Transcript for Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #476 with Jack Weatherford. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Jack Weatherford, anthropologist and historian specializing in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. He has written a legendary book on his topic titled Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and he has written many other books, including Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens and other excellent books. I’ve gotten to know Jack more after this conversation and I cannot speak highly enough about him. He’s a truly brilliant, thoughtful, and kind soul. This was a huge honor and pleasure for me. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Jack Weatherford.

Origin story of Genghis Khan

Lex Fridman (00:00:56) Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that, he was a boy named Temüjin, who at nine years old, lost everything. His father, his tribe, living in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world. So tell me about this boy, his childhood and the Mongolian steppe from which he came from.
Jack Weatherford (00:01:27) The story of Genghis Khan, like the story I think of all of us, it doesn’t begin at birth, it begins… That’s the beginning of life. The story begins long before birth, and sometimes it can be many generations before and sometimes only shortly before. But I think with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived. And that is that one day a cart was coming across the Mongol territory and only women drove carts. Men rode horses, women also rode horses, but women owned the houses which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment, and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another. And in fact, her husband was with her. She was a new bride and her husband was on a horse close to her.
(00:02:29) So what happened was a man named Yesügei… Yesügei, the future father of Genghis Khan. Yesügei was up on a hill. He was hunting with his falcon. The words of the Secret History of the Mongols were very clear, and he looked down and he saw her and he could barely glimpse her, but he knew she was young and she was a new bride. And he rode back to camp. He got his two brothers and they came racing down and they came… And first the husband of the woman looked around and he decided to flee, not because he was a coward, but he figured he would probably pull the men after him. They would chase him. And they did. They chased him. He went far away. He circled around. He came back. He arrived back at the cart where his wife was. Her name was Hö’elün. And Hö’elün had time to think while he was riding around being chased by the Mongols.
(00:03:28) And she decided that it’s more important for him to live. And she told him when he came back, “You must flee. If you stay here, they will kill you and they will take me. But if you flee, they will take me, but you will have the chance to find another wife. There are many women in the world. You find one and you call her Hö’elün after my name, and you remember me when you’re with her.” It’s a very dramatic moment. And he rode away and he looked back and forth, and it said that the pigtails or the braids that were hanging down were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back. He was divided, obviously, whether he should go or stay. But the three men were approaching again and they were headed straight for the cart this time. And they came in and they took Hö’elün.
(00:04:22) She didn’t say a word until her husband was over the ridge. And when he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail. And one of the brothers said to her, “It doesn’t matter if you shake the waters out of the river and if you shake the mountains with your screaming, you will never see this man again.” And he was right. That was the moment that Genghis Khan’s mother and father met. That’s the beginning of his story in this kidnapping. And it’s going to reverberate every detail of it. We’ll come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Genghis Khan, but it’s going to continue on with the feuds and the issues caused by it all the way into the future. And to some extent in certain parts of the world, you could say it still exists.
Lex Fridman (00:05:17) So the meeting is fundamentally sort of a mixture of heartbreak and dark criminal type of kidnapping?
Jack Weatherford (00:05:27) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:05:28) And from that is conceived this conqueror of the biggest contiguous empire in history.
Jack Weatherford (00:05:35) What I was really interested in was how did this happen? Who was this person? As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, “The child is father of the man, and it’s the childhood that created him.” And it’s that episode that was before he was born, but all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became. And so he was now, suddenly this unusual situation was created where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman who’s being held by strange people, the Mongols. They were not her people. And he already had another wife, her husband, he had a wife named Sochigel. He had at that time already one son, later he had another son with her. It was a very odd situation. And in fact, the father, Yesügei wasn’t even there when Temüjin was born. He was off fighting the Tatars.
(00:06:38) And during this campaign against the Tatars, he killed two Tatars. One of them was named Temujin-üge, which is sort of person of iron is what it means from the Turkic. But today a part of also Mongolian language. So he came back, he had a baby, and he decided to name him Temüjin, the person of iron or iron-man, we might call him.
Lex Fridman (00:07:04) After the man he killed.
Jack Weatherford (00:07:05) After the man he killed. So he has a kidnapped mother, she’s a second wife now, not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife. And he’s named for someone his father just killed. It was not an auspicious beginning. And in fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious. The father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him. He was left behind. So here’s this young child, we don’t know what age, but it could have been around four or five, I think. He was left behind. And as it turned out, some other people, the Taichiud found him and then they kept him for a while, and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother.
(00:07:58) And it’s very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of relationship much between the father and the son because then when Temüjin is eight years old, his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means you give the child to that family or you give the boy to that family and he will live with them and they will raise him up and they will train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter. And so he’s taking him off at age eight, but he didn’t take the other son from the other wife, Behter. He was keeping him. There was something about Temüjin having been lost once and found by the Taichiud and reunited with the family.
(00:08:46) And now his father takes him off at age eight and he was going to take him to Hö’elün’s family, but he never made it. He stopped with another family. It’s like the first family he came across. And in the words of the Secret History, it sort of like instant love that there was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes. And he saw this girl Börte, who was about nine years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family according to the story. And so the father left him there with that family. But on the way home, the father, he saw a drinking party and he decided to join them. They were Tatars. He hid his identity. On the steppe, everybody kind of figures out who everybody is. They figured out who he was. And supposedly they poisoned him. He got on his horse and was able to ride back home. But within a few days he died.
(00:09:53) So now Temüjin is off living with another family, and somebody comes from his family, a family, not a relative, but a close person named Münglig comes to get him, take him back, and they make it through the winter. They make it through the winter. Mother Hö’elün, by now she has four sons and one daughter. I think the daughter had already been born or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that, but they make it through the winter. The spring comes and of course the clan is going to move to a new camp. They go to spring camp from winter camp. And they have a ceremony for the ancestors. And they started the ceremony, but they did not tell Hö’elün. And so she came and she was angry that she had been left out. And the old women said, “You’re the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you.”
(00:10:57) Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view. And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. And they packed up and they took her animals. They took the animals. But at that moment, she still had one horse for a moment, and she jumped on the horse and she took the banner of her husband and she raced around the people. And the banner after death contains the soul of the person, [foreign language 00:11:29] it’s called. And so she raced around and they were a little bit nervous. And so they camped for one night and they waited until it was dark, then they took off. And this time one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them and they killed him.
(00:11:46) And Temüjin cried. He was a little boy, eight years old. There was nothing he could do. He’s just a little boy. And now that family is left there on the steppe, four children, possibly five already. Sochigel, the other woman with two children. They’re all left there to die on the steppe. When the winter comes, they will surely all die.
Lex Fridman (00:12:14) How do they make it through the winter?
Jack Weatherford (00:12:16) Mother Hö’elün, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head. She took her black stick and she ran up and down the banks of the river digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found foods digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could. And even at this young age, Temüjin was already beginning to go out to collect things. He could get fish, he could do a few tasks to help feed the family. It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.
Lex Fridman (00:13:03) So Temüjin’s early years were marked by loneliness, abandonment and struggle?
Jack Weatherford (00:13:12) Yes. Even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Taichiud people. He was kidnapped and we would say, I think the correct word, enslaved. They put him into a cangue, a yoke like a ox would wear. And so his two arms are in it and his head is in it, and he’s trapped in this thing. And every night he would be taken to a different ger to be guarded by that family. And one night there was a little celebration. So most of the people are drinking and he’s left with a boy who’s not very smart. Temüjin managed to take the cangue, the wooden yoke that he’s trapped in and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out. That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols, that anything that moves is a weapon.
(00:14:10) This is going to go on for generations. Very important for the Mongols. If it moves, it’s a weapon. He did that. He raced off in the night and he jumped into the river to hide. He still got a cangue on him. He’s still trapped under there. The people are looking for him. They come out and they’re up and down the river and he’s hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can, but it’s dark and it protects him a little bit. They give up and they say, “Okay, we’ll come back tomorrow. He can’t possibly escape.” But the next day, he knew one family that he thought he could go to, and he was right. He went to that family and a great risk to themselves. They in fact were a captive family of the Taichiud and at great risk to themselves, they managed to saw off the cangue and then burn it in their fire, and they gave him food to escape, and then he had to go find his family again. So this is the kind of life that this boy Temüjin had.
Lex Fridman (00:15:18) So he, just to be clear, the neck is trapped and the hands are trapped?
Jack Weatherford (00:15:23) We think that’s how it is. We just have the word. They don’t say the head and the hands. We know that his body is trapped in it, but from all evidence we have, it’s the hands and the head.
Lex Fridman (00:15:36) And he is running around deeply alone with this thing?
Jack Weatherford (00:15:41) Yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.
Lex Fridman (00:15:46) So this in part was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition, that kinship is the most important thing above all else. Because here’s his life story where he’s abandoned over and over and over.
Jack Weatherford (00:16:00) Yes, by his father’s own brothers. See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under the Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died. They did not. They should take care of her and her children because her children or the children of their brother, they count as the sons of the clan, or they should. But no, they had all deserted him, all betrayed him. He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.
Lex Fridman (00:16:31) You mentioned that Genghis Khan’s childhood, Temüjin was marked by extreme tribal violence. Can you describe sort of the state of affairs in the steppe? How much violence is there? How much kidnapping is there?
Jack Weatherford (00:16:48) The story of Temüjin is not a unique story for that time. Now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course he’s not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around them, but they are constantly raiding in the winter and for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find. It’s almost like their way of getting trade goods from China. That one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal.
(00:17:23) Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding. Even in the genealogy of Temüjin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father’s child, and it’s unclear who the father was, and all of these issues go back for a long time. Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
Lex Fridman (00:18:16) And this is one of the things you talk about, this in some ways, the love story with his wife was her kidnapping, was the defining… If you could point to one place where Genghis Khan the conqueror was created, it’s that point, his wife being kidnapped. Can you describe, first of all, his love for this woman and what that means and what the kidnapping of her meant?
Jack Weatherford (00:18:45) At age 16, Börte, the girl he had met when he was eight years old as she was nine, she’s now 17, and she and her mother come. It’s hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16-year-old boy who has suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine. And suddenly, here is the love of his life, who’s going to be living with him, making him happy. He has somebody who loves him. It’s not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the five children and plus the other wife and her two children. No, he has somebody who loves him.
(00:19:32) It’s all the excitement that you can imagine with the fire in the eyes and the excitement. And then it only lasts a few months. So there they are… And there’s a lady visiting them. We don’t know exactly who she is, but just they called her grandmother, [foreign language 00:19:50]. Granny [foreign language 00:19:51] is there. Granny [foreign language 00:19:52] is sleeping, of course, on the floor of the ger, the tent. And early in the morning, she feels the vibrations in the earth, and she knows that horsemen are coming. She rouses the family. And mother Hö’elün is in charge. Mother Hö’elün is still in charge even though Temüjin is now married. She puts all of her children on a horse. She takes the baby girl Temülün in her own lap. She has one extra horse, but she won’t take Börte because she knows…
(00:20:31) She doesn’t know who the men are. She has no idea. But they’re coming. They’re coming in the dark. They’re coming for a woman. They know there’s a girl there. This family of outcasts has acquired a wife, and they know that they’re coming for that. And so she leaves Sochigel, the other wife, she leaves this old lady, granny [foreign language 00:20:51], who actually has her own cart, and she leaves Börte. They pile into granny’s cart, and it’s only an ox to pull it so they don’t get too far before the attackers get there. But mother Hö’elün is right. She’s able to get her children off to the mountain, into [foreign language 00:21:09], to the mountain side away from them because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there and who they are and all. So mother Hö’elün saved her family, but at a cost.
(00:21:26) Suddenly Temüjin realizes he has obeyed his mother, but he’s lost the most important thing in his life. And I do think this is the defining moment of his life. The story began back when his mother was kidnapped, but now the kidnapping of his wife and [inaudible 00:21:46] what will he do? What should he do? What can he do? Is he going to just resign himself to it? Is he going to go out and look for another wife? And he decides that life is not worth living without Börte. He has found something good in this life. And if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back.
Lex Fridman (00:22:14) And this is the early steps of the military genius born, because in order to get her back requires an actual organization of troops.
Jack Weatherford (00:22:26) He needs allies.
Lex Fridman (00:22:27) Allies.
Jack Weatherford (00:22:28) He goes to a man who ruled the Khiyad people in Central Mongolia, the Tuul River, about where the capital Ulaanbaatar is today. He goes there because that Wang Khan is his name or Toghrul khan. He goes there because Wang khan had been the Lord over his father at one point, and his father had gone on raids for him. And so he went there and actually he took a gift, that’s because Börte’s mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for mother Hö’elün at that time of the marriage. So he took the coat and he took it and he gave it as a gift to Wang Khan and asked for his help. And Wang Khan said, “Yes.” He said, “I’ll send some troops, but we need more. And you need to ask Jamukha. You need to ask him to come also.” He said, “I will send a message to him to get troops.”
Lex Fridman (00:23:28) You have to tell the story of Jamukha. Because the story of Genghis Khan is one of people abandoning him, being disloyal. And here is a person who’s not of his kin, but becomes his, in a way, brother, in a way, loyal. And as you’ve described, he’s both the best thing to have happened to Genghis Khan and one of the biggest challenges in the later years to Genghis Khan. So who was Jamukha?
Jack Weatherford (00:24:01) Jamukha was a boy about the same age as Temüjin. And his family had winter camp close to where mother Hö’elün was living with her children. And so the two boys met during the winter time. In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about four generations earlier, or five. It’s a little unclear. She was a Uriankhai woman who herself was kidnapped, and actually Jamukha was the descendant of her from the fact that she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping. And then Temüjin is descended from her through the new kidnapper, [foreign language 00:24:38], his ancestor. So they’re both through, as the Mongols would say, from the same womb. They come from the same historic origin. However, their lives were similar and they both lost their fathers very early. But Jamukha also lost a mother. So he grew up in the household of his grandfather. He had no siblings, unlike Temüjin with a whole house full of siblings. He grew up with his grandfather and his grandfather had several wives.
(00:25:06) So he grew up with a bunch of old women, which later he said he thought was an influence on his life. But the two boys meet. So they come from different backgrounds. And Jamukha is not as deprived by any means as the life of Temüjin, but he has a certain emotional deprivation I think, having not had mother, father, siblings, and he lives with these old people. The two boys meet, they become good friends playing on the ice. And so they’re playing on the ice. And then very early on, I think when they’re about 10 or 11 years old, they decide to make a pact. It’s called becoming anda. Anda is more than a friend. A friend is like [foreign language 00:25:49] in the language. And there are several different types of friendship, but anda is a friendship that’s beyond a friendship. It’s something for life. And they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment.
(00:26:05) And they exchanged knucklebones. So each one of them had the knuckle bone of a roebuck, a deer, a knuckle bones are used in these games that they play, but it’s also used to forecast the future. You can roll them around and all. And it’s very strange, on the ice, I will say in the wintertime in Mongolia, it can be up to 50 degrees below zero. And it doesn’t really matter at that point, whether it’s even Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is. But you slide something across the ice and it’s just absolutely smooth like silk, and it goes on for a long way. And if you put your ear down to the ice, you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the earth. It’s just like the angels are singing under the ice. So once they’ve sworn this relationship of anda, then a couple years later they swear it again, but this time they’re slightly older boys and they have bows and arrows, and so they exchange arrows with each other.
(00:27:05) In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off of a 2-year-old calf, and he whittled it down. And then he drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow, which is used for several purposes among the Mongols. It’s used for signals for one thing, from one person to another. But also when you’re hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move. So it had a lot of uses. So the boys had exchanged roebuck knuckles, this time they exchanged… And so they had been close friends. And Wang Khan said, “Okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you.” And he did.
(00:27:53) So the three set out. Some troops from Wang Khan. He himself did not go. He was too old, but he sent some troops and then Jamukha and his troops, and then basically just Temüjin and his family, he just had his brothers. That’s all. They set off to find the Merkit people up the Selenga River, which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal. They had to go through some extremely rough territory. And you see in this episode though, Jamukha is already a little bit fierce without necessarily thinking it through carefully. He gives this long speech about all the things they’re going to do to the Merkit people. “We’re going to jump to the [inaudible 00:28:40], the smoke hole in the top of the ger. We’re going to jump in there and we’re going to kill them all. We’re going to kill the men and the women and the children. We will destroy these people forever.”
(00:28:50) He has an extremely militant rhetoric at least. And he’s also rather critical of the other people. Wang Khan’s people came late and he gave them this long lecture about, “We are Mongols, and if we give our word, our word is our promise, forever. And rain or sleet or snow, it doesn’t matter. We be there on time.” So he’s dressing down his superiors. He is very aggressive, but he’s very helpful. So these troops, they move in on the Merkit camp. They also come in at night. And so there’s a small amount of warning because some men are out hunting sables, the Merkit men, and they race back to the camp and they tell the people, and the people are getting ready to get out as fast as possible. So Börte has no idea who’s coming. She doesn’t want to be kidnapped again, it’s just somebody.
(00:29:48) So she and the grandmother [foreign language 00:29:52], and Sochigel, they’re loaded into a cart to go away. So Temüjin comes in. And there’s a full moon that night, so they could see what they’re doing, and he’s really searching for her. He’s not paying too much attention to the battle. And he’s calling for her, and she hears his voice. She knows who it is. She jumps off the cart and she runs to him and they reunited and he grabs her, embraces her, and then he said, “This is the goal. This is why we are here. We don’t need anything else.” He was very clear about that.
Lex Fridman (00:30:31) And that was his first full on military engagement?
Jack Weatherford (00:30:38) Yes, aside from the things… Yes, his first full on military engagement. Now, along the way, in addition to escaping all these horrors, he had killed his older half brother, Behter.
Lex Fridman (00:30:51) And that too was a deeply formative experience. So what was that about? Can you explain in Mongol society, the role of the older brother and the power struggle there, and not to moralize, but there’s also the ethical foundation behind the murder?
Jack Weatherford (00:31:12) The killing of Behter, that’s one of the things that’s totally unknown outside of the Secret History of the Mongols, none of the Persian Chronicles, none of the Chinese Chronicles, none of them knew about this until the Secret History was deciphered and translated. But Behter was the older child of Sochigel. The older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society, they have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta. And he refers to them as chi. It’s like a formality. And his word goes. He’s the father in the absence of the father. But also it’s quite common that if a man dies and he has no brothers, or his brothers do not marry his widow, then if he has a son by another wife, she will become his wife.
(00:32:10) So it would’ve been common that Behter eventually, when he passed through puberty, would then perhaps marry mother Hö’elün. Now, I don’t know that that happened, but I think either it did or Temüjin was trying to prevent it, because it was bad enough that he was the older brother, but he comes the older brother and the stepfather. I think Temüjin just couldn’t handle that. And he was already, Behter was ordering around. So he would take things like a fish or bird that Temüjin had caught, and that’s perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy.
Lex Fridman (00:32:51) So Temüjin would catch a fish and Behter would take the fish?
Jack Weatherford (00:32:56) Yes, it’s only recorded once, but perhaps it happened several times.
Lex Fridman (00:32:59) So that’s an okay thing to do for an older brother, just take stuff?
Jack Weatherford (00:33:04) Yes, he can do anything he wants just about with his younger siblings. But Temüjin is not going to stand for it. Mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish, which I’m not so sure that’s really the blame. And the boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother. They were using them for fishing… I think it was more complicated than that. But for whatever reason, he and his next brother Qasar decided to kill him, and they did.
Lex Fridman (00:33:38) Why to you, is it more complicated than that? It feels to me like stealing of a fish is like the final straw. Here he’s being abused over and over and over, and the fish is a symbol of that. And so here he takes matters into his own hands.
Jack Weatherford (00:33:56) I think it is the symbol of that, and it can be the thing that pushes him over the edge, but it’s all these other tensions of what’s going on…
Jack Weatherford (00:34:00) … over the edge, but it’s all these other tensions of what’s going on with the family. Because they shoot him with arrows, they kill him, but what happens afterwards is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before. Because we hear nothing from Sochigel. She and her younger son Belgutei, they stay with the family. They don’t go away.
(00:34:23) But the one who is outraged is mother Hö’elün, his mother. She screams and hollers at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine. About, “You’ll never have anybody in your life except your own shadow, and you are worse than”… Everything that she could name that could be worse than. She was outraged and went on, and on, and on about it.
(00:34:47) So, she was obviously extremely distressed about it. Whereas Sochigel, the mother of the boy, she may have been distressed, I don’t know, but nothing has shown up in the record. So, he does have this episode of having killed off his brother. But I don’t think it was a deeply meaningful, I think it was important, but I don’t think it was a mostly deeply meaningful for Temüjin. The brother was gone, the problem was solved, mother is extremely ticked off at him but…
Lex Fridman (00:35:20) But it does show… In fact, it’s interesting if it’s not a big deal for him. It does show that he’s willing to resort to murder to take care of a bad situation.
Jack Weatherford (00:35:34) Yes, he is capable of doing anything that needs to be done to resolve what he sees as a problem. Bekhter was a problem, he resolved it at a very young age. So, he’d had that experience behind him. But now Bekhter’s younger brother Belgutei is on the raid with him and with Jamukha when they go to capture Börte back. So, he has both loyalty, and Belgutei stays loyal to him his entire life, his entire life. It was very interesting.
Lex Fridman (00:36:11) So, actually if we return to Börte, is it normal to have such a love story across many years when you’re separated, and sort of having that kind of loyalty? Because it was two-way loyalty from Börte to Temüjin and Temüjin to Börte, and this is like before he was Chinggis Khan.
Jack Weatherford (00:36:31) I think as children, he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that, to really be pining for her all the time. But for whatever reason, she came. And it could be that her family liked him in some way, or that she remembered him, or that she had no other suitors because at 17 she should have been married actually.
(00:36:59) So, I can’t explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact, if not before. I mean those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives. Or she was, I would say, the most important person to him after that.
Lex Fridman (00:37:16) He went to literal war to get her back.
Jack Weatherford (00:37:20) He risked everything, he was willing to die. He was willing to kill, he was willing to die in order to get her back. And he got her back, and now he’s reestablished his relationship with Jamukha. And so they decide to stay together and they all go off to the Olkhonud Valley. And she is pregnant, this becomes a huge issue forever.
(00:37:54) It’s one of those things that to this day almost, it’s an issue and what happens. But as he says much later in life, when his own sons rebel against him, and they call that first child a Merkit bastard, he defends his wife viciously to his own sons. He says, “You were not there. You do not know who loved who and who did not. You did not see the sky turning around. You did not see the stars falling. You did not see the earth turn over. You don’t know what was happening. And if I say he is my son, he is my son. Who are you to say otherwise, you were not there. You come from the same warm womb, and if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb would turn to cold stone.”
(00:38:45) So, he defended her forever. But he’s off now… We go back to the beginning. She’s pregnant, they are in the Olkhonud Valley, and he Jamukha decide to renew their vows of being anda to each other. So, this time it’s more serious and it’s a ceremony in front of the whole… We can’t say tribe, it’s not big enough yet for a tribe, but a whole clan that’s there.
(00:39:18) And then Jamukha takes off a gold belt, which actually he had stolen from the Merkit at some point. And where on earth they got a gold belt? I don’t know where. He took off a gold belt and he put it on Temüjin. And then Temüjin gave him a mare who had never had a foal that had never given birth. And it was an unusual mare who had a little growth on the front of her head, which they called a horn.
(00:39:44) So, it was an unusual gift and don’t… It has meaning, but I don’t know all the meanings behind it. It’s sort of odd to me. But the golden belt I didn’t think about it in different ways. But the belt for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood. And in fact, just a belt, büse, a woman was often then and even now called a person without a belt because that’s how they were at that time.
(00:40:12) Today, women wear belts, of course. But they still use the word busgui, busgui with no belt. So, it’s a very important symbol of manhood. So, he gave that to Temüjin and they celebrated. And then the word told a secret history. They slept apart under the same blanket, apart from the other group, and they were happy together. And then when the baby was born to Temüjin named the baby Jochi, which means visitor.
(00:40:44) And some people say, “Well, it’s because the child was really the Merkit child.” Other people say, “No, it’s because he was a visitor on the territory of Jamukha at that time.” And other people can say, well, Jamukha’s ancestor who had been born from the kidnapped woman who was pregnant, that they had named that Jarigadi which meant foreigner. So, it’s kind of like a parallel, the visitor, the foreigner. And so Jamukha’s clan took the name from him. They were called Jadaran, Jadaran. So, there are all these things that sometimes we can’t quite understand because we don’t have the total mentality of that time, and we were not there.
Lex Fridman (00:41:27) But we should say that… I mean, it’s a pretty powerful part of this love story is that the child is likely not his. And he accepted that child as his own. And defended it as it becomes much more important later as his first child.
Jack Weatherford (00:41:47) Yes, he defends this child through his entire life. But not long after the birth, he and Jamukha break apart. Or really it’s Temüjin breaks apart at the urging of Börte. She said, “He lords it over you too much. He orders you around too much. You need to be free. We need to break away.” And she urged him, and he loved his wife more than anything.
(00:42:19) I think that in a certain way the most important other character in his life, adult life, would be the anda relationship. Which gets up being severely tested in the future years. But they run away through the night. They go all night long to escape from him. But he obviously loved Börte the most and took the baby of course with them as well.

