How unlikely that Michelangelo, Faraday, Napoleon, the Wright brothers, Ford, Einstein, Jim Clark (the founder of Silicon Graphics and co-founder of Netscape), and K.C. Irving would have transformed the world. Like most brilliant strategists and innovators, they were outsiders who were not constrained by the status quo. The heights they obtained were distinguished by unusual approaches that followed from their unique perspectives. They saw what others did not, somehow surpassing those who far outreached them in resources and credentials.

Yet none of these famous examples outshines the son of an outcast family left to die on the steppes of Mongolia, who as a child received no formal education, feared dogs, and barely managed to escape enslavement by a rival clan. From these desperate origins, Genghis Khan (1162-1227) went on to conquer more than twice as much territory as any other person in history. He accomplished all this with small ill-provisioned armies.

In battle, Khan’s object was total victory while losing not a single man. He used propaganda and ruse as much as force and employed cavalry that moved quickly and without the encumbrance of infantry and supply trains. His armies were arranged in concentric circles, not columns, and paid fanatical attention to terrain. They used poetry to help the illiterate men memorize messages that could be passed along quickly and accurately. Conquered engineers and scholars were quickly assimilated, for Khan was a great believer in knowledge. Once his victories had disrupted the established order, he encouraged innovation at an unprecedented scale.

As outlined in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), Khan was a visionary whose outlook made him one of the founders of modern civilization. He consolidated smaller states, creating the modern countries of Russia, China, Korea, and India, and linked regional civilizations with diplomatic and commercial contacts. He smashed aristocratic privilege, made the Silk Road into history’s largest free-trade zone, cut taxes, established a census and the first international postal system, and created an international law that applied to everyone. He granted religious freedom, abolished torture, and instituted the practice of diplomatic immunity, even with his enemies.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers,” writes

Weatherford. “The nomadic Mongols made no technological breakthroughs themselves, yet their conquering armies spread skills from one civilization to the next.” Tellingly, they built no permanent structures except bridges.

In the words of the admiring Weatherford, “The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge…[They] exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. Their engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined technologies to produce the cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance, the larger impact came in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids.”

A chip off the same block, Genghis Khan’s grandson Khubilai Khan introduced a paper currency, created primary schools, improved the calendar, and sponsored mapmakers. In Europe the Mongols slaughtered the aristocracy but, disappointed by the general poverty and filth, they did not bother to conquer the cities. Still, they managed to stimulate the Renaissance by encouraging trade and introducing the printing press, firearms, and the compass.

Genghis Khan’s influence lasted 800 years. His last ruling descendant died in 1927 in Uzbekistan, and the Dalai Lama has ties to the lineage. Yet, ultimately, history is written by the victors, and today Genghis Khan is considered a barbarian and a destroyer. “In due course the Mongols became the scapegoats for other nations’ failures and shortcomings,” writes Weatherford, citing China, India, Persia, and even the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, who blamed their failures on Mongol influence. Even in business, the term “mogul” can have a derogatory slant.

From the time of Genghis Khan’s death, Mongolians preserved his original homeland in a remote corner of their country. In the 20th century, an era of barbarism on an unprecedented scale, the Soviet Union set out to destroy Mongol culture, killing tens of thousands and cutting off Khan’s sacred territory with military bases and testing grounds that were left in a cesspool of industrial waste. The long-term influence of Stalin and his henchmen will be minimal, one hopes, while the impact of Genghis Khan will live on.