Weatherford here takes up the challenge of accenting the positive impact of his brutal conquests. Among other things he makes the case for his setting the West up for the Renaissance, the introduction of paper money, the postal system, Religious tolerance, and new vegetables. He bases much of this on new scholarship, rather than the hysterical propaganda of the aristocrats whom he threatened. Partly based on the mysterious "Secret History of the Mongols," the author's own travels in Mongolia, and contacts with Mongolian revivalists, he makes this bit of history accessible even to the most prejudiced reader.

Strangely omitted, though, is the fascinating tale that the geneticists have discovered about his Y chromosome, which appears to show that he might just have been the most prolific lover in the last couple of millennia! Too recent, maybe.

One of the remarkable features of his style was that he hated the elite and the aristocrats, and slaughtered as many as he could. He loved the professional men, the teachers and doctors, and especially the craftsmen and engineers, and did not even tax them. My kinda guy!

Weatherford's style of writing is lively and easy to read. The maps are just detailed enough to be informative without overburdening the reader in detail. This is not an exhaustive account of every battle, every city destroyed, which would be mind-numbing history as usually written, but rather a wide survey of events and their impact on the world to come. And I especially enjoyed his description of the military tactics employed by the cavalry, and his use of siege engines and gunpowder, which would be new to most readers.

Perhaps one of his greatest inventions, though, is that of diplomatic immunity. Any city, and there were several, who murdered or mutilated his envoys as a method of rejecting his terms of surrender, would be ruthlessly razed and the inhabitants slaughtered. Even in those days, the word got around...

This is quite a tale, well told.


Simply the best book on Genghis Khan and his Empire   January 16, 2005
 114 out of 121 found this review helpful

When Genghis Khan and his armies exploded out of the steppe in the early thirteenth century, no one on the Eurasian continent was prepared for his innovative style of warfare. Through years of what was essentially civil war, the Mongols of that period, as well as the surrounding tribes, had already refined various elements of shock warfare. But Temujin - Genghis Khan's birth name - added much to the Mongols' arsenal that was previously missing. He integrated surrounding tribes into his Mongol army; he ensured looting was strictly controlled and that shares of it were divided on a pre-assigned basis; he killed off the aristocracies of the tribes, cities, and empires he defeated, thereby ensuring they would not rally their people to turn on him at a later time; he organized his armies, and even his society, through a decimal system that smoothed the functioning of his eventual empire; he instituted laws that even he, a great khan, must obey.

What resulted from these innovations was unprecedented: an army with the same benefits of speed and maneuver that had always been a part of the traditional tactics of the tribes of the steppe melded together with an effective bureaucratic leadership that was very different from the typical kin-based and ad hoc tribal relationships. This was Temujin's creation, and he perfected it in numerous battles to unify Mongolia under his leadership. In 1206, two years after the final battle to assume control of all Mongolia, he took the name Genghis Khan, and prepared to take his army out into the world.

Jack Weatherford's remarkable narrative of these events captures the creativity of Genghis Khan and the Mongols in a way that no book I've read before ever has. Whereas most histories of the Mongols have long emphasized their unprecedented success in war, Weatherford builds a solid case that shows the social and economic achievements of the Mongols may have been even more remarkable than their adaptations to warfare. The author makes the argument that the Mongols were fairly civilized by the standards of the thirteenth century, almost never engaging in torture, mutilation, or maiming. While they were quick to kill, and left an unprecedented path of destruction in their path, especially to those who resisted their rule, conquest and loot were their goals, not gratuitous death and injury.

After making himself the undisputed ruler of the steppes, an area about the size of Western Europe, Genghis Khan began moving south and west, conquering the Jurched (Manchurian) tribes ruling Northern China and the kingdom of Khwarizm, an empire under the rule of a Turkic sultan that stretched from what is modern Afghanistan to the Black Sea. Khwarizm was an important catch, as the Muslims there were noted for their steel- and glass-making, as well as numerous exotic commodities. As each conquest was assimilated, Genghis Khan took what was special and distinctive about the place and employed it productively. Craftsmen, miners, artisans, interpreters, and specialists in warfare were all absorbed into the Mongol Empire and tasked according to their specialty. The Mongols were nomads, but the genius of Genghis Khan was to recognize the value of even the smallest and most foreign of civilized talents and to use it to his empire's advantage.

