--- title: Genghis Khan: Five Myths About the Historic Ruler description: Forget all the things you’ve heard. This is the real Genghis Khan canonical: https://time.com/3980047/5-myths-genghis-khan/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-01T16:00:17.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:41:26.498Z article:section: History og:title: Genghis Khan: Five Myths About the Historic Ruler og:description: Forget all the things you’ve heard. This is the real Genghis Khan og:url: https://time.com/3980047/5-myths-genghis-khan/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfb0f85304aee4dfd/69885d533c1639c1bd459104/khan.jpeg?branch=production&width=497&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 497 og:image:height: 280 og:image:alt: Genghis Khan og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Genghis Khan: Five Myths About the Historic Ruler twitter:description: Forget all the things you’ve heard. This is the real Genghis Khan twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfb0f85304aee4dfd/69885d533c1639c1bd459104/khan.jpeg?branch=production&width=497&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 5 Myths About Genghis Khan > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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It covers the reporting, scoops and conversations shaping AI and the decisions facing leaders. #### Where can I get reported AI news rather than commentary? In the Loop is TIME's AI newsletter, built on original reporting and access to the people building and governing AI. It publishes Tuesdays and Fridays and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes TIME's In the Loop? Harry Booth, a tech reporter at TIME, writes In the Loop. #### Is In the Loop free? Yes. In the Loop is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Ze Frank: The History of Afghanistan in 3 Minutes [Watch (HLS stream): Ze Frank: The History of Afghanistan in 3 Minutes](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/huXH8DFQ.m3u8) (3:25)  _Published 2009-10-23. Ze digs deep into the history of the 'Graveyard of Empires' to offer a condensed timeline of Afghanistan from Genghis Khan to 9/11_ by [Frank McLynn / History News Network](https://time.com/author/history-news-network/) ## Frank McLynn / History News Network Aug 1, 2015 4:00 PM UTC  Genghis Khan. Found in the collection of the Beijing Military Museum. Genghis Khan. Found in the collection of the Beijing Military Museum. Heritage Images/Getty Images by [Frank McLynn / History News Network](https://time.com/author/history-news-network/) ## Frank McLynn / History News Network Aug 1, 2015 4:00 PM UTC  History News Network _This post is in partnership with the_ [_History News Network_](http://historynewsnetwork.org/)_, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at_ [_HNN._](http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159818) **1\. He was a one-dimensional tyrant of a ‘right wing’ kind** A close study of the principal sources (in Mongolian, Arabic and Persian) reveals a personality of the utmost complexity. Depending on mood or context he could be all of the following: shrewd, far-sighted, just, generous, stoical, restrained, iron-willed, multitalented, a man with all the gifts of a great ruler and cowardly, treacherous, devious, ruthless, ungrateful, vengeful and even stupid. Usually an uncannily sharp reader of men, he could be naïve, as when he was taken in by a Chinese charlatan called Chung Chan, who became his guru and spiritual adviser. But in this respect he was not so very different from those eminent personalities in modern times who have been taken in by ‘perfect masters’ of every stripe. He was prey to paranoia and jealousy and could fly into terrible rages, but he was also charming and charismatic and attracted a faithful following in the days before he had the power to constrain anyone by fear. As for the popular ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’ tag, this is of course anachronistic nonsense, since the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ did not appear in history until the French Revolution. **2\. He was uniquely cruel, perhaps even a psychopath** The important thing to realize about Genghis was that he may have exceeded in degree, but never in kind, the routine cruelty of the Middle Ages. One could give any number of instances of medieval war crimes: the slaughter of the Song Chinese by their rivals the Jin at Kaifeng in 1127; the massacre of the Albigensians by fellow-Christians at Beziers and Carcassonne in 1209; Edward I’s butchery of 8,000 Scots at Berwick in 1296; the 30,000 Hindus killed at Chittor in 1303 by the troops of Ala al-din Khilji; the Byzantine mass blinding of the Bulgars in 1014; the behavior of the Christians at Antioch and Jerusalem during the First Crusade – one could go