Kazachok genghis khan biography

Genghis Khan's impact is evident not just in his conquests but also in the enduring legacy of his descendants, who would continue to influence Asian and European histories for centuries to come. Genghis Khan, originally named Temujin, had a complex and varied personal life that included multiple marriages and numerous children. He married his first and principal wife, Borte, at the tender age of 16, solidifying an alliance with the Konkirat tribe.

Borte endured significant hardships, including being kidnapped by the rival Merkit tribe shortly after their marriage. However, Genghis Khan's fierce loyalty and resourcefulness enabled him to rescue her, and together they had four sons: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei, and Tolui. Despite the uncertainty surrounding Jochi's paternity due to Borte's captivity, Genghis Khan accepted him as his son, underscoring his commitment to family ties and clan loyalty.

Throughout his life, Genghis Khan had multiple wives as part of Mongolian custom, allowing him to forge alliances and strengthen his political power. His marriages were not only personal but also strategic, and he often took on additional wives to secure alliances with various tribes. The children he fathered with these wives, alongside his sons with Borte, played significant roles in the Mongolian Empire's leadership structure and succession.

Following Genghis Khan's death, his sons inherited portions of the vast empire, illustrating how his marital arrangements laid the foundation for enduring political unity and influence across a remarkably expansive territory. Genghis Khan, born Temujin in , would eventually create the largest contiguous empire in history, yet the concept of "net worth" in the modern sense is not directly applicable to historical figures like him.

Instead, Genghis Khan accumulated vast resources through conquests, loot, and tribute from subjugated peoples, which he redistributed among his followers and military leaders. His wealth can be seen in the enormous territories he controlled, which spanned from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan, facilitating trade and economic growth throughout the Mongol Empire.

Genghis Khan's earning potential was magnified by his military campaigns and successful diplomatic endeavors. He established trade routes that connected the East and West, fostering economic exchanges that further enriched the Mongolian economy and, by extension, him personally. Although exact figures are impossible to determine, the wealth generated under Genghis Khan laid the foundation for prosperity that would benefit generations and spread across continents.

Then in , he was captured by former allies of his father and imprisoned with a wooden head brace. However, on one occasion, sensing a weakness in the guards, Temujin used the wooden head brace to knock out a guard and then through great good fortune and tenacity, he escaped. One anecdote about his escape is that coming across a farm, Khan implored a stranger for a horse.

It is typical of how Khan could inspire awe and reverence from those who met him. Free of his former captives he gained a reputation as a fearsome warrior and leader of men. He gathered together a band of men who were very loyal and he astutely created alliances to increase his power base. Reports suggest many instances, where people saw something in his eyes that encouraged great loyalty and devotion.

It was a loyalty Temujin was keen to exploit as he held great determination and ambition. At the age of 16, he married his childhood bride Borte, whom he had great admiration for. Shortly after the marriage, Borte was kidnapped, but Temujin was able to call on some friends to lead a rescue operation. This was successful, and although Borte was found to be with child, Temujin would bring up the child as if it was his.

Harhorin — the landscape of where Genghis Khan grew up. One of his most important early victories was leading a small unit and allies in defeating the Merkit tribe who bore a grudge against Temujin. Temujin routed his opponents and proceeded to kill all people taller than a cart axle. During these years, the Mongols imposed their control on surrounding areas.

Genghis dispatched Jochi northwards in to subjugate the Hoi-yin Irgen [ ja ] , a collection of tribes on the edge of the Siberian taiga. Having secured a marriage alliance with the Oirats and defeated the Yenisei Kyrgyz , he took control of the region's trade in grain and furs, as well as its gold mines. Their khan was killed and Kuchlug fled into Central Asia.

The Mongols had started raiding the border settlements of the Tangut -led Western Xia kingdom in , ostensibly in retaliation for allowing Senggum, Toghrul's son, refuge. Wulahai was captured again in May and the Mongols advanced on the capital Zhongxing modern-day Yinchuan but suffered a reverse against a Xia army. After a two-month stalemate, Genghis broke the deadlock with a feigned retreat ; the Xia forces were deceived out of their defensive positions and overpowered.