Genghis Khan died in 1227 - a mere sixteen years after he began his world conquest. With the exception of India and China, he had conquered everything he set his mind to. It would now be up to his sons and their children to finish what in the shortness of time he could not. (Genghis Khan dies about halfway through Weatherford's book, leaving plenty of space to write about the continued expansion of the empire.) Interestingly, the empire seems to have expanded more by the momentum of its founder's achievements, even after his death, than by the skill of his heirs. Genghis Khan had always been careful not to give his children too much power, as he sought to break away from the traditional kin-based ties of the steppe in order to more smoothly run his empire. In mediating disputes involving his sons, he sometimes took the side of non-kin against them. Until late in his life, he neglected their training as leaders. The consequences of this became immediately apparent in the actions of his son and first heir to the empire, Ogodei.

But, even with sub par and occasionally strife-ridden leadership, the empire continued to expand. Some of the Mongol leaders to follow Genghis Khan were exceptional leaders, while others were not, but the combination of unbeatable virtues in the empire was fixed in a way that it hardly mattered in the first few decades after his death. Nothing outside of the empire could stop it, only enduring struggles from within. As Weatherford details, even as the empire began to split into four quadrants, trade and other imperial activities continued. Two Mongol rulers from separate quadrants could be at war with each other and still allow trade and investments between the sides to continue unmolested. Eventually this relationship would break down, and when it did, it would spell the end of the empire. The Mongols did not create anything. They conquered and looted. And the trade routes needed to move their loot from one part of the empire to another were necessary to keep the empire strong. When those trade routes began to close down, and the economy contracted, the Mongol rulers in each area needed to depend on their local political skills to survive. Some did, but others never made the transition.

Weatherford's book is a marvel - the best of more than half-a-dozen histories I have read on the subject. Writing about the Mongols has always been a complex task for two seemingly contradictory reasons. On the one hand, their widespread empire requires a scholar to dig through a variety of source material written by those conquered by the Mongols, which many find daunting; on the other hand, the Mongols themselves were illiterate and secretive, and so their own literature was almost nonexistent and, when found, difficult to understand. Given these odd circumstances, histories on the Mongols are usually hit-and-miss affairs. Scholars tend to be great at explaining some part of the Mongols, but fail to maintain that quality in other areas. Weatherford's extensive experience in Mongolia, researching Genghis Khan and his empire, makes up for what he loses by not going to the source material outside of English; his accomplishment is a narrative of the highest order.


Not A Good or Balanced History of Ghengis Khan or Mongols   October 4, 2005
 56 out of 74 found this review helpful

This was perhaps the most dissappointing book on Ghengis Khan I have read in a long time (and I have read many). It starts poorly, expands into an excellent account of Ghengis Khan's personal life, then gives a cliff notes version of his descedants history that is laughable in its proclamations and assumptions, followed by a deplorable set of concluding chapters that leave a sour taste for the readers to savor.

What was good about this book?
The middle chapters focus on Ghenghis Khan's motivations and his *non* military accomplishments. As an insight into his *possible* motivations, there is a wealth of material. There is also a great deal of geographical descriptions, which, although limited in scope by the travelogue style of narration, provide some minor insights into how geography may have directed some historical events.

What was utter crap about this book?
The author literally festoons his work with poorly thought out statements, ludicrous links, and a lack of insight or even adequate discussion into the military genius of genghis, subadai, Mongke, and others. Some winners include: Nazi's search mongol texts for clues on how to use mechanized warfare, the Russians using Mongol Campaigns as guidance for their WWII strategies (rather than Kutuzov's strategies during the Napoleonic campaigns, or Stalin's unplanned bumbling), That American Indians, such as the red branch creek, were inheritors of the tradition of Genghis Khan. More troubling are the unsupported or even elaborated upon assumptions that: It was not military inovation, but merely discipline and force of will that made the Mongols successful, that Ghengis Khan could not have conquered Sung China, That Kubulai's plan was the only way to conquer or assimilate Sung China effectively (he does repeatedly say that Kubulai was, however "brilliant" and smarter than his rivals, without any justification or examples), and that the russian slave trade with the Mamluks was the singular causal factor for the Mongol's defeat in Palestine.
More troubling is the cursory review of Tammerlane and his legacy as it relates to the Mongols, and his refusal to adequately describe the Huns tactics, accomplishments, and leaders, and their impact upon Mongol culture.
This book is not good history, nor is it particularly well written. It is a passable acculmulation of assumptions, unsupported conclusions, and a complete lack of attention to the singular importance that military accomplishments had on Mongol culture (and the related infrastructure).

Much better books include:
Genghis Khan or the Emperor of All Men (Paperback)
by Harold Lamb
Genghis Khan and the Mongol Conquests 1190-1400
Stephen R. Turnbull
Subotai the Valiant : Genghis Khan's Greatest General by Richard A. Gabriel


If you do buy this book, as those other reviewers who have limited reading lists or focus on military or period history, I recommend *not* reading the introduction, the first chapter, and the last four chapters, as they are so riddled with inacuracies, suppositions, and poor scholarship as to make them actually detrimental to an understanding of Mongol History.

