Genghis Khan:
A Little PR Problem?
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
History is written mostly
by the victorious. In case of Genghis Khan, however,
it is written by the vanquished, those he and
his descendants had conquered.
He was a man only a mother could perhaps love,
and she also happened to be the only person he
feared most.
With a highly mobile army, never more than 110,000,
he conquered more contiguous land and more people
in just 25 years than the Romans did in 400 years,
an area twice as large as that of any other single
individual in history. All this can be perhaps
attributed to 3-S’s: speed, surprise, and
siege. He controlled almost five million square
miles (or little less than the British Empire
at its peak), which makes Alexander the Great,
with 2.2 million sq. miles or less than half the
real estate, mere minor league, and Caesar and
Napoleon just “puny” by comparison.
Out of the tribal nomadic culture of Mongolian
steppe, he united the tribes, built an army that
fought and, using novel techniques for fighting,
conquered the isolated sedentary civilizations.
He literally re-drew the map of the 13th century
world.
All this, he did with barbaric cruelty: slaying
people, enslaving women and children, razing cities
and civilizations to the ground and demanding
total loyalty and obedience to himself and the
Mongol Empire. He [Genghis Khan], as Washington
Post put it (1989), “was a doer.”
He didn’t deserve a good press, and didn’t
get any. Surprisingly, however, he did get a few
tributes from some most unlikely sources: Closer
to Genghis' time, Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1390)
heaped praise on him in the longest of 'The Canterbury
Tales', the first book written in the English
language. Chaucer was no homebound poet; he had
traveled in France and Italy on diplomatic missions.
Here's what Chaucer had to say about Genghiz Khan,
"this noble king" in “The Squire’s
Tale”:
This noble king was called Genghis Khan,/ Who
in his time was of great renown/ That there was
nowhere in no region/ So excellent a lord in all
things./ He lacked nothing that belonged to a
king./ As of the sect of which he was born/ He
kept his law, to which that he was sworn./ And
thereto he was hardy, wise, and rich,/ And piteous
and just, always liked;/ Soothe of his word, benign,
and honorable,/ Of his courage as any center stable;/
Young, fresh, and strong, in arms desirous/ As
any bachelor of all his house./ A fair person
he was and fortunate,/ And kept always so well
royal estate/ That there was nowhere such another
man./ This noble king, the Tartar Genghis Khan./
Inspired by Marco Polo who had visited Kublai
Khan before and was impressed by him, when Columbus
set out from Spain in 1492, he was, it seems,
really after the Mongol kingdom of Cathay, not
India.
And, when after some small Caribbean islands,
he landed in Cuba, Columbus thought he had reached
the south of the Mongol empire, and the Mongol
regime was a bit more in the North (present-day
America).
To Francis Bacon (1561-1612), the three most revolutionary
inventions were: printing, the gunpowder and the
compass. He was unaware, however, that all of
them originated in China, and were introduced
into the West by the Mongols, without any record
of China taking advantage of these revolutionary
inventions.
However, Voltaire (1694–1778) saw the Mongols
as they were. In one of his plays (‘Orphan
of China’; staged in 1755), adapted from
‘The Orphan of Chao’ by Chi Chün-hsiang,
he painted Genghis as "The rapine, who live
in tents, in chariots, and in the fields,"
and accusing the Mongols in general, because they
"detest our arts, our customs, and our laws;
and therefore mean to change them all; to make
this splendid seat of empire one vast desert,
like their own.” The only redeeming quality
Voltaire saw in Genghis was that he (in that play)
admired the “wondrous people, great in arts
and arms, in learning and in manners great; their
kings on wisdom's basis founded all their power."
Byron also acknowledged Genghis’ legendary
prowess, for comparison, in his Don Juan (Canto
Eighth; CXXXIII; lines 1057 - 1058):
“Suwarrow* now was conqueror--a match /
For Timour or for Zinghis in his trade.”
[*Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov (1729-1800), a
Russian general commanding the siege, being compared
to Timour the Lame (1336-1405) and Genghis Khan
(1162-1227), two famous Mongol emperors and conquerors.]
Coleridge went further and romanticized those
times in his poem (composed 1798; published 1816),
“Xanadu, the Ballad of Kublai Khan,”
a grandson of Genghis.
