43 pages • 1 hour read
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
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Themes
Family Relations and Kinship
Family relationships among the figures in this history are both fundamental to Mongol culture and subject to change surprisingly quickly. The nature of kinship in medieval Mongol society, as described by Weatherford, is nothing like our modern conception of it. Family relationships could be entered into willingly (as in a bond of blood brotherhood, taken by Jamuka and Temujin and by Ong Khan and Yesugei), or one could be born into them. However, neither arrangement is permanent: Temujin kills his half-brother Begter and his blood-brother Jamuka.
On a larger scale, relationships between Mongol clans before the rise of Temujin were similar to relationships between members of an extended family. This was often accurate in a literal sense, as many of the clans indeed descended from a common ancestor, but we see in the course of Weatherford’s history that these relationships could also be more of an “idiom” than a literal status. For example, when Temujin conquered a nearby clan, he would ritually adopt its members into his own. There was nothing symbolic about this adoption; the new clan members were treated just as blood relatives would be.
Yet even when kinship bonds were well-established, they were still mutable. A quarrel between relatives or blood brothers could be set off by a single insult and the resulting feud could last for generations. In this light, kinship appears to be more of a justification for certain actions than a status that can be easily defined. Weatherford seems to take this view himself. (see quote #7 below). In the end, it seems that if one of Genghis’s great changes to Mongol culture was that the strength of family bonds remained undiminished, the nature of those bonds (what exactly it meant to be family) underwent radical change.
Tradition versus Innovation
The tension between tradition and innovation is a constant theme across the several generations of rulers that Weatherford’s history deals with. Each of the khans, from Genghis to Khubilai, finds his own balance between adhering to traditional Mongol values and customs and embracing new or foreign ideas. Genghis himself does not fall into neither category absolutely; as Weatherford writes, he “consciously set out to create a state and to establish all the institutions necessary for it on a new basis, part of which he borrowed from prior tribes and part of which he invented” (67).
As Genghis established his new empire almost completely on his own terms, the choice of whether to adhere to his vision, to more traditional Mongol norms, or to foreign ideas mainly belonged to his children and grandchildren. In response, the different khans made greatly-contrasting choices. Ogodei departed from tradition in establishing a permanent city and living a more sedentary life; Khubilai, on the other hand, maintained Mongol values in his personal conduct while curating a foreign-based public image. Mongke embraced the contribution of foreign artisans, workers, and thinkers to his empire but remained steadfastly proud of his Mongol heritage. Over the course of Weatherford’s history, each of these rulers makes a different choice, and the choice itself is a legacy of Genghis Khan’s groundbreaking achievements.
Later Misconceptions of Mongols
Throughout his history, Weatherford reiterates that one major goal of his work is to correct the misinformation about the Mongols and their customs that has spread throughout the West in the centuries since the collapse of their empire. This misinformation has taken many forms, and Weatherford addresses it in several ways.
In the Introduction, he stresses that the pop-culture image of Genghis Khan as the leader of a barbarian horde is largely a post-medieval invention, and that contemporary accounts, while acknowledging the extreme violence of some of his campaigns, are much more generous in their portrayal, noting the technological advances made possible by the empire and the ambition inherent in its founding principles.
In the body of his narrative, Weatherford takes time to debunk contemporary accounts of the Mongol court that were inaccurate or written for propagandistic purposes. For example, many Muslim and Christian sources associate the Mongols with divine retribution for the sins of their nations, or involve them in their own theories concerning the impending end of the world. This often taints the depiction of the Mongols, and such sources cannot be considered historically objective. Weatherford makes the valuable point that such sources say more about their writers than about their subjects.
In the final portion of his history, Weatherford describes the pseudoscientific theories that proliferated in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries concerning the Asian race and its supposed inferiority. Conditions such as mental retardation were taken to be a symptom of Asian heritage somewhere in the patient’s bloodline. Such harmful theories persisted until the twentieth century, and while not directly related to historical opinions of Genghis Khan, testify to the misconceptions and irrational fears that many in the West harbored about Asian peoples in general. Weatherford hopes that by offering a more objective view of Mongol history that he will be able to correct some of these misconceptions, or undo the harm that their proliferation has caused.
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