Jack Weatherford：成吉思汗与蒙古帝国｜Lex Fridman Podcast #476

The following is a conversation with Jack Weatherford, anthropologist and historian specializing in Djangghaskhan and the Mongol Empire. He has written a legendary book on this topic titled Jenis Khan and the making of the modern world. And he has written many other books including Emperor of the Seas, Kubla Khan and the Making of China, Jangghask Khan and the Quest for God, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, and other excellent books. I've gotten to know Jack more after this conversation, and I cannot speak highly enough about him. He's a truly brilliant, thoughtful, and kind soul. This was a huge honor and pleasure for me. This is the Lex Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's Jack Weatherford.

Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that, he was a boy named Temüjin who, at 9 years old, lost everything—his father and his tribe—and lived in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world, tell me about this boy, his childhood, and the Mongolian steppe from which he came.

The story of Genghis Khan, like the story, I think, of all of us, doesn’t begin at birth. That’s the beginning of life, but the story begins long before birth. Sometimes it can be many generations before, and sometimes only shortly before. But with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived.

One day, a cart was coming across Mongol territory, and only women drove carts. Men rode horses. Women also rode horses, but women owned the houses, which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment, so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. The fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another.

In fact, her husband was with her. She was a new bride, and her husband was on a horse close to her. A man named Yesügei—the future father of Genghis Khan—was up on a hill, hunting with his falcon. The words of The Secret History of the Mongols are very clear. He looked down and saw her, and he could barely glimpse her. He knew she was young and a new bride.

He rode back to camp, got his 2 brothers, and they came racing down. When they approached, the woman’s husband looked around and decided to flee—not because he was a coward, but because he figured he would probably pull the men after him. They chased him. He went far away, circled around, and came back to the cart where his wife was. Her name was Hö’elün.

Hö’elün had time to think while he was riding around being chased by the Mongols, and she decided that it was more important for him to live. When he came back, she told him, “You must flee. If you stay here, they will kill you and take me. But if you flee, they will take me, but you will have the chance to find another wife. There are many women in the world. Find one, call her Hulan after my name, and remember me when you’re with her.”

It was a very dramatic moment. He rode away and looked back and forth. The pigtails, or braids, that were hanging down were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back. He was divided in whether he should go or stay. But the 3 men were approaching again, and this time they were headed straight for the cart.

They came in and took Hö’elün. She didn’t say a word until her husband was over the ridge. When he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail. One of the brothers said to her, “It doesn’t matter if you shake the waters out of the river and shake the mountains with your screaming. You will never see this man again.” He was right.

That was the moment that Genghis Khan’s mother and father met. That’s the beginning of his story, in this kidnapping. It’s going to reverberate. Every detail of it will come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Genghis Khan, but it will continue with the feuds and issues caused by it all the way into the future. To some extent, in certain parts of the world, you could say it still exists.

So the meeting is fundamentally a mixture of heartbreak and dark, criminal-type kidnapping.

Yes.

And from that was conceived this conqueror of the biggest contiguous empire in history.

What I was really interested in was: How did this happen? Who was this person? As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, “The child is father of the man,” and it’s the childhood that created him. It’s that episode that was before he was born, but all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became.

This unusual situation was suddenly created where a child was going to be born to a kidnapped woman who was being held by strange people. The Mongols—they were not her people. Yesügei already had another wife. He had a wife named Sochigel, and at that time he already had one son. Later, he had another son with her.

It was a very odd situation. In fact, Yesügei wasn’t even there when Temüjin was born. He was off fighting the Tatars. During this campaign against the Tatars, he killed 2 Tatars. One of them was named Temüjin-Üge, which means “person of iron,” from the Turkic language, although today it’s also part of the Mongolian language.

Yesügei came back, had a baby, and decided to name him Temüjin—the person of iron, or the iron man, as we might call him.

After the man he killed.

After the man he killed.

So he has a kidnapped mother. She’s a second wife now—not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife. And he’s named for someone his father just killed. It was not an auspicious beginning.

In fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious. His father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young, and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him. He was left behind.

Here’s this young child. We don’t know his age, but he could have been around 4 or 5. He was left behind, and as it turned out, some other people, the Tayichiud, found him. They kept him for a while, and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother.

It’s very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of a relationship between the father and the son. When Temüjin was 8 years old, his father decided to take him off to find a wife. Finding a wife in Mongolian terms means you give the boy to that family. He will live with them, and they will raise him and train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter.

His father was taking him off at age 8, but he didn’t take the other son from the other wife, Bekter. He kept him. There was something about Temüjin having been lost once, found by the Tayichiud, and reunited with the family.

His father was going to take him to Hö’elün’s family, but he never made it. He stopped with another family. It was almost like the first family he came across. In the words of The Secret History, it was a sort of instant love: There was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes. He saw this girl, Börte, who was about 9 years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family.

According to the story, his father left him there with that family. But on the way home, his father saw a drinking party and decided to join them. They were Tatars. He hid his identity on the steppe, but everybody figures out who everybody is—or they figured out who he was—and supposedly they poisoned him.

He got on his horse and was able to ride back home, but within a few days he died. Now Temüjin was living with another family. Someone from his family—not a relative, but a close person named Mönglik—came to get him and take him back.

They made it through the winter. Hö’elün, by now, had 4 sons and 1 daughter. I think the daughter had already been born, or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that.

They made it through the winter. Spring came, and of course the clan was going to move to a new camp. They went to spring camp from winter camp and had a ceremony for the ancestors, but they did not tell Hö’elün. She came and was angry that she had been left out.

The old women said, “You’re the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you.” They were letting her know that, as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view.

That was really the signal that, when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. They packed up and took her animals. At that moment, she still had one horse. She jumped on the horse, took the banner of her husband, and raced around the people. The banner, after death, contains the soul of the person. It’s called a sülde.

She raced around, and they were a little nervous, so they camped for 1 night and waited until it was dark. Then they took off. This time, one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them, and they killed him.

Temüjin cried. He was a little boy, 8 years old. There was nothing he could do. Now that family was left there on the steppe: 4 children, possibly 5 already, and Sochigel, the other woman, with 2 children. They were all left there to die on the steppe. When winter came, they would surely all die.

How did they make it through the winter?

Mother Hö’elün, in the words of The Secret History, pulled her hat down over her head.

She took her black stick and ran up and down the banks of the river, digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found food, digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could—everything she could. Even at his young age, Temüjin was already beginning to go out to collect things so he could get fish. He could do a few tasks to help feed the family.

It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children. So Temüjin’s early years were marked by loneliness, abandonment, and struggle.

Yes.

Even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Tayichiud people. He was kidnapped and, I think, the correct word would be re-enslaved. They put him into a cangue, a yoke like an ox would wear. His two arms and his head were trapped in it.

Every night, he would be taken to a different ger to be guarded by that family. One night, there was a little celebration, so most of the people were drinking. He was left with a boy who was not very smart, and Temüjin managed to take the cangue—the wooden yoke that he was trapped in—and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out.

That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols: anything that moves is a weapon. This is going to go on for generations. It was very important for the Mongols: if it moves, it’s a weapon.

He raced off in the night and jumped into the river to hide. He still had the cangue on him; he was still trapped under it. The people were looking for him. They came out and searched up and down the river, and he was hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he could. It was dark, and that protected him a little bit.

They gave up and said, “Okay, we’ll come back tomorrow. He can’t possibly escape.” But the next day, he knew one family that he thought he could go to, and he was right. He went to that family, and at great risk to themselves—they were, in fact, a captive family of the Tayichiud—they managed to saw off the cangue and then burn it in their fire. They gave him food to escape, and then he had to go find his family again.

So this is the kind of life that this boy, Temüjin, had.

So, just to be clear, his neck is trapped and his hands are trapped?

We think that’s how it is. We just have the word. They don’t say the head and the hands. We know that his body is trapped in it, but from all the evidence we have, it’s the hands and the head.

And he’s running around deeply alone with this thing.

Yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.

So this, in part, was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition: that kinship is—

Yes.

—the most important thing above all else, because here is his life story, where he’s abandoned over and over and over—

By his father’s own brothers. See, the men who kidnapped her had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died. They did not. They should take care of her and her children because her children are the children of their brother. They count as the sons of the clan, or they should, but no, they had all deserted and all betrayed him.

He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.

You mentioned that Genghis Khan’s childhood as Temüjin was marked by extreme tribal violence. Can you describe the state of affairs in the steppe? How much violence is there? How much kidnapping is there?

The story of Temüjin is not a unique story for that time. As an isolated family of outcasts, of course, he’s not participating in the various feuds and raids of the people around them, but they are constantly raiding in the winter—for women, for horses, and for any kind of valuables that they can find.

It’s almost like their way of getting trade goods from China: one group raids the other in order to find whatever they have, whether it’s textiles or metal. Mongols produce nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. So they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.

Even in the genealogy of Temüjin, you see, going back generation after generation, women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father’s children, and it’s unclear who the father was. All of these issues go back for a long time.

Later, he will realize, once he becomes Genghis Khan, that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is women. Later, he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but because of what happened to him next in his life.

And this is one of the things you talk about: in some ways, the love story with his wife. Her kidnapping was the defining moment. If you could point to one place where Genghis Khan the conqueror was created, it’s that point—his wife being kidnapped. Can you describe, first of all, his love for this woman and what the kidnapping of her meant?

At age 16, Temüjin is with Börte, the girl he had met when he was 8 years old and she was 9. She’s now 17. She and her mother come, and it’s hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16-year-old boy, who had suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine.

Suddenly, here is the love of his life, who is going to be living with him and making him happy. He has somebody who loves him. It’s not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the 5 children, plus the other wife and her 2 children. No, he has somebody who loves him.

It’s all the excitement that you can imagine, with the fire in the eyes and the excitement, and then it only lasts a few months. There they are, and there’s a lady visiting them. We don’t know exactly who she is, but they called her Grandmother Kawakin.

Granny Kawakin is there, and she’s sleeping, of course, on the floor of the ger, the tent. Early in the morning, she feels the vibrations in the earth and knows that horsemen are coming. She rouses the family, and Mother Hoelun is in charge. Mother Hoelun is still in charge even though Temüjin is now married.

She puts all of her children on a horse, and she takes the baby girl Temülün in her own lap. She has one extra horse, but she won’t take Börte because she doesn’t know who the men are. She has no idea. But they’re coming. They’re coming in the dark. They’re coming for a woman. They know there’s a girl there. This family of outcasts has acquired a wife, and they know that they’re coming for her.

So she leaves Sochigel, the other wife. She leaves this old lady, Granny Kawakin, who actually has her own cart, and she leaves Börte. They pile into Granny’s cart, and it’s only an ox to pull it, so they don’t get too far before the attackers get there.

But Mother Hoelun is right. She’s able to get her children off to the mountain, to Burkhan Khaldun, to the mountainside away from them, because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there, who they are, and everything.

Mother Hoelun saved her family, but at a cost. Suddenly, Temüjin realizes he has obeyed his mother, but he’s lost the most important thing in his life. I do think this is the defining moment of his life. The story began back when his mother was kidnapped, but now the kidnapping of his wife—

What will he do? What should he do? What can he do? Is he going to just resign himself to it? Is he going to go out and look for another wife? He decides that life is not worth living without Börte. He has found something good in this life, and if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back.

And these are the early steps in the birth of the military genius, because getting her back requires an actual organization of troops.

He needs allies.

Allies.

He goes to a man who ruled the Kereit people in central Mongolia, kind of on the river, about where the capital, Ulaanbaatar, is today. He goes there because Wang Khan—the name for Toghrul Khan—had been the lord over his father at one point. His father had gone on raids for him, so he went there.

He actually took a gift because Börte’s mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for Mother Hoelun at the time of the marriage. So he took the coat and gave it as a gift to Wang Khan and asked for his help. Wang Khan said yes. He said, “I will send some troops, but we need more, and you need to ask Jamukha to come also.” He said, “I will send a message to him to get troops.”

You have to tell the story of Jamukha, because the story of Genghis Khan is one of people abandoning him and being disloyal. Here is a person who’s not of his kin, but becomes, in a way, his brother—in a way, loyal. As you’ve described, he’s both the best thing to happen to Genghis Khan and one of the biggest challenges in the later years to Genghis Khan. So who was Jamukha?

Jamukha was a boy about the same age as Temüjin, and his family had a winter camp close to where Mother Hoelun was living with her children. So the two boys met during the wintertime.

In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about 4 or 5 generations earlier. It’s a little unclear. She was an Uriankhai woman who herself was kidnapped, and actually Jamukha was a descendant of hers because she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping. Then Temüjin was descended from her through the new kidnapper, Bodonchar, his ancestor.

So they’re both, as the Mongols would say, from the same womb. They come from the same historic origin. However, their lives were similar in that both lost their fathers very early. But Jamukha also lost a mother.

So he grew up in the household of his grandfather. He had no siblings. Unlike Temüjin, who grew up in a whole household of siblings, he grew up with his grandfather, who had several wives. So he grew up with a bunch of old women, which later he said he thought was an influence on his life.

But the two boys met. They came from different backgrounds, and Jamukha was not as deprived by any means as Temüjin, but he had a certain emotional deprivation, I think, having not had a mother, father, or siblings. He lived with these old people. The two boys met, became good friends, and played on the ice.

Very early on, I think when they were about 10 or 11 years old, they decided to make a pact. It’s called becoming anda, and it’s more than a friend. A friend is like nökör in the language, and there are several different types of friendship, but anda is a friendship that’s beyond a friendship. It’s something for life, and they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment.

And they exchanged knucklebones. Each one of them had the knucklebone of a roebuck, a deer. Knucklebones are used in the games that they play, but they’re also used to forecast the future. You can roll them around and use them to tell the future.

It’s very strange on the ice. I will say, in the wintertime in Mongolia, it can be up to 50 degrees below zero. It doesn’t really matter at that point whether it’s Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is, but you slide something across the ice, and it’s absolutely smooth, like silk, and it goes on for a long way. If you put your ear down to the ice, you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the Earth. It’s just like the angels are singing under the ice.

Once they had sworn in this relationship, a couple of years later they swore it again. This time they were slightly older boys, and they had bows and arrows, so they exchanged arrows with each other. In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off a two-year-old calf, whittled it down, and drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow, which is used for several purposes among the Mongols.

It’s used for signals from one person to another. But also, when you’re hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move. So it had a lot of uses. The boys had exchanged roebuck knucklebones. This time they exchanged arrows.

They had been close friends, and Wang Khan said, “Okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you.” And he did. So the three set out: some troops from Wang Khan—he himself did not go; he was too old—then Jamukha and his troops, and then basically just Temüjin and his family. He just had his brothers. That’s all.

They set off to find the Merkit people up the Selenge River, which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal. They had to go through some extremely rough territory. You see in this episode, though, that Jamukha is already a little bit fierce without necessarily thinking it through carefully. He gives this long speech about all the things they’re going to do to the Merkit people:

“We’re going to jump through the toono, the smoke hole in the top of the ger. We’re going to jump in there and kill them all. We’re going to kill the men, the women, and the children. We will destroy these people forever.”

He has extremely militant rhetoric, at least. He’s also rather critical of the elder people. Wang Khan’s people came late, and he gave them this long lecture: “We are Mongols, and if we give our word, our word is our promise forever. Rain or sleet or snow, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be there on time.” So he’s dressing down his superiors. He’s very aggressive, but he’s very helpful.

These troops moved in on the Merkit camp. They also came in at night, so there was only a small amount of warning, because some of the Merkit men were out hunting sables. They raced back to the camp and told the people, and the people were getting ready to get out as fast as possible.

Börte had no idea who was coming. She didn’t want to be kidnapped again. So she and the grandmother went off again, and they were loaded into a cart to get away. Temüjin came in, and there was a full moon that night, so they could see what they were doing. He was really searching for her. He wasn’t paying too much attention to the battle; he was calling for her.

She heard his voice. She knew who it was. She jumped off the cart and ran to him, and they reunited. He grabbed her, embraced her, and then said, “This is the goal. This is why we are here. We don’t need anything else.” He was very clear about that.

And that was his first full-on military engagement.

Yes, his first full-on military engagement.

Now, along the way, in addition to escaping all these horrors, he had killed his older half-brother, Bektar, and that, too, was a deeply formative experience. What was that about? Can you explain, in Mongol society, the role of the older brother and the power struggle there? Not to moralize, but there’s also the ethical foundation behind the murder—the killing of Bektar.

That’s one of the things that’s totally unknown outside of The Secret History of the Mongols. None of the Persian chronicles, none of the Chinese chronicles—none of them knew about this until The Secret History was deciphered and translated.

Bektar was the older child of Sochigel and Yesügei. The older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society. They have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta, and he refers to them as chi. It’s a formality, and his word goes. He is the father in the absence of the father.

Also, it’s quite common that if a man dies and he has no brothers, or if his brothers do not marry his widow, then if he has a son by another wife, that son will become her husband. So it would have been common that Bektar, eventually, when he passed through puberty, would then perhaps marry Mother Hoelun.

Now, I don’t know if that happened, but I think either it did or Temüjin was trying to prevent it, because it was bad enough that he was the older brother, but he would become the older brother and a stepfather. I think Temüjin just couldn’t handle that, and Bektar was already ordering him around. He would take things like a fish or a bird that Temüjin had caught, and that’s perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy.

So Temüjin would catch a fish, and Bektar would take the fish.

Yes. It’s only recorded once, but perhaps it happened several times.

So that’s an okay thing to do for an older brother—just take stuff?

Yes, he can do anything he wants, just about, with his younger siblings.

But Temüjin was not going to stand for it. So mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish, which I’m not so sure is really the blame. The boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother; they were using them for fishing, and I think it was more complicated than that. But for whatever reason, he and his next brother, Khasar, decided to kill him, and they did.

Why do you think it’s more complicated than that? It feels to me like stealing a fish is the final straw. Here he’s being abused over and over and over, and the fish is a symbol of that. So here he takes matters into his own hands.

I think it is the symbol of that, and it can be the thing that pushes him over the edge, but it’s all these other tensions of what’s going on with the family.

They shot him with arrows and killed him, but what happens afterward is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before, because we hear nothing from Sochigel. She and her younger son, Belgütei, stayed with the family. They didn’t go away.

But the one who was outraged was Mother Hoelun, his mother. She screamed and hollered at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine: “You will never have anybody in your life except your own shadow,” and, you know, “You are worse than everything that I could name.” She was outraged and went on and on and on about it.

So she was obviously extremely distressed about it. Whereas Sochigel, the mother of the boy, may have been distressed—I don’t know—but nothing has shown up in the record. So he does have this episode of having killed off his brother, but I don’t think it was deeply meaningful. I think it was important, but I don’t think it was emotionally deeply meaningful for Temüjin. The brother was gone. The problem was solved. His mother was extremely ticked off at him.

But it does show—in fact, it’s interesting if it’s not a big deal for him—that he’s willing to resort to murder to take care of a bad situation.

Yes, he is capable of doing anything that needs to be done to resolve what he sees as a problem. Bektar was a problem. He resolved it at a very young age, so he’d had that experience behind him.

But now his brother Belgütei was on the raid with him and with Jamukha when they went to capture Börte back. So he had both loyalty, and Belgütei stayed loyal to him his entire life. His entire life. It was very interesting.

So, if we return to Börte, is it normal to have such a love story across many years when you’re separated and to have that kind of loyalty? It was two-way loyalty—from Börte to Temüjin and Temüjin to Börte. And this was before he was Genghis Khan.

