Commanding Historical Figure : Scholar Wants Genghis to Get His Due

If Maury Kravitz descends on his Chicago commodities trading firm some morning muttering, “Sack! Pillage! Maim! Kill! Give no quarter! Ask no quarter!” he’s thinking about his hobby, not the market.

Kravitz, 58, a lawyer and the owner of a trading firm at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, has spent 17 years independently researching the life and military exploits of the 13th-Century Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.

Commodities contracts might be complicated enough for most businessmen, but Kravitz feels at home among translations of medieval Chinese and Persian historians, looking for shadowy references to Genghis.

“You’re always dealing with a hazy profile when you begin searching for facts about Genghis or any of the Mongol leaders, even though they created the largest empire the world has ever known,” Kravitz said last week in a telephone interview. “Until Genghis ordered a written Mongol language to be created, they were illiterate. They had no written history and no written laws.

300 Volumes

“The Persians who wrote about the Mongols got their information 200 years later, so you have to learn to read through the guys,” Kravitz said. “It’s a difficult field of study, and it doesn’t yield its facts easily.”

Kravitz’s obsession with Genghis has led him to amass more than 300 volumes on Mongol history, which he believes is the largest private library in the world devoted to the subject.

It also has led him to name his 38-foot telephone-equipped yacht Temujin, the great conqueror’s given name. The vanity license plates on Kravitz’s Mercedes Benz also bear the name Temujin, and a Mongol sword decorates his Mercantile Exchange office.

“People simply don’t appreciate the Mongol Empire, and what a profound effect it had on this world,” Kravitz said. “After all, they did conquer three-quarters of the then-known world, from China to Eastern Europe and from Siberia to Southeast Asia.”

“You don’t measure Genghis’ conquests in miles, you measure them in degrees of latitude and longitude, and by the time he died in 1227, this nomad barbarian had brilliantly redesigned military strategy, had a written language created and gave his people a formal code of laws, the Yassa,” Kravitz said.

“You look at Mr. Napoleon, Mr. Alexander, Mr. Hannibal and Mr. Field Marshal Montgomery--next to Mr. Temujin, they were first-year students,” he said. “Attila the Hun was nothing.”

Kravitz majored in history at the University of Illinois, but decided against following it as a profession.

‘Liked to Eat’

“All you could do as an historian was to teach, and I liked to eat better then most teachers could afford to eat,” said the burly commodities executive. “History was my first love, but I went to John Marshall Law School and became a lawyer.”

Kravitz calls his study “The Search,” and says two things about it sadden him.

One is the fact that he has yet to visit Central Asia, although he still has plans to do so. He believes a vast treasure, “the spoils of Genghis,” lies buried somewhere in what is now the People’s Republic of Mongolia.

The second disappointment is his failure to learn as much as he wants to about Genghis.

“The sources are so incomplete,” he said. “You get glimpses of aspects of his personality, but they don’t jell. You can feel his great cruelty, but you can also feel great kindness and his great loyalty to those who were loyal to him.

“It may sound kind of pathetic, but after 17 years of study, if Genghis Khan himself could come back and sit down with me, I’d feel I really didn’t know him,” Kravitz said.