Original subtitles

A noble prince reduced to poverty as a boy,

has risen above his brutal childhood to become

a brilliant leader on the Mongolian plains.

He is now the fearsome ruler known as Chinggis Khan.

What gave his followers the idea that he was greater

than a mere conqueror was the fact that he was so successful.

He has crushed foes, subdued rival houses,

and clawed back everything his family lost.

He achieves a lot diplomatically,

which is a side to his career that can easily be overlooked.

Now, at the age of 44,

he is the undisputed ruler of the Mongolian people,

but he stands at the brink of something far greater

with an insatiable hunger for power, his eyes are set

on the world beyond Mongolia.

The world irrevocably changed with his actions.

Chinggis Khan's ambition knows no bounds,

and soon the world will learn the cost of standing

in his way.

1206, this is the huge assembly, the Kurultai.

There would have been a lot of ritual, great deal of luxury.

There would have been power and pomp on display.

There are all the major Royals, members of Chinggis Khan's

own family, are there.

You're gathering huge numbers of people and livestock.

The Kurultai is where they make major decisions.

Decision concerning war,

decision concerning peace, decision concerning

big trade treaties.

-One most practical reason for Kurultai is

to choose a new Khan.

-When you become a famous, important ruler,

you show it to the world. You make it official

by taking a title.

Chinggis Khan is a title that means also that something new

is going to happen under this new ruler is sitting

on a very deep heritage, but he is already planning to do

something new, something bigger.

He wants to go higher than his predecessors,

and he's able to break tradition, and that's what,

exactly what he's going to do.

Actually, this is the beginning of a completely new story.

It is a story told in the legendary book,

The Secret History of the Mongols,

a new translation helps challenge long held beliefs

and myths about Chinggis Khan, offering a new perspective

on his legacy and people.

Chinggis Khan is seen now in Mongolia as

the founder of the nation, the father who created

the Mongolian people and the world-famous conqueror.

That being said,

there's a difference of opinion about him.

Some people are particularly fascinated by the glory

of that Imperial age.

Others see him as part of a conquest dynasty that did

invade and attack its neighbors.

The idea that the Mongols were barbarians, that's all nonsense.

We know these are highly sophisticated political

formations, just as complex and sophisticated

and as hierarchical as the dynasties around them.

So, it's another very sophisticated political

formation, just as other kingdoms on the Eurasian

continent were.

Central to Chinggis Khan's vision

is the unification of the people of the Mongolian plains

under a single banner, loyal only to him.

He wants to have one single Mongol people.

There's only going to be one group on the steppe.

Everyone is now a Mongol.

This is why the Mongols still exist.

Is because of this moment in 1206,

Chinggis Khan has agreed there will only be the Mongols.

To achieve this goal, Chinggis Khan reorganizes

the military structure of his new realm,

adapting and refining a military system

that strengthens his command.

This was a really ancient system

for administration that dates back to at least

the second century BCE,

you can see that Chinggis Khan did revamp it.

It divides up subject that is, commoner households

into units of 10, fitted into units of 100 those into units

of 1000 and those into units of a nominal 10,000

he declares exactly which of these 1000 household units

are authorized and supported, and exactly who

is the hereditary Noble who will rule over it.

He could designate members of his own royal family

or his most important supporters as rulers

of these 10,000 or Tumen units.

Chinggis Khan also knows he must protect

his position as leader as one's warring households

come together under his command.

This is where the Empire really comes

into focus. He realizes he's his single ruler of the step.

And he also needs to try to get beyond the old system

that allowed for all the feuds, all the fighting that have

taken place throughout his lifetime.

He does not want to return to that.

My sense of this is that he does not completely trust

all of his relatives.

He is very focused on loyalty.

Chinggis Khan has inserted himself at the top

of an existing hierarchy of commoners and nobles.

What was new was Chinggis Khan's new reorganization

of the existing divisions of power, the kingdoms within

that he had reused, absorbed and replaced with his own

newly centralized Imperial formation.

There'll be multiple layers of authority.

