by Ben Horowitz
That was the Mongol way. When Temujin was eight or nine, his father took him along as he rode out to seek a wife for the boy. During their search among nearby clans, they stayed with a family who had a daughter named Borte. The children liked each other and the fathers agreed to betroth them. Temujin would remain with Borte’s family as a herder while his father raised the bride price, and then they would marry.
Three years later, Yesugei ate a meal with the Tatars, the tribe of Temujin Uge, the warrior he had killed. Apparently he failed to sufficiently hide his identity, and they poisoned him. As he was dying, Yesugei sent for Temujin, who was forced to leave Borte and her family and return home—to a family that now consisted of two widows and seven small children.
Unwilling to support so many hungry mouths, the Tayichiud abandoned the family and stole their animals, essentially condemning them to death on the harsh steppe. Hoelun kept her family going through sheer will: they wore the skins of the dogs and mice that they ate to keep from starving.
Temujin chafed under the bullying of his older half brother Begter, now the family’s eldest male. Not only did Begter eat the fish that Temujin had caught, but he seemed eager to begin sleeping with his widowed stepmother, Hoelun, as was traditional. Temujin’s solution to the problem was extremely direct: he and his younger brother Khasar took their bows and shot Begter full of arrows. Kids, let that be a lesson to you: don’t pick on your younger brother, as he may turn out to be Genghis Khan.
Hoelun was furious. How could the boys hope to build alliances and avenge themselves on their tribe if they couldn’t even refrain from murdering their half brother? “You are like wolves,” she said, “like mad dogs that tear their own flesh.”
To punish this killing, the Tayichiud captured Temujin and made him a slave, working him hard. Temujin soon escaped and was taken in by a poor family that hid him under fleeces when his captors came in search of him. This kindness from strangers, contrasted with his treatment by his rich kin the Tayichiud, made a strong impression. In Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford observes that the experience gave Temujin “the conviction that some people, even those outside his clan, could indeed be trusted as if they were family. In later life, he would judge others primarily by their actions toward him and not according to their kinship bonds, a revolutionary concept in steppe society.” As we shall see, judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.
In 1178, Temujin turned sixteen. Though he had not seen his intended wife, Borte, since his father died, he felt confident enough to seek her out again. He was pleased to discover that she had waited for him. By custom a new bride brought a gift for the groom’s parents. Borte brought a coat of black sable, the most prized fur on the steppe. Temujin shrewdly gave the coat to a man named Ong Khan, one of his father’s old allies, expecting that he’d need allies of his own.
He needed them almost immediately. After eighteen years of biding its time, Hoelun’s original tribe, the Merkid, took its vengeance for her abduction, falling on Temujin’s camp with some three hundred men. Temujin and his brothers were able to ride away, but Borte was captured and given to an older Merkid man as his wife.
Temujin’s clan was no match for the powerful Merkids, and most men in his position would have simply looked around for a new wife to kidnap. But though Mongol men were reserved, Temujin openly lamented that the Merkids had cut open his chest and broken his heart. Choosing to fight, he went to Ong Khan, who agreed to help. Ong Khan sent Temujin to get additional aid from a rising young Mongol, Jamuka of the Jadaran clan. Jamuka and Temujin were already blood brothers—they had played knucklebones together as children—so Jamuka signed on, too. With these powerful friends, Temujin was ready for battle.
One night Temujin’s posse fell upon the Merkids, routing them. Temujin began searching the tents for Borte. She had been loaded into a cart and sent away from the battle for safety. The Secret History describes how, amid the sounds of conflict, Borte recognized a voice crying her name. Jumping from the cart, she raced through the darkness toward the voice. Temujin was so distraught that when she ran up and snatched the reins of his horse, he almost attacked her. Then he recognized her, and they “threw themselves upon each other.” Though Borte was pregnant by her Merkid husband, Temujin adopted the child as his own. Blood lineage truly meant little to him.
Despite his blood brother Jamuka’s help in rescuing Borte, Temujin began to clash with him. Once again, caste played a significant part in the conflict. In Mongol kinship hierarchy, each lineage was known as a bone. The closest lineages to the leader were considered superior and known as white bones. More distant lineages were black bones. As long as Temujin was part of Jamuka’s band, he was black-boned kin to a white bone. Only if he established his own band would Temujin be considered white-boned.
Having murdered his own brother rather than submit to him, Temujin was not going to bow to Jamuka. In 1183, their tribes split. It took twenty years of bitter fighting—interrupted by periodic truces and oaths of fealty—for Temujin to finally conquer Jamuka, sweep up the other independent tribes, and become the de facto leader of all the Mongols.
In 1206, the Mongol nobles gathered and asked Temujin to become their supreme leader. He accepted under the condition that every Mongol obey him without question, go wherever on earth he directed, and put to death whomever he chose. Now that he was in charge of thirty-one tribes and some two million Mongols, Temujin took the name Genghis Khan, meaning “fierce” or “tough” ruler.
