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GENGHIS KHAN

Death toll: 40 million¹

Rank: 2

Type: world conqueror

Broad dividing line: Mongols vs. civilization

Time frame: lived ca. 1162–1227, but didn’t strike out against the world until 1206

Location: Asian interior (the largest contiguous empire ever created)

Who usually gets the most blame: Genghis Khan

Another damn: Mongol invasion

The unanswerable question everyone asks: He couldn’t have been this destructive, could he?

HIDDEN AWAY IN THE BACK OF BEYOND, MONGOLIA IS A HARSH, DUSTY wilderness that’s synonymous with remote. It’s where you find dinosaur bones and shaggy nomads and none of the major fast-food franchises. Modern Mongolia is a tiny football-shaped country that has been kicked around by larger countries for hundreds of years, but the Mongolians comfort themselves with the knowledge that once upon a time they produced the absolutely baddest badass in human history: Genghis Khan.

Of course, the Mongolians can’t actually brag about his wholesale butchery—in fact, they vigorously deny it—so they emphasize his courage, his audacity, his splendor, his cunning, his occasional acts of charity, along with the admittedly useful feat of temporarily bridging East and West into a single political entity. They point out all of the helpful inventions (such as pasta and gunpowder, maybe) that passed back and forth across this vast, unprecedented empire. They proudly use him to decorate their banknotes, vodka bottles, beer bottles, shops, hotels, street signs, and chocolate bars.²

Some Westerners buy into this. When a recent genetic study indicated that Genghis Khan might have 16 million living descendants, many reports described him as a “prolific lover,” not a serial rapist.^{a 3} Throughout the best-selling Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford often writes like a defense counsel picking away at the prosecution’s case: “Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate . . . they deviated from standard practice of the times in an important and surprising way. The Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim.”⁴ After an arrow from the walls of the besieged city of Nishapur killed his son-in-law, Genghis Khan allowed his widowed daughter to decide the fate of the city: “She reportedly decreed death for all. . . . According to widely circulated but unverified stories, she ordered soldiers to pile the heads . . . in three separate pyramids—one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she supposedly ordered that the dogs, the cats . . . be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder [sic] of her husband” (emphasis added).⁵

Personally, I find it unsettling to see the victims of Genghis Khan shrugged off as easily as Holocaust-deniers ignore the Jews, and then to realize that hundreds of years from now, some historians will be rehabilitating Hitler’s reputation.

But it’s not really a black or white issue. No world leader can get as far as Genghis Khan without a certain amount of charisma, adaptability, and competence. If we spend several generations stereotyping a ruler as a dim-witted, bloodthirsty savage, then sooner or later iconoclastic researchers will realize that there’s more to the story than our simplistic stereotypes.

Angry Orphan

Who was this man named Genghis Khan? Well, for starters, that’s not his name; it’s a title meaning “Universal Leader.” It isn’t even a very good transliteration into English because we tend to pronounce both of the g’s the same. Across the centuries, the “Universal” part has been rendered in English as Zingis (1700s), Jenghiz (1800s), Genghis (1900s), and Chinggis (2000s), and even though my spell-checker prefers Genghis, we should start getting used to Chinggis.

But let’s begin with Temujin, since that was his actual name. He was born insignificantly, somewhere in Mongolia, sometime around 1162, to one among several rival tribes on the steppe. When Temujin was nine, a rival tribe, the Tatars, murdered his father, and the family had to flee into exile. Temujin had to fight for supremacy within his family; he killed his older half-brother, ostensibly for stealing the game he took in a hunt. Temujin got married at the age of sixteen, but a rival tribe kidnapped his wife. Although he got her back quickly, she turned out to be pregnant, so the paternity of that son, his eldest, was always in doubt. Eventually, Temujin linked up with a chieftain who was most notorious for occasionally boiling the flesh off live prisoners in a cauldron.

Personally charismatic, Temujin gathered followers from among other dispossessed individuals, which meant that these followers owed everything they had to him, not to an accident of birth.⁶ Temujin valued loyalty so highly that even when disloyalty among his enemies worked to his advantage, the culprit was punished. At one city, the soldiers of the garrison snuck down and opened the gates for his army to flood in. Chinggis Khan had them executed for their treachery.