Early battles & conquests

Lex Fridman (00:42:43) So, here’s this breaking point of the anda. How did that relationship evolve?
Jack Weatherford (00:42:48) The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. Now, we have Wang Khan, the most powerful ruler on the Steppe who’s ruling out of Central Mongolia of the Kerait people. And so Jamakha remains loyal to him, but at first, so does Temüjin. They are both loyal to him, but they’re fighting in different kinds of campaigns, and all.
(00:43:16) So, for a while they’re not fighting each other. But eventually some things happened that separate Temüjin. Temüjin was making all of these great victories for Wang Khan. And he even got the title Wang, which means… from Chinese, meaning a prince or king. Wang Khan received that from the Jin Dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people.
(00:43:45) So, Temüjin was rising up, and then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Wang Khan, and Wang Khan said, “No.” His own son Senggum told the father, “No, no, no, no, we don’t marry those low people. They’re Mongols. They’re not like us. We are Kerait people. We’re not going to marry them.”
(00:44:07) And so then now war, you could say, breaks out. Or feud really, it’s more of a feud. And Temüjin has to flee far away into the east to a place called Baljuna. And he goes to Baljuna, and at this time then Jamukha is going to fight on behalf of his Lord, Wang Khan. The two of them do not meet in combat, but now their forces are fighting each other.
Lex Fridman (00:44:37) And they didn’t see that. I mean, there’s an obvious tension there. There’s an obvious, if slight, breaking of loyalty, right?
Jack Weatherford (00:44:46) Yes. It’s hard to know what’s going through their minds at that point. We only have it later on when their relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways. They claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it, because they never harmed each other directly.
(00:45:06) And in fact, then Temüjin eventually defeats Wang Khan. So, he takes over Central Mongolia, he’s starting to really rise up now. And he has the title from his own people of Chinggis Khan. They give him that at Black Heart Mountain by the Blue Lake. It’s a very beautiful special place.
(00:45:26) But he takes that title. That’s not a title that anyone had ever held that we know of. Chinggis Khan, it was a new title that he just thought up, or somebody thought up, or somebody thought it had auspicious meaning behind it. It’s very close to the word tengiz, which means the sea. It could have had something to do with that.
(00:45:49) Mongolians really like, we might say puns of… they like words with meanings. And that’s very important to them. The more meanings a word has, the more power that word has, so if it has different meaning and different languages. So, in the Mongolian, it sounds like strong Chin, Chinggis. But in the Turkic, and there are many Turkic people, including the Merkit themselves are mostly Turkic people. It sounds like the sea, tengiz, tengiz.
Lex Fridman (00:46:17) So, it’s exciting to them when there’s this double meaning and the double meaning plays with each other, and that excites them.
Jack Weatherford (00:46:25) Especially, with names. I’m like today in Mongolia… Well, I’ve been there so long, I think the fad has passed now. But about 20 years ago, it was popular to name children Misheel, girls. Because it’s a French name, an American name, and it means smile in Mongolian. So, it’s the power of three great languages and three great civilizations.
(00:46:46) And so many names are like that. And so I think Chinggis it doesn’t have one meaning. I think it means powerful, it means the sea, I think it means many different things. So, he had become a Khan, and he was ruling over him. And so Jamukha now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over called the Naiman people who are farther west.
(00:47:06) And he becomes the protege, you could say, of the Naiman people. But when Chinggis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamukha deserts the Naiman. He tells them, “These people have snouts of steel and they eat humans alive.” And he was telling him all these horrible things about the Mongols.
(00:47:35) And Tayang Khan, the leader of the Naimans he was rightfully scared about them. And he was left there, and he, in fact, was very quickly also defeated. So, Jamukha has not fought against Temüjin in this campaign. And he’s off with some of his people, Jadaran clan people.
(00:47:58) He’s off with them and they see the turning of the tide. But he now wants to become the Great Khan of the Steppe. He has very few followers, but he takes the title Gurkhan, which is a very old ancient important title. But because Wang Khan is gone, Toghrul Khan gone, he could take this title and pretend to be the great Khan of the Steppe, and all.
(00:48:30) But his own people turn against him and they capture him, and they think they will take him to Chinggis Khan. It’s now Chinggis Khan. They’ll take him and they’ll be rewarded perhaps for turning him in. And Chinggis Khan does reward them immediately. He kills them all because they have betrayed their leader who is his anda. It’s a very strange encounter. And so supposedly Chinggis Khan says to him, “Come back to me, save me, be beside me, protect me, be my shadow, be my safety guard in life.” And supposedly Jamukha says, “But I did betray you when my people fought against you, and you will always know that, and you will never completely trust me. I’ll be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic. I’ll be like a thorn in the lapel of your dell.”
(00:49:43) He said, “Kill me without shedding my blood, let me die. And if you do, take my remains up to a high place and bury me, and I will be the guard, I’ll be the protector for you and your people forever.” So, they obviously, Tamujan did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing. And he was either… It’s not specified how he was killed without shedding the blood, but the Mongols had several ways.
(00:50:21) Because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood. The blood contains part of the soul, and if you lose it, you’re losing your soul before you die. So, they usually wrap them up in felt carpets and then beat them to death or trample them to death with horses, something like that. There are a couple other methods, but I think that’s probably the method by which Jamukha was killed.
(00:50:43) And so he was killed, and then Temüjin or Chinggis Khan had his remains taken up and buried in a high place. This is over near Tuva, which is today part of Russia. But until the 20th century it was a part of Mongolia. The Tuvan people very, very close culturally to the Mongols.
Lex Fridman (00:51:04) It seems that both of them under the anda relationship had a deep value for loyalty. And so it’s not worth living after you’ve been disloyal, which is the Jamukha perspective, right?
Jack Weatherford (00:51:21) He had become very practical at this point, and he understood that you needed complete total loyalty and trust with everybody around you. And I think for this reason, he was willing either say, to accept the plea of Jamukha, and when Chinggis Khan was asking him to come back, and to be his shadow, and to be his safety guard. Again, maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected. Or maybe when Jamakha offered to be killed without shedding blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.
Lex Fridman (00:52:05) Nevertheless, to me, just reading your work and understanding this history, this relationship seems like a really, really important relationship that defines the nature of loyalty for Chinggis.
Jack Weatherford (00:52:19) I would say in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Börte. But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects. They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things. So, she was by him and she was positive in every regard so far as we know forever.
(00:52:41) Although she was not submissive but she was always on his side. And Jamakha, he was just a little too hot-headed for me. I mean, in my evaluation of him. That these things like, “Oh, we’re going to drop down on the Merkit and we’re going to come through the smoke hole, kill everybody,” and all. And he had a flair for the dramatic, even in a way of giving the gold belt to Temüjin.
(00:53:08) But Jamakha also explained himself at the end of life, and he said, “We both lost our father, but I also lost my mother. And you had a strong mother to raise you, I did not.” And he said, “You had Börte, you have a very strong wife to help you. And my wife, just used a word like prattler, like she just sort of complains and prattles along, and we did not have a relationship.”
(00:53:40) So, I think something about that rings true, that there were some elements of that that were true. But Jamakha certainly didn’t have the intelligence and the real genius for dealing with people, dealing with soldiers, especially in warfare that Temüjin had.
Lex Fridman (00:54:02) Yeah, in that relationship, there’s a contrast because Chinggis Khan did not accumulate riches or accumulate power in a way that was for the sake of the riches or for the sake of the power. He was always very practical in what is the way to maximize the success of this operation.
Jack Weatherford (00:54:24) Yes, yes. I often wonder, what happened to the gold belt? It disappeared from the story. And a gold belt doesn’t just disappear. What happened to that? It’s so interesting because Temüjin was never interested in material goods. And when as Chinggis Khan, as the ruler, in some ways you could say, became the richest man in the world, because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him.
(00:54:50) But he always dressed simply. He always lived in the tent and he said, “I eat what my soldiers eat. I dressed the way my soldiers dressed. I lived the way my soldiers live. We are the same.” So, he had no interest in the wealth. And Jamakha, he had sided before with Wang Khan, which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people, and all. But he just didn’t have the temperament, I think, that was going to be helpful for Chinggis Khan’s continued rise.

Power

Lex Fridman (00:55:23) That is one of the powerful things about the Chinggis Khan stories. He came from nothing.
Jack Weatherford (00:55:27) From absolute nothing.
Lex Fridman (00:55:29) And he didn’t, from what I see and understand, become sort of corrupted by the riches or changed. He fundamentally remained the same person who does not have value for material things.
Jack Weatherford (00:55:42) He changed and matured in various ways over life as we all do, or we hope we do. But he never became avaricious in any way. He was never greedy. He was never acquisitive. He kept a simple life. And part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him. No one was allowed to make his likeness. They couldn’t paint a picture of him. They couldn’t make a statue of him. No building could be built dedicated to him. No palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort. Not even, at the point of death, the simplest gravestone. Nothing, nothing.
Lex Fridman (00:56:19) It’s fascinating that a kid, like a boy that doesn’t know the world would have the intelligence to understand how corrupting that is. The moment somebody builds a statue of you, it’s like a slippery slope. Doors becoming… Not seeing the world clearly. Not seeing surrounding yourself with sycophants that don’t tell you the information. Not being able to select the right people to lead the armies or to lead the territories that you conquer. So, it’s interesting that he had that foresight of don’t record, don’t worship. That’s because that’s a dangerous road to go down for a leader.
Jack Weatherford (00:57:00) And it’s very hard to explain how he stuck to that, how he got it. You’re so easily corrupted by power, and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude towards his relationship with the people around him, his guard mostly, or his private part of the army that went with him, the central part of the army. That was his relationship, his family. He had four wives. This was what was important to him. And in fact, no portrait was painted until 1278. Well, by then he’d already been dead for 51 years. And then no statue until the 21st century.

Secret History

Lex Fridman (00:57:46) Just incredible. But let’s go to the document that you referenced several times, the Secret History.
Jack Weatherford (00:57:53) The Secret History is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much. But I said, Chinggis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. The people couldn’t take notes. Even the army was not… He, Chinggis Khan ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people. And it was adapted from the Uyghur people.
(00:58:14) And so to this day, it’s often called the Uyghur alphabet, the Uyghur alphabet. So, he had ordered that, and he’d ordered his children to learn to read and write. And some did, I think most did not, but some did. But one of the things he did with every campaign, even the one with the Merkit when he rescued Börte was he always adopted one orphan.
(00:58:41) And that child became a full member of the Mongol nation and his household. His mother Hö’elün would raise the child. So, she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes, but they all became very high-ranking members of the government. And one was the Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier, but he could read and write, he was the best. And later eventually, he became the supreme judge appointed by Chinggis Khan, of course. And so when Chinggis Khan died, he recognized it was important not just to write down the law, that’s all Chinggis Khan allowed to be written in blue books, only the law. Nothing about him or campaigns or military, anything,
(00:59:27) But Shigi Qutuqu, was his name. Shigi Qutuqu realized that this was going to be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened. So, he compiled the work. A part of it he… I don’t know other people contributed, helped him, just a little bit unclear. The Mongols, they don’t specify that. So, they always tell you exactly where something happens so we know exactly where it happened. In Mongolia, you can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That’s very important to the Mongols.
(00:59:55) And we also know it as the year of the Mao, so it was 1228, Chinggis Khan had died at 1227. So, he wrote down, it begins with what we would say are the myths, although I’m not sure they’re myths, but the origins of the myths. It begins with the marriage of a Gray-Blue Wolf with a Tawny Deer.
(01:00:14) Then some people say, “Well, that’s some kind of myth. It’s totemic.” And Mongols mostly, they look at me, I asked them about this. They said, “What? He was named Blue-Gray Wolf, she was named Tawny Deer. They married.” They are very practical about it, and they think they’re real people. Maybe they were or not, I don’t know.
(01:00:36) So, this earlier history is just the Genealogy as it should be, who knows? But it’s also in there because like Bodonchar, they call it Bodonchar the Fool, the ancestor of Temüjin. He’s cast out because he’s just so dumb. The rest of the family doesn’t want him. And his father is undetermined who he was. He kidnapped the Ö’elün Üjin woman. She has the child who becomes the ancestor, Temüjin.
(01:01:00) So, it’s a confusing mess. But I tend to think it’s probably accurate. It has a lot of good information. And by the time you get to the life of Temüjin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person Shigi Qutuqu, he was there. Sleeping in the same gear with the people. So we even see in there, he will record instances where Börte sits up in bed and tells her husband, “Okay, you got to do this. You got to do that. You can’t do this anymore. We can’t think of”… It’s all recorded, right?
(01:01:30) So, it’s a very intimate document. And this is one reason that it was secret, it was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Chinggis Khan’s prohibition against putting out information about the family. So, it was a secret for a very long time. So, much so that scholars began to think it didn’t exist.
(01:01:50) And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time, in Beijing. He discovered a manuscript which was very, very odd that people didn’t think was anything because it’s all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese. But he recognized, but if you read it, pronounce it, it makes sense to a Mongolian. And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.
Lex Fridman (01:02:23) So, they were recording the sounds.
Jack Weatherford (01:02:26) The sounds, correct. They used Chinese characters to record sounds. Which is always problematic in some little areas here, not exactly sure what the name is or something like… But it was a very unusual document. And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already.
(01:02:47) So, that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much, and I liked their work very much. And so it was helpful that it already existed. And some of it existed in other Mongolian sources that were written later. Some of it was just incorporated.
(01:03:06) So, it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn’t a hundred percent pure. It had… Little things had happened to it along the way. Some things have been stepped here and there, and a few words changed. Sometimes for Temüjin, they call him Chinggis Khan. Well, he wasn’t the Khan then. And sometimes they call him Khan, which is like chief, and other times Khan, which is Emperor. Well, in Mongolian, it’s a big difference.
(01:03:31) So, there are little things like this that move around that you’re not sure why. But it’s a document that I have great faith in. It was not published in English until 1982, but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the 50s. It was ready for publication, and he was having trouble with the publisher. And so it didn’t appear for nearly 30 years.
(01:03:55) And it was supposed to be two volumes. The first volume is the translation, the second volume was going to be the notes, and the second volume was lost. To this day, it hasn’t been found. I would love to see that. But anyway, now it’s in all languages, just about in the world.
Lex Fridman (01:04:14) Can you clarify? So there’s two volumes, the 19th century Chinese manuscript covers the first volume.
Jack Weatherford (01:04:23) Yes, that was translated and then published by Harvard University. But the notes were just the notes from the scholar, Francis Woodman Cleaves. Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes.
Lex Fridman (01:04:23) I got it.
Jack Weatherford (01:04:34) There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things in it. And they also, they disapproved of some things, so they would try to put their own notes in the margins to kind of correct the story and explain in a way why the Mongols women would be often marrying their stepson. It just did not match with Confucian ethics. So, there’s several things like that that they try to skip around. But so it’s interesting just to read the Ming Dynasty notes that are attached to it. But the document itself, Mongolian Nuuts Tovchoo, it’s just so important. And for me it was the guiding document. I didn’t want to be guided by anything else, first.
(01:05:21) Everything else I would check to correlate and fill in blanks and give more information. But I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there, and to feel it. And it’s so important, I think, because your history does not live in books. History does not live in archives or even libraries, as much as I need them for my work.
(01:05:45) But history lives in the people. History lives in the memory of the people and the culture. And for example, the episode with the kidnapping of Börte. So, I went to that place and I didn’t know when it happened, what season it happened. It was very important for figuring out the bursts that came afterwards and other events that were being correlated.
(01:06:06) Very important to me. And so I’m just talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there. They said, “Oh, it’s clear, it was the winter.” I said, “Oh, where did you read that?” He said, “No, granny Kuoqchin was on the ground, and she could feel the vibrations.” She said, “Look, this is summertime now. You’re not going to feel any vibrations the ground here is so soft.” Suddenly a whole important piece that I’ve been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse.
(01:06:44) And he was absolutely right. It could only happen in the winter. And that also correlates with the time that reading was done. So, it correlates with other historic factors. But then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things. History lives in the people.
Lex Fridman (01:06:59) Just to link on that point, you visited different places that were important to the story of Chinggis Khan. What did it feel like? What are some memorable things about just the experience of standing there?
Jack Weatherford (01:07:16) Yes. I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all. And there was so little to learn. I mean, everything was kind of known of whatever the Chroniclers had recorded, the archeologists had found whatever they had found. And I get there, and he hadn’t spent much time there, he didn’t identify with it, I wasn’t feeling anything.
(01:07:37) But in Mongolia, I would go to these places and I would know… If Chinggis Khan came back today, he would know exactly where he is. There’s no road, there’s no sign, there’s no building, there’s no power line going to… nothing. And just to smell the air, to feel it, to see the animals, and to see what kind of animals live here, what kind of plants are growing here, you begin to get a-
Jack Weatherford (01:08:00) … here. What kind of plants are growing here? You begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking and then you begin to see, ah, I know which direction they came from, the only direction they could come from was that way. You begin to see it and his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way that I have the text or the text is it has no scenery, no props, nothing like that. The Mongols all understand their way of life, they don’t need to explain anything. They know which way the ger faces with the sun, they know all these things but, for me, that’s how I learned it, it was from being with the people, it was the most important thing and this was starting in the 1990s and the people, at this time, they were amazed that I would come.
(01:08:51) The Soviet era had just ended, socialism was just ending, democracy was starting and Genghis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century and every known descendant of Genghis Khan was killed in Mongolia following the secret history, that became the key to writing what I wrote. Take the history, which is difficult to understand, you have to go over and I often never understand different parts or I change my mind and think it was yes now it’s no but the secret history is a valuable document. And to me, also, it’s the opening document of Mongolian written language and I think it’s very important how do people begin their written language and they begin it with the words [foreign language 01:09:45], from highest heaven came the destiny of the blue wolf who is married to the tawny deer and their descendants who came from the Great Sea to live at the base of Mount Burkhan-Khaldun.
Lex Fridman (01:10:03) And then integrating the spiritual elements of nature, the mountains and the Great Sea and this deep connection to nature that they have.
Jack Weatherford (01:10:15) Mongolia is a world that, for the most part, is the same as when Genghis Khan was there, we cannot say that far to any other place in the world. Certainly not for America but, just a few hundred years ago, it was entirely different, people, languages, everything. But you can’t say it for London or Moscow or Istanbul, Constantinople, all of these things have changed so much but Mongolia is still Mongolia. It’s one of the largest countries in the world and space with the fewest number of people about, today, 3.3 million and they’re spread out and they live in their environment in such an intimate way. This was important for learning about Genghis Khan, how he thought, how he hunted, how he strategized for war, you learn that from the people today because they’re still there, they’re still living.

