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The Rise of Temujin From a Nobody to History’s Greatest Conqueror

Khalid Elhassan April 28, 2025 20 min

7. The Genocidal Mongols

Campaigns of Chinggis, 1207 to 1225. Wikimedia

After two years’ of campaigning in Western Xia, during which his men carried out a series of massive massacres, each with victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Chinggis’ quest to conquer the world ended when he fell off a horse in 1227, and died of his injuries. His death did not save the Western Xia: the Mongols continued the campaign, with redoubled ferocity in honor of their deceased leader. Today, the Western Xia are almost unknown beyond a small circle of academics, precisely because Chinggis’ campaign to annihilate them was so successful. In addition to the creation of a massive empire, the Mongol invasions kicked off by Chinggis had another global impact. According to research by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Temujin’s depredations cooled Earth.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.