section_path: Legacy and historical assessment
section_name: Legacy and historical assessment
paragraph_text: Legacy and historical assessment
  
  Genghis Khan left a vast and controversial legacy. His unification of the Mongol tribes and his foundation of the largest contiguous state in world history "permanently alter the worldview of European, Islamic, East Asian civilizations", according to Atwood. His conquests enabled the creation of Eurasian trading systems unprecedented in their scale, which brought wealth and security to the tribes. Although he very likely did not codify the written body of laws known as the Great Yasa, he did reorganise the legal system and establish a powerful judicial authority under Shigi Qutuqu.
  
  On the other hand, his conquests were ruthless and brutal. The prosperous civilizations of China, Central Asia, and Persia were devastated by the Mongol assaults, and underwent multi-generational trauma and suffering as a result. Perhaps Genghis's greatest failing was his inability to create a working succession system—his division of his empire into appanages, meant to ensure stability, actually did the reverse, as local and state-wide interests diverged and the empire began splitting into the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate, and the Yuan dynasty in the late 1200s. In the mid-1990s, the Washington Post acclaimed Genghis Khan as the "man of the millennium" who "embodied the half-civilized, half-savage duality of the human race". This complex image has remained prevalent in modern scholarship, with historians emphasising both Genghis Khan's positive and negative contributions.