Unraveling the Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Historical Examination
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Since one version of Genghis Khan is that of a cruel despot who raised mountains of human skulls, we should first ask: how many died as a result of his wars and conquests? The answer can only be guesswork for three main reasons. Ancient and medieval chroniclers routinely multiplied numbers, sometimes 10?fold, so we have to discount their figures. Estimates of fatalities can be made only when we have accurate population statistics, but medieval census figures are unreliable. And the assessment of war casualties is a notorious minefield, even in the modern age.
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There were three great Mongol campaigns between 1206, when the local warlord Temujin was acclaimed as Genghis Khan, emperor of Mongolia, and 1242, when the Mongols withdrew from Europe following the death of Ogodei, Genghis’s son and successor as Great Khan. The European conquest of 1237–42 probably accounted for a million deaths while the subjugation of modern Iran and Afghanistan from 1219–22 cost 2.5 million lives.
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The real problem of historical interpretation comes in the great campaign to conquer the Jin regime of northern China, which lasted from 1211–34. We can have only the haziest idea of the population of northern China at the time, but it was probably somewhere in the 60–90 million mark… Two obvious analogies for Genghis’s 23-year war against the Jin are the An-Lushan revolt against the Tang dynasty in 755–63 and the great Taiping rebellion of 1850–64. The An-Lushan convulsion caused 26 million deaths and the Taiping 30 million... Using these statistics as a lodestone, scholars argue that the likely fatalities from 1211–34 were 30 million. If we then include casualties in the ‘little wars’ Genghis and his sons waged against people like the Tanguts, the Bulgars, the Armenians and the Georgians, we arrive at a total of some 35–37 million deaths attributable to the Mongols.
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Why was the death toll so high, and why were the Mongols so ferocious? Different reasons have been adduced: the Mongols spread terror and cruelty because they had a small-scale steppe mentality transposed onto a global stage; because it was the most efficient way to warn already conquered peoples not to attempt ‘stab in the back’ revolts as the Mongols pressed ever forwards.
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The simplest explanation for the chilling policy of ‘surrender or die’ was that the Mongols, as a far from numerous people totalling at most 2 million souls, were obsessed with casualties. For them, the best-case scenario was a walkover surrender in which none of their troops died. This explains why nearly all the cities that surrendered without even token resistance received relatively good treatment.
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There are no signs in Genghis of a mindless or psychopathic cruelty… One could give any number of other instances: from the slaughter of the southern Chinese (Song) by the Jin in Tsao-Chia in 1128, through the massacre of the Albigensians by fellow Christians at Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209, to the killing of 30,000 Hindus at Chitor in 1303 by Ala-ud-din Khilji’s troops. It is wisest to accept the judgment of a notable historian of medieval Russia, Charles J Halperin: “(Genghis) was no more cruel, and no less, than empire builders before and since. Moral judgments are of little help in understanding his importance.”