Genghis's attempt to redirect the Yellow River into the city with a dam initially worked, but the poorly-constructed earthworks broke—possibly breached by the Xia—in January and the Mongol camp was flooded, forcing them to retreat. A peace treaty was soon formalised: the Xia emperor Xiangzong submitted and handed over tribute, including his daughter Chaka, in exchange for the Mongol withdrawal.

Wanyan Yongji usurped the Jin throne in He had previously served on the steppe frontier and Genghis greatly disliked him. After calling for a kurultai in March , Genghis launched his invasion of Jin China in May, reaching the outer ring of Jin defences the following month. These border fortifications were guarded by Alaqush's Ongud, who allowed the Mongols to pass without difficulty.

The defences of Juyong Pass had been strongly reinforced by the time the conflict resumed in , but a Mongol detachment led by Jebe managed to infiltrate the pass and surprise the elite Jin defenders, opening the road to the Jin capital Zhongdu modern-day Beijing. Unable to do more than camp before Zhongdu's fortifications while his army suffered from an epidemic and famine—they resorted to cannibalism according to Carpini , who may have been exaggerating—Genghis opened peace negotiations despite his commanders' militance.

As the northern Jin lands had been ravaged by plague and war, Xuanzong moved the capital and imperial court kilometres mi southwards to Kaifeng. He immediately prepared to return and capture Zhongdu. In , Genghis had appointed a man named Qorchi as governor of the subdued Hoi-yin Irgen tribes in Siberia. Appointed not for his talents but for prior services rendered, Qorchi's tendency to abduct women as concubines for his harem caused the tribes to rebel and take him prisoner in early They managed to surprise and defeat the rebels, securing control over this economically important region.

Kuchlug , the Naiman prince who had been defeated in , had usurped the throne of the Central Asian Qara Khitai dynasty between and He was a greedy and arbitrary ruler who probably earned the enmity of the native Islamic populace whom he attempted to forcibly convert to Buddhism. Jebe had him beheaded and paraded his corpse through Qara Khitai, proclaiming the end of religious persecution in the region.

Genghis had now attained complete control of the eastern portion of the Silk Road , and his territory bordered that of the Khwarazmian Empire , which ruled over much of Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan. Inalchuq , the governor of the Khwarazmian border town of Otrar , decided to massacre the merchants on grounds of espionage and seize the goods; Muhammad had grown suspicious of Genghis's intentions and either supported Inalchuq or turned a blind eye.

The killing of an envoy infuriated Genghis, who resolved to leave Muqali with a small force in North China and invade Khwarazmia with most of his army. Muhammad's empire was large but disunited: he ruled alongside his mother Terken Khatun in what the historian Peter Golden terms "an uneasy diarchy", while the Khwarazmian nobility and populace were discontented with his warring and the centralisation of government.

For these reasons and others he declined to meet the Mongols in the field, instead garrisoning his unruly troops in his major cities. Bukhara's citadel was captured in February and Genghis moved against Muhammad's residence Samarkand , which fell the following month. Later called the Great Raid , this lasted four years and saw the Mongols come into contact with Europe for the first time.

The long siege ended in spring amid brutal urban conflict. Genghis's youngest son Tolui was concurrently conducting a brutal campaign in the regions of Khorasan. Every city that resisted was destroyed— Nishapur , Merv and Herat , three of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world, were all annihilated. Contemporary Persian historians placed the death toll from the three sieges alone at over 5.

Genghis abruptly halted his Central Asian campaigns in The khan listened attentively to Changchun's teachings and granted his followers numerous privileges, including tax exemptions and authority over all monks throughout the empire—a grant which the Taoists later used to try to gain superiority over Buddhism. The usual reason given for the halting of the campaign is that the Western Xia , having declined to provide auxiliaries for the invasion, had additionally disobeyed Muqali in his campaign against the remaining Jin in Shaanxi.

Returning to Mongolia in early , Genghis spent the year in preparation for a campaign against them. This began in the first months of with the capture of Khara-Khoto on the Xia's western border. Genghis ordered that the cities of the Gansu Corridor be sacked one by one, granting clemency only to a few. On 4 December, Genghis decisively defeated a Xia relief army ; the khan left the siege of the capital to his generals and moved southwards with Subutai to plunder and secure Jin territories.

