Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476

The story of Genghis Khan, like the story I think of all of us, it doesn't begin at birth. It begins—that's the beginning of life. The story begins long before birth, and sometimes it can be many generations before, and sometimes only shortly before. But I think with Genghis Khan a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived. And that is that one day a cart was coming across the Mongol territory, and only women drove carts. Men rode horses. Women also rode horses, but women owned the houses, which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another. And in fact her husband was with her. She was a new bride and her husband was on a horse close to her. So what happened was a man named Yesugei. Yesugei, the future father of Genghis Khan. Yesugei was up on a hill. He was hunting with his falcon. The words of the Secret History of the Mongols were very clear. And he looked down and he saw her and he could barely glimpse her. He knew she was young and she was a new bride. And he rode back to camp. He got his two brothers and they came racing down. And they came and first the husband of the woman looked around and he decided to flee. Not because he was a coward, but he figured he would probably pull the men after him. They would chase him. And they did. They chased him. He went far away. He circled around. He came back. He arrived back at the cart where his wife was. Her name was Hoelun.

And Hoelun had time to think while he was riding around being chased by the Mongols. And she decided that it's more important for him to live. And she told him when he came back, you must flee. If you stay here, they will kill you and they will take me. But if you flee, they will take me, but you will have the chance to find another wife. There are many women in the world. You find one and you call her after my name and you remember me when you're with her. It was a very dramatic moment. And he rode away and he looked back and forth and it said that the pigtails or the braids that were hanging down were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back. He was divided obviously in whether he should go or stay. But the three men were approaching again and they were headed straight for the cart this time. And they came in and they took Hoelun. She didn't say a word until her husband was over the ridge. And when he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail. And one of the brothers said to her, "Doesn't matter if you shake the waters out of the river and if you shake the mountains with your screaming, you will never see this man again." And he was right. And that was the moment that Genghis Khan's mother and father met. That's the beginning of his story in this kidnapping. And it's going to reverberate. Every detail of it will come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Chinggis, but it's going to continue on with the feuds and the issues caused by it all the way into the future and to some extent in certain parts of the world you could say it still exists.

Yes. And from that is conceived this conqueror of the biggest contiguous empire in history. What I was really interested in was how did this happen? Who was this person? As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, you know, the child is father of the man, and it's the childhood that created him and it's that episode that was before he was born. But all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became. And so he was now suddenly this unusual situation was created where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman who is being held by strange people. The Mongols, they were not her people. And he already had another wife or husband. He had a wife named Soichigul. He had at that time already one son. Later he had another son with her. It was a very odd situation. And in fact the father Yesugei wasn't even there when Temujin was born. He was off fighting the Tatars. And during this campaign against the Tatars, he killed two Tatars. One of them was named Temujin, which is sort of 'person of iron' is what it means from the Turkic, but today part of also Mongolian language. So he came back, he had a baby and he decided to name him Temujin, the person of iron or iron man we might call him, after the man he killed.

It was not an auspicious beginning. And in fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious. The father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him. He was left behind. So here's this young child. We don't know what age, but could have been around four or five I think. He was left behind and as it turned out some other people, the Tayichi'ud, found him and then they kept him for a while and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother. And it's very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of relationship much between the father and the son because then when he—when Temujin is 8 years old his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means you give the child to that family or you give the boy to that family and he will live with them and they will raise him up and they will train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter. And so he's taking him off at age eight, but he didn't take the other son from the other wife, Bekter. He was keeping him. There was something about Temujin having been lost once and found by the Tayichi'ud and reunited with the family and now his father takes him off at age eight and he was going to take him to Hoelun's family but he never made it. He stopped with another family. It's sort of like the first family came across and in the words of the Secret History it's a sort of like instant love, that there was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes and he saw this girl Börte who was about 9 years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family according to the story and so the father left him there with that family. But on the way home the father decided—he saw a drinking party and he decided to join them. They were Tatars. He hid his identity on the steppe. Everybody kind of figures out who everybody is or they figured out who he was and supposedly they poisoned him. He got on his horse and was able to ride back home, but within a few days he died. So now Temujin is off living with another family and somebody comes from his family—a family not a relative but a close person named Mongolqul—comes to get him, take him back and they make it through the winter. They make it through the winter. Mother Hoelun by now she has four sons and one daughter. I think the daughter had already been born or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that. But they make it through the winter. The spring comes and of course the clan is going to move to a new camp. They go to spring camp from winter camp and they have a ceremony for the ancestors and they started the ceremony but they did not tell Hoelun. And so she came and she was angry that she had been left out. And the old women said, "You're the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you." Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view. And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. And they packed up and they took her animals. They took the animals. But she at that moment she still had one horse for a moment and she jumped on the horse and she took the banner of her husband and she raced around the people and the banner after death contains the soul of the person, it's called, and so she raced around and they were a little bit nervous and so they camped for one night and they waited until it was dark then they took off and this time one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them and they killed him and Temujin cried. He was a little boy, 8 years old. There was nothing he could do. He's just a little boy. And now that family is left there on the steppe, four children, possibly five already. Such the other woman with two children. They're all left there to die on the steppe. When the winter comes, they will surely all die. How do they make it through the winter? Mother Hoelun, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head. She took her black stick and she ran up and down the banks of the river, digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found foods, digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could. And even at his young age, Temujin was already beginning to go out to collect things so he could get fish. He could do a few tasks to help feed the family. It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.

Yes. Even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Tayichi'ud people. He was kidnapped and we would say, I think the correct word, re-enslaved. They put him into a khanq, a yolk like an ox would wear. And so his two arms are in it and his head is in it and he's trapped in this thing. And every night he would be taken to a different ger to be guarded by that family. And one night there was a little celebration. So most of the people are drinking. And he's left with a boy who's not very smart. And Temujin managed to take the khanq, the wooden yolk that he's trapped in, and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out. That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols, that anything that moves is a weapon. This is going to go on for generations. Very important for the Mongols. If it moves, it's a weapon. He did that. He raced off in the night and he jumped into the river to hide. He's still got the khanq on him. He's still trapped under there. The people are looking for him. They come out and they're up and down the river and he's hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can, but it's dark and it protects him a little bit. They give up and they say, "Okay, we'll come back tomorrow. He can't possibly escape." But the next day he knew one family that he thought he could go to and he was right. He went to that family and at great risk to themselves—they in fact were a captive family of the Tayichi'ud—and at great risk to themselves they managed to saw off the khanq and then burn it in their fire and they gave him food to escape and then he had to go find his family again. So this is the kind of life that this boy Temujin had.

We think that's how it is. We just have the word. They don't say the head and the hands. We know that his body is trapped in it. But from all evidence we have, it's the hands and the head.

Yes. Yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is. So this in part was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition that kinship is, yes, the most important thing above all else because here is his life story where he's abandoned over and over and over by his own brothers. See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died. They did not. They should take care of her and her children because her children are the children of their brother. They count as the sons of the clan or they should, but no, they had all deserted, all betrayed him. He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.