Mongolian steppe

Lex Fridman (01:11:10) What’s the open Mongolian steppe like? As we return to the feeling of Temujin and Genghis Khan, what’s it like looking at this place that has not changed since this time?
Jack Weatherford (01:11:22) The first thing I think about this steppe is that you can see forever in every direction. There’s no building, nothing to stop your line of view and it’s like being in the ocean in many ways. So, you have this extremely open space and the wind is usually blowing through it but it’s extremely fresh, it’s coming out of Siberia, it’s coming out of the Arctic, it sweeps down across Mongolia, cold as a dickens sometimes but it’s always fresh, always fresh. So, you have the wind coming in, you have the smell of the wind but also then there’s grass, the smell of grass becomes very important. Now, because of the particular location, from one year to another, one area may have grass one year and then drought the next year, another area has grass so you don’t always know. If it’s not grass, it’s dust. You have dust flowing in, the dust doesn’t smell so good, it doesn’t feel so good but that’s just one more part of the country.
(01:12:28) The waters are mostly pure. Now, unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining in several areas but, even when I was there or even today when we go to some place like the Selenga River where we talk about the market lived, so it’s a place of pure waters and that’s how Mongolians define their world is by the water. Genghis Khan does not give lands to his sons to rule, he gives waters and people to rule. They do not refer to the earth as land, they refer to the earth as dalai, ocean, the sea. And so, water is very important and, to learn the rules about water, you don’t camp by water. If you can’t by water, your animals and you are going to be polluting it, messing it up so they’re back, maybe in our modern terms, about a kilometer back. You take the animals to the river to drink and then you take them away. You do not bathe in that river, you take the water away from the river and you bathe away from the river so you do not pollute the river.
(01:13:41) The rules are very strict and very clear and they’re from the time of Genghis Khan about how to deal with … But also, it’s dangerous to live close to the river because there are flash floods in the summertime, you could suddenly have it and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water. So, the people, they live with nature in a way that I don’t see anywhere else in the world. And even today with the changes with the cell phone and with solar panels and they could get TV out in the middle of the steppe, still they’re living a similar life. The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike but they’re still herding cows and yaks and camels. If it’s on a motorbike, okay, they’re still doing it the Mongol way.

Mounted archery and horse-riding

Lex Fridman (01:14:28) But then, if we go to the time of Temujin, of Genghis Khan, another component is the horses. Can we talk about their relationship with the horse? Thinking about this open steppe, from a young age, all Mongols are trained to master riding horses. As you write, while standing on the horse, so they learn how to ride while standing on the horse from a young age. While standing on the horse, they often jostled with one another to see who could knock the other off. When their legs grew long enough to reach the stirrups, they were also taught to shoot arrows and to lasso on horseback making targets out of leather pouches that they would dangle from poles so they would blow in the wind. The youngsters practice hitting the targets from horseback at varying distances and speeds, the skills of such play proved invaluable to horsemanship later in life. Can you speak to the relationship of Genghis Khan and the Mongols to horses?
Jack Weatherford (01:15:36) The Mongol and the horse are inseparable. I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because that was insulting. I said, the Mongol and the horse, they live together, they know each other with every twitch of the muscle and they smell the same. Well, I was saying it just not to be insulting about anything but they have that deep intimacy and the horses do know their owner from the smell. This is very important. It’s also important for Genghis Khan because they made the flags, what they call [foreign language 01:16:05], out of the horse hair from their own horses. And so, in battle, they used it for a very practical purpose and that is the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag, it was other members of their own herd.
(01:16:23) So, the language itself, I have never ever mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less for all the other things about it. I can remember, Mongolians, being out there in the countryside, they say, “Oh, I want to learn English.” I say, “Okay. Yeah, that’s nice, you teach me some words in Mongolian, I teach you some words.” “Okay.” They say, “What color is that horse?” I say, “Brown,” they would say, “Brown.” I’d say, “Yes, okay. What color is that horse?” “Brown.” Then they said, “But you said this color was brown, what color is this?”
(01:16:56) I said, “Well” … It’s just amazing. They have words based on how smooth the coloring is and the variation in the texture and all the different … Today in English, sometimes you can put them together, we say yellow brown or brown brown or black. But the words for horses, of course, by sex and then they have three because they have geldings and so they’re very important too and by age and by whether or not they’ve reproduced in the case of the females, all these things are important parts of the horse and the horse. And the horse …
(01:17:34) A few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan raised in the dust of many fast horses. It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit and the dust itself is important. The Mongolians, they will wipe the sweat and the dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead which is the most sacred part of the body where the soul resides. This is how intimate a relationship is with the horses and they’re hard on them in some ways, they train them very well, they ride them very hard but the horses are also trained for that. They use a very small crop, it’s a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end, that they hit the rump of the horse, never anything else. They’re horrified at Western people who use metal spurs and metal to harm the horse in the stomach. And to harm the head of a horse, they say it’s a capital crime. I don’t know anyone who’s ever executed for it but you never ever harm a horse’s head.
(01:18:43) So, the horses are important in every way, even religiously important with the making of the fermented horse’s milk that the mother goes out every morning and she throws some to each of the four directions to start the day and they use it for every kind of thing. But some things puzzled me that, in my watching, I remember one day being with a very nice family, it happened to be on a gelding day when they were out there gelding the would-be stallions who don’t get to be stallions. But this family, they had a bunch of boys and only one or two girls, there were four or five boys and one boy was maybe 11 years old, he fell from the horse. You could see it not so far away, he fell from the horse and he didn’t get up. No one moved. In fact, they all turned attention away and I thought, what am I supposed to say? “This boy fell down, somebody go get him.” No.
(01:19:44) And then the boy was trying to hobble back, he still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn’t remount and he was trying to hobble back so his little brother went out to help him come in and they came into the ger and they sat down, the mother just turned her back. And I’m thinking, how on earth can you do this? This is a child, this is your child. But two weeks later, by chance, another boy who is practicing for Naadam, the annual races this boy had been doing, he was often in an area right close to the mountain area and the horse bolted, took off through the woods, he was knocked off by a tree and then the horse went deeper into the woods, the boy followed him, the boy became lost. The boy was 12 years old, he was lost for two weeks and he lived. I would’ve died in 48 hours, he lived.
(01:20:37) He said, well, he slept in the daytime when it was warm, he walked at night when it was cold, even though this was the summertime, the nights can be quite cold especially on a mountain, and he sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away. And he knew what to eat and then he walked until he found water moving and then he would follow that water down to the … He lived and I realized, the boy falls from the horse, his mother’s not going to be there, she knows that. And it’s probably hard for her too to see her boys suffer but she knows.
Lex Fridman (01:21:13) Just a small tangent. There’s a wrestler named Cary Kolat and he tells the story about mental toughness, that the first time he saw truly mentally tough people was when he visited Mongolia for a wrestling tournament. And he remembered that they were taking showers in ice-cold water and, all the other wrestlers, they would take the shower and then, when the water hits them, you could see a little grimace. With the Mongols, it was emotionless. So, ice-cold water or any other kind of hardship, you build a hardness to that.
Jack Weatherford (01:21:56) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:21:56) And I suppose that falling from the horse is just an example of that.
Jack Weatherford (01:21:57) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:22:00) There’s a mental hardness and a mental toughness.
Jack Weatherford (01:22:03) You have to be able to take care of yourself. And with the weather, for example, often in that time, and still today, some people, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow in order to prepare for the coming winter. And the valley where I lived, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition and the water is very cold coming down from the mountain and, every day when there’s a break, they go down, they take … Again, they do not get in the water, never but they take the water and they pour the cold water over themselves and, yes, it’s refreshing to them, refreshing.

Genghis Khan’s army

Lex Fridman (01:22:49) Well, then, getting back to the horses, the value they had for the horses and the horse riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history. So, if we just talk about the mounted archery that they’ve employed in war. The Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. So, there’s a lot to say. You have to time, and just watching some of the videos, it’s just incredible how stable you could be on top of a horse and I guess you’re supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all four of the feet of the horse are off the ground. And so, you have to time all of that, you have to position your body to maintain balance and then there’s the skill of the actual holding and shooting the bow accurately and there’s, obviously, the technology of the bow, the composite bow, the recurve bow.
(01:23:52) They’ve also, I read, used crossbows later, they’ve adapted the technology and there’s a particular kind of a thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse. The thing is bouncing up and down, so you have to not drop the arrow. It’s just incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway. Can you speak to this exceptional excellence that Genghis Khan and the Mongols had for riding horses and engaging in war off of the horse?
Jack Weatherford (01:24:31) The Mongol, the horse and the bow were a perfect combination and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible the synchronization and the timing of the movements and also the years of skill. The fact that, from absolute birth, the Mongols would be on a horse and, by three years old, they would probably be riding alone on the horse. Now, when I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time, all jockeys on horses for races had to be under six years old. That was the age limit, the cut-off was six years old at that time and so you had some as three years old racing out there. It’s absolutely incredible. And of course, at that age, they can’t even have a saddle because it can’t even be used so all they’re doing is staying on the horse, the horse has been trained to do what it has to do and they just stay on it.
(01:25:29) But by staying on it, they learn the horse, they become one and, not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses. Usually, five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle and this ability to shoot. You have to defend your animals, there are wolves around, foxes, other things, in some areas, there were even tigers and other animals that would come in and you had to be able to shoot to defend it against other people who might be raiding you. So, they became excellent archers that had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. Now, I say all that because it’s very important but those are all nomadic traits of the great steppe anyway. In an earlier version, you had the huns who came out of Mongolia and hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun, to this day, that’s what they say for a human being. So, they came out of Mongolia and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia and they had similar skills.
(01:26:40) So, you have this perfect weapon but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it and this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all but the genius of Genghis Khan came in. Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times, a number of Turkic leaders or even Attila the Hun who, of course, was actually born in the West but they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders and it wasn’t that they were so excellent in their strategy, they were very good in warfare and that’s what carried them through.
(01:27:20) Genghis Khan’s army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small. When you’re going against China that has millions just in the army, not to count in the country, and you’re going against Russia and you’re going against the Middle East and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas, your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow and each horse. That’s the weapon but the army becomes the super weapon of Genghis Han, how he organized it, on how he used it and the strategies that he put together.
Lex Fridman (01:28:04) Yeah. When you have a small army … Just think about that. A small army that conquered the world.
Jack Weatherford (01:28:13) It would fit in a stadium today in America.
Lex Fridman (01:28:18) So, there’s extreme efficient coordination of units, mostly cavalry, right?
Jack Weatherford (01:28:18) All cavalry.
Lex Fridman (01:28:24) It was all cavalry?
Jack Weatherford (01:28:26) He had no infantry and he had no baggage train, he had no backup commissary, early on, no engineer corps, later one was added, much later. But no, all cavalry.
Lex Fridman (01:28:40) And so, there’s light cavalry and heavy cavalry and breaking down units using the decimal system, 10, 100, 1,000 so there’s a hierarchy where you delegate authority but, to the degree there’s commands, they must be followed strictly.
Jack Weatherford (01:29:03) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:29:03) So, for extremely efficient, accurate, precise deployment of these troops in the battlefield and the dynamic movement of the troops, including all the interesting tactics that were utilized, you have to have really good communication and coordination and, for that, orders must be followed.
Jack Weatherford (01:29:23) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:29:25) Is there something to speak to that? How do you tune this kind of system to where everybody is working together so well?
Jack Weatherford (01:29:31) I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him. So, he had extreme loyalty. And then, as you mentioned, he organized as decimal system so the smallest unit of the army was the [foreign language 01:30:04], the squad of 10 men. They were put together and then, the head of that squad, he had total control over it but the men knew that they were going to protect each other and they had to come back with every member or every body, you don’t leave anybody behind. So, this was extremely important.
(01:30:25) So, if you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he’s risking his own life for you also and you know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you. The army, they were organized with five horses each man, they had their bow and they had a lot of arrows, as many as they could have, but they also retrieved arrows at the end of their battle and they also would retrieve the enemy arrows. This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia because the Russians could not use Mongolian arrows, they could knock them in their bow but the Mongols could use Russian arrows.
(01:31:05) So, all these little things but it’s not even just the arrow, also they had to carry needle and thread. Every soldier had to be able to sew and sometimes that could be a torn garment, it could be a piece of skin or a wound that somebody has. It was a very odd thing when you think about the army of Genghis Khan and they’re carrying everything themselves, they don’t have any pack train behind them and that one of the things they have to carry is needle and thread in order to sew up things.
Lex Fridman (01:31:36) So, complete self-reliance in that regard.
Jack Weatherford (01:31:38) Yes. They also carried dried dairy products, aaruul it’s called, dry curd and they can keep it for a couple of years even. But you dry it and then, when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water, you ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom and turns into thick protein. It’s said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire, they had enough food. They would …
(01:32:04) So, all these little things at the lowest level were important as well at the highest level of his loyalty of his men to him and it went all the way down. Loyalty was extremely important and he organized the army into left wing, right wing or east and west. Mongols, the word for left is east, the word for right is west so those two wings and then in the middle was the [foreign language 01:32:30], the center, this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle.
(01:32:39) Then usually they would have a vanguard and a rearguard and sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through. And they never marched the way other armies do it in a line of one following the other, they would always go in long lines spread out in wings so that each horse is on its own path, you can say, but all parallel together. So, they had very precise ways of doing things and this, I think, was the secret with him and he used the best people but he was willing to train them as much as possible, he never punished them for what happened. So, Shigi Qutuqu, for example, the supreme judge, he was command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan and he lost the battle which is very, very unusual for Mongols.
(01:33:43) So, Genghis Khan went out with him, said, “Okay, let’s go to the battlefield together and look it over and you explain to me what you did and then we will talk about it.” So, he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him and they knew they weren’t going to be punished, it’s not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No, Genghis Khan knows every general is going to try 100% and, if they retreat fine, they’re saving Mongol lives, they know what to do, he respects that. So, all these things like that fit together but I think a part of it that was important for him … So, he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery and how that all fit together but he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw.
(01:34:38) I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we’re going to make it a little faster, we’re going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first. So, he went into Tangut territory of what’s now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. So, he went there and, of course, the cities have walls around him, this is a man who’s never encountered a wall in his life. Well, he did but they were made out of felt, the walls around his tent or felt walls.
Lex Fridman (01:35:23) Yeah. Just imagine what it’s like for the first time in your life seeing a wall.
Jack Weatherford (01:35:29) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:35:30) When you come from the Mongolian steppe where there’s very few even natural wall-like things.
Jack Weatherford (01:35:36) Right. Well, they have wall cliffs in some places, they’re familiar with that and they can climb them but they don’t have people at the top shooting down the mountain but on the … So, he looked but he looked at everything around him and he saw, okay, they have this river and they have all these channels and they’re always moving water around and, like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon, anything that doesn’t move is a target. You’ve got moving water, you’ve got a standing non-moving wall so he said, okay, the men are going to dig a channel and they’re going to bring down the wall of the Tangut city.
(01:36:16) Well, they did it and they didn’t know exactly what they were doing and the embankments weren’t high enough and too much water came in from the Yellow River and actually flooded out the Mongol camp. But okay, it happened, we learned that lesson so we’re going to improve it and that became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols for the next 50 years, all the way to Baghdad. They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258.
(01:36:45) So, this ability to see things and to try them and, if they fail, to try them in a different way but a better way … We all think we learn from our mistakes. We all, yeah, yeah, I learned from that, I … And what do we do? We repeat the mistake. I think it’s just a part of human nature. Well, it didn’t work the first eight times but I’m going to do it one more time, I think it’s going to work. I know I’m going to win the lottery this time because I got the right … That’s how we think. But he had that real ability to, first of all, to be humble before these other things he didn’t know about, technology, and to understand that he didn’t understand but he could understand it in his own way and he did. Over and over, the Mongols were excellent at putting together new things and new ways and using them against their enemies.
Lex Fridman (01:37:37) So, rapid, extreme, continued innovation. So, you couple that with a, you have to say, a revolutionary idea that promotion should be based on merit. That idea combined with the innovative approach to military it just feeds on itself because the people who are learning from their mistakes and constantly improving are the ones that get promoted in the positions of power and then they inspire everybody else to do the same. And so, if every action is judged based on the excellence of that action, then over time, repeated iteration in war creates a more and more powerful army.
Jack Weatherford (01:38:25) Yes, yes. And they were able to do that for three generations to create an army that was ever expanding, ever changing its tactics and its technology and they got worse at it over time but Genghis Khan was the one who innovated it. He was the best with it and he used to throughout his lifetime and he was getting better over his lifetime with using foreign information, foreign technology, foreign ideas. He just had a genius for that.

Military tactics and strategy

Lex Fridman (01:39:01) If we can go back to the horses, you mentioned every soldier had five horses. The reason for that is the horses get tired.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:07) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:39:08) And so, you can cover a lot of ground in a single day.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:11) Yes. Usually, the way the rotation of the horses were, the horse would usually ride for one day and then rest for the next four to five days and then another horse would be riding the next day. One way to measure it is that, later, at the time of the death of Ogedei Khan, the word went from Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.
Lex Fridman (01:39:33) Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:35) Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman (01:39:35) So, let’s just imagine this army that’s able to move at such high speeds, does not need to follow roads because it’s used to riding in the open steppe.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:45) Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:39:46) So, you can do all kinds of dynamic movements in encircling a place.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:52) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:39:52) And then, also, one of the other famous things is the feigned retreat that was used continuously. Can you explain how that worked?
Jack Weatherford (01:40:00) The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that, they fought for victory. That was the one thing. So, to retreat, to save lives and all, there’s no shame in that. So, the Mongols would often retreat and Genghis Khan, basically, he himself never fought a battle that he thought he could lose and he won every battle he fought. That wasn’t true for every general under him, as we said for Shigi Qutuqu for example, but he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating and in not fighting, not engaging the enemy.
(01:40:42) However, that also becomes a tactic and that they would send in a small group of soldiers to attack and the Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse, they were able to then act like they were defeated and turn but they could still fire backwards which is the Parthian shot which is unusual in the world. Not totally unique but unusual to fire backwards. But the Mongols also could lean down and fire under the neck of the horse so they’re protected, they had many different ways.
(01:41:15) So, they’re firing coming, they’re firing going but, usually, the soldiers who are against them would break ranks to chase them. They want to go, they want to get the weapons, they want to kill the Mongols and, if they didn’t immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out like loot from someplace and valuables around and soldiers usually couldn’t resist it.
(01:41:38) So, they’d come chasing out after the Mongols, pale male going in every different direction and then they would get to a certain point and, from behind the two hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them. Over and over, this tactic worked, it’s like the one with the water. I’m thinking, the people, how can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing, how can they not know that.
Jack Weatherford (01:42:00) How can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing? How can they not know that?
Lex Fridman (01:42:04) Human nature. There is something that when the forces are retreating-
Jack Weatherford (01:42:04) You want to follow them. You want to run after them.
Lex Fridman (01:42:08) You want to follow them. You can’t help it. I don’t know what that is. That’s maybe the animalistic, but take that with the ability at high speeds for the Mongols to encircle and attack the flanks. Which there has been many great military historians who have written about the great military forces throughout history, and one of the things you write about and in general is the Mongols don’t get written about almost at all, and don’t get credit for the military tactics and the military genius exhibited through the different strategies. This kind of idea of the feigned retreat and then attacking the flanks that’s been, if not invented and perfected by Genghis.
Jack Weatherford (01:43:04) He really was a military genius. But there were other things too. They didn’t like roads. They just didn’t like roads. So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody ever came from, and the people would be unprepared for that.
(01:43:18) The most famous example is probably in Bukhara. This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, a great place in the world to this day. And they came across the desert. Well, nobody had ever attacked across the desert, so people see dust coming. They think, well, caravan. They don’t even know what’s going on. But it was the direction that was a surprise element in that particular case. So he was able to think in ways that the other people were not thinking yet, and to be able to surprise them.
Lex Fridman (01:43:48) What do you think it again, felt like to have this Mongol armada, the horses? The ground must shake when you have that many horses. What do you think it feels like to be in a town when Genghis Khan’s approaching?
Jack Weatherford (01:44:05) I think the terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had. He cultivated this reputation of ferocity. Not only did he win battles, but he… he didn’t allow people to write about him, as we said, but he encouraged refugees. And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it’s going to weaken them. It’s going to weaken their food supply, and they’re going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it.
(01:44:44) This is propaganda. It’s terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy. And so when you hear, or even if you know they’re coming, you see the dust, you hear the roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth, it must’ve been truly terrifying.
Lex Fridman (01:45:03) So psychological warfare was a part of the whole process, but as I understand, there was always an offer for the towns and the territories being attacked for them to surrender peacefully without the loss of life.
Jack Weatherford (01:45:18) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:45:19) And the alternative would be the near complete loss of life. Can you speak to that?
Jack Weatherford (01:45:26) Genghis Khan had a precise system. Exactly. He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols. Already much was known, but to explain to them that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared and they could continue in their professions. It’s just that now the rulers would be the Mongols. They would have to pay the taxes, and usually it would be the same taxes they’d paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols. That was the general system. And because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can’t leave a detachment there. So you’re going to leave the local people in charge to run their country or their city and their area, the way they have done in the past. He was absolutely faithful to that.
(01:46:10) And one episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son-in-law, Toquchar, he violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered. Genghis Khan called him in and he stripped him of his rank, and he said, “The next city, you go first as a common soldier.” And of course, he was killed in the next battle. I don’t know the name of the daughter, unfortunately. I’ve tried to figure that out. But anyway, it was a close relative to him, and he was killed in the next by violating this law. So that was the law.
(01:46:46) If the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone. What they did was they killed all the leaders. They felt like the elite had not served them well. And they usually kill the army, because they couldn’t incorporate the army into their own, the army had failed. But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot. It could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.
(01:47:23) So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn’t so severe. What was truly severe was if you surrendered, and many of them did, and then they knew they would not be harmed. So they’re not harmed. The Mongols go on. The Mongols are hundreds of miles away and all of a sudden, forget about the Mongols. Chinggis Khan sent word they were supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help. Forget about the Mongols. They’re far away. It’s a… No. He stopped, he returned, he conquered the city, and he killed everyone. That’s the way it worked.
Lex Fridman (01:47:57) So the most drastic slaughter happens when there’s an agreement and then betrayal.
Jack Weatherford (01:48:04) Yes. And as it turned out, I would say it was more the Middle East of what we call around Iran and Afghanistan, where these were the worst cases. I would say only in Afghanistan did sometimes the emotion of the slaughter take over in an unfortunate way. He had a grandson whom he loved very much, and that grandson traveled with him, and he had the happy childhood that had not had. And I think Chinggis Khan just loved that about him.
(01:48:39) But in Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan where the great Buddhas are actually. He was sent to Bamiyan, and as it says in the Persian history, the thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down. He was killed. And for Chinggis Khan, he had never lost a family member. Not one. None of his sons, none of his grandsons in battle, he had not lost them, and now to lose the most valuable grandson you have, the one that’s your pride and joy in so many ways.
(01:49:20) So he called the father, his own son, to him and did not tell him, did not announce it to the public. And the son came and the son didn’t know why he was being summoned. And Chinggis Khan said, “You have to tell me that you will not cry or moan when I tell you this, but your son is no more.” And the father was… No one was allowed to moan. No one was allowed to cry, no one was allowed to do anything. You just, he said, “Make them cry.” He came down on the people of Afghanistan so harshly. And it went on for weeks and weeks, the killing in Afghanistan. And then it just wore itself out. He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality and the slaughtering of these people should stop. And so he did.
(01:50:29) But that’s the only time I know of that he really kind of lost control of his own emotions. It’s something we can all understand, but his response was truly extreme of we will not cry, we will not mourn. They will cry. They will mourn.
Lex Fridman (01:50:47) So that goes against the cold, rational way he approached war, which is peace is offered, and then betrayal is punished.
Jack Weatherford (01:51:01) I should add, he did not slaughter the people in the peaceful towns. What happened was the killing of what people thought was the heir, and he well may have been, of Chinggis Khan, the killing of him revitalized a lot of people’s hopes and a lot of cities revolted. The ones who did not revolt were not killed. But the cities who revolted, he killed them all. There was a mass slaughter.

