Hi I’m John Green; this is Crash Course World History and today we’re gonna discuss…
wait for it… THE MONGOLS.
So you probably have a picture of the Mongols in your head. Yes, that’s the picture: brutal,
bloodthirsty, swarthy, humorously mustachioed warriors riding the plains, wearing fur, eating
meat directly off the bone, saying, "Bar bar bar bar bar bar bar". In short, we imagine
the Mongol empire as stereotypically barbarian. And that’s not entirely wrong.
But if you’ve been reading recent world history textbooks like we here at Crash Course
have, you might have a different view of the Mongols, one that emphasizes the amazing speed
and success of their conquests — how they conquered more land in 25 years than the Romans
did in 400. How they controlled more than 11 million contiguous square miles. And you
may even have read that the Mongols basically created nations like Russia and even Korea.
One historian has even claimed that the Mongols, “smashed the feudal system” and created
international law. Renowned for their religious tolerance, the Mongols, in this view, created
the first great free trade zone, like a crazy medieval Eurasian NAFTA. And that’s not
entirely wrong either. Stupid truth, always resisting simplicity.
[theme music]
So remember herders? We talked about them back in episode one as an alternative to hunting
and gathering or agriculture. Here are the key things to remember:
1. Nomads aren’t Jack Kerouac: They don’t just go on like random road trips. They migrate
according to climate conditions so they can feed their flocks.
2. Nomads don’t generally produce manufactured goods which means they need to trade, so they
almost always live near settled people.
And 3. Because they live in generally live close to nature and in harsh conditions, pastoralists
tend to be tougher than diamond-plated differential calculus. Like, think of the Huns, or the
Xiongnu. Or the Mongols. Okay, Stan. That’s enough. Back to me. Stan. I AM THE STAR OF
THIS SHOW NOT THE MONGOLS!!! Hi. Sorry about that.
Right, so one last thing: pastoral people also tend to be more egalitarian, especially
where women are concerned. Paradoxically, when there’s less to go around, humans tend
to share more, and when both men and women must work for the social order to survive,
there tends to be less patriarchal domination of women. Although Mongol women rarely went
to war. I can’t tell your gender. I mean you’ve got the pants, but then you also
have the floopity flop, so… That’s the technical term, by the way. I’m a historian.
If you had to choose a pastoral nomadic group to come out of central Asia and dominate the
world, you probably wouldn’t have chosen the Mongols. Because for most of the history
we’ve been discussing, they just hung out in the foothills bordering the Siberian forest,
mixing herding and hunting, quietly getting really good at archery and riding horses.
Also, the Mongols were much smaller than other pastoral groups like the Tatars or the Uyghurs.
And not to get like all Great Man History on you or anything, but the reason the Mongols
came to dominate the world really started with one guy, Genghis Khan. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
The story goes that Genghis or Chingus Khan was born around 1162 with the name Temüjin
to a lowly clan. His father was poisoned to death, leaving Temüjin under the control
of his older brothers, one of whom he soon killed during an argument. By 19 he was married
to his first and most important wife, Börte, who was later kidnapped. This was pretty common
among the Mongols, Temüjin’s mom had also been kidnapped. In rescuing his wife, Temüjin
proved his military mettle and he soon became a leader of his tribe, but uniting the Mongol
confederations required a civil war, which he won, largely thanks to two innovations.
First, he promoted people based on merit rather than family position, and second, he brought
lower classes of conquered people into his own tribe while dispossessing the leaders
of the conquered clans. Thus he made the peasants love him. The rich hated him — but they
didn’t matter anymore, because they were no longer rich.
With these two building block policies, Temüjin was able to win the loyalty of more and more
people and in 1206 he was declared the Great Khan, the leader of all the Mongols. How?
Well, the Mongols chose their rulers in a really cool way. A prospective ruler would
call a general council called a kurultai, and anyone who supported his candidacy for
leadership would show up on their horses, literally voting with their feet.
Past John: Mr. Green, Mr. Green! But horses don’t have feet they have hooves.
I hate you, Me From the Past. Also, NO INTERRUPTING THE THOUGHT BUBBLE!
After uniting the Mongols, Genghis Khan went on to conquer a lot of territory. By the time
he died in his sleep in 1227, his empire stretched from the Mongol homeland in Mongolia all the
way to the Caspian Sea. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So that’s a pretty good looking empire, and sure a lot of it was pasture or mountains
or desert, but the Mongols did conquer a lot of people, too. And in some ways with Genghis’
death, the empire was just getting started. His son Ögedei Khan expanded the empire even
more. And Genghis’ grandson Möngke was the Great Khan in 1258 when Baghdad, the capitol
of the Abbasid Empire, fell to the Mongols. And another of Genghis’ grandsons, Kublai
Khan, conquered the Song Dynasty in China in 1279. And if the Mamluks hadn’t stopped
another of Genghis’ grandsons at the battle of Ain Jalut, they probably would have taken
all of North Africa. Genghis Khan sure had a lot of grandkids… It must be time for the open letter.
An Open Letter To Genghis Khan’s Descendants. But first, let’s check what’s in the secret
compartment today. Oh. A noisemaker and champagne poppers? Stan, you know I suck at these. What's
all this for? Ohhh, it’s because it’s a BIRTHDAY PARTY!! YAY. Happy birthday to Genghis Khan’s descendants.
