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Such was the setting in Mongolia when Genghis Khan (his given name was Temüüjin) was born, about 1162 (the date favoured by contemporary Mongol scholars). Temüüjin came from a clan that had a tradition of power and rule: he was the great-grandson of Khabul (Qabul) Khan, who had been the greatest ruler of All the Mongols. Temüüjin inherited a feud against the Juchen-Jin dynasty and another against the Tatars, who had betrayed a collateral ancestor of his to the Juchen. His own father was poisoned by Tatars. He also inherited feuds among the ruling clans of All the Mongols and a feud with the powerful Merkit (Mergid) tribe, from whom his father had stolen his mother.
Temüüjin was orphaned in his teens. His family fell on bad times, and power among the Mongols passed to other clans. Even in such apparently primitive practices as camp raiding and horse thieving, he skillfully used ancient customs: marriage alliances; putting himself under the patronage of a stronger prince; making an alliance with Jamuka (later his dangerous rival) by the oath of anda, under which men became as if blood brothers; and recruiting nökhör (“companions”). Unlike the institution of anda, which created a fictitious kinship and harboured the possibility of deadly rivalry, a man who became a nökhör forswore all loyalties of kinship and tribe and declared himself solely “the man” of his chosen leader. Genghis Khan later fell out with his anda, but he was never betrayed by a nökhör, and his most brilliant generals were nökhör.
By 1206 Temüüjin’s success in tribal warfare caused him to be proclaimed ruler of All the Mongols with the rank of khan and the title of Genghis (Chinggis)—a word deriving probably from the Turkic tengiz, meaning “ocean”; although this explanation has not convinced all Mongol scholars, it is consistent with the belief that the ocean symbolized breadth and depth of wisdom. (Later the equivalent Mongol word dalai was applied to the supreme lama of Tibet.) Previous nomads had invaded China, but none had yet ruled the whole of it, chiefly because they had invaded prematurely, leaving other nomads on their flanks and in their rear. Genghis Khan, however, first united all the tuurgatan (“people of the felt-walled tents”), probing far back, away from China, to make sure that he controlled all potential nomadic rivals.
His first move was to bring under control the major tribal groups to the west of him in Mongolia, the Naiman and Kereit (Kerait) with whom he had been alternately in alliance and rivalry, as well as the tribes fringing the northern Mongolia-Siberia frontier. He then turned toward the eastern half of northern China (then ruled by the Jin dynasty), south almost to the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang). In the northwestern corner of China and the western extension of Inner Mongolia there was a small state, that of the Xi (Western) Xia. Its rulers were Tangut from Tibet, and under them there were Turkish and Sogdian merchants who exploited the caravan trade; the cultivators of the oases were Turks and Chinese. China south of the Yangtze was ruled by the Nan (Southern) Song dynasty (1127–1279). Although they had lost North China, the Nan Song were expanding southward toward Indochina, bringing rich new land under cultivation. Among all these states there was an interplay of diplomacy, alliances made and broken, and open warfare.
Between 1207 and 1215 the armies of Genghis Khan probed deep into North China. Genghis Khan made good use of the Khitan in northern and northeastern China, whose Liao dynasty the Jin had overthrown and who were now discontented subjects of the Jin. In 1215 the Jin capital Zhongdu (modern Beijing), from which the Jin emperor had withdrawn southward, was taken and sacked. Realizing, however, that it was premature to commit his main strength to the conquest of China, Genghis Khan withdrew to Mongolia, leaving one of his best generals, Mugali, to ravage and weaken the country. He himself turned westward. When he had defeated the Naiman, the last of the powerful tribes in Mongolia proper, the son of the last ruler of that tribe, Küchlüg, fled to Karakhitai and married the daughter of its last ruler, whom he then overthrew. In that variegated kingdom, which included Semirechie in Russian Turkistan and the Kashgar (Kashi) oasis in Chinese Turkistan (present-day Xinjiang), Küchlüg favoured the Buddhist minority and persecuted Islam, the majority religion. This situation made it easy for the Mongols to defeat him. The Mongol general Jebe proclaimed freedom of religion and forbade massacre and plunder. This policy indicates that the Mongols did not massacre out of sheer savagery but only when they thought it necessary to break the power of an opponent.
Taking over the lands of the Karakhitai opened the way for Genghis Khan to Khwārezm, the land of the oases along the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) in what are now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. This gave him an alternative to China, and it also secured him against the danger of any other nomadic power organizing, on his flank and rear, a military striking force backed by agricultural and urban resources. With this task accomplished, he turned back toward China, leaving further campaigning into Russia and the eastern fringes of Europe to his generals and sons. He would not, however, commit his main forces in China until he had dealt with the wealthy Tangut state of Xi Xia, and it was on this successful campaign in 1227 that he died.