Original subtitles

The mighty Chinggis Khan

has risen to become the undisputed leader

of the Mongols.

Uniting the once divided people under his command.

Chinggis Khan did something no one else

had done before.

Taken the Mongols farther than they've ever been before.

This was a whole new world for them.

Having reshaped society and quelled

all internal opposition, his ambitions have shifted

beyond Mongolia's lands.

Chinggis Khan conquered his enemies, the Tanguts,

who now swear loyalty to the Mongols.

His armies in the East have killed the emperor of the Jin

and continue to ravage their lands.

You get the sense of overwhelming dread about

the Mongol invasion.

Chinggis Khan is now in his fifties.

And has been in command of the Mongolian people for ten years

and now his gaze turns west.

His forces will travel further than ever before

where a new wave of destruction

awaits his enemies.

1216 Chinggis Khan controls

the whole of the eastern steppe.

He's also master in effect of a lot of northern China

and he's expanding eastward.

The Jin in the east and the Tanguts to the south

have felt the awesome power of the Mongolian army

but to the west lies a new potential threat,

a great Empire that could challenge the might

of Chinggis Khan.

-There is a big power just on the west

that is called the Qara Khitai Empire.

Qara Khitai is the big central Asian Empire

that is just next to the new Mongol Empire.

This is really a core area.

Mainly on trade connection which is super important

for Chinggis Khan.

The Qara Khitai were the people who were kicked out

by the Jin over in the Far East.

They migrated on masse and had fled one of the princes

who'd been defeated by Genghis and he'd taken over

and was therefore a threat.

The Qara Khitai, led by one of Genghis Khan's

worst enemies.

They are not going to trade peacefully with the Mongols.

Genghis Khan starts putting some pressure

on the Qara Khitai Empire.

He sends one of his ace generals, Jebe.

He begins to take over and occupy regions

from the Qara Khitan Dynastic rule.

This conquest is very fast.

When the Mongols arrived many people opened doors

and said ok we are happy to make a deal with you

as long as you let us practice our religion, Islam.

The Mongols thought that religious agreements

they can practice their religion as long as

they support Mongol power.

It's implemented first time in Qara Khitai land,

then it will be implemented everywhere in the Empire

by the Mongols and it's gonna work very well.

Now Chinggis Khan's prime left tenant

is basically ensconced in the Qara Khitan capitol.

So this whole part of central Asia entered

the Mongol Empire, absorbed by the Mongols.

And the Mongols gain access to this trade network.

It was an essential part in his progress.

As part of that expansion,

Chinggis Khan's Empire is bumping into another rival

Empire emerging from the west.

The Khwarazmian Empire, the largest Islamic

Empire of the early 13th century.

Mohammed, the king of Khwarazmian,

had expanded successfully over much of the Middle East.

A lot of Persian areas were now tributary to him.

Emerging from Khwarazmian way out west to the Caspian Sea

and we're still in the process of growing,

Mohammed the second had been really successful.

He's done some great conquests.

He's extended the Khwarazmian Empire to its greatest extent.

-Khwarazmian was the richest Empire

of their time.

Rich in the wealth, rich in people, rich in culture.

In many ways there were a lot of

similarities actually between the Mongol conquest

and those of the Khwarazmian Shah.

Khwarazmian also controlled a lot of urban

and agricultural areas so they had more by the way

of infantry and other sedentary forces.

Both of them drew upon steppe land subjects to form

the basis of their cavalry units.

Expanding across the territories and gaining

this submission from various cities and regions.

Most local rulers would often be left in place provided

they swore fealty to the new ruler,

in this case the Khwarazmian Shah.

They were trying to mop up territory and gain wealth

and power from the regions

they controlled just as Chinggis was.

Chinggis Khan's Empire expanding to the west

and the Khwarazmian Empire expanding to the east.

Sultan Mohammed Khwarazmian Shah,

the ruler of the Khwarazmian Empire,

he was dealing with nomadic raiders

and stumbled across the track of the Mongols,

Mohammed is able to catch up with them.

He encounters Jochi.

Jochi does not want to fight the Khwarazmian Empire.

He tells Mohammed, we're going back to Mongolia.

Mohammed says, you're invaders, I am powerful,

I am the second Alexander the great

and they fight the Mongols,

even though Jochi's armies are outnumbered,

they fight the Khwarazmian to a standstill.

The battle ends at nightfall.

They're out on the open steppe, it gets dark fast.