He'll have his relatives, his sons, ruling certain areas,

but he also has commanders.

They're ultimately Chinggis Khan's men.

They ultimately report back to him,

so they serve as a system of checks and balances against

his relatives. Should they ever have

some ambition to threaten his power.

The position of ruler comes with unique dangers

and threats, so Chinggis Khan prepares for challenges

to his authority.

Very wisely preempts any possible disloyalty

by creating a bodyguard.

It's called Keshig.

The Keshig consisted of a total of 1100 men.

This included guards for the daytime, included night guards,

included a special regiment that rode with him into battle.

But in 1206, he increases the size to 10,000.

He orders all of his commanders to send the son to them,

and they would assemble the bodyguard out of this.

Now this will serve as a hostage.

It helps guarantee good behavior.

If you misbehave, we could possibly kill your son,

or if you misbehave, we can kill you,

and we have someone here that we can replace you with.

And these guys will be great fighters.

They'll be great warriors.

So, it serves not only a bodyguard,

but also a military academy, an intelligence agency,

and it's a finishing school for diplomats,

for governors to learn how to rule on behalf of the Khan,

to understand the wishes.

Genghis Khan's reforms of the nobility

and a Kesh bodyguard make him more powerful than ever,

but he will face untold enemies, both from beyond

Mongolia's borders and from closer to home.

After the death of Chinggis Khan's father,

his mother remarried, and this new branch of family

would soon ignite unrest.

Chinggis Khan's stepfather had seven sons,

and the middle one was called K kecu Teb Tenggeri.

K kecu was his name, and Teb Tenggeri was a title he had,

which means something like most heavenly.

Now it seems that he was a really powerful Shaman.

The ancient faith of the steppe rulers

was a shamanistic devotion to Tengri, the eternal blue sky,

who controlled the fate of the world.

At the time of Genghis Khan,

they did have rituals and believed in spirits of Nature,

trees, mountains, rivers, lakes.

They are also ancestors.

In every important family, people gather to celebrate

the family ancestors.

This is a very rich set of beliefs.

-We find that a lot of the declarations

of the spiritual and religious refer to an overarching

heavenly power that created destinies that favored

some rulers over others, and that was used extensively

to justify Chinggis Khan's claim to ultimate power.

So certainly, shamans were important

in the Mongolian court.

Chinggis Khan decided religious elites

need to be respected.

They also need to be loyal to the power;

also, they need to stay away and not decide for the Emperor.

That's also something that you can see clearly

from 1206 onwards.

At this stage, it seems as if K kecu Teb Tenggeri

and his other brothers become increasingly

arrogant and proud.

They seem to throw their weight around.

A rivalry emerges.

Teb Tenggeri has started to suggest that it's actually

Chinggis Khan's brother Qasar, who might be destined

by Heaven to rule this is a real threat

to Chinggis Khan himself.

Teb Tenggeri's poisonous rumors are so

persuasive that Chinggis Khan grows suspicious

of his own brother until their mother intervenes.

-Then mother reprimanded Chinggis Khan

that you were just from the same womb, same brotherhood.

You can't be rival to each other.

You have to be friendly to each other.

Chinggis Khan finds this coming to a head

when his younger brother comes into his tent saying

that he's been beaten up by Teb Tenggeri and his brothers

and begging Chinggis Khan to do something about it.

Chinggis Khan is slow to move against Teb Tenggeri

until his wife Börte urges decisive action,

warning that the shaman is too dangerous to ignore.

In the secret history,

we get a lot of accounts of women,

particularly the royal women, giving advice and guiding

the prime male characters,

Chinggis Khan is often given advice by his wife,

Börte and his mother, Hö'elün.

Key decisions get made because of good advice

from one of Chinggis Khan's female relatives,

or his wife

With Börte urging him on,

Chinggis Khan devises a plan of action.

The solution is they invite all of the

brothers, including Teb Tenggeri to meet Chinggis Khan.

