Ancients Behaving Badly (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - Genghis Khan - full transcript

NARRATOR: Genghis Khan, the
destroyer. He sets in motion the conquest

of a quarter of the world's population.

The body count is in the millions.

He is aiming at world

domination, and it doesn't

matter how many people die in the process.

IBEJI: I mean, this is

blitzkrieg on steroids.

They wiped out virtually the

entire population.

Horror stories about the



Mongol warlord have become

legendary but are they true?

Investigators will put his life

under a microscope with a range

of scientific tests.

New archaeological evidence

will challenge long-held myths

about how he really stormed the

world's great cities.

A leading psychiatrist will analyze his
character to reveal what drove Genghis Khan to

massacre millions, and how he

stacks up against other

Ancients Behaving Badly.

In medieval times, there's no
bad boy worse than Genghis Khan.



He's an illiterate Mongolian

nomad who in the 1200s conquers

what will become the world's

biggest empire, twice the size

of Rome's and one and a half

times the size of the United States.

His bloody rise leaves a trail
of corpses from China to the

Middle East.

He's one of history's great

overachievers, determined to

fulfill what he believes is his

God-given destiny.

Genghis Khan has an

extraordinary drive to achieve this vision.

He wants to change the world

but he's psychologically complex.

You would not want to be an

enemy of Genghis Khan.

To understand Genghis Khan

better, psychiatrist David

Mallott will examine his

behavior and then position him

on a unique Behaving Badly

Psychograph, showing how he

stacks up against history's

other rogues like Julius Caesar

and Caligula.

The bodies start piling
up from an early age.

When Genghis Khan is still a teenager,
he slays the brother who stands in his way.

He goes on a two-year rampage

through Central Asia and is

said to slaughter over 3 million people.

JOHN MAN: He killed most
of the adult males, and most of the

male children as well.

He has a voracious sexual appetite,
raping his way from China to Iran.

It's said that women jump to

their deaths by the thousands to avoid him.

He's the ultimate bad date.

He flattened the cities and

either enslaved or killed the population.

And he uses people as human shields.

These tales are so extreme, you

have to question the evidence.

The primary source is a book called The Secret
History of the Mongols, written sometime

after 1227 when he died.

The account is significant

because it's the oldest

historical record of Genghis

and the Mongols.

It's called The Secret History

because it was written for the

eyes of Mongol royalty only.

The Secret History explained

the rise of Genghis.

The purpose is obviously not to

show him as a mass-murdering

psychopath but to give a far

more nuanced approach to his leadership.

But The Secret History was

commissioned by Genghis's sons.

They inherited his empire, so it's unlikely
they would show him in a bad light.

The clues to the real Genghis

Khan begin in his early years.

MALLOTT: To evaluate Genghis

Khan's personality, we'd want to

look at those childhood years to

see if they can tell us who he really was.

Historian John Mann is

following the book, The Secret

History, to test its accuracy.

This is the sort of

landscape that Genghis would

have recognized.

These pastures are pretty much

in the middle of Mongolia.

It's also very near where he was born.

Genghis would recognize the

lifestyle, too.

Born around the year 1160,

Genghis grew up just like these

modern-day herdsmen, raising

sheep, yaks and horses.

He would have been raised like
these guys. He would have been used to

riding, to milking, to scaring

off wolves, even, and strapped

into the saddle until he knew

how to ride at the age of three or four.

Genghis is a Mongol, one of

the four major tribes who

battled for decades to dominate the Steppe.

He's the son of a Mongol warlord.

The world he grows up in is one

of hardship, conflict and violence.

According to The Secret

History, when Genghis is just

nine, his life is turned upside down.

His father is murdered by the
Mongols' bitter rivals, the Tartars.

He, his mother, five brothers and a sister
are now cast out to live on the barren Steppe.

They were expected to die,

but they did not die and

Genghis became, as it were, his own father.

And he had to rebuild the

family, make sure they survived.

Their only shelter is a tent, the kind
many Mongolians still called home today.

How would these traumatic

events affect a nine-year-old boy?

It's impossible to

overestimate the effect of the

death of his father and his

subsequent exile would have on a young boy.

