24. Young Genghis Lived an Adventurous Saga
Temujin, who grew to become Genghis Khan, was the son of a minor Mongol chieftain. When Temujin was nine, his father was murdered, and tribal rivals then banished his widow and her family of five children to fend for themselves on the harsh Steppe. It was a veritable death sentence, but Temujin’s mother managed to keep her children alive. Or at least managed to keep most of them alive: the family endured such dire want and poverty, and things got so bad, that Temujin killed an older brother because he refused to share a fish.
Even before he became a great conqueror, Temujin’s youth was a real-life action-adventure saga. Among other things, the tribal rivals who had banished his family grew alarmed when they didn’t die on the Steppe as expected. Especially when they heard that Temujin was morphing into a tough and charismatic youth, who might grow into a formidable man who’d come after them for revenge. So they captured and enslaved him, and to humiliate him, put him in wooden stocks, in a board with holes cut out for his hands and head. He managed to club a guard unconscious with the board and made a dramatic escape. He then roamed the Steppe as a freebooter and began to collect a band of devoted followers.
