Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

 Book Review - Five Stars

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World relates history that impacted the lives of most all civilizations. The book is well-written, excellently edited, and magnificently researched.

I was immediately attracted to the book about Genghis Khan and the Tartars.

In 2002 my wife and I were in Europe for our yearly bicycle tours. We went to the public library in Eibergen, Netherlands, for internet access, and there at the library we met and befriended many of the refugees from a nearby camp. They were all a captive audience. The government had confiscated their identity credentials and issued them temporary identity cards. Among this group was a young man from Uzbekistan who happened to have a passport stamped as “Tartar.” He was a brilliant multilingual tour guide, but his wife got in trouble with the government, and they fled for their lives. This intriguing story is too big to present here. We have kept in contact.

EXCERPTS:

Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units. Rather than relying on defensive fortifications, he made brilliant use of speed and surprise on the battlefield, as well as perfecting siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities. Genghis Khan taught his people not only to fight across incredible distances but to sustain their campaign over years, decades, and, eventually, more than three generations of constant fighting. In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century.

Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history. The hooves of the Mongol warriors’ horses splashed in the waters of every river and lake from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.

The majority of people today live in countries conquered by the Mongols; on the modern map, Genghis Khan’s conquests include thirty countries with well over 3 billion people. The most astonishing aspect of this achievement is that the entire Mongol tribe under him numbered around a million, smaller than the workforce of some modern corporations. From this million, he recruited his army, which was comprised of no more than one hundred thousand warriors—a group that could comfortably fit into the larger sports stadiums of the modern era. In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and taxed the resources of scholarly explanation.

John Grimsrud's author's page