If one looks at motives for world conquest there are obvious parallels with Tamerlane, Genghis’s fourteenth-century counterpart and, in my view, a greater and more complicated figure by some margin.

Personally, I’m not sure such a conjecture, which takes the official Secret History of the Mongols at face value, is all that helpful, and it is not supported by much hard evidence either. This unbreakable faith in his heavenly support, Man argues, created a division within Genghis between the arrogance required in a man determined to unite his people and lead them out of their homeland to conquer the world and ‘the humility of an ordinary man awed by the inexplicable nature of the assignment’. ‘This was no mere political stance,’ Man writes ‘I think he believed it heart and soul.’ Genghis was a subtler figure by far, possessed of genius, convinced of his divine calling to subdue and rule an unruly world. This is, of course, something of a caricature, and one whose inaccuracies John Man is eager to correct in this popular history and travelogue. Cruelty and conquest were simply two sides of the same coin. Razing all before him, he reveled in destruction and bloodshed as he annexed an empire which at the time of his death in 1227 stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea.

The passage probably says as much about Rashid ad-Din’s lustful thoughts as it does about Genghis, but it is in keeping with his enduring popular image as the ultimate warlord, the rapist’s rapist and the pillager’s pillager. Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as night-shirts and supports, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of their breasts. Being twelfth-century Mongols, they told him it was falconry. Genghis had been out riding with his general Boorchu and other comrades in arms and had asked them what they considered to be man’s greatest happiness. Writing half a century after Genghis’s death, the Arabic historian Rashid ad-Din tells the following story about the Mongol conqueror. FOR A MAN who was believed to set the greatest store by divine guidance and to live his life according to the dictates of Eternal Heaven, Genghis Khan apparently had rather earthy preoccupations.

Genghis Khan by John Man