Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

“The boy who became Genghis Khan grew up in a world of excessive tribal violence, including murder, kidnapping, and enslavement. As the son in an outcast family left to die on the steppes, he probably encountered no more than a few hundred people in his entire childhood, and he received no formal education. From this harsh setting, he learned, in dreadful detail, the full range of human emotion: desire, ambition, and cruelty.”

This is the first expression of a common theme in Weatherford’s history: that Genghis Khan’s upbringing was the primary factor in shaping him into the leader that he became. Weatherford acknowledges the skills and leadership traits that life on the steppes would help instill in Khan, and goes further to suggest that most other Mongols of the time would have learned less than he did, as an outcast and pariah among the tribes (at least during his early life). Khan’s harsh upbringing, combined with his unique hardships, grant him, Weatherford suggests, a unique status even among the Mongols.

“The dual capacity for friendship and enmity forged in Genghis Khan's youth endured throughout his life and became the defining trait of his character. The tormenting questions of love and paternity that arose beneath a shared blanket or in the flickering firelight of the family hearth became projected onto the larger stage of world history. His personal goals, desires, and fears engulfed the world.”

Foreshadowing Temujin’s long and complex relationship with Jamuka, Weatherford suggests that Genghis’s unusual (for his time) combination of leniency and aggression towards his enemies arose from the relationships he formed in his youth. His friendships and rivalries, as with Jamuka, Ong Khan, and even his own sons, shift quickly from love to hatred and back again. Rather than just another paradox in the character of this leader, Weatherford suggests that this is part of a larger pattern showing his double-sided nature. Weatherford’s intimation, however, that Genghis’s imperial wars were “projections” of his own psychological condition onto the rest of the world is impossible to confirm.