BIOGRAPHY:
Genghis Khan (also Chinggis Khan, around 1162-1227) was the founder of the Mongol Empire (1206-1368) over which he was to reign from 1206 until his death in 1227. Born Temüjin, he acquired the title of Genghis Khan , probably meaning ‘universal sovereign’. After unifying the Mongol tribes, he attacked the Xi Xia and Jin states, then Song. In another direction, his swift armies invaded Persia, Afghanistan and even Russia. He is merciless with his enemies, countless innocent people were massacred in his campaigns of terror – millions, according to medieval chroniclers. Genghis Khan, however, was a competent administrator who introduced writing to the Mongols, created their first code of laws, promoted trade, and allowed all religions to be freely practiced anywhere in the Mongol world. Thus, Genghis Khan established the foundations of an empire which, under his successors, would ultimately control a fifth of the globe.Youth
The life of Genghis Khan:
The life of Genghis Khan is recounted, sometimes fantastically, in the Secret History of the Mongols, parts of which probably date from the first half of the 13th century, and others from later Chinese and Arabic sources. Born to a noble family, he was given the birth name Temüjin (or Temuchin), after a Tatar chieftain captured by his father. His date of birth is not known with certainty, with some researchers retaining 1162 and others 1167. Legend has it that the child was born holding a blood clot in his right hand, an ominous omen for things to come. Temüjin’s mother was named Höelün and his father, Yisügei, a tribal leader. He arranged for his son to marry Börte, daughter of another influential Mongol leader, Dei-Sechen, but Temüjin’s father was poisoned by a rival before this plan could come to fruition.
Temüjin was still only nine or twelve years old at the time, so he was unable to retain the loyalty of his father’s disciples. As a result, he and his mother were abandoned on the Asian steppe, left to die. However, the rejected family managed to feed themselves and live off the land as best they could. Things then took a bad turn when young Temüjin was captured by a rival clan leader, perhaps as a result of an incident where Temüjin killed one of his older half-brothers, Bekter, who likely represented a rival branch of the family that had taken over Yisügei’s inheritance. Fortunately, Temüjin was able to escape during the night and, gathering around him the few loyal followers of his father, he joined Toghril, chief of the Keraït, a tribe that his father had once helped. Temüjin then married his fiancée of many years, Börte.
Soon, Temüjin’s leadership and martial skills brought him victories over his local rivals, and his army grew in size. The conflicts were fierce, notably with a tribal chief who boiled his captives in 70 large cauldrons. Temüjin proved unstoppable, however, and he succeeded in unifying most of the nomadic tribes that roamed the steppes of Central Asia. Each was made up of different clans, but linked by a network of alliances between them. Temüjin himself became the dominant leader through a mixture of diplomacy, generosity, and his ruthless use of force and punishment. Defeated tribes were sometimes forced to join his army under penalty of total extermination. Courageous himself in battle, Temüjin often rewarded the bravery of the vanquished, making a man called Djebe one of his generals because he had resisted a cavalry charge, and had fired an arrow which had shot Temujin’s own horse.
The Great Khan:
As his army swelled to ever greater proportions, over a period of about ten years Temüjin defeated rivals such as the Tatars, Kereyits, Naimans, and Merkits, until a Mongol confederation was formed. at a great conference, or kurultai, at the Kerülen River in 1206, and officially declared Temüjin their leader. He was given the title Genghis Khan, which probably means ‘universal ruler’ (in Mongolian, Chinggis but ‘Genghis’, coming from medieval Arab scholars, remains more familiar today).
The goal now was to combine this power base with traditional Mongol skills as horsemen and archers. It was a question not only of overcoming the traditional rivalry with neighboring states, but also of building an empire which could then conquer the richest state in Asia, China. Genghis may not have planned this, but that is indeed what happened.
Despite his now elevated position, Genghis had to remain close to his roots and continue to live in a large portable wool felt tent (yurt). Indeed, until the Mongol Empire was established, these nomads had not formed villages or towns but moved regularly from pasture to pasture according to the seasons. The Great Khan did not always look back however, and he insisted that the hitherto only spoken Mongolian language was now converted into a written language using the script of the Uyghur Turks. Consequently, a code of laws, the Yasa, could now be drawn up with, among many other provisions, penalties for specific crimes.