Temujin heard of the legendary beauty of a Tatar princess, so he had his followers hunt her down. His soldiers swooped in and chased away her fiancé. They carried the princess back to Temujin, who took her as one of his many wives. Some time later, at a court gathering, he saw his bride go white with terror. Glancing around, Temujin saw only one unfamiliar face in the crowd, so he had this man seized and interrogated. It was the former fiancé, who just wanted to look at her one more time. Temujin had him beheaded.

When Chinggis Khan finally beat the Tatars, he is said to have lined up all of the men and boys alongside a wagon and ordered his followers to kill every Tatar male who stood taller than the lynch pin of the wagon wheel; however, this attempt to exterminate the tribe that killed his father was either pure myth or less than successful. Tatars eventually formed such a major part of his armies that the terms Tatar and Mongol became almost interchangeable among Europeans.⁷

Most of Temujin’s career was spent consolidating the tribes of the Mongolian grasslands into a single fighting nation. Temujin incorporated conquered tribes into his army by scattering them across his organization. The Mongols came to be more of an army than an actual ethnicity, a fusion of diverse clans that abandoned their petty feuds and grudges and subordinated themselves to Temujin. After many hard years of killing, a gathering of the freshly unified tribes of Mongolia in 1206 proclaimed Temujin to be Chinggis Khan, ruler of the world. The title was only a little bit premature.

Steppenwolves

War colleges and polemophiles^b have a special warm spot for the Mongols. These horsemen combined the big-sky freedom of cowboys with the shock and awe of a blitzkrieg. Like a modern army, Mongol horse archers relied on mobility and projectiles to annihilate their enemies, so they inspire more professional admiration and daydreams than do plodding lines of peasant pikemen.

Among the nomadic herdsmen of the Eurasian steppe, boys old enough to walk were old enough to ride, so they became expert horsemen at an early age. Because the management of a herd was so much like battle itself, all men were trained in the arts of war by default. The herdsmen would circle their herds of sheep, cattle, and goats on fast ponies, leading a herd in a chosen direction, splitting it into smaller sections, and selecting a few head of livestock to pick off for the day’s meal. The techniques for slaughtering cattle and sheep worked just as well for slaughtering people. The archers rode up close enough to send a volley into the massed enemy, and then veered off before the enemy could retaliate. They would keep this up all day, thinning the enemy ranks and creating gaps that could be slowly widened, wedging the mob apart into smaller, bite-sized groups.⁸

Adding to the tactical skills of the nomads was their amazing long-distance mobility. Peasant armies were tied to the land—both defending it and working it—and they could spare only a handful of their adult males for long-distance campaigning. The nomads, however, lived in carts and tents and lived off cattle, goats, and sheep. They could simply uproot their entire nation and drag it along wherever they went. In the quiet times between battles, they could still tend their herds and their families, thriving wherever there was enough pasture to support them.

This ability to hurry from place to place made Mongol armies seem much larger than they really were, which is why the word ordu, originally a Mongol military unit, has come into English as horde, a huge mob.

Many historians openly admire Chinggis Khan’s mastery of psychological warfare. By wiping out every population that resisted him, Chinggis Khan hoped to terrify future enemies into immediate submission, thereby saving countless lives—well, except for the thousands he originally massacred to make his point, obviously.⁹ And excluding the towns that bravely tried to stand up to him; obviously they got massacred as well. And sometimes a town surrendered without a fight, but then Chinggis Khan decided that leaving behind a garrison was too much trouble, so he just killed everyone instead. And of course, many, many refugees—terrified of these propaganda stories—died of hunger, disease, and exhaustion while fleeing the Mongol onslaught. So when you add it all up, his propaganda probably didn’t save nearly as many lives as some historians say it did.

Mongol weapons were the finest of their kind anywhere in the world, and the composite bow was the deadliest weapon known to man for many centuries. It originated in distant antiquity, but the Mongols became the masters of it.

Bend a stick over your knee until it breaks. That is the kind of pressure a bow is put through every time you shoot an arrow. The best solution is to build the bow with materials that enhance the performance and counteract the specific problems facing critical points along the curve. Inside the bend needs a material that compresses and recoils sharply without breaking. Horn is ideal for that. The curved outside of the bend needs an elastic material that stretches without losing its snap. That would be sinew, the tough connective tissue joining muscle and bone. Then bind all of the parts tightly with glue (from boiled hooves) that can take the repeated strain, and you’ve got a composite bow, made entirely from materials the Mongols could get from their herds.¹⁰

Why didn’t the whole world field armies trained and equipped along the Mongol model? Since archery and horsemanship take years of training to master, it took years to replace each lost soldier on the Mongol side. Also, campaigning exhausted and killed horses faster than most societies could replace them.^c In addition, the food surplus of farming societies was useful for producing huge, expendable infantry regiments armed with easy weapons like pikes, axes, and crossbows. To these solid lines of infantry, a sedentary, civilized nation could add a mobile strike force of armored knights on heavy warhorses, who might not have been as fast or as numerous as a nomadic horde but could usually chase them out of the neighborhood before they did too much damage.

