I wasn’t happy with my last post on A Gathering of Shadows. It didn’t feel right. I spent more time trying to provide context for the post than thinking and writing about the book. I wanted to discuss how the author examined death through her characters, but never found the right way to do it. With that in mind, I’m going to play around with upcoming posts to find a better format.
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As a note, I have read a single book on the Mongols and everything should be taken with a grain of salt in this post. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this post and I may have misinterpreted the book. I am attempting to be accurate, but this is, at the end of the day, a blog post.
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Ghenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford was an eye-opening book for me. I was wrong about the Mongols in so many ways and the book even discussed why. It went over how the Europeans besmirched the reputation of the Mongols and Genghis Khan in the eighteenth century (254) and how this has affected the unconscious bias of today. For example, in 1924 Francis G. Crookshank released the book The Mongol in Our Midst which introduced the term “mongoloid,” and used it as a mental categorization and a race (258). These unfounded views and many others permeated throughout the unconscious bias and have left us with an inherently negative and incorrect view of the Mongols.
Before I go onto praise the Mongols, I do want to address the topic of cruelty. In the book, there are a few mentions of someone being put into a bag and kicked to death or drowned. This sounds extremely brutal when compared to a quick decapitation. However, the Mongols viewed mentioning blood as a violation of taboo (24). In fact, one of the reasons Mongols used bows was to avoid the splattering of blood on themselves that would occur in hand to hand combat (48). And, from what I can tell, the death via drowning or kicking, a bloodless death, was never meant to be the cruel action that we see it as today. However, this does not absolve them. For example, on conquests, the Mongols would use civilians they had captured to fill up motes with their own bodies to create live ramparts (8). They weren’t perfect, but I agree with the author when he makes the argument that the Europeans were far more Barbaric than the Mongols ever were (116).
Figure 1: From
Wikipedia,
a visualization of the Mongol empire’s growth over time until it’s ultimate collapse.
Now let’s examine a portion of what made them so impressive. The Mongols had a culture built around horses (58) and the children are said to have mastered riding a horse by the age of four (21), which seems like an exaggeration to me. This in combination with their use bows, to avoid blood, made the Mongols a cavalry based force that kept its distance. In addition, because the bow was the primary weapon they tended to be better shots than their opponents. In 1211, Genghis Khan ended up going to war against an opposing empire that had demanded his submission (82). Please note, that he didn’t go to war simply because someone demanded submission. This empire was where trade goods flowed to the Mongols. If he didn’t submit, then he would lose the flow of trade. Which meant he could either submit, which a Khan of Khans could not, or go to war.
This was his first war fought against a non-Mongol tribe. During this first campaign, he displayed military prowess and talent for simple and unorthodox methods. For example, when attacking the fortified Tangut capital he diverted a river in an attempt to flood the city (85). To keep the story of this war short, he won. The real power behind the Mongol forces was that “they did not find honor in fighting; they found honor in winning” (91). For example, when they fought the Germans in 1241 they retreated shortly after the fighting began. But they did not run away quickly, they retreated slowly. As the Germans engaged in an undisciplined chase they slowly tired until the Mongols lured them into a trap and destroyed the German army. When the Mongols fought against the Japanese, they did not engage in individual combat; they just killed them (210).
But it was not only an attitude about winning that allowed them to succeed. It was adaptability. When Genghis Khan first fought against the Jurched empire in 1211 he learned simple tactics like cutting off food supply lines (85) but he later traveled with a diverse group of engineers from areas he had previously captured to build the siege machines necessary to capture the city (4); by having these groups worked together they ended up melding their technology to produce the cannon (XXIII). This allowed the Mongols to remain mobile when conquering a city since they did not need to travel with siege equipment. Perhaps the tactic I find most impressive is what the Mongols did when approaching a city. Rather than charging the city and sieging it, they terrorized the surrounding area to spark public fear. After taking over a town they would let a large majority of the population escape and run towards the target city (5). This has three effects: (1) spread fear across the city, (2) reduce food stores, and (3) overpopulate the city. This tactic had the chance to causes enemy armies to flee, people to plug the gate that the Mongols could charge through, and more.
That is enough on military tactics; suffice it to say the Mongols were very impressive. The last topic in this book I want to discuss is the great law. Also known as the supreme law, this was not a single law but a growing body of legal work that Genghis Khan worked on for his last two decades. The very first law made forbade the kidnapping of women (68). A common goal for each law was to end infighting amongst the Mongols (69). Perhaps the most interesting law added was one that “decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone” (69). He even exempted religious leaders and their property from taxation to promote all religions (69). Given that religious freedom is still a problem today, it really surprised me to hear that it was attempted in the thirteenth century. During the majority of the Mongol Empire’s rule, this law was enforced and resulted in an empire where Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and more worked together (135).
But with all that said, I want to point out one thing that I think points out a major flaw in our preconceptions of Ghenghis Khan. In fact, I think it shows how modern of a thinker he was for his time, “Enforcement of the [Great Law] and the responsibility to abide it began at the highest level, with the Khan himself” (70). Genghis Khan, the Khan of Khans, made sure that he was never above the law.
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I hope you enjoyed this post and, for my next book, I am reading Playing Smart by Julian Togelius.