Recently there was a somewhat stupid “controversy” on Twitter where someone tried to get “Genghis Khan canceled.” It was mostly a joke but illustrated an important fact: it is hard to deny the reality of the brutality of Genghis Khan’s conquests.Part of the reason is that the Mongols themselves are not shy about what happened. The Secret History of Mongols is a document that is nearly contemporary with the original conquests and outlines their brutality. But sometimes conquerors boast. Consider the monuments erected by the Egyptians asserting they won the Battle of Kadesh, which they did not in fact win.
But we have external validation of the Mongol impact on the world’s human geography. The human die-off was large enough that it may have left an ecological footprint to increase carbon uptake from forests that grew because fewer people were around to cut them down! Additionally, there is lots of circumstantial evidence that the Mongols replaced some of the genes of people they killed.
If you want a thorough modern overview, I recommeend Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy. If you want, “actually Genghis Khan was good”, then Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
A bigger question is how we should judge Genghis Khan in relation to his time. Julius Caesar in Gallic Wars claims hundreds of thousands of deaths. Other ancient historians argue for millions. These are likely exaggerations, but they illustrate the fact that ancient war was brutal, and the Mongols were basically a hunter-gatherer people who had recently taken up nomadism. Their morality and ethics were primitive, to say the least. In t he 18th century the highly civilized Qianlong Emperor ordered the genocide of the Dzunghars.
I think the clear reason why the Mongols and Genghis Khan are held in such ill repute is that they were the greatest and most explosive of the barbaric eruptions from the Eurasian core. They were Atilla the Hun simultaneously assaulting the Four Corners of the world. They quickly created the largest land empire in the history of the world and therefore wreaked havoc from one end of Eurasia to the other. The Mongols finally collapsed the distinctions and distances between disparate portions of the Eurasian “rimland” civilizations. They were the ones who brought Roman Catholic Alans to Northern China and sponsored a flourishing of Buddhism in Iran for several decades. The consensus is that the Hui Chinese Muslim community derives mostly from the Mongol period when they imported Central Asian Muslims as a “middleman minority.”
Many books of history that are macro-focus use the Mongol Empire as a watershed because it destroyed so much and created a new “world system” which persisted long after the Mongol Empire as such was no more. To understand the “Great Divergence” and the early modern breakout of Europe, one has to understand the resurgence of rimland polities in the wake of the Mongol shock.
@ Razib Just for fun, could you engage in a hypothetical? What if the Mongol Empire never came to be? What would that counterfactual world look like especially the rimland polities (Western Europe, India, China), in your opinion?
the pressure from the steppe would still be a major problem and likely degrade the integrity of a lot of these states, but
– there would be more cultural continuity around the rimlands (abbassids would not fall, the break btwn kievan rus and moscovy would be soft, etc.)
– there would be less immediate integration btwn the rimlands
basically a ‘world system’ might have been delayed?
@Razib: “A bigger question is how we should judge Genghis Khan in relation to his time. Julius Caesar in Gallic Wars claims hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
Caesar did unleash a brutal war machine and acted genocidal in various instances from the modern perspective, but he was rarely if ever cruel, and he usually gave even his enemies always a chance to come to terms, oftentimes even more than one.
Like he acted reasonable and humane overall, since the harshest and genocidal measures only got activated if the people he wanted to subdue didn’t give in, acted exceptionally cruel towards his own soldiers and allies, started a brutal guerilla war themselves.
Otherwise he offered, in most instances, peace and rather acceptable terms to his tribal enemies and sometimes seems to have been rather too lenient than the opposite, if thinking about his and his armies safety and success, if a tribe which tricked him twice still got away even though he could have destroyed it.
He did that for political reasons also of course, because he wanted to come to terms with the majority of the inhabitants of the regions he conquered and show other tribes that they can capitulate at good terms and don’t have to fight to the bitter end, which would have just prolonged the war, he thought.
