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36. Fitzgerald, China: A Short Cultural History, pp. 302-7; Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 268-73; Hansen, The Open Empire, pp. 243-44; Hucker, China's Imperial Past, pp. 146-47.

FOUR: THE GREAT MONGOL EMPIRE: COSMOPOLITAN BARBARIANS

Epigraphs: Both quotes can be found in Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004), pp. 79, 160.

This chapter draws heavily on the following secondary sources: Walther Heissig, A Lost Civilization: The Mongols Rediscovered, D.J.S. Thomson, trans. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966); Harold Lamb, Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1927); David Morgan, The Mongols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); J. J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971); Bertold Spuler, The Muslim World: A Historical Survey, F.R.C. Bagley, trans., part 2, The Mongol Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969); and especially Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. These modern histories in turn rely on various Chinese, Persian, and European primary materials, as well as, most critically, an extraordinary Mongol work known as The Secret History of the Mongols, believed to be written contemporaneously with the Mongols’ rise to world dominance. Neither the author of The Secret History nor its exact date of compilation is known. In addition, the original document, most likely written in an adapted Uighur script (the Mongols had no alphabet of their own), has never been found. The version of The Secret History that has come down to us is a Chinese character transcription, probably dating from the fourteenth century, which was discovered in Beijing in the nineteenth century. See Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 5—11; Weatherford, Genghis Khan, pp. xxvii-xxxv.

In researching the Mongols, I came across a surprising number of factual discrepancies, no doubt reflecting the linguistic and interpretative difficulties involved in the study of Mongol history. (Even Genghis Khan's exact year of birth is reported differently by different authors.) In these instances, I usually relied on those sources based on the most recent scholarship, research, and archaeological evidence: The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union opened up many exciting research opportunities for Mongol scholars and historians and cultural anthropologists from around the world.

1. Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, p. xviii.

2. Lamb, Genghis Khan, p. 13; Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 58-59; Weather-ford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, pp. xviii, xxii, xxxiii, 9-27, 134, 169, 198.

3. The authority for Genghis Khan's infamous quotation was a medieval chronicler from Asia Minor whose people had been conquered by Genghis Khan; many historians have questioned whether the quotation is authentic. The particular translation I use is from Lamb, Genghis Khan, p. 107; see also Heissig, A Lost Civilization, pp. 9-10. On the gruesome cruelty of the Mongols, quite possibly exaggerated by unsympathetic historians, see Lamb, p. 134; Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, pp. 93-94, 113, 164.

4. Lamb, Genghis Khan, p. 18; Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, p. 162.

5. Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik Juvaini, The History of the World-Conqueror, John Andrew Boyle, trans., vol. 1 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 21; Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, pp. 14,27-28.

6. Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 187-89; Heissig, A Lost Civilization, pp. 44-45; Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, pp. xix, 13, 25, 50-53.

7. Heissig, A Lost Civilization, p. 44; Juvaini, The History of the World-Conqueror, p. 35; Lamb, Genghis Khan, pp. 35-37; Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World,