China

China at this time was split in half. The southern part was still under the Song dynasty, a purely Chinese manifestation renowned for its art, poetry, and justice. It didn’t get conquered until the onslaught of Chinggis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, so it doesn’t concern us here.^d Northern China was under the relatively benign rule of alien conquerors from the north, Jurchen warlords ruling from Beijing as the Jin dynasty.

In 1211, about 100,000 Mongols with 300,000 horses crossed the Gobi desert and overwhelmed the Jin cavalry at the pass known as Badger’s Mouth on the northern edge of Chinese territory. One Mongol column swept down quickly enough to take the secondary Jin capital at Mukden (now Shenyang), but the primary capital at Beijing held against their first attack and subsequent siege. While waiting for the city to surrender, the Mongols devastated the countryside. Although Chinggis Khan had no siege machines, he discovered another way to take some of the other walled cities scattered across northern China. He rounded up every civilian he could find and herded them ahead of his assault teams as human shields while the Mongols advanced safely behind them. Either the defenders wasted all of their arrows killing noncombatants, or they refused to shoot and surrendered instead—a win-win for Chinggis Khan.

After a year, the Jin paid him off, and Chinggis Khan abandoned his siege of Beijing. Feeling dangerously exposed to the frontier, the Jin emperor moved the court south from Beijing to Kaifeng, behind the Yellow River. Some Chinese army units, however, took this as a sign of weakness and betrayal and then defected to the Mongols, bringing many alien but useful military skills into the Mongol camp, such as siegecraft for taking fortifications. Now that the Mongols had the ability to take Beijing, they resumed the attack. The city was taken, looted, and burned in May 1215, but Chinggis Khan was so indifferent to the value of cities that he didn’t even attend the capture, leaving it to a turncoat Chinese general instead.

Reportedly, 60,000 women flung themselves from the walls of Beijing to avoid rape. That number is probably an exaggeration, but the full extent of the devastation was obvious. A year later, a scout from Khwarezm, the next land on Chinggis Khan’s to-do list, investigated the site to confirm the horrible fate of this great city. “He reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat, that some of his entourage died from the diseases spread by rotting bodies.”¹¹

The Mongol attempts to conquer the remnant of the Jin empire beyond the Yellow River failed as Mongol resources were stretched thin and Jin resources were easily concentrated, but this bothered Chinggis Khan not at all. For the next several years, he regarded northern China more as a no-man’s-land to be ruthlessly plundered rather than as a conquered province to be administered and taxed. He hadn’t quite learned to appreciate the value of urban economies.¹²

Death of Khwarezm

Long ago the barren desert region now covered by all of the ’stans of Central Asia hosted a string of oasis cities along the caravan routes between Persia and China. Supported by irrigated orchards and gardens, this was the thriving cultural center of Islam known as Khwarezm. The city of Bukhara is said to have had a population of 300,000 and a library of 45,000 volumes, among them 200 written by a native son, Ibn Sina, the greatest scientist of medieval Islam.¹³ Merv, the hometown of poet Omar Khayyam, had ten libraries containing a total of 150,000 handwritten volumes.¹⁴ Today, if you look on a map, you won’t see Khwarezm anymore. Here’s why.

For a few years after the fall of northern China, Chinggis Khan and Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm played diplomatic games, exchanging gifts, envoys, embassies, and pleasant letters in order to shame one another with their own unsurpassed magnificence. Certain gifts or forms of address would imply superiority, which meant the other had to reply with more splendor or admit defeat. Finally, in 1219, the sultan tired of this one-upmanship. When a splendid caravan of Mongol envoys and merchants arrived at the Khwarezmi city of Utrar, the local governor, with the connivance of the sultan, accused them of being spies and had them all killed. When Chinggis Khan sent ambassadors to the court of the sultan of Khwarezm in the city of Bukhara to demand compensation and punishment, the sultan killed one ambassador and plucked out the beards of the other two, which was even more insulting in central Asian culture.¹⁵ Chinggis Khan then rode west with an army numbering between 100,000 and 150,000. The forward scouting units were traveling at sixty miles per day.

