Before my bike went back to the manufacturer, the rides were where I listened to audiobooks. The one I am still working through is a history of Genghis Khan. It turns out I might be one of his.
That is less mad than it sounds. A study some years ago found a single line of male descent, carried by something like sixteen million men alive today, that traces back to Genghis or his close kin. It turns up right across the lands the Mongols once held, mine among them. I have not taken the test, and the link to the man himself is more inference than proof. But the odds are not nothing.
He was not a kind man, whatever blood we share, and the book does not pretend otherwise. The Khwarazmian campaign was no exaggeration. Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Nishapur, Merv: real cities, stormed, their people massacred, and Baghdad gutted in 1258. In Persia the Mongols smashed the qanat irrigation the farmland lived on, and the oases fell back to desert and stayed there for generations, so the ruin was still legible on the land long after the riders had gone. And much of it was deliberate, not frenzy. Terror was policy. Flatten one city completely and the next ten open their gates without a fight. He wanted the reputation, because fear did the conquering cheaply. It was marketing, in blood.
But the picture is also louder than the truth, because the people who wrote it down were the ones underneath it. The Mongols were largely illiterate and left almost no account of their own. Nearly everything we have comes from the settled, literate civilisations they rolled over, Persian, Arab, Chinese, Russian, European, who had every reason to record the horror and to round the numbers up. The millions dead, the ninety per cent, come from those chronicles and are almost certainly inflated, but they set the image. So did being the thing from outside. To Islam the sack of Baghdad was the end of a world. To Christian Europe they were the Tartars, a name people quietly bent toward Tartarus, hell. Pagan nomads boiling up out of the steppe and toppling the great empires inside a single lifetime does not read as administration. It reads as the apocalypse.
And yet it was never quite blind. At Bukhara, the people who came out and fed his horses were spared and taken under his protection. The ones he turned on were the rich. He is said to have stood the wealthiest men of the city up in the mosque and told them to their faces that they were the great sinners, the men who should have led their people and instead grew fat off them, and he took what they had hoarded. He called himself the punishment of God, sent for their greed. Whether he truly said it or his conquered subjects wrote the words for him later, the line held: feed the horses and live, hoard and answer for it.
The thing that stuck with me, though, was not the conquest. It was something quieter. Genghis would not let blood decide rank. Being his son, his cousin, his anything, earned you nothing on its own. One of his greatest generals, Jebe, began as an enemy soldier who had shot Genghis’s horse out from under him in battle. Captured afterwards, he did not lie about it. He admitted the shot and said he would serve loyally if he was spared. Genghis spared him, renamed him Jebe, which means arrow, and made him a commander. A man who had just tried to kill you could still rise on skill alone, all the way to the top, if he was good enough. In the 1200s, in a world that ran almost entirely on who your father was, that is a genuinely strange idea. He trusted what people could do over who they came from.
And here is the part I keep turning over. He built the whole thing on merit, and then he left it to his blood. The empire was carved up between his sons and grandsons, and within a generation or two they were at each other’s throats over who got what, settling the succession with civil wars instead of competence. The thing that built the empire was not the thing they ran it by. Merit made it. Blood lost it. The largest land empire there has ever been came apart not because anyone beat it, but because his descendants could not stop fighting over the inheritance.
What outlived all of it was the connection. For a while the Mongols held a road from the Pacific to the edge of Europe, and for the first time a person, or a coin, or an idea could travel the length of it in relative safety. Paper money, a postal system of relay riders, the long road for silk and spices: things moved that had never moved before. The Italians worked it out fastest. Venice and Genoa set up colonies on the Black Sea at the western end of the road and grew rich shipping what came down it. One of those colonies, Genoese Caffa, is where the plague stepped onto a boat, sailed to Europe, and killed a third of it. And when the road finally closed and the goods stopped coming overland, it was a Genoese who went looking for another way to the riches of the East, sailing west, across the ocean. The empire was long gone by then. The shape it had pressed into the world was not.
So that is what I was carrying around in my ears on the bike, before the bike went away. A man who might be my blood, who built something enormous by ignoring blood, and whose blood then threw it away. I do not know if any of his is in me, and I will probably never get the test done. But I like that the one thing I took from fourteen hours with him was not a battle. It was the idea that where you start does not have to decide where you end up. Coming from where I come from, that is the part I would want to be descended from.
