Was Genghis Kahn A Trust Fund Kid?

When we think about great political figures of the past – the folks who built empires and rendered the world theirs – we rarely focus on their origin story. We focus instead on the breadth of what they did.

But it is an interesting question to ask – how would great conquerors have appeared to us were they to arrive at power in modern 21st century America?

What would their origin stories look like in a 21st century context?

Julius Caesar: A NYC Trust Fund Kid Without a Trust Fund

Imagine a NYC kid who gets into an Ivy League school because of his family name but whose family falls out of favor because the Dad became a big Trump booster. After Trump loses, the family is banished from the establishment. This kid hangs out with the rich kid crowd, but he no longer really belongs. He has to do things that rich establishment kids don’t normally necessarily do, like deal coke. 

Then also imagine that early in this story, our protagonist gets kidnapped by the Sinaloa cartel on a trip to Mexico and while kidnapped he tells the drug dealers that he plans on killing them if he is ever freed.

Despite his threats, the kidnappers eventually free him and he returns to the US. Then imagine our protagonist goes right back to Mexico and has all of his erstwhile captors butchered just as he had promised.

If you can imagine all that – well, then you’ve imagined the strange origin story of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Caesar was born into the Julia family, which was one of the founding families of Rome. His dad also named Gaius was a Senator who sided with Marius during the Marius versus Sulla fight that consumed Rome during the early part of the 1st century BC.

This was basically like Republicans versus Democrats taken to a new level of street violence with Sulla and the Senate representing the older conservative order and Marius and the Populares representing the proletariat/commoners. Sulla (and the Senate) won and Marius and his supporters were killed or banished or stripped of their assets.

Caesar came of age as all this was happening. His family estate was confiscated due to their Marius connections and he grew up anxious that Sulla would in turn come for him as well. His relative poverty forced him into a low-end dwelling and into the field of law – he was like a Better Call Saul lawyer who hustled in the streets peddling arguments for a fee (but in so doing he become a great orator).

At one point, he left Rome in fear of Sulla and joined the army in Turkey (joining the eastern army in Asia was how you got rich back then). He waited for Sulla’s death before returning. On his voyage back to Rome, Caesar was captured by pirates.

The pirates demanded a ransom from his family and Caesar was famously insulted at how low a ransom they demanded. The pirates grew to like Caesar even though he constantly spoke of murdering them – (they felt he was just kidding because he always said it with a grin).

After being released and returned home, Caesar made his way back again to Turkey to continue fighting and getting rich. But before he got there, he went out of his way to visit his old pirate friends. It was not to thank them for his release but to slit their throats and crucify all of them.

Trust Fund Kid Score: (6 out of 10) It is hard to call Caesar a full blown trust fund kid given he had no real money to start – just a good name. That said, he wasn’t starting with nothing either. So he’s somewhere in between.

Alexander the Great: Scion Who Takes the Family Business Global

Imagine that Don Trump Jr. is not a feckless idiot but rather a more cunning version of his establishment disrupting father. He takes his father’s brand of populism and uses it to dominate the United States and the world in the decades to follow.

This is a bad analogy on a bunch of levels but where it does work is in articulating the similarities between Donald Trump and Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon.

Both of these men were considered barbaric outsiders to the establishment powers that be of the time – the Greek City States in Philip’s case and the Republican Party in the case of Trump. They nonetheless thoroughly subdued those powers to become dictators and they did so by taking an existing technology and using it in a novel way. In the case of Trump, it was social media and an unvarnished and unapologetic style. In the case of Philip it was the Sarissa.

The Sarissa was an elongated spear (4-6 meters instead of 1-2). Philip trained his men to use this unusual weapon in a phalanx formation. It might seem simplistic, but it worked devastatingly well – the Macedonian phalanx divisions were like German panzer divisions rolling through Polish cavalry units – the definition of unstoppable in Ancient Warfare. When someone has the superior mousetrap in war, no amount of strategy or bravery can overcome that.

What is little appreciated in history is that the war machine that Alexander unleashed on the world was actually built and perfected by his father decades earlier (and had already proven its success in demolishing the Greek city states). This doesn’t take away from Alexander’s accomplishments, but it does add some context around how someone could accomplish so much at such a young age.

If Alexander were around today – he would have very much been the scion of a wealth family – but one who took the family to a whole unprecedented new level that could never have before been imagined. Still the groundwork was laid by someone else.

Trust Fund Kid Score: (9 out of 10) Alexander is like a kid who inherited $1b but who deploys that to become the world’s first trillionaire. Still the greatest Conqueror – just had more help than usual. 

Genghis Kahn: Hell’s Angels Chapter President Who Randomly Conquers World

Imagine a kid in North Dakota whose dad is the head of a local Hell’s Angels chapter. His dad is respected and feared within the Hell’s Angels community but that is about it. If you’re existing literally anywhere else outside of a Hell’s Angels bar in North Dakota, no one cares who your dad is. 