“In Xanadu did Kublai Khan/ a stately pleasure-dome
decree,/ where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ through
caverns measureless to man/ down to a sunless
sea, … …// A damsel with/ a dulcimer/
in a vision once I saw./
Among prominent modern historical figures who
have had nice things to say about Genghis was
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of
independent India. Early in January, 1931, he
wrote a series of letters from jail to his 13-year
old daughter, Indira Gandhi, a future Indian PM
herself; her mother had also been arrested at
that time. In his ‘Letters’, later
published, Nehru (echoing Chaucer) had this to
say about Genghis Khan, the man who had brought
barbaric devastation to India:
(i) “One can well imagine what the amazement
of the Eurasian world must have been at this volcanic
eruption. (ii) “Strong men and women they
were, these nomads from Mogolia, … their
strength and their training might not have availed
them much if they had not produced a chief who
was a most remarkable man.” (iii) [Genghis]
was “ a cautious and careful middle-aged
man, and everything big he did was preceded by
thought and preparation.” (iv) “Chengiz
is, without a doubt, the greatest military genius
and leader in history.”… “Alexander
[the Great] and [Julius] Caesar seem petty before
him. ” (v) “I [Nehru] have given you
more details and information about Chengiz Khan
than was perhaps was necessary. But the man fascinates
me.”
Genghiz was born as Temujin (= black smith) in
Mongolia’s Khentii Mountains by the Onon
River in the valley of ‘Gurvan Nuur’
(200 miles NE of Ulaan Bataar, in the spring of
1162 and proclaimed in 1206 (at age 44) as Genghis
Khan, by kurultai, the Mongol shamanistic assembly
of the chiefs. [Chingis, Jinghiz and other phonetically
similar spelling of the anglicized ‘Genghiz’;
‘zheng’ in Chinese = true or just;
khan or khagan = ruler or ruler of rulers, emperor].
This public ceremony was elaborate and performed
on the open steppe under the only supreme spiritual
power they worship, the ‘Eternal Blue Sky’.
The 17th century French biographer, Francois Petis
de la Croix, has described it, based on a Persian-Turkish
account (now lost) considered to be the most complete
so far. After installing him as their ruler, his
followers bowed to him (“nine times”)
according to the shamanistic ritual and their
prayers concluded in shouts of the ancient Mongolian
phrase “huree, huree, huree” (not
too different, perhaps, from the British, ‘Hurray’).
He established the Mongol Empire, after unifying
and making a political reality of a disparate
group of nomadic tribes that had existed since
prehistoric times around Lake Bajkal, somewhat
north of present-day Mongolia at the border of
the Siberian regions in the North and the Turkic
steppe cultures in South. This area was influenced,
in no small measure, by the ancient Chinese. By
the time he died (August, 1227), he had literally
redrawn the map of the 13th century world.
The choice up till recently was between effusive
praise of the kind described above, or the blood-dripping
history chapters of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368)
we have been familiar with.
The only other account of that history was what
the Mongol scribes had written more or less contemporaneously,
but that [“The Secret History of The Mongols,”
subtitled “The Origin of Chingis Khan.”]
was never found for centuries. Its long-rumored
existence was a mystery and its discovery itself,
a history. Not surprisingly, it was written in
a Mongolian language (very different from the
Chinese) and centered mostly around Genghis Khan
and the Mongol history, according to him. This
‘Secret History’, according to experts,
is believed to have been completed in 1240-41,
about 13 years after Genghis’ death. Much
about how this ‘secret’ history, originally
meant only for the use of the dynasty, was found
and how it became known, is itself a series of
adventures, each more mysterious than the next;
we see several accounts of it. The original (or
a copy of it, if any made) has not been found
– perhaps lost forever. However, what was
found in Beijing was its Chinese transcription
under the name Yuan Ch’ao Pi Shih (Kublai
Khan, a grandson of Genghis was the Chinese Yuan
dynasty). It was this Chinese transcription, the
only literary 13th century Mongol monument, that
was thoroughly investigated, authenticated, supported
by the secondary sources. Francis Woodman Cleaves
(Harvard University) translated it into English
in 1956.
But what proved crucial was another series of
events, unexpected in the ‘50s or ‘early
‘80s: the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1989, its withdrawal from Mongolia and independence
of Mongolia and replacement of communism (1992)
with an increasingly open government that has
allowed greater access of the international scholars
to the sites and materials related to Genghis
Khan and the Mongol Empire. This renaissance over
the past two decades has seen teams of international
researchers visiting Mongolia for extended periods
of time.
Perhaps the best effort to document the Mongol
history written by the Mongol contemporaries of
Genghis is the 2004 book by Jack Weatherford,
“Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World,” who spent years doing research and
spending time in the area, with help from local
scholars. He describes what else did the man who
conquered more land than any one single man in
the history of the world do and how: a three-dimensional
Genghis that emerges out of those pages is not
the one we thought we had known.
[To be continued]
Selected references:
1. Jack Weatherford. Genghis Khan and the Making
of the Modern World. Rown Publishers, NY. 2004
2.National Geographics. December, 1996 & February,1997
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