The Empire of Genghis Khan Trivia Quiz

Answer: His father had been assassinated by a rival tribe.

Originally named Temujin ('blacksmith'), Genghis was the third son of the minor chieftain Yesugei. He was 9 when his father was poisoned by the neighboring Tatars. Since Yesugei's followers then fled, the child had to become partly responsible for keeping his family from starvation.

Answer: 1206

A kuriltai, or assembly of nobles, declared Genghis the supreme Khan - or ruler - after he had defeated the Tatars, the Naimans, the Merkits, the Keraits, and allied himself with the Qonggirats by marrying their Princess Bortei. It was probably at this time that the forty-year-old Temujin took the name Genghis Khan: 'oceanic ruler.'

Answer: the Uighurs

This alliance worked out very well for the Uighurs, who sat near the top of the new empire as all their neighbors - the Keraits of the Mongolian steppes, the Hsi-Hsia in northern China, the Song Dynasty in southern China, and countless others - were swallowed up by the Mongol juggernaut.

Answer: Hsi-Hsia

Hsi-Hsia, a kingdom ruled by the Tangut people, wasn't able to put up much of a fight. Genghis made the kingdom a vassal state, requiring tribute and soldiers. As his armies marched west, though, the Hsi-Hsia refused to provide soldiers for him any longer.

As soon as his western enemies were subdued in the 1220s, Genghis got his revenge, slaughtering most of the Tangut citizens and utterly destroying the ruling and intellectual classes.

Answer: Jin

The Jin, first invaded in 1211, lost their central capital in 1214 (their eastern capital had fallen in 1212). The Jin fled to their southern capital, and finally fell in 1234 to a son of Genghis Khan. While Genghis Khan and his successors wanted very badly to conquer the prosperous Song Empire, no one managed to do it until Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, in 1279. Kublai founded the Yuan Dynasty, and China has never been disunited since.

Answer: He first executed a band of Mongol traders on suspicion of spying, and then killed the Mongol ambassadors sent to seek justice.

Although the traders probably really were spies, Genghis Khan had to respond to their execution - and when his ambassadors were executed as well, the insult to his sovereignty was more than he could accept.

Answer: Khwarazm was brutally conquered, and more than twenty cities were utterly wiped out.

It took the armies of Genghis Khan only a few years to conquer Khwarazm completely. The Khwarazm Shah fled to an island in the Caspian Sea while the Mongols destroyed such cities as Samarkand, Nishapur, Bokhara, and Herat. All Genghis had needed was an excuse to invade.

Answer: 100,000 horsemen

Each tumen consisted of 10,000 horsemen, each with four horses for remounts. Also part of the tumen were the families of the warriors, as well as the livestock necessary to feed such a throng. Moving through the countryside like a small city, the tumens were slow on the march (moving perhaps five miles in a day) but formidable in battle.

Answer: Four

These sons were Jochi (d. 1227), Chaghatai (d. 1242), Ogodei (d. 1241), and Tolui (d. 1231) - although Jochi died before his father did, his sons received the lands that would have gone to him. Genghis's apportionment of the Mongol lands did not last long, but after a number of civil wars the four khanates were relatively stable.

They were the Chaghataid Khanate in central Asia, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Khanate of the Golden Horde in Russia, and the Khanate of the Great Khan (in what is now Mongolia and China), whose khan nominally ruled over the others.

Answer: Ogodei, the third son

The Mongols did not practice primogeniture - instead, the heir to the empire was picked by the previous Great Khan. Genghis was respected enough that, when he died in 1227, his choice was honored by all his family, and the system worked as it was supposed to - but every succession after that was marred by vicious civil wars between the various family houses.

The sons of Tolui went so far as to wage a genocidal campaign against their own cousins, the descendants of Chaghatai and Ogodei.