Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476

- The following is a conversation with Jack Weatherford,

anthropologist and historian,

specializing in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.

He has written a legendary book on his topic,

titled "Genghis Khan and The Making of the Modern World."

And he has written many other books,

including "Emperor of the Seas, Kublai Khan

and The Making of China",

"Genghis Khan and the Quest for God",

"The Secret History of the Mongol Queens",

and other excellent books.

I've gotten to know Jack more after this conversation,

and I cannot speak highly enough about him.

He's a truly brilliant, thoughtful, and kind soul.

This was a huge honor and pleasure for me.

This is the Lex Fridman Podcast,

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And now, dear friends, here's Jack Weatherford.

Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162,

became the Conqueror

of the largest contiguous empire in history.

But before that, he was a boy named Temujin,

who at nine-years-old, lost everything,

his father, his tribe, living in poverty,

abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe.

From a boy with nothing, to the conqueror of the world.

So tell me about this boy, his childhood,

and the Mongolian steppe from which he came from.

- The story of Genghis Khan, like the story

I think of all of us, it doesn't begin at birth,

that's the beginning of life.

The story begins long before birth,

and sometimes it can be many generations before,

and sometimes only shortly before,

but I think with Genghis Khan,

a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met,

and then how he was conceived.

And that is that one day,

a cart was coming across the Mongol Territory,

and only women drove carts.

Men rode horses, women also rode horses,

but women owned the houses which were called gers,

the tents, they owned all the household equipment,

and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth,

and the fact that a cart was moving

meant that some woman was moving from one place to another,

and in fact, her husband was with her.

She was a new bride, and her husband

was on a horse close to her.

So what happened was a man named Yesugei,

Yesugei, the future father of Genghis Khan,

Yesugei was up on a hill, he was hunting with his falcon,

the words of the "Secret History the Mongols"

were very clear, and he looked down,

and he saw her, and he could barely glimpse her,

what he knew, she was young, and she was a new bride,

and he rode back to camp, he got his two brothers,

and they came racing down, and they came,

and first, the husband of the woman

looked around, and he decided to flee,

not because he was a coward,

but he figured he would probably pull the men after him.

They would chase him.

And they did.

They chased him, he went far away,

he circled around, he came back.

He arrived back at the cart where his wife was,

her name was Hoelun,

and Hoelun had time to think while he was riding around

being chased by the Mongols.

And she decided that it's more important for him to live.

And she told him when he came back, "You must flee.

If you stay here, they will kill you, and they will take me.

But if you flee, they will take me,

but you will have the chance to find another wife.

There are many women in the world.

You find one, and you call her Hoelun after my name.

And you remember me when you're with her."

It was a very dramatic moment.

And he rode away, and he looked back and forth,

and it said that the pigtails or the braids

that were hanging down were whipping back and forth

from his chest to his back.

He was divided, obviously, and whether he should go or stay.

But the three men were approaching again,

and they were headed straight for the cart this time,

and they came in, and they took Hoelun.

She didn't say a word until her husband was over the ridge.

And when he was over the ridge,

and she could no longer see him,

she began to scream and wail.

And one of the brothers said to her,

"Doesn't matter if you shake the waters out of the river,

and if you shake the mountains with your screaming,

you will never see this man again."

And he was right.

That was the moment

that Genghis Khan's mother and father met.

That's the beginning of his story and this kidnapping.

And it's gonna reverberate,

every detail of it will come back again and again,

not only throughout the story of the life

of Genghis Khan, but it's gonna continue on

with the feuds and the issues caused by it,

all the way into the future,

and to some extent, in certain parts of the world,

you could say it still exists.

- So the meeting is fundamentally sort of a mixture

of heartbreak and dark, criminal type of kidnapping?

- Yes. - And from that

is conceived this conqueror

of the the biggest contiguous empire in history.

- What I was really interested in was,

how did this happen?

Who was this person?

As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, you know,

"The child is father of the man

and it's the childhood that created him."

And it's that episode that was before he was born,

but all the things that happened throughout his childhood

made him into the man that he became.

And so he was now suddenly

this unusual situation was created,

where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman

who's being held by strange people, the Mongols,

they were not her people, and he already had another wife,

her husband, he had a wife named Sochigel,

he had at that time already one son,

later he had another son with her,

it was a very odd situation.

And in fact, the father, Yesugei, wasn't even there

when Temujin was born.

He was off fighting the Tatars,

and during this campaign against the Tatars,

he killed two Tatars,

one of 'em was the name Temujin Uge,

which is sort of "Person of iron"

is what it means from the Turkic.

But today a part of also Mongolian language.

So he came back, he had a baby,

and he decided to name him Temujin,

"The person of iron" or "Iron Man",

we might call him. - After the man he killed?

- After the man he killed.

So his kidnapped mother, she's a second wife now,

not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife,

and he's named for someone his father just killed.

It was not an auspicious beginning,

and in fact, just episode after episode

in his childhood was inauspicious.

The father and mother moved camp one time

when he was quite young, and somehow they overlooked him,

and forgot him.

He was left behind.

So here's this young child, we don't know what age,

but it could have been around four or five, I think,

he was left behind, and as it turned out,

some other people, the Taichiud found him,

and then they kept him for a while,

and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother,

and it's very odd to me that I never have any inkling

of a spark of relationship much

between the father and the son,

because then when Temujin is eight-years-old,

his father decides to take him off to find a wife,

which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means

you give the child to that family,

or you give the boy to that family,

and he will live with them, and they will raise him up,

and they will train him the way they want

before he can marry their daughter,

and so he's taking him off at age eight,

but he didn't take the other son

from the other wife, Behter, he was keeping him.

There was something about Temujin having been lost once

and found by the Taichiud, and reunited with the family,

and now his father takes him off at age eight,

and he was gonna take him to his, to Hoelun's family,

but he never made it, he stopped with another family,

it's sort of like the first family he came across,

and in the words of "The Secret History",

it's a sort of like instant love

that there was fire in his eyes, and fire in her eyes,

and he saw this girl, Borte,

who was about nine-years-old, a little older,

and he wanted to stay there with that family

according to the story,

and so the father left him there with that family.

But on the way home, the father decided,

he saw a drinking party, and he decided to join them.

They were Tatars.

He hid his identity, on the steppe,

everybody kind of figures out who everybody is,

they figured out who he was,

and supposedly, they poisoned him.

He got on his horse, and was able to ride back home,

but within a few days, he died.

So now Temujin is off living with another family,