by CHRISTOPHER HUDSON

Last updated at 16:51 22 May 2007

We know he was one of history's greatest warriors, but new research shows Genghis Khan could have fathered thousands of children

Seven hundred years ago, a man almost conquered the Earth. He made himself master of half the known world, and inspired mankind with a fear that lasted for generations.

"In the course of his life he was given many names - Mighty Manslayer, Scourge of God, Perfect Warrior. He is better known to us as Genghis Khan."

So begins Harold Lamb's 1927 book Genghis Khan: Emperor Of All Men, which - 80 years after its publication - remains the best-selling history on the Mongolian warlord.

But what Lamb did not say - because there was no proof of it until this day - is that Genghis Khan could also lay claim to being the most prolific lover the world has ever seen.

After analysing tissue samples in populations bordering Mongolia, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences believe the brutal ruler has 16 million male descendants living today, meaning that he must have fathered hundreds, if not thousands, of children.

And as the geneticists agree, it can be explained only by Genghis Khan's policy of seizing for himself the most beautiful women captured in the course of his merciless conquests.

The Mongol victory feasts were notorious. Genghis Khan and his commanders would tear at huge lumps of nearly raw horsemeat while captive girls were paraded for their inspection.

Genghis Khan chose from women of the highest rank. He liked them with small noses, rounded hips, long silky hair, red lips and melodious voices.

He measured their beauty in carats: if he rated them below a certain number they were sent to the tents of his officers.

On one occasion, his lieutenants were idly debating what was the greatest enjoyment that life afforded. The consensus was leaning toward the sport of falconry - Genghis owned 800 falcons - when their leader offered his own deeply felt view.

"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters," he announced.

Despite his appetite for women, the findings of the geneticists sound impossible. They suggest that Genghis fathered more offspring than anyone in history.

How could 16 million men, living in an area stretching from China to the Middle East, share the identical genetic footprint of one man?

Yet that vast region precisely matches the range of Genghis Khan's dominion, through which he led his 13th century Mongol armies on the greatest orgy of pillage, rape and slaughter known to history.

It was a phenomenal achievement, accomplished in just 20 years. At the time of his death in 1227, Genghis ruled an empire twice the size of Rome's, and it changed the world forever.

His original name was Temujin, but he took the title of Genghis Khan or 'Universal Ruler' when he united the fractious Mongolian tribes in 1206.

He and his pony-mounted archers then set out on a whirlwind of foreign conquest and destruction.

His armies ravished northern China, Samarkand and the other fabled Central Asian cities of the Silk Road, and much of far-off Russia.

Genghis and his hordes annihilated every community which resisted them, killing or enslaving men, then distributing captured women among themselves and raping them.

"The plundering of enemy territories could begin only when Genghis Khan or one of his generals gave permission," wrote Russian historian George Vernadsky.

"Once it had started, the commander and the common soldier had equal rights, except that beautiful young women had to be handed over to Genghis Khan."

Often Khan took pleasure in sleeping with the wives and daughters of the enemy chiefs. His army commanders believed him to have extraordinary sexual powers, because he would sleep with many women every night.

There was never any shortage of women, for he and his hordes used bone- crushing violence to wipe out all the men who stood in their path.

A year after he and his hordes ransacked Beijing in 1214, an ambassador to the city reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat and that some of his own entourage had died from diseases spread by the rotting bodies.

When Genghis and his armies laid siege to cities, the besieged inhabitants were forced to resort to cannibalism.

His nomadic tribesmen travelled with battering rams, scaling ladders, four-wheeled mobile shields and bombhurlers in a juggernaut that was something new in history: a growing army which gathered prisoners as it went along and used them as soldiers or in its slave-labour force.

The further it travelled, building its own roads, the stronger it became. Prisoners were used as cannon-fodder - driven forward as suicide troops to fill up the moats and take the full force of the defences' fire.

Where possible, Genghis Khan used local prisoners so that defenders would hold back, unwilling to slaughter people they recognised.

In the Persian city of Merv, an ancient seat of learning regarded as the pearl of Asia, Genghis Khan committed one of the greatest unmechanised mass killings in history, second only to the massacres of Armenians by Turks in 1915.

For four days, the population was led out from the city walls to the plains to be slaughtered. A group of Persians later spent 13 days counting the people slain.

The Persian historian al-Juvayni, writing a generation after the destruction of Merv, said: "The Mongols ordered that, apart from 400 artisans, the whole population, including the women and children, should be killed, and no one, whether woman or man, be spared.

"To each Mongol soldier was allotted the execution of 300 or 400 Persians. So many had been killed by nightfall that the mountains became hillocks, and the plain was soaked with the blood of the mighty."

Historians today estimate that more than a million were killed.

In southern Russia, Khan's Mongol armies destroyed a combined Russian army four times bigger. The surviving leaders, including Prince Romanovitch of Kiev, surrendered on the understanding that no blood would be shed. It wasn't.

The captives were tied up and laid flat, where they became the foundation for a heavy wooden platform on which the Mongol commanders feasted and chose which women to bed, while the Prince and his allies were crushed or suffocated.

Aside from these battlefield conquests, Genghis Khan had six Mongolian wives, he established a large harem and he married many daughters of foreign kings who prudently submitted to his rule.

It was on August 18, 1227, during a campaign against the Tangut people of northwestern China, that Genghis Khan died. The reason for his death is uncertain.

Many assume he fell off his horse, due to old age and physical fatigue; others allege he was killed by the Tangut.

There are persistent folktales that a Tangut princess, to avenge her people and prevent her rape, castrated him with a hidden knife and that he never recovered. Whatever the cause, his legacy was astonishing.

His Mongol Empire ended up ruling, or briefly conquering, large parts of modern day China, Mongolia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, South Korea, North Korea and Kuwait.

His sons and heirs ruled over his empire, and may well have used their position to establish their own large harems, especially if they followed their father's example.

David Morgan, a historian of Mongol history at the University of Wisconsin, says Genghis's eldest son, Tushi, had 40 sons.

Ata-Malik Juvaini, who wrote a treatise on the Mongols in 1260, said: "Of the issue of the race and lineage of Ghengis Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth and affluence more than 20,000.

"More than this I will not say ... lest the readers of this history should accuse the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time so great a progeny."