In popular imagination, Genghis Khan is a name virtually synonymous with conquest and savagery, but for eight centuries, Genghis Khan has been revered as a founding father in Mongolia, though little was known about him. He refused to let artists create a portrait or statue of him, so we don’t even know what he looked like, really. When the Soviets took over Mongolia, they wanted to keep the Mongolians ignorant: They desecrated Buddhist temples and destroyed relics that honored the Great Khan. They sealed off access to the regions of Mongolia where he was likely born and buried, which would have had nationalistic and even spiritual significance for the Mongolians. The Communists did not want the Mongolians to rally around a heroic figure and retaliate. When the Soviet Union collapsed, anthropologist Jack Weatherford, with the help of scholars and local guides, pored over recently translated ancient manuscripts that detailed the Genghis Khan story, traveled around Mongolia to understand his stomping grounds, and gradually pieced together a picture of the warlord’s life that helps us appreciate him as a man, and why his accomplishments were so towering. Weatherford’s account unsettles many conventional understandings of Genghis Khan and settles his rightful place in human history.

The famed Venetian explorer Marco Polo wrote of his contemporary Genghis Khan that, “this Great Khan is the mightiest man, whether in respects of subjects or of territory or of treasure.” Polo was right. No military leader in human history has ever captured and subjugated such a wide range of territories and civilizations—and he did so with armies smaller, more poorly trained, and technologically inferior to many of his adversaries. Despite these disadvantages, he managed to conquer an area twice as large as the Roman Empire. It took astonishingly little time: less than three decades.  

These feats are staggering all on their own, but they become even more impressive when we consider his humble (really, humiliating) beginnings. The man we know as Genghis Khan (khan meaning “chief” or “ruler”) was born Temujin in 1162. He was the product of a bandit from a disreputable clan and a 16-year-old girl the bandit kidnapped while raiding a caravan. The world did not know it yet, but the kidnapping of this young girl from a nomadic tribe in the Mongolian steppe would alter not only her personal history, but also the world’s.

A rival tribe later poisoned Temujin’s bandit father, leaving the young boy fatherless, and his mother in a vulnerable position. The father was survived by his wife (Temujin’s mother), his concubine, and the seven young children he had with the two women. The husband was the link that connected both women to the tribe, so his death effectively severed them from the clan. Caring for the man’s widow, his concubine, and his seven young children would make survival a challenge for the clan, so the clan slipped away one night and left the hapless cadre of widows and children to fend for themselves. Abandonment was a virtual death sentence with a Siberian winter just around the corner. But the mother scavenged and her young sons scraped by, foraging and catching rats and fish.

Somehow, an obscure, forgotten family of scavengers cast out from a tribe that was already the lowest of the low on the nomadic totem pole evaded almost certain death. They eked out an existence without the support of husband or clan in an unforgiving climate. And yet, from this mess arose the world’s most fearsome and successful warlord. A boy who saw maybe a few hundred people over the course of his childhood in the Mongolian wilderness became a man known to civilizations across the world. These impossible, hardscrabble beginnings were the making of the Genghis Khan.

Temujin’s best friend and eventual rival was a boy from a nearby clan named Jamuka. They hunted, fished, and fought together across the steppes. The nomads at that time were usually proficient horseback riders by age four. The two boys became skilled enough not only to ride, but to ride standing up, and eventually to shoot arrows at targets and joust, all while standing on the horses’ backs. Fishing, hunting, stalking prey, riding, and archery: These games were all part of shaping Temujin into the warrior we still speak of eight centuries later.

A grimmer test of Temujin’s knack for strategy came in an altercation with his domineering stepbrother, Betger. The culture of the steppes was rigidly authoritarian and when a man died, his eldest son was expected to step into the father role and be treated with the same level of deference. Betger was only slightly older, but he abused his newly acquired paternal powers to steal fish and birds that Temujin had caught, and Temujin resented him for it. While Betger was sitting by a river, Temujin instructed another brother, this one younger, to approach Betger from the front while Temujin stalked him from behind. The brothers simultaneously fired their arrows and left Betger dead by the riverbank. His mother was furious that he’d killed his older brother and the de facto head of the family: “Now you have no companion other than your shadow,” she told him.