Under the cover of night, the Mongols who never wanted

the fight, they leave, but the battle the previous day

shook Mohammed to his core;

he'd never fought an army like this.

So he knows the Mongols are dangerous,

Mohamed Khwarazmian Shah, feeling quite confident

in his power and he sends a caravan to the Jin Empire

to gather intelligence.

And this caravan meets Chinggis Khan and they see the siege

of Zhongdu, they see what's happening in the Jin Empire

and they come back and they tell Mohammed,

who views himself as the second Alexander the Great,

it looks like there is a new power.

Chinggis Khan seems to have been very

prepared to coexist with the Khwarazmian Empire.

He's occupied by the Jin.

He seems to have wanted to initiate trading relations

with the Khwarazmian Empire.

In which Chinggis was interested because he liked

the idea of trade routes which would bring him wealth

which would be useful for preserving the loyalty

of his generals and his allies.

His first advances were diplomatic;

he offers to look upon the Shah in a kindly way

as if he were a son and so on, so it was a little bit

patronizing but sort of nevertheless friendly

so it's to try and establish good relations

with his western neighbor.

Sending three times his ambassadors

to negotiate with the Khwarazmian Shah

about what to trade and how to cooperate.

And a big caravan of goods were sent to Khwarazmian.

He sent a trade mission.

He would have regarded them as envoys;

the idea was that a trade mission would establish

trade links with the Khwarazmian Empire

and everyone would benefit.

The caravan that Chinggis Khan sends

to central Asia to the Khwarazmian Empire

consists of approximately 100 merchants

and 400 camels each camel can carry about 400 pounds

of goods so this includes silk, and spices, furs,

and allegedly there is a gold nugget the size

of a camel's neck. And if you're familiar with

the size of a camel that's a really big nugget.

This mission was seen by the local governor

in the town called Otrar which exists.

And the Governor there decides that these merchants

are probably spies.

It's true to say that the Mongols

had a reputation for using merchants as spies

and gathered intelligence that way.

The governor of Otrar City

took all these goods and killed all the merchants.

Basically they robbed the caravan by killing everyone.

The governor there probably got permission from Sultan Mohammed.

Chinggis acknowledged if you want your own envoy

to be protected you better protect the envoys

that come to you as well.

So it was a sort of diplomatic no-no to kill an envoy.

However there was a camel tender.

He survived the massacre. He escapes.

He goes back to the Mongols and he informs them

of what happened.

Chinggis sends some more envoys

to try to establish what's gone wrong.

Chinggis Khan asks Khwarazmian Shah

to send him the Governor of Otrar who killed his traders.

Of course, they reject it.

Mohammed burns the beards of the guards

and then kills the envoy.

As a result, drove Chinggis into a fit of rage,

such as nobody had ever seen before.

This fall for Chinggis Khan, is undoubtedly

a declaration of war?

To him it's now unmistakable that the Khwarazmian's,

are bent on military conflict.

Sultan Mohammed believes he's the most

powerful ruler, but he's not as powerful as he thinks he is.

Not surprisingly, Chinggis feels

very much up to the challenge.

He's never been faced down before.

He decided that he was unable to live alongside

such an aggressive power as the Khwarazmians.

He headed west instead of finishing

the campaign against Jin.

And he summons his armies to prepare for

a major new campaign into the Empire of the Khwarazmians.

Chinggis Khan, enraged by the Khwarazmian

Shah's rejection of diplomacy and the slaughter

of his envoys, gathers his armies,

they will enter the biggest war the Mongolian Empire

has ever faced.

-The Mongols then start attacking various parts

of the Khwarazmian Empire.

-It became the start of the Mongol war,

which was directed towards the Middle East.

Chinggis Khan's Invasion of

the Khwarazmian Empire was an enormous military campaign.

Quite how big his forces were isn't really well established

down from 70,000 way up to maybe 200,000

but whatever the size of the invasion force,

it's pretty certain that the most reliable troops

would have been his step cavalry that had taken

the Mongols to victory so many times before, augmented

and supported by other kinds of specialist troops.

They've got siege engineers and so on,

some of them drawn from the areas of what is now northern

China and Manchuria, as well as other kinds of specialist

troops, which they bring in for this big new western expansion.

Chinggis Khan makes his sons key military commanders there.

He also relies upon one of his ace generals, Jebe.

Anticipating the tough war ahead.

Chinggis Khan calls upon his subjects, the Tanguts,

for assistance.

