In the 13th Century, the horse-riding warriors of the Mongolian steppes struck fear into the hearts of civilized people throughout Eurasia – Russians, Chinese, Indians, Persians, and Arabs. It all began, unassumingly, in the year 1206, when a consortium of Mongol tribes elected a man named Temujin as their “khan” – supreme ruler. He took the name Genghis, which means “universal”, and proceeded to send his armies striking in all directions.
According to contemporary Persian historian Rashid ad-Din, Genghis Khan is said to have extolled conquest with blood-curdling bluntness: “Man’s greatest joy is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his widows weeping, ride his horses, and use the bodies of his women”. (It is not much of an imaginative leap to picture Bush’s neoconservative buddies sharing similar sentiment.)
By the time of his death in 1227, Genghis had extended Mongol dominion over northern China and most of Central Asia. He had also earned a reputation for piracy and mass-murder comparable to that of Hitler and Stalin – indeed, his last recorded decree was the genocide of the Tibetan kingdom of Xi Xia. By the mid-1200s, Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons had engulfed Russia, Afghanistan, Persia, Korea, and the Caucasus – in all these places, repeating their mentor’s pattern of pillage, slaughter, and ravaging of civil society. The stage was now set for what became, perhaps, the Mongols’ most infamous act. In 1258, an army commanded by Hulagu, enlarged to nearly 150,000 men by conscription from conquered Georgia and Armenia – what today would be called a “coalition of the willing” – set its sights on the Abbasid Caliphate, the splendid Muslim kingdom centered in modern-day Iraq.
According to contemporary Persian historian Rashid ad-Din, Genghis Khan is said to have extolled conquest with blood-curdling bluntness: “Man’s greatest joy is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his widows weeping, ride his horses, and use the bodies of his women”. (It is not much of an imaginative leap to picture Bush’s neoconservative buddies sharing similar sentiment.)
By the time of his death in 1227, Genghis had extended Mongol dominion over northern China and most of Central Asia. He had also earned a reputation for piracy and mass-murder comparable to that of Hitler and Stalin – indeed, his last recorded decree was the genocide of the Tibetan kingdom of Xi Xia. By the mid-1200s, Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons had engulfed Russia, Afghanistan, Persia, Korea, and the Caucasus – in all these places, repeating their mentor’s pattern of pillage, slaughter, and ravaging of civil society. The stage was now set for what became, perhaps, the Mongols’ most infamous act. In 1258, an army commanded by Hulagu, enlarged to nearly 150,000 men by conscription from conquered Georgia and Armenia – what today would be called a “coalition of the willing” – set its sights on the Abbasid Caliphate, the splendid Muslim kingdom centered in modern-day Iraq.