Temujin showed that from an early age he was ready to defy his mother’s wishes,  disregard convention, and refuse to be a follower. He would be the one giving the orders.

Temujiin’s assassination plot showed an uncanny ability for turning regular skills like hunting and applying them to strategic warfare tactics. He would be doing this the rest of his life. But his skill was not just technical—it was also political. He had an ability to read people and work the clan system in some ways, and alter it in others. When he was still a teenager, for example, he procured the protection of Ong Khan, the leader of a nearby clan, which came in handy when his mother’s clan came to exact revenge on his father for kidnapping his mother all those years ago. Clans did not forget grievances, and could wait years or decades to exact retribution.

Temujin defied the norms of caste and clan, and eventually unified clans through his cultivation of strategic alliances with members of other clans. His early life taught him that family and clan could not be counted on for aid. He had found kindness from those who were not his kinfolk and abandonment and death warrants from those who were. Throughout his life, he refused to honor the tradition of deference or loyalty to the clan, opting instead for a radical standard of evaluating how a person treated him. Actions spoke louder to the future khan than appeals to blood relations. He would rank his fighters based on their skill, rather than how directly their clans were linked to his.

Temujin managed to take down powerful clans and incorporate them into his clan conglomerate that he increasingly referred to as “People of the Felt Walls”—a reference to the materials that comprised the huts in the steppe. These early victories showed his drive to consolidate and unify. Eventually Temujin united all the clans of the Mongolian steppes, beating out his childhood friend-turned-rival Jamuka.

Temujin Khan had come from nothing and supplanted rivals, but from a global vantage point, he was still a petty local warlord cutting down nomads and stealing horses, women, and valuables. Even if this warlord had managed to unify the Mongol people and redefine kinship structure, his activity was still localized to impoverished nomads in the steppes. But that changed when Genghis Khan realized the material wealth available to other lands through trade along the Silk Roads into China, Persia, and Slavic regions. The other civilizations would soon learn that they were not safe in their own lands, that this warlord’s name was to be feared.

Over the course of a five-decade Mongol World War (1211-1261), Genghis Khan and his descendants expanded the Mongolian Empire to cover 11 to 12 million square miles; the Mongols numbered only one million, and the standing army only one hundred thousand. You could have fit the entire Mongol horde in a football stadium, but this roaming army controlled an area the size of the African continent. What makes the accomplishment even more impressive is that these nomads were fierce but poorly trained compared to the troops who defended the densely populated urban centers of other civilizations.

The Mongols developed a singular model of waging war. They didn’t use supply lines, as every other army in history had done. They traveled in the dead of winter, when the horses and men would lose the least amount of water. The armies lived off the land and always carried a group of elite builders who could create weapons and tools from the surrounding environs to meet the needs of the moment. The Mongols appropriated the technologies of other civilizations they conquered, rather than developing their own. By integrating the goods and technologies of the people they subjugated wherever they went, they eliminated the need to devote time and resources to technological innovation—they could simply smash and grab the best of the best from cultures they conquered. For example, when Genghis Khan’s armies invaded the city of Bukhara (modern-day Uzbekistan), the horde could have tried to take down the thick fortress walls and then contend with the highly trained soldiers inside. Those soldiers were poised and ready for hand-to-hand combat. Instead, the Mongols blew them up with a gunpowder-like explosive they’d discovered while conquering China. The walls fell, and the Mongols casually strolled into their new holding.

Whenever the Mongols defeated an enemy, they demanded a meal from the conquered side. By serving a meal, their enemies were admitting defeat and swearing loyalty to Genghis Khan, but this act also entitled them to his protection.

