Conquerors & Commanders

We remember conquerors by their empires and forget the people who built them: the boy, the first command, the gamble, the ending. This shelf holds five of them, more than two thousand years apart.

Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle and was king at 20. He never lost a battle, and it was his own army that made him turn back. He died at 32. Genghis Khan was abandoned by his clan as a boy, and later held captive with a wooden collar locked round his neck. He escaped, and founded the empire that became the largest contiguous land empire in history. His greatest general, Subutai, was a blacksmith’s son who started out guarding a tent door. Timur, lamed by arrow wounds, sacked Delhi, Damascus and Baghdad and captured the Ottoman sultan. Napoleon, teased at military school for his Corsican accent, took the crown from the altar and put it on his own head.

The lives link up: Genghis Khan was Subutai’s master, and the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, on the Rulers shelf, was descended from both Genghis and Timur.

Their victories cost an enormous number of lives. We tell these stories to understand how that power was won, and what it did to the people in its path, never to admire it.