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Two crowned figures share one throne, with a gold dish in front of each of them. The man was born Temüjin, and the world came to call him Genghis Khan. As a boy he lived on the open steppe, eating roots and marmots.

His name was Temüjin, and his childhood is the least likely opening in the history of conquest. His father, a minor Mongol chief, was poisoned by Tatars when the boy was about nine. The clan abandoned the widow and her children on the steppe rather than feed them. They lived on roots, marmots and fish. He killed his own half-brother in a dispute over a hunting catch. He was captured by a rival clan and kept in a wooden collar before escaping. His wife Börte was carried off by raiders and he had to fight to get her back. What he did with that education was organizational. He rebuilt his position through two men. One was Jamukha, a friend he swore brotherhood with. The other was Toghrul, khan of the Kereit and an old ally of his father's. Then he began dismantling the system that had produced him. He broke up the tribes and put men into units of ten, hundred and thousand, under officers he picked for competence rather than birth. His personal guard became the school his commanders came out of. He banned looting a camp before the battle was decided. Both his sworn brother and his patron eventually turned against him, and both lost. In 1206 an assembly on the Onon river gave him the title Genghis Khan. The empire that followed reached from Korea to Hungary within two generations. It is the largest connected land empire there has ever been. The arithmetic of how it was put together is appalling: cities that resisted were emptied out, and the archaeology still shows it. It also produced a working postal relay across Asia and a written script for a language that had none. He let people keep their religions. The roads were safe enough for merchants, and later for the plague, which took the same routes. The painting is from the Jami al-Tawarikh, a world history compiled around 1307 by Rashid al-Din, a Jewish-born physician who converted to Islam and became vizier to the Mongol rulers of Persia. He was executed in 1318 on a charge of poisoning his khan. The manuscript he ran is where most images of Genghis Khan come from. A workshop illustrated it, mixing Chinese and Persian technique because the empire had mixed the two. Everyone who painted him worked for his descendants.