The story of Temujin is not a unique story for that time. Now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course, he's not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around them, but they are constantly raiding in the winter for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find. It's almost like their way of getting trade goods from China, that one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal. Mongols produce nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere and it was through raiding. And so even in the genealogy of Temujin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father's child, and it's unclear who the father was. And all of these issues go back for a long time. Later, Chinggis will realize—once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women in part not only because of what had happened to his mother but what happened to him next in his life.

At age 16, Börte, the girl he had met when he was 8 years old and she was nine, she's now 17, and she and her mother come. It's hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16-year-old boy who has suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine. And suddenly here is the love of his life who's going to be living with him, making him happy. He has somebody who loves him. It's not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the five children and plus the other wife and her two children. No, he has somebody who loves him. And it's all the excitement that you can imagine with the fire in the eyes and the excitement and then it only lasts a few months. And so there they are and there's a lady visiting them. We don't know exactly who she is, but they called her grandmother Kuaqin. Granny Kuaqin is there and Granny Kuaqin is sleeping of course on the floor of the ger, the tent, and early in the morning she feels the vibrations in the earth and she knows that horsemen are coming. She rouses the family and mother Hoelun is in charge. Mother Hoelun is still in charge even though Temujin is now married. She puts all of her children on a horse and she takes the baby girl Temulin in her own lap and she has one extra horse. But she won't take Börte because she knows—she doesn't know who the men are. She has no idea. But they're coming. They're coming in the dark. They're coming for a woman. They know there's a girl there. This family of outcasts has acquired a wife and they know that they're coming for that. And so she leaves Soichigul, the other wife. She leaves this old lady, Granny Kuaqin, who actually has her own cart. And she leaves Börte. They pile into Granny's cart, and it's only an ox to pull it, so they don't get too far before the attackers get there. But Mother Hoelun is right. She's able to get her children off to the mountain and to Burkhan Khaldun, to the mountainside away from them because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there and who they are and all. So mother Hoelun saved her family but at a cost. Suddenly Temujin realizes he has obeyed his mother but he's lost the most important thing in his life. And I do think this is the defining moment of his life. The story began back when his mother was kidnapped but now the kidnapping of his wife—I think it's the def—what will he do? What should he do? What can he do? Is he going to just resign himself to it? Is he going to go out look for another wife? And he decides that life is not worth living without Börte. He has found something good in this life. And if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back. And this is the early steps of the military genius born because in order to get her back requires an actual organization of troops. He needs allies. Allies. He goes to a man who ruled the Kereit people in central Mongolia kind of on the river about where the capital Ulaanbaatar is today. He goes there because that—Wang Khan is the name or Toghrul. He goes there because Wang Khan had been the lord over his father at one point and his father had gone on raids for him and so he went there and actually he took a gift because Börte's mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for mother Hoelun at that time of the marriage. So he took the coat and he took it and he gave it as a gift to Wang Khan and asked for his help and Wang Khan said yes and he said, "I will send some troops but we need more and you need to ask Jamukha, Jamukha, you need to ask him to come also." He said, "I will send a message to him to get troops."

Jamukha was a boy about the same age as Temujin and his family had winter camp close to where mother Hoelun was living with her children. And so the two boys met during the winter time. In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about four generations earlier or five, it's a little unclear. She was an Onggirat woman who herself was kidnapped and actually Jamukha was the descendant of her from the fact that she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping and then Temujin is descended from her through the new kidnapper, Barin, his ancestor. So they're both through the—as the Mongols would say, from the same womb. They come from the same historic origin. However, their lives were similar in that both lost their fathers very early. But Jamukha also lost a mother. So he grew up in the household of his grandfather. He had no siblings. Unlike Temujin with a whole household of siblings, he grew up with his grandfather and his grandfather had several wives. So he grew up with a bunch of old women which later he said he thought was an influence on his life. But the two boys meet. So they come from different backgrounds and Jamukha is not as deprived by any means as the life of Temujin but he has a certain emotional deprivation I think having not had mother, father, siblings and he lives with these old people. The two boys meet, they become good friends playing on the ice and so they're playing on the ice and then very early on I think when they're about 10 or 11 years old they decide to make a pact. It's called being anda and anda is more than a friend. A friend is like nöqör in the language and there are several different types of friendship but anda is a friendship that's beyond a friendship. It's something for life and they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment. And they exchanged knucklebones. So each one of them had the knucklebone of a roebuck, a deer. Knucklebones are used in these games that they play, but it's also used to forecast the future. You can roll them around and all. And it's very strange on the ice. I will say in the winter time in Mongolia, it can be up to 50° below zero. And it doesn't really matter at that point whether it's either Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is, but you slide something across the ice and it's just absolutely smooth like silk and it goes on for a long way. And if you put your ear down to the ice, you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the earth. It's just like the angels are singing under the ice. So once they've sworn in this relationship of anda, a couple years later they swear it again but this time they're slightly older boys and they have bows and arrows and so they exchange arrows with each other. In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off of a two-year-old calf, and he whittled it down, and then he drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow, which is used for several purposes among the Mongols. It's used for signals for one thing from one person to another. But also when you're hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move. So it had a lot of uses. So the boys had exchanged roebuck knuckles. This time they exchanged arrows. And so they had been close friends. And Wang Khan said, "Okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you." And he did. So the three set out some troops from Wang Khan. He himself did not go. He was too old. But he sent some troops and then Jamukha and his troops and then basically just Temujin and his family. He just had his brothers. That's all. They set off to find the Merkit people up the Selenga River which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal. They had to go through some extremely rough territory. And you see in this episode though, Jamukha is already a little bit fierce without necessarily thinking it through carefully. He gives this long speech about all the things they're going to do to the Merkit people. We're going to jump through the toono, the smoke hole in the top of the ger. We're going to jump in there and we're going to kill them all. We're going to kill the men and the women and the children. We will destroy these people forever. He has an extremely militant rhetoric at least. And he's also rather critical of the elder people. Wang Khan's people came late and he gave them this long lecture about we are Mongols and if we give our word, our word is our promise forever and rain or sleet or snow, it doesn't matter. We be there on time. And then it—so he's dressing down his superiors. He's very aggressive but he's very helpful. So these troops they move in on the Merkit camp. They also come in at night and so there's a small amount of warning because some men are out hunting sables, the Merkit men, and they race back to the camp and they tell the people and the people are getting ready to get out as fast as possible. So Börte has no idea who's coming. She doesn't want to be kidnapped again. It's just somebody. So she and the grandmother go off again and so they're loaded into a cart to go away. So Temujin comes in and there's a full moon that night so they could see what they're doing. And he's really searching for her. He's not paying too much attention to the battle. And he's calling for her. And she hears his voice. She knows who it is. She jumps off the cart and she runs to him and they reunite and he grabs her, embraces her and then he said, "This is the goal. This is why we are here. We don't need anything else." He was very clear about that. And that was his first full-on military engagement.