Wars of conquest

Lex Fridman (01:51:24) There are estimates that Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world’s population. To put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today’s population. How should we think about the brutality of numbers like these?
Jack Weatherford (01:51:51) The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it’s a total loss. It doesn’t matter what the number is, it’s a tremendous loss. And there was tremendous loss of life, as in every war.
(01:52:09) I don’t think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Chinggis Khan or the Mongols did it. You look today in the world, people are killing children, women, civilians, every day. Every day. And it’s always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing. And the United States has certainly involved with that. Supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, invading, fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. And it’s always, oh, but we’re defending democracy. Yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people.
(01:53:18) You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germany. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That’s America. That’s us. My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in that war, and he fought in Korea. And he was a good American. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it.
(01:53:52) And I don’t even condemn America, but I’m saying, how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves? But we tend to do that. We, especially barbarian people, people from steppe for example, we tend to demonize them. Or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them.
Lex Fridman (01:54:14) You said a lot of interesting things there. One is just the very nature of war. That war is hell. That sometimes things like dropping the atomic bomb, which is an act of essentially terror, in the same style as Genghis Khan, in an attempt to prevent further war.
Jack Weatherford (01:54:40) It’s a justification. People are always fighting for peace, always fighting for peace. World war I was to make the world safe for democracy and peace. And then World War II. But what happened? We went to war in Korea, we went to war in Vietnam. We bombed Cambodia, we bombed Laos, we bombed Afghanistan, we bombed Syria, we bombed Iraq. We’re always fighting for… And I’m not a pacifist. I am not, I grew up surrounded with soldiers and I’m not a pacifist, but I try to be a realist that all nations kill, it happens everywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:55:16) So can we universally also then, in the way you’re passionately criticizing wars of the 20th century, can we also criticize Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great and the wars fought by Caesar and others in the Roman Empire? That they’re essentially wars of conquest and in some human way were not necessary or were not defensive. They’re just part of this human drive to expand, to explore, and to accumulate power.

Dan Carlin

(01:55:49) Maybe this is a good place to also talk about somebody I respect a lot, Dan Carlin of a Hardcore History podcast. He did an amazing series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols called Wrath of the Khans. I recommend people go listen to it. He had a lot of interesting ideas there. One of them, he presented the idea of historical arsonists. So referring to figures who cause immense destruction, but also paved the way for new developments and progress, basically making this complicated case that destruction often in history paves the way for progress. What do you think about this idea?
Jack Weatherford (01:56:26) Creative destruction, it certainly works in some aspects of life, even with ourselves. For example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones, it sometimes works or we can destroy relationships that we’re in order to create new ones, it can work. When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult.
(01:56:49) I certainly think that these episodes create great changes. You can see great changes that happened because of the Mongol Empire. Now, whether or not that’s a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch for me. The Mongols helped to unify many countries. You can think Korea had been three, basically kingdoms, push them together. Everything that you see in China today was a part of the Mongol Empire. They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria. It was a little bit larger under the Mongols. Even Russia with so many little kingdoms and Duchies and Dukedoms, and the center had been in the Ukraine and Kiev, and they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more towards into what we call Russia now. And they began the process of the unification and had a great impact on the country.
(01:57:47) So in a way, it’s a new creation. Yes, it does arrive out of the destruction, but also I think we need to look where does the destruction come from? And it often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated and so corrupted, and so decayed of their own lack of moral fiber, that it was easy to conquer them.
(01:58:12) Kublai Khan finally conquered all of China. He was conquering a decayed dynasty. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the Caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution. No one likes war, and I certainly don’t like war, but I’m not 100% against it. I think that there are times that people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else, or of their family, and it’s justified in that sense to themselves. It may not be justified in a world sense. I just make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did if we can tolerate what the Americans did. And I am American through and through, there’s no question about that, but we overlook all of our things that we did.
(01:59:01) That’s interesting, for example, in Afghanistan. We were there for some 20 years. We had made the Taliban stronger before when they were fighting against the Russians, and then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out. But some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadran clan, the descended from Jamukha family, from his clan. This is what I mean when I say that The ramifications from that time are still with us, and we don’t even see it.
(01:59:33) And when Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said, “The Mongols,” meaning America, “The Mongols have returned. The Mongols have returned.” And he said, “The Americans are just the new…” I can see it. I don’t accept it, but I can see how people think. If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.
Lex Fridman (02:00:07) And there’s effects that you could talk about. I mean, the unification of China, Mongols or otherwise, is a very important step in the history of China that permeates to today. And then there’s a lot of stuff that we’ll talk about, the ideas of religious freedom, the postal network, the trade routes, all of this. There’s a lot of progressive consequences of the Mongol conquest and the Mongol Empire. We’ll talk about that. But let’s linger on the heavier topic for a little bit longer.
(02:00:39) We were talking about Dan Carlin, he was critical of your work a little bit, showing it respect, but also a little bit critical, as being a bit too… Emphasizing and focusing a lot on the positive impacts correctly and accurately, but not giving enough air time or describing the brutality of the killing, the hell that is war. Can you understand his criticism?
Jack Weatherford (02:01:12) Guilty. I’m guilty.
Lex Fridman (02:01:15) [inaudible 02:01:15]
Jack Weatherford (02:01:17) Carlin’s a very smart man. I respect him very much. I like him tremendously. And he’s right. But that is not what I want to stress. It’s not that I want to deny the killing. It’s not that I want to deny the warfare, but that’s pretty much the same everywhere in the world, and how much do we need to say about how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated, and all. No, it’s what comes afterwards. Just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards.
(02:01:54) If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You’ve got to be offering something that they want, something that they like. And all the things you’ve mentioned from the trading system, the postal system, the religious freedom, the rights of women, the rights of minorities, these were things that people responded to. So the world benefited tremendously from the life of Chinggis Khan. But all we want to talk about, and I don’t deny it, is the conquest part. Okay, that’s 20 years. It went on for another 150 years. There’s more to the story than just conquest.
Lex Fridman (02:02:51) There is a point that you correctly identify, and you’ve also written about Native Americans and so on, that history does seem to be written by the non-barbarians. But in reality, history is not divided in this way. And the barbarians are not these crude, brutal, plain, simple people. That there is a sophisticated, deep culture within them as well. All the different kinds of peoples that came from the steppe.
Jack Weatherford (02:03:20) Yes. I guess if there’s one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world. We tend to have two categories for them. They’re barbarians who kill people and eat one another, or they’re victims and we should feel sorry from them and nostalgic about everything about them, and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering. That’s the two roles for tribal people.
(02:03:50) But I’m trying to show them in a different light. That they conquered. Yes, they were conquerors, but they also created great things in the history of the world. And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I’m putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
(02:04:20) You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey the great ethics of the sky. And there were things like that about his vision that I think very few people in history had, a vision. And I look around the world today, and in my lifetime, since the time of Roosevelt’s death, I look around, I don’t see much vision. I see lots of slogans, lots of talk, policy papers. Oh my God, we can produce it. Where’s the vision? It’s always, we’re going to have peace and we’re going to have a better life and vote for me or vote for my party and we’re really for the people. What the heck are they talking about? There is no vision there. So what is this country? What should this country be? What is this world? How should we… No. No vision.
Lex Fridman (02:05:16) Well, those figures, I mean, they’re rare through history. The legendary figures that come along that have vision, but are able to capture the public imagination and heart and mind with the vision, but also have the skill to execute and implement it, and all of those things combined, and have the mental fortitude not to be corrupted by success along the way. All of those things.
Jack Weatherford (02:05:44) That’s very rare in history. Very rare.

Religious freedom

Lex Fridman (02:05:46) And when they come along, they change the direction of history. If we could linger on some of these world-defining ideas. Religious freedom. It’s just surprising and incredible that Genghis Khan was able to enforce, inspire the value of religious freedom throughout all of these disparate lands for whom religion was a very powerful force. So can you speak to that?
Jack Weatherford (02:06:16) Some empires in history, and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups. I mean, Rome to some extent was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions, not of the Christians, but reasonably. But what happened with Genghis Khan, the first campaign he had outside of Mongolia was for the Uyghur people who lived in Western China. They at that time were being ruled by, actually we had mentioned before, the Naiman king, Tayang Khan. His son Kuchlug had fled. No good, worthless, well son. Kuchlug had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan. They ruled over the Uyghur people. He had been a Christian. The Naiman had been a Christian tribe, but he converted to Buddhism.
(02:07:07) Well, his subjects were Muslim, and he outlawed the Muslim religion, and he made all kinds of things happen. So the Uyghurs sent a delegation to Genghis Khan. At this time they knew that the emperors of China were too weak to protect them, so they sent delegation to Genghis Khan and asked him to come and save them from him. And he did. He sent down a detachment. He didn’t actually go himself. He said a detachment down there, they drove Kuchlug from power. Kuchlug fled down towards Pakistan, in that direction, they caught up with him. They killed him. That’s what the Mongols did.
(02:07:42) And then Genghis Khan made the first law that he ever made for people outside of Mongolia. Up to this point, it’s been tribal law. And he saw, as we had mentioned before, the tribes were mostly fighting over women. So you outlaw the kidnapping of women, you outlaw the sale of women, and you cut down on a lot of the feuding. But he saw that “civilized” people fought a lot over religion. They weren’t fighting over women, they were fighting over religion. And so he made the law.
(02:08:13) Now, this was very interesting, we talk about religious freedom. Religious freedom comes in many forms. One form is to allow institutions to do what they want. So we’re going to allow the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims each to do what they want in the organized churches that they have. His law was not that. It presumed that. It allowed that, but he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
Lex Fridman (02:08:53) I mean, that’s a really, really powerful statement.
Jack Weatherford (02:08:56) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:08:56) That alone, I mean, that’s why you talk about Thomas Jefferson being deeply inspired by Genghis Khan. That religious freedom, yes, of the individual, but it’s such a powerful illustration, manifestation of just individual freedom period. If you in the world, in history, are allowed to practice any religion you want, I mean, that is one of the biggest way to say that the individual is fundamentally free in a society.
Jack Weatherford (02:09:33) Yes. It was a great source of power for him also. I don’t say that he did this because of some ideological reason. Just like he didn’t outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn’t come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life. His mother was kidnapped, his wife was kidnapped. He knew that that was a crime against every ethics that you can think of and every form of morality. That’s why he did it, not for ideological reasons, but practical reasons. It hurt people. It hurt people.
(02:10:06) It was the same with religion. He gave this right to everybody because it was going to be their own personal right to keep them from being hurt. And then that gave him tremendous support from minorities of many types. And so they flocked to him. Minorities after that, this was a minority effort of the Muslim Uyghurs to come to him, many people flocked to him for the same reason. For that kind of religious freedom.
Lex Fridman (02:10:32) So that religious freedom and also the other things you mentioned, they create a stable society and that allows him with a small army to administer a large empire.
Jack Weatherford (02:10:45) And also, I will say on a more practical political way of thinking, he recognized the power of having a balance of power of Shiite and Sunni. That both are going to be allowed, equal rights. One is not dominant over the other. And Christians and Jews. Well, that keeps the society from fragmenting against him or uniting against him, and it’s a kind of fragmentation that he’s taken advantage of. I don’t think that was his main reason, but I do think he was quite aware of that. That you give every religion the right, and unfortunately, the only religion he didn’t recognize as a religion was Confucianism. He said, “What do they do?” The Taoists can do magic on the earth and they can give people magic formulas and to cure, or they have all this kind of stuff going on. Well, what did the Confucianist do? So still the people could be Confucianist. That was okay, but he didn’t expend all the tax-free rights.
(02:11:51) See, that was another thing. He dropped all taxes on religious institutions, all types. But since the Confucianists were not necessarily classified. But then of course eventually that was abused so much because the religions were then getting everybody did not own a property. You can still use it. You can still farm your land, but it’s ours. And now you don’t have to pay taxes on it. You just give us some money. Got abused. But it started off as a good idea.
Lex Fridman (02:12:19) And genuinely, as I understand, maybe you can correct me, of course, there’s the practical aspect of those policies, but he himself was just curious about the different religions as well, as I understand. So he never chose any religion except the one from which he came. I guess, can you describe what he believed spiritually himself?
Jack Weatherford (02:12:45) It’s interesting, we said after the death of [inaudible 02:12:49], his grandson in Bamiyan and the slaughter that followed that, he went through a new phase in which he summoned religious scholars of all sorts of famous Chung Chang from China, who I despise. But anyway, he came with all of his magic formulas for things, and then a bunch of various Muslim leaders came. So Chinggis Khan was exploring all these different religions, and not just in a simple way. He had organized public lectures from these people and public debates, not antagonistic debates, but discussions among groups of people who hated each other and would never discuss anything. And suddenly this powerful man summons them and he has to say, “Okay, well explain your religion and explain yours.” And even sometimes you can’t just explain it in terms of your own scripture. What do you say to the people who believe a different?
(02:13:44) So he was exploring, but no, he never changed at all. He was an animist, we would say. That’s about the only term we know to use. Early in life he worshiped that mountain where he took refuge several times. Burkhan Khaldun, Burkhan Khaldun was the great refuge of his life. He would go to the top, he would pray. He would take off his hat. He would take off his belt. He would stand there before the sky and pray. Also later on, actually, this became rather dramatic. He would sometimes go away to pray, should we invade these people? So all of the subjects are waiting to hear what’s God going to tell Chinggis Khan when he goes up the mountain? There are episodes like that, but he was very sincere.
(02:14:28) But I think what happened, the Mongols have so many spirits in the water, the mountains, everything around them and you have to know them personally and pray to them and know what they like and don’t like. And should you sing to them or should you offer some milk products or what do you do? You have to know them. Well, you get away from Mongolia, and this was a problem in China, they didn’t know the spirits. This caused great consternation for the Mongols. You’ve got a land here and the spirits don’t like us. They’re hostile lands. We don’t even know who they are. We don’t know these spirits in China. It took a long time. And so gradually, Chinggis Khan, he moved from just the spirit of the mountain that he worshiped, which remained his main focus of worship his whole life, he removed that to the sky. That was the one universal spirit. It was everywhere in the world. The sky was the same for every people.
(02:15:25) And so for the Mongolians in their language, the word for sky and the word for heaven and the word for God and the word for weather are all the same, Tenger. Or Mönkh Khökh Tenger in the case of the eternal sky when they’re talking about it in a religious terms, the eternal blue sky. So he became more universalistic in this animist vision of the world. So then the sky could embrace all religions, all religions, and all people were trying to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well…
Jack Weatherford (02:16:00) … to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well, enlightenment is too specific a word, but the same form of moral life and guidance from the sky. He felt that each person knew morality, each person could communicate it, know morality within themselves. They didn’t have to just be taught it by somebody from a book. And in fact, as one of his grandson, Mongke Khan said, “You people,” talking to all the others, to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Daoists, said, “You people have your scriptures and you don’t live by them. We have our spirits and our shamans and our drums, and we live by them” and I think it’s true.
Lex Fridman (02:16:43) Throughout this conversation, it’s just blowing my mind that the kid from the Mongols that lost everything, just had the hardest of lives is now, yes, a military genius, but also this kind of sage-type character, to understand the value of religious freedom. I mean, there is a cynical way to see all these things, because he did awfully a lot of things that look like he’s a feminist. And you’re saying, “Well, the cynical way to see that is what he saw the value of promoting women in positions of power because they create a more stable society, and there’s less power, struggles,” all that. But the reality is, there’s a lot of things that look awfully progressive about the things he’s implemented, and they stayed.
Jack Weatherford (02:17:36) I’m not trying to say it in modern terms. When you have one million people, you’ve got to use every one. And the men are fighting. And so he left women to administer a lot of things inside the country, the economy in particular, and some of the ancillary Turkic kingdoms around the Mongols, such as the Ongud, the Qarluq, and the Uyghur, even, were administered by his daughters, primarily. And then his wives were in charge of administering the land of Mongolia itself, and handling the economy.
(02:18:09) So he was using the women, but in a very practical way, but it wasn’t necessarily in our ideological way. I think it’s the same with the environment. I’m not trying to say he was environmentalist in our modern way, but he passed very strict laws about the use of water, and also about not using water, that you couldn’t move water into an area to irrigate it. That was violating the earth and violating the water.
(02:18:37) So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, “This is going to return to pasture land.”
(02:18:54) This lasted, Kublai Khan was the one who changed that, actually, and then started allowing for more irrigation and the movement of water and things. But Chinggis Khan, we can’t use these modern terms of a human rights crusader, or that I’m trying to say he’s a Democrat, the modern sense, or environmentalist, or a feminist. But all of this was a part of it. Another part was the protection of envoys. He said, “Every envoy, every ambassador, every messenger is protected from arrest, from torture, and from killing. And if you kill one of ours, we will wipe you out.”
(02:19:35) And in 1240, that was the destruction of Kiev. This is after Chinggis Khan already know there’s Ogedei Khan, his son, the happy, happy drunk. Ogedei Khan’s army had come there under Subutai, the greatest general of the history of the world, I would say, Subutai, person who’s not … It wasn’t Chinggis Khan for the military part. He was the greatest strategist for organizing everything together. But the military part was Subutai. So Subutai had been there, and they sent in an ambassador who happened to be a woman. Now, some of the western sources say a daughter of Chinggis Khan. I have no evidence of that, and I don’t quite believe it, but maybe she was kin to him or something. Some say she was a daughter of Chinggis Khan. Others say she was a witch. The people of Kiev decided she was a witch and killed her. Okay. That’s it. That’s it. Kiev was destroyed for killing a Mongol envoy.
Lex Fridman (02:20:32) The envoy is a method of communication.
Jack Weatherford (02:20:34) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:20:35) And diplomacy.
Jack Weatherford (02:20:36) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:20:37) And so if you destroy that method of communication or disrespect it in any way-
Jack Weatherford (02:20:42) Exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:20:43) … and that sends a signal to everybody else. We send an envoy, you respect it.
Jack Weatherford (02:20:48) That’s why these plans, I say that the making of the modern world, most of the ideas have, we accept the idea. We don’t do the practice. All of us accept, today, diplomatic freedom. Diplomats are killed around the world yearly. We accept the idea of female equality and emancipation of every way, but in fact, they’re enslaved in many parts of the world today. We accept the idea of religious freedom, oh, but not those people. Theirs isn’t good. Their religion isn’t right. But our religion, we will tolerate them, but they got to be more like … No. We only say these things, but the world still hasn’t achieved some. And he did achieve these within his empire in his time, he achieved those.