Another innovation was the development of a postal system with which horse couriers could quickly carry messages over long distances, with relay stations for food, rest and changing horses.
The network proved extremely useful during campaigns where military intelligence needed to be transmitted quickly. Genghis also made his army more secure by avoiding the Mongol tradition of forming divisions based on tribes, which could then split due to centuries-old rivalries. . To better secure his own position, the Great Khan formed and then expanded his elite personal guard, the keshik, from 800 to 10,000 men. Traditionally, their loyalty was assured by the corps’ diverse composition and by the fact that its members were drawn from the sons and brothers of its senior commanders. Later, its members swore absolute loyalty to the Khan in exchange for special favors in terms of spoils of war. In addition, many of its members also acquired important administrative functions in the conquered territories.
The Mongol War:
Another advantage was that Genghis Khan knew how to exploit the enemy’s internal divisions and stir up old rivalries that could weaken enemy alliances, information often acquired by spies and merchants. Finally, motivation was high because the Mongol War was designed for one purpose: to gather spoils. Additionally, victorious commanders could expect to be given vast tracts of land to rule as they pleased, while the Great Khan himself received tribute from those rulers allowed to remain in power as Mongol vassals. In short, once mobilized, the Mongol hordes proved very difficult to stop.
The Mongol Empire:-
  The Jin State:
Genghis attacked the Jin state (of the Jürchen Jin Dynasty, 1115-1234) and the Yellow River Plain in 1205, 1209, and 1211, the latter invading with two Mongol armies of 50,000 men each. The Jürchen (ancestors of the Manchus), controlled most of northern China and were capable of fielding 300,000 infantry and 150,000 cavalry, but Mongol high-speed tactics proved that numbers were not everything. For example, Genghis would savagely sack a city and then retreat so the Jin could retake it, but then they had to deal with the chaos. The tactic was even repeated several times in the same city. Another strategy was to capture a city, devastate it, kill all the citizens, then warn neighboring cities that the same fate would befall them if they did not surrender immediately. There were also acts of terror such as the use of captives as human shields. A Jin official, Yuan Haowen (1190-1257) wrote the following poem to describe the devastation of the Mongol invasion:To add to the Jin’s woes, they were plagued by internal problems such as chronic corruption draining the coffers of state, natural disasters and assassinations of high officials, including Emperor Feidi in 1213. The Jin rulers were forced to retreat south, sign a peace agreement and pay tribute to the Great Khan in 1214, although they were probably happy about it, given the alternative. It was a respite, but worse was to come as the Mongols were to attack the Jin again in 1215 after they moved their capital south, and Genghis took this as a rejection of their vassal status.
 Xi Xia and Song:
In 1215, the Great Khan also attacked the Tangut state of Xi Xia (Western Xia, 1038-1227), in northern China, repeating his raids of 1209 there. Rather myopically, the fourth player of this game he empires, the Song Dynasty (960-1279), instead of allying with the Jin to create a useful buffer zone between them and the Mongols, allied themselves with the Khan. Certainly, the Jin and Song had attacked each other since the previous century and the Song even paid tribute to keep Jin raids to a minimum.
The Mongols continued their attacks on China over the next decade, with around 90 cities destroyed in 1212–13 alone. Many disgruntled or captured Chinese and Khitan (steppe nomads who had once ruled northern China and Manchuria) soldiers were absorbed into the Mongol army along the way. The Song launched a counterattack into Mongol territory in 1215, which ultimately failed, and the Chinese general P’eng I-pin was captured, a fate which also befell one of his successors in 1217. Again, in 1215, Beijing was taken and the city burned for a month. Even Korea did not escape the Khan’s attention, with an invading force pursuing the fleeing Khitans in 1216, and a Korean army subsequently supporting the Mongols in battles against the Khitans in 1219.