One of the generals says, well,

if you don't have enough troops, perhaps

you shouldn't be the Khan.

It was certainly considered to be an insult.

Chinggis Khan was very angry, of course,

by saying that I have a more important thing to do,

but I'll come back to you after I finish my business.

The Tanguts refuse to assist.

Then Chinggis Khan continues leading his armies toward

the Khwarazmian Empire.

Readying their first assault on the city of Otrar,

where his envoy was massacred.

Chinggis himself marches through along

the main trade routes where armies

might be expected to appear.

Chinggis Khan's army was very well prepared.

It was not difficult to have long distance travel

because they used to have this at their own homeland,

usually Mongols, they do start their raids in the Autumn.

If you start from Autumn, you have to pass

also through the winter.

But winter was not the obstacle for the Mongols,

because we have in Mongolia a really harsh winters.

So everybody is ready for this,

and we are well equipped for this.

Livestock was in many ways a key ingredient

in the success of Mongol steppe armies

because it enabled mobility.

Camels were certainly used crossing the deserty regions.

They could carry heavy burdens where they're particularly

valuable for that.

But the mainstay of the Mongol fighting force was,

of course, horses.

As long as there's grass there,

you have fuel for the horses, cattle and sheep

as well, you have food. And that's the crucial element.

Typically, any Mongol force would bring

a lot of spare horses, remounts, as they were called.

So a single Mongol Trooper would often have a string

of four, five or perhaps six remount horses,

so that when one steed tired, they could swap out

and ride another one, which meant that you could cover

much greater distances.

They waited until the horses gained weight

to be ready for crossing.

They endured all this, mainly due to Mongols survival

skills and Mongol horses' survival skill.

Having strategically prepared for their invasion,

the Mongol forces descend upon their first target.

The Mongols come to Otrar.

The city where the governor ordered

the death of the traders.

And the governor tries hard to survive.

The garrison they're trying to escape,

and the Mongols realize it's a lot easier to kill people

when they're running away, so they wipe out that garrison.

The Governor was greedy.

His avarice led him to massacre the caravan

and steal everything.

Chinggis Khan has shown the city of Otrar

no mercy.

He now targets the heart of the Khwarazmian Empire.

He splits his army into different battalions, leading

his own troops through the treacherous Kyzylkum desert.

If he succeeds in this dangerous journey,

his forces will be able to strike directly at the heart

of the Khwarazmian Empire.

Chinggis Khan's forces have advanced deep

into hostile lands.

They now prepare to strike one of the Khwarazmian's

most prized cities.

Genghis Khan turns up at Bukhara,

300 miles behind enemy lines.

It was wondrous urban center,

famed for its architecture, its mosques,

beautiful buildings and so on, and it was very well defended.

-This is where Mohammed has stored

the treasure from the caravan,

and again, Chinggis Khan is demanding the treasure.

The Mongols encircled Bukhara,

relentlessly battering the city with their powerful

catapults for 12 long days.

It was quite a siege.

The siege goes on for a while.

It was eventually successful.

And then we have the great scene where Chinggis Khan

enters the Great Mosque of Bukhara.

And he's supposed to have given

a sermon from the pulpit.

He said, the reason that you are suffering,

the reason that I have been sent is because

God has sent me as a punishment upon you.

This was picked up by the Muslim historians

and repeated as a truth.

So this gives you a sense of the way

in which the Mongol Empire tries to make Mongol victory

a kind of manifest destiny, historical inevitability

willed by God or Heaven.

And the best way when you're faced with that kind

of inevitability, is simply to surrender.

The people of Bukhara finally surrender,

but not soon enough to save themselves.

The Mongolians slaughter 30,000 people

and burn the city's buildings to the ground.

Those who are not killed become fodder

for the next battles.

Great cities like Bukhara and Otrar taken one by one.

The Khwarazmian Empire sends 50 war elephants,

the Mongols have never met war elephants before.

Now, elephants tend to frighten horses

because they're loud, they're scary,

but the Mongols have a pretty good record fighting elephants

because it turns out elephants don't like

being shot by arrows either.

Some of the elephants, they killed, some of the elephants,

they let them go.

The Khwarazmians find it difficult to note

the best way to defend against these simultaneous strikes

from different directions by Mongol forces.

The information that the Khwarazmian Shah is getting

is very confused.

They don't have a single location where they can

be sure to find the main Mongol force.

Word of the Mongols brutality spreads fear across

the Khwarazmian Empire, city after city fall in fierce

campaigns led by Chinggis Khan and his sons.

