I came to this book with some preexisting ideas about the Mongols: they were formidable warriors, the most skilled and organized horse archers in history; great conquerors, but not skilled rulers; ferocious, bloodthirsty fighters fond of torture and of creating wastelands where there once had been cities; essentially smash-and-grab barbarian looters like the Vandals, the Huns, and other blights on ancient history.
As Weatherfield shows in this beautifully-written, well thought-out book. Almost all of what I just wrote (except for the first description) is wrong. I suspect that this book started out as a book on historiography, the study of how history is understood and recorded, and then gradually changed into its present form as the author started to realize the implications of what he was learning. As I will discuss below, the historiography is eye-opening, but so is the history.
Many of us know that the Mongols and other steppe-based tribes in East-Central Asia somehow became united into a single military entity and swept in all directions, conquering virtually every civilization then encountered, much as the Arabs united and conquered in the Middle East and beyond in the 7th Century.
It turns out that the "somehow" was one man, an outcast from his tribe, who gradually and patiently built up alliances and started to focus the endless, chaotic warfare that had been the life of his people from time immemorial. Genghis Khan has a reputation as a military genius, but he was something even more rare: a man who recognized his mistakes and learned from them. His great goal was to unite the people of his region into a single nation that he would lead and, day after day, year after year, he worked to make this happen. He wound up with a single nation with an extraordinarily powerful army. He wound up launching that army at Khwarezmia, a powerful neighboring Muslim state that occupied what are now Iraq, Iran, much of Afghanistan, etc. after trade delegations he had sent there seeking an alliance had been killed or mutilated, and conquered it in short order. This produced an enormous flow of wealth for the Mongols and was the beginning of an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Hungary and up through what are now Ukraine and Russia. Part 1 of the book is how this came about.
Part 2 of the book is the consequence of those conquests. The Mongols, ferocious and terrifyingly efficient in battle, were just as businesslike as rulers. In battle, their goal was to destroy resistance as quickly as possible with the least risk to themselves. In running their empire, their goal was to create a peaceful and safe place where commerce could flourish and enrich the rulers and, incidentally, the populace. They enforced religious toleration, with the religious authorities subject to the state. They created a system of laws that were uniform and, by the standards of the time, enlightened. They had no use for torture (with very few exceptions). They worked hard to ensure the free and safe flow of goods from end to end of their state. The Mongol Empire at its peak was probably one of the best places to live in the world. It had some very wise rulers, chief among whom was probably Khublai Khan of Marco Polo fame. It created a new silk road by sea parallel and much faster and more efficient than the old land routes. Unfortunately for those who lived there (and in many other places) the Black Death appeared in the 1300s and all the safe travel routes that had sustained the empire's trade were now channels to bring plague and death to tens of millions of people. The commercial structure collapsed and took the Mongol political structure with it. Some vestiges or successors to the Mongol governments remained in place, but the giant entity was gone. Weatherfield argues that the commerce fostered by the Mongols brought goods and ideas to Europe that helped lead to the Renaissance.
Part 3 is an examination of how the Western perception of the Mongols and their ruler went from admiration at the time of the Empire's existence to scornful during the Enlightenment and even worse with the growth of eugenics in the 19th century and after. Humans were arbitrarily divided into races, which were arbitrarily assigned places on some scale of human development. The East Asians were called Mongol or Mongoloid and were associated with children with developmental handicaps, with primitive and barbarous culture and terrible laws designed to keep East Asians out of the U.S. and widespread discrimination. The Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist government worked hard and cruelly to suppress all signs and memory of past Mongol greatness (including descendants of past rulers)when they occupied what is now Mongolia.
Weatherfield shows admirable restraint in not pounding his readers with how advanced in how many ways East and Central Asia was for so long in comparison with Europe.
Weatherfield is trained as an anthropologist and his writing does much to bring the Mongol culture - as it existed in the past and continues today - to life.
This is a compelling story compellingly told. It is well worth the time it will take to read it.
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Top reviews from other countries
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O melhor imperio que o mundo não conheceuReviewed in Brazil on June 17, 2024
A melhor e mais profunda visão sobre os legados do maior lider que já passou no planeta
- Cuauhtli ElizaldeReviewed in Mexico on January 16, 2023
Awesome. This book is a must