The Mongols had always been divided against themselves, with tribes and clans and bands ceaselessly teaming up to battle a common enemy and then falling out to fight each other. Every noble on the steppe, even the lowliest brigand, believed he should rule over all. Genghis realized that these warlords needed a common goal, and that it should be predicated not on the aristocrats’ dream of primacy, but rather on his soldiers’ primal desires. Genghis grasped that he could motivate them with “huge and exponential amounts of booty,” as McLynn puts it. This, in fact, would be their only form of payment.
The aim was to ensure loyalty to the khan, not to tribe or clan, and this loyalty could be secured if the rewards were big enough. . . . To keep his superstate in being, Genghis needed constant influxes of wealth, and that meant permanent conquest and war; too long a period of peace would encourage the powerful and frustrated custodians of his commonwealth to turn in on, and eventually against, themselves.
After putting all the Mongol tribes under his yoke, Genghis attacked and subdued northern China. Then he turned west and knifed through Khwarezmia, the Persian Empire. And finally, before he died in 1227—most likely from the effects of a fall from his horse—he brought Russia under his thumb.
Genghis’s campaigns were ruthless. His generals routinely told opposing forces they would spare them if they surrendered, then, when they did, butchered them all. After conquering the city of Gurganj, his army made the women strip naked and fight each other before they slaughtered them. In many cities Genghis wiped out not only the people, but even the dogs, cats, and rats. He spared only the artisans, who were sent back to Mongolia. In the Arab world to which he laid waste, he became known as “the Accursed One.”
But he also, contrarily, displayed a new kind of acceptance and inclusiveness.
How Culture Affected Military Strategy
Genghis Khan’s sweeping meritocracy made his army fundamentally different from—and more powerful than—any that came before it.
In most armies, the leaders were on horseback while everyone else was slow-moving infantry; Genghis’s army consisted entirely of cavalry, so they were all equals and they all moved fast. Most armies had large units dedicated to providing supplies; in Genghis’s army, each man carried what he needed: clothes for all weathers, flints for making fires, canteens for water and milk, files to sharpen arrowheads, a lasso for rounding up animals or prisoners, sewing needles for mendin
g clothes, a knife and a hatchet for cutting, and a skin bag for packing it all. They all milked their animals and fed themselves from hunting and looting.
Traditional armies, hierarchical and class based, moved in long columns that marched in one direction trailed by large supply units. The Mongols were organized in concentric circles. Each squad of ten men was part of a brigade of one thousand, a new “tribe” Genghis created to replace the Mongols’ hereditary ones. These brigades, in turn, were part of a battalion of ten thousand men. At the pinnacle of the army’s power, ten of these ten-thousand-man battalions encircled Genghis Khan, who rode in the middle.
This structure enabled the Mongols to outmaneuver, surround, and destroy their enemies. Mongol forces routinely defeated armies five times their size. And they often confounded conventional wisdom by attacking on two fronts at once, a tactic that forestalled neighboring princes from coming to each other’s aid, lest the next attack suddenly land on their own city. Genghis’s campaigns were marked by rapid advances—his cavalry could move sixty-five miles a day, and Mongolian ponies were as nimble as dogs—by clouds of arrows, alternate attacks from light and heavy cavalry, feigned retreats and frequent ambushes, and an unsporting reluctance to engage in hand-to-hand combat. They were guerrilla warriors who happened to have an army. The Jin people of China were only the first to be astonished by the Mongols’ mercurial strikes: “They come as though the sky were falling, and they disappear like a flash of lightning.”
As his armies surged forward, Genghis made sure that the best practices among the newly conquered were transmitted throughout his domain. In this way, the entire empire rose as one. Weatherford writes:
Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.
Genghis created a remarkably stable culture by founding it on three principles: meritocracy, loyalty, and inclusion.
Meritocracy
After uniting the Mongols in 1189, Temujin made his first organizational innovation. In most steppe tribes, the khan’s court was an aristocracy consisting of his relatives. Weatherford writes:
Temujin, however, assigned some dozen responsibilities to various followers according to the ability and loyalty of the individual without regard to kinship. He gave the highest positions as his personal assistants to his first two followers, Boorchu and Jelme, who had shown persistent loyalty to him for more than a decade.
Mongol women were already treated unusually well for the time, but Genghis went on to abolish inherited aristocratic titles and eliminate the caste hierarchy; all men were equal. Shepherds and camel boys could now become generals. Temujin called all his subjects “the People of the Felt Walls”—the material used for the walls of their gers, or yurts. This symbolized that they were a single clan.
To solidify this new meritocracy, he made it a capital offense for his family members to become a khan, or leader, without being elected to the post. He introduced the concept of the rule of law; might alone no longer made right. At a time when rulers considered themselves above the law, Genghis Khan insisted that leaders be as accountable as the lowest herder.
There was just one exception to this principle: Genghis himself. At his worst he behaved like any other despot. And he further weakened the meritocracy by favoring his own children with huge land grants after they complained that they’d been bypassed by commoners. McLynn writes, “To the question ‘Was Mongol society under Genghis Khan a rule-governed system or a tyranny?’ the answer can only be: both.”