And its exactly here where the Mongols in particular differ, not just from Caesar, but also from Alexander, the Franks or the Muslim Arabs, but are closer to what the Assyrians and Oriental despots did, sometimes the Byzantines, oftentimes the Turkic, especially the Ottomans too:
The Mongols didn’t give the opponents a chance, they, oftentimes, didn’t offer an acceptable peace, they demanded complete submission and if the other people didn’t give in immediately, sometimes even regardless, they started with unbelievably cruel mass tortures and killings. So that the initial impact of their appearance was practically always death, suffering and destruction on an unprecendented scale.
Their “strategy” or even better mindset was to be as cruel and barbarious as possible, to force every enemy in submission or annihilate it without giving it a chance.
This is contrary to people like Caesar, which did use deterrence and cruelty too, but only in cases in which a reasonable person would say its justified and probably even necessary from a military and political point of view. Like a tribe which did trick him twice, murdered his garrison soldiers and allies in a gruesome and cowardly way, can’t be trusted if giving them a 3rd chance and would be a negative role model for others to follow their example: If there is no punishment, real, hard punishment, for that kind of cruel and treacherous behaviour towards Roman rule, everyone can try it!
The Mongols killed whole people and city populations even though they gave in, even though they were defeated the first time, sometimes even without caring for humans, without giving them any chance. That’s the most fundamental difference.
And I think if the Islamic Arab-Persian civilisation ever had a chance to reach, on its own, a higher level and evolve on, the Mongol conquest ruined it. Everywhere they were going, but fortunately for Central and Western Europe, they stopped at Liegnitz and didn’t sack Hamburg, Vienna, Köln, Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels or even Rome and Paris, and I’m pretty sure, at that point they could have.
They would have destroyed those urban centres and reduced the local elite, this would have been a catastrophy for the occident and changed the course of human history.
Yet what they did in Bagdad is exactly that, they finished off the heart of a civilisation. The story might be known to most, but probably not all:
“Citizens attempted to flee, but were intercepted by Mongol soldiers who killed in abundance, sparing neither women nor children. Martin Sicker writes that close to 90,000 people may have died.[40][41] Other estimates go much higher, but are almost certainly exaggerated.[42]
The caliph Al-Musta’sim was captured and forced to watch as his citizens were murdered and his treasury plundered. According to most accounts, the caliph was killed by trampling. The Mongols rolled the caliph up in a rug, and rode their horses over him, as they believed that the earth would be offended if it were touched by royal blood. All but one of Al-Musta’sim’s sons were killed, and the sole surviving son was sent to Mongolia, where Mongolian historians report he married and fathered children, but played no role in Islam thereafter”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
So if anyone dares to say the Mongol conquest was in any way positive or helpful to build civilisation, he has simply no idea. The only thing remotely an argument is that the passage from East to West got safer, after the Mongols killed and subdued all people on the way and produced something like a “Pax Mongolica”, but that’s it and its, in comparison to what was taken away, like a joke.
It would be the equivalent to getting piece in modern Afghanistan by killing off most tribals and threatening the few remains with punishments like being boiled alive for not complying and then stating “its now safer than before to travel through the country and do commerce”.
I wonder how many of the “positive Mongol” authors would argue that way for a modern context.
The Mongol conquest was a success story, for the Mongol and Turkic people, and that’s true in its own right. Their genes, culture and dynasties spread with this conquests. That’s the success story. But contrary to the Roman conquests, this added nothing of significance to the progression of humanity as a whole and never had the potential to do so, even on the contrary.
This means to me I understand if Mongols celebrate Genghis Khan, he was a great ruler FOR THEM, because he united the Mongol tribes and gave them new, great opportunities, but if other people which suffered from his rule or which relatives got annihilated by him or simply people which relatives had no direct advantage from his onslaught do the same, I would just test their mental health status.
Genghis Khan and the Mongol conquest is one of these simple stories, where the profiteurs can be easily datermined and named. The rest of humanity had only bloodshed and losses from this.
One could argue that it could have become a large Eurasian empire and could have developed into this or into that, but that’s just an academic debate, because even though the Mongols won and had their chance, they ruined it themselves within the first generations after their success.
