Lessons from Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that, he was a boy named Temüjin, who at nine years old, lost everything. His father, his tribe, living in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world. So tell me about this boy, his childhood and the Mongolian steppe from which he came from. 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, here's this breaking point of the anda. How did that relationship evolve? The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. Now, we have Wang Khan, the most powerful ruler on the Steppe who's ruling out of Central Mongolia of the Kerait people. And so Jamakha remains loyal to him, but at first, so does Temüjin. They are both loyal to him, but they're fighting in different kinds of campaigns, and all.

That is one of the powerful things about the Chinggis Khan stories. He came from nothing. From absolute nothing.

Just incredible. But let's go to the document that you referenced several times, the Secret History. The Secret History is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much. But I said, Chinggis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. The people couldn't take notes. Even the army was not... He, Chinggis Khan ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people. And it was adapted from the Uyghur people.

What's the open Mongolian steppe like? As we return to the feeling of Temujin and Genghis Khan, what's it like looking at this place that has not changed since this time? The first thing I think about this 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 as a dickens 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 flowing in, the dust doesn't smell so good, it doesn't feel so good but that's just one more part of the country.

But then, if we go to the time of Temujin, of Genghis Khan, another component is the horses. Can we talk about their relationship with the horse? Thinking about this open steppe, 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 jostled 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. Can you speak to the relationship of Genghis Khan and the Mongols to horses? 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 Genghis Khan because they made the flags, what they call [foreign language 01:16:05], 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.

Well, then, getting back to the horses, the value they had for the horses and the horse riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history. So, if we just talk about the mounted archery that they've employed in war. The Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. So, there's a lot to say. You have to time, and just watching some of the videos, it's just incredible how stable you could be on top of a horse and I guess you're supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all four of the feet of the horse are off the ground. And so, you have to time all of that, you have to position your body to maintain balance and then there's the skill of the actual holding and shooting the bow accurately and there's, obviously, the technology of the bow, the composite bow, the recurve bow. They've also, I read, used crossbows later, they've adapted the technology and there's a particular kind of a thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse. The thing is bouncing up and down, so you have to not drop the arrow. It's just incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway. Can you speak to this exceptional excellence that Genghis Khan and the Mongols had for riding horses and engaging in war off of the horse?

If we can go back to the horses, you mentioned every soldier had five horses. The reason for that is the horses get tired. Yes.

There are estimates that Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world's population. To put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today's population. How should we think about the brutality of numbers like these? 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.

Maybe this is a good place to also talk about somebody I respect a lot, Dan Carlin of a Hardcore History podcast. He did an amazing series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols called Wrath of the Khans. I recommend people go listen to it. He had a lot of interesting ideas there. One of them, he presented the idea of historical arsonists. So referring to figures who cause immense destruction, but also paved the way for new developments and progress, basically making this complicated case that destruction often in history paves the way for progress. What do you think about this idea? 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 order to create new ones, it can work. When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult.

And when they come along, they change the direction of history. If we could linger on some of these world-defining ideas. Religious freedom. It's just surprising and incredible that Genghis Khan was able to enforce, inspire the value of religious freedom throughout all of these disparate lands for whom religion was a very powerful force. So can you speak to that? Some empires in history, and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups. I mean, Rome to some extent was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions, not of the Christians, but reasonably. But what happened with Genghis Khan, the first campaign he had outside of Mongolia was for the Uyghur people who lived in Western China. They at that time were being ruled by, actually we had mentioned before, the Naiman king, Tayang Khan. His son Kuchlug had fled. No good, worthless, well son. Kuchlug had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan. They ruled over the Uyghur people. He had been a Christian. The Naiman had been a Christian tribe, but he converted to Buddhism.

So one of the things we've mentioned, but I think is really, really fascinating and maybe in a measurable impact that Chinggis Khan had is on trade, and you could say a lot of stuff, but basically establishing a unified trade network that spanned, I don't know how many thousands of kilometers, and there's a lot of interesting things that were done to enable that trade. One is providing safety and security of not just the envoys, like we mentioned, for communication in the military context, but for the merchants. Can you speak to the what Chinggis Khan did for the trade network? Connected to the Silk Road, as an example? Nomads in general are interested in trade, and throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another or one oasis to another. And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent. They could create very little in their home country. They couldn't grow hardly anything, and they didn't have the technological skills for most of the crafts. So they're very dependent on trade.

