The mention of Genghis Khan evokes images of war, carnage, and archers riding horses, raining death in the form of arrows. The impact of his rise and the expansion of the Mongol Empire in the 12th century is discussed, and felt, to this day.
Who was Genghis Khan?
Genghis Khan rose from complete anonymity and was orphaned at a young age. Growing up, he fought and won over the other Mongolian tribes that were constantly at loggerheads with each other. These tribes were constantly infighting and where it kept them ready for war, it also weakened any effort to expand outwards into China or on towards the Adriatic Sea.
This was reflected in the life of Temujin as well. It is said that he was responsible for the murder of his brother when he was only 12 years old. It was a brutal environment. The mongols at that time were in a crunch for resources. The lands that they had been using for grazing were slowly being desiccated and the Mongol lands were simply not able to sustain the population. The tribes had to turn towards their secondary mode of making a living-war.
Genghis Khan was able to unite the Mongols and then focus the attention of the tribes onto the outside world. The Mongols became infamous for their brutal war tactics, and even more brutal peacetime treatment of their vanquished foes. Genghis is one of the few leaders of history who are equally portrayed as blood-thirsty by Mongol, and Non-Mongol sources. Even writers under the pay of the Mongols refused to disregard the massive genocidal rampages that the Mongols would enact during his time.
Apparently, Temujin, as was his real name, was known for slaughtering any individual of the opposing tribe that was taller than the axle of a common cart. This, because he determined that a child so young would not remember the carnage the Mongols had wrought and would thus prove to be royal members of his empire and follow him as emperor.
The Impact of the Mongol Hordes.
Genghis Khan was able to establish a massive empire complete even with its own postage system and multiple aspects of infrastructure were developed. One can not make an omelet without cracking some eggs, however, and in this case, the eggs were roughly forty million people.
Genghis Khan has been said to have caused the deaths of 20-40 million people. Around the time of his brutal rise to power, he is said to have killed almost one-tenth of the global population. In many ways, the world that we know today has been immensely shaped by the rise of the Mongols and the consequences of mountainous, warring nomads overrunning the sedentary societies that existed around them.
Even the very beginnings of his rise to power were bloody. He extinguished all the existing lines of Mongol Nobility that remained in the existing Mongol tribes, he then went to war with the Tatar tribe as well, destroying whosoever came into his warpath. In 1206, simply by virtue of default, Temujin was declared the Chinggis khan, or Genghis Khan, as we know him today.
Genghis Khan and the environment
Even as the Mongol Hordes made their way across central Asia and China, burning and pillaging and leaving millions of people dead, they were unintentionally undoing much of the damage done by humanity to the environment.
Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology has stated that Genghis Khan and the empire that he left, actually caused global cooling. Now comes the question of how that came to be.
Pongratz and her team from Stanford used the data that was found from the ice-core samples and also constructed models for the global output of carbon dioxide in the environment that can be attributed to humanity.
After analysis of ice core samples, it was found that the atmospheric carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, actually went down during a few ages of human history. The researchers had a few instances of change in history that they had to keep a close eye on when examining the ice core samples for carbon dioxide presence. It was found that during stages where it was expected that the carbon output of humanity did not actually go down as hypothesized.
Perhaps this points to the fact that just the death toll of any cataclysm, disease, or war is not enough to impact the total impact of the global population on the environment. In the form of the amount of organic matter pumped into the environment, at least.
For example, even though the black death killed twenty five million people, this event did not have a significant impact on the amount of carbon dioxide (the primary cause of global warming) in the atmosphere. The plague spread across the globe in the thirteenth century and left swathes of people dead in its wake. Despite this, it seems that it did not have a significant effect on the volume of carbon that was being pumped into the atmosphere. The ice core samples did not reveal a significant enough dips in the atmospheric carbon dioxide during that time.
In contrast, the Mongol invasion had such a huge effect that it effectively did change the total carbon being pumped into the atmosphere. According to the study, carbon dioxide actually went down by about 0.1 parts per million as a result of the immense destruction and bloodshed that the Mongol Horde wrought. To put that into perspective, Ganges Khan alone was responsible for about 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide not being put into the atmosphere.
Why was this the case? It might have to do with agriculture. The black death eliminated large swathes of the population but the survivors were healthy individuals, weaker people are more likely to die of any disease. The infrastructure still functioned to the point that basic activities like agriculture could resume, and agriculture is one of the biggest causes of rising carbon dioxide levels.
Agricultural land is obtained by deforestation. The trees that would otherwise lock up much of the carbon in the air were no longer there. The plague did not affect it as much as Ganghis Khan did. It does not matter how healthy you are, however, when faced with a sword.
Ganghis Khan and his hordes left entire villages destroyed and no people left to till the fields and maintain the crops. This eventually left the fields open to being repopulated with trees. Thus one of the unintended consequences of the Mongol Invasion was the reforestation and consequential locking of carbon dioxide into the ground.
In Conclusion
As astounding as it may seem, Genghis Khan was actually one of the first instances of humanity limiting its carbon footprint. The lesson, in this case, is not that absolute genocide is necessary for the prevention of eventual cataclysms as a result of man-made global warming.
The ice-core samples and the work done by the team at Stanford go to show that the human impact on the environment is in fact very real. The impact of agriculture has been more of an issue than any petrol-fueled cars or single-use plastics.
Hopefully, we can move forwards towards more land and resource-efficient and sustainable forms of agriculture. This, to allow the reforestation efforts required to put the world to rights. Until then, however, we can reflect on the immense impact of one man’s cruelty, and what kind of legacy we would like to leave for those that come after us.