And its exactly here where the Mongols in particular differ, not just from Caesar, but also from Alexander, the Franks or the Muslim Arabs, but are closer to what the Assyrians and Oriental despots did, sometimes the Byzantines, oftentimes the Turkic, especially the Ottomans too
not sure they differed that much tbh. not sure i trust you to make a judgment. the romans often offered a fake caus belli, but that is the main difference i think.
i was thinking ‘when things changed’. i think after westphalia it seems european warfare got less brutal. but turchin and others have done work which shows ‘intra-civilizational’ war is less brutal. europeans could be quite brutal to non-europeans deep into the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide
The main difference really is whether your primary strategy is to induce the greatest amount of terror and the only exit path for your opponents to completely subdue themselves instantly, when you enter the scene. You don’t even leave them a choice, and after the first cities and tribes being cruelly massacred, the rest might submit to your rule without putting up a resistance or you even completely annihilate the people in your way without leaving them any choice at all.
Coming back to Caesar, his strategy in Gallia was nothing like that. You can see how often he showed mercy, allowed even the hardest foes to come to acceptable terms and even after a siege, that he completely annihilated or enslaved the inhabitants did occure, but it was an absolute exception based on a dramatic conflict and situation, in which his tactical decision almost could be just that.
Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar were therefore not even similar at all, but one could argue, that in areas of massive insurgencies and brutal guerilla wars, the genocidal tendencies are the only logical consequence for a military leader, simply because the opponent pushes him to this decision to protect his own troops and success.
Just compare how often Caesar showed mercy after a siege and how often the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Also compare how the Mongols devastated almost all of the Islamic world they could conquer and Eastern Europe, as well as large parts of China. How few places were left intact, even without rebellions and insurgencies. Actually much of the destruction was the initial impact of the conquest already, a complete and devastating shock.
The Roman conquest of Gallia on the other hand shows remarkable differences between allies, but also hostile tribes which gave in and submitted themselves to Roman rule in a second or third round, and those which kept up a long and dirty guerilla resistance for longer period of times. The Romans, especially under Caesar, just acted proportionally, which could become brutal depending on the emerging conflicts, but was generally not as much, whereas the Mongols did, on various occasions, use disproportoinal cruelty and bloodsheds.
The Romans too had their cruel times and fake casus belli surely, that too, but especially under Caesar we see the proportionate use of force. Actually, a lot of the devastation in Gallia, as well as Caesars end, might have been preventable if he would have been harder with his opponents and showed, in some cases, less mercy than he did. He was, at times, too lenient and even let long term enemies go, which didn’t deserve it.
That’s really something you can’t say about Genghis Khan or the Mongols at that time at all, in my humble opionion, when they destroyed whole people just because of their initial refusal to submit themselves to Mongol rule (!). Even on the contrary, that the Mongol clans of Genghis could come to power and destroy so much, was caused by those tribes which defeated them before being merciful with them. Which they were not, when it was their turn.
Also, guerilla wars in which the opponent acts exceptionally cruel always provoke reactions of a brutal and sometimes genocidal war, this is just proportionate warfare in which both sides provoke the other to increase their level of brutality from one level of escalation to the next.
I could use various examples for this, within a civilisaton and race or between different ones, for different times and cultures. This makes an obvious difference, which is just easy to explain too, but the main factor was the cruelty and kind of warfare before anything else.
If a group of soldiers sees mutilated comrades, probably even own civilians, women and children, which were tortured to death, this always provokes a reaction. This is just normal human behaviour and can only be suppressed by an extremely high level of discipline, personal moral and probably even defiance for the own feelings and people’s interests, like highly professionalised soldiers which just “do their job” and don’t have a strong identity with their comrades and civilians any more – otherwise only highest level political, legal, moral and religious considerations might prevent them from acting proportionate, because this means to suppress the usual logic and instincts.
If you look at different wars in which such situations emerged, just take the Napoleonic Wars as an example, you always get “a pattern”.
“they stopped at Liegnitz and didn’t sack Hamburg, Vienna, Köln, Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels or even Rome and Paris, and I’m pretty sure, at that point they could have.”
iirc a lot of historians claim they couldn’t have, because west of the Hungarian plain there isn’t enough grass land to sustain the huge horse armies the Mongols relied on.