Genghis fell from his horse while hunting in the winter of —27 and became increasingly ill during the following months. This slowed the siege of Zhongxing's progress, as his sons and commanders urged him to end the campaign and return to Mongolia to recover, arguing that the Xia would still be there another year. He died on either 18 or 25 August , but his death was kept a closely guarded secret and Zhongxing, unaware, fell the following month.

The city was put to the sword and its population was treated with extreme savagery—the Xia civilization was essentially extinguished in what Man described as a "very successful ethnocide ". Rashid al-Din and the History of Yuan mention he suffered from an illness—possibly malaria , typhus , or bubonic plague. Legends sprang up around the event—the most famous recounts how the beautiful Gurbelchin, formerly the Xia emperor's wife, injured Genghis's genitals with a dagger during sex.

After his death, Genghis was transported back to Mongolia and buried on or near the sacred Burkhan Khaldun peak in the Khentii Mountains , on a site he had chosen years before. The tribes of the Mongol steppe had no fixed succession system, but often defaulted to some form of ultimogeniture —succession of the youngest son—because he would have had the least time to gain a following for himself and needed the help of his father's inheritance.

The Secret History records that Genghis chose his successor while preparing for the Khwarazmian campaigns in ; Rashid al-Din, on the other hand, states that the decision came before Genghis's final campaign against the Xia. After the siege of Gurganj, where he only reluctantly participated in besieging the wealthy city that would become part of his territory, he failed to give Genghis the normal share of the booty, which exacerbated the tensions.

Chagatai's attitude towards Jochi's possible succession—he had termed his elder brother "a Merkit bastard" and had brawled with him in front of their father—led Genghis to view him as uncompromising, arrogant, and narrow-minded, despite his great knowledge of Mongol legal customs. Tolui was unquestionably superior in military terms—his campaign in Khorasan had broken the Khwarazmian Empire, while his elder brother was far less able as a commander.

Aware of his own lack of military skill, he was able to trust his capable subordinates, and unlike his elder brothers, compromise on issues; he was also more likely to preserve Mongol traditions than Tolui, whose wife Sorghaghtani, herself a Nestorian Christian , was a patron of many religions including Islam. Serving as regent after Genghis's death, Tolui established a precedent for the customary traditions after a khan's death.

These included the halting of all military offensives involving Mongol troops, the establishment of a lengthy mourning period overseen by the regent, and the holding of a kurultai which would nominate successors and select them. He was still a viable candidate for succession and had the support of the family of Jochi. It has been suggested that Tolui's reluctance to hold the kurultai was driven by the knowledge of the threat it posed to his ambitions.

No eyewitness description or contemporaneous depiction of Genghis Khan survives. Zhao wrote that Genghis had a broad brow and long beard while Juzjani commented on his cat's eyes and lack of grey hair. Atwood has suggested that many of Genghis Khan's values, especially the emphasis he placed on an orderly society, derive from his turbulent youth.

Heaven grew weary of the excessive pride and luxury in China I am from the barbaric North I wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cowherds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifices and we share our riches. I look upon the nation as a new-born child and I care for my soldiers as if they were my brothers. The principal source of steppe wealth was post-battle plunder, of which a leader would normally claim a large share; Genghis eschewed this custom, choosing instead to divide booty equally between himself and all his men.

He encouraged his companions to address him informally, give him advice, and criticise his mistakes. Although he is today renowned for his military conquests, very little is known about Genghis's personal generalship. His skills were more suited to identifying potential commanders. In exceptional circumstances, such as when Muhammad of Khwarazm executed his envoys, the need for vengeance overrode all other considerations.

Genghis came to believe the supreme deity Tengri had ordained a great destiny for him. Initially, the bounds of this ambition were limited only to Mongolia, but as success followed success and the reach of the Mongol nation expanded, he and his followers came to believe he was embodied with suu lit. Genghis Khan left a vast and controversial legacy.

His unification of the Mongol tribes and his foundation of the largest contiguous state in world history "permanently alter[ed] the worldview of European, Islamic, [and] East Asian civilizations", according to Atwood. On the other hand, his conquests were ruthless and brutal. The prosperous civilizations of China, Central Asia, and Persia were devastated by the Mongol assaults, and underwent multi-generational trauma and suffering as a result.

