[From Book Review]
As a byword for barbarity, Genghis Khan has come down to us 800 years later as the cruellest conqueror of all time. We preserve his name to compare the perpetrators of genocide today to him.
Is this tradition justified? That is what a new biographer should tell us and this one, John Man, has every qualification. He even speaks Mongol and makes Mongolia his stamping ground. He has written a very lively and enjoyable book on a very complex and baffling story.
[. . .]
When they reached a fortified city their strategy was to surround it, starve it and invite its leaders to surrender or be annihilated. Those that refused were slaughtered to the last man, woman or child, but the same thing might easily happen to those which capitulated.
[. . .]
Merv, an oasis city of mosques and mansions. Its ten libraries contained 150,000 volumes, the greatest collection in Central Asia. The Mongols entered the city and after separating 400 craftsmen and a crowd of children to act as slaves, drove the remaining population on to the plain.
‘Then,’ writes Man, ‘the killing started. The place was ransacked, the buildings mined, the books burned or buried.
[. . .]
But not before having told his leading captives: ‘I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent me as your punishment’.
[. . .]
He allowed toleration of all religions — perhaps because he didn’t have much of one himself, except as a mandate for conquest. He allowed women to play a more leading role than other dictators and he employed anyone of talent, irrespective of where they came from.
But he built nothing. He left no palaces, no writings, no philosophy, nothing but territories that owed allegiance to him.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2679923/Bow-die-ocean-BLOOD-Why-Genghis-Khan-throat-slitter-supreme-nastier-thought.html
Bow to me or die in an ocean of BLOOD: Why Genghis Khan, throat slitter supreme, was even nastier than you thought
Genghis Khan has been a byword for barbarity for the last 800 years
Some historians estimate four million people were killed under his orders
As a boy Genghis believed God had decreed he should conquer the land
The name Genghis means 'fierce, hard, tough'
During Genghis's reign of terror the Mongol Empire took up most of Asia
By PETER LEWIS
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 17:11 EST, 3 July 2014 | UPDATED: 18:06 EST, 3 July 2014
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