In the middle of that meeting, he sort of grabs him

and pulls Teb Tenggeri outside, where Chinggis Khan

has got three wrestlers stationed.

When they get Teb Tenggeri outside,

they pounce on him and they kill him.

They broke Teb Tenggeri's spine.

Teb Tenggeri has been eliminated.

With this merciless act.

Chinggis Khan has quashed internal descent.

But far more dangerous enemies await beyond the steppe

ready to challenge his power.

With his kingdom reordered and the people of the Eastern

steppe unified under his command, Chinggis Khan's

wealth and power surges, but his ambition

is far from satisfied.

He wants more and plans to take it from a wealthy neighbor.

South of Mongolia is the Empire of the Xi Xia,

ruled by people known as the Tangut.

The Tangut were a Tibetan Burmese people

who rule this region in what is now Gansu Ningxia,

provinces of modern day China.

The Tangut were both the rulers and the nobility,

but also a nomadic people.

The Mongols had long relations with the Tangut.

What the Tangut thought of the rise of Chinggis Khan?

They couldn't have been too happy about it.

In 1209, the Mongols invaded.

What he wants to do at this point is basically nullify

the Tangut as a threat to the Mongol state

that he's just created.

As they head into battle against the Tangut,

Chinggis Khan employs an ancient maneuver,

the feigned retreat.

-This is a common step tactic.

Chinggis Khan does not invent the feigned retreat.

It's been used for 1000s of years.

What matters is how well you execute it.

The Mongols have trained they're able to pull off

a feigned retreat. So it is perfect.

They sell the retreats like they are fleeing for their

lives, that they're terrified of the Tangut.

This lures them out into a place where the Mongols

have already designated as this is a spot where we're

going to annihilate you, but then you pull back.

It's a trap.

One of the ancient skills of the horse

Archer was the ability to ride their horse, but also to turn

in the saddle and shoot backwards over the rump

of their steed.

It means that the horse Archer can ride away

from their opponents.

If you are on a whiffed steed, you can always outpace

the person chasing you, but at the same time,

you can shoot back at them,

which means that you can shoot at your enemies

without being in any particular danger yourself.

This was a tactic used by lots of steppe armies,

but the Mongols certainly used it to really good effect.

Coupled with the feigned retreat,

Chinggis Khan uses another devastating tactic

to eliminate large groups in quick succession.

They used arrow showers.

Down on a line of soldiers trying to kill that entire area.

For the know it, the Tangut have lost large portions

of their army.

After success on the battlefield.

Chinggis Khan's forces marched toward the Tangut stronghold,

prepared to stop at nothing in their quest for victory.

Now the Mongols are approaching Zhongxing.

This is the capital of Xi Xia. They blockade it.

Someone gets the bright idea of we have a river here.

Why don't we dam it up and flood the city.

They don't have the engineering skills to make a dam

that is really going to be stable.

They do successfully flood the city,

however, the dam breaks, and they also flood

their own camp and almost drown themselves.

But what this effort does is demonstrate to the ruler

of Xi Xia that the Mongols are a real danger.

and they're not just going to go away.

We should submit.

And so they do.

And they offer gold. They offer furs,

Falcons.

Also the ruler gives one of his daughters to Chinggis Khan

as a wife. So now we have a marriage alliance.

in this case, I think the implication is that

by giving the Princess The Tangut ruler of the Xi Xia,

was showing that he accepted the overlordship

of Chinggis Khan and showed his loyalty to Chinggis Khan,

it was a way of cementing a political arrangement

which acknowledged Genghis Khan's supremacy

To promote peace and prosperity.

The gifting of wives is a common diplomatic practice.

These kinds of diplomatic marriages

were obviously really important features of

courtly politics at the time.

There was lots of interest in having additional wives

for the emperor, so that you would get another embassy.

The kin spoke of the new queen would have access

to the internal decision-making processes

and the ear of the emperor through their kins, women

who had married into the Imperial dynasty.

Chinggis Khan must have had a lot of queens.

Many of them were useful, diplomatic and political

marriages, which made sense in terms of the dynasty,

as well as possibly his own personal lifestyle.

