Travels In Siberia handout (extra credit)

The story begins with an anecdote about Genghis Khan seeking out a monk famed with wisdom and medicinal knowledge to make the great khan immortal. Genghis Khan perhaps was so ambitions in his conquests in his own lifetime that he still wanted to conquer more territory once he realized his time on Earth was drawing to a close. He was born surrounded by divine-right legends as Temuchin. And in his early life united the Mongol tribes and conquered territories from China all the way to Muslim lands in central Asian steppe, bordering on the Middle East.  It was said that the Mongols practically lived their whole lives on horseback. They shaved the crowns of their heads, leaving bangs, filed their weapons constantly. Their arrows were “four fingers broad” to inflict larger wounds. They wore shiny armor and where known both for the military tactics as much as their psychological warfare. They’d even mock enemies such as Muslim infantries war cries. The Mongols according to historians even were feared from the stench of their unwashed clothes. And perhaps they stank also because they drank mares milk, which would have caused them to have a rancid odor. For the Mongols, they had not only conquer, but also destroy. Genghis Khan once famously said about his ambitions, “It is not enough that I succeed. All others must fail!”  Genghis really had a strong blood-lust. He also said, “The greatest pleasures in life is to ‘cut my enemies to pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those who are dear to them and to embrace their wives and daughters.” One Persian chronicler said that “not one in a thousand of the inhabitants survived” where Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had invaded and decimated the local populations.

It was not enough to conquer and intimidate. Genghis Khan had many wives and so did his sons and soldiers. One historian hypothesized that Genghis Khan sired 20,000 descendants.  Geneticists later studying the Y chromosome in Asia found that at least 8% of the populations could trace their lineage to  a common ancestor (perhaps Genghis Khan himself) out of sixteen million men or 1% of the population. The Mongols during Genghis’ lifetime didn’t take much interest in the Russian empire. Their primary focus was later on the Islamic empires to the west after they’d conquered China.  However, later on the Mongols a.k.a. The Tatars would invade Russia and the Ukraine. When the Mongols took Kiev they did a lot of burning and they even opened up tombs, scattering and crushing the bones. It’s thought that no czar until Alexander II dared make military annexations past the Urals because the Mongols had so imbued the Russian psyche with their psychological warfare in the past. A Mongol general under the Mongol ruler, Tamerlane even managed to at one point burn Moscow to the ground. It was only when the Mongols were absorbed into the populations they’d subjugated; the Mongols adopted those peoples faiths that the Mongol threat truly ended for the western world.