Quotes from Jack Weatherford

The great actors of history cannot be neatly tucked between the covers of a book and filed away like so many pressed botanical specimens.

Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had.

The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well.

He considered betrayal of duty, cowardice, lying, and laziness the vilest of all sins, and he praised those who put personal honor above their well-being, or even their life. He knew he could never depend on those who valued riches over honor. "Such people are base, craven, and they are slaves by nature," wrote Juvaini. "Genghis Khan despised and destroyed them without mercy."22

tranquility, and its same small scale indicates that it lacked sufficient grazing for the number of animals needed to support a large army or even a large court of retainers. The location indicates

for Temujin, such chosen forms of fictive kinship were already proving more useful than the ties of biological kinship.

The truth may be hard to find, but it is out there—somewhere.

At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

Following the example of Genghis Khan, the early Mongol rulers clearly recognized that knowledge constituted their most potent weapon, and controlling the flow of information served as their organizing principle. Genghis

The word blizzard probably derives from an Indian word, although its origin is now lost. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written record of blizzard comes from the frontiersman Colonel Davy Crockett in 1834. Since Crockett used it without explanation, as though the reader would already know the word, we may assume that blizzard had already attained common usage by that time.

These skills later gave the Mongols a great advantage because, unlike almost every other army, the Mongols easily rode and even fought on frozen rivers and lakes. The frozen rivers that Europeans relied upon as their protection from invasion, such as the Volga and the Danube, became highways for the Mongols, allowing them to ride their horses right up to city walls during the season that found the Europeans least prepared for fighting.

With the onslaught of plague, the center could not hold, and the complex system collapsed. The Mongol Empire depended on the quick and constant movement of people, goods, and information throughout its massive empire. Without those connections, there was no empire.

The white settlers of St. Louis nicknamed their settlement "Mound City" in recognition of the twenty-six Indian mounds they found there, but those mounds have since been cleared away to make room for the modern city.

It is reported, but impossible to verify, that no play was censored during Khubilai's reign.

Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through this usage of fictive kinship. In the same way that he took these children into his own family, he accepted the conquered people into his tribe with the possibility that they would share fairly in the future conquests and prosperity of his army.

The messages were clear to all their related clans on the steppe. To those who followed Temujin faithfully, there would be rewards and good treatment. To those who chose to attack him, he would show no mercy.

Rabban Bar Sawma

The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Swama, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe.

Novelties became necessities, and each caravan of cargo stimulated a craving for more. The more he conquered, the more he had to conquer.

Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. The human hand might erase the words, mutilate the manuscript, or chisel off a name, but that only alters memory. Such vandalism tampers with the evidence without altering the facts. Cutting part of a document still leaves an outline of what was removed, a silhouette of the missing piece.

They sought not merely to conquer the world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages.

The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes, listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard.

As Genghis Khan reportedly said, there is no good in anything until it is finished.

trouble. As an extension of a married woman's ownership of the cart, the wife handled all issues related to money, barter, or commerce.