Genghis Khan, spreader of knowledge. Genghis Khan, codifier of laws. Genghis Khan, peacemaker. Genghis Khan, consolidator of civilizations... Sounds more like a man worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than the bloody tyrant historians have handed down to us. But it turns out that one brave soul wants to make this exact case, that, rather than the Satanic force Matthew Paris and his ilk portrayed him to be, Genghis Khan forged, for the first time, a nation out of disparate and warring tribes and deployed that nation to create an empire that prized scholars, teachers and women. Mr. Weatherford has set himself a tall order, but though he doesn't completely convince, thanks to a dearth of corroborating evidence, his argument is surprisingly and fascinatingly forceful.
In the some 60 years Genghis Khan spent on this planet, he experienced the lowest of the low and the highest of the high. Mr. Weatherford walks us through Genghis Khan's life as it is understood, from his moderately low birth, to his enslavement by a rival tribe, to his escape and achingly slow rise to prominence through, what was then, the rather novel approach of valuing women and using them to create marital ties between himself and the tribes he sought as allies. Though he stood on the brink of total failure on numerous occasions, his strategy eventually won out, placing him at the head of a powerful force of unified tribesmen which he quickly set about reforming into one of the world's most successful fighting forces. What happened next comes down to us through legend, the consolidation of a remarkable empire that even threatened medieval Europe. And this, Mr. Weatherford argues, is the source of the legend of Genghis Khan. So while he was a tyrant, and while he did wage war for most of his life, he did so while promoting religious tolerance, the adoption of a common language, the creation of rights for women, and the standardization of routes of both trade and information capable of knitting the empire together. All the Europeans cared about, though, was whether or not he and his hordes would wash over them like a wave, demonizing him in order to rally resistance against the invaders.
Though medieval historians would have us believe that God delivered Christian Europe from the hands of the vile Mongols, Mr. Weatherford argues that we owe our non-Mongolian west to a trick of geography. For the two major, tactical advantages the Mongols had in the dry east were eliminated in the humid west. Their peerless cavalry exhausted itself far quicker in the dampness of Europe the same dampness that ruined the bows of their mounted archers so feared across Asia. Nonetheless, the Mongolian empire tried to leave their mark on the West, but all tides must ebb and so too did the invasion of the Mongols.
Mr. Weatherford's tale educates as much as it entertains which is the most successful combination for a biography of its kind. He leaves us wondering what it must have been like to live in the time of Genghis Khan for it's clear that rarely was there ever an empire whose fortunes hinged more on its founder than that of the Mongols. After Khan's death, his empire entered a phase of precipitous decline marked by royal excess, but this only serves Mr. Weatherford's case. Perhaps Genghis Khan was a butcher, but he was other things too. And after all, wasn't Augustus a butcher? Wasn't Constantine? Wasn't Charlemagne and Henry VIII? And yet their virtues are celebrated. If men like Genghis Khan were just butchers, they would have never have been smart enough, or lived long enough, to create from nothing what only Alexander could rival. (4/5 Stars)
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