Generalizations about violence in history are always difficult, but I’m inclined to think you might have a point. I read some 13th century sources from Dalmatia and Hungary a few years ago (one a long letter written by a cleric who barely escaped the destruction of several Hungarian towns and was a captive of the Mongols for some time, so saw them up close), and what struck me was the cold-blooded, systematic nature of the violence described. E.g. at one point the Mongols sent captives to the woods, to promise clemency to villagers who had fled there, if they returned to their villages until a fixed date; then they had those people bring in the harvest – and after that killed them all, because they didn’t want them to consume any food.There were many such instances of planned massacres, where the intention seemed to be extracting the maximum amount of resources; e.g. one source mentions captives being forced to strip naked before a mass killing, so clothes wouldn’t get stained by blood and the process would be less tiresome for the executioners (added to that also many references to women being raped, sometimes in front of fathers or husbands, various tortures etc.). I certainly got the impression that this was a level of violence that went well beyond anything people in 13th century Europe were accustomed to or thought within the “normal” range of violence in war.
@GR: All these arguments which try to play the capabilities of ancient people down stand on shaky grounds. For sure the death toll for Bagdad was mich higher and the Mongols could have marched on. Whether they would have been as successful and how much logistical problems might have weakened them is a completely different issue from stating they couldnt have at all, which is just a baseless assumption.
They were riding through much worse territories than the Northern German plain and other steppe people like the Huns and Hungarians did so before.
Even if some cities would have been able to withstand the initial onslaught, the whole country would have been completely devastated, minimum as bad as the Turkic Ottomans did it, with less light cavalry and which was bad enough.
Otherwise I can just agree with you. I read various sources on Mongol atrocities and there was little like that throughout human history, because you get the impression of widespread, systematic Sadism, even without any reason or provocation at all.
What’s more, this sticked out even among steppe warriors of that time, even for related Mongolian groups. That extreme was a speciality of Genghis Khan, like his more meritocratic military system which paid less attention to the ethnicity and social background within his ranks.
In this respect he was a bloody revolutionary.
If the other steppe groups rould have been as harsh as he was, his tribe would have been eliminated long before, because they were not always on the winning side.
I think the murder of his own brother at young age, if taking it for real, says something about his character too.
I spent a few weeks in Mongolia. Beautiful country (except the polluted capital, get out as soon as you can), great and friendly people.
You’ll be unsurprised to learn they’re very proud of Mongol conquests and are convinced they were beneficial (e.g., mostly peaceful because they won so quickly).
Modern Mongolia will never measure up, if they consider the Mongol empire as a positive thing. I’ve wondered if that might hold them back. The US will face something similar over the next century – we’ll never be as powerful as we were after World War 2. Maybe we can be better, though.
When judging history’s greatest monsters, I still have to give pride of place to Stalin and Mao. Gengis killed lots of people, but not very many Mongols. Stalin and Mao butchered their own people in industrial quantities. That strikes me as very special.
Pol Pot gets a special lifetime achievement award for the small state division. His rampage killed 25% of his own people. A feat only equaled by the black plague.
@Obs
Stone castles, though, and also heavily-armored knights. Their latter onslaught into Hungary and Poland, just 40 years after the first, was repulsed by these very technologies.
@razib
Apart from the more ruthless use of deception and treachery by the Mongols, which other commenters have already pointed, I think the main difference people perceive is in the aftermath. Roman conquest was brutal, but it didn’t completely destroy the defeated and it brought the more advanced Roman civilization to the conquered places; a thing that the very descendants of the conquered came to value. Mongol conquest, OTOH, brought… Mongols.
Mongols brought gunpowder and possibly even constant bore canons to Europe and also to Middle East despite the outrageously nationalistic nonsense claimed by Arab historians.
European military dominance in the past 500 years owes much to the Mongols.
@EastAsianMan
Pretty sure that European dominance over the last 500 years owes a lot to… Europeans, despite some outrageously nationalistic nonsense claimed by some other people. Sure, gunpowder came from Asia, but the game-changing guns were not developed there.