He would be confused, lonely.

He could become angry,

vengeful, lash out and kill everyone.

And even as a boy,
Genghis Khan has the tools to kill.

The Mongolian composite bow.

We call this a composite
bow because it is constructed

primarily of wood, horn and sinew.

The horn can take an incredible amount
of compression in comparison to wood.

The sinew can withstand a greater tension.

It's simple but cunning technology.

Here, we're going to attempt

to string this bow.

One has to be extremely

cautious doing it because you

can actually get injured if you

do it incorrectly.

To string it, he has to bend

it against the natural curve,

and this creates a powerful pull.

Now here we have a strung

Mongolian-type bow from the

period of Genghis Khan.

This is a complex and

time-consuming bow to make.

Why do the Mongolians go to all

this trouble when there's been

a simpler and perfectly

adequate design of bow around

for thousands of years?

A design typified by the English longbow.

I'm shooting a reproduction

of an English longbow.

The long bow was used by

Europeans in the 14th century

to wipe out heavily armored enemy knights.

It was a superweapon of its

time, and it sets the standard

against which other bows must be measured.

Can the much shorter Mongol bow

stand comparison?

In this test, arrows from both will be shot at
a brass plate. It's 1/8" thick, the equivalent

of a knight's armor.

First, the long bow.

So they all seem to have entered
about 7". >> Now, the Mongol bow.

So they've all entered about
8", 9". >> It penetrates more than 2"

farther.

The payoff for the extra work

involved in a complex composite

construction is a weapon that

packs a real punch.

The Mongolian composite bow

more than matches the iconic

longbow for firepower, and

that's before you even begin to

fight the way the Mongols

preferred: on horseback.

Shooting sideways is fine,

but a lot of horse archery, you

want to be shooting towards

where you're charging or away.

And to do that with the longbow,

I'm poking the horse all the time.

The shorter Mongol bow does

not poke the horse.

It turns the Mongol archer into

a deadly warrior, able to fire

in any direction even as they

charge or retreat.

This devastating combination of

horse and bow create a Mongol superweapon.

Genghis will use this
weapon to take on the world.

But first, the young boy uses

it to seize control of his own family.

There's one person that

stands between Genghis and the

top position: his half-brother.

Begter, the half-brother, is older and
thinks he can bully the teenaged Genghis.

But nobody bullies Genghis.

He kills his own brother.

The killing as a prelude to a career of
slaughter. Genghis is growing up in a

hurry.

The killing of his brother

shows us that Genghis Khan is

ready for adulthood, ready for leadership.

He's a man of action.

And Genghis is hell-bent

on leading the Mongol hordes to power.

What he does next reveals the

depth of his ambition and the

horrors that he's capable of.

NARRATOR: Genghis Khan is just nine years
old when his father is murdered by Tartar

tribesmen.

Abandoned by his own Mongol

tribe, he needs to make

powerful friends just to stay alive.

And so Genghis forges a friendship
with Jamuka, the son of a powerful warlord.

ARYA: The two youths
form an inseparable bond.

They swear to become blood brothers.

And according to The Secret

History, this means their lives

merge and become one.

They never will desert the

other, they will always defend the other.

The book says that the two
of them become rising stars on

the battlefield.

Then, at the age of about 20,

Genghis disappears.

The Secret History provides no

clue where he went or what he

did until around 10 years later

when he suddenly reappears.

The Genghis returns is a man on a mission.

His plan: to forge the peoples

of the Steppes into one great

fighting force with himself at

the head of it.

It's a massive break with tradition.

No longer does one depend on

the clan or tribe.

Tribal loyalties fall away.

It becomes a personal loyalty

to Genghis Khan himself.

It's not "Who do you know?"

It's "What have you done for me?

Have you demonstrated your loyalty to me?"

Genghis plans to lead his

Mongol army against the tribe

who killed his father, the Tartars.

It is five years before he's sure
his troops are ready to take them on.

When the day of battle arrives,

Genghis's warriors smash the Tartar army.

But the defeated Tartars still

won't admit that Genghis is now

the boss by pledging their loyalty.

