Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
© 2005 Jack Weatherford
For all the differences and tensions between the West, Iran, and China, all can agree on one thing: the Mongols were mean. Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes of Central Asia after uniting regional tribes to create an empire which spanned from the Pacific Ocean into western Russia. His armies emptied Central Asia and under a successor would crush even Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. This history of the Mongolian khanate, from the rise of Genghis to its delayed division after his death, attempts to give the Khan the same sort of hearing that other world-conquerors like Alexander and Napoleon receive, weighing the positive aspects of his realm against the negative mass-slaughter, which in the west renders Genghis as an uber-powered barbarian. Among the virtues of the Khan’s realm: general religious tolerance, as Genghis supposedly regarded religion as a private and not a public thing, and liked to hold debates between clerics of competing faiths; Eurasian trade, as Mongolian rule allowed east-Asian goods to flow across to Europe; and a state that valued merit and loyalty more than caste. The author’s story is helpful and convincing, but having read Lost Enlightenment only a few weeks ago, I started this extra-conscious of how much vanished under the Khan’s wake in central Asia. However, I can now grudgingly admit that some of Khan’s destruction had a creative aspect to it as well.