by Jack Weatherford
IN 1937, THE SOUL of Genghis Khan disappeared from
the Buddhist monastery in central Mongolia along the River of the Moon
below the black Shankh Mountains where the faithful lamas had protected
and venerated it for centuries. During the 1930’s, Stalin’s
henchmen executed some thirty thousand Mongols in a series of campaigns
against their culture and religion. The troops ravaged one monastery
after another, shot the monks, assaulted the nuns, broke the religious
objects, looted the libraries, burned the scriptures, and demolished
the temples. Reportedly, someone secretly rescued the embodiment of
Genghis Khan’s soul from the Shankh Monastery and whisked it away
for safekeeping to the capital in Ulaanbaatar, where it ultimately disappeared.
Through the centuries on the rolling, grassy steppes of inner Asia,
a warrior-herder carried a Spirit Banner, called a sulde, constructed
by tying strands of hair from his best stallions to the shaft of a spear,
just below its blade. Whenever he erected his camp, the warrior planted
the Spirit Banner outside the entrance to proclaim his identity and
to stand as his perpetual guardian. The Spirit Banner always remained
in the open air beneath the Eternal Blue Sky that the Mongols worshiped.
As the strands of hair blew and tossed in the nearly constant breeze
of the steppe, they captured the power of the wind, the sky, and the
sun, and the banner channeled this power from nature to the warrior.
The wind in the horsehair inspired the warrior’s dreams and encouraged
him to pursue his own destiny. The streaming and twisting of the horsehair
in the wind beckoned the owner ever onward, luring him away from this
spot to seek another, to find better pasture, to explore new opportunities
and adventures, to create his own fate in his life in this world. The
union between the man and his Spirit Banner grew so intertwined that
when he died, the warrior’s spirit was said to reside forever
in those tufts of horsehair. While the warrior lived, the horsehair
banner carried his destiny; in death, it became his soul. The physical
body was quickly abandoned to nature, but the soul lived on forever
in those tufts of horsehair to inspire future generations.
Genghis Khan had one banner made from white horses to use in peacetime
and one made from black horses for guidance in war. The white one disappeared
early in history, but the black one survived as the repository of his
soul. In the centuries after his death, the Mongol people continued
to honor the banner where his soul resided. In the sixteenth century,
one of his descendants, the lama Zanabazar, built the monastery with
a special mission to fly and protect his banner. Through storms and
blizzards, invasions and civil wars, more than a thousand monks of the
Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism guarded the great banner, but they
proved no match for the totalitarian politics of the twentieth century.
The monks were killed, and the Spirit Banner disappeared.
Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for himself.
It seemed highly unlikely that he would ever have enough horses to create
a Spirit Banner, much less that he might follow it across the world.
The boy who became Genghis Khan grew up in a world of excessive tribal
violence, including murder, kidnapping, and enslavement. As the son
in an outcast family left to die on the steppes, he probably encountered
no more than a few hundred people in his entire childhood, and he received
no formal education. From this harsh setting, he learned, in dreadful
detail, the full range of human emotion: desire, ambition, and cruelty.
While still a child he killed his older half brother, was captured and
enslaved by a rival clan, and managed to escape from his captors.
Under such horrific conditions, the boy showed an instinct for survival
and self-preservation, but he showed little promise of the achievements
he would one day make. As a child, he feared dogs and he cried easily.
His younger brother was stronger than he was and a better archer and
wrestler; his half brother bossed him around and picked on him. Yet
from these degraded circumstances of hunger, humiliation, kidnapping,
and slavery, he began the long climb to power. Before reaching puberty,
he had already formed the two most important relationships of his life.
He swore eternal friendship and allegiance to a slightly older boy who
became the closest friend of his youth but turned into the most dedicated
enemy of his adulthood, and he found the girl whom he would love forever
and whom he made the mother of emperors. The dual capacity for friendship
and enmity forged in Genghis Khan’s youth endured throughout his
life and became the defining trait of his character. The tormenting
questions of love and paternity that arose beneath a shared blanket
or in the flickering firelight of the family hearth became projected
onto the larger stage of world history. His personal goals, desires,
and fears engulfed the world.
Year by year, he gradually defeated everyone more powerful than he
was, until he had conquered every tribe on the Mongolian steppe. At
the age of fifty, when most great conquerors had already put their fighting
days behind them, Genghis Khan’s Spirit Banner beckoned him out
of his remote homeland to confront the armies of the civilized people
who had harassed and enslaved the nomadic tribes for centuries. In the
remaining years of life, he followed that Spirit Banner to repeated
victory across the Gobi and the Yellow River into the kingdoms of China,
through the central Asian lands of the Turks and the Persians, and across
the mountains of Afghanistan to the Indus River.
In conquest after conquest, the Mongol army transformed warfare into
an intercontinental affair fought on multiple fronts stretching across
thousands of miles. Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques
made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing
them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units. Rather than
relying on defensive fortifications, he made brilliant use of speed
and surprise on the battlefield, as well as perfecting siege warfare
to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities. Genghis Khan
taught his people not only to fight across incredible distances but
to sustain their campaign over years, decades, and, eventually, more
than three generations of constant fighting.
In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people
than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together
with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations
of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the total number of people
defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied,
Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history.
The hooves of the Mongol warriors’ horses splashed in the waters
of every river and lake from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean
Sea. At its zenith, the empire covered between 11 and 12 million contiguous
square miles, an area about the size of the African continent and considerably
larger than North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico,
Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean combined. It stretched
from the snowy tundra of Siberia to the hot plains of India, from the
rice paddies of Vietnam to the wheat fields of Hungary, and from Korea
to the Balkans. The majority of people today live in countries conquered
by the Mongols; on the modern map, Genghis Kahn’s conquests include
thirty countries with well over 3 billion people. The most astonishing
aspect of this achievement is that the entire Mongol tribe under him
numbered around a million, smaller than the workforce of some modern
corporations. From this million, he recruited his army, which was comprised
of no more than one hundred thousand warriors—a group that could
comfortably fit into the larger sports stadiums of the modern era.
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood
if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated
merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate
slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination,
liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet,
wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented
a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and
opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across
the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and
scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of
imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.
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