In the first clash of armies, the Khwarezmians were routed, leaving a reported 160,000 dead on the field. Utrar, site of the first insult, was besieged for five months. Finally, one of the besieged commanders tried to flee through a side gate. The Mongols caught him and executed him for treachery, but this opened the gate for the Mongol army to rush in. The governor barricaded himself in the inner fortress, which held for a further month. When he was captured, Chinggis Khan had molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.¹⁶ The city was looted and burned. The eradication of the city was so complete that archaeologists did not discover its exact location until very recently.

The city of Balkh surrendered without a fight, but Chinggis Khan slaughtered the inhabitants anyway so his troops wouldn’t have to watch their backs when they moved on to the next town.¹⁷

Then Bukhara fell. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir described it as “a day of horror. There was nothing to be heard but the sobbing of men, women, and children torn apart forever, the Mongol troops sharing out the population. The barbarians did violence to the modesty of the women under the eyes of all their unfortunate menfolk, who in their powerlessness could only weep.”¹⁸

Gurganj withstood a five-month siege, beginning in 1220. Finally, prisoners taken in previous conquests were forced to fill the moats with dirt and debris and undermine the walls. After the walls crashed down, the city was overrun quarter by quarter, street by street, in slow, desperate combat. The defenders threw buckets of flaming petroleum onto the buildings in the path of the invaders. Three thousand Mongols tried to cross the river, but Muslim soldiers on the bridge held against them, and the Mongols were killed to a man. When the city finally fell in April 1221, the river was diverted through broken dikes to erase every trace of the city.¹⁹ The women and children were sold into slavery, and 100,000 captives with useful skills were sent back to China. Everyone else was herded out onto the plain and killed. According to the historian Juvaini, 50,000 soldiers killed twenty-four people apiece, for a total of 1.2 million dead.

At city after city, rather than face defenders on the walls directly, Chinggis Khan herded captive men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside and suburbs ahead of his armies, where they took direct hits from the defenders’ arrows.

One woman hoped to save herself by crying out while being attacked that she had swallowed a pearl to hide it from looters. It didn’t work. She was quickly gutted and her entrails were searched. All of the other corpses from that day forward were opened up and inspected.²⁰ At another town, the Mongol general heard that the living hid among the dead so he ordered all of the native corpses beheaded and the heads stacked up just to be sure.

Nishapur fell to another column of Mongols in April. Its people were killed, and the town was demolished and plowed over. According to the medieval historian Sayfi, 1,747,000 people were killed at Nishapur. This is probably far more people than lived in the city, but it suggests the scale of the massacre. If a million is the medieval way for of saying “the highest number you can possibly imagine,” then the number who died at Nishapur was clearly much more than what you can possibly imagine.

When the Mongols sent a messenger to demand the surrender of Herat, the leaders of the city had him killed, which is usually considered an unwise move when dealing with Mongols. Fortunately, the city’s governor was killed early in the subsequent siege, and the townsfolk immediately surrendered and blamed the misunderstanding on him. The people were spared, but the Mongols executed the Turkish garrison of 12,000. Unfortunately, the people of Herat pushed their luck too far. After Chinggis Khan moved on to new conquests, the Heratis rose up against the Mongol garrison, so Chinggis Khan returned and wiped them out.

The first Mongol scouting party to reach Merv was driven off, and the prisoners taken in the skirmish were paraded through the streets and publicly executed. Then the main Mongol force arrived and camped outside the city walls. The city was swollen with refugees from the countryside, with many times its normal population of 70,000. After six days, the town surrendered, and the Mongol commander ordered the citizens to assemble outside the walls. The wealthiest were tortured into revealing the whereabouts of all their hidden treasure. Four hundred artisans and some children were kept for future use. The rest of the population was wiped out. Afterward, a cleric explored the ruins and counted the bodies, calculating the total number of dead at 1.3 million. The Mongols destroyed the dam that supplied the irrigation for the area. No city was ever rebuilt on that site.²¹

Further Expansions

Chinggis Khan returned to China to clean up the annoying enclaves that had survived his earlier conquest. He spent a brief period trying to resolve his ongoing war against the reduced Jin empire, but that came to nothing, so he turned instead against the Tanguts—Tibetans who had moved down from the Himalayas and founded caravan cities in the oases between China and Khwarezm. City after city fell to his hordes, and no mercy was recorded for the captives. Tanguts tried to flee to the mountains and hide in caves, but few succeeded. Bonefields littered the desert for many years afterward.