Trade and the Silk Road

Lex Fridman (02:21:34) So one of the things we’ve mentioned, but I think is really, really fascinating and maybe in a measurable impact that Chinggis Khan had is on trade, and you could say a lot of stuff, but basically establishing a unified trade network that spanned, I don’t know how many thousands of kilometers, and there’s a lot of interesting things that were done to enable that trade. One is providing safety and security of not just the envoys, like we mentioned, for communication in the military context, but for the merchants. Can you speak to the what Chinggis Khan did for the trade network? Connected to the Silk Road, as an example?
Jack Weatherford (02:22:20) Nomads in general are interested in trade, and throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another or one oasis to another. And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent. They could create very little in their home country. They couldn’t grow hardly anything, and they didn’t have the technological skills for most of the crafts. So they’re very dependent on trade.
(02:22:46) Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn’t so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars. They’re going to have certain rights. For example, they get to be taxed one time. Whatever the national tax is, that’s it. They’re not taxed every time they stop in some new town.
(02:23:15) And he created a set of what we would call rest houses, or recuperation centers, where they could get fresh horses, they could get food, they could deposit their money and get paper receipts that could be used anywhere in the empire. They were guaranteed protection. If they had to pass to an area where it might be dangerous, then a small group, a squad of men and horses would go with them. So trade was extremely important. And then the Mongols also, they supported trade in a very odd way, and that is the merchants would come in, and they would ask for an outrageous price for some goods, much more than they should get, waiting for the Mongols to bargain them down. The Mongols would say, “I’ll give you much more than that.”
(02:24:10) And his son, Ogedei Khan, was the one to ask, “Why do you do that? You’ve got to stop doing that.” This was a Muslim financial advisor. He’d called in. He told him, “Well, you’ve got to stop paying more than people ask.” And Ogedei said, “Where’s the money going to go? It’s still in my empire. It’s going to come back eventually.” And so they had a much different attitude, with great respect. And I think a symbol of that is in the time of Kublai Khan, when we see that his uncle and father went to China and came back from China, and then on the second trip, Marco Polo went with him to China and back. They were safe the whole way. Their goods were safe. They came back with tremendous amount of wealth. They were never harassed. And the mere fact that they could cross, it took two years, but the mere fact that they could cross the whole continent safely and come back, it was unprecedented. We really don’t have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols. But since Chinggis Khan, there’s never been a year without contact between east and west. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.
Lex Fridman (02:25:19) I don’t think it’s possible to measure the positive impact of that, because it wasn’t just trade of goods. It was also exchange, explicit or implicit, along the way, exchange of ideas. Whether that’s exchange of technologies, exchange of philosophical ideas, scientific ideas, technical, mathematical ideas, all of this spread throughout and constantly circulating. Can you speak to that aspect of it?
Jack Weatherford (02:25:51) Yes. It was an exchange of ideas on every level. Ideas, technology, ideologies, beliefs, scientific information, everything was being exchanged, and even agricultural goods, of new crops for new areas. But Chinggis Khan, he had, a part of his genius of organization, was knowing what skill people had that would contribute towards his empire. For example, the Muslims were very good with arithmetic. In fact, he conquered the little empire of Khorezm, from which we get the word algorithm, because it was a mathematician there who invented algorithms. And so Khorezm, he conquered it very quickly, very easily, no problem, but it belonged to him. But the Muslims were using the zero. The Mongols were absolutely impressed with that. The Chinese less so. They were very suspicious about the zero. But the Mongols were very impressed. Because herders, numbers are important to them for keeping up with their animals.
(02:26:54) In fact, the Mongols have a simple system. They reduce all animals to the number of horses. You can ask somebody how many animals you can have, and they can say, “Well, 100 horses.” And it doesn’t mean they have 100 horses. It’s going to be like five cows count as four horses, five sheep or five goats count as one horse, four camels count as five horses. So they reduce it all down like that. The Mongols take a census of everything.
(02:27:25) And that’s one of the first things Chinggis Khan did. And that was one of the demands he made of every place he went, is a complete census of your people. And every house had to post outside, how many people, how many animals, what did they do, the occupations, all this information.
(02:27:41) So they needed good mathematics for this. The Muslims provided it. So they took the Muslims to China, these Middle Eastern scholars and all. Unfortunately, they were rather ruthless sometimes when it came to implementing the tax policies, but they became the financial advisors to him. Other groups of people had other roles like that, and he was moving them around constantly. And so you had a combination. As I said, he himself had that genius for combining new bits of technology, but it created a new kind of cultural spirit, in which other people were also combining technology at other levels, and being encouraged. It was no longer heresy or the devil’s work to bring in this thing.
(02:28:29) So we had the spread of printing, for example. We had the partial spread of something such as print money, for example. But we had almanacs being created now through printing, that combined different calendars and different information that was coming along. But one simple but lethal form of technology was that, for example, Chinese had gunpowder. Mostly it was used for fireworks, religious things, and then sometimes in warfare was used for kind of primitive hand grenade, or primitive bomb that could be thrown with a trebuchet.
(02:29:04) This was in the time of Kublai Khan more, the grandson. So they had that. The Middle Eastern, the Muslims, and the Byzantines, especially, they had naphtha, what we call Greek fire, flamethrowers that could set things on fire. The Europeans did not excel very much in technology. They were behind in almost everything, but they could cast bells for churches.
(02:29:31) Okay, let’s take that bell and we’re going to turn it on its side, and we’re going to use the principles of the flamethrower, and we’re going to use the gunpowder from China, and you’ve got a cannon. So the Mongols, even early on, by the time they got to the siege of Baghdad, but not, I think, in the lifetime of Chinggis Khan, but soon thereafter, in his sons and grandsons, they were using some very primitive forms of cannon. And even something like firing rods. We can’t even call it anything like a rifle, but it could fire a very small ballistic device and all. So this combination of metallurgy, gunpowder, flamethrowers, you put it all together and you come up with something incredibly different.

Weapons innovation

Lex Fridman (02:30:21) So if we jump around a little bit on the topic of a cannon, what are some technological developments that Chinggis Khan, and his son, and Kublai Khan were using? So how much gunpowder were they using? In general, what was their approach to siege warfare, for example? What are some different ideas there?
Jack Weatherford (02:30:44) If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, first of all, he changed a lot of the strategies that were no longer working. The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grassland, but by the time you get to Hungary, the grassland starts to give out. By the time you get to Poland, it’s so many farms. It’s hard for horses to get through to farms, and they don’t want to go on the roads. By the time you get to the Indus River, it’s too hot, too humid. The bows are beginning to wilt. The horses are exhausted. It’s not working.
(02:31:15) So to conquer South China, Kublai Khan had to come up with new things. One thing, the South Chinese had built a great wall. It was called the Great Wall of the Sea. This is before the wall that we know as the Great Wall, which is really the Ming Wall, of the Ming Dynasty, was built, but the Great Wall of the Sea. And they used it as a defensive navy. They had the largest navy in the world. It was defensive, and it was both literally defensive, and it came time for warfare, they would chain the ships together across the mouth of a harbor to protect the city. And so it became a wall.

Kublai Khan and conquering China

Lex Fridman (02:31:52) So actually, if we rewind, Kublai Khan, who was he? And what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare?
Jack Weatherford (02:32:05) In 1215, Chinggis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of Northern China. And at that time, Southern China was ruled by the Song Dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Xi Xia Kingdom of the Tangut people. And so most of Northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered middle later, his descendants conquered middle, and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south.
(02:32:38) But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing. And he was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Chinggis Khan. Well, he’s got lots of cousins out there who’ve been riding around. They’re conquering Russia, and they’ve already burned down Kiev, and they’ve conquered different places in the world.
(02:33:01) They’re real Mongols. That’s their whole life. And he’s born, and he doesn’t meet Chinggis Khan until he’s about seven years old, because Chinggis Khan was away on a conquest in Central Asia. And Chinggis Khan came back and he met him and he said, “Oh, he doesn’t look like a Mongol. He looks like his mother’s people.” His mother was Sorghaghtani, who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people, whom he had conquered sometime earlier.
(02:33:28) And he said, ” He looks like his mother’s people,” who is a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white with very bright red cheeks, and have a certain very round face, and so on. And so he looked different. And for whatever reason, his mother, I think she recognized the difference, and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Mongke, later Mongke Khan, Mongke, and she wanted him to become, even though her husband was a drunk, who died out on campaign drunk, and she took over northern China and she began to put it together.
(02:34:07) And she wanted her son to become the Great Khan, the emperor of the Mongol Empire. And this wasn’t in line. This wasn’t going to happen. Because he’s the fourth son out of three, others are way in line, way ahead of her.
(02:34:21) But she calls the revolution. She made it happen. She put her son in, Mongke Khan in 1251. He became Great Khan. He only lived till 1259. He died of something. It could have been cholera, or there are different stories, and I don’t know the truth of it, but he died on campaign in China trying to conquer Southern China.
(02:34:42) Well, up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was, she was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him. And she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China.
(02:35:07) And so he was learning all this stuff for it. But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout. He needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people, Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn’t great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart. And at first a little bit lazy, he liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had many with him to do the shooting, and then to prepare the food and all. And his territory in Northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, “Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge.” And everybody was terrified of the mother. So he ran off to China and he started administering his land, and he started learning how to do it.
(02:36:19) Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River, on a campaign that he was sent by his brother. He was having no success at all. But he thought, “Okay, the brother’s dead. I should finish the campaign.” Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Boke, Ariq Boke was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded. And he was back in Mongolia. And his tolerance for religions, he had to oversee the debate one time between the Daoists and the Buddhists, because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists.
(02:36:54) So he had to oversee it. He got mad, and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he just wasn’t good for moderating debates. So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people.
(02:37:20) So his wife, Chabi sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, “Forget about Southern China. It’s going to always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new Emperor. You are the next son after Mongke Khan.” And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back. And even though he didn’t have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense.
(02:37:52) He could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on Northern China for food. All the Mongols supported Ariq Boke, all the ones in Central Asia, all of whom were supporting Ariq Boke. So he went to get food from them, and then they didn’t want to give up their food. “Yeah, we want to support you for Great Khan, but we’re not giving up our food.” So he was basically starved into submission in 1262. And then he was taken prisoner into China, and then he mysteriously passed away in 1264, while a legal case was being brought against him for trial, but he never made it to trial. He was gone.
(02:38:38) So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but he didn’t have the genius of his grandfather. I won’t say that. But he was smart and clever. He understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did.
(02:38:59) So the great thing left, that Chinggis Khan said on his deathbed, “Finish conquering China.” That was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn’t know how. The Great Wall of Ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze River was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them.
(02:39:25) So he had one of his very smart generals named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in innovative way. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father Uriyangkhadai on the conquest of the Red River of Northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people. They went down the river. They were trying to surround this Chinese territory. So they were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south. So they went down the Red River to conquer the Dai Viet. The Dai Viet moved the army up on the other side by boat. And then they had a whole core of elephants.
(02:40:05) So they have the Mongols on one side of the river, the Dai Viet forces on the other side. Uriyangkhadai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart. And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to route the elephants was with flaming arrows to their feet. That was it. But he recognized that they came up on boats. Mongols didn’t like boats. They crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. I am not going over on a floating cart. I’m going to ride a goatskin across the river. So he’s assigned one detachment, “You have to burn the boats so the Dai Viet cannot escape when we route the elephants.”
(02:40:54) Well, the battle, I mean, got started. The elephants are running wild. All kinds of chaos is going on. The group that’s sent to burn the boats, they’re Mongols. They want to go to war. Why burn a bunch of women’s carts? It’s just not floating … So they go and join the battle. They leave the boats. Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dai Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what’s now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the Delta. The Mongols arrived. They conquered, quote-unquote, Hanoi, the capital city. And they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle, they lost the war. They retreated. Aju was the son of Uriyangkhadai, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats. And so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze River and every little river around it, and the cities.
(02:41:55) And the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side, because invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water. And so their city walls are weak. The defenses are weak on that side. That’s where we have to attack. So how?
(02:42:15) They sent off to the Ilkhanate, to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle was now dead, and his cousins were ruling there, or his nephews, we would say, or cousins, nephews. So they sent over engineers to build special kind of trebuchet, a catapult. And they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat, because they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things. And also for some incendiary bombs, they developed it. They attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked the … it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy. And then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.
Lex Fridman (02:43:02) So this is a catapult on a ship?
Jack Weatherford (02:43:06) Catapult on a ship. But yeah, we call it trebuchet for this type of catapult.
Lex Fridman (02:43:10) So this is an engineering solution for peoples who are deeply uncomfortable with boats?
Jack Weatherford (02:43:17) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:43:18) And they’ve accepted it.
Jack Weatherford (02:43:19) Yes. Now it’s a great weapon. It’s no longer a woman’s cart. It’s a bow and arrow. It is a giant bow and arrow.
Lex Fridman (02:43:28) Yeah, it’s fascinating. So they hit them hard on the walls, on the weak side, where there’s no, the army protection.
Jack Weatherford (02:43:35) Yes. And they conquer their way down to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song. They’ve been in power for a long time, since 970, on now we’re already into the 1270s. That’s a long time. They’re dissipated. They’ve been, had child, they had imbeciles ruling, all kinds of things going on.
(02:43:59) And at this point, we have a child in command. But Kublai makes a very strange move. He says, “Okay, let’s invade Japan now. They’re thinking, “What? Wait, wait, wait. We’re fighting against the Song Dynasty.” And most people ascribe it to all kinds of things. But actually I think there was a great logic to it. One was, he had abolished his grandfather’s policy of defeat and destroy until they are no more. That was the phrase that was used for their enemies. And he had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy. Try to incorporate them into your army of possible, but be merciful. He did not want to destroy. And he was not. He had a lot of defectors coming in. And because the Mongols prized people with skills, a lot of very clever people, with ship building, and engineers, and these people were flocking to the Mongols. Whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Guangzhou, doing calligraphy, and poetry, and having contests over who could sing or paint or … I don’t know what scholars do, but they were being scholars.
Lex Fridman (02:45:11) Yes.
Jack Weatherford (02:45:11) But there actually, I think there’s a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
(02:45:31) But I think there were other reasons. If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan. And they didn’t want that to happen. And then there’s this idea of kill the chicken to scare the monkey. It’s like, okay, we’ll go do this. And then maybe they’ll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan.
(02:45:50) Well, it was a total failure. You’ve got a bunch of ships that are mainly great on the river and right along the coast, and you’re crossing some treacherous water there. And the Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing. Okay, you can arrive with the trebuchet and you can throw grenades at the beach. It’s not really going to do a lot of damage. It might scare a few horses, but you’re not destroying cities. And the Japanese cities were more in, they weren’t on the beach waiting for Mongols to come invade. So he failed in that invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:46:22) So we should say that this is the time of the samurai, right? In Japan.
Jack Weatherford (02:46:25) Yeah, the Samurai.
Lex Fridman (02:46:29) So there was never a real test of that-
Jack Weatherford (02:46:32) No. There was some fighting. And the Samurai learned some very valuable things. The samurai had such a ritualized way of writing. It’s like the knights of Europe, coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse. And I mean, it was just craziness. Craziness.
(02:46:48) The samurai, almost at that point, you ride out in front of your enemy and you recite the story of your genealogy. What? Mongols, they have no use for that. They’re there to fight. They’re there to win. But on the other hand, this was unknown territory to them, and the weather did turn against them. But I don’t want to give too much credit to the weather. I really think that the Japanese defeated them. The Mongols weren’t well-prepared. Their ships were not very good. They were defeated in the first invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:47:20) Could they get off the ships onto the beach?
Jack Weatherford (02:47:23) Oh, they did. They had some skirmishes or small battles on land. Yes, they did.
Lex Fridman (02:47:27) But they didn’t successfully complete them [inaudible 02:47:31]-
Jack Weatherford (02:47:30) No, no.
Lex Fridman (02:47:31) So they couldn’t do their usual Mongol thing.
Jack Weatherford (02:47:33) Right. Well, see, they don’t have enough horses, for one thing. And there were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly. It’s the first time anybody had ever tried to have such a massive invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:47:46) So they’re just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy.
Jack Weatherford (02:47:50) So he has failed to conquer, and he’s thinking like a Mongol, that you rule those waters and lands. But he ruled the ocean. He stopped the trade. He stopped the supply. He cut off the possibility of the Song dynasty fleeing to Japan. He won, in a certain way. He lost, but he had won his objective of cutting off southern China.
(02:48:16) Also, it gave him, navy some experience with the ocean, and now they were ready to move out into the ocean around Southern China. So they were closing in then. Aju was in command. But actually the head command was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia. He was perhaps close to the Fergana Valley, in that area. We’re not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there. And then he eventually was living in what’s now Iran.
(02:48:49) But he came and he took over command of the army. He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intelligent. Aju should have been in command. But Bayan recognized that, and he and Aju worked together very well. Aju knew how to fight the war. Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things. So Bayan is in command.
(02:49:14) And so the generals are deserting the South Song right and left. The artisans are all coming up to join the Mongols, get paid. The generals are loading up the boats with all the jewels, and they grab a couple of brothers to the little five-year- old emperor, and they put them on a boat, and they’re fleeing. They even deserted their own families. The generals were corrupt cowards who fled. The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady. She had no children. Cixi was her name, the Dowager Empress Cixi. They said she was missing an eye. She was ugly. They called her Ugly Cixi. That’s what they called her at that time. She was in charge, and she offered the Mongols everything. “I’ll give you everything-“
Jack Weatherford (02:50:00) And she offered the Mongols everything. “I’ll give you everything. Please let the emperor stay. Okay, even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay.” Bayan said, “No, total surrender. Total surrender.” So she decided to surrender. Well, she said, “Yes, we will surrender the capitol.” So Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers. They looked around and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender. And he said, “No, I didn’t win this war in a palace. My soldiers won this war in the field. You have to come with the emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender.” But he did not harm her, he respected her, and there was no looting of the city. Now, later, they take everything in a very systematic way. They take the archives and all this kind of stuff away, but there was no wholesale looting, a killing of people, nothing like that.
(02:50:56) So they’ve taken the capitol and she comes out, she surrenders, she bows on the ground towards Beijing, and then she takes the child emperor and they slowly make their way. She was a little bit sick. It took her a longer time to Beijing, and they surrender again in a public ceremony, bowing to the Kublai Khan. He gives each of them a palace. He gives them a new title. He’s trying to show the world this is the new face of Mongols. We don’t kill off the old people anymore who are ruling. We’re gonna give them a palace, treat them nicely and all. But the navy that had fled did not defend the city. Those cowardly generals, they made the new little boy, seven-year-old brother, half-brother to Emperor Gong, was his name. They made him the emperor.
(02:51:54) Well, they’re just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city. The Muslims, who were controlling the trade and controlling many of the ships of that area, they were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims. They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom thing, and because they were merchants and their status would be raised. The Muslims were switching over. The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country out there. They had some loyal supporters, some places. They drop the emperor into ocean.
Lex Fridman (02:52:37) What do you mean?
Jack Weatherford (02:52:37) How do you drop an emperor into ocean? They accidentally spilled him in the ocean, and then they fished him out, but he died. So fortunately they had one more seven year old half brother, so on Lantau Island, exactly where the Hong Kong airport is today, the new… well, it’s not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island. So they went there and they had a big coronation ceremony and all, but the people there were not supportive enough. It certainly wasn’t Hong Kong then, anyway, the delta of the Pearl River. So they sailed out farther south to another island, and then they took it over. And of course, the first thing they did was, well, we have to build a palace. What? The Mongols are chasing you and you’re going to stop and build a palace?
Lex Fridman (02:53:25) So these are the remains of the Chinese?
Jack Weatherford (02:53:28) Yes, the generals.
Lex Fridman (02:53:29) The generals.
Jack Weatherford (02:53:29) The army and the navy.
Lex Fridman (02:53:31) And there was a real competence issue.
Jack Weatherford (02:53:33) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:53:34) Okay, so they’re going to build a palace.
Jack Weatherford (02:53:36) And we’re gonna protect it with a great wall of the sea.
Lex Fridman (02:53:39) Right.
Jack Weatherford (02:53:39) They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor, and they put the palace boat, so-called, in the middle. The generals didn’t trust their own soldiers enough, so they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols. So Mongols arrived, and over and over and over they asked them to surrender. You won’t be harmed, all this kind of stuff. But the Mongols now took over the land. So they had the water all around them and they had the land. And once the fighting started, they could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships. And they’ve cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water. So they can’t boil rice. They have to try to eat rice and drink sea water. They’re all sick as dogs out there. And the leaders refused to surrender.
(02:54:33) The little boy is there, seven-year-old emperor, Bing was his name, with his pet parrot. That’s the only thing he had left in life, was his pet parrot. And then the Mongols, they offered every opportunity, but the prime minister, so-called, coward that he is, although he’s treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history, the coward that he was, he said, “We will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor.”
(02:55:06) So first he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown. And then he took the emperor and held him, he was seven years and one month, he had just turned seven years old, and jumped into the water with his child. A child murderer. He’s a child murderer, to do that. Somehow in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot and the parrot fell in the water too. So the seven-year-old boy and the parrot died in the water. That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world. The Song Dynasty, they were intellectually great. They were artistically great. They were technologically great. They were just one of the greatest moments of world history. And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor that was betrayed by this woman. The men lost the war. The men lost the war. Who’s to blame? An old one-eyed, ugly lady Empress Xie?
Lex Fridman (02:56:13) Well, the bigger picture there is probably the institutions became corrupt and stale.
Jack Weatherford (02:56:19) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:56:19) The army weakened and the politician class probably have lost their skill and competence at ruling and all that kind of stuff.
Jack Weatherford (02:56:31) All that is true. And the Chinese summarize that with losing the mandate of heaven.
Lex Fridman (02:56:35) Right. I mean, everybody has their perspective, maybe. The way you told the story has a very kind of objective sort of way of revealing the absurdity and the cowardice of it. But there’s probably the Chinese perspectives that they tell the story in some maintained honor to the last moment.
Jack Weatherford (02:57:01) Very often, most scholars depict Empress Xie as the traitor to the country. And I say, “No, that boy lived on for another 45 years.” And so she did not betray the country. She protected her emperor that she was supposed to protect. It was the man who killed the child emperor who killed Zhao Bing.
Lex Fridman (02:57:24) So what was the lasting impact of Kublai Khan unifying China?
Jack Weatherford (02:57:30) Well, yes, first of all, he had unified China in the largest sense of the word, with Korea, Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, part of Central Asia, he had unified it. But he did so at the expense of his empire. They didn’t recognize him as the great emperor, and there was great opposition from the Golden Horde of Russia, and also from the central region, which is called the Chagataid, the descendants of Chagatai, the second son, the Chagatai Empire, and then from the Il-Khanate of Persia.
Lex Fridman (02:58:03) These are the different sort of fracturings of the Mongol Empire?
Jack Weatherford (02:58:06) The sons of Genghis Khan.
Lex Fridman (02:58:07) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (02:58:08) And only the Il-Khanate was still loyal to him, but they’re so far away.
Lex Fridman (02:58:13) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (02:58:14) But now he has a navy.
Lex Fridman (02:58:15) But this is, I mean, even the four pieces, the whole thing is gigantic, and even the pieces are gigantic.
Jack Weatherford (02:58:22) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:58:22) So, I mean, it’s very hard it to keep an empire of this size together.
Jack Weatherford (02:58:27) Yes. But he had China. It was unified under him. And then he sent out the first expedition to sail directly to Persia. There had been trade all throughout thousands of years, but it was usually port to port, different merchants trading goods. No, he organized a great fleet to send a queen, or a princess to become a queen in the Il-Khanate, to marry the Il-Khan of Persia. It’s Persia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and Iraq and part of Syria, all of that area. So he organized this, and it so happened that Marco Polo was ready to go home because they knew Kublai Khan was about to die. And in fact, he only had about one year left to live. And they wanted to get their riches out before they didn’t know what’s gonna happen. This is a new dynasty. They’ve been in total control of China for one generation, and they didn’t know what was gonna happen.
(02:59:27) And also, just before that, there’d been a bad sign because Kublai Khan had tried to invade Japan a second time, and he had failed a second time. And the second time, I think again, he had a practical purpose, and that was he had this whole huge Song army that now he’s the new enlightened Mongol who doesn’t slaughter. What is he gonna do? They’re not reliable. They’re not safe. So he sends a bunch of them up into the Amur River of what’s now the Russian Far East, or we call Siberia in English, but the Russian Far East, the Amur River. He sent expeditions up into Tibet, exploring options up there, but there wasn’t enough room, or enough agricultural area for a huge military colony.
(03:00:12) But most of his ships were loaded with former prisoners of the war from the Song Dynasty. And they were not armed. They had hoes and implements for farming. He wanted to create, obviously, a military agricultural farm in Japan to help feed Northern China, ’cause it was very important. Just as they were doing with the Amur River, but it was more complicated. So, again, they lost. They didn’t have it. And part of the reason is the expedition was massive, and they organized it in the Mongol principles of left wing, right wing. This didn’t work at sea ’cause the left wing is from Korea. There’s Korean ships built up there. The right wing is from Southern China, mostly, with ships built down there. They’re not the same. They have a head, but there’s no center point. Genghis Khan always had the gol, they called it, G-O-L, the gol, the center, or Q-O-L, qol [inaudible 03:01:14]. But he had the center in command. No, he sent the two without a clear… And they were arguing with each other, not cooperating, not helping each other, sabotaging each other.
(03:01:25) They get there, and once again, they have the same problems. Even though they’ve come with lots of grenades this time, again, the grenades are exploding. They’re scaring the horses. It’s impressive. And a lot of silk screens are made later showing these impressive battles and all. But they lost. And again, a typhoon happened to be the final destruction of the navy. But I think Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say. Japanese deserve credit for that victory. And then the sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon. But already the Japanese had developed good strategies while the Mongols had been away. They knew how the Mongols fought, and they knew that at night they could fire flaming arrows at the ships, set them on fire, and they were doing great damage. So again, Kublai Khan lost the invasion of Japan, but the soldiers were gone. They drowned. He didn’t kill them off, was his deliberate plan, but the problem was solved.
(03:02:40) It’s one of those ironies of history that is hard to quite understand. So this had happened, but then Kublai Khan was coming to near the end of life, and Marco Polo and those wanted to get out, they’re ready to go. And Kublai Khan allowed them to sail on this expedition with Kokochin, was her name, the Princess Kokochin, to go to Hormuz. And so they went, and that began a whole system of trade, back and forth, back and forth. Kublai Khan died soon after that. His grandson, who’s not so well respected in history, because he’s often called a drunk, but his name was Temur, Temur Oljeitu. But he was a drunk when he was young, but his grandfather had him caned a couple times in public, and he cured him of drinking. And actually he was not a drunk later on.
(03:03:38) And first he reassembled the Mongol Empire. He did. The Golden Horde declared loyalty to him, recognized him as Great Khan, as emperor of the whole empire, the Chagataid of Central Asia, they declared loyalty to him. The Il-Khanate was already loyal to him. They all declared loyalty. He had reassembled the empire and he had the greatest navy in the world, and he sent out envoys to every place they had attacked or traded with to say, “That era is over. We’re no longer attacking anybody. We’re changing from conquest to commerce. We want to trade with you. Come to China, bring your goods. We’re gonna trade with you.” He instituted, it was short, unfortunately didn’t last forever. I wish it could have. But it was a great era of the exchange of all kinds of things going back and forth, actually all the way to Africa, ’cause from Hormuz they had connection to Somaliland. And some people say Kenya already at that time, I’m not sure, but very wide. Very wide.
Lex Fridman (03:04:45) So technically he ruled over the largest size the Mongol Empire ever had?
Jack Weatherford (03:04:53) Yes. But although, actually, the Golden Horde of Russia, they were quite independent by now. And he let them be independent, but they were loyal to him and they were still exchanging back and forth all kinds of things. So there were Ossetian soldiers in China. They had a whole contingent of Ossetian soldiers there, and from Russia, from the Caucus areas of Russia.
Lex Fridman (03:05:19) And how do they communicate? Are they using the postal service? You have to literally deliver the letters?
Jack Weatherford (03:05:26) Over time, those groups started intermarrying, they were allowed to intermarry. The Chinese were not, but they were intermarrying with Mongols, and they were switching to Mongolian language, slowly. At first, I don’t know, it’s not clear. But again, Kublai Khan thinking in this internationalist way, said, “Okay, we need a new alphabet for the world.” Everybody in the world writes with one alphabet, Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, everything. It didn’t work. But he tried it for a while and some inscriptions are still there to this day.
Lex Fridman (03:06:03) And we should maybe briefly mentioned Marco Polo that you’ve talked about. So he’s this now famous explorer that traversed the continent, the Silk Road, and then stayed with Kublai Khan for a while. And I guess is one of the primary documenters of everything that’s been going on. Is there something else interesting to say about Marco Polo and about his interaction with Kublai Khan?
Jack Weatherford (03:06:32) I like Marco Polo. I use his work a lot. I find him very reliable. In the areas where he’s not reliable you can kind of tell because he wasn’t there. But the places he was, he reported a lot of stuff. And so I’m very much indebted to him for a lot of things because with something like the Princess Kokochin, and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Khutulun, he wrote about that. But I also needed other sources. So I found if I could find Chinese sources or Arab sources or something else, or Persian to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence with him over time. But pieces were romanticized. You have to always discount it, but he’s very good.
(03:07:20) However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison in Genoa. In the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions. That was both a play on what he was called, Il Milione, the million, ’cause he had talked about cities of millions of people, and about money in the millions and things that people in Europe just couldn’t believe could happen.
(03:07:58) He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant. And it was an ironic look at capitalism, ’cause this is 20th century already, versus the idea of like a philosopher king, which he saw in Kublai Khan. And so Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism, not at its worst, but at its most basic. And that is like the princess in this story. This is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene O’Neill, but I think it captures a lot. The Princess Kukachin says, “Marco is an excellent judge of quantity,” and there are things like that.
(03:08:45) And then in the play, Bayan, the great general, he talks with Kublai Khan and he said, “Look, these people are dangerous from the West. We should go conquer them now while we can.” Kublai Khan tells Bayan, again in the play, this is fiction, but he tells Bayan, “They are not worth conquering, and if we conquer them, we will become like them.” And he said, “Marco Polo has been in our land. He has seen everything. He has learned nothing. He has seen everything. He understands nothing.”
(03:09:21) For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world, symbolically. With Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the coming together of two worlds, it could have gone a different way, it could have gone a different way. It’s not that I’m anticapitalist, I’m procapitalist, but the way so many things worked out, it was a misstep in history. Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment, and we could have learned more from cooperation.
Lex Fridman (03:09:54) They didn’t quite integrate successfully.
Jack Weatherford (03:09:57) No. But today we’ve returned to that, I think. The East and the West are confronting each other again on more equal terms. For a long time, the West was so dominant and the East was so downtrodden by colonialism and other things, and internal rot and other things. But today there’s, not necessarily equality, but there’s more of a balance, and which way will we go?
Lex Fridman (03:10:25) And again, there’s a lot of room and a lot of energy for division, for misunderstanding versus integration. Like the East is demonized in the West. And one of the great regrets I have that I hope to alleviate is just how little I understand China and the East.
Jack Weatherford (03:10:55) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:10:56) It’s just sort of not just from economics, politics, reading a few books, but the way you’ve understood and felt the Mongolian steppe, like understand the Chinese people in that way, because it does feel like from that understanding there could be integration of ideas.
Jack Weatherford (03:11:17) My work is often classified as Chinese history, which I think is ironic ’cause for me it’s always a Mongolian history. But for the last book I wrote, which dealt a lot more with China because it was about Kublai Khan, then in that book, I deliberately did not go to China. I’d been there numerous times before. I deliberately did not. I’m an outsider. I do not speak Chinese. I’m not a Chinese scholar. I never even had a course in Chinese art or calligraphy or anything. And I wanted to be very clear. Mine is an outside perspective. But I think it’s possible as an outsider to still have respect for that culture, even if I disagree that they point this one as a hero and that one just the villain. I disagree and they’ll say, oh, I’m wrong. I don’t understand their history. And they’re probably right. That’s quite possible. But this is an outside view that is different and tries to be respectful of what happens in that part of the world.
(03:12:16) Just as I’m respectful towards Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, I respect China very much. I’m an American. I love the ideals of my country. I love so many aspects of our culture, and there are many aspects I don’t, of course, because it’s impossible to love everything, even about the members of your own family, you know?
Lex Fridman (03:12:38) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:12:38) And I do hope that through understanding one another, or just making the effort to understand, even if we understand wrongly and we’re incorrect in it, just to make the effort to understand will help us a lot. And the West has had a long couple of centuries of extreme arrogance that they are there to teach the world. And I am sometimes dismayed. I meet these young people all over the world who’ve come to help. They’re an NGO, and they’re gonna teach the people how to take care of the environment. They’re gonna teach the women how to exercise their rights. They’re gonna bring in micro financing to help liberate people. We are arrogant beyond words, and we need to be a little bit more humble and try to put ourselves on an equal basis with some of these people, not a superior basis.