I think as children he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that to really be pining for her all the time. But for whatever reason, she came, and it could be that her family liked him in some way, or that she remembered him, or that she had no other suitors, because at 17 she should have been married, actually.

I can't explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact, if not before. Those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives. She was, I would say, the most important person to him. After that, he went to literal war to get her back. He risked everything.

He was willing to die. He was willing to kill. He was willing to die in order to get her back. And he got her back. Now he's reestablished his relationship with Jamuka, and so they decide to stay together. They all go off to the Qorqonaq Valley, and she is pregnant.

This becomes a huge issue forever. It's one of those things that, to this day, is almost an issue: what happens? But as he says much later in life, when his own sons rebel against him and call that first child a Merkit bastard, he defends his wife viciously to his own sons.

He says, “You were not there. You do not know who loved whom and who did not. You did not see the sky turning around. You did not see the stars falling. You did not see the earth turn over. You don't know what was happening.”

“If I say he is my son, he is my son. Who are you to say otherwise? You were not there. You come from the same warm womb. And if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb would turn to cold stone.” So he defended her forever.

But he's off now. We go back to the beginning. She's pregnant. They're in the Qorqonaq Valley, and he and Jamuka decide to renew their vows of being anda to each other. So this time it's more serious, and it's a ceremony in front of the whole—we can't say tribe. It's not big enough yet for a tribe, but the whole clan that's there.

Then Jamuka takes off a gold belt, which actually he'd stolen from the Merkit at some point. Where on earth they got a gold belt, I don't know. But he took off the gold belt and put it on Temüjin. Then Temüjin gave him a mare that had never foaled, had never given birth.

It was an unusual mare who had a little growth on the front of her head, which they called a horn. So it was an unusual gift, and I don't know—it has meaning, but I don't know all the meanings behind it. It's sort of odd to me. But the golden belt, you can kind of think about in different ways.

The belt for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood. In fact, a woman was often then, and even now, called a busgui, or “person without a belt,” because that's how they were at that time. Today women wear belts, of course, but they still use the word busgui, “without a belt.” So it's a very important symbol of manhood.

He gave that to Temüjin, and they celebrated. In the words of The Secret History, they slept apart under the same blanket, apart from the other group, and they were happy together. When the baby was born, Temüjin named the baby Jochi, which means “visitor.”

Some people say it's because the child was really the Merkit child. Other people say, no, it's because he was a visitor on the territory of Jamuka at that time. Other people say that Jamuka's ancestor had been born to a kidnapped woman who was pregnant, and they had named him Jajiradai, which meant “foreigner.”

So it's kind of like a parallel: the visitor, the foreigner. Jamuka's clan took the name from him; they were called Jadaran. There are all these things that sometimes we can't quite understand because we don't have the total mentality of that time, and we weren't there.

But we should say that a powerful part of this love story is that the child is likely not his, and he accepted that child as his own without question and defended it, as it becomes much more important later, as his first child.

Yes. He defends this child through his entire life. Not long after the birth, he and Jamuka break apart—or really, it's Temüjin who breaks apart—at the urging of Börte. She said, “He lords it over you too much. He orders you around too much. You need to be free. We need to break away.”

She urged him, and he loved his wife more than anything. I think that, in a certain way, the most important other character in his adult life would be Jamuka, and their relationship gets severely tested in the future years. But they run away through the night. They go all night long to escape from him.

He obviously loved Börte the most and took the baby, of course, with him as well.

So here is this breaking point of the anda. How did that relationship evolve?

The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. Now we have the Wang Khan, the most powerful ruler on the steppe, who's ruling out of central Mongolia, of the Kereit people. Jamuka remains loyal to him, but at first so does Temüjin. They're both loyal to him, but they're fighting in different kinds of campaigns. So, for a while, they're not fighting each other.

Eventually, some things happen that separate Temüjin. Temüjin was making all of these great victories for Wang Khan, and he even got the title wang, which, from Chinese, means prince or king. Wang Khan received that from the Jin dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people. So Temüjin was rising up.

Then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Wang Khan, and Wang Khan said no. His own son, Senggum, told his father, “No, no, no, no. We don't marry those low people. They're Mongols. They're not like us. We are Kereit people. We're not going to marry them.”

So then war, you could say, breaks out—or feud, really. It's more of a feud. Temüjin has to flee far away into the east, to a place called Baljuna. He goes to Baljuna. At this time, Jamuka is going to fight on behalf of his lord, Wang Khan. The two of them do not meet in combat, but now their forces are fighting each other.

And they didn't see each other. I mean, there's an obvious tension there. There's an obvious, if slight, breaking of loyalty, right?

Yes. It's hard to know what's going through their minds at that point. We only have it later on, when the relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways, that they claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it because they never harmed each other directly.

In fact, Temüjin eventually defeats Wang Khan. So he takes over central Mongolia. He's starting to really rise up now, and he has the title from his own people of Chinggis Khan. They give him that at Black Heart Mountain, by the Blue Lake. It's a very beautiful, special place.

But he takes that title. That's not a title that anyone had ever held, that we know of. Chinggis Khan was a new title that he just thought up, or somebody thought up, or somebody thought had auspicious meaning behind it. It's very close to the word tenggis, which means “the sea.” It could have had something to do with that.

Mongolians really like, we might say, puns. They like words with multiple meanings, and that's very important to them. The more meanings a word has, the more power that word has. So it has different meanings in different languages. In Mongolian, it sounds like “strong”—Chinggis. But in Turkic, and there are many Turkic people, including the Merkits themselves, who are mostly Turkic people, it sounds like the sea—tenggis.

So it's exciting to them when there's this double meaning. And the double meaning plays with each other, and that excites them, especially with names.

Yeah. Today in Mongolia—or, well, I've been there so long, I think the fad has passed now—but about 20 years ago, it was popular to name girls Misheel because it's a French name, an American name, and it means “smile” in Mongolia. So it's the power of 3 great languages and 3 great civilizations.

So many names are like that, and I think Chinggis doesn't have 1 meaning. I think it means powerful. It means the sea. I think it means many different things.

He had become a khan, and he was ruling over them. Jamuka now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over, called the Naiman people, who are farther west, and he becomes the protégé, you could say, of the Naiman people.

But when Chinggis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamuka deserts the Naiman. He tells them, “These people have snouts of steel, and they eat humans alive.” He was telling them all these horrible things about the Mongols. Tayang Khan, the leader of the Naiman, was rightfully scared of them and was, in fact, very quickly defeated as well.

Temüjin did not fight against Jamuka in this campaign. Jamuka was off with some of his people, Jadaran clan people. They saw the turning of the tide, but he now wanted to become the great khan of the steppe. He had very few followers.

He took the title Gurkhan, which is a very old, ancient, important title. Because Wang Khan was gone—Toghrul Khan was gone—he could take this title and pretend to be the great khan of the steppe and all. But his own people turned against him, and they captured him. They thought they would take him to Chinggis Khan.

Chinggis Khan didn't reward them immediately. He killed them all because they had betrayed their leader, who was his anda. It's a very strange encounter.

Supposedly, Chinggis Khan said to him, “Come back to me. Save me. Be beside me. Protect me. Be my shadow. Be my safeguard in life.”

Supposedly, Jamuka said, “But I did betray you when my people fought against you, and you will always know that, and you will never completely trust me. I will be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic. I will be like a thorn in the lapel of your deel.”

He said, “Kill me without shedding my blood. Let me die. And if you do, take my remains up to a high place and bury me. I will be the guard. I will be the protector for you and your people forever.”

Obviously, Temüjin did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing.

It’s not specified how he was killed without shedding blood, but the Mongols had several ways, because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood. The blood contains part of the soul, and if you lose it, you’re losing your soul before you die. So they usually wrapped people up in felt carpets and then beat them to death or trampled them to death with horses, something like that. There were a couple of other methods, but I think that’s probably the method by which Jamuka was killed.

He was killed, and then Temüjin—or Genghis Khan—had his remains taken up and buried in a high place. This is over near Tuva, which is today part of Russia but, until the 20th century, was part of Mongolia. The Tuvan people are very, very close culturally to the Mongols. It seems that both of them, under their relationship, had a deep value for loyalty. The way—you know, it’s not worth living after you’ve been disloyal—which is the Jamuka perspective, right?

He had become very practical at this point, and he understood that you needed complete, total loyalty and trust with everybody around you. I think for this reason he was willing either to accept the plea of Jamuka, when Genghis Khan was asking him to come back and to be his shadow and to be his safety guard again, or maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected. Or maybe when Jamuka offered to be killed without shedding blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.

Nevertheless, to me, just reading your work and understanding the history, this relationship seems like a really, really important relationship that defines the nature of loyalty.

Yes. For Genghis, I would say, in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Börte. But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects. They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things. She was by him, and she was positive in every regard, so far as we know, forever. Although she was not submissive, she was always on his side.

With Jamuka, he was just a little too hotheaded for me. In my evaluation of him, these things like, “Oh, we’re going to drop down on the market, and we’re going to come through the smoke hole and kill everybody,” and all. He had a flair for the dramatic, even in giving the gold belt to Temüjin.

But Jamukha also explained himself at the end of his life. He said, “You know, we both lost our father, but I also lost my mother, and you had a strong mother to raise you. I did not.” He said, “You had Börte. You have a very strong wife to help you. And my wife”—he used a word like “prattler”—“she just sort of complains and prattles along, and we did not have a relationship.”

I think something about that rings true, that there were some elements of that that were true. But Jamukha certainly didn’t have the intelligence and the real genius for dealing with people—dealing with soldiers, especially in war and warfare—that Temüjin had.

Yeah. In that relationship, there’s a contrast, because Genghis Khan did not accumulate riches or accumulate power for the sake of the riches or for the sake of the power. It was always very practical:

What is the way to maximize the success of this operation?

Yes.

Yes. I often wonder what happened to the gold belt. It disappeared from the story. A gold belt doesn’t just disappear. What happened to that? It’s so interesting, because Temüjin was never interested in material goods. When Genghis Khan was the ruler, he in some ways became the richest man in the world, because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him. But he always dressed simply, he always lived in the tent, and he said, “I eat what my soldiers eat. I dress the way my soldiers dress. I live the way my soldiers live. We are the same.”

So he had no interest in wealth. He had sided before with Wang Khan, which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people and all, but he just didn’t have the temperament that I think was going to be helpful for Genghis Khan’s continued rise. That is one of the powerful things about the Genghis Khan story: he came from nothing.

From absolute nothing. And he didn’t, from what I see and understand, become corrupted by the riches or change. He fundamentally remained the same person who does not value material things.

He changed and matured in various ways over life, as we all do—or we hope we do. But he never became greedy. He was never acquisitive. He kept the simple life.

Part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him. No one was allowed to make his likeness. They couldn’t paint a picture of him. They couldn’t make a statue of him. No building could be built dedicated to him: no palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort—not even, at the point of death, the simplest gravestone. Nothing.

Nothing. It’s fascinating that a boy who didn’t know the world would have the intelligence to understand how corrupting that is. The moment somebody builds a statue of you, it’s like a slippery slope toward not seeing the world clearly, not seeing who’s surrounding you, having sycophants who don’t tell you the right information, and not being able to select the right people to lead the armies or to lead the territories that you conquer.

So it’s interesting that he had that foresight: don’t record, don’t worship.

Yes, because that’s a dangerous road to go down for a leader. It’s very hard to explain how he stuck to that, how he got it. You’re so easily corrupted by power, and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude toward his relationships with the people around him—his guard, mostly, or the private part of the army, the central part of the army that went with him. That was his relationship, his family.

He had 4 wives. This was what was important to him. In fact, no portrait was painted until 1278. By then, he had already been dead for 51 years. And there was no statue until the 21st century.

Just incredible. But let’s go to the document that you referenced several times, The Secret History.

The Secret History is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much. Genghis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. People couldn’t take notes. Even the army was not—Genghis Khan ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people, and it was adapted from the Uyghur people. To this day, it’s often called the Uyghur alphabet.

He ordered that, and he ordered his children to learn to read and write. Some did. I think most did not, but some did.

One of the things he did with every campaign, even the one against the Merkit when he rescued Börte, was that he always adopted 1 orphan. That child became a full member of the Mongol nation in his household. His mother, Hoelun, would raise the child.

Eventually, she had a whole household full of boys from different tribes, but they all became very high-ranking members of the government. One was a Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier, but he could read and write. He was the best at it, and later he eventually became the supreme judge, appointed by Genghis Khan, of course.

When Genghis Khan died, he recognized that it was important not just to write down the law. That’s all Genghis Khan allowed to be written in the blue books: only the law, nothing about him or campaigns or the military or anything. But Shigi Qutuqu was his name, and Shigi Qutuqu realized that this was going to be lost, that this was a great historic thing that had happened. So he compiled the work.

I don’t know whether other people contributed or helped him, but it’s still a little bit unclear. The Mongols don’t specify that. They always tell you exactly where something happens, so we know exactly where it happened in Mongolia. You can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That’s very important to the Mongols.

We also know it was the Year of the Mouse, so it was 1228. Genghis Khan had died in 1227. It begins with what we would say are the myths, although I’m not sure they’re myths. It begins with the marriage of the Grey-Blue Wolf with the Tawny Deer.

Some people say, “Well, that’s some kind of totemic myth.” The Mongols look at me, and I ask them about this, and they say, “He was named Grey-Blue Wolf. She was named Tawny Deer. They married.” They’re very practical about it, and they think they were real people. Maybe they were or maybe they weren’t. I don’t know.

This earlier history is just the genealogy, as it should be. Who knows? But it’s also in there because, like Bodonchar, whom they call Bodonchar the Fool, the ancestor of Temüjin, he’s cast out because he’s so dumb that the rest of the family doesn’t want him. His father is undetermined. He kidnaps a woman from the Khongirad, and she has the child who becomes an ancestor.

It’s a confusing mess, but I tend to think it’s probably accurate. It has a lot of good information.

By the time you get to the life of Temüjin, the reason we know these intimate things is because Shigi Qutuqu was there, sleeping in the same ger with the people. We even see in there that he records instances where Börte sits up in bed and tells her husband, “Okay, you’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You can’t do this anymore.”

It’s all recorded, right? So it’s a very intimate document. This is one reason that it was secret. It was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Genghis Khan’s prohibition against putting out information about the family, so it was secret for a very long time.

So much so that scholars began to think it didn’t exist. Then, in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time, in Beijing, discovered a manuscript. It was very odd, and people didn’t think it was anything because it was all Chinese characters, but it made no sense in Chinese.

But he recognized that if you read it—pronounce it—it makes sense in Mongolian. So it was a code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.

So they were recording the sounds?

Correct. They used Chinese characters to record sounds, which is always problematic in some little areas. You’re not exactly sure what the name is or something, but it was a very unusual document. Once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had already incorporated part of it.

That was very helpful to me because I trust some of the Persians very much, and I like their work very much. It was helpful that it already existed, and some of it existed in Mongolian. Other Mongolian sources were written later, and some of it was just incorporated. So it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn’t 100 percent pure. Little things had happened to it along the way: some things had been stripped here and there, and a few words had changed.

Sometimes for Temüjin they call him Chinggis Khan. Well, he wasn’t the khan then. Sometimes they call him khan, which is like chief, and other times khagan, which is emperor. In Mongolia, it’s a big difference. There are little things like this that move around, and you’re not sure why. But it’s a document that I have great faith in.

It was not published in English until 1982, but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the 1950s. It was ready for publication, but he was having trouble with the publisher, so it didn’t appear for nearly 30 years. It was supposed to be 2 volumes. The first volume was the translation; the second volume was going to be the notes, and the second volume was lost. To this day, it hasn’t been found. I would love to see that. Anyway, it’s now in just about all the languages in the world.

Can you clarify? So there are 2 volumes. The 19th-century Chinese manuscript covers the first volume?

Yes, that was translated and then published by Harvard University. But the notes were just the notes from the scholar Francis Woodman Cleaves. Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes.

There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things in it, and they disapproved of some things. They would try to put their own notes in the margins to correct the story and explain away why Mongol women would often marry their stepsons. It just did not match with Confucian ethics. There are several things like that that they tried to skip around. It’s interesting just to read the Ming dynasty notes that are attached to it.

But the document itself, in Mongolian, is just so important. For me, it was the guiding document. I didn’t want to be guided by anything else first. Everything else I would check to correlate, fill in blanks, and give more information.

I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there, and to feel it. It’s so important, I think, because history does not live in books. History does not live in archives or even libraries, as much as I need them for my work. History lives in the people. History lives in the memory of the people and the culture.

For example, the episode with the kidnapping of Börte: I went to that place, and I didn’t know when it happened or what season it happened. That was very important for figuring out the births that came afterward and other events that were being correlated. So I was talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there. They said, “Oh, it’s clear. It was the winter.”

I said, “Where did you read that?”

They said, “No, Granny Quaxton[?] was on the ground, and she could feel the vibrations. She said, ‘Look, this is summertime now. You’re not going to feel any vibrations. The ground here is so soft.’”

Suddenly, a whole important piece that I’d been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse. He was absolutely right. It could only happen in the winter, and that also correlates with the time that raiding was done. So it correlates with other historic factors, but then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things. History lives in the people.

Just to linger on that point, you visited different places that were important to the story of Chinggis Khan. What did it feel like? What are some memorable things about just the experience of standing there?

Yes. I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all. There was so little to learn. Everything was kind of known from whatever the chroniclers had recorded, and the archaeologists had found whatever they had found.

I’d get there, and he hadn’t spent much time there. He didn’t identify with it. I wasn’t feeling anything. But in Mongolia, I would go to these places and I would know that if Chinggis Khan came back today, he would know exactly where he was. There’s no road, there’s no sign, there’s no building, there’s no power line going to anything.

Just to smell the air, to feel it, to see the animals, and to see what kind of animals live there and what kind of plants are growing there, you begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking. Then you begin to see, “Ah, I know which direction they came from. The only direction they could come from was that way.” You begin to see it, and his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way.

I have the text, but the text is like it has no scenery, no props, nothing like that. The Mongols all understand their way of life. They don’t need to explain anything. They know which way the ger faces with the sun. They know all these things. But for me, that’s how I learned it. It was from being with the people. It was the most important thing.

This was starting in the 1990s. The people, at this time, were amazed that I would come. The Soviet era had just ended. Socialism was just ending. Democracy was starting. Chinggis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century, and every known descendant of Chinggis Khan was killed in Mongolia.

I followed The Secret History of the Mongols, and that became the key to writing what I wrote. You take the history, which is difficult to understand. You have to go over it, and I often don’t understand different parts, or I change my mind and think it was yes—now it’s no. But The Secret History of the Mongols is a valuable document, and to me it’s also the opening document of the Mongolian written language.

I think it’s very important. How do people begin their written language?

They begin it with the words: “From the highest heaven came the destiny of the blue wolf, who was married to the fallow doe, and their descendants came from the great sea to live at the base of Mount Burkhan Khaldun.”

It then integrates the spiritual elements of nature—the mountains and the great sea—and this kind of deep connection to nature that they have.

Mongolia is a world that, for the most part, is the same as when Chinggis Khan was there. We cannot say that for hardly any other place in the world. Certainly not for America, but just a few hundred years ago it was entirely different—different people, languages, everything. You can’t say it for London or Moscow or Constantinople. All of these things have changed so much.

