How long was genghis khan in power

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rossabi, Morris "Genghis Khan. New York: Scribner, Visiting The Met?

Basin with Figural Imagery. Citation Carboni, Stefano, and Qamar Adamjee. Central and North Asia, — A. China, — A. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets. India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.

Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big Grassroots efforts are bringing solar panels to rural villages without electricity, while massive solar arrays are being built across the country.

Epic floods leave South Sudanese to face disease and starvation. Travel 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient. But will they invade your privacy?

Go Further. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.

It was a bold statement, but one that was, on the face of it at least, fully justified. For the Jin dynasty of northern China was perhaps the most powerful polity on the face of the Earth at the time. The Jin had unimaginable wealth, gunpowder and an enormous army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry, such as catapults. So why should they be concerned about a nomad army riding roughshod over their land?

But there were a couple of problems. He was Genghis Khan. Over the next two decades, the Mongol ruler would forge a reputation as arguably the greatest military commander in history.

A few years earlier, he had launched a massive invasion of northwest China, pillaging, plundering and killing on an epic scale. Not even the Great Wall could stop him. Instead of attempting to assault it, he simply took his army around the side. Now, having arrived at Beijing, Genghis Khan faced another wall, the one surrounding the city. 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.

And so he waited… and waited, slowly strangling the Jin capital in a long siege. Thousands starved within the walls and the population resorted to cannibalism. And still Genghis Khan waited until, in early summer , with the populace at breaking point, he ordered his men to storm the city. The walls were scaled, the defenders overcome, and what followed was utter annihilation. For one month, his army burned, plundered and raped with abandon. 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.

They also recorded that beyond the walls stood a mountain of bones. That achievement in itself would have been enough to elevate him into the pantheon of great military commanders. But for Genghis Khan, it was just the start. Over the course of the century, he and his successors built the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, a million-square-mile swathe of land that stretched from the Sea of Japan to the grasslands of Hungary in the heart of Europe.

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. Some three billion of the seven billion people alive today live in countries that formed part of the Mongol Empire. Yet perhaps more astonishing still is the story of the catalyst behind this extraordinary feat of empire-building.

He turned a rag-bag collection of tribes — with no permanent homes, precious few possessions and a long history of butchering one another — into an unstoppable juggernaut. And he did so from fraught beginnings. When he was born in c, the son of a tribal warrior chief, he was named Temujin. The Secret History of the Mongols , the oldest-surviving literary work in the Mongolian language, set down shortly after his death, tells us that he was born clutching a blood clot, a sign that he would be a brave warrior.

If Temujin was destined for greatness, there were few signs during his early years. At the age of eight or nine, his father was poisoned by a rival tribe, the Tatars, and he and his mother were rejected by their clan and forced out onto the grasslands of Mongolia, where they survived by foraging for berries, rats and birds. This haplotype is spread geographically across roughly the extent of the Mongolian empire and dated to around a thousand years ago, leading scientists to surmise that it represents the ancestry of Genghis Khan himself.

But the genetic heritage is also a reminder of the way the Mongol ruler rose to prominence. To leave such a legacy, he and his family would have had to sire a ridiculous amount of children. And those children came from mothers who were most likely counted among the spoils of war for Genghis Khan and his followers. Once the Khan came, his rule was absolute — for better or for worse.

Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Planet Earth. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Want more?