ARYA: The Tartars offer

nothing but defiance and rivalry

so Genghis orders the final solution.

The Mongols slaughter every

Tartar male they can find, young and old.

Genghis sends out a clear

message on how he intends to rule.

"Mess with me and you're history."

Genghis Khan is a ruthlessly

efficient leader.

He's very bright.

He's able to adopt new strategies.

We see somebody who's able to

lead and become a charismatic,

great individual.

His rise to power seems unstoppable.

Legends grow suggesting the

Mongols are immortal.

You can hit them with arrows

and they just keep on coming

like an army of zombies.

Did they have some kind of amazing
protection? The Mongols wore studded

leather armor.

Could this really stop an arrow?

In this test, a leather plate

simulates the Mongol arm and

a pig's carcass stands in for

the human torso.

The arrow punches
through and into the rib cage.

GALVAN: Had this been the

chest cavity of a warrior, he

would have sustained a critical injury.

Clearly, the leather armor

is not enough.

Archaeological evidence shows the
Mongols wore silk shirts under the armor.

Another shot, this time with

silk between the leather and the carcass.

Incredibly, the silk stops the arrow from
puncturing the rib cage, much like a bullet-proof

vest.

There's no penetration

whatsoever through the chest wall.

It seems to have had some sort

of a braking effect.

This has been caused by the

silk wrapping itself around the arrowhead.

The silk material did lessen

the severity of the wound,

probably allowing him to

continue the fight.

So the simple silk shirt

could have tipped the balance

in favor of the Mongols.

And victory brings Genghis
his choice of reward.

For Genghis, it wasn't about jewelry
and gold as preferred spoils of war.

It was women, and he collected

empresses, princesses, beauty

queens the way that a kid today

would collect baseball cards.

The Secret History named

several wives and says he has

his way with the fairest

maidens from many tribes he defeats.

He considers them his victor's

rewards, and he's insatiable.

Genghis is a winner in sex and in
battle. And warriors abandon their own

warlords to join him.

But some of these new recruits

were serving his blood brother, Jamuka.

Now, when he goes off with a

group of Jamuka's men, Jamuka

cannot find this acceptable,

and now the blood brothers are rivals.

The two warlords will have to

fight it out.

Genghis already has a fearsome

reputation but Jamuka has the bigger army.

The night before the battle, Genghis figures
out a brilliant way of making his army seem

stronger.

Normally, each soldier would have one fire.

But Genghis orders every single

man to light five fires.

In the dark, it looks like he

has a huge army, five times its real size.

Many of Jamuka's men quit
even before the fighting starts.

Genghis's ruse has helped even the
score and the battle is a stunning victory.

Jamuka's own bodyguards, the men
who should be most loyal, betray him.

They hope to save themselves by

handing him over to Genghis.

They don't realize they've

broken Genghis's golden rule.

When he's confronted by men

who've defected, even though

they've defected to him, they

have an underlying disloyalty.

Disloyalty cannot be tolerated.

The traitors are beheaded.
Jamuka suffers an agonizing death.

Genghis orders that his back is broken.

The battle ends four years of bloody
civil war. Genghis has crushed every

opponent.

The tribes gather at Mongolia's

sacred Blue Lake to acknowledge

him as supreme warlord.

JOHN MAN: This is the
heart of Genghis's homeland.

It's also the heart of a revolution.

Genghis had destroyed his

enemies, united his allies,

created a nation.

This was quite extraordinary

because it was the first time

this has ever happened in

Mongol history, the unity of

all the tribes.

And it was here that his people

acknowledged him as supreme leader.

Genghis Khan has created a new nation,
Mongolia. >> In 1206 he united his clans,

founded his nation and was

granted a unique title.

We don't really know what it

meant because it fell out of

use very soon afterwards, but

it probably meant "The Most

Powerful King, Genghis Khan."

But Genghis believes he has more than just
tribal support. According to the 600-year-old

Chinese history, the Yuan Shi,

he has a belief that his

marching orders come directly from God.

The vision is that the world

has been given to the Mongols by God.

Is his destiny to realize this

astonishing idea?