As the king of the Tanguts tried to negotiate the safe surrender of his besieged capital, Ningxia, in 1227, the aged Chinggis Khan felt his own death approach. His last orders saw to it that the Tanguts would not outlast him. Ningxia was taken and the population exterminated.

Meanwhile, two of Chinggis Khan’s most trusted generals, Subotai and Jebe, had chased the refugee Sultan Muhammad of Khwarezm deep into Persia, but he died before they caught him. So the expedition wouldn’t be a total waste, the Mongols took the Persian city of Qazwin while they were in the neighborhood. “The inhabitants fought back in the streets, knife in hand, killing many Mongols, but their desperate resistance could not fend off a general massacre in which there perished more than forty thousand people.”²² Then the Mongols pushed northward into Azerbaijan and Georgia, destroying countless towns, and crossed the Caucasus into the steppe of Russia and Ukraine. The advance columns were closing in on Poland when word came that Chinggis Khan had died, so the attack was halted as the leaders returned to decide the succession.

Chinggis Khan was buried in a secret tomb, somewhere deep in the Mongol homeland. Any witnesses who happened across his funeral procession were seized and killed to prevent them from reporting the location. After the body was buried with his accumulated wealth, the slaves who carried him were ambushed and slaughtered to hide the location forever. His grave has never been found, but it haunts archaeology as one of the world’s greatest career-boosting possibilities.

Was It Even Possible?

For now let’s forget the incredible body counts reported for individual atrocities and focus instead on overall estimates from modern demographers. By all accounts, the population of Asia crashed during Chinggis Khan’s wars of conquest. China had the most to lose, so China lost the most—anywhere from 30 to 60 million. The Jin dynasty ruling northern China recorded 7.6 million households in the early thirteenth century. In 1234 the first census under the Mongols recorded 1.7 million households in the same area. In his biography of Chinggis Khan, John Man interprets these two data points as a population decline from 60 million to 10 million. In The Atlas of World Population History, Colin McEvedy estimates that the population of China declined by 35 million as the Mongols subjugated the country during the thirteenth century. In The Mongols, historian David Morgan estimates the Chinese population (in both the north and the south) as 100 million before the conquest and 70 million after.²³

John Man makes a rough guess that 1,250,000 people were killed in Khwarezm in two years—one-fourth of the 5 million original inhabitants. McEvedy states that the population of Iran declined by 1.5 million; the population of Afghanistan dropped by some 750,000, while European Russia lost 500,000.²⁴

One of the most common arguments about Chinggis Khan is that he just couldn’t have been this destructive, could he? He had such primitive weapons, and there were far fewer people to kill in those days, so how could he kill more people than Stalin and World War I combined? There has been a recent trend to rehabilitate his reputation by dismissing all of the horror stories as propaganda. It’s interesting to watch the debate go back and forth over time as each expert weighs in:

J. D. Durand, 1960: “A considerable decrease of population in the north might have been caused by the struggle between the Chinese and the Mongol invader. . . . Still the sheer magnitude of the decrease in the north, not balanced by any corresponding increase in the south, creates a suspicion that the census in the north was very defective.”²⁵

Rene Grousset, 1972: “Courtesies having been observed in respect to strict historical objectivity, let us make no bones about our horror at the appalling butchery.”²⁶

David Morgan, 1986: “Professor Bernard Lewis, something of a revisionist on this matter of the Mongol horrors, has suggested that in the twentieth century we are better able to judge man’s destructive capacity than were our Victorian forebears, to whom the Mongol conquests seemed terrible beyond normal human experience. . . . [H]e feels . . . we should resist the temptation to believe that the Mongols, whose apparatus of destruction was so primitive compared with what was available to Hitler, could have devastated the Islamic world so totally.”²⁷

David Morgan, 1986 (speaking for himself): “It is true that what we hear most about is the slaughter and demolition of the great cities of [eastern Persia]. But more serious . . . was the effect of the Mongol invasions on agriculture. . . . [S]ome of [the irrigation systems] were destroyed during the invasions, and without effective irrigation much of the land would soon revert to desert. But a more long-term consideration is that [these systems], even if not actually destroyed, quickly cease to operate if they are not constantly maintained. Hence if peasants were killed in large numbers, or fled from their land and stayed away, land would suffer irreparable damage simply through neglect.”²⁸