That's one of the things that's totally unknown outside of the Secret History of the Mongols. None of the Persian chronicles, none of the Chinese chronicles, none of them knew about this until the Secret History was deciphered and translated. But Bekter was the older child of Soichigul and Yesugei. The older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society. They have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta, and he refers to them as chi. It's like a formality and his word goes—he is the father in the absence of the father. But also it's quite common that if a man dies and his brothers—he has no brothers or his brothers do not marry his widow—then if he has a son by another wife, she will become his wife. So it would have been common that Bekter eventually when he passed through puberty would then perhaps marry mother Hoelun. Now I don't know that that happened but I think either it did or Temujin was trying to prevent it because it was bad enough that he was the older brother but he becomes the older brother and a stepfather. I think Temujin just couldn't handle that and he was already—Bekter was ordering him around. So he would take things like a fish or bird that Temujin had caught and that's perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy. So Temujin would catch a fish and Bekter would take the fish.

Yes, he can do anything he wants just about with his younger siblings. That's—yeah. And but Temujin is not going to stand for it. So mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish, which I'm not so sure that's really the blame. And the boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother. They were using them for fishing. And I think it was more complicated than that. But for whatever reason, he and his next brother, Khasar, decided to kill him, and they did.

Yes.

I think it is the symbol of that. And it can be the thing that pushes him over the edge, but it's all these other tensions of what's going on with the family because they shoot him with arrows, they kill him, but what happens afterwards is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before because we hear nothing from Soichigul. She and her younger son, Belgutei, they stay with the family. They don't go away. But the one who is outraged is mother Hoelun, his mother. She screams and hollers at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine about you will never have anybody in your life except your own shadow and you know you are worse than—everything that she could name they could be worse than. She was outraged and went on and on and on about it. So she was obviously extremely distressed about it. Whereas Soichigul, the mother of the boy, she may have been distressed, I don't know, but nothing has shown up in the record. So he does have this episode of having killed off his brother, but I don't think it was a deeply meaningful—I think it was important, but I don't think it was emotionally deeply meaningful for Temujin. The brother was gone. The problem was solved. Mother is extremely ticked off at him. But it does show, in fact, it's interesting if it's not a big deal for him. It does show that he's willing to resort to murder to take care of a bad situation.

Bekter was a problem. He resolved it at a very young age. So he'd had that experience behind him. But now Bekter's younger brother Belgutei is on the raid with him and with Jamukha when they go to capture Börte back. So he has both loyalty and Belgutei stays loyal to him his entire life. His entire life. It was very interesting.

I think as children he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that to really be pining for her all the time. But for whatever reason, she came and it could be that her family liked him in some way or that she remembered him or that she had no other suitors because at 17 she should have been married actually. So I can't explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact if not before. I mean those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives. She was I would say the most important person to him. After that he went to literal war to get her back. He risked everything. He was willing to die. He was willing to kill. He was willing to die in order to get her back. And he got her back. And now he's reestablished his relationship with Jamukha. And so they decide to stay together and they all go off to the Khentii Valley and she is pregnant. This becomes a huge issue forever. It's one of those things that to this day almost it's an issue. And what happens. But as he says much later in life when his own sons rebel against him and they call that first child a Merkit bastard, he defends his wife viciously. To his own sons he says, "You were not there. You do not know who loved who and who did not. You did not see the sky turning around. You did not see the stars falling. You did not see the earth turn over. You don't know what was happening. And if I say he is my son, he is my son. Who are you to say otherwise? You were not there. You come from the same warm womb. And if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb would turn to cold stone." So he defended her forever. But he's off now. We go back to the beginning. She's pregnant. They're in the Khentii Valley and he and Jamukha decide to renew their vows of being anda to each other. So this time it's more serious and it's a ceremony in front of the whole—we can't say tribe. It's not big enough yet for a tribe but the whole clan that's there. And then Jamukha takes off a gold belt which actually he'd stolen from the market at some point. Where on earth they had a gold belt? I don't know. But he took off a gold belt and he put it on Temujin. And then Temujin gave him a mare who had never had a foal, had never given birth. And it was an unusual mare who had a little growth on the front of her head which they called a horn. So it was an unusual gift and I don't know if it has meaning but I don't know all the meanings behind it. You know, it's sort of odd to me. But the gold belt you can kind of sort of think about in different ways. But the gold—the belt—the belt for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood. And in fact this belt—a woman was often then and even now called a person without a belt because that's how they were at that time. Today women wear belts of course but they still use the word büsgüi with no belt. So it's a very important symbol of manhood. So he gave that to Temujin and they celebrated and then in the words of the Secret History they slept apart under the same blanket apart from the other group and they were happy together and then when the baby was born Temujin named the baby Jochi which means visitor. And some people say well it's because the child was really the Merkit child. Other people say no it's because he was a visitor on the territory of Jamukha at that time. And other people can say well but Jamukha's ancestor who had been born from the kidnapped woman who was pregnant that they had named that Jardagai which meant foreigner. So it's kind of like a parallel, the visitor, the foreigner. And so Jamukha's clan took the name from him, they were called Jadaran. And so there are all these things that sometimes we can't quite understand because we don't have the total mentality of that time and we're not there.

Yes. As his first child. Yes. He defends this child through his entire life. And but not long after the birth, he and Jamukha break apart—or really it's Temujin breaks apart at the urging of—she said he lords it over you too much. He orders you around too much. You need to be free. We need to break away. And she urged him and he loved his wife more than anything. I think that in a certain way the most important other character in his life, adult life would be the anda relationship which gets severely tested in the future years. But they run away through the night. They go all night long to escape from him. But he obviously loved Börte the most and took the baby of course with him as well. So here is this breaking point of the anda. How did that relationship evolve? The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. And now we have Wang Khan, this the most powerful ruler on the steppe who's ruling out of central Mongolia of the Kereit people. And so Jamukha remains loyal to him, but at first so does Temujin. They're both loyal to him, but they're fighting in different kinds of campaigns, you know. So, for a while, they're not fighting each other. But eventually, some things happened that separate them. Temujin was making all of these great victories for Wang Khan. And he even got the title Wang, which means from Chinese meaning prince or king. Wang Khan received that from the Jin dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people. So Temujin was rising up and then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Wang Khan and Wang Khan said no. His own son Senggum told the father no, no, no, no, we don't marry those low people, they're Mongols, they're not like us, you know, we are Kereit people, we're not going to marry them. And so then now war you could say breaks out or feud really it's more of a feud. And Temujin has to flee far away into the east to a place called Baljuna. And he goes to Baljuna. And at this time then Jamukha is going to fight on behalf of his lord Wang Khan. The two of them do not meet in combat. But now their forces are fighting each other.

Yes. It's hard to know what's going through their mind at that point. We only have it later on when the relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways that they claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it because they never harmed each other directly. And in fact, then Temujin eventually defeats Wang Khan. So he takes over central Mongolia. He's starting to really rise up now. And he has the title from his own people of Chinggis Khan. They give him that at Khentii Mountain by the Blue Lake. It's a very beautiful special place. But he takes that title. That's not a title that anyone had ever held that we know of. Chinggis Khan. It was a new title that he just thought up or somebody thought up or somebody thought it had auspicious meaning behind it. It's very close to the word tengeris which means the sky. It could have had something to do with that. Mongolians really like, we might say, puns. They like words with multiple meanings and that's very important to them. The more meanings a word has the more power that word has. So it has different meaning in different languages. So in the Mongolian it sounds like strong Chinggis but in Turkic—and there are many Turkic people including the Merkit themselves are mostly Turkic people—it sounds like the Chingis thing. So it's exciting to them when there's this double meaning.

