Rise of the MONGOLS

How Genghis Khan forged an empire that sought to span the world

- John Man

The Mongols, under the brilliant, ruthless leadership of Genghis Khan, founded the world's biggest land empire. So you would assume the Mongols originated in Mongolia. Well, no. Long before Genghis rose to power, they were immigrants, moving westward from lands beyond the borders of the nation named after them.

Their foundation epic, the Secret History Of The Mongols, written soon after Genghis's death, says they came to their current homeland over a, or the, 'Tengis' meaning a sea or lake - some three or four centuries before Genghis was born in 1162. What an academic storm that word has produced. Which body of water does the word 'Tengis' refer to? Perhaps the Caspian or Aral? Unlikely, because that would mean that the Mongols came from the far west. Or possibly, as some scholars argue, Lake Baikal in Siberia, where the Buryat Mongols live to this day. More likely, this Tengis was the only other large body of water in this part of the world - Lake Hulun, in north-east China.

The evidence is slight, but enough to construct a narrative:

Some 1,500 years ago, according to Chinese records, forest people known as Shiwei dominated the forests of the northeast, in present-day Manchuria. They lived in huts made of bent branches covered by the skins of the animals they hunted. They paid tributes in furs to the Turkic empire that ruled Mongolia in the 6th century (long before the Turks started to migrate westward to Turkey) and to the Tang in China from the 7th to the 9th centuries. They were divided into up to 20 clans, one of which lived in the western part of their range, the Xingan mountains, and was referred to as Meng-wu, the Chinese for Mongol.