With his numerous wives, concerts

and concubines, Chinggis Khan may have fathered

many children beyond those born to his primary wife,

Borte, fueling speculation that millions today can trace

their lineage back to the great conqueror.

Someone did a study of DNA in the late 1990s.

It showed that male chromosomes of a singular person were

common in a certain area that fit in the Mongol Empire.

So naturally, everyone assumes it's Chinggis Khan,

maybe, but maybe not.

It's an intriguing idea.

Who wouldn't want to be able to make that kind of a claim

that you're a descendant from someone of that magnitude.

Chinggis Khan has brought the Tangut

to their knees, and they have paid tribute to spare

themselves from his wrath,

yet they are just one of many enemies bordering his kingdom,

and new threats will soon emerge.

Beyond his foreign conquests, Chinggis Khan has tightened

his grip within his own land, bringing any remaining local

rulers under his control.

Chinggis Khan finishes off his old enemies,

the Merkit.

He finishes off the Naiman to the west,

and he makes some diplomatic conquests.

The Uyghur, which were originally a very powerful

Turkic dynasty, swear fealty to Chinggis Khan.

They can see the way the winds blowing.

They can spot the up and coming power in the region.

to manage his expanding empire.

Chinggis Khan delegates power to his four heirs.

Chinggis Khan was going to use his sons

as core commanders to lead his armies on the various

different campaigns.

The Empire is getting pretty big now,

Chinggis himself can't be everywhere.

He wants to make sure that all of his sons have some stake

in the new empire that he's building,

whilst beginning to think about what other big prizes

there might be.

Chinggis Khan's dominance soon draws

the attention of another neighboring Empire.

The local superpower for a long time

was the Jin.

The emerging Jin formed this really powerful and wealthy

empire in the northern part of China,

and they were the sort of major power players in that region.

Chinggis Khan had spent time in the employ

of the Jin when still a young prince.

Although Chinggis Khan is now ruler,

the Jin Emperor still expects him to bow to their vast power.

In early 1211, an envoy from the Jin Empire arrived.

From this envoy, he learns that the old Emperor is dead

and the new guy is someone that Chinggis Khan

does not have any respect for.

Chinggis Khan listens and he spits in the direction

of the Jin empire and rides away.

He's not taking orders from the Jin Empire anymore.

Chinggis Khan is finally in a position

where he's powerful enough to consider taking on the Jin.

Before attacking the Jin, the Mongolians prepare,

both physically and spiritually.

Chinggis Khan goes up to the mountains and prays

to Tengri and seek His favor.

They'll definitely look for divine help wherever they can.

Chinggis Khan also summons his trusted generals

and military leaders, seeking their counsel

on battle strategies.

While he demands loyalty,

he does not want yes men.

He wants people to point out that might not be a good idea,

he may not be happy about it, but he's going to listen

to it and consider it.

He always listens to his commanders,

particularly those who rose up with him,

working out what would be the best approach.

How can we improve how we fight so we don't make

the same mistakes.

We got to move an army from here in central Mongolia

to the Jin empire.

We got to cross the open steppe.

We got to go across bounds.

We got to cross the Gobi Desert.

What does that require?

They have to figure out the logistics.

Ultimately, he will make the final decision.

He knows what the Jin are capable.

They have the army of roughly 600,000

which easily is five times greater than the Mongol army.

It's a really big step to take

on this very formidable dynasty.

But Chinggis Khan is finally powerful enough to do it.

The Jin are facing an enemy that they think they know.

They haven't realized that things on the steppe

have changed.

These are not the Mongols of the 12th century.

This is a whole new power organized for warfare.

Chinggis Khan advances into Jin territory.

He invades in 1211,

the way the Jin had layered their defense is

they had a zone of clients who would be a buffer zone

between them and the possible steppe powers

like Chinggis Khan.

These either defeated or some of them recruited by Chinggis Khan.

A common narrative was that the Mongols sort of kidnapped

engineers and other skilled people and forced them

to fight in their armies.