But Mongolia is still Mongolia. It’s one of the largest countries in the world in terms of space, with the fewest number of people—about 3.3 million today—and they’re spread out. They live in their environment in such an intimate way.

This was important for learning about Chinggis Khan: how he thought, how he hunted, and how he strategized for war. You learn that from the people today because they are still there. They’re still living.

What’s the open Mongolian steppe like? As we return to the feeling of Temüjin and Chinggis Khan, what’s it like looking at this place that has not changed since his time?

The first thing I think about this steppe is that you can see forever in every direction. There’s no building, nothing to stop your line of view. It’s like being in the ocean in many ways. You have this extremely open space, and the wind is usually blowing through it, but it’s extremely fresh.

It’s coming out of Siberia. It’s coming out of the Arctic. It sweeps down across Mongolia. It can be cold and thickening sometimes, but it’s always fresh. Always fresh. You have the wind coming in, and you have the smell of the wind.

But also, there’s grass. The smell of grass becomes very important. Because of the particular location, from one year to another, one area may have grass one year and then drought the next year, while another area has grass. So you don’t always know. If it’s not grass, it’s dust. You have dust blowing in. The dust doesn’t smell so good. It doesn’t feel so good. But that’s just one more part of the country.

The waters are mostly pure. Unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining in several areas. Even when I was there, and even today when we go to some place like the Selenge River, where we talk about the Merkit, it’s a place of pure waters.

That’s how Mongolians define their world: by the water. He does not give lands to his sons to rule; he gives waters and people to rule. They do not refer to the earth as land. They refer to the earth as dalai—ocean, the sea. Water is very important.

To learn the rules about water, you don’t camp by water. If you camp by water, your animals and you are going to be polluting it, messing it up. So they’re back—maybe, in our modern terms, about a kilometer back. You take the animals to the river to drink, and then you take them away.

You do not bathe in that river. You take the water away from the river, and you bathe away from the river, so you do not pollute the river. The rules are very strict and very clear, and they’re from the time of Chinggis Khan about how to deal with water. It’s also dangerous to live close to the river because there are flash floods in the summertime.

You could suddenly have it, and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water. So the people live with nature in a way that I don’t see anywhere else in the world. Even today, with the changes, with the cell phone and solar panels, and the fact that they could get TV out in the middle of the steppe, they’re still living a similar life. The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike, but they’re still herding cows, yaks, and camels. If it’s on a motorbike, okay, they’re still doing it the Mongol way.

But then, if we go back to the time of Temüjin, Genghis Khan, another component is the horses. Can we talk about their relationship with the horse, thinking about this open steppe?

From a young age, all Mongols are trained to master riding horses, as you write, while standing on the horse. So they learned how to ride while standing on the horse. While standing on the horse, they often jousted with one another to see who could knock the other off. When their legs grew long enough to reach the stirrups, they were also taught to shoot arrows and to lasso on horseback, making targets out of leather pouches that they would dangle from poles so they would blow in the wind.

The youngsters practiced hitting the targets from horseback at varying distances and speeds. The skills of such play proved invaluable to horsemanship later in life. Can you speak to the relationship of Genghis Khan and the Mongols to horses?

The Mongol and the horse are inseparable. I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because it was insulting. I said, “The Mongol and the horse, they live together. They know each other with every twitch of the muscle, and they smell the same.”

I was saying it just not to be insulting about anything, but they have that deep intimacy, and the horses do know their owner from the smell. This is very important. It’s also important for Genghis Khan, because they made the flags—what they call the sülde—out of the horsehair from their own horses. In battle, they used it for a very practical purpose: the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag. It was other members of their own herd.

The language itself—I have never mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less all the other things about them. I can remember Mongolians being out there in the countryside. They’d say, “Oh, I want to learn English.” I’d say, “Okay, that’s nice. You teach me some words in Mongolian, and I’ll teach you the words.”

I’d say, “What color is that horse?” They’d say, “Brown.” I’d say, “Yes.” Then I’d ask, “What color is that horse?” “Brown.” Then they’d say, “But you said this color was brown. What color is this?”

Yeah.

So, I mean, it’s just amazing. They have words based on how smooth the coloring is, the variation in the texture, and all the different shades. Today in English, sometimes you can put them together; we say, like, yellow-brown or brown-brown.

The words for horses are, of course, organized by sex. Then they have 3 categories because they have geldings, so they’re very important too, and by age, and by whether or not they’ve reproduced in the case of the females. All these things are important parts of the horse.

A few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan, “Raised in the dust of many fast horses.” It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit, and the dust itself is important. The Mongolians will wipe the sweat and dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead, which is the most sacred part of the body, where the soul resides. This is how intimate the relationship is with the horses.

They’re hard on them in some ways. They train them very well, and they ride them very hard, but the horses are also trained for that. They use a very small crop that’s a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end, and they hit the rump of the horse. Never anything else.

They’re horrified at Western people who use metal spurs to harm a horse in the stomach and metal bits to harm the head of a horse. They say it’s a capital crime. I don’t know anyone who’s ever been executed for it, but you never, ever harm a horse’s head.

The horses are important in every way, even religiously important, with the making of the fermented horse milk. The mother goes out every morning and throws some to each of the 4 directions to start the day. They use it for every kind of thing.

Some things puzzled me in my watching. I remember one day being with a very nice family. It happened to be on a gelding day, when they were out there gelding the would-be stallions who don’t get to be stallions. This family had a bunch of boys and, I think, 1 or 2 girls—4 or 5 boys.

One boy was maybe 11 years old. He fell from the horse. You could see it, not so far away. He fell from the horse, and he didn’t get up. No one moved. In fact, they all turned their attention away.

I thought, “What am I supposed to say? This boy fell down. Somebody go get him.” But no. The boy was trying to hobble back. He still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn’t remount, and he was trying to hobble back. So his little brother went out to help him come in. They came into the ger and sat down. The mother just turned her back.

I’m thinking, “How on earth can you do this? This is a child. This is your child.” But 2 weeks later, by chance, another boy who was practicing for Naadam, the annual races, as this boy had been doing, was off in an area right close to the forested mountain area. The horse bolted and took off through the woods. He was knocked off by a tree, and then the horse went deeper into the woods.

The boy followed him. The boy became lost. The boy was 12 years old. He was lost for 2 weeks, and he lived. He said, “He slept in the daytime when it was warm. He walked at night when it was cold,” even though this was summertime. The nights can be quite cold, especially on a mountain.

He sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away. He knew what to eat. Then he walked until he found moving water, and he followed that water down to the next ger. He lived.

I realized that when the boy falls off the horse, his mother is not going to be there. She knows that. It’s probably hard for her too, to see her boy suffer, but she knows.

Just a small tangent: there’s a wrestler named Cary Kolat, and he tells the story about mental toughness. The first time he saw truly mentally tough people was when he visited Mongolia for a wrestling tournament. He remembered that they were taking showers in ice-cold water. All the other wrestlers would take a shower, and when the water hit them, you could see a little grimace.

With the Mongols, there was just no emotion. It was emotionless, sort of like ice-cold water or any other kind of hardship.

Yeah, you build a hardness to that. I suppose that falling from the horse is just an example of that. There’s a mental hardness and a mental toughness.

You have to be able to take care of yourself. With the weather, for example, often in that time, and still today, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow in order to prepare for the coming winter.

In the valley where I live, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition. The water is very cold, coming down from the mountain. Every day, when there’s a break, they go down and pour the cold water over themselves. They do not get in the water—never—but they take the water and pour it over themselves. Yes, that’s refreshing to them. Refreshing.

Well, then, getting back to the horses, the value they had for the horses and the horse-riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history.

If we just talk about the mounted archery they employed in war, the Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. There’s a lot to say. You have to time it, and just watching some of the videos, it’s incredible how stable you can be on top of a horse.

I guess you’re supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all 4 of the horse’s feet are off the ground. You have to time all of that. You have to position your body to maintain balance, and then there’s the skill of actually holding and shooting the bow accurately.

There’s also the technology of the bow—the composite bow, the recurve bow. I read they also used crossbows later. They adapted the technology. There’s a particular kind of thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse, because the thing is bouncing up and down. You have to not drop the arrow.

It’s incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway, can you speak to this exceptional excellence that Genghis Khan and the Mongols had in riding horses and engaging in war from horseback?

The Mongol, the horse, and the bow were a perfect combination, and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible—the synchronization and timing of the movements, and also the years of skill.

The fact is that from absolute birth, the Mongols would be on a horse, and by 3 years old they would probably be riding alone on the horse. When I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time all jockeys on horses for races had to be under 6 years old. That was the age limit. The cutoff was 6 years old at that time.

And so you had some as young as 3 years old racing out there. It's absolutely incredible. At that age, they can't even have a saddle because they can't even use one, so all they're doing is staying on the horse. The horse has been trained to do what it has to do, and they just stay on it. But by staying on it, they learn the horse. They become one—not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses.

Usually, 5 is the number that you should have with you when you go off to battle. This ability, then, is to shoot. You have to defend your animals. There are wolves around, foxes, and other things. In some areas, there were even tigers and other animals that would come in, and you had to be able to shoot to defend against them, as well as against other people who might be raiding you. So they became excellent archers.

They had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. I say all that because it's very important, but those are all sort of nomadic traits of the Great Steppe. Anyway, in an earlier version, you had the Huns, who came out of Mongolia. Hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun—that's what they say to this day for a human being.

They came out of Mongolia, and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia. They had similar skills. So you have this perfect weapon, but you also have to have perfect strategy in how to coordinate it, organize it, and use it. This is where the genius of Genghis Khan came in—a genius that I cannot explain at all.

Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times: a number of Turkic leaders, and also Attila the Hun, who of course was actually born in the West. But they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders. It wasn't that they were so excellent in their strategy. They were very good in warfare, and that's what carried them through.

Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare, but small. He probably never got above 100,000—at most, 110,000. That's small when you're going against China, which has millions just in the army, not counting the rest of the country. You're going against Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Afghanistan, and these other areas. Your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow, and each horse. That's the weapon, but the army becomes the superweapon of Genghis Khan: how he organized it, how he used it, and the strategies that he put together.

Yeah. When you have a small army, just think about that: a small army that conquered the world.

It would fit in a stadium today in America.

So there's extremely efficient coordination of units, mostly cavalry, right?

All cavalry.

Oh, it's all cavalry.

He had no infantry, and he had no baggage train. He had no backup commissary. He had no engineer corps; later, one was added, much later. But no, it was all cavalry. There was light cavalry and heavy cavalry, and the units were broken down using the decimal system: 10, 100, and 1,000.

There's a kind of hierarchy where you delegate authority, but to the degree that there are commands, they must be followed strictly. So the smallest unit is a squad of 10, and it goes all the way up from there.

So for extremely efficient, accurate, precise deployment of these troops on the battlefield, and the dynamic movement of the troops, including all the interesting tactics that were utilized, you have to have really good communication and coordination. For that, orders must be followed.

Is there something to speak to that? How do you tune this kind of system so that everybody is working together so well?

I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him. The relationship with his kinsmen was traditional, but all the others that he found were just common people—herders or hunters, very ordinary people—and they were loyal to him. They never, ever revolted against him or betrayed him.

So he had extreme loyalty. Then, as you mentioned, he organized his decimal system. The smallest unit of the army was the arban, the 10—the squad of 10 men. They were put together, and the head of that squad had total control over it. But the men knew that they were going to protect each other, and they had to come back with every member—everybody. You don't leave anybody behind.

This was extremely important. If you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he's risking his own life for you, too. You know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you. The army was organized with 5 horses for each man. They had their bow, and they had a lot of arrows—as many as they could carry—but they also retrieved arrows at the end of the battle.

They would also retrieve the enemy's arrows. This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia. The Russians could not use Mongolian arrows; they could not nock them in their bows. But the Mongols could use Russian arrows. All these little things mattered, but it's not even just the arrow. They also had to carry needle and thread.

Every soldier had to be able to sew. Sometimes it could be a torn garment, a piece of skin, or a wound that somebody had. It was a very odd thing when you think about the army of Genghis Khan: they were carrying everything themselves. They didn't have any pack train behind them, and one of the things they had to carry was needle and thread in order to sew things up.

So complete self-reliance in that regard.

Yes. They also carried dried dairy products. It's called aaruul, where they dry curd, and they can keep it for a couple of years. You dry it, and then when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water. You ride all day, it jostles up and down—boom, boom, boom—and turns into a kind of thick protein.

It's said that the Mongols could easily go 3 to 5 days without ever building a fire. They had enough food with them. So all these little things were important at the lowest level, just as his loyalty to his men was important at the highest level, and it went all the way down.

Loyalty was extremely important, and he organized the army into a left wing and a right wing, or east and west. In Mongolian, the word for left is east, and the word for right is west. So there were those 2 wings, and then in the middle was the gol, the center—this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit.

Usually, they would have a vanguard and a rear guard. Sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as 2 years in advance to clear the land, drive the people away, scare them, and make them go away so that the grass would be left there for the army when it moved through. They never marched the way other armies do, in a line with one following the other.

They would always go in long lines, spread out in wings, so that each horse was on its own path—all parallel together, you could say. They had very precise ways of doing things. This, I think, was his secret: he used the best people, but he was also willing to train them as much as possible.

He never punished them for what happened. Shigi Qutuqu, for example, the supreme judge, was in command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan, and he lost the battle, which was very unusual for the Mongols. So Genghis Khan went out with him and said, “Okay, let's go to the battlefield together and look it over. You explain to me what you did, and then we will talk about it.”

He was very thoughtful in the way that he trained the people around him, and they knew they weren't going to be punished. It wasn't like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No. Genghis Khan knew that every general was going to try 100 percent. If they retreated, fine—they were saving Mongol lives. They knew what to do, and he respected that.

All these things fit together. Part of what was important for him was that he had this base from steppe warfare already: the horse, the archery, and how that all fit together. But he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw. I think that sedentary armies, like sedentary civilizations, get stuck in their ways. This is how we do it, and we're going to make it a little faster, a little bigger, or a little stronger, but this is how we think.

Genghis Khan had no set way to think. When he encountered the first walled cities, around 1209, after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids. I really think they were raids, not wars, at first. He went into Tangut territory in what's now northwestern China, in the upper reaches of the Yellow River.

Of course, the cities had walls around them. This was a man who had never encountered a wall in his life. Well, he had, but they were made out of felt. The walls around his tent were felt walls.

Yeah. Just imagine what it's like for the first time in your life seeing a wall, when you come from the Mongolian steppe, where there are very few even natural wall-like things.

Right. They have the wall cliffs in some places. They're familiar with those, and they can climb them, but they don't have people at the top shooting down the mountain.

He looked at everything around him and saw, “Okay, they have this river, and they have all these channels, and they're always moving water around.” Like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon. Anything that doesn't move is a target. You've got moving water, and you've got a standing, nonmoving wall.

So he said, “Okay, the men are going to dig a channel, and they're going to bring down the wall of the Tangut city.” Well, they did it, but they didn't know exactly what they were doing. The embankments weren't high enough, too much water came in from the Yellow River, and it actually flooded the Mongol camp.

But it happened. We learned that lesson. So we're going to improve it. That became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols for the next 50 years, all the way to Baghdad. They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258.

This is the ability to see things and to try them, and if they fail, to try them in a different way, but a better way. We all think we learn from our mistakes. Yeah, yeah, I learned from that. And what do we do? We repeat the mistake.

I think it's just a part of human nature. Well, it didn't work the first 8 times, but I'm going to do it 1 more time. I think it's going to work. I know I'm going to win the lottery this time because I got the right numbers. That's how we think.

But he had that real ability, first of all, to be humble before these other things he didn't know about—technology—and understand that he didn't understand them, but that he could understand them in his own way. He did that over and over. The Mongols were excellent at putting together new things in new ways and using them against their enemies.

So, rapid, extreme, continued innovation. You couple that with a revolutionary idea that promotion should be based on merit. That idea, combined with the innovative approach to the military, just feeds on itself, because the people who are learning from their mistakes and constantly improving are the ones who get promoted into positions of power. Then they inspire everybody else to do the same.

If every action is judged based on the excellence of that action, then over time, repeated iteration in war creates a more and more powerful army.

Yes. And they were able to do that for 3 generations, to create an army that was ever-expanding and ever-changing its tactics and its technology. They got worse at it over time, but Genghis Khan was the one who innovated it. He was the best at it.

He used it throughout his lifetime, and he was getting better over his lifetime at using foreign information, foreign technology, and foreign ideas. He just had a genius for that.

If we can go back to the horses, you mentioned that every soldier had 5 horses. The reason for that is that the horses get tired.

Yes. And so you can cover a lot of ground in a single day. Usually, in the rotation of the horses, a horse would ride for 1 day and then rest for the next 4 to 5 days. Then another horse would be riding the next day.

One way to measure it is that later, at the time of the death of Ögedei, the word went from Mongolia to Hungary in 6 weeks.

Mongolia to Hungary in 6 weeks. So let's just imagine this army that's able to move at such high speeds, doesn't need to follow roads because it's used to riding in the open steppe.

So it can do all kinds of dynamic movements in encircling a place. Then there's also one of the other famous things: the feigned retreat that was used continuously. Can you explain how that worked?

The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers—Achilles in the Iliad and things like that. They fought for victory. That was the 1 thing. To retreat to save lives—there's no shame in that.

The Mongols would often retreat, and Genghis Khan himself never fought a battle that he thought he could lose. He won every battle he fought. That wasn't true for every general under him, as we said, for Shigi Qutuqu, for example. But he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating, in not fighting, and in not engaging the enemy.

However, that also becomes a tactic. They would send in a small group of soldiers to attack. The Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse. They were then able to act like they were defeated and turn, but they could still fire backwards. That was the Parthian shot, which is unusual in the world—not totally unique, but unusual—to fire backwards.

The Mongols could also lean down and fire under the neck of the horse, so they were protected. They had many different ways. They're firing coming, they're firing going, but usually the soldiers who were against them would break ranks to chase them. They wanted to go, they wanted to get their weapons, and they wanted to kill the Mongols.

If they didn't immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out, like loot from some place—valuables. The soldiers usually couldn't resist it, so they'd come chasing out after the Mongols, sort of pell-mell, going in every different direction. Then they would get to a certain point, and from behind the 2 hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them. Over and over, this tactic worked.

It's like the 1 with the water. I'm thinking, how can people not know this is what the Mongols are doing? How can they not know that?

Human nature. There is something about when the forces are retreating: you want to follow them. You want to follow them. You can't help it.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what that is. That's maybe the animalistic part, but take that together with the ability of the Mongols, at high speeds, to encircle and attack the flanks.

There have been many great military historians who have written about the great military forces throughout history. One of the things you write about, and in general, is that the Mongols don't get written about almost at all and don't get credit for the military tactics and the military genius exhibited through the different strategies.

This kind of idea of the feigned retreat and then attacking the flanks—

Yes.

—that's been, if not invented, perfected by Genghis Khan. He really was a military genius. But there were other things, too.

They didn't like roads. They just didn't like the roads. So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody had ever come from, and the people would be unprepared for that.

The most famous example is probably in Bukhara. This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, a great place in the world to this day. They came across the desert. Nobody had ever attacked across the desert, so people see dust coming and think, “Well, caravan.” They don't even know what's going on, but it was a direction that was a surprise element in that particular case.

He was able to think in ways that other people were not thinking and to surprise them.

