Transcription
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 9 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.
The story of Genghis Khan, like the story of all of us, doesn't begin at birth. It begins, 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, 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 yurts, 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 of the Mongols were very clear. And he looked down, and he saw her, and he could barely glimpse her, but 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. 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 Hulan 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, in 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 in this kidnapping, and it's going to 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 going to 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 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, "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 is 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 Sö'igöl. 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 them was named Temujin Ugu, which is sort of "person of iron" is what it means from the Turkic, but today 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 he has a 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 could have been around four or five, I think. He was left behind, and as it turned out, some other people, the Taijuts, 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.
And then, when Temujin is 8 years old, his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in 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, Begte. He was keeping him. There was something about Temujin having been lost once and found by the Taijuts and reunited with the family. And now his father takes him off at age eight, and he was going to 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 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 Börte, who was about 9 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, and somebody comes from his family, not a relative, but a close person named Mongluk, comes to get him, take him back, and they make it through the winter. They make it through the winter. Mother Hoelun, by now she has four sons and one daughter. I think the daughter had already been born, or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that. But they make it through the winter.
The spring comes, and of course, the clan is going to move to a new camp. They go to spring camp from winter camp, and they have a ceremony for the ancestors, and they started the ceremony, but they did not tell Hoelun. And so she came, and she was angry that she had been left out. And the old women said, "You're the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you." Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view. And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. And they packed up, and they took her animals. They took the animals. But she, at that moment, she still had one horse for a moment, and she jumped on the horse, and she took the banner of her husband, and she raced around the people. And the banner after death contains the soul of the person, it's called. And so she raced around, and they were a little bit nervous. And so they camped for one night, and they waited until it was dark, then they took off. And this time, one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them, and they killed him. Killed him. And Temujin cried. He was a little boy, 8 years old. There was nothing he could do. He's just a little boy.
And now that family is left there on the steppe, four children, possibly five already. Sö'igöl, the other woman with two children. They're all left there to die on this steppe. When the winter comes, they will surely all die. How do they make it through the winter? Mother Hoelun, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head. She took her black stick, and she ran up and down the banks of the river, digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found foods, digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could. And even at his young age, Temujin was already beginning to go out to collect things. He could get fish. He could do a few tasks to help feed the family. It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.
So Temujin's early years were marked by loneliness, abandonment, and struggle. Yes. Even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Taijut people. He was kidnapped, and we would say, I think the correct word, re-enslaved. They put him into a cangue, a yoke, like an ox would wear. And so his two arms are in it, and his head is in it, and he's trapped in this thing. And every night, he would be taken to a different yurt to be guarded by that family. And one night, there was a little celebration. So most of the people are drinking. And he's left with a boy who's not very smart. And Temujin managed to take the cangue, the wooden yoke that he's trapped in, and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out. That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols, that anything that moves is a weapon. This is going to go on for generations. Very important for the Mongols: if it moves, it's a weapon. He did that. He raced off in the night, and he jumped into the river to hide. He's still got a cangue on him. He's still trapped under there. The people are looking for him. They come out, and they're up and down the river, and he's hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can, but it's dark, and it protects him a little bit. They give up and they say, "Okay, we'll come back tomorrow. He can't possibly escape."
But the next day, he knew one family that he thought he could go to, and he was right. He went to that family, and at great risk to themselves, they, in fact, were a captive family of the Taijuts, and at great risk to themselves, they managed to saw off the cangue and then burn it in their fire, and they gave him food to escape, and then he had to go find his family again. So this is the kind of life that this boy Temujin had.
So, just to be clear, his neck is trapped, and the hands are trapped. We think that's how it is. We just have the word. They don't say the head and the hands, and we know that his body is trapped in it. But from all evidence, we have, it's the hands and the head. And he's running around, deeply alone, with this thing. Yes. Yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.
So this, in part, was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition. Kinship is, yes, the most important thing above all else, because here is his life story where he's abandoned over and over and over by his father's own brothers. See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died. They did not. They should take care of her and her children, because her children are the children of their brother. They count as the sons of the clan, or they should. But no, they had all deserted, all betrayed him. He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.