Genghis Khan

He was born with a clot of blood in his fist. The shamans said it meant something. They were right.

In 1162 CE, a boy named Temujin was born into a minor Mongol clan on the vast grasslands of the Mongolian steppe. When he was nine years old his father was poisoned and his clan abandoned his family beside the Onon River with almost nothing. His mother kept them alive with pine nuts and ferocity. He wore a wooden cangue around his neck as a captive and escaped it. He got his wife back from the people who took her. He unified the tribes that had been destroying each other for centuries.

In 1206 the assembled tribes proclaimed him Genghis Khan — the Universal Ruler. It was not an exaggeration.

Genghis Khan: The Conqueror of the World enters the consciousness of the man behind the legend — the boy abandoned beside the Onon who became the most consequential military and political figure in the history of the world, the commander who built the largest contiguous land empire that has ever existed, the ruler who opened the Silk Road and established religious tolerance and promoted merit over birth and built the postal system that connected a territory stretching from the Pacific to the Caspian.

The book follows the full arc of a life that defies comprehension in its scale. The years of abandonment and survival beside the Onon River, where his mother Hoelun taught him the lessons the empire was built on. The captivity and the cangue and the escape that taught him patience as a military virtue. The recovery of Börte from the Merkits and the beginning of the military career. The blood brotherhood with Jamuka and the twenty years of rivalry that followed, ending with the weeping beside the body of the man who had known him best.

The unification of the tribes. The Yasa — the great law that gave the empire its institutional foundation. The generals: Subutai, who never lost a campaign; Jebe, the arrow, who had once shot the Khan’s horse from under him; Muqali, who governed China in his name. The Chinese campaigns. The Khwarazmian campaign and the destruction of the great Islamic cities. The Pax Mongolica and the Silk Road opened and the world connected.

The death on campaign in 1227. The unmarked grave on the steppe he came from. The blood in the fist that produced it all.

Genghis Khan is the third book in I. Ioakim’s Warriors series — full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history’s greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.