Even if it was the Mongols who (ineptly) brought gunpowder to Europe, that’s usually not what people count as a wonderful cultural contribution, even if it became a useful one. And what’s more, what they brought was hardly ready-to-use like the things Caesar had with him. Laws, industry, long-range commerce, a developed literary language with a large, useful corpus, philosophy, state-of-the art weaponry… did the Mongols bring any?
Nope. They just brought Mongols. That’s why their fame is so bad even compared to other conquerors.
@EAman: If the Mongols brought it directly to Europe is debatable and it needed some more centuries of European development to make it an effective weapon. Besides, this kind of argument reminds me of ideas like Central Europeans should be thankful for the Ottoman invasions and massacres, because they brought coffee…
Whether true or not, its hardly a good excuse and would have come to Europe anyway.
Similarly, Europe had a lot to learn from China, but the Mongols were, whereever they went, a primarily destructive force.
Morons who do not even know what constant bore cannons are should just shut up.
EastAsianMan: despite the outrageously nationalistic nonsense claimed by Arab historians.
It does seem hard to blame the Mongols for *any* relative decline with Eurasia, really. The Greater Middle East is most plausibly explained by cousin marriage per Henrich (though I have some doubts about this), or religion per Rubin, either directly or indirectly due to Islam. Central Asian relative decline relates to land trade being bypassed by maritime trade and then bad economic systems under the Russian and Soviet Empires. If not these, then simply bad luck in a better technological package coming together in Western Europe. The claims of various peoples who expanded fairly violently themselves and who more plausibly brought the specific technologically retarding traditions (Arab expansion bringing Islam, European Russian expansion across Eurasia bringing Eastern Orthodox civilization, then, eventually Soviet Communism) may be taken with some degree of salt.
@EAman: Thank you for the ad hominem. But to answer your insult:
– The Mongols didn’t invent proper cannons, nor were they originally any sort of experts for gunpowder or metallurgical innovations
– All of the innovations they got in these fields, were taken away from China, to which Europe would have made contacts, eventually, regardless
– Whether any cultural and technological transmission of this importance was directly caused by the Mongols is debatable, this is no sure case to begin with
– Gunpowder and fire arms were first in usage not just by the Europeans, but effectively used by the enemies of the occident, especially the Ottomans, with great effect. It was only over time that the Europeans with their developed craftsmanship, scientific approach, in competition with each other and based on financed projects got the real edge over other users of fire arms around the world.
– The destruction caused by the Mongols was tremendous everywhere they couldn’t be stopped, and sometimes even where could be stopped, because of the cruel mass killings and destruction along their way.
– If the Mongols did help the Occident in any way, it was only by weakening potential competitors both in Eastern Europe (Russia) and the Islamic World (Arab-Persion civilisation). They threw both back for centuries and changed their trajectories to the negative. Russia needed 500 years to fully recover, the Islamic world never did. It was like a pandemic which only hit the Eastern and South Eastern neighbours, but left Central-Western-Southern Europe alone and therefore relatively stronger.
I wouldn’t say that was decisive for the occidental success, but it made it possibly happen earlier and easier than it would have otherwise. But even that is debatable.
@EastAsianMan
The Mongols’ marvellous and super-advanced (borrowed) cannons could not break the stone fortresses they found in Hungary (which were hardly the best representatives of the kind), constant bore or not. They also were of no use against the cannons developed in Europe a few centuries latter.
I’m sorry, but calling people names will not change the facts. Nope, your dear fellow East Asian Men in Mongolia didn’t bring anything to Europe that would make the invasion seem worthwhile, regardless of what you yourself call “outrageously nationalistic nonsense”.
I told them to shut up but they are still talking.
i have not been reading these comments closely but skimming i do get a sense of “mighty whitey yo!!!” 😉
@EAMan: Who do you think you are that you can tell other people to shut up when you talk nonsense yourself. Like:
“Mongols brought gunpowder and possibly even constant bore canons to Europe and also to Middle East despite the outrageously nationalistic nonsense claimed by Arab historians.
European military dominance in the past 500 years owes much to the Mongols.”
You said yourself, even for your great “cannon theory”, that its only “possible”, so you recognised that not even that kind of contribution, which is in no way able to compensate for the suffering and destruction, the fact that the Mongol invasion caused havoc and pushed many people hundreds of years back for their further development, is not proven anyway. So what’s that about?