Chinggis devised a new and rather dramatic way

of taking the Empire.

In general, if the Mongols besieged your city

and you surrendered straight away, the terms of surrender

weren't too bad.

Siege warfare is extremely expensive.

Each was an operation, and it's far simpler,

if you can persuade a city to surrender in advance.

Very often, the local rulers

would be left in place.

A Mongol Garrison might be placed there

to keep an eye on it.

This might include extracting artisans and crafts people

and so on, to be relocated somewhere useful

to the Mongol conquerors.

But in general, early surrender meant relatively

good accommodation with the new conquerors.

However, if the siege lasted, and particularly

if they stretched out and were stubborn,

and the Mongol forces began to suffer losses

from disease or attrition or something then

the terms shortened to something really brutal.

There were very often massacres as a result.

So the purpose, for instance,

of destroying Samarkand was not so much to destroy it,

but to convince next cities down the line to surrender

in advance, having been told that this would be their fate

if they didn't.

And this happens extremely quickly, as you can imagine.

It would take a matter of minutes for one Mongol

soldier to slit the throat of, say, 10 people.

You can deal with 10s of 1000s of people in a morning.

And it destroyed the heart of Khwarazmian Empire,

from then onwards.

Chinggis Khan has this very well entrenched

reputation as a brutal conqueror.

But the reality is that if you compare his conquests

to others, the scale is enormous.

The scope for massacre and bloodshed, just simply,

is larger.

Other famous conquerors in history like Alexander

the Great, they were also very brutal.

It was a standard feature of pre-modern Empires

included massacres.

The civilian population were frequently killed in large

numbers as a result of these huge conquests.

So, these were brutal times, and Chinggis Khan being

the most powerful, the most successful conqueror,

in a way that brutality was amplified.

There is a term in Chinese culture

Jing guan, big spectacle in translation,

which means that the enemies who were killed,

their skulls would be collected by the victors,

and they were piled into mountains to showcase

your own achievement.

But your victory over the enemies, at same time,

you try to frighten the enemies,

they would need to establish aura.

Try to awe and shock the enemies so that you do not resist.

This kind of practice was never denounced as some kind

of symbolism of brutality in East Asia.

This is a standard practice.

-Of course, every invasion in conquest,

it has lots of casualties, lots of death,

lots of cruelty, that's obvious.

So if you look at European history as well,

so many slaughtering as well.

Mongols didn't write their history.

Mongols' history was written by the losers, by the victims.

Therefore, they will, of course, naturally,

sort of characterize Mongol, as you know, as brutal.

The Mongols were brutal, just like anybody else.

The stories of the Mongol's terrifying massacres

spread across the land.

The Khwarazmian realize they are powerless against

the invading force.

Muhammad, he's seeing his Empire fall apart.

He had fought for this.

He had plotted to get this from Kara Khitai

for most of his early reign, and then it's gone.

The Mongols have taken it in less than a year.

Chinggis Khan's armies have weakened

the Khwarazmian Shah.

Can his Empire withstand the force of the Mongolian

onslaught.

The Khwarazmian are overrun.

The cities are taken.

The Emperor chased away.

He's stripped of all his power,

living from pillar to post, and he's fled.

And then Chinggis Khan sends a task force

led by his commander, Subudai and Jebe.

Jebe and Subudai chase Mohammed all over Iran.

-It makes sense for Chinggis Khan

to make sure he is dead.

After all, he is the rival ruler,

and he doesn't want him rallying support.

Muhammad has to flee with some of his troops

on an island in the Caspian Sea.

In complete poverty and surrender.

Muhammad went from being one of the most powerful

people on the planet to basically a beggar.

Jebe and Subudai are way out west,

and they have at least one division each.

Jebe and Subudai eventually find

the Khwarazmian Shah hiding place,

but he has already met a grim fate,

succumbing to the ravages of dysentery.

He is eventually chased to death.

Meanwhile, the remaining forces

of Khwarazmian Empire rally under the leadership

of the Shah's son.

Their resistance is short lived.

Mohamed Khwarazmshah's son Jalal Al-Din has put up

an effective resistance in Afghanistan.

Which is where Chinggis pursues him.

Eventually, Chinggis Khan will chase him down

to the Indus River.

Jalal All-Din will flee into India.

The Mongols will send a pursuit force after him,

but eventually give up.

-Chinggis withdrew from Afghanistan,

which was as far west as he ever got.