on and on. Genghis was no more and no less cruel than other victors in his era. He was not perceived by contemporaries as being exceptional in this regard nor did he have the kind of exceptional contemporary reputation that Henry VIII had in the sixteenth century. He could not rival Tamerlane for slaugherous brutality and can be documented as less bloodthirsty than contemporary Chinese, Khitans or Persians. Many tales of Mongol atrocities were exaggerated by their enemies and critics, especially Arab historians. The Mongols themselves were happy to collude in this black propaganda, as the legend made opponents less likely to resist them and more likely to surrender without a fight. Moral judgements made from a twenty-first century standpoint are of no use in helping us to understand history. **3\. His ‘surrender or die’ policy was an outrageous crime against humanity** This policy has attracted a lot of attention, and various reasons have been adduced for it: the result of a small-scale steppe mentality transposed onto a world stage; because in terms of Genghis’s conviction that he had been appointed by God to rule the world resistance to him was blasphemy; because the Mongols feared and hated cities and spent their fury on them once taken; because it was the most efficient way to warn already conquered peoples not to attempt ‘stab in the back’ revolts as the Mongols pressed ever onwards. But the simplest explanation is that the Mongols, a far from numerous people, were always obsessed with casualties, so that the best-case scenario was a walkover surrender in which none of their troops died. This explains why nearly all the cities that surrendered without even token resistance received relatively good treatment. It was the fear of casualties that triggered the Mongols’s worst excesses. Sustaining large numbers of dead and wounded when besieging a city meant they would take a terrible revenge when the city finally fell, and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the toll of the massacred; sometimes this included every last human being, including women and children and all animals, including cats and dogs. It also explains the policy that so appalled the Arab historians: using prisoners of war in the Mongol front ranks as ‘arrow fodder.’ But an era that has witnessed the egregious atrocities of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in a so-called civilized age, not to mention the Holocaust, has no call to single out the Mongols. **4\. Genghis and the Mongols were successful because they swamped their enemies with ‘hordes,’ overwhelming them with sheer numbers** This is one of the hoariest of all myths associated with the Mongols and one of the falsest. Until the time of Genghis’s grandson Kubilai Khan, the Mongols always fought from a position of numerical inferiority. Their most famous set-piece victories, against the Russians at the Kalka river in 1222, against the Poles at Liegnitz in 1241 and against the Hungarians at Mohi the same year, all fit into this category. The most famous example of conquest with numerical inferiority came with the defeat by the Mongols (a people of two millions maximum) of the Jin empire of northern China, whose population was probably close to one hundred million. In fact the Mongols achieved their victories because they had achieved a quantum leap in military technology. Other medieval armies simply had no answer to master horsemen firing arrows from powerful bows at distances of three hundred yards; it was probably the first demonstration in history of the primacy of artillery. **5\. Genghis is ‘the father of us all’ –we nearly all descend from the Mongols** Here we enter the arcane world of genetics. Geneticists have established that about 0.8 per cent of the population of Asia has an identical Y-chromosome, indicating the likelihood of a common ancestor, possibly some time around 1000 A.D. This would imply that about 0.5% of the world’s population has this common ancestor, and that he has 16-17 million descendants. The easy availability of huge numbers of women to Genghis and his sons, as to no other identifiable Asian personality, makes it likely that Genghis might be this mysterious progenitor. But the theory has not generally been accepted. The difference of a couple of centuries between the dates of Genghis’s life and the timing of this putative ancestor could no doubt be explained away, but there are simply too many imponderables to allow such a neat calculation, and even on the best-case scenario the most we would have, without a tissue sample from Genghis himself, is probability. But Genghis as the undoubted common ancestor makes a headline that sells newspapers, and devotees of ‘good copy’ are not above distorting the argument still further. _Frank McLynn is the author of_ [Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy](http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Conquests-Empire-Legacy/dp/0306823950) _(Da Capo Press, July 2015)._ ## Transcript So, I decided to try to catch up on Afghanistan-- what a bad idea-- and here's a little bit of a kind of surface- scratching that you can only get on the internet. They-- who? They call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. So here's the deal, for the last 50, 000 years, Afghanistan has been people, by all sorts of peoples with names like the Hephthalites and the Sussanians and the Ghaznavids. Then Genghis Khan and the Monguls ruled through, which was a time period that seemed to suck radically but they couldn't hold on. Then lots of kings killed other kings and brothers killed other brothers from other mothers until 1747 when the Durrani Empire was established, which is considered the birth of modern Afghanistan. Then starting in about 1838, the British Empire and the Russian Empire started using Afghanistan as a buffer state to protect their interest in the region. And let me say that if anyone ever ask you to be a buffer state, just walk away. It does not look like fun. Over the next 80 years or so, the Afghans played the Brits off, the Russians and we see not just one, not two, but three Anglo- Afghan wars where the Brits were never able to control the capital. This whole time period was called The Great Game and it had none of the qualities of a great game. It took a long time, there was lots of fighting and nobody won. By the 1920's, the British Empire was in decline and seem as though it may just have been a Global- English- as- a- Second- Language class. And the Russians were more interested in revolutions, so they signed a Treaty of Friendship with Afghanistan-- you know where this is heading. From the 1930's to the 1970's, Afghanistan enjoys a period of relative common. Kabul, the capital, was even referred to as 'The Paris of Central Asia,' but things are not always as they seem in the Graveyard of Empires. In the 1960's, the Communist Marxist Party, called the PDPA formed and became buddy- buddy friends with the Soviet Union. And in 1978, they grabbed power in what is called the Saur Revolution. This fledgling communist government has an agenda of modernization and social reform, which irks traditional and conservative Muslims, who band together to form the resistance fighters known as the Mujahideen, which is fun to say, Mujahideen. Now, the Soviets want to back up their buddies, so they sign a new treaty called The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness while the US decides that the great way to piss off the Soviets is to fund the Mujahideen. This eventually lead to a full blown Soviet occupation of Afghanistan where the Soviets are now fighting the US- backed Mujahideen and fundamentalist Muslims from other countries, like Osama Bin Laden. By the late 1980's the mighty Soviet army realized that it was in a quagmire, which is fun to say, quagmire, but sucks to be in, quagmire, so they withdrew. The Soviets had lost 15, 000 men and the Afghans 1 million. The Graveyard of Empires is after all, a graveyard. Once the Soviets left, the US lost interest and the Mujahideen were left to fight amongst themselves for control of the war- ravaged country. This eventually lead to a whole bunch of provinces being controlled by war lords, which I'd like to think of as land pirates and soon violence and corruption were everywhere. Meanwhile, a group of Afghans that had fled to Pakistan became inspired by the extreme fundamentalist version of Islam that was being taught in Pakistani, in Madrassas and they formed the group called the Taliban. So in 1994 with Pakistani backing, the Taliban marches into Afghanistan and starts taking back territory from the local war lords, stemming out corruption, and eventually within a couple of years, consolidating a significant part of the country. But with that consolidation comes a heavy price. Namely, the Taliban institutes an extreme version of Sharia or Islamic law which brings back things like amputations and whippings and extreme subjugation of women. And that's around when the Taliban gave refuge to another fundamentalist organization called Al- Qaeda. What happens next is September 11th, but I'm over my time limit. But I also think that were gonna be talking a lot about Afghanistan in the upcoming months and a little bit of background can't hurt. Till next time. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3980047/5-myths-genghis-khan/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3980047/5-myths-genghis-khan/"},"headline":"5 Myths About Genghis Khan","datePublished":"2015-08-01T16:00:17.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:41:26.498Z","description":"Forget all the things you’ve heard. 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