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And, of course, he promoted through merit, which meant that the greatest talents got to the top. This was a brilliant way of quelling inter-tribal feuding. Then, when he became Genghis Khan, he came up with the idea of breaking up tribes and distributing them into different parts of the army. He realised early on that the only way to prosper was to strike alliances with rival tribes. He never stopped learning and was endlessly willing to adapt. John Man, author of 'The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, His Heirs and the Founding of Modern China' (Corgi, 2015), answers some of the biggest questions surrounding the Mongol warlord

“If you had not committed great sins, God would not have inflicted a punishment such as me upon you.” “I am the punishment of God,” was his defiant message. Genghis Khan was, it appears, entirely unrepentant for violence. It remained the fastest way of sending messages across Asia until the advent of the railways. The widereaching network of routes connected by regular staging posts enabled a message to travel 125 miles in a single day. Greasing the wheels of this connectivity was the Mongols’ celebrated postal system. Without these Mongol trade routes, Marco Polo could never have made his celebrated journey from Europe to China in the late 13th century. The empire made the world a smaller place, in effect serving as a transmission belt for technology, science and goods between areas as diverse as China, Iran and eastern Europe. And whether they were Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, it appears they were free to worship in peace.Īnother key to Genghis Khan’s success was his promotion of trade. As a result, his capital of Karakorum bristled with small communities of foreign silversmiths, silk-weavers, artists, architects and the like. He certainly wasn’t averse to exploiting these people’s skills, identifying the best artisans across the empire and bringing them back to Mongolia. But there was another, often overlooked, side to him, and that was as the enlightened ruler who realised that if his Mongol Empire was to prove sustainable, he would have to work with the peoples he had subjugated. The Genghis Khan of popular imagination tends to be a pitiless killer, leading a merciless army across the land and building an empire on the bones of millions. Was Genghis Khan a vengeful tyrant or an enlightened ruler?