Yeah. Like today in Mongolia—well I've been there so long I think the fad has passed now but about 20 years ago it was popular to name children Michelle, girls, because it's a French name, an American name, and it means smile in Mongolian. So it's the power of three great languages and three great civilizations. And so many names are like that. And so I think Chinggis, it doesn't have one meaning. I think it means powerful, it means the sky, I think it means many different things. But so he had become a Khan and he was ruling over them. And so Jamukha now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over called the Naiman people who are farther west and he becomes the protégé you could say of the Naiman people. But when Genghis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamukha deserts the Naiman. He tells them, "These people have snouts of steel and they eat humans alive." And he was telling him all these horrible things about the Mongols, you know, and Tayang Khan, the leader of the Naiman, he was rightfully scared about them and he was left there and he in fact was very quickly also defeated. So Jamukha has not fought against Temujin in this campaign. And he's off with some of his people, Jadaran clan people. He's off with them and they see the turning of the tide, you know, and but he now wants to become the great Khan of the steppe. He has very few followers. But he takes the title Gur Khan, which is a very old ancient important title. But because Wang Khan is gone, Toghrul gone, that he can take this title and pretend to be the great Khan of the steppe and all. But his own people turn against him and they capture him and they think they will take him to Chinggis Khan. It's not Chinggis Khan. They'll take him and they will be rewarded perhaps for turning him in. And Chinggis Khan doesn't reward them immediately. He kills them all because they have betrayed their leader who is his anda. And it's a very strange encounter and so supposedly Chinggis Khan says to him, come back to me, save me, be beside me, protect me, be my shadow, be my safety guard in life. And supposedly Jamukha says, "But I did betray you when my people fought against you and you will always know that and you will never completely trust me. I will be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic. I will be like a thorn in the lapel of your deel." He said, "Kill me without shedding my blood. Let me die. And if you do, take my remains up to a high place and bury me. And I will be the guard. I will be the protector for you and your people forever." So they—obviously Temujin did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing. And he was either—it's not specified how he was killed without shedding the blood, but the Mongols had several ways because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood. The blood contains part of the soul and if you lose it, you're losing your soul before you die. So they usually wrapped them up in felt carpets and then beat them to death or trampled them to death with horses, something like that. There are a couple other methods but I think that's probably the method by which Jamukha was killed and so he was killed and then Temujin had—or Chinggis Khan had his remains taken up and buried in a high place. This is over near Tuva which is today part of Russia but until the 20th century was a part of Mongolia. The Tuvan people very very close culturally to the Mongols.

He had become very practical at this point and he understood that you needed complete total loyalty and trust with everybody around you and I think for this reason he was willing either to accept the plea of Jamukha and when Chinggis was asking him to come back and to be his shadow and to be his safety guard again. Maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected. Or maybe when Jamukha offered to be killed without shedding the blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.

Yes. And for Chinggis, I would say in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Börte. But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects. They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things. So she was—she was by him and she was positive in every regard so far as we know forever. Although she was not submissive, but she was always on his side. And Jamukha, it was just a little too hotheaded for me, you know, I mean, in my evaluation of him, that these things like, oh, we're going to drop down on the Merkit and we're going to come through the smoke hole, kill everybody, and all. And he had a flair for the dramatic even in a way giving the gold belt to Temujin. But Jamukha also—he explained himself at the end of life and he said, you know, we both lost our father but I also lost my mother and you had a strong mother to raise you. I did not. And he said you had Börte. You have a very strong wife to help you. And my wife—he just used a word like paddler. Like she just sort of complains and paddles along. And we did not have a relationship. So I think something about that rings true that there were some elements of that that were true. But Jamukha certainly didn't have the intelligence and the real genius for dealing with people, dealing with soldiers especially in war, for warfare that Temujin had.

Yes. Yes. He—I often wonder what happened to the gold belt. It disappeared from the story, you know, and a gold belt doesn't just disappear, you know, what happened to that. It's so interesting because Temujin was never interested in material goods and when as Genghis Khan is the ruler he in some ways you could say became the richest man in the world because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him but he always dressed simply, he always lived in the tent and he said, I eat what my soldiers eat, I dress the way my soldiers dress, I live the way my soldiers live. We are the same. So he had no interest in the wealth and he had sided before with Wang Khan which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people and all but he just didn't have the temperament I think that was going to be helpful for Genghis Khan's continued rise.

Yes. He changed and matured in various ways over life as we all do or we hope we do. But he never became a way—he was never greedy. He was never inquisitive. He kept the simple life. And part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him. No one was allowed to make his likeness. They couldn't paint a picture of him. They couldn't make a statue of him. No building could be built dedicated to him. No palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort, not even at the point of death at the simplest gravestone. Nothing. Nothing.

Yes, that's because that's a dangerous road to go down for a leader. And it's very hard to explain how he stuck to that, how he got it. You're so easily corrupted by power and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude towards his relationship with the people around him, his guard mostly, or his private part of the army, you know, that went with him, the central part of the army. That was his relationship, his family. He had four wives. This was what was important to him. And in fact, no portrait was painted until 1278. Well, by then he'd already been dead for 51 years. And then no statue until the 21st century.

The Secret History is a very unusual document and I happen to love it very much. But I said, you know, Chinggis allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. People couldn't take notes. Even the army was not—Genghis Khan ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people. And it was adapted from the Uyghur people. And so to this day, it's often called the Uyghur alphabet, the Uyghur alphabet. So he had ordered that and he'd ordered his children to learn to read and write. And some did. I think most did not, but some did. But one of the things he did with every campaign, even the one at the Merkit when he rescued Börte, was he always adopted one orphan and that child became a full member of the Mongol nation in his household. His mother Hoelun would raise the child. So she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes but they all became very high ranking members of the government and one was a Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier but he could read and write. He was the best and later eventually he became the supreme judge appointed by Genghis Khan of course. And so when Chinggis died he recognized it was important not just to write down the law—that's all Chinggis allowed to be written in blue books, only the law, nothing about him or campaigns or military anything—but Shigi Khutugtu was his name and Shigi Khutugtu realized that this was going to be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened so he compiled the work, part of it. I don't know, other people contributed, helped him but it's still a little bit unclear. The Mongols, they don't specify—that's—they always tell you exactly where something happens. So we know exactly where it happened in Mongolia. You can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That's very important to the Mongols. And we also know it's the year of the mouse. So it was 1228. Chinggis had died in '27. So he wrote down—it begins with what we would say are the myths, although I'm not sure they're myths, but the origins of the myths. It begins with the marriage of Grey Blue Wolf with a Tawny Deer. Then some people say well that's some kind of myth, it's totemic. And Mongols, they look at me, I asked them about this, they said, what? He was named Grey Blue Wolf, she was named Tawny Deer, they married, you know, very practical about it. And they think they're real people. Maybe they were or not. I don't know. But so this earlier history is just the genealogy as it should be. Who knows? But it's also in there because like Bodonchar, they call him Bodonchar the Fool, the ancestor of Temujin. He's cast out because he's just so dumb. The rest of the family doesn't want him. His father is undetermined who he was. He kidnaps a Khitan woman. She has the child who becomes ancestor. So it's a confusing mess, but I tend to think it's probably accurate. It has a lot of good information. And by the time you get to the life of Temujin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person Shigi Khutugtu, he was there sleeping in the same ger with the people. So we even see in there, he will record instances where Börte sits up in bed and tells her husband, "Okay, you got to do this, you got to do that, you can't do this anymore." We can't think of—you know, it's all recorded right. So it's a very intimate document and this is one reason that it was secret. It was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Chinggis Khan's prohibition against putting out information about the family so it was secret for a very long time so much so the scholars began to think it didn't exist and then in the 19th century a Russian academic who was working in China at the time in Beijing, he discovered a manuscript which was very very odd that people didn't think was anything because it's all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese. But he recognized, but if you read it, pronounce it, it makes sense in Mongolian. So it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.