He declares himself on a

divine mission to conquer the world.

It sounds like he's gone mad,

but that's not what the

psychiatric assessment reveals.

MALLOTT: Genghis Khan has a

religious experience.

His vision does not show us

that he's psychotic or delusional.

He's becoming a confident leader.

It's time for him to conquer the world.

After destroying a city, he

tells the survivors, "I am the

punishment of God.

The dead must have been sinful,
otherwise why would God have sent me?"

A chilling letter quoting

Genghis Khan is found in Chinese archives.

He says that he has a great

work to unify and conquer the entire world.

He has the ambition but does he

have the talent to fulfill it?

He will need more than just talent.

Leading the Mongols to realize

his destiny will lead to the

slaughter of millions.

NARRATOR: Genghis Khan has united the
tribes of the Steppes into a single warrior

nation.

To fulfill his vision of world

conquest, he will need to

invade the great Islamic

kingdom of Central Asia, ruled

by Shah Muhammad II.

For once, Genghis does not

unleash his horde.

He sends merchants and spies.

But he's met with a short and

bloody response.

The Shah summons the Mongol envoys,

and executes them. Big
mistake. Very big mistake.

Genghis is furious.

He unleashes the Mongol horde.

The Shah's armies flee to
the fortified cities, thinking

their high walls and deep moats

will protect them.

Imagine the problem: mounted

archers up against walls 35', 40' high.

How on earth are they going to

get inside them?

Genghis has taken thousands

of the Shah's people prisoner

and has a typically brutal solution.

He throws them into the moat to

make a human bridge.

To the horror of the Shah's people,
thousands more prisoners are used as a human

shield by the advancing Mongols.

The people in the cities

would want to give up rather

than kill their own people.

They are human shields.

This is completely brutal

even by modern standards, but

he is aiming at world

domination, and it doesn't

matter how many people die in the process.

But how do the Mongols

break through Persia's massive city walls?

The answer lies here in Merv,

the jewel in the crown of the

Shah's empire.

These ruins were once a great metropolis.

WILLIAMS: Merv is one of
the great cities of the medieval

world. It reminds me a bit of

London, actually, in

contemporary society in the

sense of having all these

different ethnicities. It's

actually part of the cultural

and intellectual revolution

that's taking place within the

Islamic world.

The mighty walls of Merv are 10
miles around. >> The main town is protected

by a wall that's very substantial.

It's around about 15' thick,

about 30' high.

It seems impregnable, but

Genghis is a fast learner and

he's studied the military

technologies of the peoples he's conquered.

His army now includes engineers

skilled in siege warfare.

But could they really build a

weapon that could batter

through walls 15' thick?

A team of engineers are putting

it to the test.

According to Persian and

Chinese sources, Genghis's

super weapon is a trebuchet, a

kind of medieval artillery.

MASON: The trebuchet
was, in its time, right at the cutting

edge of the arms race.

It was like the atomic bomb.

A large trebuchet would be

shooting stone balls typically

about that size.

There's records of them being

as big as a Volkswagen.

Merv will test the

trebuchet's power to the absolute limit.

It must be able to fire over

the moat which surrounds Merv

and hit the walls, a distance

of at least 85'.

But is it up to the job?

That's just 67', nowhere near the
target. >> There's something wrong.

It was going straight up.

You want it to go far.

Time for some math and a few

adjustments.

Looking good. >> 96'! >>
That's well over the magic

number of 85'.

MASON: Once they got their

range in, once they found a

soft part of the wall, they

would just keep pounding,

pounding and pounding away at it.

So the trebuchet would have worked.

But there's a question mark

over whether Genghis used it at Merv.

One ancient source says the

city surrendered without a fight.

The Persian writer Juvaini,

writing 40 years after the

siege, says the Mongol warriors

simply rode around the city for

60 days and the terrified

citizens gave in and opened their gates.

So did Genghis take Merv using just fear...

or his giant catapult?

The archaeological evidence shows that we
actually have damaged buildings, destroyed

buildings, where the catapult

ball is actually embedded in them.

This shows that Merv did

suffer a devastating assault by

siege weapons.

