Genghis Khan: The History of the World-Conqueror (2025)

Huge and rich, a treasure-house. With sentences like elaborate jewelry, too -- but not so bad as other Persian historians, the intro says, whose rhetoric can become hard to disentangle. I enjoy how he intersperses (short) verses, from sources we can't even trace. The metaphor and manner of speech you have both in his prose and in these odd lines of poetry, give you glimpses into the mentality and the tropes they thought in.

Unfortunately he has little on the early life of Genghis. Even so, his potted history, 'On the condition of the Mongols before the time of Chingiz Khan' and 'Chingiz Khan's rise' is told with vim, and a sense of the sheer unexpectedness of that history. Juvaini's astonishment comes through, and already he begins to ask the questions: how did this happen, why did this happen? Contingency, God? He has the most catastrophic events to grapple with -- and at the time he wrote, he like his father before him were high in the service of the Mongol government. I don't think he's either for or against the Mongols -- it isn't that simple. He has and uses free speech to paint the catastrophe. But he isn't embittered beyond objectivity, like another Persian historian who escaped the Mongol onset and wrote in an entirely anti-Mongol vein from India: Juzjani. Certain chapters on the war follow insane events, such as 'Of Merv and the fate thereof.' Between the Mongols, the inhabitants, the neighbours and the putative Sultan who's meant to defend them... as insane a story as you can hope to find in time of war.

Juvaini does vivid portraits. For instance, 'Of the remaining events in the life of the Sultan Muhammad of happy memory and the confusion of his affairs.' Muhammad, Khorazm-Shah, was a disaster for his people -- Juvaini's people -- and Juvaini tells his pathetic story with sympathy and criticism too, and simply with a story-teller's verve.

Later, the portrait of Chingiz' son and successor: he piles up the incidents to be told of him, whose main trait was a generosity gone crazy. Generosity was a trait admired in kings, maybe the number one kingly trait, in both cultures here, and it's funny to read about him splashing around the Mongols' newfound fabulous wealth, and sensible heads attempting to save a little of the treasury.

These are tidbits merely. It's a treasure-house of a book, like I say. Legendary beginnings of Uighur kingship -- kings grown from trees? In here. The famous Sorqotani Beki, and not just the politics but the social context that seemed just as important to Juvaini; her deeds in patronage of religions. Plural; she was Christian, but Juvaini likes her because she fostered Islam too.

The Mongol-related content is stunning, but everything else is boring. I suggest skipping section 2 and the end of section 3.

Some examples from the invasion of Nishapur:

The land hath died for the loss of them that have left it:
it is as though they had been its soul.

Aye, calamities have enslaved it, and its hills have
become lowly things accustomed to kneeling.

I'm glad I finally read this work (nearly) cover to cover. Jovayni included many interesting anecdotes from the early days of the Mongol empire as well as some beautiful descriptions, such as that spring of 1246 where envoys across Eurasia were summoned to the quriltai that proclaimed Guyuk as khan. Jovayni also has the habit of embroidering his histories with pertinent quotations from literary and poetic works, which the translator identifies in the footnotes. At times he can't resist adding such a flourish, even if the contents somewhat contradict his self-image as a proper gentleman and the scion of a distinguished line of ministers and bureaucrats. One can sense his self-consciousness and some measure of self-satisfaction when he quoted a cheeky verse from the mathematician Omar Khayyam.

"...And here I have inserted the following verses, which, although this is not the appropriate place for them, will yet have some appeal to men of taste and discernment:
Who am I to God that when I sin He should not forgive my sin?
Forgiveness is expected of the sons of Adam: how then shall it not be expected of God? (601)

I'm also inclined to believe Jovayni was a master of what Cal Newport called Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, as he composed this work over 20 years in his free time, when he's not helping to govern the Mongol empire and witnessing many of the events, and bouncing between Mongolia and the Middle East. The introduction described him as composing the work bit by bit, mostly during pit stops on his work trips, which accounts for the slight haphazard nature of the work and references to chapters that were never written, etc. But still, it stands as one of the most important accounts we have of the Mongol conquests.