The sounds. Correct. They use Chinese characters to record sounds which is always problematic in some little areas you're not exactly sure what the name is or something like that. But it was a very unusual document and then once they found it they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already. So that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much and I like their work very much and so it was helpful that it already existed and all of it—some of it existed in Mongolian, other Mongolian sources that were written later, some of it was just incorporated. So it seemed to be fairly genuine but it wasn't 100% pure. It had little things had happened to it along the way. Some things have been snipped here and there and a few words changed. And like sometimes for Temujin they call him Chinggis Khan, well he wasn't the Khan then, and sometimes they call him Khan which is like chief and other times Khagan which is emperor. Well in Mongolia it's a big difference, you know, so there are little things like this that move around that you're not sure why. But it's a document that I have great faith in. It was not published in English until 1982 but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the '50s. It was ready for publication and he was having trouble with the publisher and so it didn't appear for nearly 30 years. It was supposed to be two volumes. The first volume is the translation. The second volume was going to be the notes and the second volume was lost. To this day it hasn't been found. I would love to see that. But anyway it now it's in all languages just about in the world.

Yes, that was translated and then published by Harvard University. But the notes were just the notes from the scholar Francis Woodman Cleaves. Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes. There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things in it. And they also—they disapproved of some things. So they would try to put their own notes in the margins to kind of correct the story and explain away why the Mongol women would be often marrying their stepson. It just did not match with Confucian ethics, you know. So there's several things like that that they try to skip around. But so it's interesting just to read the Ming dynasty notes that are attached to it. But the document itself, Mongolian, it's just so important and for me it was the guiding document. I didn't want to be guided by anything else first. Everything else I would check to correlate and fill in blanks and give more information. But I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there and to feel it. And it's so important I think because you know history does not live in books. History does not live in archives or even libraries as much as I need them for my work. But history lives in the people. History lives in the memory of the people and the culture. And for example, the episode with the kidnapping of Börte. So I went to that place and I didn't know when it happened, what season it happened. It was very important for figuring out the births that came afterwards and other events that were being correlated. Very important to me. And so I'm just talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there. They said, "Oh, it's clear. It was the winter." I said, "Oh, where did you read that?" Said, "No, Granny Kuaqin was on the ground and she could feel the vibrations. She said, look, this is summertime now. You're not going to feel any vibrations. The ground here is so soft." Suddenly, a whole important piece that I've been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse. And he was absolutely right. It could only happen in the winter. And that also correlates with the time that raiding was done. So it correlates with other historic factors. But then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things. History lives in the people.

Yes. I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all. And there was so little to learn. I mean, everything was kind of known of whatever the chroniclers had recorded. The archaeologists had found whatever they had found. And I get there and he hadn't spent much time there. He didn't identify with it. I wasn't feeling anything. But in Mongolia, I would go to these places and I would know if Chinggis Khan came back today, he would know exactly where he is. There's no road, there's no sign, there's no building, there's no power line going to nothing. And just to smell the air, to feel it, to see the animals and to see what kind of

animals live here, what kind of plants are growing here, you begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking. And then you begin to see, ah, I know which direction they came from. The only direction they could come from was that way. You begin to see it and his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way. I have the text, but the text is like it has no scenery, no props, nothing like that. The Mongols all understand their way of life. They don't need to explain anything. They know which way the ger faces with the sun. They know all these things. But for me, that's how I learned it. It was from being with the people. It was the most important thing.

And this was starting in the 1990s. And the people at this time, they were amazed that I would come. The Soviet era had just ended. Socialism was just ending. Democracy was starting. And Chinggis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century. And every known descendant of Chinggis Khan was killed in Mongolia. Following the Secret History, that became the key to writing what I wrote. Take the history, which is difficult to understand. You have to go over it, and I often never understand different parts, or I change my mind and think it was yes, now it's no. But the Secret History is a valuable document, and to me also it's the opening document of Mongolian written language. And I think it's very important how people begin their written language, and they begin it with the words:

There is, from highest heaven, came the destiny of the blue wolf who was married to the fallow doe, and their descendants who came from the great sea to live at the base of Mount Burkhan Khaldun.

And then integrating the spiritual elements of nature, the mountains and the great sea, and this kind of just like a deep connection to nature that they have. Mongolia is a world that for the most part is the same as when Chinggis Khan was there. We cannot say that for hardly any other place in the world. I mean, certainly not for America, but just a few hundred years ago it was entirely different people, languages, everything. But you can't say it for London or Moscow or Constantinople. All of these things have changed so much. But Mongolia is still Mongolia. It's one of the largest countries in the world in space with the fewest number of people, about today 3.3 million, and they're spread out and they live in their environment in such an intimate way. This was important for learning about Chinggis Khan, how he thought, how he hunted, how he strategized for war. You learn that from the people today because they are still there. They're still living.

The first thing I think about the steppe is that you can see forever in every direction. There's no building, nothing to stop your line of view. And it's like being in the ocean in many ways. So you have this extremely open space and the wind is usually blowing through it, but it's extremely fresh. It's coming out of Siberia. It's coming out of the Arctic. It sweeps down across Mongolia. Cold is a thing sometimes, but it's always fresh. Always fresh. So you have the wind coming in. You have the smell of the wind, but also then there's grass. The smell of grass becomes very important.

Now, because of the particular location, from one year to another, one area may have grass one year and then drought the next year, another area has grass. So you don't always know. If it's not grass, it's dust. You have dust growing in. The dust doesn't smell so good. It doesn't feel so good. But that's just one more part of the country. The waters are mostly pure. Now, unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining in several areas. Even when I was there, even today when we go to some place like the Selenge River, where we talk about the market lift, so it's a place of pure waters, and that's how Mongolians define their world, is by the water. Chinggis Khan does not give lands to his sons to rule, he gives waters and people to rule. They do not refer to the earth as land, they refer to the earth as dal, ocean, the sea. And so water is very important.

And to learn the rules about water, you don't camp by water. If you camp by water, your animals and you are going to be polluting it, messing it up. So they're back, maybe in our modern terms, about a kilometer back. You take the animals to the river to drink and then you take them away. You do not bathe in that river. You take the water away from the river and you bathe away from the river so you do not pollute the river. The rules are very strict and very clear, and they're from the time of Chinggis Khan about how to deal with it. Also, it's dangerous to live close to the river because there are flash floods in the summertime. You could suddenly have it and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water. So the people, they live with nature in a way that I don't see anywhere else in the world. And even today with the changes, with the cell phone and with solar panels, and they could get TV out in the middle of the steppe, still they're living a similar life. The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike, but they're still herding cows and yaks and camels. If it's on a motorbike, okay, they're still doing it the Mongol way.