Fall of the Mongol Empire

Lex Fridman (03:13:41) Beautifully put. How did the Mongol Empire come to an end? How did it fall?
Jack Weatherford (03:13:51) Despite the fact that Temur Oljeitu Khan had United the Empire, at least symbolically, all of it, and they had the trade going on, the Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas. So in some areas of the world, they became more like the local people. So in Central Asia, they became Muslim and they got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before. Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time, and it was based around the Volga River, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people minority within a Russian empire. But the Mongols had left the framework for empire for Russia. That’s something the Russians don’t wanna hear any more than they wanna hear me criticize the end of the Song Dynasty.
(03:14:49) But it is true that even Yam. Yam is the word that was used for this postal system. And that’s the ministries today in Russia. There are many, many other things in Russia. Even Malchin. Malchin is a herder, mal is an animal, and chin is a person who takes care of animals. It’s all kinds of influences in Russia that some people want to deny. But there’s always a great powerful strand of research and scholarship in Russia that supports this understanding of the Mongols. And I depend on them tremendously.
(03:15:26) It’s not just Gumilev is one of the famous ones, but he was a little bit too romantic with his ideas and all. But I depend upon a lot of the research done by Russian scholars and by early German scholars in the 19th century under sponsorship of the Tsar. So I depend on that work. So you had a great influence there, but it was weakening. So bit by bit, 1368, the Mongols had become so weak within China that they were overthrown, but they weren’t absorbed into China. The Mongols had been there since 1215 to 1368. They packed up, went back to Mongolia. It was just another seasonal migration.
Lex Fridman (03:16:15) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:16:16) You know? It was just amazing. And they said, “Okay, we’re still the Yuan Dynasty. We’re not giving you the seals. We’re not acknowledging the Ming.” And they never did, throughout the whole of the Ming. In fact, they went down one time and captured the Ming Emperor, took him back to Mongolia, and then they tried to ransom him, and the attorney said, “No, we’re gonna appoint another emperor.” So the Mongols decided, “Okay, the worst thing we can do to the Chinese is give them back the old Emperor.” So you had two emperors back. Okay, let them work it out. And the empire just weakened from internal reasons for the Mongols, but some external things from nature. And I think that was the great plague.
(03:16:59) Everything in history, everything that’s good comes with something underneath it that’s bad. And everything that’s bad seems to have something underneath that sometimes works out good, in a way. But this great system that united, it’s called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that’s what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
(03:17:33) And if all of these people are ruled by Mongols because they’re benefiting so much from this system, and now the system collapses, you don’t need the empire anymore. So it just fell apart. After 1368, the empire just fell apart, and most of them stayed in Persia and Iran and Afghanistan. The Hazara people are still descended from the army there. And then in Russia, some of them stayed. But then finally in the time of Catherine the Great, a lot of them were returned. They had been there for hundreds of years, and then they returned to Mongolia in the 1700s. And so, many Mongols came home. They were still Mongols. Despite hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures, they came back to their tent and squatting around the fire and drinking fermented milk and eating dried curds.
Lex Fridman (03:18:34) It’s interesting that the Mongolian spirit is so strong that it persists through centuries, and they just return right back on the horse, riding in the open steppe.
Jack Weatherford (03:18:49) Yeah, well, it was actually very difficult because they were a little bit lazy and they weren’t so good with doing the task. And so it became difficult, actually, to support so many people coming home and eating up all the animals. The Mongols in China had been used to just eating. They hadn’t been producing much for 150 years.
Lex Fridman (03:19:12) So just to return to Genghis Khan, and we talked about Dan Carlin, and Dan Carlin said that Genghis Khan’s army was the greatest military force in history. And many other historians agree that before rifles came into popular use, Genghis Khan would basically beat every single army, including Napoleon. And you mentioned the Samurai, the whole formal setup, same with Napoleon. There’s a whole several hours to set up the chess pieces on the military board. I mean, you could just imagine what Genghis Khan and the dynamism, the speed of everything, what that would do to Napoleon. So, I guess the question is, do you agree with that notion that Genghis Khan’s army is the greatest military force in history?
Jack Weatherford (03:20:10) Short answer is yes, absolutely. No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again. Nobody’s going to conquer China and Russia again and rule both countries. It’s just not gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (03:20:41) What lessons can you take from that’s applicable to modern warfare?
Jack Weatherford (03:20:47) Oh, I think there’s a very good lesson. The Mongols took Iraq. They took Baghdad, they held it. The Americans, we followed the exact opposite strategy of the Mongols. The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They’re country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that’s how they did it every time. They would come in, as I say, in some cases, two years in advance, to clear people out so they would have room for their horses and have pasture for their horses and all. And you take the small towns and then the small cities, and then the last one is the big city. Americans, they said, “No, we’re gonna take Baghdad. We’re gonna bomb Baghdad. We’re gonna have this shock and awe. We’ll go in, we conquered a country from Baghdad.”
(03:21:41) So they go in, they get trapped in their little tiny green zone. They never conquer Iraq. The strongest army in the world. This is something that worked in Europe, World War II. Yes, we bombed the cities and we took the city ’cause that was the center of production for the modern era. But the countryside is the place that produces the food. The Mongols were very aware of that, and supplies the water. You cut off the water from the city, you cut off the food for the city. What’s the city going to do? They’re going to surrender. The Americans were applying something that worked in Western Europe to conquer Germany. It did not work to conquer Iraq or Vietnam, or even Northern Korea or Cambodia or Laos or Syria or god know. It worked only in Grenada. I think, in my lifetime, that’s the only successful war we had. Lasted a couple of hours. We went in, conquered the little tiny island. Otherwise, we’ve been chased out of every country. We’ve lost it, tail between our legs.
(03:22:46) We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than we dropped on Germany. It’s hard to believe. Hard to believe. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany. We did nothing. Because Germany, you destroy the cities, the people surrender. Dresden’s gone, Frankfurt, [inaudible 03:23:07], Berlin. In Cambodia, you can bomb the countryside forever. You can kill the people, and they did. You can use chemical warfare, and they did. And you could still go into the eastern part of Cambodia and you could go to large areas where you don’t hear birds singing because of their chemical warfare of American bombs. So we still do it, but we don’t want to admit it, and we don’t want to go in to win. In World War II, the Americans did have unconditional surrender. Well, I mean, you can support the war, not support the war. We did it right. We did it wrong. These are all issues that people can argue. But we had a clear policy. We go into Afghanistan, we’re fighting terror. We’re gonna bring democracy, we’re gonna free the women. What? I mean, it’s absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did.
Jack Weatherford (03:24:00) It’s absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did, and we kill people. Not only did we use chemical warfare and kill a lot of people in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, we killed American soldiers. We killed American soldiers, and my father was one. He died from Agent Orange disease. Oh, but that doesn’t count. He didn’t die on the battlefield and we didn’t mean to kill him. It doesn’t count. Modern warfare is brutal and we just paper over it sometimes.
Lex Fridman (03:24:39) Can you explain Agent Orange?
Jack Weatherford (03:24:41) It was designed to kill all vegetation. This is going to be a humane way. We’re going to kill all the vegetation in the jungle, and that way they can stop moving the army through the jungle and they can stop the supplies from coming. That was the American strategy. Yeah. Henry Kissinger, Nobel Prize winner, he is now resting in hell, is exactly where he belongs for what he did to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The bombing was just absolutely horrendous. So Agent Orange comes in, they defoliated, which means they wiped out the crops so people are starving. Literally in the case of Cambodia, starving to death. The animals are being killed and deformed children are being born to this day, and American soldiers died by the thousands. Not immediately. Not on the battlefield, not right there.
(03:25:33) They go home, they have the disease, they linger. They take the whole family down with them in an emotional trauma of becoming slowly paralyzed and dying. We did that to our own people. So yeah, warfare. I don’t think we’re any more humane with it any better today than in the past. It’s just we can hide parts of it more easily and deny it more easily. If you’re killed by a Mongol, it’s very clear you’re killed by a Mongol. You’re killed by friendly fire in American war, it’s a different matter.
Lex Fridman (03:26:10) It seems that what people mean when they say that war is hell, that in some deep sense, everybody loses no matter the narrative you put on top of it.
Jack Weatherford (03:26:22) Yes, yes. I’m not a pacifist again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations, but the more controlled it is, the better. My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Chinggis Khan with the brutality and all like that, but it’s to measure it against what goes on today in the world today. And we have different images. There are two images of Chinggis Khan. One is our image. He’s a barbarian on a horseback killing people and raping women all the time. The other image is the Mongolian image. And when they finally built an official statue of him in this century, for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to themselves, and they chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model.
(03:27:20) He was the late great law giver of the Mongol nation. And so he seated there in front of the Mongolian parliament. There’s another statue that’s better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback, but not with a weapon. But he’s on horseback out in the countryside. But the official one from the government is Chinggis Khan seated like Abraham Lincoln, and they issued stamps to show that he is the great law giver.
Lex Fridman (03:27:50) And the truth is somewhere in between, I suppose.
Jack Weatherford (03:27:55) Well, or depending on where you are and how you want to see it.
Lex Fridman (03:28:00) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:28:00) There are many things that happened that were terrible and horrible, and for people who lose a war, it’s going to always be terrible and horrible.
Lex Fridman (03:28:08) Yeah. Let’s return back to Chinggis Khan’s life and the end of it. How and where did he die?
Jack Weatherford (03:28:19) After conquering the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia, Chinggis Khan returned and then they had a great, what they called Naadam, a great celebration that went on for a whole summer just about, and they had so much wealth to distribute to everybody, and everybody is being given all kinds of things for what they have done and including the people who helped saved him when he was in the cank in the ox yoke. They were rewarded with… Everybody was rewarded. It was a great time. But the first place he had attacked outside was the Tangut Nation, and they had sworn allegiance to him. And then when he went off to the Middle East, they refused to send troops. He didn’t forget that. He’s going back to the Tangut Nation and he’s going to conquer them again. As he was crossing the Gobi, which takes a while and you’re crossing the Gobi, he was distracted a little bit by hunting the khulan, which is the wild… We say the wild ass, or I used to say wild horse. It sounds a little better, but the khulan to say khulan of the Gobi, he was off hunting khulan.
(03:29:26) He fell from his horse and he injured his leg very badly, and he seemed to decline from that point, and it took some number of months before August of 1227. He was very much near the end of life. You can read online the exact date, and it’s all very specific. But the truth is we don’t know exactly which day he died in that time because one of his wives was running the camp and they were keeping it secret until the defeat of the Tangut was completed. And the Tangut offered all kinds of things for the Mongols to go away again the second time. And Chinggis Khan told his family, “No, accept nothing. And then when they surrender, you kill the royal family, kill them all.” So that the idea, they were Buddhist people, the Tanguts were Buddhists, and the idea was usually you can be reborn into your own family. But he said, “No, you kill off the whole family, so they can’t be reborn.” So he died there.
Lex Fridman (03:30:36) How was the successor chosen?
Jack Weatherford (03:30:38) Oh, the succession issue was always difficult. He did not have the right to appoint a successor. That was not the Mongol way. He could nominate somebody. So before he set off for the Middle Eastern campaign, one of his wives said to him, “Even the biggest tree falls. You’ve got to make a plan and talk to your sons about the future.” So he did. He called the sons together. So this is Jochi, the oldest boy who was born while the father was allied with his anda Jamukha, and he was named Visitor, Jochi. And then the next one was Chagatai, and the next one was Ogedei.
(03:31:27) And the next one was Tolui, the father of Kublai Khan. But he was still alive at this point. So all four of them came. So Chinggis Khan explained to them he wanted to talk about the succession and to get some consensus from them about the succession. And so he said… The Mongols always call on people to speak by order of age. They also serve tea or food, anything by order of age. It’s always done that way from then until now. So he called first on Jochi. And he said, “What do you say, Jochi?” Chinggis Khan favored Jochi. This is the one who was questionable paternity, but he always favored him. The youngest Tolui was too hotheaded. Ogedei was a heavy drinker. Chagatai was very rigid about the law of the Mongols and all, but he seemed to favor Jochi as a good warrior but reasonable person.
(03:32:22) But he called on Jochi, “My son, speak.” Chagatai, the second one who believed in Mongol law supposedly, he jumped up and he said… This is when he accused his father of all kinds. He said, “How can you call on this Mongol, this Merkit bastard? If you call on him first, that means you want him to be the Great Khan. He should not be the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. This is Mongol Empire now.” On and on. You can imagine kind of scene. Well, Chinggis Khan is the greatest ruler in the world. He’s sitting there being lectured by his second son, and this is when he gave that impassioned speech to his… Actually, the way the secret history, it makes it look like it was his assistant speaker who said it because very often the great power doesn’t say the words directly. They let somebody else say them for them. They have a spokesperson. But anyway, I think it was his words, and I think he said them on that day.
(03:33:22) That’s what I think on this business of, “You do not know. You were not there. The stars were moving in the sky, the head was turning around, the Earth was turning over. You do not know who loved who. You do not know who your mother loved. You do not know what your mother did. And if I say he is my son, who are you to say he is not my son?”
Lex Fridman (03:33:43) By the way, really high integrity, really respectable to do that.
Jack Weatherford (03:33:43) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:33:52) To have that respect and honor his wife in this way.
Jack Weatherford (03:33:58) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:33:58) And his son in this way. It’s really powerful.
Jack Weatherford (03:34:01) I believe that I don’t know if she was alive at this point or not. We do not have the death recorded. Mongols are not good at recording death. They don’t. They usually just say somebody finished their age or they have some euphemism for it. But he made that impassioned speech and Chagatai had to submit, and he said, “Yes, you are our father, and we accept what you say. But a deer shot with words cannot be loaded on a horse. A deer shot with words cannot be eaten.”
(03:34:36) So Chinggis Khan knew. So he said to the boys… The boys. These are middle-aged men. They’re not boys. He said to the men, “What do you want to do? What do you want to do?” And he said, “I don’t favor Chagatai because of his attitude and the situation and Tolui is still hot-headed.” He actually end up being drunk and dying early. But the other guys, they said, “Well, Ogedei.” They chose him because he was the most generous and the bon vivant. He was for every party and drinking every time. And yeah, one time, Shigi Qutuqu the great judge who wrote The Secret History, Shigi Qutuqu was sleeping on a cart one time for whatever reason. I don’t know what. I think he also had passed out drunk perhaps, but Ogedei came out drunk and grabbed him up and pulled him back into the party. Ogedei was a party guy.
(03:35:37) And so he was chosen as the next Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. But fortunately, there was sort of a plan B, and that Chinggis Khan had set up very powerful women, his daughters, but also he had chosen wives for each of his sons, very, very capable wives. And for Ogedei, he had a wife who wasn’t even his first wife. The first wife would usually be somebody closer by certain clan or something. But he had a very intelligent woman named Toregene. And then she was more or less ruling in his last few years. And then after he died, she ruled Empire in her own name. She was the ruler of the greatest empire in world ever ruled by a woman.
Lex Fridman (03:36:27) It’s incredible. The genius of Genghis to set it up that way.
Jack Weatherford (03:36:31) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:36:35) There’s probably very widespread discrimination of women at that time. And to have not care about any of that and just making the right decision.
Jack Weatherford (03:36:46) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:36:46) For what will keep the Empire together.
Jack Weatherford (03:36:49) And Toregene was… Actually, there was peace. She stopped all campaigns. There was peace during her time. And the women such as Toregene and others were extremely into economics and trade and running these, they had these private corporations called [foreign language 03:37:05]. She was running her [foreign language 03:37:07] and everything. So she became much more interested in economics of the trade and running the Empire. And it was a time of peace. And she recognized that peace was better for trade. It was better. And so it was a peaceful time. But like all of us, we have our weak points, and she favored a worthless son to become the successor. And none of the sons actually were great, but Ogedei had favored another. But anyway, she favored Guyuk, her son. And so she arranged to have him made a great emperor while she was still alive. And she had her primary minister was also a woman named Fatima from the Middle East. And unfortunately, Guyuk organized a purge of her court and killed off a lot of these people who had been supporting her.
(03:38:02) And a lot of them were Muslims. And he killed awful lot. And then he was going to march against the Golden Horde because they weren’t supporting him. So he set off and he died. He was only in office for 18 months, and he was gone. And then his wife took over, Oghul Qaimish. Unfortunately, she was not capable as her mother-in-law, Toregene. Oghul Qaimish was a bit greedy, and she didn’t start any new wars, but she just kind of messed up things. And she didn’t rule for too long. And this is why Kublai Khan’s mother, Sorghaghtani, was able to have a revolution. She united with the Golden Horde. She was on one end on China. She had Northern China. The Golden Horde had Russia. The two of them united against the center. And they overthrew Oghul Quaimish. And she put her son, Mongke, in who was succeeded by Kublai Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:38:58) And we should say probably that this whole succession by kin probably goes against the initial spirit-
Jack Weatherford (03:39:05) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:39:05) … of what Genghis Khan stood for.
Jack Weatherford (03:39:07) Yes. Yes. In the end, he was a father and he favored his sons even knowing they were not so capable. And he had lost a grandson that he loved. But he organized it though, as what we call today, almost a corporation. All lands belonged to everybody in the family, everybody. So Kublai Khan, that’s why he had soldiers. There were Christian soldiers, Ossetian soldiers and Kipchak soldiers. He had 10,000 of each come in. And then the Russians would own silk factories in China. The Ilkhanate would own silk factories and jade mines in China. The people in China, the Mongols, they would own villages in Persia and in Iran. So he organized it all. Everything was owned by the entire clan. It didn’t last too long like that because of the divisions that developed. So the Great Khan was primarily in charge of conquering and expanding the land, so they had more lands to own. That was going to be the job. And Kublai Khan fulfilled it. Mongke Khan, to some extent, fulfilled it. Ogedei did. Guyuk did not.
Lex Fridman (03:40:28) This family ruling the land, all the different territories.
Jack Weatherford (03:40:33) Yeah. And they weakened with every generation.
Lex Fridman (03:40:36) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:40:37) Every generation.