For many centuries, Genghis was remembered in Mongolia as a religious figure, not a political one. After Altan Khan converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the late s, Genghis was deified and given a central role in the Mongolian religious tradition. In the 19th and early 20th century, Genghis began to be viewed as the national hero of the Mongolian people.

Foreign powers recognised this: during its occupation of Inner Mongolia , Imperial Japan funded the construction of a temple to Genghis, while both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party used the memory of Genghis to woo potential allies in the Chinese Civil War. According to May, Genghis "was condemned as a feudal and reactionary lord [who] exploited the people.

Because Chinese historians were largely more favourable towards him than their Soviet circumstances, Genghis played a minor role in the Sino-Soviet split. The arrival of the policies of glasnost and perestroika in the s paved the way for official rehabilitation. Less than two years after the revolution , Lenin Avenue in the capital Ulaanbaatar was renamed Chinggis Khan Avenue.

His visage appears on items ranging from postage stamps and high-value banknotes to brands of alcohol and toilet paper. In , the Mongolian parliament officially discussed the trivialization of his name through excessive advertising. Modern Mongolians tend to downplay Genghis's military conquests in favour of his political and civil legacy—they view the destructive campaigns as "a product of their time", in the words of the historian Michal Biran, and secondary to his other contributions to Mongolian and world history.

There were tax exemptions for religious and some professional leaders, as well as a degree of religious tolerance that reflected the long-held Mongol tradition of religion as a personal conviction not subject to law or interference. This tradition had practical applications as there were so many different religious groups in the empire, it would have been an extra burden to force a single religion on them.

With the annihilation of the Khwarizm Dynasty, Genghis Khan once again turned his attention east to China. The Tanguts of Xi Xia had defied his orders to contribute troops to the Khwarizm campaign and were in open revolt. In a string of victories against Tangut cities, Genghis Khan defeated enemy armies and sacked the capital of Ning Hia. Soon one Tangut official surrendered after another, and the resistance ended.

Genghis Khan hadn't quite extracted all the revenge he wanted for the Tangut betrayal, however, and ordered the execution of the imperial family, thus ending the Tangut lineage. Genghis Khan died in , soon after the submission of the Xi Xia. The exact cause of his death is unknown. Some historians maintain that he fell off a horse while on a hunt, and died of fatigue and injuries.

Others contend that he died of respiratory disease. Genghis Khan was buried without markings, according to the customs of his tribe, somewhere near his birthplace—close to the Onon River and the Khentii Mountains in northern Mongolia. According to legend, the funeral escort killed anyone and anything they encountered to conceal the location of the burial site, and a river was diverted over Genghis Khan's grave to make it impossible to find.

Before his death, Genghis Khan bestowed supreme leadership to his son Ogedei, who controlled most of eastern Asia, including China. The rest of the empire was divided among his other sons: Chagatai took over central Asia and northern Iran; Tolui, being the youngest, received a small territory near the Mongol homeland; and Jochi who was killed before Genghis Khan's death.

Jochi and his son, Batu, took control of modern Russia and formed the Golden Horde. The empire's expansion continued and reached its peak under Ogedei Khan's leadership. Just when the Mongol armies had reached the gates of Vienna, Austria, leading commander Batu got word of the Great Khan Ogedei's death and was called back to Mongolia. Subsequently, the campaign lost momentum, marking the Mongol's farthest invasion into Europe.

At a young age, Kublai had a strong interest in Chinese civilization and, throughout his life, did much to incorporate Chinese customs and culture into Mongol rule. Kublai rose to prominence in , when his eldest brother, Mongke, became Khan of the Mongol Empire and placed him as governor of the southern territories. Kublai distinguished himself by increasing agricultural production and expanding Mongol territory.

After Mongke's death, Kublai and his other brother, Arik Boke, fought for control of the empire. After three years of intertribal warfare, Kublai was victorious, and he was made Great Khan and emperor of the Yuan Dynasty of China. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Mark Antony. Julius Caesar.

Napoleon Bonaparte. Queen Elizabeth II.