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By Root 1071 0

military strategy, Genghis pursued a longstanding Mongol aspiration, the conquest of China, the Mongols’ much larger and more powerful neighbor to the south and east. In his insatiable quest for more land to add to his empire, he subdued potential rivals—and there were many—among the Mongols, and built alliances with distant warlords. He then exploited the internal politics of China, playing one clique against another, using a mixture of diplomacy and war. The Chinese, who had seemed invulnerable, quickly fell before Genghis Khan’s cunning generalship. He mastered the art of siege warfare, learning to take cities by any means, no matter how savage. His troops burned or starved out inhabitants. They employed giant slingshots or catapults such as mangonels and trebuchets, capable of hurling stones or flaming naphtha or even diseased corpses over the walls into the midst of terrified city dwellers trapped by their own defenses. “Sometimes they even take the fat of the people they kill and, melting it, throw it onto the houses,” Carpini wrote, “and wherever the fire falls on this fat it is almost inextinguishable”—unless doused with wine, which few victims had the presence of mind to employ. “If it falls on flesh”—an even more horrifying possibility—Carpini calmly advised that “it can be put out by being rubbed with the hand”—a technique that escaped Marco Polo’s notice.

Ill-equipped to repulse the determined Mongol adversaries, China became resigned to the Mongols’ unifying influence and tried to make the best of the inevitable. In words that Genghis would have approved, Vassaf remarked, “As the rumors of his just rule spread to the horizons, the happy people of China and beyond, up to the Egyptian coasts and the far western territories, were honored to submit to his just rule.” The bitterest of ironies informed this assessment.

Genghis Khan knew when to hold his strength in check, and he took pains to respect Chinese customs and religion. Where he was received relatively peacefully, he ordered his generals to proclaim religious freedom and to forbid wholesale slaughter. In the process, the Mongol invaders took on as many traits from the conquered as they imposed. They adopted Chinese dietary practices, clothing, legal procedures, and religious observances.

IN 1227, as his vision of China unified under Mongol rule neared fulfillment, Genghis Khan died at the age of sixty-five, leaving his immense empire to his son Ögödei, along with a trove of lore unique in the world’s literature.

The year after Genghis’s death, a group of Mongol scribes produced The Secret History of the Mongols, an extraordinary compilation of Mongol history, ritual, folklore, and customs recorded in a mixture of Mongol and Uighur tongues. (The Uighurs are a Turkic people dwelling in Central Asia.) There were three to five major revisions of the work between 1228 and 1240, when a final compilation was produced. The original has been lost; an abridged Chinese transcript became the basis of subsequent versions of the Secret History.

Why secret? It contained stories about Genghis that the Mongols preferred to keep private, along with recommendations about governing best left to the powers that be. Even though the Mongols wanted to shield it from outsiders, they were all familiar with its laws and concepts, and among them it was known, simply, as their History.

Written in poetry and prose, the epic emerged from a shamanistic mind-set, connecting Heaven and earth, human and animal. The story begins: “Chinggis”—a more accurate transcription of the Mongol leader’s name, which probably meant “strong”—“Qahan was born with his destiny ordained by Heaven above. He was descended from Boerte Chino, whose name means ‘grayish white wolf,’ and Qo’ ai Maral, the wolf’s spouse, whose name means ‘beautiful doe,’ who crossed the lake and settled at the source of the Onon River.”

The narrative goes on to recount the elemental Mongol way of life, beginning twenty-two generations before Genghis. Of one hardy precursor, the Secret History records: “He saw a young female