Genetic legacy

Lex Fridman (03:40:38) But that reminds me of a very popular idea about Genghis Khan articulated in the 2003 paper titled The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. So that paper has a finding that estimates that 0.5% of the world’s male population is descended, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. I’ve heard you kind of be a little bit skeptical of this paper, but I actually really like its findings. I talked to a good friend of mine, Manolis Kellis, who’s a biologist, computational biologist and geneticist, and he likes the paper as well. I find it really convincing. But I think your skepticism has to do not necessarily with the paper’s contents but more the implication that it speaks to the thing that maybe the people who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason is 0.5% of the population is because of some institutionalized mass rape conducted by Genghis Khan.
(03:41:47) But to me, and we actually spoke about this, you can’t get those kinds of numbers with rape. If you want for the empire to propagate the gene, if you were a person that wanted to propagate the genes, you would make sure that all the lands you conquer are stable, flourishing, and happy. And so actually, this is much better explained in the paper. It indicates this. It’s better explained by it was of high value, like social status value to be associated with the lineage of Genghis Khan. And so that means that for many generations, people loved the Great Khan.
Jack Weatherford (03:42:34) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:42:34) The Genghis Khan. And so in that sense, given how vast the land was, all the transformational effects it has on trade, on culture and so on, it makes total sense. In fact, the 0.5%, just so people understand, is just male descendants. The way it works, that means if this paper is at all correct in its estimate, that the number of people descendant, not direct male descendants, but the way trees work is there’s women on each step.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:11) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:43:12) So the number of descendants could be much larger than that. So I think that’s pretty interesting. And I think there’s singular figures like this in history but none like Genghis.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:25) It’s interesting. It’s fun. Where did they get the DNA from Genghis Khan?
Lex Fridman (03:43:30) Oh, yes. So one of the criticism you have is like, well-
Jack Weatherford (03:43:33) They don’t have one shred of scientific.
Lex Fridman (03:43:37) That’s right.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:37) They’re supposed to be scientific. No, they found that a bunch of people are connected.
Lex Fridman (03:43:41) Yes.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:42) And then they choose-
Lex Fridman (03:43:45) No. To one person. To one person.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:45) Yes. But they choose Genghis Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:43:47) Right. But who else?
Jack Weatherford (03:43:48) There’s no evidence that it was from him. No evidence.
Lex Fridman (03:43:51) It’s from that time. It’s one person.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:53) But from that time or 200 years before?
Lex Fridman (03:43:56) It could be 200 years before.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:58) Yes. Yes. See, I mean, actually, I would like for it to be true in a certain way. I would, and I do think there is a truth there.
Lex Fridman (03:44:06) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:44:07) I think that by attaching it to the name of Genghis Khan, they’ve done a disservice to themselves. But it gets a lot of publicity and a lot more funding, and it’s exciting and so on. But I think it’s to that Mongol experience. But Genghis Khan’s descendants were almost every one categorized and recorded. He’s the largest conqueror in the world. You do not have just children popping up all over the place. He had four wives all the time. He had children with two of them.
(03:44:35) That’s not a lot of descendants. We know mostly who they are for many generations. His brother, Qasar, had many more children than he did. Many more. And they caused a lot of problems later on for the Empire too by rivaling the power. So it could be that one of these other people, Bodonchar Deful, could have been the origin of this. It could have been back well before Chinggis Khan. And in Mongolia today, we have nobody who claims descent from Chinggis Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:45:09) Well, claims is a different thing than biology, right?
Jack Weatherford (03:45:13) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:45:13) So the reason I say this is this methodology is pretty solid.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:19) Oh, I believe that they found some connection of people.
Lex Fridman (03:45:24) Yeah. But it’s-
Jack Weatherford (03:45:25) They have no evidence-
Lex Fridman (03:45:25) That it’s Genghis Khan.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:26) … that it’s really connected to Chinggis Khan. I think it may be tangentially connected to him.
Lex Fridman (03:45:32) Yeah. But it’s somebody from the Mongolia region.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:35) Yeah, I think that’s quite possible. But we’ve already had the Hans come through. We’ve had all the Turks.
Lex Fridman (03:45:40) Yes. Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:41) Every one of the Turkic nations is descended from Mongolia.
Lex Fridman (03:45:44) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:44) They all came out of Mongolia.
Lex Fridman (03:45:47) I mean, you’re right. You’re right.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:49) On the other hand, I wish they could get some proof. I wish it could be true.
Lex Fridman (03:45:55) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:45:55) I just can’t believe it the way it is. We have no DNA. Nobody knows where he went.
Lex Fridman (03:46:02) They don’t. So they don’t know where he’s buried?
Jack Weatherford (03:46:04) Okay. Chinggis Khan said, “Let my body go, let my nation live.” And he chose to be buried in an unmarked grave. And the Mongols believe very strongly, it should always be that way. Most of the Khans who followed him were also buried in a similar way. The Chinese emperors were buried in very elaborate tombs, but not the Yuan dynasty. No. And so Kublai Khan was buried back with his grandfather in an anonymous grave.
(03:46:38) And not everyone, like Guyuk died when he was on campaign towards Russia. He was died out there. I mean he was buried out there. I think his father, Ogedei, was also buried out there. That was more their homeland, but many of them were buried with him. And it’s known and not known at the same time. Officially you should not know it. You cannot know it. It should never be disturbed. He should never be disturbed. We’re not going to have a tour group coming in.
Lex Fridman (03:47:16) But you’re saying like the people of Mongolia, they have a sense.
Jack Weatherford (03:47:20) They believe he’s in a certain place. Yes. And they believe they know where the place is. But it’s sacred. You can do nothing, nothing. Just leave it as it is. That’s no roads, no buildings, no killing of animals, no chopping of trees. Nothing can be done. It’s a holy land dedicated to him and his family.
Lex Fridman (03:47:45) It’s pretty amazing. Unmarked grave.
Jack Weatherford (03:47:47) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:47:49) For the greatest conqueror in the history of humanity.
Jack Weatherford (03:47:54) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:47:55) For good and for bad, the most impactful, one of the most impactful humans in history.
Jack Weatherford (03:47:59) Yes. I believe in his thing about let my nation live. Let my body go.
Lex Fridman (03:48:03) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (03:48:04) And I say to people, they ask me, “Well, what did he look like?” And I say, “Well, the portrait was painted 50 years later by somebody who never saw him.” And actually, if you look at the portrait of Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan, they look alike except one’s old and one’s younger. And I think that’s because Kublai was trying to establish, he wanted to establish his legitimacy as a real Mongol that they looked alike. But his grandfather said he didn’t. And then Ogedei Khan and Mongke Khan looked different. They looked different. So there was nothing. But I say, “If you want to see the face of Genghis Khan, walk in any ger in Mongolia. The first child you see, that’s the face of Genghis Khan. It’s his nation. He created that nation. That’s his face.”
Lex Fridman (03:48:45) Does that make you sad that there is no, from his time, capturing of his image, that he really made himself sort of disappear into the land? Does that make you sad?
Jack Weatherford (03:49:02) No, not at all. No, because he’s everywhere. When you have these clans that are still operating in Afghanistan, and the Russians are still using the Yam system, there are many aspects of him that are out there in the world. And I think I find personally inspiration the same way that Thomas Jefferson did.
(03:49:27) He found so much inspiration in the life of Genghis Khan and the books of Genghis Khan that you can still read. He bought so many copies and gave to the Library of Congress, to the Library of Virginia, the University of Virginia, and to his granddaughter. These ideas live on, and we still have not fulfilled them. We do not have religious freedom. We do not have the protections for women. We do not have the protections for envoys and ambassadors. The ideas live on, and the rulers do not live as the common people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, sleep in the same, but not a bed in his case, but sleep in the same situation and simple home. No.
Lex Fridman (03:50:14) I have tremendous respect for leaders that live just as the people who they lead.
Jack Weatherford (03:50:23) Yes.

Lessons from Genghis Khan

Lex Fridman (03:50:24) It’s mostly not done. But when it is, have just infinite respect for that. That is the way. What lessons can we learn from Genghis Khan that apply to the modern world? You’ve already said religious freedom, some of these ideas.
Jack Weatherford (03:50:42) Well, I think his policy ideas I think are important. We can still learn from that about protection of diplomats, not buying and selling women, not kidnapping women and having religious freedom of individuals. But also he had interesting things. He had tax-free status for all religions, all physicians and all teachers. They didn’t pay taxes in his Empire. As a former teacher, I embrace that idea out of pure greed and self-interest. But it’s not, to me, the idea of saving the money. It’s the idea of focusing on that as something important for the society. He didn’t say tax-free for any other category of people, as I recall, just for those. And he’s highlighting the health of the people, the education of the people, and the spirit of the people there spiritually. That’s very important. That’s a profound approach to life. And so these are policies, and I’m not advocating so much to policies, but I think some of the general principles of being willing to learn from our mistakes. Admit your mistake to yourself, correct it and go on with your life.
(03:51:59) All of us say it’s important, but we don’t do it for the most part. We don’t learn from our failures as much as we think. The other idea of promoting people on ability, I think that’s certainly an idea that is very valuable, not in the simple way of meritocracy that we’ve done it with. Oh, if you pass the exam with this score, you get this or that. But really evaluating people and their ability, I think it’s a very good thing. Not the only thing, but I think it’s very important. And even though he failed in the end in his own life, and he turned power over to his sons and his family, it’s a principle that he lived by most of his life, and we can learn from that principle. The other thing I think is just his global feel for the world. His global understanding. Here was a man who had had no education in any formal sense.
(03:52:55) And he had this sense that the world should be united. We should have things that unite all people. Everybody should have their own law, but there should be a higher law of heaven that governs people. And this later was translated, everybody should have their own language, but they all write the same alphabet by Kublai Khan. It didn’t work. Or his idea, he tried to impose the use of paper currency in Iran, the Persian Ilkhanate Chinese paper money. It didn’t work. The people there weren’t used to it but all this international spirit of their Empire, I think that we need today. We talk about, oh, globalization, we’re all connected, it’s just incredible. And we’re more provincial than ever. We are just so provincial, and sometimes we use all this technology to help preserve our provincialism. And we can’t think in global terms. We can’t think about the world. It’s just amazing to me how narrow-minded we are.
Lex Fridman (03:53:58) I also saw the Mongol proverb of, “If you’re afraid, don’t do it. If you do it, don’t be afraid.”
Jack Weatherford (03:54:07) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:54:08) That you especially celebrate. There is something to that. In many ways, Genghis Khan is a representation of a person, of a self-made man. That person from nothing.
Jack Weatherford (03:54:26) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:54:27) Willed an entire empire into existence.
Jack Weatherford (03:54:30) Yes. And everything against him that you can think of. Your own family deserting you, your father dying at an early age, all these things like that. But as Jamukha said, he had a good mother and he had a good wife. And there were many crucial points at which it was either his mother or his wife who made the deciding point. His wife, Borte was the one who caused the first break with Jamukha to go away. Later on when the shamans had become too powerful, and they had humiliated his younger brother, she was the one who said he had to clamp down on the shamans who were exercising too much power. And she guided him a lot.
Lex Fridman (03:55:23) It cannot be understated how important and critical women are in this story of the Mongol Empire.
Jack Weatherford (03:55:30) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:55:31) It’s fascinating.
Jack Weatherford (03:55:32) Yes. And sometimes because they’re not behind the scenes because they’re always out front. In the Mongol Court, they always sat up front. They were always out front. And this horrified the Chinese who were very good… It horrified the Muslims. It horrified the Christians. They didn’t know what to… They say, “The women even drink in public.” Okay, yeah, they drink in public. They do what? So sometimes it was like that, but other times it is with Toregene. She’s actually the ruler or the case of his daughters, such as Alaqa Beki, who ruled over a part of northern China called the Angut people, and other daughters who ruled over different… They ruled in their own names. And this is something about The Secret History that upset me. All the sections are numbered. I get to chapter or number or section 215, and there’s only half a sentence left.
(03:56:31) In 214, he’s just awarded a girl he calls his daughter, so she’s probably a clan daughter, but she lives with his mother at this point. His youngest son, Tolui, is only four years old. A tatar comes and Mother Hoelun gives him food because you food everybody. He realized this is the mother of Chinggis Khan, and that’s the child of Chinggis Khan. He grabs him up and kidnaps him and runs out, and he’s holding the child in one hand, and he’s pulling out a knife with another hand. Altani raced out and she grabbed his arm and held it down. And two men, Jebe and Jelme, they were back behind the ger, slaughtering an ox with an ax because you have to do it in the shade behind the ger. You don’t do it in the light. And so they were back there doing that. So they raced out with ax and they kill the man.
(03:57:20) And so then Chinggis Khan is rewarding everybody for all their great deeds. And Jelme and Jebe, they wanted to be rewarded for saving the life of Tolui. He said, “No, you killed a tatar. Altani saved his life because she held the hand that had the knife until you got there to kill him. She saved it, and now we reward her.” So he’s finished that story in 214. We get to 215. He says, “Now, let us reward our daughters.” It’s actually only a phrase. I said it as a complete sentence, but it’s not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It’s missing. And I was just so…
Jack Weatherford (03:58:00) It’s missing. And I was just so … And I looked at all these different translations of how to different language, and most often they translate it as, and now let us marry our daughters. Oh, no. Oh, no. He was very clear in his wedding speeches to his daughters, “I give these people to you to rule. You have three husbands. You have your honor, you have your nation, and you have the man that I give to you, but the man I give to you goes in the army with me and brings his soldiers.”
Lex Fridman (03:58:40) Genius.
Jack Weatherford (03:58:41) You stay here and rule it to people.
Lex Fridman (03:58:42) Brilliant.
Jack Weatherford (03:58:43) The Chinese, when they arrived in the court of Al Thani, they didn’t know what to think. There she is ruling this area of the Angut people and they said, “Well, she can read and write and she’s a supreme judge and she doesn’t allow any death sentence without her permission.” But they didn’t say which languages she could read and write. That has really puzzled me a lot.
Lex Fridman (03:59:04) So, you’re saying the secret history as we have gotten access to, has been edited to remove the significance of women even though they’re still there?
Jack Weatherford (03:59:17) In that case. I mean, other cases with his mother, they did not and all. But I think in that case, because what happened is most of these women had few offsprings because their husband was gone to war and Al Thani, of course, she married several times, sometimes sons of the last one. But they were going off to war and they weren’t reproducing there. Only one Checheyigen who was ruling in Siberia, she was the one who had a whole bunch of daughters. They wouldn’t be going off to war. And so, they actually spread out through the empire and had a lot of power later.
(03:59:53) But what happened was the area for Alakhai Bekhi, for example, was then taken over by Kublai Khan and then all the Turkey areas, one by one, were taken over by their nephews as they died out, not in their own lifetime, they didn’t kill the women off. But as they died out, the men took it over. And so, then they just wanted to erase it. It’s like, “No. Northern China, even though it was ruled by Sorghaghtani, it always was Mongol.” She was ruling because her husband was Mongol and her sons were Mongol. Therefore, they had the right to rule it. So, they cut out the women for those reasons.
(04:00:34) I think anytime it threatened the power of a particular man, then there are other little things that are added in there. Sometimes you can find a phrase and …
Lex Fridman (04:00:42) This does not fit.
Jack Weatherford (04:00:44) That phrase was not in the original.