But was it the Mongols?

The answer was found beneath the rubble.

Skeletons.

What we found was a young

individual who's in their early

20s, female, some of the bones

of which you see here in the

foreground: skull, teeth, the

vertebrae, pelvis and some of

the leg bones.

Next of them was a small child,

probably around 18 months to

two years old, killed by the

collapse of the substantial

earth building on top of them.

This may well have been a young
mother who dies protecting her baby.

By scientific dating of pottery fragments
found with the skeletons, archaeologists are

now certain that these remains

date from exactly the time of

the Mongol invasion.

We're looking at a casualty

of the Mongol siege.

The Mongols didn't just

scare the city into submission,

they smashed their way in.

The historian Juvaini says the Mongols then
marched the entire population of Merv into the

desert and killed them.

He says each warrior slaughters

300 people, leaving more than

1 million dead in total.

But it was Juvaini who invented the story of
Merv's surrender. Is he right about the death

tolls?

Modern population density

studies can answer this question.

They suggest Merv couldn't have

contained a population even

close to 1 million.

I think given that the

estimate of the population of

the city is about 150,000 at

maximum, then we're looking at

deaths somewhere in the order of

100,000 to 150,000 people being killed.

Juvaini was hyping up the

horror for one good reason:

the brutal reputation of his

Mongol masters is a tool of war.

The fear it creates is a

powerful example of psychological warfare.

MALLOTT: Genghis Khan
was a master of terror tactics.

He knew exactly how to strike

terror into the hearts of his

enemies and he used that tactic

throughout his life.

The Mongols have torn across Asia leaving a
trail of bodies. Persian accounts say they

slaughter 3 million.

The victories bring more and

more female captives to feed

Genghis's insatiable sexual appetite.

And things are about to get

worse when Genghis Khan wipes

out a whole civilization.

NARRATOR: By 1226, Genghis Khan has spent
20 brutal years running one of the greatest

land grabs in history.

He has engaged in five bloody

campaigns of expansion to

create an empire that covers

around 8,000,000 mi.

More than 30 million people

live under his rule.

It's quite an achievement for

a boy from the backwoods.

Eventually, the Mongol Empire
will stretch from the Pacific to Europe.

ARYA: Genghis's achievement
is really nothing short of

extraordinary.

If we make a parallel with the

United States, you have to think

of an illiterate slave gaining

his freedom, writing the

constitution, liberating

America, ultimately conquering

everything from Canada all the

way to Brazil.

He gives the Mongols a

language, laws and literacy.

JOHN MAN: He created
a unified nation that was to be

one of laws, one of literacy,

one of centralized

administration, and one, in the

end, of expansion.

He establishes governments

in the conquered lands,

building on what he's achieved in Mongolia.

He is creating a legacy.

MALLOTT: Conquest is the easy part.

Ruling is very difficult.

And this is what makes Genghis

Khan such an interesting figure.

Not only does he conquer, he

then uses his creative

abilities to rule this vast empire.

Genghis is now in his 60s, an age reached
by less than 10% of his contemporaries and

double the life expectancy in

the 13th century.

But age hasn't mellowed him.

Psychologically, he is still

driven by a simple code.

Genghis Khan is motivated by

two major factors.

The first of course is his

vision, his desire to conquer

the world and create a new society.

The second underlying it is

that of loyalty.

Scores must be settled, slights

must not be tolerated.

And it doesn't matter to him

how old these slights are.

Genghis Khan has been harboring

a seven-year grudge against a

powerful civilization in

northern China: the Tanguts.

The Tanguts were people of

great culture.

I mean, anybody living in New

York or Chicago today would

recognize them as people of

great sophistication.

They had literature, they had

art, they had currency, they

had centralized government, and

they had great cities, and they

were very, very rich.

In 1209, Genghis came to a

deal with the Tanguts.

He'd leave them in peace, and

in return, they would supply

warriors when he asked.

But when that request came 10

years later, the Tanguts said no.

They broke an oath of loyalty and trust,

the ultimate sin to Genghis.

IBEJI: The Tanguts made a
huge mistake when they refused

to send troops to Genghis Khan.

