Tony Hao
03/07/2015
C&I 1
Final Project

Establishment of the Greatest Empire
----Analysis on the peace and violence under Genghis Khan’s domination
Genghis Khan is one the most powerful militarists and conquerors in the world. Before he died in 1226, the territories of Mongolian Kingdom already spread over the Mongolian Plateau, Chinese Loess Plateau, Congling, plains of Manchuria, North China Plain, Transoxiana, the east of Azerbaijan and most of Iran. During his lifetime, he united the desperate tribes in Mongolian Plateau and expanded his territories over 16.8 million square kilometers (Kahn, 1998). During establishing his empire, Genghis Khan completed the transaction from tribes to the kingdom for Mongolia. Therefore, he dominated the peace and violence of his own country and other countries that he invaded.
Temujin (Genghis Khan’s name), was born in the north of Mongolian Plateau in 1162 (Kahn, 1998), a period when all the tribes wanted to conquer other tribes for the domination over Mongolian Plateau. Based on LeBlanc’s perspective to the warfare, people fight for territories and resources. At that time, more territories, livestock and slavers people have, the more power they are, because these things were considered as the units that decided people’s social status. This caused the ceaseless warfare in the Mongolia. Also, almost every man in the tribe needed to participate in the battles. Although the number of people died was not large, the casualties were a large percentage of the male in the tribe. After a battle, the participant tribes would take a long time to rebuild their tribes by collecting more people and livestock. Because of these reasons, there was never a tribe that could take an absolute advantage and conquer another tribe.
When Temujin was nine years old, his dad, the leader of Mongol Tribe at that time, was poisoned to death by Tartar Tribe (Kahn, 1998). Both Mongol and Tartar were relatively powerful tribes, but Mongol had hated Tartar so deeply for a long time because Tartaren betrayed the one of the previous leaders of Mongol, Ambaghai Khan, to their common enemy, the emperor of Jin Dynasty and made Ambaghai die (Kahn, 1998). So, revenge for his father and ancestor became the main reason why Temujin swore to eliminate Tartar later. Compared to the movie, Dead Bird, revenges caused warfare as well during the tribe era, because at that time, tribes were mostly formed by the kinship. When the relatives were murdered, it always angered all the people in the tribe. For Temujin, this absolutely irreconcilable hatred could not be forgotten. However, at that time in Mongolian Plateau, the angry didn’t apply to everybody in the Mongol Tribe.
After Temujin’s father died, Temujin’s relatives and other family, who had different last names from Temujin’s, in his tribe thought they lost the backer and Temujin, a nine-year-old kid at that time, could not take the responsibility to prevent their tribe from the other’ s invasions. Besides this, the other family also wanted to take over the domination position from Temujin’s family. Therefore, his dad’s cousin instigated the preceding subordinates of Temujin’s father to migrate the Mongol’s base area to another place without telling Temujin’s family and also took away their few livestock. Temujin only lived with his mother, his dad’s concubine, six siblings and a loyal maid. They had to live on hunting the marmots and digging the potherbs. The series of misfortune to Temujin’s family was caused by the inequity of the social status in the tribe and the desire to the authority. The kinship was less important than the power at that time. The connection and kinship between families had already become distant. The tribe was separating and the instruction was also becoming collapsed. The inner conflict started to emerge. The fight for the domination within the tribe gradually became the origin of the violence. At the same time, the