This is a case of a scholar who knows to much, writing a general history book, and including his own theories and flights of fancy as if they were fact, in what could have been the seminal work on Ghenghis Khan in English. A very poor results, and I am saddened to have wasted my money.


In need of a good editor   September 13, 2006
 35 out of 41 found this review helpful

As Strunk and White advise in the classic guide to writing, _The Elements of Style_, "Do not overstate. When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise."

I wanted to like this book, because I find Genghis Khan and his empire to be fascinating, and yet the author so completely overstates the significance of the Mongols that he loses all credibility, and pollutes an otherwise highly readable and interesting set of facts with so much fiction that it is often difficult to distinguish the two. For example, he claims in the introduction that the Mongols had founded the first unified nations of Korea and China, apparently ignorant of the fact that Korea had been unified since AD 668, and that China was first unified by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Similarly, he states on p. 237 that "[the Renaissance] was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture." Although the evidence for Greek and Roman influence on the Renaissance is overwhelming, the evidence for Mongol influence is flimsy at best. The more outsized the claim, the less evidence the author seems to provide.

Furthermore, he tries to give the Mongols credit for inspiring Renaissance art, which he calls a hybrid of Eastern and Western styles; he gives the Mongols credit for disseminating Arabic and Indian mathematics (the Arabs themselves had disseminated Indian mathematics throughout the civilized world, long before the Mongols); he gives the Mongols credit for introducing the compass to the West (the compass was mentioned in Alexander Neckham's De Naturis Rerum, written in 1190, before Genghis Khan had even ventured out of Mongolia); and he gives the Mongols credit for inventing the Silk Road, which had already existed for thousands of years.

What the book desperately needs are a fact-checker and responsible editor to curb the author's literary excesses. The author clearly sympathizes with the Mongols and wants to promote their case as responsible bearers of civilization. His biases are so blinding, that he frequently makes irrelevant comparisons to the worst excesses of the Catholic Inquisition to try to justify the mass slaughter of the Mongols, and even tries to deny the scale of Mongol genocides altogether, lamely asserting (p. 118), "It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumber the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them." The gigantic flaw in logic is that the Mongols never faced odds of 50-to-1 at any one moment, but rather wiped out city after city in a process that took many years. His claim the the people could "have merely run away" is laughable, given his constant reminders that the Mongol cavalry were the fastest and most efficient army of the day. He could just as easily have applied the same ludicrous argument to any other historical genocide in order to deny their scale and seriousness.

I still like the subject of Genghis Khan, and Weatherford has whetted my appetite: I may eventually pick up one of the other, more serious and scholarly books on the topic. However, I will never again make the mistake of reading anything written by Mr. Weatherford.


Among the worst I've ever read   January 28, 2006
 32 out of 40 found this review helpful

This is just not one of the worst books about the mongols, but also one of the worst books on history whatever. It should come with a warning-label. Mr.Weatherford is an anthropologist who knows nothing - and I mean nothing - about history or how to evaluate sources. I wish I could give this book negative stars! Mr. Weatherford argues that Genghis Khan created the modern world as we know it, that the mongols brought gunpowder, compass, printing, paper and pants which changed Europe. I've never read anything so stupid in any history book before! (Paper and compass was brought by the arabs, printing and gunpowder was invented in Europe without the knowledge of the chinese versions, pants were brought by the scythians long before) The mongols creating renaissance? Am I suppose to laugh or cry? Besides the fact that the impact of the "Renaissance" have been grossly exaggerated (the legacy of Rome and Classical Greece was never forgotten in medieval Europe), the mongols had nothing to do with it.

Besides spreading pure myths, fantasies and false claims, mr. Weatherford conveys modern Mongolian anti-Chinese propaganda. Yes I'm fascinated by Chinggis Khan and Mongol history, but Mr. Weatherford's uncritical praise of the Khan and his bloody conquests which resulted in so many dead just disgusts me, and ought to discust anyone who read this mumbo-jumbo! Also this book contains loads of anachronisms

Yet I actually would recommend this book, seriously. Not as a lesson in mongol or world history though - but as a study in how history-forgery and nationalist history-writing works. In that respect I'd compare this book to 19th century or early 20th century romantic history books which praises brutal warfare and authocratic tyrants.

But if you want to learn anything about Chinggis Khan and the mongols - please stay as far away from this book as you can and instead read Paul Ratchnevsky, David Morgan, Saunders, Rene Grousset - just anything else but this one...