So if we jump around a little bit on the topic of a cannon, what are some technological developments that Chinggis Khan, and his son, and Kublai Khan were using? So how much gunpowder were they using? In general, what was their approach to siege warfare, for example? What are some different ideas there? If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, first of all, he changed a lot of the strategies that were no longer working. The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grassland, but by the time you get to Hungary, the grassland starts to give out. By the time you get to Poland, it's so many farms. It's hard for horses to get through to farms, and they don't want to go on the roads. By the time you get to the Indus River, it's too hot, too humid. The bows are beginning to wilt. The horses are exhausted. It's not working.

So actually, if we rewind, Kublai Khan, who was he? And what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare? In 1215, Chinggis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of Northern China. And at that time, Southern China was ruled by the Song Dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Xi Xia Kingdom of the Tangut people. And so most of Northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered middle later, his descendants conquered middle, and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south.

Beautifully put. How did the Mongol Empire come to an end? How did it fall? Despite the fact that Temur Oljeitu Khan had United the Empire, at least symbolically, all of it, and they had the trade going on, the Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas. So in some areas of the world, they became more like the local people. So in Central Asia, they became Muslim and they got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before. Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time, and it was based around the Volga River, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people minority within a Russian empire. But the Mongols had left the framework for empire for Russia. That's something the Russians don't wanna hear any more than they wanna hear me criticize the end of the Song Dynasty.

But that reminds me of a very popular idea about Genghis Khan articulated in the 2003 paper titled The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. So that paper has a finding that estimates that 0.5% of the world's male population is descended, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. I've heard you kind of be a little bit skeptical of this paper, but I actually really like its findings. I talked to a good friend of mine, Manolis Kellis, who's a biologist, computational biologist and geneticist, and he likes the paper as well. I find it really convincing. But I think your skepticism has to do not necessarily with the paper's contents but more the implication that it speaks to the thing that maybe the people who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason is 0.5% of the population is because of some institutionalized mass rape conducted by Genghis Khan. But to me, and we actually spoke about this, you can't get those kinds of numbers with rape. If you want for the empire to propagate the gene, if you were a person that wanted to propagate the genes, you would make sure that all the lands you conquer are stable, flourishing, and happy. And so actually, this is much better explained in the paper. It indicates this. It's better explained by it was of high value, like social status value to be associated with the lineage of Genghis Khan. And so that means that for many generations, people loved the Great Khan.

Yeah. In studying human history, what have you learned about human nature and just the trajectory of humanity throughout the past several millennia? I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people, in general, and especially not for institutions. I tend to have a great suspicion about almost everything and mistrust in institutions over and over, and I think that's my own prejudice, and then I find reasons to support that. And Genghis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire. So, then I like that and I stress that and I see those things. I think that's one thing.

If I wanted to visit Mongolia, what would you recommend? What's the right way? Well, start with my home. Let's start there. You come over there. It's a nice valley. I have a nice valley there. I think almost any direction you go outside of the city is going to be interesting. It depends a little bit on your purpose. Most people go south to the Gobi and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakorum, Kharkhorin, the old capital from Ogedei Khan, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan. And then they circle back to the city and they may stop off to see what we call Przewalski, the wild horse, but they call it Kaktakhi, to see the takhi. Or they may go up to Khovsgol Lake, a big beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller.

And now, allow me to make a few comments on the ever-evolving moral landscape of human civilization throughout our 10,000-year history. I was listening to Dan Carlin's excellent eye-opening five-and-a-half-hour episode of Hardcore History titled Human Resources. It covered the topic of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade to be exact. One of the lessons I took from this episode is that the long arc of history is full of atrocities, as we modern-day humans understand them with the wisdom of time and moral progress. But during each period of history, as Dan documents, it was difficult for the majority of people to see just where the line between good and evil is. We humans, after all, forever like to weave a story in which we are the good guys. Listening to Dan discuss, and later myself, reading first-hand accounts of slaves, of torture, of rape, of separation of families is incomprehensibly heartbreaking.

And now, please allow me to say a few words about Gaza, Israel and Palestine. I'm not sure I'm eloquent enough or know quite the right words to express what I'm feeling. But let me try. I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it. And to the degree the US government is assisting the Israeli government in this, which I believe it currently is. It needs to stop immediately. For me as an American makes me sick to know that my government has any role in this atrocity. This needs to stop. Yes. There's geopolitical and military complexity, nuance, and historical context that I'm told by some so-called experts that one must understand. And perhaps they are smarter than me. But like mentioned before, unlike the more complexity of deep history that I've often spoken about from the Roman Empire to the Atlantic slave trade, this is the 21st century. This is today. In this, the 21st century, I see things quite simply and clearly.