HP. Hoodedcobra666 said:
Yurei said:
I thought Genghis Khan was of the enemy?
I looked back into what HPS Maxine told me a very long time ago. She has told me on Genghis Khan, the amount of crimes, did not make sense.
She said it was "extremely likely" Khan was a jew. It's sometimes common to have historical conversation about these subjects, as these are very curious and thought provoking subjects.
His war methods were undoubtedly only second to Mao in violence. Likely there haven't been more violent armies than Genghis Khan.
However, we need to keep in mind that most of the works about Genghis Khan were written decades and centuries after his death by historians of the middle-east who were either muslims or jews, in other words, of the enemy who are prone to perversion and exaggeration of historical facts. For example, many of them stated that the Mongols were so many and it was almost impossible to count the number of the soldiers. But in reality, the Mongols were mostly if not always, outnumbered. It is impossible for the Mongols to move more then 200 thousand men in a conquest as the total population of Mongolic people never reached a million until the mid of 20th century.
Also, judging someone by his actions during military campaigns doesn't always help you understand a person. In other words, we need to look how the Mongols lived before and what changed during his reign in order to see what kind of a person Genghis Khan was. First of all, we need to understand some etymologies. Khan is a ruler of only one tribe or small kingdom, while Khagan is a monarch ruling over all the nomads in the entire steppe. In traditional Mongolian script, he is always reffer to as Chinggis Khagan. By the time his name was romanized into Genghis Khan, the "g" in Khagan had become silent. In the modern Mongolian language, the word Khagan is written as Khaan in cyrillic. The "a" in Khan is pronounced very fast and short while the "a" in Khaan is pronounced very long.
Now time for some historical facts. The Mongolic people were on the point of extinction because of warring among themselves for nearly 2-3 decades when Genghis Khan, or Temujin by his birth name, came into power. Even when he succeeded in reuniting all the Mongolic khanates(small kingdoms) into a single Khaganate (an empire with one monarch ruling over all the nomadic people of the steppe), there were only 95 thousand households IN TOTAL. Also, when Genghis Khan inaugurated the Yassa code, he forbid and abolished slavery (even though there were slaves, none of them was Mongolian, all of them were people who were brought to Mongolian steppes) as well as abduction of woman and children in the steppes, which had became an everyday issue by then. The bordering northern Chinese states were known to enslave people from the steppes. Economically, the Mongol Empire prospered to the point where no citizen would commit stealing in the daylight. This is stated by many visitors like Plano Carpini and Marco Polo.
Now, concerning the cruelties committed by the Mongols in wars, not all but some of them is true and confirmed. And also most of them were already practiced in the steppes by the Mongolic tribes in wars against each other til the Khan united them into a single state. But it seems however that Genghis Khan was actually less cruel than his rivals. When he lost his first battle after being named the head of the khanate his father once ruled, his enemies boiled soldiers of his alive in giant pots. Soon after this, many people started to defect to his side from rival khanates after witnessing the cruelty. This is another key element to his success. The most brutal military conquest made during his lifetime was against the Khwarazmian Empire and the Islamic world. The Khan wanted to establish a peaceful relations with the Islamic dynasty and sent 400 merchants after a few formal letter exchanges. But Sultan Mohammed, the ruler of the Khwarezmian empire broke his words and killed all of them, stating he considered them as spies. This caused so much grief and anger to the Khan, to the degree where he spent 3 nights swearing revenge on the Khwarazmian Empire. He ordered that no mercy is to be shown, shall they meet resistance from locals. No-one was left alive of the town where the execution of the merchants took place. And the town was destroyed without a trace. This particular method of warfare proved extremely effective, as they had succeeded in invading the Khwarazmian empire in a single year. As such, it was continued by the Mongol army in their future conquests. This is seen when the second campaign against the Western Xia dynasty, the final military action led by Genghis Khan, and during which he died, involved an intentional and systematic destruction of Western Xia cities and culture and because of this, Western Xia is little known to anyone other than experts in the field because so little record is left of that society. This is even mentioned in the Secret History of the Mongols, which is considered to be the earliest written document in Mongolian language and tells the story of life and death of the Khan. The conquests of Europe was started a decade after the death of the Khan, so mentioning them wouldn't mean much.
