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Two crowned men and a cup passed between them. The patron on the right backed Temüjin early and was destroyed by him later.

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 promptly abandoned the widow and her children on the steppe rather than feed them, and the family survived 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 relationships: a sworn brotherhood with a friend named Jamukha, and a patron, Toghrul, khan of the powerful Kereit confederation, who had been his father's ally and who is the second crowned figure in this painting. Then he began dismantling the system that had produced him. He broke up the tribes and reassigned men into units of ten, hundred and thousand under officers he promoted for competence rather than birth; he made his personal guard a nursery for commanders; he forbade the looting of a camp before a 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, the largest contiguous land empire there has ever been, and the arithmetic of how it was assembled remains appalling; some cities that resisted were emptied in a way that shows up in the archaeology. It also produced a working postal relay across Asia, a written script for a language that had none, guaranteed religious tolerance across a dozen faiths, and safe roads on which merchants and, later, plague travelled 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, illustrated by a workshop that mixed Chinese and Persian technique because the empire had mixed them, is where most images of Genghis Khan come from, painted by people working for his great-grandsons.