“the guy was a genius, a deadly merciless genius, but a genius and a titan among leaders nonetheless.”
Yes, I agree with your assessment but he made one, small mistake. He let the women and children live so that they could breed more evil. Had he done it correctly, we wouldn’t have this Muslim problem today because all of them would have been killed by him and his armies.
My recollection was that they killed everyone, including children, who didn’t have another good use—in other words many of the females.
I watched about three minutes of a History Channel biography the other night and they made the point (as did Weatherford) that the Mongol genes are evident virtually everywhere in the world now because of the, ah, fecundity of Genghis and his crew.