Word: woulds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...forebears were a blue-gray wolf and a fallow doe. The coupling of these legendary ancestors, of predator and prey, produced a human being from whom all Mongols would claim descent. But such fantastical beginnings did little to ease the early life of the world conqueror--unless the myth was an omen for living like a wild animal in the steppes around Lake Baikal. His father Yesugei was poisoned by enemies and his widowed mother Hoelun chased away from their tribe with her brood, including her eldest, nine-year-old Temujin. The outcasts ate field mice and marmots even...
Temujin was born clutching a blood clot the size of a knucklebone. His name was war booty, taken from a captive rival by his proud warrior father and tacked on like a medal to his firstborn son. But history echoes with another of his names, a title Temujin would receive 39 years later. In 1206, by acclamation of all the Mongols, he became Genghis Khan, the "Oceanic Ruler" who in the next two decades would father an empire that rolled across Eurasia, linking the Pacific Ocean to the Blade Sea as it amassed kingdoms as loot and nations as slaves...
...squabbling warlords living under a Christian shadow. A generation before, European Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, massacring its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The Franks, as they were called, then occupied four militarily aggressive states in the Holy Land. The great Syrian leader Nur al-Din predicted that expelling the invaders would require a holy war of the sort that had propelled Islam's first great wave half a millennium earlier, but given the treacherous regional crosscurrents, such a united front seemed unlikely...
...shadows, however, Temujin would create a nation and the most disciplined fighting force on the planet. First, he escaped the wild by making a good marriage. That alliance would lead to more critical alliances as Temujin learned to ply diplomacy and a ruthless militancy. Soon, his almost supernatural generalship would win him fiercely loyal followers, enough to offset a multiplicity of traitors and false friends. He vanquished the fractious tribalism of the Mongols by dispersing clansmen among regiments in an army that used death as discipline and looting as reward. Conquered peoples were divided among the armies, swelling the ranks...
...great Khan's strategies led to the subjugation of the advanced civilizations of northern China and Persia. His sons and grandsons would extend the empire. Batu would command armies that struck deep into Russia and swept through Poland into Germany, Hungary and the Balkans. Kublai Khan, who would later build his stately pleasure dome in the city of Shangtu (Coleridge's Xanadu), conquered southern China and Burma. His brother Hulegu would not only destroy Baghdad but also devastate its irrigation network. Mesopotamia has never fully recovered...