He was going to come back and

he was going to come back with a vengeance.

The Tanguts have every reason to
feel secure. They are a regional superpower

with a population of several million.

Their territory is defended by

the vast expanse of the Gobi

Desert, the great barrier of

mountains across northern China.

But Genghis leads the Mongols

through these obstacles, and

now his horrifying horde

reveals its devastating

ability as an army of conquest.

It's swift.

It moves even faster than

Patton's charge through Europe

in 1944, or the German

Blitzkrieg across France.

I mean, this is Blitzkrieg on steroids.

It's devastating.

The Mongols completely

destroy any Chinese army they come across.

Age seems no barrier in this

last great campaign.

Genghis Khan is still a driven man.

MALLOTT: In this campaign, we

see his defining

characteristics: his drive, his

leadership, his ambition to

succeed even though it may mean

the slaughter of thousands or

even hundreds of thousands of people.

This is what he lives for.

He comes alive psychologically

during this campaign.

He sweeps through China,

driving the Tanguts into their cities.

I can't help feeling the

Tanguts were really stupid.

They must have known by now

what the Mongol army could do to cities.

They just made themselves a

huge target to an army that's

already proven it can break

down any city wall it likes.

He rolls out his devastating trebuchets.

But now, they're not just throwing rocks.

Genghis Khan has proved a rapid

learner when confronted with

new technology of war.

From the Chinese themselves he

has picked up a new weapon:

the fire bomb.

Descriptions from some Middle Eastern sources
written shortly before Genghis even contain

detailed descriptions of how to

make a fire bomb.

We're trying to duplicate
an ancient recipe from Genghis

Khan.

We've got a list of

ingredients: tar, a resin.

One of the interesting ones is

the dolphin fat and five parts

of dissolved fat of a goat's kidney.

But would this combination

work as a fire bomb?

Obviously, dolphin fat is off

the menu today, but this test

uses ingredients with the same properties.

In my experience, I'll say you're going to
get a lot of black smoke, you're going to

get a lot of stickiness.

It would stick to whatever it

was thrown on.

It would burn for a long time.

This stuff is nasty, even

for a pro with all the gear.

This mixture is quite dangerous.

Anytime you take a bunch of

different products and mix them

with different chemical

properties, you're not exactly

100% sure how they're going to react.

The ingredients create a gooey liquid.

A simple clay housing

transforms this into a deadly

medieval missile.

We've put all our

ingredients in, and we've got

our wick and we're going to

light this up and throw it and

see what we get.

So what we have is the remnants of the pot and
then we have all the debris which was all the

sticky paste so it burns multiple places.

It ignites anything it touches.

To my mind, looking at what

the original recipe was, I

think we've matched it 100%.

The test suggests the

Mongols could have deployed such weapons.

Dozens of the mighty trebuchets

bombard the Tangut cities.

MASON: You'd have these
massive stone walls coming down,

killing people randomly,

knocking the wall down, and

you'd have these incendiary

devices splitting flames and

death wherever they fell.

It must have been some kind of hell.

The impact on human flesh

would be gruesome.

The devastation on densely

packed wooden buildings, truly awful.

He used it to ruthless

effect, reducing cities to no

more than smoke and ruins.

The Tanguts have no choice. They
surrender. Their king goes to Genghis to

beg for mercy.

But he's kept waiting
because Genghis Khan is dying.

NARRATOR: 1227. Genghis
Khan is now over 60 years old.

After a brutal campaign lasting

several months, he conquers a

vast civilization in northern

China, the Tanguts.

This savage invasion is

conducted from a mobile command

center like this.

JOHN MAN: This is a
royal ger, the sort of thing that

Genghis would have had with him

on his campaign.

It's 35' across, it's 15', 20'

high, and he needed the space

for military briefings.

But what he couldn't have known

is that the throne from which

he gave his orders was in fact

about to become his deathbed.

♪

There are many theories about what killed
Genghis. >> Some people say that he was

suffering from an old arrow wound.

Some people say he had just

fallen from his horse or one of

his queens may have poisoned him.

But I think there's another explanation.