What do you think it felt like to have this Mongol armada—the horses? The ground must shake when you have that many horses. What do you think it feels like to be in a town when Genghis Khan is approaching?

I think terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had. He cultivated this reputation of ferocity. Not only did he win battles, but he didn't allow people to write about him, as we said, and he encouraged refugees.

When he conquered a city, he always made sure there were plenty of refugees to go to the next city, because it's going to weaken them. It's going to weaken their food supply, and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth, eating children, and all kinds of horrible tales.

Genghis Khan encouraged it. This is propaganda. It's terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy. When you hear—or even if you know they're coming, see the dust, and hear the roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth—it must have been truly terrifying.

So psychological warfare was a part of the whole process. But as I understand it, there was always an offer for the towns and territories being attacked to surrender peacefully without the loss of life.

Yes, and the alternative would be the near-complete loss of life.

Can you speak to that?

Genghis Khan had a precise system. He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols. Much was already known about them. He explained that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared and they could continue in their professions. It's just that now the rulers would be the Mongols.

They would have to pay the taxes, and they would be the same taxes they had paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols. That was the general system. Because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can't leave a detachment there, so you're going to leave the local people in charge to run their country, city, or area the way they have done in the past.

He was absolutely faithful to that. In 1 episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son-in-law, Toquchar, violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered. Genghis Khan called him in, stripped him of his rank, and said, “The next city, you go first as a common soldier.”

Of course, he was killed in the next battle. I don't know the name of the daughter, unfortunately. I've tried to figure that out. But anyway, he was a close relative of his, and he was killed in the next battle for violating this law. So that was the law.

Then, if the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone. What they did was kill all the leaders. They felt like the elite had not served them well, and they usually killed the army because they couldn't incorporate the army into their own. The army had failed.

The 1 thing that they valued were all the artisans—everybody who had a skill. That skill could be making a pot, hammering out a metal plate, weaving carpets, translating, or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.

So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn't so severe. What was truly severe was if you surrendered—and many of them did—and then they knew they would not be harmed.

So they’re not harmed. The Mongols go on. The Mongols are hundreds of miles away. Forget about the Mongols. Genghis Khan sent word that they were supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help. Forget about the Mongols; they’re far away. It’s a rumor.

No, he stopped. He returned. He conquered the city, and he killed everyone. That’s the way it worked.

So the most drastic slaughter happens when there’s an agreement and then betrayal.

Yes. As it turned out, I would say it was more in the Middle East, or what we call the area around Iran and Afghanistan, where these were the worst cases. Only in Afghanistan did the emotion of the slaughter sometimes take over in an unfortunate way.

He had a grandson whom he loved very much. That grandson traveled with him, and he had the happy childhood that Temüjin had not had. I think Genghis Khan loved that about him. In Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan, where the great Buddhas are. Actually, he was sent to Bamiyan, and as it says in the Persian history, “The thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down.” He was killed.

For Genghis Khan, he had never lost a family member—not one of his sons, none of his grandsons, in battle. He had not lost them. Now he had lost the most valuable grandson, the one who was his pride and joy in so many ways.

He called the father, his own son, to him, but he did not tell him. They did not announce it to the public. The son came, and he didn’t know why he was being summoned. Genghis Khan said, “You have to tell me that you will not cry or moan when I tell you this, but your son is no more.”

No one was allowed to moan. No one was allowed to cry. No one was allowed to do anything. He said, “Make them cry.” He came down on the people of Afghanistan so harshly, and the killing went on for weeks and weeks. Then it just kind of wore itself out.

He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality, and that the slaughtering of these people should stop. So he stopped. But that’s the only time I know of that he really lost control of his own emotions. It’s something we can all understand, but his response was truly extreme: “We will not cry. We will not mourn. They will cry. They will mourn.”

So that goes against the cold, rational way he approached war, which is: peace is offered—

Yes.

—and then betrayal is punished.

I should add that he did not slaughter the people in peaceful towns. What happened was that the killing of what people thought was the heir—and he well may have been the heir of Genghis Khan—revitalized a lot of people’s hopes, and a lot of cities revolted. The ones who did not revolt were not killed. But the cities that revolted, he killed them all. There was a mass slaughter.

There are estimates that Genghis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world’s population. To put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today’s population. How should we think about the brutality of numbers like these?

The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it’s a total loss. It doesn’t matter what the number is. It’s a tremendous loss.

There was tremendous loss of life, as in every war. I don’t think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history, or other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Genghis Khan or the Mongols did it.

You look at the world today: people are killing children, women, and civilians every day. Every day. It’s always in the name of something—in the name of peace, in the name of God, or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing.

The United States has certainly been involved with that, supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, fighting in Iraq, and fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. It’s always, “Oh, but we’re defending democracy.” We brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people.

You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of bringing freedom and democracy to Germans. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That’s America. That’s us.

My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all of them. He fought in Vietnam, he fought in that war, and he fought in Korea. He was a good American. There was nothing wrong with it. I don’t even condemn America, but I’m saying: how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves?

We tend to do that. We especially tend to demonize barbarian people—people from the steppe, for example—or any enemy we have.

You said a lot of interesting things there. One is just the very nature of war: that war is hell. Sometimes things like dropping the atomic bomb, which is essentially an act of terror in the same style as Genghis Khan, are justified as an attempt to prevent further war. It’s a justification. People are always fighting for peace.

World War I was to make the world safe for democracy and peace, and then came World War II. But what happened? We went to war in Korea. We went to war in Vietnam. We bombed Cambodia. We bombed Laos. We bombed Afghanistan. We bombed Syria. We bombed Iraq. We’re always fighting for peace.

I’m not a pacifist. I am not. I grew up surrounded by soldiers, and I am not a pacifist. But I try to be a realist: all nations kill. It happens everywhere. So can we universally, in the way you’re passionately criticizing the wars of the 20th century, also criticize Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, and the wars fought by Caesar and others in the Roman Empire, which are essentially wars of conquest?

And in some human way, they were not necessary or defensive. They’re just part of this human drive to expand, to explore, and to accumulate power. Maybe this is a good place to also talk about somebody I respect a lot, Dan Carlin of the Hardcore History podcast. He did an amazing series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols called “Wrath of the Khans.”

He had a lot of interesting ideas there. One of them was the idea of historical arsonists, referring to figures who cause immense destruction but also pave the way for new developments and progress. Basically, he presented this complicated case that destruction often in history paves the way for progress. What do you think about this idea?

Creative destruction certainly works in some aspects of life, even with ourselves. For example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones, it sometimes works. We can destroy relationships that we’re in in order to create new ones. It can work when you start applying it to world history, but it does become a little bit more difficult.

I certainly think that these episodes create great changes. You can see great changes that happen because of the Mongol Empire. Now, whether or not that’s a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

The Mongols helped to unify many countries. You can think of Korea, which had been basically 3 kingdoms; they pushed them together. Everything that you see in China today was part of the Mongol Empire. They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria, and more. It was a little bit larger under the Mongols.

Even Russia, with so many little kingdoms, duchies, and dukedoms—the center had been in Ukraine and in Kiev—they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more toward what we call Russia now. They began the process of unification. It had a great impact on the country. So in a way, it’s a new creation. Yes, it does arise out of destruction.

But I think we also need to look at where the destruction comes from. It often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated, corrupted, and decayed through their own lack of moral fiber that it was easy to conquer them.

In the case of Kublai Khan, he finally conquered all of China. He was conquering a decayed dynasty. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution.

No one likes war, and I certainly don’t like war, but I’m not 100% against it. I think there are times when people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else, or for that of their family, and it’s justified in that sense to themselves. It may not be justified in a world sense, but I make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did if we can tolerate what the Americans did.

I am American through and through. There’s no question about that. But we overlook all of the things that we did. It’s interesting, for example, that in Afghanistan we were there for some 20 years. We had made the Taliban stronger when they were fighting against the Russians, and then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out.

Some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadaran clan, descended from the Jamukha family, from his clan. This is what I mean when I say that the ramifications from that time are still with us, and we don’t even see it.

When Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said, “The Mongols”—meaning the Americans—“the Mongols have returned. The Mongols have returned.” And he said, “The Americans are just the new Mongols.” I can see it.

I don't accept it, but I can see how people think. If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.

There are effects that you could talk about. The unification of China, Mongols or otherwise, is a very important step in the history of China that permeates to today. Then there's a lot of stuff that we'll talk about: the ideas of religious freedom, the postal network, the trade routes—all of this. There are a lot of progressive consequences of the Mongol conquest and the Mongol Empire. We'll talk about that, but let's linger on the heavier topic for a little bit longer.

Like we were talking about Dan Carlin, he was critical of your work a little bit—showing it respect, but also being a little bit critical, as being too focused on and emphasizing the positive impacts, correctly and accurately, but not giving enough airtime to or describing the brutality of the killing, the hell that is war. Can you understand his criticism?

Guilty. I'm guilty.

Steel man.

Dan is a very smart man. I respect him very much, and I like him tremendously. He's right. But that is not what I want to stress. It's not that I want to deny the killing, and it's not that I want to deny the warfare, but that's pretty much the same everywhere in the world. How much do we need to say about how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated, and all?

No, it's what comes afterwards. Just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards. If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people—China, Russia, the Middle East—you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.

All the things you've mentioned, from the trading system and the postal system to religious freedom, the rights of women, and the rights of minorities—these were things that people responded to. The world benefited tremendously from the life of Chingis Khan. But all we want to talk about—and I don't deny it—is the conquest part. Okay, that's 20 years. If it went on for another 150 years, there's more to the story than just conquest.

There is a point that you correctly identify, and you've also written about Native Americans and so on: history does seem to be written by the non-barbarians. But in reality, history is not divided in this kind of way. The barbarians are not these crude, brutal, plain, simple people. There is a sophisticated, deep culture within them as well.

Yes.

All the different kinds of peoples that came from the steppe.

Yes. I guess if there's one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world. We tend to have 2 categories for them: they are barbarians who kill people and eat one another, or they're victims, and we should feel sorry for them and nostalgic about everything about them and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering. Those are the 2 roles for tribal people.

But I'm trying to show them in a different light: they conquered. Yes, they were conquerors, but they also created great things in the history of the world. The Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire, in the way that I'm putting together that story, and Chingis Khan was the genius behind it. He created the idea that there could be 1 world in which there would be 1 set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.

You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey the great ethics of the sky. There were things like that about his vision. I think very few people in history had a vision. I look around the world today, and in my lifetime, since the time of Roosevelt's death, I look around and I don't see much vision. I see lots of slogans, lots of talks, policy papers. “Oh my God, we can produce it.” Where is the vision?

It's always, “We're going to have peace and we're going to have a better life. Vote for me or vote for my party. We're really for the people.” What the heck are they talking about? There is no vision there. What is this country? What should this country be? What is this world? How should we—no, no vision.

Those figures are rare through history. The legendary figures who come along, who have vision, who are able to capture the public imagination, heart, and mind with that vision, but also have the skill—

—to execute and implement it, and all of those things combined—

—and have the mental fortitude not to be corrupted by success along the way. All of those things—

That's very rare in history.

And when they come along, they change the direction of history.

If we could linger on some of these world-defining ideas, religious freedom is just surprising and incredible. Chinggis Khan was able to enforce and inspire the value of religious freedom throughout all of these disparate lands, for whom religion was a very powerful force. Can you speak to that?

Some empires in history and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups. Rome, to some extent, was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions—not of the Christians, but reasonably. What happened with Chinggis Khan?

The first campaign he had outside of Mongolia was for the Uyghur people, who lived in western China. At that time, they were being ruled by, actually, the Naiman king Tayang Khan. His son Kuchlug had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan, and he ruled over the Uyghur people. The Naiman had been a Christian tribe, but Kuchlug converted to Buddhism. His subjects were Muslim, and he outlawed the Muslim religion and made all kinds of things happen.

So the Uyghurs sent a delegation to Chinggis Khan. At this time, they all knew that the emperors of China were too weak to protect them. They sent a delegation to Chinggis Khan and asked him to come and save them from Kuchlug, and he did. He sent a detachment down there; he didn't actually go himself. They drove Kuchlug from power. Kuchlug fled down towards Pakistan, in that direction. They caught up with him and killed him. That's what the Mongols did.

Then Chinggis Khan made the first law that he ever made for people outside of Mongolia. Up to this point, it had been tribal law. He saw that the tribes were mostly fighting over women, so he outlawed the kidnapping of women, outlawed the sale of women, and cut down on a lot of the feuding. But he saw that civilized, quote-unquote, people fought a lot over religion. They weren't fighting over women; they fought over religion.

So he made the law. This was very interesting. We talk about religious freedom, but religious freedom comes in many forms. One form is to allow institutions to do what they want. We're going to allow the Mormons, the Catholics, the Jews, and the Muslims each to do what they want in the organized churches that they have.

His law was not that. It presumed that. It allowed that. But he said every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea was that it was individual choice. No one in history had ever thought of that: that it belonged to the person.

That's a really powerful statement.

Yes.

That alone—that's why you talk about Thomas Jefferson being deeply inspired by Chinggis Khan.

Religious freedom. Yes.

Of the individual. But it's such a powerful illustration, a manifestation, of individual freedom, period. If you, in the world and in history, are allowed to practice any religion you want, that's one of the biggest ways to say that the individual is fundamentally free in the society.

Yes. It was a great source of power for him, also. I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason, just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life.

His mother was kidnapped. His wife was kidnapped. He knew that that was a crime against every ethic that you can think of and every form of morality. That's why he did it—not for ideological reasons, but practical reasons. It hurt people. It hurt people.

It was the same with religion. He gave this right to everybody because it was going to be their own personal right to keep them from being hurt. That gave him tremendous support from minorities of many types, and so they flocked to him. After that, minorities flocked to him. This was a minority effort of the Muslim Uyghurs to come to him. Many people flocked to him for the same reason, for that kind of religious freedom.

That religious freedom, and also the other things you mentioned, created a stable society. That allowed him, with a small army, to administer a large empire.

And also, on a more practical, political sort of way of thinking, he recognized the power of having a balance of power between Shiite and Sunni, where both were going to be allowed equal rights. One is not dominant over the other, and Christians and Jews all have rights as well. That keeps the society from fragmenting against him or uniting against him. It's a kind of fragmentation that he's taken advantage of.

I don't think that was his main reason, but I do think he was quite aware that you give every religion the right. Unfortunately, the only religion he didn't recognize as a religion was Confucianism. He said, “What do they do? The Taoists can do magic on the earth, and they can give people magic formulas to cure, or they have all this kind of stuff going on. Well, what did the Confucianists do?” So the people could still be Confucianists; that was okay, but he didn't extend all the tax-free rights.

He dropped all taxes on religious institutions of all types. But since the Confucianists were not necessarily classified as a religion, eventually that was abused so much, because the religions were then able to get everybody to donate property. You could still use it, you could still farm your land, but it was ours, and now you didn't have to pay taxes on it. You just gave us some. It got abused, but it started off as a good idea.

And genuinely, as I understand—maybe you can correct me, of course—there's the practical aspect of those policies, but he himself was just curious about the different religions as well, as I understand. So he never chose any religion except the one from which he—

Came, I guess.

I mean, can you describe what he believed spiritually himself?

It's interesting. We said that after the death of Mö'etüken, his grandson, in Bamiyan, and the slaughter that followed, he went through a new phase in which he summoned religious scholars of all sorts. The famous Changchun from China, whom I despise, came with all of his magic formulas for things, and then a bunch of various Muslim leaders came.

So Chinggis Khan was exploring all these different religions, and not just in a simple way. He had organized public lectures from these people and public debates—not antagonistic debates, but discussions among groups of people who hated each other and would never discuss anything. Suddenly, this powerful man summons them, and they have to say, “Okay, well, explain your religion, and explain yours.”

Sometimes you can't just explain it in terms of your own scripture. What do you say to the people who believe it? So he was exploring, but no, he never changed at all. He was an animist. We would say that's about the only term we know to use.

Early in life, he worshiped that mountain where he took refuge several times: Burkhan Khaldun. Burkhan Khaldun was the great refuge of his life. He would go to the top, pray, take off his hat, take off his belt, and stand there before the sky and pray.

Later on, this became rather dramatic. He would sometimes go away to pray, “Should we invade these people?” All of his subjects would be waiting to hear, “What's God going to tell Chinggis Khan when he goes up the mountain?” There are episodes like that, but he was very sincere.

I think what happened was that the Mongols had so many spirits in the water, the mountains, and everything around them. You have to know them personally, pray to them, and know what they like and don't like. Should you sing to them, or should you offer some milk products, or what do you do? You have to know them.

Well, you get away from Mongolia, and this was a problem in China. They didn't know the spirits.

This caused great consternation for the Mongols. You've got a land here, and the spirits don't like us. They're hostile lands. We don't even know who they are. We don't know these spirits in China.

It took a long time. Gradually, Chinggis Khan moved from just the spirit of the mountain that he worshiped—which remained his main focus of worship his whole life—to the sky. That was the one universal spirit. It was everywhere in the world. The sky was the same for every people.

For Mongolians, in their language, the word for sky, the word for heaven, the word for God, and the word for weather are all the same: tenger. In the case of the eternal sky, when they're talking about it in religious terms, it's the Eternal Blue Sky.

He became more universalistic in this animist vision of the world. The sky could embrace all religions—all religions. All people were trying to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well, enlightenment is too specific a word, but the same form of moral life and guidance from the sky.

He felt that each person knew morality. Each person could come to know morality within themselves. They didn't have to just be taught it by somebody from a book.

In fact, one of his grandsons, Möngke, said to all the others—the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, and the Taoists—“You people have your scriptures, and you don't live by them. We have our spirits and our shamans and our drums, and we live by them.”

I think it's true. It's just, throughout this conversation, it's blowing my mind that the kid from the Mongol steppe who lost everything, who had the hardest of lives, is now not only a military genius but also this kind of sage-type character who understood the value of religious freedom.

There is a cynical way to see all these things, because he did an awful lot of things that look like he's a feminist.

Yeah.

You're saying the cynical way to see that is that he saw the value of promoting women into positions of power because they create a more stable society, and there's less power struggles and all that. But the reality is—

There are a lot of things that look awfully progressive about the things he's implemented, and they stayed. I'm not trying to say it in modern terms, right?

You know, when you have one million people, you've got to use everyone, and the men are fighting. So he left women to administer a lot of things inside the country, the economy in particular. In some of the ancillary Turkic kingdoms around the Mongols, such as the Onggud, the Karluk, and different Mongol and Uyghur groups, they were administered primarily by his daughters.

His wives were in charge of administering the land of Mongolia itself and handling the economy. He was using women in a very practical way, but it wasn't necessarily in our ideological way.

I think it's the same with the environment. I'm not trying to say he was an environmentalist in our modern way, but he passed very strict laws about the use of water, including not moving water into an area to irrigate it, because that was violating the earth and violating the water.

A lot of historians think the Mongols were so stupid that they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy: “This is going to return to pastureland.”

That lasted until Kublai Khan, who was the one who changed it and started allowing more irrigation, the movement of water, and things like that. But with Chinggis Khan, we can't use these modern terms, like a human-rights crusader. I'm not trying to say he's a democrat in the modern sense, or an environmentalist, or a feminist, but all of this was a part of it.

Another part was the protection of envoys. He said, “Every envoy, every ambassador, every messenger is protected from arrest, from torture, and from killing. And if you kill one of ours, we will wipe you out.”

