🐉HistoryChinese History
🏠 Home🌐 中文
Chinese HistoryDYNASTIES
🏹

Genghis Khan

Given / Temple NameTemüjin

Founder of the Mongol Empire who united the steppe and conquered half of Eurasia

Holders of the Mandate · Emperors & Kings
The Mongol EmpireThe chiliarchy systemThe Eurasian conquest

Who they are

Temüjin lost his father young and his followers scattered; his mother raised her children on wild plants, his wife was seized, and he himself was captured and put in a cangue — the steppe dealt him an opening on the hardest difficulty. Through personal magnetism and iron discipline he rebuilt his following, defeated the Tatar, Kereit, and Naiman tribes one by one, united the steppe in 1206, and took the title Genghis Khan. He broke up the blood-tribes into chiliarchies, formed the keshig guard, and promulgated the Great Yassa law code, forging scattered nomads into a war machine whose organization overwhelmed its age, then destroyed Khwarazm to the west and pressed the Western Xia and Jin to the south. The empire he and his descendants built stretched from the Pacific to the Danube — the largest contiguous empire in human history.

Key stories

Sworn brother and foe

Jamukha was Temüjin’s sworn brother (anda); as boys they ate and slept together and exchanged knucklebones and whistling arrows, yet later they became the chief rivals for the steppe, and at the Battle of the Thirteen Wings Jamukha once beat Temüjin badly and boiled his captives alive. In the end, abandoned by his own men, Jamukha was bound and handed over by his followers; Temüjin executed the men who had betrayed their master, then, by steppe custom, granted his sworn brother a bloodless death. All the cruelty and all the romance of steppe politics lie in the story of these two anda.

The chiliarchy system

Genghis Khan’s most underrated achievement was not conquest but organization: he grouped all herdsmen by tens, hundreds, and thousands in a decimal system, broke the blood-tribes, appointed meritorious men as hereditary noyan to manage them, and made everyone subordinate to the Khan alone. Earlier steppe empires (Xiongnu, Türk) had all decayed fast through tribal centrifugal force; the chiliarchy system wound the steppe into a single whole for the first time — the secret of the Mongol army’s unmatched mobilization lies in this organizational chart.

Relationships

Children
🌏Kublai Khan　Grandson — the son of Tolui

Appears in

Yuan & MingGenghis Khan Unites the Steppe
← Back to Figures