Human nature

Lex Fridman (04:00:46) Yeah. In studying human history, what have you learned about human nature and just the trajectory of humanity throughout the past several millennia?
Jack Weatherford (04:00:59) I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people, in general, and especially not for institutions. I tend to have a great suspicion about almost everything and mistrust in institutions over and over, and I think that’s my own prejudice, and then I find reasons to support that. And Genghis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire. So, then I like that and I stress that and I see those things. I think that’s one thing.
(04:01:38) But other things that I learned from the Mongol people in general, not just about their history and all, but how it’s possible to live for thousands of years in a place that for many people it’s not the most beautiful in the world. It’s austere. You have a band of mountains and with some trees, and then big band of steppe and then a big band of sand, gravel, desert, the Gobi. And for many people, it’s not appealing. It’s just open. There’s too much space. It’s like we need to build something over here. Boy, you could have a condo right there. We could have a building and we could sell them off.
(04:02:15) They haven’t given into that. They really value their country. They protect their country. Even now, only 1% is privately owned. They keep it down. And Mongolian records, farm and city count is one category. Just it’s settled people. It doesn’t matter. You settle on a farm, you settle in a city, settled people, one category. And they lived there in this land that Genghis Khan would return to and love. If he returned to the capital city, he would not know where he was. He would have no idea. And all the people would just say, “Oh, big Mongolian.” “I’m Mongolian. Yeah. I’m Mongol. I have the hat. I have the belt buckle. I have all the deel that’s all embroidered. Yeah. I’m Mongol.”
(04:03:04) And Genghis Khan would say, “Where’s your horse?” “Oh, keep it in the countryside.” But he wouldn’t recognize the city. But it’s still his country, his people, they worship him in a literal sense, not the way we would worship God asking for favors, but in the sense of worshiping him with praise. They have so many songs to praise him. And about half of the hip-hop in the country is in praise of Genghis Khan. It’s something we can’t understand, because when we pray, we’re usually saying, “Oh, thank you God for this and that and the other, and you’re so wonderful and I love you, so would you please give me and would you please do this, and would you please stop this pain in my knee?” We’re asking for things all over the place. But Genghis Khan, no, no, no one ever asks for anything. They just honor him. They just praise him and honor him.

Visiting Mongolia

Lex Fridman (04:03:59) If I wanted to visit Mongolia, what would you recommend? What’s the right way?
Jack Weatherford (04:04:05) Well, start with my home. Let’s start there. You come over there. It’s a nice valley. I have a nice valley there. I think almost any direction you go outside of the city is going to be interesting. It depends a little bit on your purpose. Most people go south to the Gobi and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakorum, Kharkhorin, the old capital from Ogedei Khan, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan. And then they circle back to the city and they may stop off to see what we call Przewalski, the wild horse, but they call it Kaktakhi, to see the takhi. Or they may go up to Khovsgol Lake, a big beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller.
(04:04:52) So, that’s a beautiful trip. If you want to see the more Turkic area where they hunt with eagles, the far west is where the Kazakh people live. And the mountains are absolutely incredibly beautiful. Most mountains in Mongolia are gentle, beautiful but gentle. The farther west you go, the more dramatic they become, the more pointed and peaked and snow covered. Then if you go to the Eastern Mongolia, it tends to be very flat. There are massive, massive flocks of cranes that come in every year, millions and millions of cranes. There are also tundra swans that come in and golden ducks and all kinds of beautiful birds out there. And so, each area has something special.
(04:05:38) If you want, particularly the history of Genghis Khan, the Mongolians love him, they worship him, but they don’t do too much to capitalize on his home area, the Khentii. You can go to the Khentii. There are areas you cannot go to. Large, large areas, it’s forbidden. But you can go. But they don’t capitalize like, “This is the place.” No. They go there themselves out of respect. But the only one place, they built this statue of him, which is the largest equestrian statue in the world, but it’s the place where they say he found his whip, which is when he was coming back from being at the camp of asking Orgal Khan or Toghrul Khan or Wang Khan to support him. And he’s coming back to his family and on the way, he supposedly found a whip there, which is just a small stick with a couple of strands of rawhide at the end of it that’s used.
(04:06:40) But for the Mongolians, it’s a symbolic thing. Because obviously, it’s used for a horse. But for the Mongols, your destiny, yourself is your Khiimori, your wind horse that lives inside of you, your wind horse that guides you and gives you opportunities. But it’s up to you to ride that wind horse. It’s up to you to use the wind horse, not to just go wild with the wind horse. And so, I think it’s at that crucial moment. He’s on his way back home to go with Jamukha and the other soldiers to the market to rescue Börte. And so, symbolically, he found a whip there. But I think it means that he found the way to control his destiny, his fate. It’s very important, very important.
Lex Fridman (04:07:36) And that he did, that was the beginning of everything.
Jack Weatherford (04:07:39) Yes. And it symbolized in that statue. Some people think that he’s holding this stick, that it’s baton or something like that. But no, it’s that what they call a whip or tashuur.
Lex Fridman (04:07:51) We’ve talked a lot about the past. If we look out into the future, what gives you hope for human civilization, for us humans?
Jack Weatherford (04:08:02) Well, almost every day I’m totally dissatisfied with everything on earth. It’s just that old man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are they talking about? My grandchildren are talking to me. I don’t understand a word they say. What are they … What? And who are they talking about? I never heard of this. It’s like that. And who’s running for office? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s everything like that.
(04:08:26) But then almost every day I meet somebody, just one person who gives you some hope. You just see somebody doing something nice or they do something nice for you. And I do find in Asia, that happens a lot, that people just do nice things for old people every day. And so, then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world and the way my grandchildren talk and the way young people are, and then I see something like that. And often, it’s something with the young people, something that the young people do.
(04:09:10) And in Asia, they’re always bringing me things. They bring me dried curds. They bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me the milk in various forms or yogurt. Oh, yeah. Everybody thinks “You got to eat the yogurt. This is from my grandmother and all the other yogurt in the world is not good but my grandmother. She knows how to make the best yogurt ever and all.” And so, over and over and over, I’d find despite my all intentions to be in a bad mood, somebody spoils you with these little nice acts that are really very touching, very touching.
Lex Fridman (04:10:00) Yeah. And it reminds you that there’s that little flame of goodness that burns in everybody. I believe that that on the whole will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing towards something better with every generation.
Jack Weatherford (04:10:17) Yes. The people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time, all the time. And I think my wife had MS. I’ve talked about this before. Sometimes she had MS and slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything. And we lived half the year still in Mongolia. Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation. It was very helpful for her. But also, the people. There was a poor country. The sidewalks are broken, everything’s not working. But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone, and I knew that every bump, some arm would pick her up and pick up the wheelchair and lift her over that and not make me do it.
(04:11:08) We could go to the opera and you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera. We would go and I had no worries. I knew two guys would come from one side, two guys from the other side. They would carry up and they do not say, “Excuse me. May I help you.” They do not wait for you to say thank you, nothing. They just do it and they walk away. They have such respect. Singers would come there all the time to sing, to warm up the house for my wife. And even dancers would come sometimes to dance or play the horse head fiddle, morin khuur, to play that, to warm up the house for her, to see how they treated a totally disabled person.
(04:11:53) And if I was feeding my wife and anyone, anybody saw it, they would come and immediately take over and start feeding her in their place. Children would come up to her. In America, they’re often afraid that she’s somebody in a wheelchair. They just look, they don’t know what to do. But over there, the children would always come to her, always. They were very kind. You just learn something about the people. And living there in a country where out in the countryside, you come to a gare, you never ask for permission to go in. You certainly don’t knock on the door frame. That’s no. That’s hugely offensive.
(04:12:29) And you ask, it’s like insulting the people like, “What? You’re not a hospital people. I have to ask you for something.” No. You walk in and you sit down and they fix food for you. It’s an incredible thing. And these are the things that give me hope. It’s no institution in the world, not the big things, and not the pop culture and not all the platitudes. Oh, my God. Save us from the platitudes of modern life.
Lex Fridman (04:13:00) Yeah. True.
Jack Weatherford (04:13:02) It’s the family that will fix tea for you in 2:00 in the morning because there was a flash flood and you got stuck and now you’re cold and wet and they build a fire and take care of you. Or you just show up and you make camp somewhere if you have your own tent. And I swear, within one hour some child is going to be there with water and milk. You think, “Where did you come from?” But the mother sends them over, “Oh, there’s somebody over there in the forest.” They believe that they’re obligated to take care of one another. Anybody in your area, you take care of them and things like that. Individuals do give me hope. People one-by-one or a few at a time, even though I’m lost in the modern world.
Lex Fridman (04:13:48) Well, I’m glad you find your way. You mentioned that your wife is no longer with us. What’s a favorite memory you have with her?
Jack Weatherford (04:14:03) Well, I could tell you a favorite picture is a lake we used to go to called Ogii nuur in the middle, and somebody, a very nice friend, took a picture of us towards the end, we’re just sitting there watching the sunset over the lake that we’ve been to many, many times in life. And we’re holding hands. She’s in the chair paralyzed, and we’re just sitting there staring off in the distance. And that’s one of my favorites. But with my wife, I was just blessed with a good wife that was exciting. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met my whole life. She was smart. She would talk to people about anything. She talked about jazz or physics or art.
(04:14:53) I mean, my life is so small and narrow. But my wife, she’s the one who gave me a life. The truth is a very odd, people don’t believe sometimes, I failed English in college. I barely got in college. Nobody in my family. I’d grown up with my grandparents, mostly the countryside, and they had third grade education. My father had seventh grade. I went to live with him after the grandparents died and my mother. There was no big education there in the family. But I somehow got to college. My father told me to go. He didn’t want me to go to the war in Vietnam, so he volunteered to go because there was the rule that they couldn’t send two people from one family against their will. That was mainly designed to protect brothers, but he could go as the father and then I could go to college.
(04:15:43) So, I got to college and I can’t say, “Oh, I was drinking and having a party and not serious.” No. I was trying like hell to pass that course. I failed English. I failed it. And this was just a huge shame to me. In fact, after one year I was put on probation to be kicked out of the school. My grades were so low, overall. And then, so it took me a long time to confess this to my wife after we met. I met her. I’d briefly had known her in high school, but just not well or anything. But anyway, we met later and I told her, and she just looked at me. She said, “What does a professor know? It’s just a professor. You can write anything you want.”
(04:16:26) And she had the power to make me believe everything. She said, I don’t care what she said, I would believe it. I would say, “Yeah. That’s right. That’s just a professor. Yeah.” And she inspired me. But she supported me all the way through graduate school. She was taking some courses of her own and she was doing graduate work. But she inspired me. But she told me … I said, “I want to write for more people than just for other scholars. I’ve done this dissertation, a PhD, and it’s just dry as the Gobi Desert, and I didn’t know what to do.”
(04:17:05) And she said, “Just tell the story to me, but I can’t see you while you tell it. You’re on the radio and I’m listening in my car driving somewhere. Just tell the story to me.” And to this day, almost every word I write as always just tell the story to her the way that she would like it. And I always read the books to her even she couldn’t comprehend too much, but she just loved hearing the book, because it was mine.
(04:17:40) And in the last years of her life, I gave up the teaching and we went back to our original home in South Carolina and I said, “Okay. We’re just going to live here and watch the ocean and do things like that and just be worthless teenagers.” And my wife used to have episodes of clarity. I have no idea what would cost. It might be two hours. It might be seven or eight hours. And we would talk a lot. And so, one time she said to me, she said, “This disease is going to take my life, but it’s taking your life.” She said, “You gave up teaching and you gave up writing.” And she said, “How do you expect me to die in peace if I know that you gave up everything to this disease?”
(04:18:36) She said, “You should write.” And so, every single day we sat together by the water, I mean by the window. I moved it into the dining room overlooking the water. We sat there at the desk and she sat in her wheelchair next to me. And sometimes we would play a little soft music in the background a little bit. And for the most part, she couldn’t talk. But she liked to just sit there beside me working. And she knew that she was inspiration. She knew. She was the battery that kept me going. How on earth I ever had a wife like that? I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (04:19:17) That’s beautiful, Jack. That’s really beautiful.
Jack Weatherford (04:19:21) I just hit the jackpot with her. And I see so many people that get by and they even like each other or they’re friends or something. But in my life, there was one person. I love my children. I still do. I love my grandchildren even I don’t understand them.
Lex Fridman (04:19:41) Yeah.
Jack Weatherford (04:19:42) But there’s one person in my life, and that was my wife for 44 years, and her funeral was on our anniversary. That’s just the way life works out. But I was very lucky, very lucky.
Lex Fridman (04:19:58) If the two of you lived and met a few centuries ago, I might be reading a history book about you conquering.
Jack Weatherford (04:20:08) No, no, no.
Lex Fridman (04:20:09) And if she said, “You should do this,” maybe you would …
Jack Weatherford (04:20:14) If she said it, I probably would’ve believed it.
Lex Fridman (04:20:16) Exactly. Exactly.
Jack Weatherford (04:20:17) She was too busy enjoying the world. And in her final, I could not ask her questions and I would not say, “Oh, you remember that” … No, I never would say that, because I knew she could remember. But when she was being restless or something in the night or I used to recite scenes from our life and just give the scene without saying, “Do you remember?” But the last night, I certainly didn’t know that she was going, but it was a rough night.
(04:20:47) And we went back to the first night that we had in Moscow. We came in December in the winter, and the snow was so beautiful and white and the yellow lights shining on it. And then the most beautiful night we went to the Bolshoi and she had this elegant blue wool coat from her grandmother from the 1920s with a huge, so ironic, it was a blue wolf, but it’s gray blue, like the Mongol has a gray blue collar, this huge collar. She just looked like a movie star from the ’20s or something.
(04:21:32) And we went to see Maya Plisetskaya, and it was one of the most beautiful nights. But her last night, I told her that story again, of all the details, I’d gone through it many times with her coat from her grandmother whom she loved very much, and the snow and the yellow lights, and we arrived at night because of course the flight was late. And then the next night going to the Bolshoi and all those beautiful things from Russia, that was it. She was an inspiration. I have many, many nights or many days of great memories.
Lex Fridman (04:22:13) You’re going to make me cry, Jack.
Jack Weatherford (04:22:15) Oh, no.
Lex Fridman (04:22:16) That was beautiful. You’re a beautiful human being. It’s really an honor to talk to you. This was such a fascinating journey through human history about one of the most impactful humans in human history.
Jack Weatherford (04:22:30) Well, I thank you very much. And the amount of research, when I realized how much research you had done, I felt like you’re going to know things I don’t know, and you’re going to trick me and pull something out, and I’m going to be shamed in front of the whole world.
Lex Fridman (04:22:44) There’s only one piece of research left is me going to Mongolia and riding there on the steppe, that would be incredible.
Jack Weatherford (04:22:52) Come. Come.
Lex Fridman (04:22:54) I will. Thank you so much for talking today, Jack.
Jack Weatherford (04:22:56) Thank you.
Lex Fridman (04:22:58) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Weatherford. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. Or if you want to contact me for other reasons, go to lexfridman.com/contact.

Lex: Dan Carlin

(04:23:27) And now, allow me to make a few comments on the ever-evolving moral landscape of human civilization throughout our 10,000-year history. I was listening to Dan Carlin’s excellent eye-opening five-and-a-half-hour episode of Hardcore History titled Human Resources. It covered the topic of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade to be exact. One of the lessons I took from this episode is that the long arc of history is full of atrocities, as we modern-day humans understand them with the wisdom of time and moral progress.
(04:24:03) But during each period of history, as Dan documents, it was difficult for the majority of people to see just where the line between good and evil is. We humans, after all, forever like to weave a story in which we are the good guys. Listening to Dan discuss, and later myself, reading first-hand accounts of slaves, of torture, of rape, of separation of families is incomprehensibly heartbreaking.
(04:24:32) By the way in this topic, first-hand accounts of slavery could be read in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves. I can recommend the book that I’ve been reading, which is Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. It all seems deeply and obviously wrong by today’s standards. But slavery was seen as normal through most of human history. Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote, “All men are created equal,” which I think is one of the most powerful lines in all of human history. He himself was a slave owner, making him a fascinating case study of contradictions.
(04:25:14) In fact, there’s evidence that Thomas Jefferson drew from Genghis Khan’s ideas about the importance of religious freedom, pulling as he did foundational ideas of human freedom from the jaws of deep history. And Dan, in his episode, documents these contradictions and complexities quite well. The full range of human psychology involved, including how violations of basic human rights breed generational hatred. This I think is an important lesson to understand.
(04:25:45) The consequences of our moral failings can reverberate through decades, even centuries, and that is perhaps one of the values of studying history. It is laden with atrocities, but it also contains people who, while flawed, dare to rise in some way above the moral decrepitude of the day to try to build a foundation of a slightly better future world. As MLK Jr. put it, “The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Lex: Gaza

(04:26:18) And now, please allow me to say a few words about Gaza, Israel and Palestine. I’m not sure I’m eloquent enough or know quite the right words to express what I’m feeling. But let me try. I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it. And to the degree the US government is assisting the Israeli government in this, which I believe it currently is. It needs to stop immediately. For me as an American makes me sick to know that my government has any role in this atrocity. This needs to stop.
(04:27:04) Yes. There’s geopolitical and military complexity, nuance, and historical context that I’m told by some so-called experts that one must understand. And perhaps they are smarter than me. But like mentioned before, unlike the more complexity of deep history that I’ve often spoken about from the Roman Empire to the Atlantic slave trade, this is the 21st century. This is today. In this, the 21st century, I see things quite simply and clearly.
(04:27:39) To me, the death of a child is a tragedy. It doesn’t matter what their skin color is, what their religion is, or what plot of land they call home. In my view, they are all equal, and the death of each child is a tragedy. Hamas did a definitively evil act on October 7th, brutally murdering over 1,000 civilians. But now, the acts of war conducted by the Israeli government have led to the death of over 60,000 people in Gaza, likely over 80,000 people, of which at least 17,000 are children, 17,000. I’m not smart enough to know the path to peace and flourishing of all the peoples in the region. But I do know that what has been happening in Gaza cannot be the way.
(04:28:41) Suffering at this kind of scale breeds generational hate that leads to more evil in the world, not less, to more destruction, to more suffering. This has to stop. Two years ago, I spoke with many Palestinians in the West Bank on camera and off. There’s a video of it up if you want to hear their voices for yourselves. It was a deeply moving experience for me, and I’m grateful for it. In the future, I hope to find a way to talk to people in Gaza. I still think it’s valuable to talk to leaders, historians, soldiers, activists from all perspectives.
(04:29:25) But the most powerful and moving conversations for me on mic and off have always been with everyday people. This always felt like where the truth is, the deeper truth of life, of pain, fear, of hope, and I still have hope. I believe we humans are good at the core, and I know we’ll find our way. Thank you for listening. I love you all.