I don’t know exactly to what you are referring to when talking about “outrageously nationalistic” Arabs, but if they say that the Mongol invasion played a role in ruining or at least severely damaging the Arab-Persian, Islamic cultural sphere, then they are definitely right.
Otherwise it seems to me that you have nationalist stakes in this debate yourself. You don’t sound like someone looking at the effects of the Mongol conquests in a neutral way at all.
@Razib: Its not like the Mongols did cause troubles for Europeans only, yet they did cause a lot of problems for European, but for the Chinese and many other nations too. And if talking about East Asian contributions or developments of value, one has to look at China or Japan, rather than to what the Mongols did. They just had one big, but short historical moment, they used for themselves quite well, but in which they caused a lot of damage for other people and added little of value for their victims or mankind as a whole.
There are other brutal conquerors, but at least you could say that many of them and their ways introduced new innovations or progress in the greater scheme of things. Or that they, even though they killed a lot of people too, acted more proportionate, humane and especially less cruel. One can turn it as often as one wants, but the balance for the Mongol conquests doesn’t look too good.
Still its remarkable what they achieved and that they brought the steppe warrior tactics and organisation to a new, probably uniquely successful level for a period that late in history. And again, it worked quite well for the Mongolian people themselves.
Yet to compare Casear and his ways with that of Genghis Khan, especially from a general human perspective, can only be an insult for the first. The only thing against Caesar you could say is, that when the Mongols started their campaigns, there were many or even more reports from those suffering from their attacks, while when Caesar and the Romans did their conquest of Gaul, there is little to nothing from the defeated tribes which could tell us how they saw things.
But both the execution of the conquest, as well as the short, middle and long term results were quite different in most respects, with the exception of long term guerilla war zones, which are, like explained, a special case.
Does anyone in academia think that the effects of the Mongol Empire on Persia / Iraq was a depression that reversed or lost hundreds of years of progress, akin to the fall of the Roman Empire? I’ve never come across such an idea (again, from academia). I don’t think I’ve ever seen it put that technological progress, prevalence of advanced state institutions and such things changed in a decisive way, and comments on demography don’t seem too well founded (how much excess downswing in population, relative to the trends of Black Death, decline of Song dynasty etc? How long for?).
We kind of know what invasion during or causing collapse looks like – Migration Period and the movements from the north of the Sea Peoples and the “Dark Ages” which follow. The Mongols didn’t cause any “Dark Ages” from what I know? We have evidence from the Ilkhanate and technological production, urbanism, etc all still seem to be being maintained at a high level… I’m not suggesting the Mongol conquests caused anything particularly but not really like causing a dark age or a decline.
@Razib
“Roman Catholic Alans to Northern China”
Humbly request slight amplification. Please believe I am sure you are right, but I don’t recognize the reference. The Alans that I know of who “interacted” with the Mongols, namely the Alanians who were the progenitors of the Osettians, were aligned with the Patriarch in Constantinople, not the Bishop of Rome 🙂
Arguments like these often polarise into “mighty-whitey” (Europeans did everything) on one side and “po’ white trash” (Europeans did nothing) on the other. The reality is neither is accurate.
I typed “constant bore” and “constant bore cannon” into Google and got nothing, which suggests the commentor is just trying to make up jargon to sound knowledgable. Sometimes the contrivor of obscure jargon is a pioneer, but usually they are just trying to make “fetch” happen.
(by contrast, I googled “middleman minority” and got the Wikipedia article on it, which shows Razib is using a concept many historians think is useful)
@Jim: Its clear what he means, but the term is unusual.
@Matt: Isn’t it funny that you can read “in academia” so much about how bad the Christian crusades were, yet their effect, especially negative one, on the Islamic world was close to zero in comparison to the Mongol conquests.
There are actually plenty of academic papers, but like most they try
– to downplay the historical accounts. We all know the ancients sometimes exaggerated to look their people and rulers better, make the reader more interested or because their sources were bad in the first place. But there is no reason at all to make armies that small, casualties that low, just because a scholar argues “that surely was an exaggeration”. There are no clear cut numbers to use, when its about coming to exact numbers. However, the death toll in Baghdad in particular was surely much higher than many current scholars tell us.