The Mongols were now unified and their army had several advantages over those of their larger and more powerful neighbors. They were expert archers using their very powerful composite bows, and extremely sturdy soldiers, capable of riding for days on end with minimal food and water. Their stocky but agile horses were a weapon in themselves, and they were able to survive harsh temperatures. The Mongols had both light and heavy cavalry, and each cavalryman usually had up to 16 horses in reserve, giving them a very long range of maneuver. In addition to this, the Mongols never missed the opportunity to employ the enemy’s tactics and technology themselves. Not only did they bring fierce mobility to Asian warfare, but their flexibility also made them quickly adept at other types of battle, such as siege warfare and the use of gunpowder missiles and catapults (the Chinese first, then those of Afghanistan when they realized they were superior). Adopting the skills and innovations of others became a strong point in general, as the Khan’s ministers and commanders came from around twenty different nations.
After a period of relative stability, the Mongols set out again, attacking Korea in 1232 and 1235, and China in 1234, ultimately causing the collapse of the Jin state. It was now clear that they would not be satisfied until they had conquered the whole of East Asia. The Song state was now fully exposed to the north and weaker than ever, ravaged by internal political factions and crippled by an overly conservative foreign policy, which meant it was only a matter of time before the Mongols also cause its collapse.
 Western Asia:
However, Genghis Khan was far from satisfied with China’s impending fall and he led his army southwest and invaded what is now Turkestan, Uzbekistan, and Iran between 1218 and 1220. The target was the Khwarazm Empire. Genghis had sent a diplomatic mission asking the Shah of Khwarezm to submit to his suzerainty, but the Shah had the ambassadors executed. Genghis responded by deploying an army of some 100,000 men that swept through Persia and forced the Shah to flee to an island in the Caspian Sea. Bukhara and Samarkand were taken, among other cities. The Great Khan was relentless and merciless, destroying countless cities, murdering innocents, and even ruining the region’s excellent irrigation system. It is not for nothing that he was called ‘the Bad’, ‘the Cursed’. In 1221, the Mongols swept through northern Afghanistan, in 1222 a Russian army was defeated at the Kalka, and then the Caspian Sea was completely encircled when the army returned to Mongolia.
The Mongol’s fearsome reputation as the military equivalent of a great plague was now firmly established. There was, however, another side to Genghis Khan’s conquests. He knew that in order to keep control of the conquered territories and ensure that they would continue to produce wealth that he could regularly enjoy, there had to be a stable system of government in place. As a result, rulers were often allowed to retain power, the empire’s different religions were tolerated, international trade was encouraged, and traveling merchants were afforded protection.
The campaigns in western Asia and the edge of Europe brought Genghis Khan and the Mongols to the attention of historians other than the Chinese, notably the Persian Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani (b. 1193), who gave the following description of the Great Khan, then already a legendary figure: Death and Legacy.
DEATH:
Genghis Khan died on August 18, 1227 of uncertain causes, perhaps following a fall from his horse during a hunt a few months earlier. At the time, he was back in northwest China, besieging the Xia state capital of Zhongxing, and news of the great leader’s death was hidden from the Mongol army until that the city capitulates and that its inhabitants are all massacred. His body was then returned to Mongolia for burial, but the location of his grave was kept secret, a decision which has sparked much speculation ever since. Medieval sources mention that the tomb was near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun, and that his son Ögedeï sacrificed 40 slave girls and 40 horses to accompany his father in the future life.
Genghis knew that his successors would vie for control of the Mongol Empire after his death, so he had already made arrangements. The empire was to be divided between his sons Ögedeï, Djötchi, Djaghatai, and Tolui, each ruling a khanate (although Djötchi predeceased his father in 1227), and Ögedeï, the third son, becoming the new Great Khan in 1229, a position which he was to maintain until his death in 1241. The next major step forward came during the reign of Kublai Khan (reigned 1260-1294), grandson of Genghis, who conquered most of what remained of China from 1275, and thus caused the collapse of the Song dynasty in 1279. Kublai proclaimed himself emperor of the new Yuan Dynasty in China. Over the next two decades, China was to become entirely dominated by the Mongols. The Mongol Empire would then set out on further campaigns, in the Middle East, Korea and Japan, with varying success, but ultimately creating one of the greatest empires ever known.
However, Genghis Khan left a much longer shadow than his empire, as he came to be seen as nothing less than a pseudo-god in the region, and a father of the Mongol people. Worshiped in medieval times, his veneration has been revived in modern times, and he continues to be honored today with special ceremonies in the present-day Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.