Genghis Khan: History's Greatest Empire Builder (review)

Since Jack Weatherford's highly successful book on the Mongols there has been a surge of similar books of varying quality. A few are excellent, most are not very good. That includes the volume currently under review. The problem is that there is a scholarly literature on Genghis Khan (better Cinggisqan) and most popular authors ignore it at their peril. The usual excuse is that much of this literature is in obscure languages but this excuse no longer holds water. There is now an abundance of excellent and reliable discussions in English, although most of these are ignored by Lococo.

Lococo sets out to provide a short overview of the life of Genghis Khan, looked at from a military perspective, with special emphasis on the great campaigns outside of Mongolia. This he does but the sections of his work are uneven in quality due to the author's uneven use of source material, or, more appropriately, his misunderstanding of much that he does use and a frequent misappropriation of facts. There is a need here to sort the wheat from the chaff and be critical, but this has not been done. For the early history of the Mongols, for example, Lococo cites but apparently does not use the de Rachewiltz translation of the Secret History, our most important source for the Mongols of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. He instead uses the Khan paraphrase of Cleaves's unusable version, which Cleaves' death left without notes. This is a major mistake. De Rachewiltz is exhaustive in his citation and discussion of the literature and makes clear the many problems of the early period of Genghis Khan's life. In this section of his book, lacking this critical insight, Lococo is too willing to rely upon unreliable chronologies, often little more than guesses. We simply cannot assign dates to many of the major events of the early history of Genghis Khan.

Unfortunately, the difficulties do not stop here, and the problems that Lococo has with the early history of Genghis Khan are multiplied when he traces the expansion of the Mongols outside Mongolia. Again, the problems he has reside in an uncritical use of sources. In addition to mixing the very old (Curtin), and very outdated, with the not so very old, and often equally questionable, Lococo seems willing to believe anything he has read about the ferocity of the Mongols. This is even true when the horror stories are contradicted by known facts and a careful cross-examination of the available sources. Also marring the book are an unusual number of outright mistakes: Kiyad, not Kiryat; Subodai (Subedei) never campaigned against the forest peoples; there are two dates for the birth of Genghis Khan, neither of which may be correct; Jebe means weapon, not arrow; there is absolutely no evidence of the Mongol use of exploding bombs during their first advance to the west; Lococo's figure of 400,000 for the size of the invading army is total nonsense, unless we assume that the Mongols mobilized old women and small children; and Lococo is hopelessly confused regarding Mongolian social organization. He, for example, uses terms like tribe, clan, and sub-clan inappropriately and inconsistently.

In conclusion, Lococo's book is not recommended. And those interested in the military history of the period should still use Timothy May's excellent The Mongol Art of War. The author of these lines also has some of his own works to recommend, including short studies of Subodai and his military colleagues based upon primary sources (Lococo, unfortunately, uses the deficient account of Richard Gabriel, which is not even based on the best secondary sources).