From a young age, all Mongols are trained to master riding horses, as you write, while standing on the horse. So they learn how to ride while standing on the horse from a young age. While standing on the horse, they often jousted with one another to see who could knock the other off. When their legs grew long enough to reach the stirrups, they were also taught to shoot arrows and to lasso on horseback, making targets out of leather pouches that they would dangle from poles so they would blow in the wind. The youngsters practice hitting the targets from horseback at varying distances and speeds. The skills of such play proved invaluable to horsemanship later in life.

The Mongol and the horse are inseparable. I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because that was insulting. I said the Mongol and the horse, they live together. They know each other with every twitch of the muscle and they smell the same. Well, I was saying it just not to be insulting about anything, but they have that deep intimacy and the horses do know their owner from the smell. This is very important. It's also important for Chinggis Khan because they made the flags, what they call the sülde, out of the horse hair from their own horses. And so in battle they used it for a very practical purpose, and that is the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag. It was other members of their own herd. So the language itself, I have never ever mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less for all the other things about it.

I can remember Mongolians being out there in the countryside. And they say, 'Oh, I want to learn English.' I say, 'Okay, yeah, that's nice.' 'You teach me some words in Mongolian, I teach you the words.' Okay. Say, 'What color is that horse?' I say, 'Brown.' They would say, 'Brown.' I say, 'Yes.' Okay. What color is that horse? Brown. Then they, 'But you said this color was brown. What color is this?' Yeah. So, I mean, just amazing. I mean, they have words based on sort of how smooth the coloring is and the variation in the texture and all the different... today in English sometimes you can put them together, we say like yellow-brown or brown-brown or, you know, but the words for horses, of course by sex, and then they have three because they have geldings, so they're very important too, and by age and by whether or not they've reproduced in the case of the females. All these things are important parts of the horse.

And the horse, a few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan 'raised in the dust of many fast horses.' It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit, and the dust itself is important. The Mongolians, they will wipe the sweat and the dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead, which is the most sacred part of the body where the soul resides. This is how intimate the relationship is with the horses. And they're hard on them in some ways. They train them very well. They ride them very hard. But the horses are also trained for that. They use a very small crop, it's a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end, and they hit the rump of the horse. Never anything else. They're horrified at Western people who use metal spurs and metal to harm the horse in the stomach and to harm the head of a horse. They say it's a capital crime. I mean, I don't know anyone who's ever been executed for it, but you never ever harm a horse's head.

So the horses are important in every way, even religiously important, with the making of the fermented horse's milk that the mother goes out every morning and she throws some to each of the four directions to start the day, and they use it for every kind of thing. But, you know, some things puzzled me in my watching. I remember one day being with a very nice family. It happened to be on a gelding day when they were out there gelding the would-be stallions who don't get to be stallions. But then this family, they had a bunch of boys, and I think about like one or two girls, but like four or five boys. And one boy was maybe 11 years old. He fell from the horse. You could see it not so far away. He fell from the horse and he didn't get up. No one moved. In fact, they all kind of turned attention away. And I thought, what am I supposed to say? This boy fell down. Somebody go get him. No.

And then the boy was trying to hobble back. He still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn't remount, and he was trying to hobble back. So his little brother went out to help him come in. And they came into the ger and they sat down. The mother just turned her back. And I'm thinking, how on earth can you do this? This is a child. This is your child, you know. But two weeks later, by chance, another boy who was practicing for Naadam, the annual races, like this boy had been doing, he was off in an area right close to the forested mountain area, and the horse bolted, took off through the woods. He was knocked off by a tree, and then the horse went deeper into the woods. The boy followed him. The boy became lost. The boy was 12 years old. He was lost for two weeks, and he lived. I would have died in 48 hours. He lived. He said, well, he slept in the daytime when it was warm. He walked at night when it was cold, even though this was summertime. The nights can be quite cold, especially on a mountain. And he sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away. And he knew what to eat. And then he walked until he found water moving. And then he would follow that water down to the valley. He lived. And I realized the boy falls off the horse, his mother's not going to be there. She knows that. And it's probably hard for her too to see her boy suffer, but she knows.

Sort of like ice-cold water or any other kind of hardship. Yes, you build a hardness to that. And I suppose that falling from the horse is just an example of that. There's a mental hardness and a mental toughness. You have to be able to take care of yourself. And with the weather, for example, often in that time and still today, some people, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow in order to prepare for the coming winter. And in the valley where I live, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition. And the water's very cold coming down from the mountain. And every day when there's a break, they go down, they take again, they do not get in the water, never, but they take the water and they pour the cold water over themselves. And yes, that's refreshing to them. Refreshing.

The Mongol, the horse, and the bow were a perfect combination, and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible, the synchronization and the timing of the movements, and also the years of skill. The fact that from absolute birth the Mongols would be on a horse, and by three years old they would probably be riding alone on the horse. Now, when I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time all jockeys on horses for races had to be under six years old. That was the age limit. The cutoff was six years old at that time. And so you had some as three years old racing out there. It's absolutely incredible. And of course, at that age they can't even have a saddle because they can't even be used. So they're just, all they're doing is staying on the horse. The horse has been trained to do what it has to do, and they just stay on it. But by staying on it, they learn the horse. They become one. And not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses. Usually five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle.

And this ability then to shoot, you have to defend your animals. There are wolves around, fox, other things. And in some areas there were even tigers and other animals that would come in, and you had to be able to shoot to defend against other people who might be raiding you. So they became excellent archers. They had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. Now, I say all that because it's very important, but those are all sort of nomadic traits of the great steppe. Anyway, I mean, in an earlier version, you had the Huns who came out of Mongolia, and Hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun, that's to this day, that's what they say for human being. So they came out of Mongolia, and all the early Turk groups came out of Mongolia, and they had the similar skills.

So you have this perfect weapon, but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it. And this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all, but the genius of Chinggis Khan came in. Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times. A number of Turk leaders, and also even Attila the Hun, who of course was actually born in the west, but they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders, and it wasn't that they were so excellent in their strategy. They were very good in warfare, and that's what carried him through. Chinggis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare, but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small when you're going against China that has millions just in the army, not to count in the country, and you're going against Russia, and you're going against the Middle East and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas. Your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow, and each horse. That's the weapon, but the army becomes the super weapon of Chinggis Khan, how he organized it, how he used it, and the strategies that he put together.

All cavalry. Oh, it's all cavalry. He had no infantry, and he had no baggage train. He had no backup commissary. Early on, no engineer corps. Later one was added much later. But no, all cavalry. And so there's light cavalry and heavy cavalry, and breaking down units using the decimal system: 10, 100, a thousand. So there's a kind of hierarchy where you delegate authority, but to the degree there's commands, they must be followed strictly.