How do I know it’s your birthday, Genghis Khan’s descendants? Because every day is
your birthday. Because right now on the planet Earth, there are 16 million direct descendants
of Genghis Khan, meaning that every day is the birthday of 43,000 of them. So, good news,
Genghis Khan: Your empire might be gone, but your progeny lives on. And on, and on, and
on. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
Best wishes, John Green
Unfortunately for the Mongols, those guys weren’t always working together, because
Genghis Khan failed to create a single political unit out of his conquests. Instead, after
Genghis’ death, the Mongols were left with four really important Empires called Khanates:
The Yuan Dynasty in China, the Il-Khanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central
Asia, and the Khanate of the Golden Horde in Russia.
If you remember all the way back to the Hellenistic period, this is similar to what happened to
another good general who wasn’t much for administration, Alexander the Great. Also,
neither of them ever conquered India.
The Mongols succeeded primarily because of their military skill. Genghis Khan’s army,
which never numbered more than 130,000 was built on speed and archery. Just like this
guy. Mongol mounted archers were like super fast tanks, compared to the foot soldiers
and knights they were up against.
But wait, all the military history nerds are saying, once people knew that the Mongols
were coming, why didn’t they just hole up in castles and forts? It’s not like the
Mongols had flying horses. EXCEPT THEY DID. They didn’t? Stan, why are you always making history boring?
So the Mongols apparently didn’t have flying horses, but they were uncommonly adaptable.
So even though they’d never seen a castle before they started raiding, they became experts
at siege warfare by interrogating prisoners. And they also adopted gunpowder, probably
introducing it to Europeans, and they even built ships so they could attack Japan. That
might have worked, too except there happened to be a typhoon.
Also, people were terrified of the Mongols. Often cities would surrender the moment the
Mongols arrived, just to escape slaughter. But of course, that only happened because
there were occasions when the Mongols, did, you know, slaughter entire towns.
So with all that background, let us return to the question of Mongol awesomeness. First,
five arguments for awesome. 1. The Mongols really did reinvigorate cross-Eurasian
trade. The Silk Road trading routes that had existed for about 1000 years by the time the
Mongols made the scene had fallen into disuse, but the Mongols valued trade because they
could tax it, and they did a great job of keeping their empire safe. It was said that
a man could walk from one end of the Mongol empire to the other with a gold plate on his
head without ever fearing being robbed. 2. The Mongols increased communication throughout
Eurasia by developing this pony express-like system of way stations with horses and riders
that could quickly relay information. It was called the yam system and also included these
amazing bronze passports, which facilitated travel.
3. Another thing that travelled along the Mongol trade routes was cuisine. For example,
it was because of the Mongols that rice became a staple of the Persian diet. Which I mention
entirely because I happen to like Persian food.
4. The Mongols forcibly relocated people who were useful to them, like artists and musicians
and, especially administrators. As you can imagine, the Mongols weren't much for administrative
tasks like keeping records, so they found people were good at that stuff and just moved
them around the empire. This created the kind of cross-cultural pollination that world historians
these days get really excited about. And 5. The Mongols were almost unprecedentedly
tolerant of different religions. They themselves were shamanists, believing in nature spirits,
but since their religion was tied to the land from which they came, they didn’t expect
new people to adopt it and they didn’t ask them to. So you could find Muslims and Buddhists
and Christians and people of any other religion you can think of prospering throughout the
Mongol empire. And it’s that kind of openness that has led some historians to go back and
re-evaluate the Mongols, seeing them as kind of a precursor to modernity.
But there’s another side to the story that we should not forget, so, here are five reasons
why the Mongols might not be so great. 1. Here is Genghis Khan’s definition of
happiness: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before
you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to
your bosom their wives and daughters." Off-topic, but if that quote rings a bell, it might be
because Oliver Stone blatantly plagiarized Genghis Khan in the movie Conan the Barbarian.
2. Is an extension of one. The Mongols were seriously brutal conquerors. I mean, not uniquely
brutal, but still: the Mongols destroyed entire cities, and most historians estimate the numbers
they killed to be in the millions. 3. Their empire didn’t last. Within 80 years
they’d left China and been replaced by a new dynasty, the Ming. And in Persia they
blended in so completely that by the 15th century they were totally unrecognizable.
I mean, they’d even taken up agriculture! Agriculture, the last refuge for scoundrels
who want to devote their lives to working instead of skoodilypooping.
4. They also weren’t particularly interested in artistic patronage or architecture. I mean,
your palace may last forever, but my yurt can go anywhere.
5. The Mongols were probably responsible for the Black Death. By opening up trade they
also opened up vectors for disease to travel, in the case of the Plague via fleas infected
with Yersinia pestis. And at least according to one story, the Mongols intentionally spread
the plague by catapulting their plague-ridden cadavers over the walls of Caffa in the Crimea.
While this primitive act of biological warfare might have happened, it’s unlikely to be
what actually spread the plague. More likely it was the fleas on the rats in the holds
of Black Sea ships that were trading with Europe. But that trade only existed because of the Mongols.
All right Stan, one last time- cue the Mongol-tage.
So the Mongols promoted trade, diversity, and tolerance, and they also promoted slaughter
and senseless destruction. And what you think about the Mongols ends up saying a lot about
you: Do you value artistic output over religious diversity? Is imperialism that doesn’t last
better or worse than imperialism that does? And are certain kinds of warfare inherently
wrong? If you think those are easy questions to answer, than I haven’t been doing my job.
Regardless, I look forward to reading your answers in comments. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you
next week. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself, and our Graphics
Team is Thought Bubble. Last week's Phrase Of The Week was "Hawaiian Pizza". If you want
to suggest future phrases of the week or guess at this week's, you can do so in comments,
where you can also ask questions about today's video that can be answered by our team of
historians. By the way, if you want to wear your love for Crash Course there's a Mongols
shirt, link in the video info.
Thanks for watching Crash Course. Nobody can beat Crash Course viewers. Well, except for the Mongols.