The brutal childhood of Genghis Khan | Jack Weatherford and Lex Fridman

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, 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, 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, but 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 Hoelun 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, 'It 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.

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.

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 in this unusual situation 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, her husband. He had a wife named Besüdei. 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 Temüjin, which is sort of 'person of iron' is what it means from the Turkic, but today part of also the 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.