Due to the lack of written historical records the exact birth date of Genghis Khan is unknown. It is generally accepted that he was born in 1162, in the north of modern-day Mongolia, not far from Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
Named Temüjin, he was born to a tribal leader. Temüjin proved himself to be an excellent politician, diplomat and warrior and achieved the impossible – uniting the nomadic tribes on the Central Asian plateau.
The skill of the Mongols with the horse and arrow had been honed over centuries of hunting on the steppes of Asia, making them formidable opponents on the battlefield. Combine this with Genghis Khan’s reputation as one of the world’s great generals and his appetite for conquest and Eurasia was faced with a military force that was seemingly unstoppable.
By the second decade of the 13th century, while Europe was an ever-changing patchwork of small feudal states, Genghis Khan was ruling over a vast empire that would eventually span the breadth of Asia, making it the largest contiguous empire in history – in just fifty years, a third of world’s land surface had fallen under Mongol control.
Genghis Khan had 500 wives. A 2003 genetics study found that one in 200 of the male population (16 million men) are directly descended from Genghis Khan.