Not only was Ghengis Khan a formidable warrior, he had brains to match his brawn. He knew what people were like and what motivated them, and he strategized accordingly. In that same battle of Bukhara, Genghis Khan attacked the outposts surrounding the city and allowed the survivors to retreat to the city. Thus, he made them harbingers foretelling the city’s imminent doom. This created an atmosphere of panic in the city well before the Mongols appeared on the horizon.

You have probably heard of the Pax Romana, that stability and peace through hegemony that the Roman Empire brought to parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. What some scholars are calling the Pax Mongolica was at least as effective in creating stability and stimulating trade across Eurasia. And unlike just about every other empire, the Mongols did not condense wealth and power into a central locale. Rome and Babylon did so to such a degree that their entire empires became coterminous with the urban epicenter.

Under Genghis Khan’s grandson Khubilai Khan, the Mongols created a network of trade routes with sheltered rest stops and accommodations every 20-30 miles. They also created a kind of passport-credit card combo: a tablet that hung around the neck of travelers. Depending on the metal the tablet was made of and the image inscribed, the local Mongols hosting shelters and serving food would know the level of hospitality and care to give to those sojourning through the Mongol Empire, and whether or not they were to be taxed.

Every Mongol, from royal families to widows and orphans, were entitled to shares of the loot from conquest. So deep was the value of the share system that even when there was infighting between Genghis Khan’s grandsons, both sides would agree to cease fires to allow the shares of goods to pass unimpeded. After all, fighting between ruling families didn’t negate their need for silk and porcelain from China or steel and horses from Persia. This claiming of shares was honored—whatever the political climate. It was only when the Bubonic Plague broke down the supply chains across the empire that things really began to unravel between the different ruling families.

What began as warpaths under Genghis Khan became trade routes and communication lines in subsequent generations. Goods, people, and ideas moved from Vietnam to Korea or Mongolia to Persia. The Mongols began to realize it was easier to move massive quantities of goods by water than to move armies over land using horses. They mapped out rivers and Genghis Khan’s grandson Khubilai Khan worked especially diligently to piece together maps from conquered enemy cities.

Thus they produced maps and atlases and appropriated scholars from the Arab world to reconstruct a lay of the land and seas. One even created a globe depicting Afroeurasia and the Pacific Ocean. That was in 1267. The Mongols also created a unifying calendar system to better coordinate trade across the empire.

China had printing presses since the mid-1100s, but it was the Mongols who began using movable type printing presses on an enormous scale by the 1230s. As a result of these efforts, books and pamphlets became more widely available, leading to higher literacy rates and lower prices on reading materials. Johannes Gutenberg wouldn’t begin printing Bibles in the West until 1455.

And unlike other religious and political elites who feared dissemination of information, the Mongols encouraged its spread through printed media. They were a very pragmatic civilization that ruled based on what worked. They felt no compulsion to convert people to their way of living or religion. Pamphlets on religion and politics were printed without any fear of censorship or reprisal from the government.

There are many holdovers from the Mongol era that are part of our culture that we don’t even realize. Pants replacing tunics and elated shouts of “hurray” came to Europe through the Mongols. The scientist Francis Bacon praised gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press as technological innovations that were catapulting Europe into the modern world, but all three of these inventions came to the West during the Mongol era.

Most people are more aware of the rape, pillage, and plunder associated with Genghis Khan than of the ways he and his Golden Horde paved the way to the globalized world. We have internalized the one-dimensional barbarian caricature that Voltaire and other Enlightenment figures passed on, and the legacy continues. Genghis Khan’s European contemporaries, like the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, admired him, and Asians under Europe’s imperial boot, from the Japanese to the Chinese and Indians, adopted him as a pan-Asian symbol of heroism and resistance to oppression. When we take a deeper look at the warrior from the steppes, we find that he was a far more complex figure, whose legacy remains with us more than we realize.

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