In 1240, that led to the destruction of Kiev. This is after Chinggis Khan. This was Ögedei Khan, his son, the happy, happy drunk. Ögedei Khan's army had come there under Subutai—great, great, great, the greatest general in the history of the world, I would say.

Chinggis Khan, for the military part, was the greatest strategist for organizing everything together, but the military part was Subutai. Subutai had been there, and they sent in an ambassador who happened to be a woman. Some of the Western sources say she was a daughter of Chinggis Khan. I have no evidence of that, and I don't quite believe it, but maybe she was kin to him or something.

Some say she was a daughter of Chinggis Khan. Others say she was a witch. The people of Kiev decided she was a witch and killed her. Okay, that's it. That's it. Kiev was destroyed for killing a Mongol envoy.

The envoy is a method of communication.

Yes.

In diplomacy.

Yes. And so if you destroy that method of communication or disrespect it—

In any way.

Exactly.

That sends a signal to everybody else. Send an envoy, you respect it.

That's why these things, I say, are the making of the modern world. Most of the ideas, we accept the idea; we don't do the practice.

All of us accept diplomatic freedom today. Diplomats are killed around the world yearly. We accept the idea of female equality and emancipation in every way, but in fact, women are enslaved in many parts of the world today.

We accept the idea of religious freedom. “Oh, but not those people. That's not theirs. Their religion isn't good. Their religion isn't right. But our religion—we will tolerate them, but they have to be more like us.” No, we only say these things, but the world still hasn't achieved all of them. He achieved these within his empire in his time. He achieved those.

One of the things we've mentioned, but I think is really fascinating—and maybe an immeasurable impact that Chinggis Khan had—is on trade. You could say a lot of stuff, but basically, he established a unified trade network that spanned I don't know how many thousands of kilometers.

There are a lot of interesting things that were done to enable that trade. One is providing safety and security, not just for the envoys, as we mentioned, for communication in the military context, but for the merchants. Can you speak to what Chinggis Khan did for the trade network connected to the Silk Road, as an example?

Nomads in general are interested in trade, and throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another, one oasis to another.

And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent. They could create very little in their home country. They could hardly grow anything, and they didn’t have the technological skills for most of the crafts. So they were very dependent on trade.

Mhm.

Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn’t so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden, he raises them up above scholars.

They were going to have certain rights. For example, they got to be taxed one time. Whatever the national tax was, that was it. They weren’t taxed every time they stopped in some new town. And he created a set of what we would call rest houses or recuperation centers, where they could get fresh horses and food, deposit their money, and get paper receipts that could be used anywhere in the empire.

They were guaranteed protection. If they had to pass through an area where it might be dangerous, then a small group—a squad of men and horses—would go with them. So trade was extremely important.

And then the Mongols also supported trade in a very odd way. The merchants would come in and ask for an outrageous price for some goods, much more than they should get, waiting for the Mongols to bargain them down. And the Mongols would say, “I’ll give you much more than that.”

Ögedei Khan, the son of Genghis Khan, was once asked, “Why do you do that? You’ve got to stop doing this.” This was a Muslim financial adviser whom he had called in. They told him, “Well, you’ve got to stop paying more than people ask.” And then Ögedei said, “Where’s the money going to go? It’s still in my empire. It’s going to come back eventually.”

So they had a much different attitude, with great respect. I think a symbol of that is in the time of Kublai Khan, when we see that Marco Polo’s uncle and father went to China and came back from China, and then, on the second trip, Marco Polo went with them to China and back. They were safe the whole way, their goods were safe, they came back with a tremendous amount of wealth, and they were never harassed.

The mere fact that they could cross the whole continent safely and come back—it took 2 years—was unprecedented. We really don’t have any well-documented case of anybody from China visiting Europe, or Europe visiting China, before the Mongols. But since Genghis Khan, there’s never been a year without contact between East and West. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.

I don’t think it’s possible to measure the positive impact of that, because it wasn’t just trade of goods. It was also exchange, explicit or implicit, along the way: exchange of ideas, whether that’s exchange of technologies, philosophical ideas, scientific ideas, or technical and mathematical ideas. All of this spread throughout and was constantly circulating. Maybe you can speak to that aspect of it.

Yes, it was an exchange on every level: ideas, technology, ideologies, beliefs, scientific information, everything was being exchanged, including crops for new areas. But Genghis Khan—part of his genius of organization was knowing what skills people had that would contribute toward his empire.

For example, the Muslims were very good with arithmetic. In fact, he conquered the little empire of Khwarazm, from which we get the word “algorithm,” because there was a mathematician there who invented algorithms. And so he conquered it very quickly, very easily, with no problem. But it belonged to him. The Muslims were using zero.

The Mongols were absolutely impressed with that. The Chinese were less so. They were very suspicious about zero. But the Mongols were very impressed, because for herders, numbers are important to them for keeping up with their animals.

In fact, the Mongols had a simple system: They reduced all animals to the number of horses. You could ask somebody how many animals they had, and they could say, “100 horses,” and it didn’t mean they had 100 horses. It would be something like 5 cows counting as 4 horses, 5 sheep or 5 goats counting as 1 horse, and 4 camels counting as 5 horses. They reduced it all down like that.

The Mongols took a census of everything, and that was one of the first things Genghis Khan did. It was one of the demands he made of every place he went: a complete census of the people. Every house had to post outside how many people, how many animals, what they did, their occupations—all this information. So they needed good mathematics for this, and the Muslims provided it.

They took the Muslims to China, these Middle Eastern scholars and others. Unfortunately, they were rather ruthless sometimes when it came to implementing the tax policies, but they became the financial advisers to him. Other groups of people had other roles like that, and he was moving them around constantly.

So you had a combination. As I said, he himself had that genius for combining new bits of technology, but it created a new kind of cultural spirit in which other people were also combining technology at other levels and being encouraged. It was no longer heresy or the devil’s work to bring in this thing.

So we had the spread of printing, for example. We had the partial spread of something such as paper money. We had almanacs being created through printing that combined different calendars and different information that was coming along.

One simple but lethal form of technology was that the Chinese had gunpowder. Mostly, it was used for fireworks and religious things, and then sometimes in warfare it was used for a primitive hand grenade or a primitive bomb that could be thrown with a trebuchet. This was in the time of Kublai Khan, the grandson.

The Middle Eastern Muslims and the Byzantines, especially, had naphtha—what we call Greek fire—flamethrowers that could set things on fire. The Europeans did not excel very much in technology. They were behind in almost everything, but they could cast bells for churches.

“Okay, let’s take that bell and turn it on its side. We’re going to use some principles of the flamethrower, and we’re going to use the gunpowder from China.” And you’ve got a cannon.

So the Mongols, even early on, by the time they got to the siege of Baghdad—but not, I think, in the lifetime of Genghis Khan, but soon thereafter, under his sons and grandsons—they were using some very primitive forms of cannon and even some fire lances. We can’t even call it anything like a rifle, but it could fire a very small ballistic device.

So if we jump around a little bit on the topic of a cannon, what are some technological developments that Genghis Khan, his son, and Kublai Khan were using? How much gunpowder were they using in general? What was their approach to siege warfare, for example? What are some different ideas there?

If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, first of all, he changed a lot of the strategies. They were no longer working. The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grasslands, but by the time you got to Hungary, the grasslands started to give out. By the time you got to Poland, there were so many farms that it was hard for horses to get through them, and they didn’t want to go on the roads. By the time you got to the Indus River, it was too hot and too humid. The bows were beginning to wilt, the horses were exhausted—it wasn’t working.

So to conquer South China, Kublai Khan had to come up with new things. One thing was that the South Chinese had built a great wall. It was called the Great Wall of Ships. This was before the wall that we know as the Great Wall, which is really the Ming wall of the Ming dynasty.

They used it as a defensive navy. They had the largest navy in the world. It was defensive, and it was most literally defensive. When it came time for warfare, they would chain the ships together across the mouth of a harbor to protect the city. So it became a wall.

Actually, if we rewind, who was Kublai Khan, and what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare.

In 1215, Genghis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin dynasty of northern China. At that time, southern China was ruled by the Song dynasty, usually called the Southern Song.

He had already conquered the Xixia kingdom, or the Tangut people, and so most of northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. Then his descendants conquered central China, and Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south.

Kublai Khan was born that year, in 1215, about 3 months after the capture of Beijing. He was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Genghis Khan. He had lots of cousins out there who had been riding around. They had conquered Russia, already burned down Kyiv, and conquered different places in the world. They were real Mongols. That was their whole life.

He was born, and he didn’t meet Genghis Khan until he was about 7 years old, because Genghis Khan was away on conquest in Central Asia. Genghis Khan came back and met him, and he said, “Oh, he doesn’t look like a Mongol. He looks like his mother’s people.”

His mother was Sorghaghtani, who was actually part of the royal family of the Kereit people, whom Genghis Khan had conquered sometime earlier. Kublai looked like his mother’s people, who were a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white, with very bright red cheeks and a certain very round face, and so on.

So he looked different, and for whatever reason, I think his mother recognized the difference and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Möngke, later Möngke Khan, and she wanted him to become the Great Khan, even though her husband had died drunk out on campaign. She took over northern China and began to put it together.

She wanted her son to become the Great Khan, the emperor of the Mongol Empire. This wasn't in line. This wasn't going to happen because he was the fourth son, with 3 others way ahead of him. But she caused the revolution. She made it happen. She put her son Möngke in power in 1251, and he became Great Khan.

He only lived until 1259. He died of something. It could have been cholera; there are different stories. I don't know the truth of it, but he died on campaign in China trying to conquer southern China.

Up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him and Chinese scholars come in to tutor him. She gave him a very good education. I think she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother and administer the lands in China, so he was learning all this.

But his older brother insisted on sending him out on campaign. He was overweight. He was fat. He had gout. He needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. His brother assigned Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general, to teach him warfare.

He wasn't great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart and, at first, a little bit lazy. He liked talking about religion and sitting around going hunting, as long as he had many men with him to do the shooting and then prepare the food.

His territory in northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were overtaxing the people, cheating the people, and doing everything wrong. His mother basically pulled his chain and said, "Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there. You live there. You take charge."

Everybody was terrified of his mother, so he ran off to China and started administering his land. He started learning how to do it. When his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River on a campaign that his brother had sent him on. He was having no success at all, but he thought, "Okay, my brother's dead. I should finish the campaign."

Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Böke, was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded, and he was back in Mongolia. He had to oversee a debate one time between the Daoists and the Buddhists because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody. He got mad, picked up a statue of the Buddha, and beat the Daoist representative to death. He just wasn't good for moderating debates.

So he was going to be the new Great Khan. He was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning point in Kublai Khan's life, because he had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people. His wife, Chabi, sent him some coded messages basically telling him, "Forget about southern China. It's always going to be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new emperor. You are the next son after Möngke."

Somehow, she invigorated him. He came back, and even though he didn't have all the military strategy, he had northern China. The resources were immense. He could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on northern China for food.

All the Mongols supported Ariq Böke. All the ones in Central Asia were supporting Ariq Böke. He went to get food from them, and they didn't want to give up their food. "Yeah, we want to support you for Great Khan, but we're not giving up our food." So he was basically starved into submission in 1262. Then he was taken prisoner into China, and he mysteriously passed away in 1264 while a legal case was being brought against him for trial. He never made it to trial. He was gone.

Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much. He didn't have the genius of his grandfather—I wouldn't say that—but he was smart and clever. He understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about the Mongols than most Chinese did.

The great thing that Chinggis Khan said on his deathbed was, "Finish conquering China." That was the great objective. Kublai was going to fulfill this, but they didn't know how. The Great Wall of ships was protecting the Southern Song. The huge Yangtze River was so wide, with the ocean on the side. All of these things were protecting them.

So he had one of his very smart generals, named Aju, who was a real Mongol but was also able to think in innovative ways. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father, Uriyangkhadai, on the conquest of the Red River in northern Vietnam against the Đại Việt people.

They went down the river. They were trying to surround this Chinese territory. They were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south. They went down the Red River to conquer the Đại Việt. The Đại Việt moved their army up on the other side by boat, and they had a whole corps of elephants.

So they had the Mongols on one side of the river and the Đại Việt forces on the other side. Uriyangkhadai was a smart man—not a genius, but smart. He already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to rout the elephants was with flaming arrows to the feet. That was it.

But he recognized that they had come up on boats. Mongols didn't like boats. They crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. "I am not going over on a floating cart. I'm going to ride a goatskin across the river."

So he assigned one detachment: "You have to burn the boats so the Đại Việt cannot escape when we rout the elephants." The battle got started. The elephants were running wild. All kinds of chaos was going on.

The group sent to burn the boats were Mongols. They wanted to go to war. Why burn a bunch of women's carts? So they went and joined the battle. They left the boats. The Mongols won the battle, but the Đại Việt forces got on the boats and sailed back to what's now Hanoi.

Then they evacuated the city, took all the food and everything out of the city, and disappeared into the delta. The Mongols arrived and conquered—quote, unquote—Hanoi, the capital city, and they had nothing.

They had nothing. They won every battle. They lost the war. They retreated.

Aju was the son of Uriyangkhadai, and he saw all this happen. He recognized the importance of water and boats, so he spent his time studying the Yangtze River, every little river around it, and the cities.

The crucial thing he saw was that the cities were heavily, heavily fortified on the land side because invasion comes from the land. They expected this little line of boats to protect them on the water, so their city walls were weak on that side. The defenses were weak. That's where they had to attack.

So they sent engineers to the Ilkhanate in Persia, where his uncle was now dead and his cousins were ruling there—or his nephews, we would say, or cousins' nephews. They sent over engineers to build a special kind of trebuchet, a catapult. They had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat because they were usually made for stable ground. They adapted it for boats and for throwing heavy things, as well as incendiary bombs.

They developed it and attacked the first city. It fell. They attacked the next one; it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy. Then the army would move in after the navy had broken down the defenses.

So this is a catapult on a ship?

A catapult on a ship. We call it a type of trebuchet for this type of catapult.

So this is an engineering solution for people who are deeply uncomfortable with boats.

Yes.

And they've accepted it.

Yes. Now it's a great weapon. It's no longer a woman's cart. It's a bow and arrow. It is a giant bow and arrow.

Yeah, it's fascinating. So they go and hit them hard on the walls on the weak side.

Yes.

Where there's no army protection.

Yes. And they conquer their way down to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song. They've been in power for a long time, since 970, and now we're already into the 1270s. That's a long time. They are dissipated. They've had child emperors ruling. All kinds of things are going on.

At this point, we have a child in command. But Kublai Khan makes a very strange move. He says, "Okay, let's invade Japan now." They think, "What? We're fighting against the Song Dynasty."

Most people ascribe it to all kinds of things, but actually, I think there was a great logic to it. One reason was that he had abolished his grandfather's policy of "Defeat and destroy until they are no more." That was the phrase used for their enemies. He had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy: "Try to incorporate them into your army if possible, but be merciful."

He did not want to destroy. He had a lot of defectors coming in, and because the Mongols prized people with skills, a lot of very clever people with shipbuilding and engineering skills were flocking to the Mongols.

Whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Hangzhou doing calligraphy and poetry and having contests over who could sing or paint. I don't know what scholars do, but they were being scholars.

Yes. But I think there was actually a very good reason for invading Japan. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the Southern Song. They had lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out, and they got it from Japan, which was a great source.

But I think there were other reasons. If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan, and they didn’t want that to happen. Then there’s this idea of “kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” It’s like, okay, we’ll go do this, and then maybe they’ll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan. Well, it was a total failure.

You’ve got a bunch of ships that were mainly great on the river and would ride along the coast, and you’re crossing some treacherous water there. The Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing. Okay, you can arrive with a trebuchet and throw grenades at the beach, but it’s not really going to do a lot of damage. It might scare a few horses, but you’re not destroying cities. The Japanese cities were more inland; they weren’t on the beach waiting for the Mongols to come and invade. So he failed in that invasion.

So we should say that this is the time of the samurai, right?

Samurai. Yeah.

So there was never a real test of, like—

No, there was some fighting, and the samurai learned some very valuable things. The samurai had such a ritualized way of fighting. It was like the knights of Europe.

Yes.

Coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse—it was just craziness. Craziness. The samurai, at that point, would ride out in front of their enemy and recite the story of their genealogy. Right? You know, the Mongols had no use for that. They were there to fight. They were there to win.

But on the other hand, this was unknown territory to them, and the weather did turn against them. I don’t want to give too much credit to the weather. I really think that the Japanese defeated them. The Mongols weren’t well prepared, and their ships were not very good. They were defeated in the first invasion.

Could they get off the ships onto the beach?

They did. They had some skirmishes, or small battles, on land. Yes, they did.

But they didn’t successfully complete them. I mean—

No.

So they couldn’t do their usual Mongol thing, right?

Right? Well, they didn’t have enough horses, for one thing. There were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly. It was the first time anybody had ever tried to mount such a massive invasion.

Yeah. So they’re just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy. So he has failed to conquer, and he’s thinking like a Mongol: You rule those waters and lands, but he ruled the ocean. He stopped the trade. He stopped the supply. He cut off the possibility of the Song dynasty fleeing to Japan. He won—

In a certain way. He lost, but he had won his objective of cutting off southern China. It also gave his navy some experience with the ocean, and now they were ready to move out into the ocean around southern China. So they were closing in, then.

Aju was in command, but actually the head commander was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia. He was perhaps born close to the Fergana Valley, in that area. We’re not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there, and then he eventually lived in what’s now Iran. He came and took over command of the army.

He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and intelligent. Aju should have been in command, but Bayan recognized that, and he and Aju worked together very well. Aju knew how to fight the war. Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things.

So Bayan was in command, and the generals were deserting the Southern Song right and left. The artisans were all coming up to join the Mongols for pay. The generals were loading up the boats with all the jewels, and they grabbed a couple of brothers of the little 5-year-old emperor and put them on a boat. They were fleeing. They even deserted their own families.

The generals were corrupt cowards who fled. The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady. She had no children. Her name was Empress Dowager Xie. She was missing an eye. She was ugly; they called her ugly at that time.

She offered the Mongols everything. “I’ll give you everything. Please let the emperor stay, okay? Even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay.” Bayan said no. Total surrender. Total surrender.

So she decided to surrender. She said, “Yes, we will surrender the capital.” Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers. They looked around, and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender. He said, “No, I didn’t win this war in the palace. My soldiers won this war in the field. You have to come with the emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender.”

But he did not harm her. He respected her, and there was no looting of the city. Later, they took everything in a very systematic way. They took the archives and all this kind of stuff away. But there was no wholesale looting and killing of people, nothing like that.

They had taken the capital, and she came out and surrendered. She bowed on the ground toward Beijing, and then she took the child emperor and they slowly made their way to Beijing. She was a little sick, so it took her longer to get there. They surrendered again in a public ceremony, bowing to Kublai Khan.

He gave each of them a palace and gave them a new title. He protected them. He was trying to show the world that this was the new face of the Mongols: We don’t kill off the old people who are ruling anymore. We’re going to give them a palace, treat them nicely, and all that.

But the navy that had fled did not defend the city. Those cowardly generals made another little boy, a 7-year-old half-brother to the emperor. Gong was his name. They made him emperor.

They were just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city. The Muslims who were controlling the trade and many of the ships in that area were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims. They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom and because they were merchants whose status would be raised.

