Genghis Khan (born Temüjin, 1162 – August 1227) was a Mongol commander and ruler, the founder and first Khan of the Mongol Empire. Temüjin, who lost no battle he fought during his reign, is regarded as one of the greatest military leaders in world history. For this reason he is remembered not so much by his birth name Temüjin as by the name Genghis Khan, meaning "mighty ruler." At the beginning of the 13th century he united all the nomadic steppe peoples of Central Asia, turned them into a single nation, and gathered them under the roof of a Mongol political identity. During his reign, between 1206 and 1227, Genghis Khan carried out campaigns against the Western Xia and the Jin dynasty in northern China; the Qara Khitai and Transoxiana in Turkestan; the Khwarazmshahs in Khwarazm, Khorasan, and Iran; the Georgians in the Caucasus; the Russian principalities, the Kipchaks, and the Volga Bulgars in the Dasht-i Qipchaq. As a result of these, he founded an empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea and to the north of the Black Sea.
Genghis Khan, who created a meritocratic army based on talent and the individual excellence of persons by using the decimal organization inherited from the steppe tradition, owed his fame as a great soldier in large part to the postal organization and spy network he established and to the great value he placed on the art of intelligence. As a result of his campaigns, many cities were destroyed and millions of people were slaughtered; yet with the rules codified under the name of the Yassa of Genghis he also prohibited torture, lying, theft, and adultery, and enacted into law that craftsmen, doctors, educated people with certain knowledge and skills, and clergy of every religion — of whatever nation they might be — were to be shown respect without distinction among them and exempted from taxation.
Genghis Khan also, in order to provide his people with a script, summoned important figures from the Uyghurs to his capital Karakorum and, having the Uyghur alphabet adapted for Mongolian, wished it to be taught to his children as well. In this way he ensured that the Mongolian language too was put into written form.
Genghis Khan died of an unknown cause in 1227 while returning from the campaign in which he had defeated the Tanguts in northern China. The location of his grave is still unknown today. According to a famous rumor, he willed before his death that his grave be kept secret; when he died, his kin buried him in an unknown place, and afterwards everyone who attended the funeral killed themselves so that the location of the grave would in no way become known. However, this claim is regarded by many as fabrication. Today archaeologists believe they are approaching the place where Genghis was buried. In the years ahead it is possible that modern Mongolia will host an extraordinary discovery.
Ancestors and origins
Genghis Khan's genealogy lies, in a semi-mythological manner, behind a veil of mist. The legend of the birth of his ancestors and of himself is among the important documents of Mongol mythology. According to The Secret History of the Mongols — which, in terms of its date of composition, is the closest to the era in which Genghis Khan lived, shows the influence of Shamanism, and was written in Mongolian in 1240 — Alan Gua, who lived 10 generations before Genghis Khan, was regarded as the legendary great-mother of Genghis Khan's lineage. According to the legend contained in The Secret History of the Mongols, after Alan Gua was widowed she had three more sons although she had not married. Genghis Khan and the Borjigin to whom he belonged descend from the youngest of these children, named "Bodonchar." Although the legend of Alan Gua concerns not only Genghis Khan but, together with him, a whole host of tribes called the "Nirun," that is, the children of light, it has been regarded as the greatest legend of Genghis Khan's lineage. Among the Nirun tribes, one may count first Genghis Khan's own tribe, the Borjigin, then the Tayichiud, the Barlas, the Derben, the Saljiud, and several other tribes. In 1140, Kabul of the Borjigin among the Mongol tribes took the title of "Khan" as the first leader of all the Mongols. Genghis Khan's father Yesügei Bahadur was his grandson.
In the time of Kabul Khan and his successor Ambaqai Khan, although the Mongols grew strong enough to struggle with the Jin Empire in China, the Tatars, to please the Chinese, handed Ambaqai over to China. Ambaqai was executed in a most unusual manner, being forced into a state called the "wooden donkey shape" and crucified. Genghis Khan's great-uncle Kutua responded to this insult by launching a series of attacks on China and the Tatars, and through these raids he earned the title "Hercules of the Mongols." However, in 1160, at the end of a series of events whose details are unknown, the Jin dynasty, the ruler of northern China, routed the Mongols. The Mongols scattered in disorder for a time. Yesügei Bahadur, grandson of Kabul Khan and one of the minor leaders among the Mongols in this chaotic, poverty-stricken situation, tried to strengthen the Mongols by forming alliances. One of the western neighbors of the Mongols was the Kerait, of the Turkic tribes. The Kerait had been Nestorian Christians for 200 years. The leader of the Christian Kerait at that time was Toghrul. Toghrul had lost his throne in 1160 as a result of internal troubles. Yesügei, the leader of the Mongols, helped Toghrul to regain the leadership of his tribe. After Toghrul and Yesügei swore an oath of brotherhood as anda (sworn brothers), they formed an alliance that would later prove of extraordinary importance in the re-emergence of the Mongols.
Birth
Some time after the marriage, when Yesügei returned from a raid on the Tatars, he was greeted with the news that his wife Höelün was pregnant. The sources maintain that during the baby's birth a bow and arrow were hung on Höelün's door to prevent the devil from entering, and that close relatives and a woman Shaman served as midwives. The Shaman, examining the baby very closely, was to look for a sign that might foretell its future. According to the legend, he was born with a blood clot in the shape of an anklebone in his right palm — something that would later, quite naturally, be characterized as a symbol of power and of much bloodshed to come. Yesügei Bahadur had taken captive a man named Temüjin, the chief of one of the Tatar tribes with whom he was at enmity. It was on account of this captive and this event that Yesügei Bahadur gave his son the name Temüjin. Temüjin means hard, solid, firm, enduring, and iron-like.
Sources
- Turkish Wikipedia: tr.wikipedia.org
- English Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org