A lot of things are big.
But some things are what I like to call "stupid big." "Stupid big" is the kind of big where even Qui Gon Jinn
stops and thinks "Whoa, okay...
...Yeah...
.... that's... that's pretty big." The Mongol Empire, which at its height covered over 25% of the known world at the time and
16% of Earth's total landmass,
definitely qualifies as "stupid big." Now an empire that big doesn't just come out of nowhere, and the Mongols have
a reputation for being among history's most brutal conquerors. Some estimates place their death toll at 10 percent of the world's population
And if you're of the opinion that the Black Death was partly or mostly the Mongols' fault you can kick that number
up to 25 percent. 25 PERCENT
of the world's population dead in the span of two centuries on account of the Mongols! With numbers like that,
it should be no surprise that a lot of people have very strong opinions about them.
It's worth taking the time to learn about the Mongols out of sheer interest for how amazingly unique their story is, but we also need
to recognize when empire is and isn't worth it. Those who praise the Mongol Empire will point out all the good things that Genghis Khan
and his successors did for the people and their empire as well as how
mind-bogglingly effective the Mongol military was or how much the Mongols promoted trade and the Empire's astounding size.
Those who really don't like the Mongols may point out how bloody their
conquests were and how pointless all of that death can seem, given the empire
fractured and fizzled out within a century and a half of its creation. Let's also not forget that the Mongols and Genghis Khan in
particular raped a LOT of people. Both positions have merit
so I'm not going to go around and say Mongols good or Mongols bad.
They did a lot of good for their people and a lot of bad on to their enemies,
so which one counts for more is up to you.
I personally lean towards maybe a little too much of the murder-y kill-y stuff
but that's just me and you're allowed to disagree. So with all that
said, let's take a look at the history of the Mongol Empire and try to clear up some misconceptions
along the way. The Mongol Empire all started off with one guy named Temujin. Temujin had a rough upbringing,
as his father died when he was young and his family was abandoned for a long period of time. Through a lot of hard work,
he became the head of his clan and got himself a nice wife
*snrk*
Just kidding. His wife was captured by a rival clan and Temujin had to go through like eight freaking castles just to find her.
Anyway, I should say the various Mongol Clans all lived on and around a plateau called the steppe and they were known to bother each
other with raids and kidnapping and whatnot. China, their neighbor to the south, was very glad that their potential enemies to the North were
too busy fighting amongst themselves to pose any real threat to them. We'll check back on China in 26 years.
"Enjoy it while it lasts," he said ominously. *dun dun dun*
Anyway, so Temujin got his wife back
and he burned down the clan responsible. The record on the next 15 years or so is a little fuzzy,
but the main story beats are the Temujin buddied up with this old childhood friend, Jamukha.
But then Temujin and Jamukha had different views on the army. Temujin insisted on promoting based on merit alone whereas Jamukha adhered
to aristocratic hierarchies. In the end, Temujin and Jamukha got into a fight and they went to war with each other... as you do.
Jamukha won a battle and boiled some dudes alive, but then Temujin was all like "Oh, so that's how it is?
Well, get rekt, Scrub!" and trained up his army to be really good at archery on horseback,
and then he taught them all how to wrestle, and he organized the whole thing in the units, and it was all like
*makes punching noises*
"You were my brother, Anakin!
I loved you!" and then he defeated Jamukha and united all of the Mongols under his rule, and then Temujin was all like:
"My name is Khaaaaan."
*clears throat* Excuse me. So, um, yeah.
Temujin took up the name Genghis Khan, or Chingus Khan in the original Mongolian, and became the ruler of all of Mongolia in the year 1206.
Good for him. So remember what I said about China from earlier? Yeah, so now their fear of a united
Mongolia just got real and it also happens to be barreling towards them. One distinct feature of Genghis Khan's armies
is that, given they were almost entirely composed of cavalry, they could travel across
territory much faster than any marching infantry could. Mongol horses were also much smaller than
European horses, so the logistics of providing for a cavalry army were much less
nightmarish than they easily could have been.
The cavalry advantage partially explains how the Mongols would go on to conquer so much so fast.
Back to our story. In conquering China in particular, one problem was getting past the Great Wall.
But Khan got around that problem by literally getting around that problem
No,
seriously, he just went around the wall. Easy as that.
Next he had to face a large force of Chinese mercenaries who...
jumped ship and joined with the Mongols.
Oooooookay
Are we sure that Genghis isn't playing on easy mode here?
Cheat codes?
Anything?
Well, m'kay, carry on.
In his attempts to conquer Beijing, Genghis met his most fearsome adversary,
a wall that didn't have huge sections missing. Now I'll admit I'm somewhat playing this up for comedy,
and I'll give you my full rant about frontier fortifications when I properly cover Chinese history, but for now just know that while
I think that city walls are supremely useful,
I have genuine issues with frontier walls.
Anyway, in his attempts to de-wall Beijing,
Genghis got ahold of engineers who instructed him on how to build siege weaponry.
This is a big example of how resourceful and adaptable he was.
SInce the Mongol clans were all mildly to moderately nomadic
he had never really dealt with urban fortifications like this before, but he adapted to the situation without skipping a beat
So while he built up his siege engines, the city itself was slowly starving.
Soon enough, he was ready.
And there's a fairly standard rule of thumb when it comes to Mongols and cities: If you surrender without a fight,
you're usually safe and peacefully incorporated into the empire. However, if you put up a fight,
the Mongols put up a bigger fight and lots of cities were almost entirely destroyed that way.
I would say their message was pretty much, "Don't make our lives difficult
and we won't make yours short." In the long run
it was effective as many cities would turn themselves over at first sight of the Mongols.
