NotitiesGenghis Khan
Henry Freeman
Genghis Khan zocht naar loyaliteit en manpower in plaats van politieke macht, en verenigde de strijdende Mongoolse stammen onder één banner in 1206, wat leidde tot belangrijke juridische hervormingen. Hij beschermde zijn foster father tegen islamitische aanvallen en stelde de Yasa, een wetboek, in om de samenleving te reguleren. Ondanks zijn hervormingen bleef de kidnapping van vijandige vrouwen echter toegestaan.
According to the story, Genghis then rode through the camp, crying out the name of his bride. Bourtai ran to her husband, with the two embracing each other lovingly as Khan happily declared, “I have found that which I sought.” It would have been truly touching sight, but the fact that Bourtai gave birth exactly 9 months later would forever put a shadow upon whether or not that first child was truly Khan’s son or a result of her brief contact with her abductors. Even so, whatever was the case, Genghis never fell out of love with this woman, and he devoted the rest of his life to her. (Location 135)
Khan’s aims were very simple; instead of political power, he was in search of manpower. First in the criteria of the men he would lead was loyalty. In regard to this Genghis Khan himself remarked, “What shall be said of a man who will make a promise at dawn and break it at nightfall?” (Location 161)
Until Genghis Khan unified the battling tribes through the force of his own strong arm, Mongolia was known mostly as either a no man’s land or at the very least a nomad’s land, a place where the few people who dared to eke out their existence in it’s cold expanse lived as perpetual migrants who never settled down, with only their own family members serving as any sort of government. (Location 223)
Ever since the rise of Islam, Muslim forces had been pushing further and further east, forcibly converting anyone that came across their swords. The Karits had become predominantly Christian by 1000 CE, which meant that Toghrul and his people were all either Christians or practitioners of ancestral shamanism and were being routinely threatened by the Islamic advance. (Location 238)
Islamic forces that long held animosity toward the Christians of the steppes were relentless in their onslaught against the small kingdom. Being true to his vows, Khan protected his foster father and drove them out. Not long after this effective rout of Toghrul’s enemies, Khan bore witness to a military expedition of a whole other kind, one led by the Ch’in government to the south in order to take on an age-old thorn in the side of the great country: the Tatars. (Location 251)
Once Genghis Khan had achieved what was previously unthinkable and united all of the warring Mongolian tribes under one banner, he made it official in 1206 when a council was held to distribute his legal code, the Yasa. This code of laws dictated the rules of coexistence for all of his subjects. What had been a fairly lawless society was transformed as he finally set down major legal reform, including new laws such as those that condemned theft and adultery. According to this code, if a horse were taken illegally from someone, the penalty would be death. It also forbade the kidnapping of women, a practice that had been rampant in Mongol culture. Ironically, the laws only applied inside Mongol land, which meant that the kidnapping of enemy women as part of the spoils of war would remain fair game for the Mongols. (Location 258)
These three armies worked in unison yet retained separate autonomy. (Location 312)