To: Knighty Tin who wrote (418856 ) 11/11/2011 4:31:30 AM From: maceng2 3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) | Respond to ...Genghis Khan ... "the Mongols' lack of religious fervor is well demonstrated in one of their most lauded characteristics, their firm policy of religious tolerance, which so appealed to writers of the eighteenth century. 'The Catholic inquisitors of Europe', wrote Gibbon in a celebrated passage, 'who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.' The situation became further complicated because the governor later refused to make repayments for the looting of the caravan and handing over the perpetrators. Genghis Khan then sent again a second group of three ambassadors (two Mongols and a Muslim) to meet the Shah himself instead of the governor Inalchuq. The Shah beheaded en.wikipedia.org "A well-worn joke today is to refer to a strongly conservative person as being 'to the right of Genghis Khan," but the joke gets it wrong: Khan was, if anything, a liberal by modern definitions; he instituted a government system of record keeping, put the Mongolian language into writing, outlawed the kidnapping of women, assured diplomatic immunity to his neighbors, established an independent judiciary, and levied stiff taxes on the lands he conquered. As the historian Timothy May has noted, he also instituted a welfare system for widows,. Khan was also known for his sexual appetite: DNA tests reveal that about one-sixteenth of the population of eastern Asia is genetically descended from as single person, believed to be him" -Tom Zoellner scholarisland.org