Then imagine that kid inheriting this local North Dakota chapter and somehow subduing the other Hell’s Angels chapters in the area and then nationwide and then taking this biker army and using it to conquer the United States (a country with major nuclear weapons) and then conquering any place he could bike to (which turned out to be most of the world).  

If you can imagine that then you can picture the improbable ascent of Genghis Kahn. 

Genghis Kahn was born Temujin, the son of Yusugei, in Delun Boodog – which is on the northern edge of present-day Mongolia near the border with Russia. His father was a local chieftain– one among many. At age 9, Genghis’ dad was murdered (as was wont to happen), leaving Genghis essentially the chapter president of this little band of steppe warriors.

To understand how tough these people were – just picture a Mad Max hellscape, where bands of humans are roaming around with all their stuff and then occasionally encountering another band with all their stuff doing the same thing. When two random groups encounter each other, it is an immediate scramble to see who can take the other guy’s women and horses and food first. 

Facing this sort of survival function, the steppe peoples that inhabited that region - the Naimans, Merkits, Tatars, Keraites and Mongols – evolved to be some of the best fighters on the planet.

Genghis’ genius lay in the fact that he was the first to subdue all these warrior tribes and then to properly organize their fighting prowess for larger pitched battles. The first part – subduing these small tribes – basically took him his entire adult life. He wasn’t declared the leader within Mongolia until he was past 50. From there conquering vast swaths of territory in Central and Eastern Asia turned out to be easy and happened in relatively short order. 

For the next century or two, the Mongol Armies basically never lost and took over most of Asia and parts of Europe. Like the Macedonian Phalanx – they had the better mousetrap for fighting, which Genghis created.

That mousetrap was deploying archery off of horses in a blitzkrieg fashion and using pincer movements. These fighting units could sweep in on an enemy – shoot off a bunch of arrows and then sweep out before a retaliatory response. It took decades for the rest of the world to come up with a response.

In many ways, Genghis is like a Phillip and Alexander rolled into one person and probably represents the biggest ascent as far as starting to ending position. 

That said, it is hard to remember him too fondly. Where as Alexander brought Hellenstic learning to various parts of the world and built extra-ordinary cities – Genghis basically just burned everything to the ground – setting back Islamic and Chinese culture for centuries.

He was a massive dick – the Hell’s Angels would have been proud to have called them one of their own.

Trust Fund Kid Score (1): Genghis Kahn is basically not a trust fund kid at all. He really is more like the Pablo Escobar of the Medieval World – starting from nothing and building a huge empire from scratch through effective deployment of violence.

Napoleon Bonaparte: The Puerto Rican Kid Who Made Good

Imagine a kid from a wealthy Puerto Rican family – he’s sort of American (Puerto Rico is technically part of the United States) but he’s also sort of not American – Puerto Rico is like its own thing. The family moves to the States when he’s young but he retains his Puerto Rican accent and affinity for Puerto Rico – believing that Puerto Rico should be independent someday.  

With his foreign background and accent and short stature, he grows up a target of bullies, which forces him inward. He becomes a voracious reader and gets really into computers – your stereotypical nerd. He ends up going to West Point and becoming a cyber warfare expert just as the country begins to fall apart.

In the revolutionary tumult that ensues, this random kid from Puerto Rico manages to lever his expertise in cyber warfare to become a power player. His influence grows with each cyberwarfare victory and he becomes the absolute master of the chaos – establishing himself as an Emperor in a country that had just gone to great lengths to rid itself of the Presidency. He doesn’t go free his native homeland but instead quashes the Puerto Rican independence movement.

That story if you followed it was in a nutshell the story of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon was born in Corsica the son of minor Italian nobility of modest means. They moved to mainland France when Napoleon was a child but retained their loyalty and patriotism for Corsica – which Napoleon inherited.

Napoleon’s various oddities from how he spoke to how he looked – forced him inward and made him a voracious learner. While he originally wanted to become a writer, he instead attended the most prestigious military school in France and graduates just as the revolution is picking up steam. Rather than try to become a cavalry officer as a rich aristocratic kid was wont to do – he becomes an artillery nerd who soaks up everything there is to know about these relatively new instruments of war and in so doing is able to use them to great effect.

His early and decisive wins make him a national hero – which he in turn uses to serve his political ambitions and in time as further victories pile up, he positions himself as the absolutist ruler of a nation that had just rejected absolutism.

Trust Fund Kid Score (4): Napoleon has some similarities to Caesar in that they are both from reasonably well off families – but Caeser’s family is much more illustrious and connected to power. Napoleon was much further from the political graviety.