The hardest man of all

From the unpromising and desperately unforgiving background that forged his iron will and boundless ambition, Temujin (as Genghis Khan was named at birth) rose to build an empire that was to range from Korea and China, through Afghanistan, Persia and Iraq and eventually to Hungary and Russia, constituting the largest contiguous land imperium in history. His was an extraordinary, epic story and Frank McLynn does it full justice in a vivid, page-turning biography.

The author portrays well the extreme hardship of the nomadic life for Genghis as boy and man on the arid Mongolian steppe, where temperatures range between 100 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 43, and where ‘one can be hit simultaneously by winds from the Siberian tundra and desert storms from the Gobi’. (Readers of Tim Cope’s excellent 2011 book On the Trail of Genghis Khan will know that even for the 21st-century traveller on horseback the region is dangerous, arduous and topographically inhospitable.)

In an environment that bred hard men, Genghis was the hardest of them all. Born in 1162 (according to McLynn; other estimates vary from 1155 to 1167), by the age of 14 he had killed his half-brother (and potential rival) in an argument over a fish and had seized back his family’s horses, stolen in a raid. He married at 16, and when a competing clan abducted and impregnated his wife Borte he assembled a large army to rescue her. In 1206 he survived a poisoned arrow in his neck, and as reward for a brutally effective military career, a noble council (quriltai) of the Mongolian clans proclaimed Temujin their leader, or ‘Genghis [Chinggis] Khan’ — often translated as ‘Ruler of the Universe’. But at that point he was just warming up.