He still had unfinished business in the Far East,

Jin still remained to be taken.

At one point, Chinggis Khan thinks,

let's invade India, and then we'll cross Tibet

and then invade the Jin Empire from that direction.

But they encounter rhinoceros,

it's mentioned the sources as a unicorn.

His advisor says this is an ill omen.

We shouldn't do this.

And eventually return back to Mongolia.

Chinggis Khan returns east to fight

his old enemy, the Jin.

Although he has left their lands,

he dispatches troops to eliminate the last pockets

of the Khwarazmian resistance.

It will take the Mongols two more years to finally

wipe out one of the largest Empires known to mankind.

The Mongols are the supreme force

in the region.

They've defeated the other conquest dynasty.

They've got supreme access to the trade along

the old Silk Road.

Silk Road is the trade network in Central Asia.

This trade network connected what is Mongolia today,

northern China, southern China to Central Asia, to Iran,

up to Anatolia, up to Europe.

It included Russia.

It included Siberia, their connection with Western Europe,

their connection with 1000 Asian powers also,

but it's bigger than the Mongols.

All this allowed a traveler, a trader,

to cross almost all of Eurasia safely and make good business.

And at the time of the Mongols,

there were so many communities exchanged.

-Tributes were based on specifics

of the locations Mongols learned what to gain

from where Russia were just good suppliers of the fur

Middle Eastern countries, they had spice,

Chinese, they had grain.

It was really key for Chinggis Khan

and his successors. They need to attract traders,

and it's not so easy to do that,

because you cannot force traders from another part

of the world to come and deal with you.

You have to make them understand that good business

can be done.

So you have to convince them.

You have to make yourself known.

They want people to believe in the system.

So what they create is a very small tax,

up to 4% of what you've sold as a trader.

4 percent is really nothing.

You don't necessarily pay with coins.

People can actually pay in what they produce the best.

So you can pay in silk, or you can pay in foods,

spices, animals.

This system functions very well.

Actually, it pushed them to produce more.

Imagine at the scale of the whole system, then at the end,

it's a lot of money that circulates

through this Silk Road.

At the first stage of the conquest,

there were military overseers who were in charge

of collecting taxes, and it was done just to reinforce

the military army needs.

And then there was transformation

of the military overseers into civil ones.

When they became civil overseers,

they starting to take yearly basic taxes

from the local people.

And it wouldn't be just only for military needs,

it would be needed also for the Khan's court.

The Mongols were really keen to produce

a lot of written agreements and a lot of documents

that could also protect the traders.

So, the vision we have of an Empire built upon violence

is just a very tiny part of the picture.

The Mongols have annihilated the Khwarazmians

but their lands are so vast, Chinggis Khan does not fully

integrate their territory into his own.

-He does not try to occupy

all the Khwarazmian Empire.

Basically. He makes the Amu Darya River

his border and pulls most of his troops back.

So having returned from his successful

campaign in the Middle East,

the Khwarazmian Empire is rolled up.

Now he's defeated his main rival,

Chinggis Khan returns to his Mongolian Heartlands.

The Secret History suggests that Chinggis, around

this time, begins to decide on who will be his successor.

At this time, Chinggis Khan, he's in his 60s.

This is the central question

for any dynasty.

So this is a really big deal as to who might succeed

to the throne.

Some divisions seem to be emerging

between Chinggis Khan's four sons.

Jochi seems to have been a bit headstrong.

He doesn't seem to rendezvous with other commanders

very readily.

Chagadai is supposed to be also rather difficult.

The Secret historian writes up Chagadai as being not easy

to get on with, and we get an account in The Secret History

of a vicious dispute over succession breaking

out between Jochi and Chagadai, where Chagadai accuses Jochi

of being illegitimate.

-The sons in the rivalry called him a Merkit Bastard,

and this was an insult that he couldn't tolerate.

These kinds of family disputes begin

to emerge at this time, particularly over seniorities,

these important markers of one's status are also grounds

for disputes, which increasingly emerge alongside

the victories of the Mongol Empire.

Jochi was off on a mission to the tribes

of the North in Russia.

He was either dispatched or went off his own accord.

When he mysteriously died.

No further details available.

Chinggis Khan appoints his middle son

Ögedei as his heir.

Ögedei is even handed and well liked.

You want someone who is peaceful.

You want someone who would put people together.

Ögedei fits the picture.

At that point, Chinggis Khan decided that Ögedei

would be his successor.

