The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China, by John Man

Everybody has heard of Genghis Khan, and anyone familiar with Coleridge will recall his grandson Kublai Khan: ‘in Xanadu di Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’. And by the by, Kublai also conquered and united tribes like the Jin and the Song to create what we know as modern day China. John Man’s book about the Mongols who built an empire greater than the Romans, yet lasted only about 150 years before their line failed, is conversational and readable. I got more than a bit lost with the names of all the khans and their generals, their powerful and politically manipulative wives and the groups they led and those they conquered. However, the big picture emerges of a fierce and driven warrior group, who relentlessly invaded, murdered and pillaged all that lay before them. Man’s book looks too at the legacy of the Mongols, not so much anything cultural, because apart from their belief in a god called Blue Heaven in a sort of shamanistic religion, they did not impose any cultural values on the states they conquered. They were nomads, herders and warriors, not poets and musicians. Their legacy, rather, was how the world developed as a result of their empire building, to begin with their presence in the genetic makeup of 16 million men today, probably, Man says, because of their constant movement and the habit of giving beautiful women to the generals as booty. Second, Man believes the Mongols may have played a critical role in spreading the Black Death along what he describes as their ‘pony-express’ travel routes and because of their tactic of hurling plague infested bodies over the walls of an Italian port town they were besieging, from where it may well have been carried back to Europe. Third he believes that the Travels of Marco Polo, who visited China when the Mongols were in power, influenced Christopher Columbus and the rulers of Portugal and Spain, who were keen to find sea routes to the east once Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, closing the overland trading routes. He talks too about how a distant relative of Genghis, Timur (or Tamburlaine as the English know him), had a descendant called Babur who seized power in India and founded the Mughal dynasty that only ended with the British in 1857. And so it goes. There’s so much detail in this book that it’s impossible to remember most of it but it is nevertheless fascinating and I’m hoping remnants of what I’ve learned will pop up at the appropriate times.