This in part, as well as their distinct equine mobility, helped them conquer as much as they did as fast as they did.
Beijing, unfortunately for themselves, put up a very strong fight against the Mongols.
Genghis needed to show on his first foreign campaign that he wasn't just playing around so when he finally broke through the city he pillaged
and massacred it for a solid month
Yeeeah.
There's a reason a lot of people have beef with the Mongols. (*oops, made a pun*)
The invasion and conquest of China would continue on for another several decades,
ultimately resulting in the formation of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271. Led by Genghis's grandson, Kublai Khan.
The Yuan Dynasty conquered the Southern part of China in the following eight years and ruled over China for 89 years until it was overthrown in
1368 and replaced with the famous Ming Dynasty.
The Yuan Dynasty, short as it may have been, had its own little mini cultural boom in advance of the huge cultural boom under the Ming, so...
yeah, again, in the grand scheme of things, really didn't do a lot;
it was just kind of there.
But the Yuan dynasty
did get semi-famous in European history because of the travels of Marco Polo and all the stuff that he wrote about it.
So that's neat. Okay, so with China covered,
let's jump back in time to Genghis, who was looking westward to find trade partners.
In 1218, he reached out to the Khwarezmid Empire, a Persian-Muslim empire in and around modern Iran, as their territory
contained the old Silk Road, the
relationship was a little bit shaky to begin with, but when a Khwarezmid governor executed Mongol envoys he suspected of being spies,
Genghis got
*pretty* angry.
What followed was the most
disproportionate revenge campaign that I have ever seen. He invaded Khwarezmia and destroyed the entire Empire in two years.
Estimates are all over the map, but
conservative guesses put the death toll at well over a million. Conservative guesses. I wasn't kidding when I said "disproportionate."
For the Mongols this method they just about owned or at least had presence in the entire Silk Road, which for them was great.
They facilitated trade between Europe, the Muslim world, and Mongol, China.
And the Mongols themselves made a lot of money from Silk Road tolls and taxes. Win-win for them!
And this is a big theme of the Mongol Empire: a lot of the conquest was for the direct benefit of the Mongol people themselves.
Valuable people from conquered lands such as doctors, artists, administrators and more were spread all over the Mongol Empire.
That, along with a conquest of the Silk Road, were huge bonuses for them. They also had a transcontinental postal system,
which was neat. Genghis, growing up with the needless bloodshed and hardships that he did, wanted the best for his people even at such great
expense to everyone else. You can argue that he was protecting his own, and you can argue that he was a genocidal maniac.
I personally lean more toward the latter, but that's just me so after destroying the Khwarezmid Empire the Mongols kept going west because...
well, why not?
Even after Genghis himself died and was succeeded by his son Ögedei, the Mongols continued conquering in every conceivable
direction, pushing into Korea, Persia, Eastern Europe, and Kiev in Ruse, southern China's still going on at this point;
yeah, they're going everywhere. Well that's not true. There were a couple limiting factors. They didn't go north because Siberia;
they didn't go to India because Himalayas; and they didn't go into Arabia because deserts.
But they had a real good handle on everything in between. Things started to go downhill on account of Genghis Khan's children; first off,
he raped a lot of women during his life as a conqueror (which I don't need to tell you is really
bad and in itself worth a lot of condemnation).
But beyond that,
actually, the kids he had with his wife proved problematic enough, as the line of imperial succession quickly became muddled after Ögedei's death. Various
usurpations and civil wars led to the fracturing of the Mongol Empire
into four main bodies. Kublai Khan, who was lucky enough to win his civil wars, took control of Mongolia and China,
becoming emperor of the Yuan Dynasty as we mentioned earlier. Kublai was nominally in charge of the other three continents while he was alive, but eeehh--
in practice not so much.
When he died in 1294, the Khanites were officially all on their own. Genghis' son Chagatai held on to some land
just west of China,
but the subsequent Chagatai Khanate didn't really do a whole lot besides slowly fizzling away over the following few centuries.
All right, it's not a great start... well, let's see what else we get...
So to the southwest was the Ilkhanate, founded by Kublai's brother Hulagu. The continent gradually converted to Islam, and it ended up
disintegrating after about a century on account of the Black Death. Damn, over too? Okay, third time's the charm,
let's go. And speaking of the Black Death, the Golden Horde to the North are the ones responsible for
besieging the port city of Caffa on the Black Sea. They catapulted plague-infested
bodies over the walls, at which point Venetian and Genoese traitors to the city brought the plague back with them and proceeded to screw over
all of Europe. The Golden Horde is also quite involved with Russian history, but since that's its own story,
I'll have to leave that as a story for another time, but it like the other Khanates slowly disintegrated.
It was eventually absorbed by another blooming empire-- in this case, Russia.
Well, nuts. That's a wash, isn't it? Anyway, all four Khanates were plagued by various civil wars, intercontinental wars, and junk
like that, so it's not hard to see why some argue that the Mongol Empire simply devolved into a mess.
While various successor states to the four Khanates survived for a few more centuries, the Mongol Empire insofar as it was a
powerful force in world history was pretty much dead by the later 1300s.
So...
was it worth it?
The Mongols are fascinating to study because they raise so many questions like this one. Depending on what things you may personally
value, they can be great empire builders and trade
facilitators, or they can be bloodthirsty conquerors with a little too strong of an appetite for civil war.
I've told you where I lean, but really all I can do is lean towards one view or another because the mongols are both. You
can't ignore the death that went into creating the empire,
and you can't write off the positives that came from their conquest. History is
complicated. Who knew?! These questions are tricky with any history because just about every empire has at least one
example of doing something massively destructive for selfish gain.
But with the Mongols the stakes are so much higher because the scale in question is, to put it simply,
stupid big.