Jack Weatherford, 2004: “The Mongols operated a virtual propaganda machine that consistently inflated the number of people killed in battle and spread fear wherever its words carried.”²⁹ “Although accepted as fact and repeated through the generations, the numbers have no basis in reality. It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumbered the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them.”³⁰

John Man, 2004: “One million three hundred thousand? . . . Many historians doubt this because it sounds simply incredible. But we know from the last century’s horrors that mass slaughter comes easily . . . 800,000 were killed in the Rwanda genocide of 1994 . . . over just three months. . . . For a Mongol, an unresisting prisoner would have been easier to dispatch than a sheep. A sheep is killed with care, in order not to spoil the meat. . . . There was no need to take such trouble with the inhabitants of Merv, who were of less value than a sheep. It takes only seconds to slit a throat, and move onto the next.”³¹

The important point to notice is that the exact same evidence can easily be interpreted in opposite directions. A recorded drop in the population between censuses is either an accurate reflection of a massive decline or an indication that the census was flawed. Either the Holocaust shows how difficult it is to kill huge numbers of people or it proves how easy it is. A full confession to killing thousands is either the truth or mere boastfulness.

There’s a word for this shifting interpretation of underlying facts: paradigm. This is the theoretical framework within which theories, laws, and generalizations are formulated.³² If your ruling paradigm declares that human populations do not crash abruptly, then the only way to interpret the census is to assume an error in the data. If your paradigm declares that only the industrial efficiency of the gas chambers made the Holocaust possible, then obviously spear-waving barbarians can’t kill millions, regardless of what the chronicles say. In 1994, when a million people were massacred in Rwanda in three months, mostly with machetes, the paradigm shifted to accept the idea that gas chambers are not necessary for genocide.

Admittedly, history is biased by the available sources, and many of the stories that have come down to us are likely exaggerations. Unfortunately, when you dismiss too much history as mere propaganda, you find yourself caught in a paranoid cycle where you will not trust what anyone says, and you will believe only what you want to believe. Maybe the relentless bad press that surrounds Chinggis Khan means only that history was written by his victims. On the other hand, that’s to be expected when everyone who interacted with him ended up as a victim.

Did Everybody Do It?

Whenever you start denigrating a notable person from the past, you will be told that those were different times. Everybody did it. You can’t judge the past by modern standards, his defenders will say. Everybody else was just as bad.

Is this true? Were all the people of the Middle Ages as barbarous as Chinggis Khan? Well, unfortunately for the defenders of Chinggis Khan, the rebuttal is almost too easy. The career of the Universal Leader spanned almost the same years as a man who was nearly as famous, nearly as influential, and completely the opposite. Let’s consider the biography of a contemporary who didn’t kill as many people as Chinggis Khan:

In 1206—the same year that the Mongol tribes proclaimed their warlord Temujin to be Chinggis Khan—a twenty-three-year-old ascetic arrived in Rome. Like Temujin, Giovanni di Bernardone is more commonly known by another name, in this case, Francesco, the Frenchman, even though he was from the Italian town of Assisi.^e Unlike Temujin, Francesco’s early attempts at soldiering were simply a matter of duty to his hometown, and they proved less than legendary. He was captured by forces from Perugia at the age of twenty and spent a year as a prisoner of war before a truce secured his release. He tried again in the next war, but he was sent home from this campaign with a serious fever. Charming, witty, and pleasure-loving in his youth, Francesco turned to religion and philosophy after his experience of war and near brush with death.

After dedicating the next few years to prayer and study, Francis of Assisi concluded that all nature manifested the benevolence of God. He considered all living creatures to be the brothers of mankind. Giving away all his worldly goods and tending to the sick and poor, he made it a point to live his life as Jesus had. Francis of Assisi founded a monastic order, the Franciscans, dedicated to poverty and good works, although his contribution was mostly that of a charismatic example rather than a methodical organizer. Unlike the severe scourges-and-scorpions holy men that every religion churns up, Francis was always good-humored and pleasant.

Francis is the first person recorded to have spontaneously sprouted the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ. Inventing this new way of being mystically weird is probably a point against him, but Saint Francis of Assisi exemplifies the best of Christianity. He died in 1226, a year before Chinggis Khan did. No gravediggers were slaughtered to hide the tomb of Saint Francis. It’s now a major pilgrimage site and one of the world’s great tourist traps.