Chinggis Khan now turns his attention

to the Tangut rulers who have betrayed him.

Chinggis Khan decides to settle old scores

with the Xi Xia, the Tangut rulers,

who didn't support him when he needed additional troops

for his invasion of Khwarazmian.

He had thought in his first invasion he had left

a nice, obedient vassal.

Turned out that he was not so obedient,

because when he asked for troops from Xi Xia

the invasion westwards.

The Xi Xia Emperor refused to give them,

so he had to be punished, and then the rest of North China

had to be taken from Jin. That had to be established.

The Tangut make an alliance with the Jin,

and now they're fighting the Mongols.

Meanwhile, Chinggis Khan has received word about this.

Chinggis Khan loses his patience and invades.

And this is a campaign of destruction.

He mobilizes his army.

He marches into Xi Xia and seizures their capital city.

The extent to which Chinggis Khan himself would be engaged

in any combat, I think, is almost minimal.

He's the prime Commander.

You wouldn't risk him by putting him too close

to any of the front lines.

He has his top general, Subudai,

just eradicating fortresses as they go.

Now, remember when he conquered them in 1209,

Chinggis Khan did not occupy Xi Xia.

He says, you guys are loyal to me.

You can rule yourselves. We're good.

But now he's destroying fortifications

wherever he finds

and eventually they're reducing their cities

one by one, if the Tangut are foolish enough to send out

an army against them, it gets destroyed.

The Mongols are quite good.

They have siege trains with equipment being carried

by camels that they can rapidly assemble

and put against any city.

They've refined their techniques.

They have a core of engineers able to build roads,

make bridges across rivers.

The Tangut are not safe.

It is 1227, and war rages on against the Tangut.

Chinggis Khan is now 65 and despite his advancing age,

he still accompanies his forces on campaign.

He was heading south.

He had reached a part of what is now Xi Xia in China,

inner Mongolian, near down the Xi River.

Chingis Khan is hunting wild donkeys,

and some of them come out of the brush.

He gets flung from his horse,

and this probably has done some internal injuries to him.

He gets sick.

There was typhus in the area,

and it's probable that he caught typhus.

His health condition deteriorates

over some time. Could have been weeks,

could have been months, but he still gives commands.

As his health is worsening, he decrees that his illness

and possible death should remain completely secret

until the campaign is won.

They don't want the enemy to know that the commander

in chief is dying.

-This is such a key moment,

we could imagine that this is also the end of the Empire

he has built.

So the whole affair is shrouded in secrecy

until the campaign against the Tangut Xi Xia rulers

is complete, but he never recovers.

In August 1227, Chinggis Khan dies.

A rather symbolic end for such a conqueror

that he dies whilst conquering.

The whole episode is, I think, largely poetic.

He endured all kinds of hardship.

He survived and he managed to unite the Mongols

he was fighting all of his life.

He defeated his rivals or enemies,

and eventually he emerged as a great leader.

For someone of that age to survive and live that long

was actually a miracle.

-As people began to reflect on the enormity

of what Chinggis Khan had completed.

His afterlife took on new meaning

in the traditional belief system of the Mongols.

There is no transcendental afterlife.

The afterlife is pretty much like the mundane.

If you are just an ordinary Shepherd.

You're gonna be an ordinary shepherd for all eternity.

If you are a Khan in the spirit world, you'll also be Kahn.

But then you have someone like Chinggis Khan,

who's done something no one else had done before.

So he became a God, and in many ways, his words became sacred.

Now, of course, at this time, the Mongols did not have

a ruler and a compass to measure the extent

of their Empire on a map to say, wow, Chinggis Khan

just conquered more territory than anybody else.

They just knew it was a lot.

They've taken the Mongols farther than they've ever

been before they entered new lands.

This was a whole new world for them.

They just knew that he had done something unbelievable,

unlike anyone else. So his spiritual power

was greater than anything else that they had ever experienced.

Any other Khan in the steppe, dwarfed by Chinggis Khan.

I mean he is somebody who I admire, not just admire,

but I guess worship.

Mongolians celebrate Chinggis Khan for giving customs.

He give law to us. He gave custom to us.

He gave language to us.

The world irrevocably changed with his actions.

It could not go back to the way it was before Chinggis Khan.

-The war against the Tangut continues.

With their visionary leader gone,

the Mongol armies face their greatest test yet.

Will their Empire fall,

or can it survive the death of Chinggis Khan.