Tobacco was the first of the New World drugs to be widely accepted in the Old World, and the European zest for it played a major role in opening North America to colonization. Contemporary civic mytho...
The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to overs...
Raiding followed a geographic pattern originating in the north. The southern tribes that lived closest to the trade cities of the Silk Route always had more goods than the more distant northern tribes...
In contrast to almost every major army in history, the Mongols traveled lightly, without a supply train. By waiting until the coldest months to make the desert crossing, men and horses required less w...
Discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of...
Tranquility, and its same small scale indicates that it lacked sufficient grazing for the number of animals needed to support a large army or even a large court of retainers. The location indicates
While continuing to worship the spirit of their grandfather Genghis Khan and making him into a virtual god, his heirs destroyed everything he created. Yet the more they destroyed, the more ritually im...
Outlawing the sale or barter of women marked Genghis Khan’s first important departure from tribal practices regarding marriage, and gradually through a series of such changes he transformed the social...
Khatun Temur, literally Queen Iron, and Khatun Baatar, Queen Hero.
He considered betrayal of duty, cowardice, lying, and laziness the vilest of all sins, and he praised those who put personal honor above their well-being, or even their life. He knew he could never de...
Despite the initial reliance of commerce on routes created through military conquest, it soon became obvious that whereas armies moved quickest by horse across land, massive quantities of goods moved...
By contrast, the subsequent waves of Puritans in their search for profits quickly uprooted all natives and sold many of them into slavery without bothering to extend to them the right to become Christ...
Tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants c...
For Temujin, such chosen forms of fictive kinship were already proving more useful than the ties of biological kinship.
Three of her sisters became queens along the Silk Route, ruling over the grand Turkic nations of Onggud, Uighur, and Karluk.
No friend is better than your own wise heart! Genghis Khan
On free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.
You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.
Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy.
The royal Mongol women raced horses, commanded in war, presided as judges over criminal cases, ruled vast territories, and sometimes wrestled men in public sporting competitions. They arrogantly rejec...
