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‘Are you going to weep for the people again?’ Ögodei teased his father. A general advised Genghis to exterminate the Chinese and rusticate the Central Country as pasture, but his Chinese advisers explained the potential tax revenues. ‘An empire that can be conquered on horseback,’ he mused, ‘can’t be ruled from it.’ Whether or not he really said that, Genghis now commissioned a system of taxation.

As the Tangut emperor was on his way to submit, Genghis, out riding, fell from his horse and that night he was sick. ‘Princes and generals,’ said Khatun Yesui (a khatun was the wife of a khan, or empress), ‘consult each other; last night the khan was feverish.’ The generals proposed a withdrawal.

‘The Tangut will say our hearts are failing,’ Genghis replied, dictating specific orders: Khatun Yesui was to receive Tangut territory; he was to be buried close to his sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun. ‘Don’t let my death be known. Don’t weep or lament but when the Tangut ruler and his people leave the city, kill everyone!’

Genghis was secretly dying as the Tangut ruler arrived at the Golden ordu in August 1227. He presented his gifts – giant golden Buddhas, boys and girls, camels and horses, all in sets of sacred nine – but he was then seized and strangled, his entourage slaughtered. Informed of this, Genghis said, ‘We’ve taken our vengeance. They have vanished.’ Now he could die, leaving an empire four times as big as Alexander’s, twice the size of the Roman imperium – but only half as expansive as it would soon be. The body was borne northwards to be buried secretly on the sacred mountain, accompanied by sacrificed horses and slaves, on a site never yet found. Then the Golden princes led by Tolui, Genghis’s daughters and his generals assembled at a qurultai where, as agreed with their father, Chagatai proposed Ögodei as khagan. Ögodei consulted his brothers and took the decision to resume world conquest, taking command of the campaign to finish off the Jurchen – otherwise ‘People will ask by what ability I’ve succeeded my father.’ In 1231, Ögodei, accompanied by Tolui, took the Jurchen capital of Kaifeng, but fell ill from cirrhosis, caused by alcoholism. Tolui was also addicted, drinking so much kumis that he sometimes just wept publicly, leaving politics to his wife, Sorqaqtani Beki. Ögodei recovered; Tolui died of alcoholism, leaving Sorqaqtani to rule his appanage across northern China. Ögodei respected her, first asking her to marry him, then suggesting his useless son Güyük. But she refused graciously, saying her own four sons were her priority. She was right: she and they were the future. Instead she became Ögodei’s adviser. ‘No turban-wearer [male] could have dealt with these matters with similar brilliance,’ wrote the Persian historian Juvaini. ‘In any business which Ögodei undertook, whether concerning empire or army, he consulted her, changing arrangements according to her recommendations.’

Often soused, Ögodei founded a more permanent capital at Karakorum (Mongolia) and commissioned a family history. Although he sometimes pardoned those sentenced to death, he also ordered the rape of thousands of girls of the conquered Oirat tribe after their ruler, his sister Checheikhen, died. His addictions were so out of control that Chagatai forced him to allow a ‘supervisor’ to limit the number of his drinks, which he got around by quaffing from larger goblets of wine.

As Ögodei declined, his wife Khatun Töregene ran more of the government, appointing Muslim officials, Turks and Persians, to raise Chinese taxes. In 1236 the khagan dispatched an army of 150,000, under his nephews Batu (son of Jochi) and Möngke (son of Tolui) plus his own son Güyük, all commanded by the marshal Subotai, to conquer Europe.

The Wonder of the World, Frederick II, was unprepared. Soon after Genghis’s death, he had arrived in the Holy Land where he negotiated a peace plan with Saladin’s nephew Sultan al-Kamil. Saladin’s heirs had demolished the walls of Jerusalem to avoid it being used by family rivals or Crusaders. Now Frederick and al-Kamil agreed that each religion would control its own shrines, the Muslims the Haram al-Sharif, the Christians the Sepulchre. In Jerusalem, a triumphant Frederick wore his crown as king of the sacred city while also writing love poetry to his ‘Syrian’ mistress: was she Frankish or Arab? By now he was balding and short-sighted. An Arab writer who spotted him in Jerusalem joked, ‘The emperor, covered with red hair, was bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he wouldn’t have fetched 200 dirhams at market.’ Yet Frederick’s visionary compromise was hated by the diehard Crusaders. Back in Acre, butchers pelted him with entrails.