The Muslim merchants were switching over. The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country out there. They had some loyal supporters in some places, or they dropped the emperor in the ocean. You think, how do you drop the emperor in the ocean? They accidentally spilled him into the ocean, and then they fished him out, but he died.

Fortunately, they had one more 7-year-old half-brother. So on Lantau Island, exactly where the Hong Kong airport is today—the new airport. Well, it’s not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island—they went there and had a big coronation ceremony.

But the people there were not supportive enough. It certainly wasn’t Hong Kong then, anyway; it was the delta of the Pearl River. So they sailed farther south to another island, took it over, and, of course, the first thing they did was say, “Well, we have to build a palace.”

What? The Mongols are chasing you, and you’re going to stop and build a palace. So these are like the remains of the Chinese?

Yes. The generals and the army and the navy.

And there was a real competence issue.

Yes.

Okay. So they’re going to build—

We’re going to protect it with a great wall of the sea, right? They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor, and they put a palace boat, so-called, in the middle.

Mhm.

The generals didn’t trust their own soldiers enough. So they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols.

The Mongols arrived, and over and over they asked them to surrender. “You won’t be harmed,” and all this kind of stuff. But the Mongols now took over the land, so they had the water all around them and they had the land. Once the fighting started, they could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships, and they cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water.

So they couldn’t boil rice. They had to try to eat rice and drink seawater. They were all sick as dogs out there. The leaders refused to surrender. The little boy was there, the 7-year-old emperor. Bing was his name, with his pet parrot. That was the only thing he had left in life: his pet parrot.

The Mongols offered every opportunity. But the so-called prime minister, the coward that he was—although he’s treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history—said, “We will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor.”

First, he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown. Then he took the emperor—the 7-year-old. He was 7 years and 1 month; he had just turned 7 years old—and jumped into the water with the child. A child murderer. He is a child murderer to do that.

Somehow, in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot, and the parrot fell into the water, too.

So the 7-year-old boy and the parrot died in the water.

That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world: the Song dynasty. They were intellectually great. They were artistically great. They were technologically great. They were just one of the greatest moments of world history.

And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor that was betrayed by this woman. The men lost the war. The men lost the war. Who’s to blame? An old, one-eyed, ugly lady, Empress Xie.

Well, the bigger picture there is probably that the institutions became corrupt and stale, the army weakened, and the political class probably lost their skill and competence at ruling and all that kind of stuff.

And all that is true, and the Chinese summarize that as losing the Mandate of Heaven.

Right? I mean, everybody has their perspective. Maybe the way you told the story has a very objective sort of way of revealing the absurdity and the cowardice of it. But there's probably a Chinese perspective where they tell the story as maintaining honor to the last—

Yes—to the last moment. Scholars very often depict Empress Xie as the traitor to the country. And I say, no, that boy lived on for another 45 years. So she did not betray the country; she protected her emperor, whom she was supposed to protect.

It was the man who killed the child emperor—who killed young Bing. So what was the lasting impact of Kublai Khan unifying China?

Well, yes. First of all, he had unified China in the largest sense of the word: Korea, Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, and part of Central Asia. He had unified it, but he did so at the expense of his empire. They didn't recognize him as the Great Khan, and there was great opposition from the Golden Horde of Russia, and also from the central region, which is called the Chagatai—the descendants of Chagatai, the 2nd son—the Chagatai Khanate—and then from the Ilkhanate of Persia.

These are the different sort of fracturings of the Mongol Empire—the sons of Genghis Khan.

And only the Ilkhanate were still loyal to him, but they're so far away.

But now he has a navy. But this is—I mean, even the 4 pieces, the whole thing is gigantic, and even the pieces are gigantic. So, I mean, it's very hard to keep an empire of this size together.

Yes, but he had China. It was unified under him, and then he sent out the 1st expedition to sail directly to Persia. There had been trade all throughout thousands of years, but it was usually port to port, with different merchants trading goods. He organized a great fleet to send a queen or princess to become a queen in the Ilkhanate and marry the Ilkhan of Persia. It's Persia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and Iraq, all of that area, and part of Syria.

He organized this, and it so happened that Marco Polo was ready to go home because they knew Kublai Khan was about to die. In fact, he only had about 1 year left to live, and they wanted to get their riches out before they knew what was going to happen. This was a new dynasty. They had been in total control of China for 1 generation, and they didn't know what was going to happen.

Also, just before that, there had been a bad sign because Kublai Khan had tried to invade Japan a 2nd time, and he had failed a 2nd time. Again, I think he had a practical purpose. He had this whole huge Song army, and now he's the new enlightened Mongol who doesn't slaughter. So, what is he going to do? They're not reliable. They're not safe.

He sends a bunch of them up along the Amur River in what's now the Russian Far East, or what we call Siberia in English. He sent expeditions up into Tibet, exploring options up there, but there wasn't enough room or enough agricultural area for a huge military colony. Most of his ships were loaded with former prisoners of war from the Song Dynasty. They were not armed; they had hoes and implements for farming.

He wanted to create an agricultural military farm in Japan to help feed northern China, because it was very important, just as they were doing with the Amur River, but it was more complicated. So again, they lost. They didn't have it, and part of the reason is that the expedition was massive.

They organized it according to the Mongol principles of left wing and right wing. This didn't work at sea, because the left wing was from Korea, with Korean ships built up there. The right wing was from southern China, mostly with ships built down there. They were not the same. They each had a head, but there was no center point.

Genghis Khan always had the qol. They called it gol—the center—or qol, actually, qol. But anyway, he had the center in command. No, he sent the 2 without a clear center of command, and they were arguing with each other, not cooperating, not helping each other, and sabotaging each other.

They got there and once again had the same problems, even though they had come with lots of grenades this time. Again, the grenades were exploding and scaring the horses. It's impressive, and a lot of silk screens were made later showing these impressive battles and all, but they lost. A typhoon happened to be the final destruction of the navy.

But I think Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say the Japanese deserve credit for that victory. The sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon, but already the Japanese had developed good strategies while the Mongols had been away. They knew how the Mongols fought, and they knew that at night they could fire flaming arrows at the ships, set them on fire, and do great damage.

Again, Kublai Khan lost the invasion of Japan. The soldiers were gone; they drowned. He didn't kill them off. It wasn't his deliberate plan, but the problem was solved. It's one of those ironies of history that is hard to quite understand.

This had happened, but then Kublai Khan was coming near the end of his life, and Marco Polo and the others wanted to get out. They were ready to go, and Kublai Khan allowed them to sail on this expedition with Kököchin, the princess Kököchin, to go to Hormuz. So they went, and that began a whole system of trade back and forth, all the way back and forth. Kublai Khan died soon after that.

His grandson, who is not so well respected in history because he is often called a drunk, was named Temür. He was a drunk when he was young, but his grandfather had him caned a couple of times in public, and it cured him of drinking. Actually, he was not a drunk later on, and he first reassembled the Mongol Empire.

The Golden Horde declared loyalty to him and recognized him as the Great Khan, as emperor of the whole empire. The Chagatai of Central Asia declared loyalty to him. The Ilkhanate was already loyal to him. They all declared loyalty, and he had reassembled the empire. He had the greatest navy in the world.

He sent envoys to every place they had attacked or traded with to say, “That era is over. We're no longer attacking anybody. We're changing from conquest to commerce. We want to trade with you. Come to China. Bring your goods. We're going to trade with you.”

It was short, unfortunately; it didn't last forever. I wish it could have, but it was a great era of the exchange of all kinds of things going back and forth, all the way to Africa. From Hormuz, they had connections to Somaliland, and some people say Kenya already at that time. I'm not sure, but it was very wide.

So technically, he ruled over the largest area the Mongol Empire ever had?

Yes, but the Golden Horde of Russia was quite independent by now. He let them be independent, but they were loyal to him, and they were still exchanging all kinds of things back and forth.

So there were Oirat soldiers in China?

They had a whole contingent of Oirat soldiers there, and soldiers from Russia, from the Caucasus areas of Russia.

And how did they communicate? Were they using the postal service? I think you have to—

You have to literally deliver the letters. Over time, those groups started intermarrying. They were allowed to intermarry; the Chinese were not, but they were intermarrying with Mongols and slowly switching to the Mongolian language.

At first, I don't know; it's not clear. But again, Kublai Khan, thinking in this internationalist way, said, “Okay, we need a new alphabet for the world. Everybody in the world writes with 1 alphabet: Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, everything.” It didn't work, but he tried it for a while, and some inscriptions are still there to this day.

And we should maybe briefly mention Marco Polo, whom you've talked about. He is this now-famous explorer who traversed the continent along the Silk Road and then stayed with Kublai Khan for a while. I guess he is one of the primary documenters of everything that's been going on. Is there something else interesting to say about Marco Polo and his interaction with Kublai Khan?

I like Marco Polo. I use his work a lot. I find him very reliable. In the areas where he's not reliable, you can kind of tell because he wasn't there. But in the places where he was, he reported a lot of stuff.

I'm very much indebted to him for a lot of things. With something like Princess Kököchin, and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Khutulun, he wrote about that. But I also needed other sources, so I found that if I could find Chinese sources, Arab sources, or Persian sources to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence in him over time.

Some pieces were romanticized, and you always have to discount them, but he is very good. However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book—which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison in Genoa—was written in the 20th century.

Eugene O'Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions. That was both a play on what he was called, Il Milione—the million one—because he had talked about cities of millions of people and about money in the millions, and things that people in Europe just couldn't believe could happen.

He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant. It was an ironic look at capitalism, because this is already the 20th century, versus the idea of a philosopher-king, which he saw in Kublai Khan. Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism—not at its worst, but at its most basic.

And that is like the princess in the story.

This is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene O’Neill. I think it captures a lot. The princess Kukachin says Marco is an excellent judge of quantity, and there are things like that. Then, in the play, Bayan, the great general, talks with Kublai Khan and says, “Look, these people are dangerous from the West. We should go conquer them now while we can.”

Kublai Khan tells Bayan—again, in the play, this is fiction—that they are not worth conquering, and if they conquer them, they will become like them. He says, “Marco Polo has been in our land. He has seen everything. He has learned nothing. He has seen everything. He understands nothing.” For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world, symbolically, with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan: the coming together of 2 worlds.

It could have gone a different way. It could have gone a different way. It’s not that I’m anticapitalist. I’m procapitalist. But the way so many things worked out, it was a misstep in history. Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment, and we could have learned more from cooperation.

They didn’t quite integrate successfully.

No. But today, we’ve returned to that. I think the East and the West are confronting each other again on more equal terms. For a long time, the West was so dominant, and the East was so downtrodden by colonialism and other things, internal rot, and other things. But today, there’s not necessarily equality, but there’s more of a balance. Which way will we go?

Again, there’s a lot of room and a lot of energy for division and misunderstanding versus integration. The East is demonized in the West, and one of the great regrets I have, which I hope to alleviate, is just how little I understand China and the East—not just from economics and politics, reading a few books, but in the way you’ve understood and felt the Mongolian steppe. I want to understand the Chinese people in that way, because it does feel like, from that understanding, there could be integration of ideas.

My work is often classified as Chinese history, which I think is ironic, because for me, it’s always Mongolian history. But for the last book I wrote, which dealt a lot more with China because it was about Kublai Khan, I deliberately did not go to China. I’d been there numerous times before, but I deliberately did not. I’m an outsider. I do not speak Chinese. I’m not a Chinese scholar. I never even had a course in Chinese art or calligraphy or anything. I wanted to be very clear: mine is an outside perspective.

I think it’s possible as an outsider to still have respect for that culture. Even if I disagree that they appoint this one as a hero and that one as the villain, I disagree, and they’ll say, “Oh, I’m wrong. I don’t understand their history.” They’re probably right. That’s quite possible. But there’s an outside view that is different and tries to be respectful of what happens in that part of the world.

Just as I’m respectful toward Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, I respect China very much. I’m an American. I love the ideals of my country. I love so many aspects of our culture, and there are many aspects I don’t love, of course, because it’s impossible to love everything, even about the members of your own family.

I do hope that through understanding one another, or just making the effort to understand—even if we understand wrongly and we’re incorrect in it—just making the effort to understand will help us a lot. The West has had a long couple of centuries of extreme arrogance, believing that it is there to teach the world. I’m sometimes dismayed when I meet these young people all over the world who have come to help. They’re with an NGO, and they’re going to teach the people how to take care of the environment. They’re going to teach the women how to exercise their rights. They’re going to bring in microfinancing to help liberate people.

We are arrogant beyond words. We need to be a little bit more humble and try to put ourselves on an equal basis with some of these people, not a superior basis. Beautifully put. How did the Mongol Empire come to an end? How did it fall?

Despite the fact that Temür Öljeitü Khan had united the empire, at least symbolically—all of it—and they had trade going on, the Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas. In some areas of the world, they became more like the local people. In Central Asia, they became Muslim and got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before.

Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time. It was based around the Volga River, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people, a minority within a Russian empire. The Mongols had left a kind of framework for empire in Russia. That’s something the Russians don’t want to hear, any more than they want to hear me criticize the end of the Song dynasty.

But it is true that even yam—yam is the word that was used for this postal system—and that’s in the dictionaries today in Russia. There are many, many other things in Russia. Even malchin is a herder. Mal is an animal, and chin is a person—a person who takes care of animals. There are all kinds of influences in Russia that some people want to deny, but there’s always a great, powerful strand of research and scholarship in Russia that supports this understanding of the Mongols, and I depend on them tremendously.

It’s not just Gumilev, who is one of the famous ones. He was a little bit too romantic with his ideas and all, but I depend on a lot of the research done by Russian scholars and by early German scholars in the 19th century under the sponsorship of the tsar. So I depend on that work. It had a great influence there, but it was weakening.

Bit by bit, by 1368, the Mongols had become so weak within China that they were overthrown. But they weren’t absorbed into China. The Mongols had been there from 1215 to 1368. They packed up and went back to Mongolia. It was just another seasonal migration.

Yeah.

It was just amazing. They said, “Okay, we’re still the Yuan dynasty. We’re not giving you the seals. We’re not acknowledging the Ming.” They never did throughout all of the Ming. In fact, they went down one time and captured the Ming emperor, took him back to Mongolia, and then they tried to ransom him. The Chinese said, “No, we’re going to appoint another emperor.”

So the Mongols decided, “Okay, the worst thing we can do to the Chinese is give them back the old emperor.” So you had 2 emperors, you know, back. Okay, let them work it out. The empire just weakened from internal reasons for the Mongols, but there were some external things from nature.

I think that was the great plague. Everything in history, everything that’s good comes with something underneath it that’s bad. Everything that’s bad seems to have something underneath that sometimes works out good in a way. But this great system that united everything—it’s called the yam, or örtöö—allowed people to move back and forth quickly, but it could also take the plague out of southern China into all parts of the world.

I do think that’s what happened. The plague destroyed the Mongol system. If all of these people are ruled by Mongols because they’re benefiting so much from this system, and now the system collapses, you don’t need the empire anymore.

Yeah.

So it just fell apart after 1368. The empire just fell apart. Most of them stayed in Persia, Iran, and Afghanistan. The Hazara people are still descended from the army there. In Russia, some of them stayed. But then, finally, in the time of Catherine the Great, a lot of them returned, a little bit. They had been there for hundreds of years, and then they returned to Mongolia in the 1700s.

So many Mongols came home. They were still Mongols despite hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures. They came back to their tents, squatting around the fire, drinking fermented milk, and eating dried curds.

It’s interesting that the Mongolian spirit is so strong that it persists through centuries.

Yes.

Through centuries.

Yes. They just return right back on the horse, riding in the open steppe.

Yeah.

Well, it was actually very difficult because they were a little bit lazy, and they weren’t so good with doing the tasks. It became difficult to support so many people coming home and eating up all the animals.

The Mongols in China had been used to just eating. They hadn’t been producing much for 150 years. So, just to return to Genghis Khan: We talked about Dan Carlin, and Dan Carlin said that Genghis Khan’s army was the greatest military force in history. Many other historians agree that before rifles came into popular use, Genghis Khan would basically beat every single army, including Napoleon.

You mentioned the samurai and the whole formal setup. It’s the same with Napoleon. There’s just a whole—several hours to set up the chess pieces on the military board. You can just imagine what Genghis Khan—the dynamism, the speed of everything—would do to Napoleon. So I guess the question is: Do you agree with that notion that Genghis Khan’s army is the greatest military force in history?

The short answer is yes. Absolutely. No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia, China, Persia, Central Asia, Turkey, and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again. Nobody’s going to conquer China and Russia again and rule both countries. It’s just not going to happen.

What lessons can you take from that that are applicable to modern warfare?

Oh, I think there’s a very good lesson. The Mongols took Iraq, they took Baghdad, and they held it. The Americans followed the exact opposite strategy of the Mongols.

The Mongol strategy is: first, you take the countryside. They’re country people; they think in terms of the countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. That’s how they did it every time.

In some cases, they would come in 2 years in advance to clear people out so they would have room and pasture for their horses. You take the small towns, then the small cities, and the last one is the big city.

The Americans said, “No, we’re going to take Baghdad. We’re going to bomb Baghdad. We’re going to have this shock and awe. We’re going to go in and conquer the country from Baghdad.” So they go in, they get trapped in their little tiny Green Zone, and they never conquer Iraq—the strongest army in the world.

This is something that worked in Europe. In World War II, yes, we bombed the cities and we took the cities because that was the center of production for the modern era. But the countryside is the place that produces the food and supplies the water.

The Mongols were very aware of that. You cut off the water from the city, you cut off the food from the city—what’s the city going to do? They’re going to surrender.

The Americans were applying something that worked in Western Europe to conquer Germany. It did not work to conquer Iraq or Vietnam or even North Korea or Cambodia or Laos or Syria. God knows, it worked only in Grenada. I think that’s the only successful war we had in my lifetime. It lasted a couple of hours; we went in and conquered the little tiny island.

Otherwise, we’ve been chased out of every country. We’ve lost it, tail between our legs. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than we dropped on Germany. That’s hard to believe. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany, and we did nothing.

Because in Germany, you destroy the cities and the people surrender. Dresden’s gone. Frankfurt, Würzburg, Berlin. In Cambodia, you can bomb the countryside forever. You can kill the people, and they did. You can use chemical warfare, and they did.

You can still go into the eastern part of Cambodia, and you can go to large areas where you don’t hear birds singing because of the chemical warfare and American bombs. So we still do it, but we don’t want to admit it, and we don’t want to go in to win.

In World War II, the Americans did have unconditional surrender. You can support the war or not support the war. We did it right; we did it wrong. These are all issues that people can argue, but we had a clear policy.

We go into Afghanistan, we’re fighting terror.

We’re going to bring democracy and we’re going to free the women.

What? It was absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did. And we killed people.

Not only did we use chemical warfare and kill a lot of people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, we killed American soldiers. We killed American soldiers, and my father was one. He died from Agent Orange disease.

“Oh, but that doesn’t count. He didn’t die on the battlefield, and we didn’t mean to kill him. It doesn’t count.” Modern warfare is brutal, and we just paper over it sometimes.

Can you explain Agent Orange?

It was designed to kill all vegetation. “This is going to be a humane way. We’re going to kill all the vegetation in the jungle, and that way they can stop moving the army through the jungle and they can stop the supplies from coming.” That was the American strategy.

Henry Kissinger, Nobel Prize winner, is now resting in hell, which is exactly where he belongs for what he did to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The bombing was just absolutely horrendous.

