At the time of his sudden and violent demise, Genghis Khan was one of the most powerful warlords on Earth; his armies had carved a swath of destruction throughout much of Asia and were even beginning to pose a threat to the kingdoms of Europe. Had the attempt on his life been thwarted, or had his court physicians been able to get to him in time to treat his wounds, one can only imagine how far he might have been to extend the boundaries of the Mongol empire. As it was, his death marked the beginning of a long period of turning inward for the Mongol people as they pulled back to their original homeland to go through the laborious process of choosing a new khan; by the time they were ready to resume their wars of conquest they found their intended victims a harder nut to crack than had been the case while Genghis still lived.

Nearly eight centuries after the fact, the murderer’s identity and motives are still a mystery. So for that matter is the murderer’s fate once he or she fled the scene of the crime; no one even knows for sure how the killer managed to get into the great Khan’s camp in the first place. In the absence of substantial physical evidence to settle these questions, we are left with only conjecture, rumor, and romantic fantasies. But one fact is indisputably clear: Genghis Khan’s murder marked the beginning of the end for the Mongol Empire.

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One of the few things we can be relatively sure of concerning the untimely death of Genghis Khan is the year in which it happened. According to evidence unearthed by archeologists in modern Mongolia and the few written records of the event which have survived from the 13th century, Genghis was murdered in the late spring or early summer of 1210 A.D. while leading his armies on one of their many campaigns through the interior of what is now China. His mystery assailant is said to have stabbed the Khan nearly fifty times before fleeing into the night(and the mists of legend). After the Mongol Empire fell, the knife that killed Genghis passed from one hand to another before it finally wound up in the British Museum in London; Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century claimed the assassin as one of their own even though next to nothing was actually known about the killer’s ethnic identity. Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist revolution which toppled China’s Kuomintang government in the late 1940s, sought to make this enigmatic figure into a proto-Marxist icon only to have his propaganda efforts on this front halted dead in their tracks because no one could find the first clue about the assassin’s true identity. Another well- known Marxist ruler, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, organized a special propaganda team to publicize the claim that Genghis Khan’s killer had in fact been a Russian of Siberian extraction; the team was disbanded shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953.

The earliest known document about the murder to have been printed outside the Mongol homeland was a Korean poem written around 1212 A.D. by a scholar who was a favorite of Korea’s imperial court. Titled “The Death Of A Khan”, it described Genghis’ demise in dramatic terms-- and highly conjectural ones too, given that most of the physical evidence which could have identified the murderer had already been eroded away by time and weather long before the poet had even started to write his first draft of his first line of the poem. Famous explorer Marco Polo introduced “Death Of A Khan” to European audiences after his return to Venice from China in 1295; by 1320 A.D. Anglican monks had written the first English-language translation of the poem. During the 16th century William Shakespeare would craft one of the most magnificent sonnets of his career around the legend of a slave girl who supposedly killed the Khan in revenge for the Mongols’ destruction of her home village.

But it was during the late 18th century that the mystery of Genghis Khan’s death would truly take hold of the Western imagination. In late October of 1778, while on his way back to his Paris apartment after an afternoon meeting with the French foreign minister, American scholar, ambassador, and inventor Benjamin Franklin chanced to visit one of the French capital’s book shops and discovered an old copy of a volume of poems resting on one of the larger shelves in the center of the shop; on opening the book, he found that one of the verses listed among its contents was a 17th century French translation of “Death Of A Khan”. On a whim Franklin decided to buy the book, and before he’d finished the second stanza of the poem he’d gotten hooked on its dramatic narrative as well as its central subject. A week later the Poor Richard author started writing the initial draft of what would over the next century be considered the definitive treatise on the poem: Commentary On The Structure, Cadences, and Verse Of “The Death Of A Khan”.

Franklin’s dissertation would be published in America late in the summer of 1779 and instantly attract attention from literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. King George III bitterly resented the book’s popularity but couldn’t do much to stop it from taking hold on the minds of Great Britain’s most esteemed literary scholars; even if his advisors hadn’t warned him of the negative repercussions of trying to censor what his subjects read, his mind was starting to deteriorate as a result of hereditary neurological problems and he was having more and more trouble making even the most basic decisions of leadership. By the time he finally died in 1820, his mind had disintegrated to the point where he could barely remember the book’s existence, much less why it had upset him so much. Later British monarchs would have a much more positive attitude toward Franklin’s work; indeed, King George VI was known to consider it one of his favorite books and recommended it to his friends as an example of American literature at its finest.

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When the motion picture industry started looking for true-life material to use as a subject for its first great costume epics, it was almost inevitable that Genghis Khan’s murder would be near the top of the list of hot topics for the silver screen. The earliest known film portrayal of Genghis’ assassination is the 1903 10-minute silent drama The Fate Of All Tyrants, a British-produced morality tale based on the notion the khan had been the casualty of a life of decadence; in the movie’s jarring climax Genghis is killed by a concubine with whom he’d been sharing his bed just the day before. Three years later American film pioneer D.W. Griffith bought the U.S. rights to Fate’s script and adapted it into a 75-minute featured called simply The Mongol. When it was released in New York in April of 1910, it sparked both controversy and widespread public interest. Oddly enough the multiple sequences of all-out slaughter seemed to arouse less outrage among the bluenoses in Griffith’s audience than the lone thirty-second clip of a woman partly undressed in the khan’s tent.

