When I say the words “revolutionary reformer,” I bet the words Genghis Khan do not come to mind. He was both—a radical and a change agent unlike few others ever.

Before winning his honorific name of Genghis Khan, Borjigin Temüjin (1162–1227) rose from obscurity to mythical status, also becoming one of the most misunderstood figures of world history.

He was an unimportant son of an outcast family. His family was abandoned by its clan to die on the Mongol steppes. For a time, the young Temüjin, before his rise to power, was even a slave. He never forgot this humiliation.

Through harsh life experiences in what is now Mongolia, he honed his abilities to unite disparate groups and people of different religious traditions and end archaic practices that stymied egalitarianism and the rights of those oppressed.

Genghis Khan drew his leadership ranks from those who proved themselves in battle. He was able to identify and promote capable subordinate leaders using a promotion system based strictly on merit. This proved dramatic on the field of battle.

These methods also challenged the orders and religions of the era, including Christianity and Islam in the West and Chinese traditions of Taoism and Confucianism in the East. In creating warriors loyal to his cause, he persuaded them to abandon their religious traditions and pledge allegiance to his vision of a united kingdom.

Unlike other cultures and rulers of his day, Genghis Khan also promoted religious tolerance studied and learned Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity. He was remarkably tolerant to the local cultures in the administration of his cities. He provided order in exchange, of course, for taxes.

Above all, he and his armies were unrivaled innovators in the art of warfare. He became the world’s single greatest military conqueror, building a land empire two and a half times larger in its territory than the Roman Empire at its zenith. At the height of their power, the Mongols controlled an area which stretched from central Europe to the Pacific Ocean.

Historian Jack Weatherford, in his work “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World,” summarizes Khan’s amazing feats this way: “In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan together with his sones and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any many in history.”

In the many lands they controlled, the Mongols provided security for travelers and they promoted trade. They reduced taxes and encouraged travel and commerce. This so-called “Pax Mongolica” allowed for the caravan routes of central Asia to flourish. Persian businessmen would visit lands in China regularly, and a diplomatic envoy from the Mongols could visit Europe and take communion with the pope in Rome.

In addition to the creation of cross-continental trade, the Mongols created an efficient and modern postal system. The Yam postal system, similar to the more modern Pony Express, relied on horses and provided the Mongols a rapid communications system, which they also extended to merchants. The merchant Marco Polo in fact used the Yam system to support his travels.

Few have changed world history like Genghis Khan.

He was, when needed, remarkably violent, conquering what is now modern-day Beijing in 1215, as he subdued the kingdoms of what is now modern-day China. The Mongol armies in 1241 decimated Czech, Polish and German knights in Poland in 1241.

In Europe, which fell as spectacularly as the earlier Chinese kingdoms did just decades earlier, the writers of the era branded the Mongol armies as an almost supernatural evil.

Describing the Mongol army that conquered Europe, also known as “Tatars,” after Genghis Khan’s death, a chronicler named Matthew Paris in 1241 wrote “they swarmed out and, like locusts, overwhelmed the face of the Earth. They devastated the lands of the East with dreadful destruction, laying waste with fire and carnage. Traveling through the lands of the Saracens, they leveled cities, cut down forests, tore down fortresses, ripped up vineyards, destroyed agricultural fields, and massacred city dwellers and rural folk.”

Mongol forces won everywhere because they employed superior tactics, weaponry, and speed.

They also were brutal when they needed to crush their foes and send a message to their rivals. In 1258, nearly three decades after Genghis Khan’s death, they besieged, sacked, and burned the great Caliphate of Baghdad in a feat not replicated until the American and British invasion of the city in 2003.

To those defeated by the Mongol’s lightning-fast cavalry and steppe-raised soldiers, organized along egalitarian principles and commanded by the most proven leaders, the Mongol army was the representation of the devil itself. They brought the planet’s mightiest and non-egalitarian systems to their knees unlike any military and political force before or since.

Yet Genghis Khan and his successors were astonishingly modern and enlightened.

John Mullin, writing on the innovations of Genghis Khan for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in 2021, notes: “The Mongol empire was full of juxtaposition. In their military conquests, the Mongols countered resistance with ruthless violence. Yet after establishing control, their rule over conquered territories could be more nuanced. In the ‘Yasa’ legal code that Genghis [Khan] promulgated to complement customary Mongol law, the death penalty was ubiquitous. Acts of robbery and treason were punished with severity—but the Yuan legal code that the Mongols established in China had only half the number of capital crimes as the Song dynasty code that it supplanted, and the death penalty appears to have been used only sparingly on civilians.”

It is also important to remember Genghis Khan’s first acts as a leader. After taking power in 1206 of a united Mongol people, he wiped out practices that had cruelly subjected nearly all women to property status, brutally harmed bastard-born kids (illegitimate kids), and had ordinary people turned into slaves. He ended all of these oppressive systems. He had experienced and witnessed all of these cruelties during his life and rise to leadership. He never forgot what he had learned from the harshest of life lessons.

Today, it is no surprise those who accused Genghis Khan of barbarism were those who lost to him—the Chinese, most of the Muslim kingdoms of the Mideast/Near East, the West, and what is now Russia and Ukraine. Those defeated also were the ones who wrote the recorded history following their staggering defeats. They chose most lurid and exaggerated prose.

Yet, those who wrote the historic record, ultimately, stayed stuck in ways that Mongols were not. The social and religious systems that outlived the Mongol empire kept alive archaic and non-egalitarian systems that continued to the modern era and even today, especially the treatment of women. On the plains of Mongolia, nearly 1,000 years earlier, Genghis Khan had at least temporarily freed a generation of people from their societal prisons.