Unlike Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar before him, Genghis Khan didn’t fine-tune an already impressive military machine. Yet perhaps more astonishing still is the story of the catalyst behind this extraordinary feat of empire-building.

What if Alexander the Great had lived longer?.

Some three billion of the seven billion people alive today live in countries that formed part of the Mongol Empire. To put that into context, the Mongol Empire grew to four times the size of the one created by that other great conqueror, Alexander the Great, and twice the size of the Roman Empire. Over the course of the century, he and his successors built the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, a 12-million-square-mile swathe of land that stretched from the Sea of Japan to the grasslands of Hungary in the heart of Europe. But for Genghis Khan, it was just the start. That achievement in itself would have been enough to elevate him into the pantheon of great military commanders. Genghis Khan – the butt of a Chinese emperor’s jokes and leader of two million illiterate nomads – had brought the Jin to their knees. They also recorded that beyond the walls stood a mountain of bones. A year later, visiting ambassadors reported that the streets of Beijing were “slippery with human fat”. The city of the utmost sophistication, famed for its grand palaces and markets overflowing with silks and spices, had been reduced to a charnel house. For one month, his army burned, plundered and raped with abandon. The walls were scaled, the defenders overcome, and what followed was utter annihilation. Genghis Khan – the butt of a Chinese emperor’s jokes and leader of two million illiterate nomads – brought the Jin to their knees And still Genghis Khan waited until, in early summer 1215, with the populace at breaking point, he ordered his men to storm the city. Thousands starved within the walls and the population resorted to cannibalism.

“Now they had to learn the guile of the wolf.”Īnd so he waited… and waited, slowly strangling the Jin capital in a long siege. “I had trained my men to attack with the speed of the wind,” Genghis Khan recalled. It was 12 metres high, 10 miles long and bristling with defenders ready to rain down molten metals, crude oil, even excrement and poisons onto the Mongols. Now, having arrived at Beijing, Genghis Khan faced another wall, the one surrounding the city. Instead of attempting to assault it, he simply took his army around the side. A few years earlier, he had launched a massive invasion of northwest China, pillaging, plundering and killing on an epic scale. By the time his Mongol army first attacked Beijing in 1214, tens of thousands of hapless Chinese men, women and children had already become acquainted with Genghis Khan’s ‘talents’ as a brutal, destructive force.

Destiny conquer the day quest