Subutai never established a dynasty, never bore a royal title, and left no memoirs. Yet in the early thirteenth century he stood at the heart of the Mongol war machine and directed campaigns that remade Eurasia on a scale few commanders have equaled. Born around 1175, likely among the forest-dwelling Uriankhai north of the Mongol steppe, Subutai did not belong to the aristocratic Borjigin clan. Later accounts describe his father as a blacksmith and stress that his rise came through service rathe