Agent Orange came in and they defoliated, which means they wiped out the crops. So people were starving—literally, in the case of Cambodia, starving to death. The animals were being killed, and deformed children are being born to this day.

American soldiers died by the thousands. Not immediately, not on the battlefield, not right there. They go home, they have the disease, they linger, and they take the whole family down with them in the emotional trauma of becoming slowly paralyzed and dying.

We did that to our own people. So, yeah, I don’t think warfare is any more humane or any better today than in the past. It’s just that we can hide parts of it more easily and deny it more easily.

If you’re killed by a Mongol, it’s very clear you’re killed by a Mongol. You’re killed by friendly fire in an American war, and it’s a different matter.

It seems that what people mean when they say that war is hell is that, in some deep sense, everybody loses, no matter the narrative you put on top of it.

Yes. Yes. I’m not a pacifist, again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations. The more controlled it is, the better.

My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Chingis Han—the brutality and all like that—but to measure it against what goes on today, in the world today.

And we have different images. There are 2 images of Chingis Han. One is our image: he’s a barbarian on horseback, killing people and raping women all the time. The other image is the Mongolian image.

When they finally built an official statue of him in this century, for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to themselves. They chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model. He was the late, great lawgiver of the Mongol nation.

So he’s seated there in front of the Mongolian Parliament. There’s another statue that’s better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback—not with a weapon, but on horseback out in the countryside.

The official one from the government is Chingis Han seated like Abraham Lincoln. And they issued stamps to show that he is the great lawgiver.

And the truth is somewhere in between.

I suppose.

Yeah, or depending on where you are and how you want to see it.

Yeah. There are many things that happened that were terrible and horrible. And for people who lose a war, it’s always going to be terrible and horrible.

Let’s return to Chingis Khan’s life and the end of it. How and where did he die?

After conquering the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia, Chingis Khan returned, and then they had a great celebration called Naadam that went on for almost a whole summer. They had so much wealth to distribute to everybody, and everybody was being given all kinds of things for what they had done, including the people who helped save him when he was in the cangue. They were rewarded; everybody was rewarded. It was a great time.

But the first place he had attacked outside was the Tangut nation. They had sworn allegiance to him, and then when he went off to the Middle East, they refused to send troops. He didn’t forget that. He was going back to the Tangut nation, and he was going to conquer them again.

As he was crossing the Gobi, which takes a while, he was distracted a little bit by hunting the kulan, which is the wild ass. I used to say “wild horse,” because it sounds a little better. He was off hunting kulan in the Gobi.

He fell from his horse and injured his leg very badly. He seemed to decline from that point, and it took some number of months. By August 1227, he was very much near the end of life.

You can read online the exact date, and it’s all very specific, but the truth is we don’t know exactly which day he died at that time because one of his wives was running the camp, and they were keeping it secret until the defeat of the Tangut was completed.

The Tangut offered all kinds of things for the Mongols to go away again, the second time. Chingis Khan had told his family, “Accept nothing.” And then, when they surrendered, he said, “Kill the royal family. Kill them all.”

The idea was that they were Buddhist people, and the Tanguts were Buddhist. Usually, the idea was that you could be reborn into your own family, but he said, “No, you kill off the whole family so they can’t be reborn.” So he died there.

How was his successor chosen?

The succession issue was always difficult. He did not have the right to appoint a successor; that was not the Mongol way. He could nominate somebody.

Before he set off for the Middle Eastern campaign, one of his wives said to him, “Even the biggest tree falls. You’ve got to make a plan and talk to your sons about the future.”

So he did. He called the sons together. The oldest boy was Jochi, who was born while his father was allied with Jamukha, and he was named “visitor”—Jochi. Then the next one was Chagatai, the next one was Ögedei, and the next one was Tolui, the father of Kublai Khan. Tolui was still alive at this point.

All 4 of them came. Chingis Khan explained to them that he wanted to talk about the succession and get some consensus from them about it.

The Mongols always call on people to speak by order of age. They also serve tea or food—anything—by order of age. It’s always done that way, from then until now.

He called first on Jochi and said, “What do you say, Jochi?” Chingis Khan favored Jochi. This is the one whose paternity was questionable, but he always favored him.

The youngest, Tolui, was too hot-headed. Ögedei was a heavy drinker. Chagatai was very rigid about the law of the Mongols, but Chingis Khan seemed to favor Jochi as a more reasonable, good warrior and reasonable person.

But he called on Jochi: “My son, speak.” The second one, who believed in Mongol law, supposedly...

He jumped up and said, “How can you call on this Mongol, this Merkit bastard? If you call on him first, that means you want him to be the great khan. He should not be the great khan of the Mongol Empire. Is this his Mongol Empire now?” You can imagine the kind of scene: Genghis Khan is the greatest ruler in the world, and he’s sitting there being lectured by his second son.

This is when he gave that impassioned speech to his sons. Actually, the way The Secret History makes it look, it was his assistant speaker who said it, because very often the great power doesn’t say the words directly. They let somebody else say them for him. They have a spokesperson. But anyway, I think it was his words, and I think he said them on that day.

“That’s what I think of this business of, ‘You do not know. You were not there. You know, the stars were moving in the sky. Heaven was turning around. The earth was turning over. You do not know who loved whom. You do not know who your mother loved. You do not know what your mother did. And if I say he is my son, who are you to say he is not my son?’”

By the way, it’s pretty high-integrity, really respectable to do that—to have that respect and honor his wife in this way, and his son in this way. It’s really powerful.

Yes.

I believe that. I don’t know if she was alive at this point or not. We do not have her death recorded. Mongols are not good at recording death. They usually just say somebody “finished their age,” or they have some euphemism for it.

But he made that impassioned speech, and Chagatai had to submit. He said, “Yes, you are our father, and we accept what you say, but a deer shot with words cannot be loaded on a horse. A deer shot with words cannot be eaten.” So, Genghis Khan knew. He said to the boys—the boys, I mean, these are middle-aged men—he said to the men, “What do you want to do? What do you want to do?”

He said, “I don’t favor Chagatai because of his attitude and the situation.” Tolui was still hotheaded, and he actually ended up being a drunk and dying early. But the other guys said, “Well, Ögedei.” They chose him because he was the most generous, the bon vivant. He was for every party and drinking every time.

One time, Shigi Qutuqu, the great judge who wrote The Secret History, was sleeping in a cart. For whatever reason—I think he had also passed out drunk, perhaps—Ögedei came out drunk, grabbed him, pulled him back into the party. Ögedei was a party guy, and so he was chosen as the next great khan of the Mongol Empire.

Fortunately, there was sort of a Plan B. Genghis Khan had set up very powerful women—his daughters—but he had also chosen wives for each of his sons, very capable wives. For Ögedei, he had a wife who wasn’t even his first wife. The first wife would usually be somebody closer by a certain clan or something, but he had a very intelligent woman named Töregene. She was more or less ruling in his last few years, and then, after he died, she ruled the empire in her own name. She was the ruler of the greatest empire in the world ever ruled by a woman.

It’s incredible. The genius of Genghis Khan is to set it up that way, and to not—you know, there was probably widespread discrimination against women at that time—and to not care about any of that, but just make the right decision for what would keep the empire together.

Yes. And Töregene—there was peace. She stopped all campaigns. There was peace during her time. The women, such as Töregene and others, were extremely into economics and trade and running these private corporations they had called ortoq. She was running her ortoq and everything.

She became much more interested in the economics of trade and running the empire. It was a time of peace, and she recognized that peace was better for trade. It was better, and so it was a peaceful time.

But like all of us, we have our weak points. She favored a worthless son to become the successor. None of the sons actually were great, but Ögedei had favored another. Anyway, she favored Güyük, her son, and she arranged to have him made the great khan while she was still alive.

Her primary minister was also a woman named Fatima from the Middle East. Unfortunately, Güyük organized a purge of her court and killed off a lot of the people who had been supporting her, many of whom were Muslims. Then he was going to march against the Golden Horde because they weren’t supporting him. He set off, and he died. He was only in office for 18 months.

Then his wife took over, Oghul Qaimish. Unfortunately, she was not as capable as her mother-in-law, Töregene. Oghul Qaimish was a bit greedy. She didn’t start any new wars, but she just kind of messed up things, and she didn’t rule for too long.

This is why Kublai Khan’s mother, Sorghaghtani, was able to have a revolution. She united with the Golden Horde. She was on one end in China; she had northern China. The Golden Horde had Russia. The two of them united against the center, and they overthrew Oghul Qaimish. She put her son Möngke Khan in, who was succeeded by Kublai Khan.

And we should say, probably, that this whole succession by kin probably goes against the initial spirit of what Genghis Khan stood for.

Yes. Yes. In the end, he was a father, and he favored his sons even knowing they were not so capable. He had lost a grandson that he loved.

But he organized it, though, as what we call today almost a corporation. All lands belonged to everybody in the family. Everybody. So Kublai Khan—that’s why he had soldiers. There were Christian soldiers, Oirat soldiers, and Kipchak soldiers. He had 10,000 of each come in, and then they owned the Russians’ silk factories in China.

The Ilkhanate would own silk factories and jade mines in China. The people in China—the Mongols—would own villages in Persia and in Iraq. He organized it so everything was owned by the entire clan.

It didn’t last too long, because of the divisions that developed. The great khan was primarily in charge of conquering and expanding the land, so they had more lands to own. That was going to be the job, and Kublai Khan fulfilled it. Möngke Khan to some extent fulfilled it. Ögedei did. Güyük did not.

His family was ruling the land, all the different territories.

Yeah, and they weakened with every generation.

Yeah, every generation.

But that reminds me of a very popular idea about Genghis Khan, articulated in a 2003 paper titled “The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols.” That paper has a finding that estimates that 0.5% of the world’s male population are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.

I’ve heard you be a little bit skeptical of this paper, but I actually really like its findings. I talked to a good friend of mine, Manolis Kellis, who’s a biologist, computational biologist, and geneticist, and he likes the paper as well. I find it really convincing.

I think your skepticism has to do not necessarily with the paper’s contents, but more with the implication. People who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason 0.5% of the population is descended from him is because of some institutionalized mass rape conducted by Genghis Khan.

But to me—and we actually spoke about this—you can’t get those kinds of numbers with rape. If you wanted the empire to propagate the gene, if you were a person who wanted to propagate the genes, you would make sure that all the lands you conquered were stable, flourishing, and happy.

This is much better explained—and the paper indicates this—by the fact that it was of high value, like social-status value, to be associated with the lineage of Genghis Khan. That means that for many generations, people loved the great khan, Genghis Khan.

Given how vast the land was and all the transformational effects it had on trade, culture, and so on, it makes total sense. In fact, the 0.5%, just so people understand, is only male descendants. The number of descendants could be much larger than that, because the way family trees work, there are women at each step.

I think that’s pretty interesting, and I think there are singular figures like this in history, but none like Genghis. It’s interesting. It’s fun. Where did they get the DNA from Genghis Khan?

Oh, yes. So, one of the criticisms you have is like, well—

They don’t have one shred of scientific evidence. They’re supposed to be scientific. No, they found that a bunch of people are connected.

Yes.

And then they—

No, no, no. To one person. To one person.

Yes, but they chose Genghis Khan, right?

There’s no evidence that it was from him. No evidence.

It’s from that time. It’s one person. But from that time or 200 years before?

It could be 200 years before.

Yes. Yes. See, I mean, actually, I would like for it to be true in a certain way. I would. I do think there is a truth there.

I think that by attaching it to the name of Genghis Khan, they’ve done a disservice to themselves, but it gets a lot of publicity, a lot more funding, and it’s exciting and so on. I think it’s connected to the Mongol experience.

But Genghis Khan’s descendants were almost all categorized and recorded. I mean, he’s the largest conqueror in the world.

You do not have just children popping up all over the place. He had four wives all the time. He had children with two of them, just not a lot of descendants. We know mostly who they are for many generations.

His brother Hasar had many more children than he did. Many more. They caused a lot of problems later on for the empire, too, by rivaling the power. So it could be that one of these other people, Bodonchar, could have been the origin of this. It could have been back well before Chingis Khan. I just don't believe it. In Mongolia today, we have nobody who claims to be Chingis.

Well, claims are a different thing than biology, right? So the reason I say this is—

This methodology is pretty solid.

Oh, yes, I believe that they found some connection of people.

Yeah, but it's—

But they have no evidence that it's really connected to Chingis Khan. I think it may be tangentially connected to him.

Yeah, but it's somebody from the Mongolian region.

Yeah, I think that's quite possible. But we've already had the Han come through. We've had all the Turks. Every one of the Turkic nations is descended from Mongolia. They all came out of Mongolia.

You're right. You're right.

On the other hand, I wish they could get some proof. I wish it could be true.

Yeah.

I just can't believe it the way it is. We have no DNA.

Nobody knows where he went.

They don't. So they don't know where he's buried.

Okay. Chingis Khan said, “Let my body go. Let my nation live.” He chose to be buried in an unmarked grave, and the Mongols believe very strongly it should always be that way. Most of the khans who followed him were also buried in a similar way. The Chinese emperors were buried in very elaborate tombs, but not the Yuan dynasty.

No. And so Kublai Khan was buried back with his grandfather in an anonymous grave.

But not everyone. Güyük died when he was on campaign toward Russia. He died out there. I mean, he was buried out there. I think his father, Ögedei, was also buried out there. That was more their homeland. But many of them were buried with him. It’s known and not known at the same time. Officially, you should not know it. You cannot know it. It should never be disturbed. He should never be disturbed. We’re not going to have a tour group coming in.

But you’re saying the people of Mongolia have a sense—

They believe he’s in a certain place. Yes, they believe they know where the place is, but it’s sacred. You can do nothing. Nothing. Just leave it as it is. No roads, no buildings, no killing of animals, no chopping of trees. Nothing can be done. It’s a holy land dedicated to him and his family.

It’s pretty amazing. An unmarked grave.

Yes.

For the greatest conqueror in the history of humanity.

For good and for bad, one of the most impactful humans in history.

Yes. I believe in his thing about, “Let my nation live; let my body be eliminated.” And then I say to people, when they ask, “What did he look like?” I say, “Well, the portrait was painted 50 years later by somebody who never saw him.”

Actually, if you look at the portraits of Kublai Khan and Chingis Khan, they look alike, except one’s old and one’s younger. I think that’s because Kublai was trying to establish—he wanted to establish his legitimacy as a real Mongol—that they looked alike, but his grandfather said he didn’t. Then Dayan and Möngke Khan looked different. They looked different, so there was nothing.

I say, if you want to see the face of Chingis Khan, walk anywhere in Mongolia. The first child you see—that’s the face of Chingis Khan. It’s his nation. He created that nation. That’s his face.

Does that make you sad, that there’s no capturing of his image from his time, that he really made himself sort of disappear into the land?

No, not at all. No, because he’s everywhere. When you have these clans that are still operating in Afghanistan, and the Russians are still using the yam system, there are many aspects of him that are out there in the world. I find personal inspiration in the same way that Thomas Jefferson did.

He found so much inspiration in the life of Chingis Khan and the books of Chingis that you can still read. He bought so many copies and gave them to the Library of Congress, the Library of Virginia, and his granddaughter. These ideas live on, and we still have not fulfilled them. We do not have religious freedom. We do not have protections for women. We do not have protections for envoys and ambassadors.

The ideas live on, but the rulers do not live as the common people do. They don’t eat the same food, wear the same clothes, or sleep in the same—not a bed, in his case, but the same situation and simple home.

I have tremendous respect for leaders who live just as the people they lead.

Yes.

It’s mostly not done. But when it is, I have just infinite respect for that. That is the way. What lessons can we learn from Chingis Khan that apply to the modern world? You’ve already said religious freedom and some of these ideas.

Well, I think those policy ideas are important. We can still learn from that about protection of diplomats, not buying and selling women, not kidnapping women, and having religious freedom for individuals.

But he also had interesting things. He had tax-free status for all religions, all physicians, and all teachers. They didn’t pay taxes in his empire. As a former teacher, I embrace that idea out of pure greed and self-interest, but it’s not, to me, the idea of saving the money. It’s the idea of focusing on that as something important for society.

He didn’t say tax-free for any other category of people, as I recall, but just for those. He was highlighting the health of the people, the education of the people, and the spirit of the people. Their spiritual life—that’s very important. That’s a profound approach to life.

These are policies, and I’m not advocating so much for policies, but I think some of the general principles are very valuable: being willing to learn from our mistakes, admitting your mistake to yourself, correcting it, and going on with your life. We all say it’s important, but for the most part, we don’t do it. We don’t learn from our failures as much as we think.

The other idea of promoting people based on ability—I think that’s certainly an idea that is very valuable. Not in the simple way of meritocracy that we’ve done it, where if you pass an exam with a certain score, you get this or that, but really evaluating people and their ability. I think it’s a very good thing—not the only thing, but I think it’s very important.

Even though he failed in the end in his own life, and he turned power over to his sons and his family, it’s a principle that he lived by most of his life. We can learn from that principle.

The other thing I think is just his global feel for the world, his global understanding. Here was a man who had no education in any formal sense, and he had this sense that the world should be united. We should have things that unite all people. Everybody should have their own law, but there should be a higher law of Heaven that governs people.

Later, this was translated into the idea that everybody should have their own language, but they should all write the same alphabet, by Kublai. It didn’t work. Or his idea that he tried to impose the use of paper currency in Iran, the Persian Ilkhanate—Chinese paper money. It didn’t work. The people there weren’t used to it.

But there was all this international spirit in their empire. Today we talk about globalization, that we’re all connected. It’s just incredible how provincial we are. We are more provincial than ever. Sometimes we use all this technology to help preserve our provincialism, and we can’t think in global terms. We can’t think about the world. It’s just amazing to me how narrow-minded we are.

I also saw the Mongol proverb: “If you’re afraid, don’t do it. If you do it, don’t be afraid.”

Yes.

That’s something you especially celebrate. I mean, there is something to that. In many ways, Chingis Khan is a representation of a person—a self-made man, that person from nothing—

Yes.

—who willed an entire empire into existence.

Yes. And everything was against him that you can think of: his own family deserting him, his father dying at an early age, all these things. But as Jamukha said, he had a good mother and he had a good wife.

There were many crucial points at which it was either his mother or his wife who made the deciding point. His wife Börte was the one who caused the first break with Jamukha. Later, when the shamans had become too powerful and had humiliated his younger brother, she was the one who said he had to clamp down on the shamans who were exercising too much power. She guided him a lot.

It cannot be understated how important and critical women are in the story of the Mongol Empire.

It’s fascinating. Sometimes we can say they’re not behind the scenes because they’re always out front. In the Mongol court, they always sat up front. They were always out front. This horrified the Chinese, who were very Confucian. It horrified the Muslims. It horrified the Christians, who didn’t know what to say. The women even drank in public.

Okay. Yeah, they drank in public. You know, they did what?

Sometimes it was like that. But other times, as with Töregene, she was actually the ruler. Or take the case of his daughters, such as Alaqa, who ruled over a part of northern China called the Onggud people, and the other daughters who ruled over different parts. They ruled in their own names, and he’s very explicit. This is something about The Secret History that upset me.

I get to a chapter—the sections are all numbered. I get to section 215, and there's only half a sentence left. In section 214, he's just awarded a girl he calls his daughter, so she's probably a clan daughter, but she lives with his mother. At this point, his youngest son, Tolui, is only 4 years old.