I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Chinggis chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him. His and Jamukha was a blood-brother relationship, but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never ever revolted against him, never betrayed him. So he had extreme loyalty, and then, as you mention, he organized his decimal system. So the smallest unit of the army was the arban, the squad of 10 men. They were put together, and then the head of that squad, he had total control over it. But the men knew that they were going to protect each other, and they had to come back with every member or everybody. You don't leave anybody behind. So this was extremely important. So if you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he's risking his own life for you also, and you know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you.

The army was, they were organized with five horses each man. They had their bow and they had a lot of arrows, as many as they could have, but they also retrieved arrows at the end of their battle. And they also would retrieve the enemy arrows. This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia, because the Russians could not use Mongolian arrows. They could not knock them in their bow. But the Mongols could use Russian arrows. But so all these little things, but it's not even just the arrow. Also, they had to carry needle and thread. Every soldier had to be able to sew. And sometimes that could be a torn garment. It could be a piece of skin or a wound that somebody has. It was a very odd thing when you think about the army of Chinggis Khan and they're carrying everything themselves. They don't have any pack train behind them. And that one of the things they have to carry is needle and thread in order to sew up things. So complete self-reliance in that regard.

Yes. They also carried dried dairy products, it's called aaruul, where they dry curd and they can keep it for a couple of years even. But you dry it, and then when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water. You ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom, and turns into kind of thick protein. It's said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire. They had enough food there with them. So all these little things at the lowest level were important as well at the highest level of his loyalty of his men to him, and it went all the way down. Loyalty was extremely important, and he organized the army into left wing, right wing, or east and west. Mongols, the word for left is east. The word for right is west. So those two wings, and then in the middle was the khaan, the center, this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle. Then usually they would have a vanguard and a rear guard. And sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through.

And they never marched the way other armies do in a line of one following the other. They would always go in long lines spread out in wings so that each horse is on its own path, you can say, all parallel together. So they had very precise ways of doing things, and this I think was the secret with him. And he used the best people, but also he was willing to train them as much as possible. He never punished them for what happened. So Shigi Khutukhu, for example, the supreme judge, he was in command one time of a group in the battle in Afghanistan, and he lost the battle, which is very, very unusual for Mongols. So Chinggis Khan went out with him, said, 'Okay, let's go to the battlefield together and look it over, and you explain to me what you did, and then we will talk about it.' So he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him, and they knew they weren't going to be punished. It's not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No. Chinggis Khan knows every general is going to try 100%. And if they retreat, fine. They're saving Mongol lives. They know what to do. He respects that. So all these things like that fit together.

But I think a part of it that was important for him, so he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery, and how that all fit together. But he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw. I think that sedentary armies, like sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in their ways. This is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster. We're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger, but this is how we think. Chinggis Khan had no set way to think. And when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209, after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids. And I really think they were raids, not wars at first. So he went into Tangut territory of what's now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. So he went there, and of course the cities have walls around them. This is a man who's never encountered a wall in his life.

Yes. When you come from the Mongolian steppe where there's no, there's very few even natural wall-like things, right? Well, they have like the wall cliffs in some places. They're familiar with that and they can climb them, but they don't have people at the top shooting down the mountain. But so he looked, but he looked at everything around him and he saw, okay, they have this river and they have all these channels and they're always moving water around. And like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon. Anything that doesn't move is a target. You've got moving water, you've got a standing non-moving wall. So he said, 'Okay, the men are going to dig a channel and they're going to bring down the wall of the Tangut city.' Well, they did it, and they didn't know exactly what they were doing, and the embankments weren't high enough, and too much water came in from the Yellow River and actually flooded out the Mongol camp. But okay, it happened. We learned that lesson. So we're going to improve it. And that became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols for the next 50 years all the way to Baghdad. They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258. So this is this ability to see things and to try them, and if they fail, to try them in a different way but a better way.

I think it's just a part of human nature. Well, it didn't work the first eight times, but I'm going to do it one more time. I think it's going to work. I know I'm going to win the lottery this time because I got the right... That's how we think. But he had that real ability to, first of all, to be humble before these other things he didn't know about, technology, understand that he didn't understand, but he could understand it in his own way. And he did over and over. The Mongols were excellent at putting together new things in new ways and using them against their enemies.

Yes. Yes. And they were able to do that for three generations to create an army that was ever expanding, ever changing its tactics and its technology. And they got worse at it over time. But Chinggis Khan was the one who innovated it. He was the best with it. And he used it throughout his lifetime, and he was getting better over his lifetime with using foreign information, foreign technology, foreign ideas. He just had a genius for that.

Yes. Usually the way the rotation of the horses would, the horse would usually ride for one day and then rest for the next four to five days, and then another horse would be riding the next day. One way to measure it is that later at the time of the death of Ogodei, the word went from Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.

The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that. They fought for victory. That was the one thing. So to retreat to save lives and all, there's no shame in that. So the Mongols would often retreat, and Chinggis Khan basically, he himself never fought a battle that he thought he could lose. And he won every battle he fought. That wasn't true for every general under him, as we said for Shigi Khutukhu, for example, but he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating and in not fighting, not engaging the enemy.

However, that also becomes a tactic, and that they would send in a small group of soldiers to attack, and the Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse. They were able to then act like they were defeated and turn, but they could still fire backwards, which was the Parthian shot, which is unusual in the world. Not totally unique, but unusual to fire backwards. But the Mongols also could lean down and fire under the neck of the horse. So they're protected. They had many different ways. So they're firing coming, they're firing going, but usually the soldiers who are against them would break ranks to chase them. They want to go, they want to get their weapons, they want to kill the Mongols. And if they didn't immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out like loot from some place and valuables around. And the soldiers usually couldn't resist it. So they'd come chasing out after the Mongols, sort of pale metal, going in every different direction. And then they would get to a certain point, and from behind the two hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them. Over and over, this tactic worked.

Human nature. There is something that when the forces are retreating, you want to follow them. You want to follow them. You can't help it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what that is. That's maybe the animalistic.

Yes, that's, you know, been if not invented and perfected by the, by Chinggis. He really was a military genius. But there were other things too. You know, they didn't like roads. Yeah. You know, they just didn't like the roads. So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody ever came from. And the people would be unprepared for that. The most famous example is probably in Bukhara. This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, great place in the world to this day. And they came across the desert. Well, nobody had ever attacked across the desert. So people see dust coming, they think, well, caravan, they don't even know what's going on, but it was the direction that was a surprise element in that particular case. So he was able to think in ways that the other people were not thinking and to be able to surprise them.

I think that terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had, that he cultivated this reputation of ferocity. Not only did he win battles, but he didn't allow people to write about him, as we said, but he encouraged refugees. He said when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them. It's going to weaken their food supply and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Chinggis Khan encouraged it. You know, this is propaganda. It's terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy. And so when you hear, or even if you know they're coming, you see the dust, you hear the kind of roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth, it must have been truly terrifying. So the psychological warfare was a part of the whole process.

Chinggis Khan had a precise system. Exactly. He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols, already much was known. But to explain to them that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared and they could continue in their professions. It's just that now the rulers would be the Mongols. They would have to pay the taxes, and it used to be the same taxes they'd paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols. That was kind of the general system. And because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can't leave a detachment there, you know. So you're going to leave the local people in charge to run their country or their city or their area the way they have done in the past. He was absolutely faithful to that.