There was typhoid in the army,

and I think that's what he was

suffering from.

Whatever it was, it was all over in a week.

Genghis Khan dies in 1227.

Like much of his life, his death
has terrible consequences.

His final deathbed order is

preserved in The Secret History.

It's chilling: make the Tanguts

vanish... the women, children

and grandchildren.

His loyal army obeys.

Genghis Khan dies in
an ocean of Tangut blood.

No one knows how many
are killed, but a whole culture

dies.

They eradicated the Tangut

nation from the face of the earth.

They flattened the cities and

either enslaved or killed the population.

Generations of Tangut emperors are buried
under these extraordinary pyramid tombs.

The Mongols break them open and

smashed their ornate tile façades.

Everything Tangut must be destroyed.

JOHN MAN: The books are

destroyed, the priesthood

destroyed, and the people killed.

This is in effect, what we

would call genocide.

A civilization is wiped from

the face of the earth.

All that's left today are a few

traces of their culture and the

ruins of the grand Imperial tombs.

In just 21 years, Genghis Khan goes from
illiterate peasants to builder of the world's

biggest empire.

Eventually, the territory the

Mongols control is twice as big

as the empires of Rome or

Alexander the great.

Genghis builds a dynasty that

ensures his empire lasts for

over 100 years.

This achievement makes Genghis Khan one
of history's most controversial figures.

In Mongolia today, he's

revered, the man who

transformed Mongolia into a

world superpower.

The lakeside here has been

transformed into a shrine to

Genghis Khan it's proof, if you

like, that Genghis is alive and

well and living in the hearts

of Mongolians today.

Genghis Khan may have built

one of the world's great

empires, but the way he did it

means his name still inspires

terror and hate in many parts of Asia.

Wherever he went, dead bodies

piled up, from the boyhood

murder of his brother, to the

Tartar genocide and holocausts

in Merv and China.

He used people as human shields.

And he did it all to fulfill

what he believed was a divine

vision to rule the world.

Where does such behavior of
an ancient behaving badly put him

on a psychopathic scale of tyrants?

Genghis Khan is not a psychopath.

He uses violence in a

goal-directed way in his

single-minded pursuit of

fulfilling his vision of empire.

He did not kill for kicks
like Caligula who was a true

psychopath.

Genghis is at the other end of

the scale, a goal-centered killer.

But there is another dimension

that is key to understanding

his personality.

People talk about his animal magnetism.

He demonstrates his political

domination through his tireless

sexual appetites.

This badly behaving ancient

ranks high, very high on the

scale of sexual dominance.

This is the psychological

profile of Genghis Khan.

So who in history has a similar

report card?

You have to find somebody

who is both a conqueror and an

administrator, somebody who was

loved by his people.

And in this regard, I think we

have a marvelous model: Julius Caesar.

Both conquered the world, gave

themselves over to a vision and

bedded every woman they could.

But the accounts of all

those sexual conquests have

been no more than legends until now.

The largest genetics research

lab in the world has

accidentally stumbled on some

of the most revealing evidence

of the life of Genghis Khan.

The research team took blood samples
from more than 2,000 men from across Asia.

They were looking for microsatellites, DNA
sequences where a short length of genetic

code is repeated over and over again.

These sections are not the

building blocks of humans, but

their exact length varies from

person to person and is a

measure of how different we are

from each other.

Because the DNA samples came from across the
whole of Asia, the researchers were expecting

the microsatellites to be very

different lengths.

What they found took them by surprise.

8% of the subjects had
almost identical microsatellites.

The only possible explanation

was that they shared a common

ancestor whose DNA is found in all of them.

The scientists were able to

estimate when the ancestor

would have lived, about 1,000 years ago.

And the location of the biggest

cluster of microsatellites was in Mongolia.

The conclusion of the researchers
is that an estimated 32 million people

alive today, one in every 200

people, share related DNA and

are descendents of Genghis

Khan, a man who truly got around.

The irony is that a man
credited with mass murders and

wiping out a civilization ended

up giving life to more

people than he destroyed.

Although Genghis Khan built no

cities and left few relics, his

legacy lives on.

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