol names, it remains the more authoritative work on the Mongol Empire. Only a little of it is available in English.
Beginning in the seventeenth century with the conversion of the Mongols to Buddhism, several scholars produced fascinating histories of the Mongols. Later Mongol chronicles supplied very little information about traditional Mongol religious practice because they were written by Buddhist monks and scholars who sought to make the early history conform to their own theological teachings. These secondary chronicles, sometimes transcribed into multiple editions with slight but important differences, bear similar names, most referring to precious metals or gems—The Golden Chronicle, The Jeweled Chronicle, The Pearl Rosary, The Jewel Translucent. Some can be found in English, but the translations are stiff and render the most exciting stories opaque and boring.
In the nineteenth century, when much of Asia suffered under the oppression of European colonization, scholars and activists began to look to Genghis Khan as the first pan-Asian ruler. Kencho Suyematsu, a Japanese student studying at Cambridge University, wrote his history thesis on Genghis Khan, published in London in 1879 as The Identity of the Great Conqueror Genghis Khan with the Japanese Hero Yoshitsune and later translated into Japanese. Suyematsu claimed that Genghis Khan was actually a twelfth-century Japanese samurai hero, Minamoto Yoshitsune, who had faked his death, fled to Hokkaido, and then traveled on to Mongolia, where he had raised an army and begun to conquer the world.1 This outlandish claim coincided with the rise of industrial Japan. Having been closed to the world for so much of its history, Japan was now ready to claim its place. Suddenly the idea of Genghis Khan as Japanese elevated the country’s role in world history. Other writers expanded on this idea, connecting Japan to Mongolia and finding in the link to Genghis Khan the historical precedent for a new Asian empire.
One exceptional writer stands out from the rest: a nineteenth-century descendant of Genghis Khan by the name of Injannasi, living in Inner Mongolia. Like a modern Yelu Chucai, he was trained as a Chinese scholar and was at once fiercely loyal to and highly critical of his Mongol people. His father had left behind an unfinished novel on Genghis Khan and Injannasi developed it into one of the most profound works of Mongolian philosophy and identity. Known as The Blue Chronicle, it stands in marked contrast to the Buddhist texts, as it was a philosophical work set in a novel. The Blue Chronicle was one of the most important contributions to Mongol literature since the writing of the Secret History seven centuries earlier.2
One of the most interesting parts of The Blue Chronicle is its long introduction, which outlines Injannasi’s ideas about philosophy and religion. Living in the final century of the Qing dynasty, he saw corruption and defeat all around him. Although he had been born rich, he had lost much of his property due to a failed coal mine investment and a peasant uprising on his estates. Amid the chaos of his devastating circumstances, he found inspiration in Genghis Khan’s more liberal and orderly vision of society. His example demonstrated that Asians did not need to look to the West for ideas about freedom, democracy, and social justice; they could find precedents close to home in the great Asian leaders such as Confucius, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Genghis Khan. Without attacking the Qing officials directly, he invoked their teachings to offer scathing critiques of his fellow Chinese citizens, whom he saw as weak, hypocritical, and vain. Asia had once been a driving force in history, he argued, and by following the actions and ideals of these earlier leaders, it could once again become the philosophical and political center of the world.
In the spirit of Injannasi, a new generation of Mongolian scholars is today at work on the history of their own nation. It is my hope and expectation that their analyses will surpass these earlier works, certainly including my own, to give a fuller picture of Genghis Khan so that his unique insights might help us navigate through the future storms.