The addition of sound to motion pictures gave Hollywood writers the perfect opportunity to add purple prose to the next wave of films about Genghis Khan’s murder. The first significant Genghis Khan-themed movie of the sound era was the 1928 Cecil B. DeMille-directed costume epic Blood Of A Tyrant; besides being wired for sound, the film’s most notable claim to fame was that Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who normally was associated with playing heroic swashbucklers, had a prominent part in its supporting cast as one of the khan’s senior generals.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels predictably used Genghis’ assassination and the mystery surrounding it as a tool for promoting the Nazi Party’s virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. Case in point: the 1936 melodrama Der Mörder(“The Murderer”), which asserted that a sinister Jewish conspiracy had been responsible for the khan’s death although there was absolutely no concrete evidence whatsoever that the khan had ever come anywhere near a Jewish person or community. Not surprisingly it was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite films.

Three years after Der Mörder was released, Goebbels’ motion picture department spawned another pro-Nazi propaganda piece about the khan’s death, this time a “documentary” purporting to reveal the details of the mythical Jewish cabal supposed to have done away with him. The 47-minute-long color short, personally directed by Goebbels and titled Der Grosse Verschwörung(“The Great Conspiracy”), was widely dismissed by real documentarians as ideologically driven claptrap-- an exercise in self-delusion at best and at worst an act of unadulterated bigotry. Shortly after its release the United States’ largest society of scholastic history teachers voted unanimously to boycott the movie if it were ever to be released in American theaters(it never was). In a letter to a friend back in Chicago mailed shortly before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August of 1939, a State Department cultural attaché wrote that Verschwörung was “the worst assortment of bigoted nonsense” he’d ever seen in a movie theater.

Hollywood didn’t try to tackle the subject of the khan’s murder again until 1943, when 20th Century Fox released the John Ford-helmed epic Genghis Khan, Warlord. Warlord, a rare departure for Ford from the Westerns for which he was best-known in the motion picture world, played to packed houses during its initial North American theatrical release and was also highly popular with GIs stationed in Europe and the Pacific during the latter stages of World War II; celebrated 3rd Army division commander General George S. Patton pronounced it “the best damn war movie I’ve ever seen”. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences apparently shared Patton’s sentiments on that score, because at the 1944 Academy Awards Warlord received Oscar nominations in six categories and won in three of those categories.

In the early ‘50s three memorable films focusing on Genghis’ life and untimely death all hit theaters within six months of each other. The first was an avant-garde Italian short titled The Madman, which retold the story of the khan’s murder as a gangland assassination saga set in the modern Rome underworld. The second was a British-produced documentary, co-sponsored by Oxford University, called The Mystery Of Genghis Khan; it would win the Best Documentary Academy Award at the 1952 Oscars. But perhaps the most noteworthy of the three movies was the MGM-made three-hour epic The Great Warlord, released in June of 1952 and featuring Charlton Heston in one of his first leading roles on the silver screen. Warlord set a number of box office records in North America and positioned Heston to get cast in what may been the most famous cinematic role of his career: the Biblical prophet Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments.

The 1960s saw the official Soviet government movie studio Mosfilm release two three-hour epics that revived the Kremlin’s old Stalin-era effort to claim credit for the Russian people for the assassination of Genghis Khan. Neither film got much love domestically, but the second film became a cult hit overseas; it got especially favorable reviews in France, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the United States, where it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. One suspects that the second film’s popularity abroad had less to do with acceptance of its chief premise than with the rather impressive physique of its leading lady.

In 1983 the West German television network ZDF aired a three-part documentary miniseries which shed light on a previously little-known chapter of the Second World War and generated massive controversy all over western Europe. Broadcast on public TV in the United States as a two-hour special and titled Den Dolch(“The Dagger”), it chronicled the Nazis’ fervent obsession with the supposed occult powers of the dagger which killed Genghis Khan. Some of its critics regarded the miniseries as a glorification of the Third Reich while others considered it to be a needless reopening of old wounds; all of them vociferously protested the miniseries when it aired. The miniseries had an equally vociferous chorus of defenders who argued that it shed much-needed light on what for most of the post-World War II era had been a little-known facet of the Nazi regime. While the argument over the miniseries is still going on today, the tide seems to have turned in favor of its defenders: a 2008 re-broadcast of “The Dagger” marking its 25th anniversary drew a flood of e-mails hailing it as one of the greatest TV documentaries of all time.

The most recent big screen portrayal of Genghis Khan’s murder and its aftermath is the 2004 James Cameron epic The Khan; coming on the heels of his box office triumph with Titanic seven years earlier, The Khan turned out to be a box office sensation in its own right and was credited with sparking a surge of renewed interest in archeological expeditions to the Far East to search for further clues as to who and why Genghis was assassinated. Cameron himself helped fund at least two of those expeditions.

In our next chapter we’ll delve further into how Genghis Khan’s assassination has been portrayed in art and pop culture and begin to discuss the assassination’s effects on the course of world history.

To Be Continued