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Who really said it

The greatest joy is to conquer your enemies and drive them before you

Attributed — a real passage, a century after the fact Genghis Khan c. 1162–1227 · founder of the Mongol Empire
Attributed Free to reuse

This is the rare grim quotation that is substantially real. The exchange — Genghis asks his generals what a man’s greatest pleasure is, they all say hawking, he tells them they are wrong — is written down in Rashid al-Din’s Jami’ al-tawarikh (the Collection of Chronicles), compiled in Persia in the 1300s. Two honest catches: Rashid al-Din was writing roughly ninety years after Genghis died, from Mongol oral tradition, not from a transcript. And the English version people quote — the one with the cities reduced to ashes — adds imagery the source does not contain.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The greatest joy is to conquer your enemies and drive them before you” Attributed to Genghis Khan in Rashid al-Din's Jami' al-tawarikh, early 14th century; French text in d'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I (1834), p. 404. The popular English wording is later.

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In context

Evoking the world of Genghis Khan — founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. Theme: "The greatest joy is to conquer your enemies and drive them before you". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Work
Jami’ al-tawarikh (Collection of Chronicles)
Compiled
Persia, early 14th century, by Rashid al-Din Hamadani
Text quoted
d’Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I, p. 404 (1834)
Distance
Written down about 90 years after Genghis’s death

Non, reprit Tchinguiz-khan, la plus grande jouissance de l'homme, c'est de vaincre ses ennemis, de les chasser devant soi, de leur ravir ce qu'ils possèdent, de voir les personnes qui leur sont chères le visage baigné de larmes, de monter leurs chevaux, de presser dans ses bras leurs filles et leurs femmes. Rashid al-Din, via d'Ohsson 1834

The French of 1834, as printed. It is worth being plain about what it says: this is a boast about killing, looting and the sexual seizure of captive women, spoken by the man who did it on a continental scale. It is quoted here because it is documented, not because it is admirable.

d'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I (1834)

How we traced it

  • The passage sits in the chapter of Rashid al-Din’s chronicle collecting sayings and anecdotes of Genghis Khan. The set-up matters and is almost always cut: Genghis asks his commander Bo’orchu what a man’s greatest pleasure is, Bo’orchu answers ‘hawking on a spring day,’ the other officers agree — and only then does Genghis contradict them all the variant renderings ↗.
  • We read the passage in the earliest full Western printing we could reach: Baron C. d’Ohsson’s Histoire des Mongols, vol. I, p. 404 (La Haye and Amsterdam, 1834), whose footnote credits it simply to ‘Djami ut-Tévarikh.’ That is the French text in the excerpt above, and it is the ancestor of most English versions the 1834 volume ↗.
  • Compare the two and the embroidery shows. D’Ohsson’s Genghis speaks of enemies, their possessions, their weeping families, their horses, their women. He says nothing about cities, and nothing about ashes. Those arrived later, in popular English retellings, and it is that version the internet quotes.
Public domain

The underlying text is free to reuse: Rashid al-Din died in 1318, and d’Ohsson’s French rendering was printed in 1834. One trap, though — a translation carries its own copyright. The two English versions most often copied are not free: Naomi Walford’s 1970 English of René Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, and Wheeler Thackston’s Compendium of Chronicles (2nd edn, 2012). Safe options are to quote the 1834 French directly, or to make your own English from it. This is not legal advice.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What actually goes wrong here

This is not a fake quotation, so the usual fact-check framing does not fit. What goes wrong is subtler: the wording that circulates is not the wording in the source, and the distance between Genghis and the man who wrote it down gets forgotten.

Not in the source later embroidery

The most-shared English version runs ‘to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears.’ Neither the burning cities nor the shrouds appear in d’Ohsson’s 1834 French, which is drawn straight from the Persian. They are decoration added downstream in popular English retellings.

Rashid al-Din, not Genghis’s scribe second-hand

Genghis died in 1227; Rashid al-Din compiled the Jami’ al-tawarikh in the 1300s from Mongol informants and court tradition. That is good by the standards of steppe history and poor by the standards of a transcript. Some scholars treat the exchange as a set-piece anecdote rather than a verbatim record.

It is not there common assumption

People routinely say the line comes from The Secret History of the Mongols, the near-contemporary Mongol source. It does not appear in it. Every trail runs through Rashid al-Din instead.

Hollywood, not Mongolia pop culture

‘What is best in life?’ — the famous exchange in Conan the Barbarian (1982) — is built on this anecdote, right down to the structure of a wrong answer followed by the correct brutal one. A lot of what people ‘remember’ Genghis saying is really that scene.

Genuinely attested — in a Persian chronicle written about ninety years after Genghis Khan died. The English version with the burning cities is not what that chronicle says the trail ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

The anecdote is built like a joke, and that is why it survives. Everyone gives the polite answer — hunting on a fine spring morning — and the Khan corrects them with something so much worse that it lands as candour rather than cruelty. It is the shape of a punchline attached to a description of sacking a city.

Which is exactly why it is worth reading the plain French of 1834 rather than the polished English. Stripped of the burning cities, what is left is a boast about robbery, grief and the seizure of women. The source is more specific than the meme, and less quotable.

Everyone answers 'hawking on a spring morning.' Then the Khan tells them they are wrong.

The exchange, in order

Genghis asks the noyan Bo’orchu, one of his first generals, what a man’s greatest pleasure is.

Bo’orchu: to ride out hawking on a spring day and watch the falcon take its prey.

The Khan puts the same question to Boroghul and to other officers. They all answer the same way.

‘No,’ says Genghis — and gives the answer above.

Rashid al-Din records it in the Jami’ al-tawarikh in the early 1300s; d’Ohsson prints it in French in 1834; English versions follow, gaining cities and ashes on the way.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

What was the context of this famous Genghis Khan quote?history.stackexchange.com

The thread that runs the passage back to Rashid al-Din and to d’Ohsson’s French printing.
d'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I (1834)archive.org

The scanned volume. The exchange with Bo’orchu is on p. 404, footnoted to the Jami’ al-tawarikh.
Genghis Khan — sourced and variant wordingsen.wikiquote.org

Lines up the Grousset/Walford, Thackston and Lane renderings so you can see how far the English drifts.
Rashid al-Din Hamadanien.wikipedia.org

Who the chronicler was, and why a Persian vizier of the 1300s was writing Mongol history at all.

The attributed author

About Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan

c. 1162–1227 · founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire

Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) united the steppe tribes and built, in one lifetime, the largest contiguous land empire in history. He left no writings of his own, which is the whole problem with quoting him: everything credited to him reaches us through people who wrote it down decades or centuries later, usually in another language and often with an agenda. This saying is one of the better-documented ones — and it is still second-hand.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Rashid al-Din Hamadani, Jami’ al-tawarikh (early 14th century); quoted in C. d’Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I (La Haye and Amsterdam, 1834), p. 404.

MLA (9th ed.)

Rashid al-Din. Jami’ al-tawarikh. Early 14th c. Quoted in d’Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, vol. I, 1834, p. 404.

APA (7th ed.)

Rashid al-Din. (c. 1310). Jami’ al-tawarikh. Quoted in d’Ohsson (1834), Histoire des Mongols (Vol. 1, p. 404).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The greatest joy is to conquer your enemies’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-greatest-joy-is-to-conquer-your-enemies-and-drive-them/

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