Chinggis Khan rides into battle against

his most formidable foe yet he must rely on cunning

and sophisticated maneuvers to overcome

their superior strength.

-The Mongols do something

a little bit unexpected.

They don't just invade as one big army.

They split up, and they're going all over the place,

pillaging and plundering.

The Mongols seem like they're everywhere.

So this idea of maneuver,

of coordinating strikes between different mobile

armies simultaneously to rendezvous on targets.

DR MAY It's difficult for the Jin to really grasp

how many soldiers that Chinggis Khan really has.

the Mongol army, they could field armies that were

more sophisticated as well as more skillful.

In many cases, they were outnumbered,

but they were usually more maneuverable.

Like other steppe armies, they were cavalry only.

This was a really superb advantage,

because if you come from a sedentary or agricultural

state, many of your troops and soldiers are likely

to be infantry on foot.

That makes for a very slow army.

In comparison, an army that's composed completely of cavalry

can move faster, and that's one enormous advantage.

He's perfected his art of war, the tactics,

the strategies he wants to use, and the Mongols

execute them brilliantly.

It's not that the Jin are incapable.

They're just meeting a superior foe.

Jebe, one of his generals,

advances and then does a feigned retreat to sort of

draw out the Jin forces.

And as they come out, these different units

follow one at a time.

He can then round on them and sort of defeat them

one after the next.

Chinggis Khan was in the Jin Empire for 10 years.

He knows how they think. He knows how they operate.

Typical use of mobility and trickery

to defeat opponents that might have been numerically superior.

They win a couple very important victories

that completely demolish the armies of the Jin.

Every time the Jin sent an army out, the Mongols routed,

things on the steppe have changed.

Chinggis Khan is not a young, inexperienced guy.

He has begun to change the art of war in the step.

Chinggis Khan drives deeper into the heart

of the Jin Empire, his forces leaving a trail

of devastation as they ravage village after village,

seizing anything of value.

Relentless in his pursuit of victory,

Chinggis Khan targets the Jin's center of power.

Zhongdu was the capital of the Jin empire.

It was enormously well fortified.

It was miles and miles of wall all the way around,

and also towers, even small forts that were placed

at strategic points to help defend the city.

So it was a really formidable defensive obstacle

for the Mongols to besiege.

As the Mongol assault begins,

the Jin leadership is already crumbling under internal

conflicts, weakening their resistance.

We're beginning to see some people change sides.

The Jin will go through a number of emperors,

some Jin commanders, they'll join the Mongols.

Sometimes because, well, you can either join or die,

or they decide, these guys actually seem to know

what they're doing, let's join the winner.

Chinggis Khan senses the Jin's internal weakness

and presents them with an ultimatum,

submit and pay tribute or face complete destruction.

In 1214, the Mongols make peace.

They come to terms.

They agree to a big, huge tribute.

We get lots of treasure We get lots of good stuff.

The new Jin Emperor will also give Chinggis Khan a princess.

And those are the conditions under which

Chinggis Khan withdraws his armies.

Although Chinggis Khan commands a smaller force.

He has compelled the Jin to submit to his will.

He has been fighting for three years,

and leaves with a new wife, vast treasures and abundant

resources, but the Jin have not seen the last of Chinggis Khan.

With tributes secured and a peace treaty in place,

Chinggis Khan and his army prepare to withdraw

from Jin territory.

They're not necessarily trying

to conquer the Jin empire.

Their early actions in the first few years

are very much to secure the borders.

He wants to make sure that it is safe from invasion

and from Jin meddling.

However, as the campaigns go on, people have this

annoying tendency to either flee, which means if you want

to get more plunder, you have to keep going deeper

into the Jin empire, or possibly even worse,

they surrender and want you to rule them,

so you have to stay and deal with these people.

So the Mongols will bring in former Jin officials

that they feel that they can trust and allows them

to be ruled as they were used to being ruled.

We get another layer of Mongol governance,

not only does he have his relatives, his generals,

also the local administration.