Yet for a leader of his time, Genghis was remarkably down-to-earth; he walked the talk. While he expected obeisance, he never portrayed himself as godlike—indeed, he never allowed anyone to paint his portrait, sculpt his image, or engrave his name or likeness on a coin. In a letter to a Taoist monk, Genghis spoke of himself as just another soldier, saying, “I have not myself distinguished qualities,” and adding, “I continue to wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cowherds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifices, and we share the riches.”
By converting his army from a genetic hierarchy to a true meritocracy, Genghis Khan rid himself of the idlers and mediocrities who rule in an aristocracy, raised the army’s talent level considerably, and inspired ambitious soldiers to dream that if they proved courageous and intelligent, they, too, could lead.
Loyalty
Genghis Khan defined loyalty quite differently from his contemporaries. Typically, leaders asked warriors to die for them, but Genghis viewed loyalty as a bilateral relationship that gave him significant responsibilities. When two horse wranglers warned of a plot against him, he made them generals. After his troops captured one of Jamuka’s archers, who’d nearly killed Temujin with a long shot, the archer explained to Temujin that it was nothing personal; he’d had to follow his leader’s orders. The archer expected to be put to death, but Temujin made him an officer, and he went on to become a great general.
Genghis’s purpose in battle was to preserve Mongol life. He preferred to conquer through intimidation that led to surrender, so towns that capitulated immediately were often afforded leniency while those that resisted had their citizens marched in front of his army as human shields. (As I noted earlier, Genghis was moody and his generals could be impulsive, so his forces didn’t always adhere to this principle.) When one of his soldiers was killed, Genghis ordered that his share of the loot be distributed to his widow and children.
Unique among conquerors, Genghis never punished any of his generals, which explains why, across six decades, none of them deserted or betrayed him. Using a technique later employed by Shaka Senghor, Genghis demanded that his army’s ethics apply to outsiders as well. When he declared that you must never betray your khan, he intended it as a global rule. After he defeated Jamuka at last, in 1205, some of Jamuka’s men turned their leader over to him, hoping to gain Genghis’s favor. Rather than rewarding these turncoats, he executed them—just as Jamuka had warned them he would. And then he executed Jamuka.
By elevating loyalty to a higher principle, Genghis created a massive military advantage. Precisely because he wasn’t asking his troops to die for him, they eagerly would. The Mongols said about the Great Khan that “If he sends me into fire or water I go. I go for him.”
Inclusion
Genghis instituted a radical change in the protocols of warfare. Rather than treating conquered aristocratic leaders with special care and enslaving the rank and file, he executed the aristocrats (so they couldn’t later rise against him) and incorporated the soldiers into his army. In this way he not only swelled his ranks, but also established himself as an equal-opportunity employer, the guy whose team you wanted to be on.
After he defeated the Jurkin clan in 1196, he had his mother, Hoelun, adopt a Jurkin boy and raise him as a son. This made clear that the conquered would share in future conquests as though they were part of the original tribe. To symbolize the new equality, Genghis threw a feast for the defeated Mongols and their new relatives. He also encouraged intermarriage to further integrate the tribes.
Anyone could have added enemy soldiers into his army—everyone from the Romans on had—but Genghis’s stroke of brilliance was treating those soldiers so well that they became more loyal to him than to their original leaders.
This approach was crystallized in 1203, when he was being pursued by Ong Khan, his former mentor. Temujin took refuge in the swamp, near northern China, and there he and nineteen of his commanders drank water from the Baljuna River and swore an oath. The commanders swore lifelong allegiance to Genghis
, who swore lifelong loyalty to them. As Weatherford writes:
The nineteen men with Temujin Khan came from nine different tribes; probably only Temujin and his brother Khasar were actually from the Mongol clans. The others included Merkid, Khitan, and Kereyid. Whereas Temujin was a devout shamanist who worshiped the Eternal Blue Sky and the God Mountain of Burkhan Khaldun, the nineteen included several Christians, three Muslims, and several Buddhists. They were united only in their devotion to Temujin and their oath to him and each other. The oaths sworn at Baljuna created a type of brotherhood, and in transcending kinship, ethnicity, and religion, it came close to being a type of modern civic citizenship based upon personal choice and commitment.
When the highly civilized Uighur people surrendered without a fight in 1209, Genghis deployed many of their officials throughout his realm as judges, generals, scribes, secret agents, and tax collectors. McLynn notes that this was another pivotal moment:
Since their high skills, talents, and culture had been placed at the service of the Mongols, and their script accepted as the first official language of the governing class, they helped to give the empire ideological and spiritual legitimacy; it could no longer be said that this was just a congeries of cruel, bloodthirsty savages.
As Genghis extended his reach, he became more selective about who he incorporated into his army, focusing on scholars and engineers as well as doctors, who rode with each of his thousand-man brigades. After having great success using Chinese scholars to administer the empire, every time he captured a city he would have its scholars brought in for interrogation—essentially interviewing them for open job postings. By incorporating foreign engineers, he captured the knowledge needed to build the most technically advanced fighting force ever assembled; in this way he adopted such weapons as the trebuchet and the catapult.