The most recommended Genghis Khan books

Jin Yong’s characters move in the gritty village lanes or wander China’s remote mountains, seeking vengeance, escaping persecution, forming alliances. The launch of a martial arts series, A Hero Born was first serialized in a Hong Kong newspaper in the 1950s and is about a young hero who ends up in the Mongol camp of the future Genghis Khan. It’s a thrilling read and proved an immediate sensation, spawning movies, video games, comic books, etc.  Holmgren’s new translation offers a window into the gallant world of martial men and women who will fight to the death to defend their honor. It also gives a Chinese perspective on the rise of the Mongols.

You might not know who Tamerlane is, but you should. He was one of the last of the ‘World-conquerors’ in the tradition of Genghis Khan, the man who marched the Mongols from one end of Eurasia to the other in the 13th century. Tamerlane died in 1405 and with him the last nomadic empire of the Eurasian steppes. The Europeans then took up the quest ‘to conquer the word’. But John Darwin tells this story like no one else before him: Rather than starting the story of the European “Age of Discovery” on the bows of Iberian ships crossing the Atlantic ocean, Darwin keeps his readers grounded in Eurasia. He redirects our gaze to this massive continent as we follow emerging European empires as they had to compete with pre-existing ones. Anyone interested in understanding the global dynamics of the early 21st century should read this book with… show more.

Do we really need another book of world history? Yes, We needed this one.

Montefiore tells the story of human society through a number of carefully selected families and their relationships, thereby connecting the intimate with the geopolitical, trivia with statesman craft, family with empire.

The author is an excellent storyteller and a reliable witness. He comes across as someone you would want to share a cognac with by the fireplace. Naturally, he tells stories that had to be left out of the book. 

Conn Iggulden is no stranger to historical battle fiction. Like others on this list, at least a dozen other novels could have been selected in this spot. Yet, Lords of the Bow expresses a savage bleakness in Genghis Khan’s earliest campaigns against the Xi Xia and Jin that will linger in the mind of any reader.

Mr. Iggulden’s writing regarding the Battle of Badger’s Mouth is incredible – not only for the complexities of the Mongol-Jin battle but equally due to Mr. Iggulden’s use of terrain and weather to raise tension. The battle is brief on the page, and overtaken by the extensive preparations of the Mongol and Jin armies immediately prior to combat, yet Badger’s Mouth leaves a distinct impression in a vast and growing sea of military historical fiction.

A controversial author who I discovered in my twenties; I lapped up his non-fictional work.

This book is an in-depth investigation into the dark side of the human psyche. Wilson explores the psychology and history of criminality and violence, concluding with how that is manifested in what was then his ‘present day’.

Although first published in 1984, nearly forty years on his work is still pertinent. For me that stimulates many questions. Having just pulled it from my bookshelf, I think it is time I read it again.

Wilson covers his subject with focused attention and easy-to-understand detail. He encourages the reader to think about human existence from many perspectives. 

Overall, my list focuses on books that deal with warfare by non-states in the pre-modern world. 

The nomads of the Eurasian steppe are a primary example of such warring peoples, even as they fought in a world filled with states. The "Secret History" was composed by the Mongols, after their rise to imperial power, but it was about their pre-imperial wars with each other and with similar nomads.

It showcases the values, motives, and methods of pre-imperial Mongols. It is a fascinating insight into how they viewed their place in the world and the role of war in it. There are a number of reasonable translations, this one is readily available.

What William Dalrymple is to India, Philip Marsden is to Ethiopia. They are both inspired travel writers and scholarly historians. What I particularly loved about The Barefoot Emperor was that it actually reads like a page-turning thriller. Central to the story is the towering figure of the Emperor Tewedros, a brilliant military commander, political reformer, and charismatic leader, who was both loved and loathed by the warring factions that made up his kingdom. His rise and fall compare with anything achieved by Julius Ceasar or Genghis Khan, and Marsden captures his incredible, true-life story with bravura writing that leaps off the page. He turns a searing searchlight onto one of the most forgotten episodes in African history and captures it all with a breathtaking sense of spirit of place.        

As a child, Irish author Stewart dreamed of riding a horse across Mongolia and this book is the fulfillment of his dream. In the heart of the book, Stewart travels 1,000-miles across the vast steppes of Mongolia on horseback. He encounters stunning scenery, a hilarious nomad wedding brawl, and “a vast medieval world of nomads apparently undisturbed since 1200.” This book is worth it just for my favorite exchange.  While Stewart was watching the wrestling competition at  Mongolia’s annual Naadam Festival, he asked a fellow observer why the wrestler’s jackets had “long sleeves but an open front that left the chest bare.” “Keeps the women out,” he muttered.  Turns out Mongolian women are fearsome wrestlers. 

The magnificence of the first in the Amalgant series is the immersive reconstruction of Mongol social, political, and religious worlds, as well as the lives of its people. Hammond resistantly reads histories produced by hostile cultures, instead privileging the earliest and most comprehensive Mongol tellings of their own lives, The Secret History of the Mongols. This is no dry historical account of cultural norms, steppe relations, or material artifacts, but an intimate and humane telling of the personal tragedies and struggles that would change the world as the war-orphaned Temujin grows to be the man we know as Chenggiz Khan.

Imagining different cities from different viewpoints in history is the focus of Calvino’s wonderful set of vignettes between Marco Polo from his 13th-century travelogue and Kublai Kahn as they explore different ways they see cities that lie along the Silk Road. Weaving fact into fiction, they point up the essential logic of how cities are formed and how they evolve. What we remember, how we perceive these memories, and the size and shape of cities are all ideas which is the canvas on which Calvino describes the many cities of our imagination.

This is a wonderful set of stories–you can dip into them and read them if you are on the subway or waiting in the dentist's surgery or anywhere where you get a free moment. The stories are memorable.