In one episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son-in-law, Togachar, he violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered. Chinggis Khan called him in and he stripped him of his rank and he said, 'The next city, you go first as a common soldier.' And of course, he was killed in the next battle. I don't know the name of the daughter, unfortunately. I've tried to figure that out. But anyway, it was a close relative to him and he was killed in the next battle for violating this law. So that was the law. So then if the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone. What they did was they killed all the leaders. They felt like the elite had not served them well and they usually killed the army because they couldn't incorporate the army into their own. The army had failed. But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot, it can be hammering out a metal plate, it can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.

So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn't so severe. What was truly severe was if you surrendered, and many of them did, and then they knew they would not be harmed. So they're not harmed. The Mongols go on. The Mongols are hundreds of miles away and all. Forget about the Mongols. Chinggis Khan said word that we're supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help. Forget about the Mongols. They're far away. It's a rumor. No, he stopped. He returned. He conquered the city and he killed everyone. That's the way it worked.

Yes. And as it turned out, I would say it was more the Middle East or what we call around Iran and Afghanistan where these were the worst cases. And I would say only in Afghanistan did sometimes the emotion of the slaughter take over in an unfortunate way. But he had a grandson whom he loved very much, and that grandson traveled with him, and he had the happy childhood that Temüjin had not had, and I think Chinggis Khan loved that about him. But in Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan where the great Buddhas are. Actually, he was sent to Bamiyan, and as it says in the Persian history, you know, the thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down. He was killed. And for Chinggis Khan, he had never lost a family member. Not one. None of his sons, none of his grandsons in battle. He had not lost them. And now to lose the most valuable grandson you have, the one that's your pride and joy in so many ways. And so he called the father, his own son, to him and did not tell him. They did not announce it to the public. And the son came and the son didn't know why he was being summoned. And Chinggis Khan said, 'You have to tell me that you will not cry or moan when I tell you this, but your son is no more.' And the father was... No one was allowed to moan. No one was allowed to cry. No one was allowed to do anything. He said, make them cry. You know, he came down on the people of Afghanistan so harshly, and it went on for weeks and weeks, the killing in Afghanistan, and then it just kind of wore itself out. He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality, and the slaughtering of these people should stop, and so he did. But that's the only time I know of that he really kind of lost control of his own emotions. And it's something we can all understand. But his response was truly extreme of we will not cry, we will not mourn, they will cry, they will mourn.

I should add he did not slaughter the people in the peaceful towns. What happened was the killing of what people thought was the heir, and he well may have been of Chinggis Khan. The killing of him revitalized a lot of people's hopes, and a lot of cities revolted. The ones who did not revolt were not killed. But the cities who revolted, he killed them all. There was a mass slaughter.

The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it's a total loss. It doesn't matter what the number is. It's a tremendous loss. And there was tremendous loss of life as in every war. I don't think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. If whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Chinggis Khan or the Mongols did it. You look today in the world, people are killing children, women, civilians. Every day, every day. And it's always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing. And the United States has certainly been involved with that, supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. And it's always, oh, but we're defending democracy. And yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people.

You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germans. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That's America. That's us. My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in that war. And he fought in Korea. And he was a good American. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. And I'm not, I don't even condemn America, but I'm saying how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves? But we tend to do that. We especially, barbarian people, people from the steppe, for example, we tend to demonize them, or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them.

It's a justification. People are always fighting for peace. Always fighting for peace. World War I was to make the world safe for democracy and peace, and then World War II. But what happened? We went to war in Korea. We went to war in Vietnam. We bombed Cambodia. We bombed Laos. We bombed Afghanistan. We bombed Syria. We bombed Iraq. We're always fighting for, you know, and I'm not a pacifist. I am not. I grew up surrounded with soldiers, and I am not a pacifist, but I try to be a realist that all nations kill. It happens everywhere.

Creative destruction. It certainly works in some aspects of life, even with ourselves. For example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones, it sometimes works. Or we can destroy relationships that we're in in order to create new ones. It can work. When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult. I certainly think that these episodes create great changes. You can see great changes that happen because of the Mongol Empire. Now, whether or not that's a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch for me. You know, the Mongols helped to unify many countries. You can think Korea had been three basically kingdoms, pushed them together. Everything that you see in China today was a part of the Mongol Empire. They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria, and it was a little bit larger under the Mongols. Even Russia, with so many little kingdoms and duchies and dukedoms, and the center had been into Ukraine and in Kiev, and they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more towards into what we call Russia now, and they began the process of the unification. It had a great impact on the country. So in a way, it's a new creation. Yes, it does arrive out of the destruction.

But also, I think we need to look where does the destruction come from? And it often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated and so corrupted and so decayed of their own lack of moral fiber that it was easy to conquer them. Case of Kublai Khan finally conquered all of China. He was conquering a decayed dynasty. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution. No one likes war, and I certainly don't like war, but I'm not 100% against it. I think that there are times that people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else, or for their family, and it's justified in that sense to themselves. It may not be justified in a world sense, but I just make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did if we can tolerate what the Americans did. And I am American through and through. There's no question about that. But we overlook all of our things that we did.

Now, it's interesting. For example, in Afghanistan, we were there for some 20 years. We had made the Taliban stronger before when they were fighting against the Russians, and then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out. But some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadran clan, descended from Jamukha's family, from his clan. This is what I mean when I say that the ramifications from that time are still with us, and we don't even see it. And when Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said, 'The Mongols,' meaning the Americans, 'the Mongols have returned. The Mongols have returned.' And he said, 'The Americans are just the new Mongols.' And I can see it. I don't accept it, but I can see how people think. If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.

Guilty. I'm guilty. Steel man. Carlin is a very smart man. I respect him very much and I like him tremendously. And he's right. But that is not what I want to stress. It's not that I want to deny the killing. It's not that I want to deny the warfare, but that's pretty much the same everywhere in the world. And how much do we need to say about how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated and all? No, it's what comes afterwards. You know, just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards. If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like. And all the things you've mentioned, from the trading system, the postal system, the religious freedom, the rights of women, the rights of minorities, these were things that people responded to. And so the world benefited tremendously from the life of Chinggis Khan. But all we want to talk about, and I don't deny it, is the conquest part. Okay, that's 20 years. If it went on for another 150 years, there's more to the story than just conquest.

I guess if there's one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world. We tend to have two categories for them. They are barbarians who kill people and eat one another. Or they're victims, and we should feel sorry for them and nostalgic about everything about them, and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering. That's the two roles for tribal people. But I'm trying to show them in a different light, that they conquered. Yes, they were conquerors, but they also created great things in the history of the world. And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law. You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey kind of the great ethics of the sky. And there were things like that about his vision that I think very few people in history had a vision.

And I look around the world today, and in my lifetime since the time of Roosevelt's death, I look around, I don't see much vision. I see lots of slogans, lots of talks, policy papers. Oh my God, we can produce it. Where is the vision? It's always we're going to have peace and we're going to have a better life, and you know, vote for me or vote for my party, and we're really for the people, and what the heck are they talking about? There is no vision there. So what is this country? What should this country be? What is this world? How should we... No, no vision.