Although the Jin Emperor has admitted

to the Mongol army, he makes a reckless decision,

one that will prove costly.

The new emperor decides to move from Zhongdu

to Kaifeng, which is 550 kilometers south southwest

of modern Beijing, so far away from the Mongols.

Why does he do this?

Some people think maybe disease.

There's a lot of death and destruction in the area.

But the other thing is, the Mongols have caused

so much damage in that area, it is not a secure zone.

That's really not where you feel safe.

Even if you have a peace treaty, you have to be

a little bit nervous about that. So he moves.

For Chinggis Khan, this is seen as an act of betrayal.

We made peace.

You've just demonstrated that you don't trust me.

So it's on.

The Emperor's ill-advised move provokes

the Mongols into launching a second assault

on the Jin's capital, Zhongdu.

The Mongols once again invade Chinggis Khan

again has immense emphasis on loyalty.

If you switch sides in the middle of the battle,

most likely he's going to execute you.

He doesn't have any patience for that.

The siege of Zhongdu stretched on.

It wasn't over quickly.

It was a really formidable defensive obstacle

for the Mongols to besiege.

It's an immense city.

What they do is they leave detachments

round the city to basically blockade it.

From Kaifeng, the Jin emperor, authorizes attempts

to save the city, but the Mongols will defeat these

as they come.

The Jin armies will have archers, crossbow men,

giant crossbows, a contraption that could shoot a giant

crossbow bolt several 100 yards and neutralizing

anything it hits.

So for the Mongols to take this they had to figure out

how to overcome all these obstacles, eliminates threats

from the fortresses.

Instead of breaking through the city's

fortifications, the Mongols choose a more ruthless strategy.

They will starve the city into surrender.

Siege warfare in this age was a really

terrible ordeal for the occupants of any city.

They were cut off of stocks of food.

They begin to starve.

It is not uncommon for people in Zhongdu late at night.

You might get nabbed in the alley

and become someone's dinner.

Cannibalism is very real in Zhongdu in the later months

of the siege.

the siege lasts no more than a year before it finally

surrenders.

People are starving.

They can't put up a further resistance.

The city falls.

Although they now control a lot of Jin territory

and have displaced the Jin Dynasty itself that has had

to relocate and flee, it is not as if the fighting was over.

Chinggis himself left one of his best generals, Muqali,

who for many years continued the campaign against the Jin

there was an ongoing rolling campaign of mop up

that was masterminded by Muqali.

And one of the reasons why he was so respected

in the Chinggis core was because it was recognized

that this was an enormous effort that he undertook,

that eventually bore fruit when the Mongols eventually

came to control the whole of the Northern Chinese plain.

The Jin Empire will hold out until 1234,

it does not go away easily.

Although it will take many years for the Jin

to be fully defeated.

The Mongolians are building a fearsome reputation

on the battlefield, and they will ensure

that their brutal actions become legendary.

In many places, they would wipe out everybody,

but maybe a handful of people or one guy,

and that one guy would always tell the story,

and the story was always scary.

They killed everyone. They came back five days later,

they killed even more people who came out of the rubble.

So the fear is building.

There's one story told by a Persian chronicler Juvayni

that 60,000 virgins leapt off the walls to their death,

rather than be taken by the Mongols.

Another story tells of a caravan coming from Central Asia.

It was sent by the Kharazmshah to find out

what's going on in China.

And as they're approaching, they see these white mountains.

They think they're covered with snow,

but then they realize they're just piles of bones

from the Mongol conquest in northern China.

As a pro Zhang du the road is getting slick,

and it seems wet, and they discover it's from human fat

that's been melted.

You get this sense of overwhelming dread about

the Mongol invasions.

The Mongols are not simply another army.

They're a force of nature.

They are the apocalypse incarnate.

-Chinggis Khan, having fearlessly battled

the once mighty Jin empire, now turns his gaze west

to empires filled with untold riches.

These lands, unaware of the approaching storm,

will soon feel the devastation

of his relentless force.