A Tatar comes, and Mother Hoelun gives him food, because you feed everybody. He realizes this is Genghis Khan's mother and that's Genghis Khan's child. He grabs him, kidnaps him, and runs out, holding the child in one hand and pulling out a knife with the other. Alaqa races out, grabs his arm, and holds it down.

Two men, Jebe and Jelme, are back behind the ger, slaughtering a yak with an axe, because you have to do it in the shade behind a ger. You don't do it in the light. They race out with axes and kill the man.

Genghis Khan is rewarding everybody for all their great deeds. Jelme and Jebe want to be rewarded for saving Tolui's life. He says, “No, you killed the Tatar. Alaqa saved his life because she held the hand with the knife until you got there to kill him. She saved his life, and now we reward her.”

So he's finished that story in section 214. We get to section 215, and he says, “Now let us reward our daughters.” It's actually only a phrase. I said it's a complete sentence, but it's not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It's missing.

I looked at all these different translations in the different languages, and most often they translated it as, “And now let us marry our daughters.” Oh, no. Oh, no. He was very clear in his wedding speeches to his daughters: “I give these people to you to rule. You have 3 husbands. You have your honor. You have your nation. And you have the man that I give to you. But the man I give to you goes in the army with me and brings his soldiers. You stay here and rule the people.”

Brilliant.

When the Chinese arrived at the court of Alaqa, they didn't know what to think. There she was, ruling this area of the Onggud people, and they said, “Well, she can read and write, and she's a supreme judge, and she doesn't allow any death sentence without her permission.” But they didn't say which languages she could read and write. That has really puzzled me a lot.

So you're saying The Secret History of the Mongols, as we have gotten access to it, has been edited to remove the significance of women, even though they're still there?

In that case, I mean, in other cases, with his mother, they did not at all. But I think in that case, because what happened is most of these women had few offspring because their husbands were gone to war. Alaqa, of course, married several times—sometimes the sons of the last one—but they were going off to war, and they weren't reproducing very much.

Only one, Checheyigen, who was ruling in Siberia, was the one who had a whole bunch of daughters. They wouldn't be going off to war, and so they actually spread out through the empire and had a lot of power later.

What happened was, the area of Alaqa, for example, was then taken over by Kublai Khan. Then the Turkic areas, one by one, were taken over by their nephews as they died out. Not in their own lifetime—they didn't kill the women off—but as they died out, the men took it over.

Then they just wanted to kind of erase it. It's like, “No, northern China, even though it was ruled by Alaqa, it always was Mongol.” She was ruling because her husband was Mongol and her sons were Mongol. Therefore, they had the right to rule it. So they cut out the women for those reasons. I think anytime it threatened the power of a particular man.

Then there were other little things that were added in there. Sometimes you can find a phrase and say, “This phrase was not in the original.”

In studying human history, what have you learned about human nature and just the trajectory of humanity throughout the past several millennia?

I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people in general, and especially not for institutions. I tend to have a great suspicion about almost everything and a mistrust of institutions, over and over. I think that's my own prejudice, and then I find reasons to support that.

Genghis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire. So I like that, and I stress that, and I see those things. I think that's one thing.

Other things that I learned from the Mongol people in general—not just about their history, but how it's possible to live for thousands of years in a place that, for many people, is not the most beautiful in the world. It's austere. You have a band of mountains with some trees, then a big band of steppe, and then a big band of sand-and-gravel desert, the Gobi.

For many people, it wouldn't be appealing. It's just open. There's too much space. It's like, “We need to build something over here. Boy, you could have a condo right there. We could have a building, and we could sell them off.”

Mhm.

They really value their country. They protect their country. Even now, only 1% is privately owned. They keep it down.

In the Mongolian records, a farm and a city count as one category. It's just settled people. It doesn't matter. You settle on a farm, you settle in a city—settled people, one category.

They lived there in this land that Genghis Khan would return to in life. If he returned to the capital city, he would not know where he was. He would have no idea. All the people would say, “Oh, I'm Mongol. I'm Mongolian. Yeah, I'm Mongol. I have the hat. I have the belt buckle. I have the deel that's all embroidered. Yeah, I'm Mongol.”

He would say, “Where's your horse?” “Oh, I keep it in the countryside.” He wouldn't recognize the city, but it's still his country, his people.

They worship him in a literal sense—not the way we would worship God, asking for favors, but in the sense of worshiping him with praise. They have so many songs to praise him. About half of the hip-hop in the country is in praise of Genghis Khan.

It's something we can't understand, because when we pray, we're usually saying, “Oh, thank you, God, for this and that and the other, and you're so wonderful, and I love you. So would you please give me this, and would you please do this, and would you please stop this pain in my knee?” We're asking for things all over the place.

But Genghis Khan? No. No one ever asks for anything. They just honor him. They just praise him and honor him.

If I wanted to visit Mongolia, what would you recommend? What's the right way?

Well, start with my home. Let's start there. You come over there. It's a nice valley. I have a nice valley there. It kind of depends a little bit on your purpose.

Most people go south to the Gobi, and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakorum, the old capital under Ögedei Khan, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan. Then they circle back to the city, and they may stop off to see what we call Przewalski's horse, the wild horse, but they call it takhi. Or they may go up to Khövsgöl Lake, a big, beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller. So that's a beautiful trip.

If you want to see the more Turkic area, where they hunt with eagles, the far west is where the Kazakh people live. The mountains are absolutely incredibly beautiful. Most mountains in Mongolia are gentle—beautiful, but gentle. The farther west you go, the more dramatic they become: more pointed and peaked, and snow-covered.

Eastern Mongolia tends to be very flat. There are massive flocks of cranes that come in every year—millions of cranes. There are also tundra swans and golden eagles, and all kinds of beautiful birds out there. Each area has something special.

If you particularly want the history of Genghis Khan, the Mongolians love him. They worship him, but they don't do too much to capitalize on his home area, the Khentii. You can go to the Khentii. There are areas you cannot go to—large areas. It's forbidden, but you can go. They don't capitalize on it like, “This is the place.” No, they go there themselves out of respect.

The only place where they built a statue of him is the largest equestrian statue in the world. But it's the place where they say he found his whip, when he was coming back from the camp of Ong Khan—or Toghrul Khan, or Wang Khan—to ask him to support him.

He's coming back to his family, and on the way he supposedly found a whip there. It's just a small stick with a couple of strands of rawhide at the end of it that's used for a horse. But for the Mongolians, it's a symbolic thing, because obviously it's used for a horse. For the Mongols, your destiny, your self, your real spirit is your wind horse that lives inside of you, that guides you and gives you opportunities. But it's up to you to ride that wind horse. It's up to you to use the wind horse, not just to go wild with the wind horse.

I think it's at that crucial moment: he's on his way back home to go with Jamukha and the other soldiers to the Merkit to rescue Börte. Symbolically, he found a whip there. I think it means that he found the way to control his destiny, his fate. That's very important.

And that he did. That was the beginning of everything.

Yes, and it's symbolized in that statue. Some people think that he's holding this stick, that it's a baton or something like that, but no, it's what they call the whip, or tasuur.

We've talked a lot about the past. If we look out into the future, what gives you hope for human civilization, for us humans?

Well, almost every day I'm totally dissatisfied with everything on Earth. It's just that kind of old-man blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What are they talking about? What are they, and who are they talking about? I never heard of this. You know, it's kind of like that. And who's running for office? Oh, my God. It's everything like that.

But then, almost every day, I meet somebody—just one person—who gives you some kind of hope. You just see somebody doing something nice, or they do something nice for you. And I do find in Asia that happens a lot.

You know, people just do nice things for old people every day.

And so then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world, and the way my grandchildren talk, and the way young people are—and then I see something like that. Often, it's something with the young people, something that the young people do.

In Asia, they're always bringing me things. They bring me dried curds. They bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring me the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me milk in various forms, or yogurt.

Everybody thinks you've got to eat the yogurt. This is from my grandmother, and all the other yogurt in the world is not good. My grandmother knows how to make the best yogurt ever, you know.

Over and over and over, I find that despite all my intentions to be in a bad mood, somebody spoils it with these little nice acts that are really very touching. Very touching.

Yeah. It reminds you that there's that little flame of goodness that burns in everybody. I believe that, on the whole, will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing toward something better with every generation.

Yes. You know, the people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time. All the time.

I think my wife had MS. I've talked about this before sometimes. She had MS and slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything. We lived half the year still in Mongolia. Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation. It was very helpful for her, but also the people.

It was a poor country. The sidewalks are broken. Everything's not working. But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone, and I knew that at every bump, some arm would pick her up—I mean, pick up the wheelchair and lift her over it—and not make me do it.

We could go to the opera, and you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera. We would go, and I had no worries. I knew 2 guys would come from one side, 2 guys from the other side, and they would carry her. They do not say, “Excuse me, may I help you?” They do not wait for you to say thank you. Nothing. They just do it, and they walk away. They have such respect.

Singers would come there all the time to sing, to warm up the house for my wife. Even dancers would come sometimes to dance, or play the horsehead fiddle, the morin khuur, to warm up the house for her. To see how they treated a totally disabled person, you know.

If I was feeding my wife and anybody saw it, they would immediately take over and start feeding her in my place. Children would come up to her. In America, they're often afraid of somebody in a wheelchair. They just kind of look; they don't know what to do. But over there, the children would always come to her. Always. You just learn something about the people.

And living there, in a country where, when you're out in the countryside, you come to a ger, you never ask for permission to go in. You certainly don't knock on the door frame. That's hugely offensive. It's like insulting the people: “What? You're not good, hospitable people? I have to ask you for something?” No, you walk in and you sit down, and they fix food for you. It's an incredible thing.

These are the things that give me hope. It's no institution in the world. No, not the big things, not the pop culture, and not all the platitudes. Oh, my God, save us from the platitudes of modern life, you know.

Yeah.

It's true. It's the family that will fix tea for you at 2 in the morning because there was a flash flood and you got stuck, and now you're cold and wet. They build a fire and take care of you.

Or you just show up and make camp somewhere, if you have your own tent, and I swear within 1 hour some child is going to be there with water and milk. You think, “Where did you come from?” But the mother sends them over: “Oh, there's somebody over there in the forest.” They believe that they're obligated to take care of one another. Anybody in your area, you take care of them.

Things like that—individuals do give me hope. People, one by one or a few at a time, even though I'm lost in the modern world.

Well, I'm glad you find your way. You mentioned that your wife is no longer with us. What's a favorite memory you have with her?

I could say a favorite picture is of a lake we used to go to called Ögii, in the middle of Mongolia. A very nice friend took a picture of us toward the end. We're just sitting there watching the sunset over the lake that we'd been to many, many times in life. We're holding hands. She's in the chair, paralyzed, and we're just sitting there staring off in the distance, you know. That's one of my favorites.

With my wife, I was just blessed with a good wife who was exciting. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my whole life. She was smart. She would talk to people about anything. She'd talk about jazz, physics, or art.

My life is so small and narrow, but my wife—she's the one who gave me a life. The truth is very odd. People don't believe it sometimes: I failed English in college. I barely got into college. Nobody in my family had a big education. I grew up mostly with my grandparents in the countryside, and they had a third-grade education. My father had a seventh-grade education.

I went to live with my father after my grandparents died. There was no big education in the family, but I somehow got to college. My father told me to go. He didn't want me to go to the war in Vietnam, so he volunteered to go because there was a rule that they couldn't send 2 people from one family against their will. That was mainly designed to protect brothers, but he could go as the father, and then I could go to college.

So I got to college, and I can't say, “Oh, I was drinking and having a party and not serious.” No, I was trying like hell to pass that course. I failed English. I failed it. This was just a huge shame to me. In fact, after 1 year, I was put on probation to be kicked out of the school. My grades were so low overall.

It took me a long time to confess this to my wife after we met. I had briefly known her in high school, but just not well or anything. Anyway, we met later, and I told her. She just looked at me and said, “What does a professor know? It's just a professor. You could write anything you want.”

She had the power to make me believe everything she said. I didn't care what she said; I would believe it. I would say, “Yeah, that's right. That's just a professor.”

She inspired me, but she also supported me all the way through graduate school. She was taking some courses of her own and doing graduate work, but she inspired me.

I said, “I want to write for more people than just other scholars. I've done this dissertation, a PhD, and it's as dry as the Gobi Desert. I don't know what to do.”

She said, “Just tell the story to me, but I can't see you while you tell it. You're on the radio, and I'm listening in my car, driving somewhere. Just tell the story to me.”

To this day, almost every word I write, I have always just told the story to her the way that she would like it. I always read the books to her, even when she couldn't comprehend too much, because it was mine. She just loved hearing the book.

In the last years of our life, I gave up teaching, and we went back to our original home in South Carolina. I said, “Okay, we're just going to live here and watch the ocean and do things like that, and just be worthless teenagers.”

My wife used to have episodes of clarity. I have no idea what caused them. It might be 2 hours; it might be 7 or 8 hours. We would talk a lot. One time she said to me, “This disease is going to take my life, but it's taking your life.”

She said, “You gave up teaching and you gave up writing. How do you expect me to die in peace if I know that you gave up everything to this disease?” She said, “You should write.”

So every single day, we sat together by the window. I moved it into the dining room overlooking the water, and we sat there at the desk. She sat in her wheelchair next to me, and sometimes we would play a little soft music in the background. For the most part, she couldn't talk, but she liked to just sit there beside me working, and she knew that she was my inspiration. She knew.

She was the battery that kept me going. How on earth I ever had a wife like that, I don't know.

That's beautiful, Jack. That's really beautiful.

You know, I just hit the jackpot with her. I see so many people who get by, and they even like each other, or they're friends or something. But in my life, there was 1 person.

I love my children. I still do. I love my grandchildren. I don't understand them.

Yeah.

But there's 1 person in my life, and that was my wife for 44 years. Her funeral was on our anniversary. That's just the way life works out, you know.

But I was very lucky—very lucky.

If the two of you had lived and met a few centuries ago, I might be reading a history book about you conquering.

No, no, no.

And if she said, “You should do this,” maybe you would.

If she said it, I probably would have believed it.

Exactly. Exactly.

She was too busy enjoying the world.

And, you know, I could not ask her questions, and I would never say, “Oh, you remember that?” I knew she couldn’t remember. But when she was restless at night or something, I used to recite scenes from our life and just give the scene without saying, “Do you remember?”

But on her last night, I certainly didn’t know that she was going. It was a rough night, and we went back to the first night we had in Moscow. We came in December, in the winter, and the snow was so beautiful and white, with the yellow lights shining on it. Then, on the most beautiful night, we went to the Bolshoi, and she had this elegant blue wool coat from her grandmother, from the 1920s, with a huge collar.

It’s so ironic: it was blue wool, but it was gray-blue, like the Mongol Khan’s gray-blue collar. She just looked like a movie star from the 1920s or something. We went to see Maya Plisetskaya, and it was one of the most beautiful nights.

But on her last night, I told her that story again, with all the details. I’d gone through it many times: her coat from her grandmother, whom she loved very much; the snow and the yellow lights. We arrived at night because, of course, the flight was late. Then, the next night, we went to the Bolshoi, and there were all those beautiful things from Russia. So that was it.

She was an inspiration. I have many nights, or many days, of great memories.

You’re going to make me cry, Jack.

Oh, no.

That was beautiful. You’re a beautiful human being. It’s really an honor to talk to you. This was such a fascinating journey through human history, about one of the most impactful humans in human history.

Well, I thank you very much. When I realized how much research you had done, I felt like you were going to know things I didn’t know, and you were going to trick me and pull something out, and I was going to be shamed in front of the whole world.

There’s only one piece of research left: me going to Mongolia and riding there on the steppe. That would be incredible.

Come, come.

I will. Thank you so much for talking today, Jack.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Weatherford. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I've been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfreedman.com/amma. Or if you want to contact me for other reasons, go to lexfreedman.com/cont. And now, allow me to make a few comments on the ever-evolving moral landscape of human civilization throughout our 10,000-year history.

I was listening to Dan Carlin’s excellent, eye-opening 5.5-hour episode of Hardcore History titled “Human Resources.” It covered the topic of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, to be exact. One of the lessons I took from this episode is that the long arc of history is full of atrocities, as we modern-day humans understand them with the wisdom of time and moral progress. But during each period of history, as Dan documents, it was difficult for the majority of people to see just where the line between good and evil is.

We humans, after all, forever like to weave a story in which we are the good guys. Listening to Dan discuss, and later reading firsthand accounts myself—of slaves, of torture, of rape, of the separation of families—is incomprehensibly heartbreaking. By the way, on this topic, firsthand accounts of slavery can be read in “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.” I can recommend the book that I’ve been reading, which is “Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives.”

It all seems deeply and obviously wrong by today’s standards, but slavery was seen as normal through most of human history. Thomas Jefferson was the man who wrote, “All men are created equal,” which I think is one of the most powerful lines in all of human history. He himself was a slave owner, making him a fascinating case study of contradictions.

In fact, there’s evidence that Thomas Jefferson drew from Genghis Khan’s ideas about the importance of religious freedom, pulling, as he did, foundational ideas of human freedom from the jaws of deep history. Dan, in his episode, documents these contradictions and complexities quite well. He also documents the full range of human psychology involved, including how violations of basic human rights breed generational hatred.

This, I think, is an important lesson to understand. The consequences of our moral failings can reverberate through decades, even centuries. And that is perhaps one of the values of studying history. It is laden with atrocities, but it also contains people who, while flawed, dare to rise in some way above the moral decrepitude of the day to try to build the foundation of a slightly better future world. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And now, please allow me to say a few words about Gaza, Israel, and Palestine. I’m not sure I’m eloquent enough or know quite the right words to express what I’m feeling, but let me try. I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity. And I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it.

To the degree that the U.S. government is assisting the Israeli government in this, which I believe it currently is, it needs to stop immediately. For me, as an American, it makes me sick to know that my government has any role in this atrocity. This needs to stop.

Yes, there’s geopolitical and military complexity, nuance, and historical context that I’m told by some so-called experts that one must understand. And perhaps they are smarter than me. But as mentioned before, unlike the moral complexity of deep history that I’ve often spoken about, from the Roman Empire to the Atlantic slave trade, this is the 21st century. This is today.

In this, the 21st century, I see things quite simply and clearly. To me, the death of a child is a tragedy. It doesn’t matter what their skin color is, what their religion is, or what plot of land they call home. In my view, they are all equal. And the death of each child is a tragedy.

Hamas committed a definitively evil act on October 7, brutally murdering over 1,000 civilians. But now, the acts of war conducted by the Israeli government have led to the death of over 60,000 people in Gaza—likely over 80,000 people—of whom at least 17,000 are children. 17,000.

I’m not smart enough to know the path to peace and flourishing for all the peoples in the region. But I do know that what has been happening in Gaza cannot be the way. Suffering at this kind of scale breeds generational hate that leads to more evil in the world, not less—to more destruction, to more suffering. This has to stop.

Two years ago, I spoke with many Palestinians in the West Bank, on camera and off. There’s a video of it up if you want to hear their voices for yourselves. It was a deeply moving experience for me, and I’m grateful for it. In the future, I hope to find a way to talk to people in Gaza.

I still think it’s valuable to talk to leaders, historians, soldiers, and activists from all perspectives, but the most powerful and moving conversations for me, on mic and off, have always been with everyday people. This always felt like where the truth is—the deeper truth of life, of pain, fear, and hope. And I still have hope.

I believe we humans are good at the core, and I know we’ll find our way. Thank you for listening. I love you all.