History tells us that Genghis Khan was the most bloody-minded conqueror that ever lived; Hitler doesn’t even come close. Environmentalists tell us that no one person has ever achieved what Genghis did for bringing down the emission of greenhouse gases on the planet. By killing or causing the deaths of around 30 million people, the great Khan ensured that country-sized tracts of cultivated land became jungles within a generation, thus countering global warming (however negligible it might have been a millennium ago).
Thankfully we are not dealing with the environment but with history, which has not only been diluted but is presented to us in Eastmanesque colours. In Empire of Silver, Con Iggulden continues the saga of the Khan dynasty, a story that started with the young Genghis Khan, three books ago.
We enter the world of Ogedai, the great Khan’s successor and third son, whom he chose above his elder sons Jochi and Chagatai to lead the “nation”. Genghis has been dead for two years but his dream of conquering everything “from sea to sea” is yet unfinished. The book starts with Ogedai completing the capital city of the Mongols, Karakorum, a task which the other generals and Genghis’ brothers look upon with contempt because the Mongols have never needed cities other than to conquer them. An undaunted Ogedai, however, finishes Karakorum despite assassination attempts by his brother Chagatai (their elder brother Jochi has been ordered killed by Genghis for treason in an earlier book) and a weak heart that might fail any moment.
Empire of Silver, however, is not so much about Ogedai, the Khan. It’s about the entire Mongol nation in general and Genghis’ family in particular. It’s about the third generation of princes (Genghis’ grandsons) and how they become men and it’s about a certain woman named Sorhatani, the wife of Genghis’ youngest son Tolui.
Other than documenting the Mongol conquests during the decade after Genghis’ death, the book is a base for launching that great ruler who would rule over land even greater than that of Genghis — we are talking about his grandson Kublai, Sorhatani’s son. Iggulden makes it clear — and historians wholeheartedly agree — that Kublai could never have got the aptitude and training to rule from China to Baghdad, if it were not for his mother’s astute training and court play.
We see Mongol hordes conquering a winter-ravaged Russia, something no one thought was possible, and taking the two great Hungarian cities of Buda and Pest. The brilliant Mongol general, Tsubodai, is only unable to go further on to France and even England because back in Karakorum, Ogedai’s heart finally lets go and his heir, Guyuk, who is on the campaign trail with Tsubodai, assumes authority and orders the general and his armies back to Karakorum to safeguard his title.
As Iggulden points out, Ogedai’s death perhaps has had the most far reaching consequence in the history of mankind, for after conquering Buda and Pest, valiantly defended by Crusader Knights, Tsubodai could have sauntered into France and then on to England. If that happened, the entire world’s history would change. There would be no Elizabethan England, no superpower, no Industrial revolution (at least not in the sense we now it) and this review might have been written in Mongolian or Chinese instead of English.
Iggulden, as usual, is a master storyteller and one of the few who can make historical novels really interesting without twisting the facts too much. We have followed the life of Genghis Khan and his conquests in the earlier three books, Wolf of the Plains, Lords of the Bow and Bones of the Hills and in Empire of Silver, Iggulden manages to get across the same raw emotions and power that made the earlier books bestsellers. The task must have been more difficult because in Empire of Silver the charismatic figure of Genghis is dead and Kublai still hasn’t ascended the throne.
However, if you haven’t read the earlier books, you will find the characters sketchy and their actions often abrupt as Iggulden does not bother to explain past incidents — unless they are absolutely necessary — perhaps knowing that one wouldn’t pick up Empire of Silver without reading the first three books.