However, there are different estimates and opinions on the issue even in academia, but to question the effect of the Mongol onslaught on the Islamic world is not justified. Yes, civilisation didn’t completely collapse, but in this case first an elite was eliminated and second the trajectory of a people, a whole civilisation changed. Its not just about how big the middle term economic depression was, but how it changed the culture as a whole.
There are nice articles around about what happened in Baghdad and there is no way this caused just 90.000 deaths, like some claim:
“However, when talking about the biggest loss of life through violence in a single day, the 13th of February 1258 surely ranks as one of the bloodiest days in human history. This was the day on which Hulagu Khan’s Mongol army entered Baghdad after a 12-day siege.
The city had approximately one million residents, and the army massacred many of them. It was a horrendous act that, in one fell swoop, brought an end to the Islamic Golden Age.”
“It was also supplemented by 20,000 Christian troops from Armenia and Antioch, along with 1,000 Chinese artillery engineers, and auxiliary contingents of Persian and Turkic soldiers.”
“While it was customary for Mongol military leaders to offer the chance for a bloodless surrender, it was always a one-off offer. If it was rejected the first time around, there would be no further chances to surrender — there would only be death and destruction.”
This is where Caesar and the Romans under his command usually differed a lot, because only in very exceptional cases he brought the whole population to the sword and into slavery. If they gave in during a siege, he usually came to terms with the inhabitants, still. The Mongols did not and the way they massacred the people also sticks out and often they did the same for a whole region, just because of an initial refusal to give in immediately, at first sight, befor the could have know with whom they dealt with. Not to speak of cases of “fake arrangements”, in which people trusted the Mongol word, but got cruelly massacred or enslaved nevertheless.
That’s why it was going on like that (compare that with the usual conduct of Romans and Greeks!):
“Now desperate, Al-Musta’sim attempted to negotiate with Hulagu, but his envoys were simply killed. Around 3,000 of Baghdad’s nobles also attempted to try and meet with Hulagu to offer terms of surrender, but he had them killed as well.
There was only one way this siege was going to end; Hulagu had long since made up his mind about this.
The city officially surrendered on February 10th, but Mongol troops only entered the city on February 13th. So began one of the bloodiest days the world has ever seen.
The city had about a million inhabitants, and none were allowed to escape. The only people who were spared were Baghdad’s population of Nestorian Christians. Hulagu’s mother was a Nestorian, and this is why he let them live.”
“As for the rest, the Mongol warriors put men, women, and children, old and young, to the sword. Those they did not kill they took as slaves. Al-Musta’sim was captured and forced to watch all of these horrendous mass killings, as well as the wanton destruction of what was surely one of the most beautiful cities on earth.
Palaces, mosques, churches, hospitals, and the city’s thirty-six public libraries were smashed to pieces or burned to the ground. The House of Wisdom, with its centuries of knowledge from all cultures across the planet, was razed.
The House’s collection of books – perhaps the largest collection of books in the world at that time – was also destroyed. The books were ripped apart and thrown into the Tigris River, which was said to have run black from the ink.
The Tigris was not only choked with destroyed books, but also with the bodies of the dead. The very lowest estimates state that 90,000 people were massacred when the Mongols entered the city – higher estimates range from the hundreds of thousands all the way up to a million.”
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/medieval/the-sack-of-baghdad-in-1258.html
I know this is no academic source, but its a short and handy summary of what just happened. Not that I think that Islam and its violent spread was just a good thing at all, but to deny the impact of this on the Islamic world is, from my point of view, impossible.
Then read more closely, and realise that those comments were in response to a certainly-not-jingoistic guy who styles himself EastAsianMan making a very odd claim about Mongols being responsible for European success, and that we’re stating things that you yourself has said in the past.
I’m really surprised that acknowledging that (1) the Mongols were not responsible for European advances done in Europe and (2) that the Mongols were stopped in Hungary and Poland by the natives of these countries would both be counted as “mighty whitey yo!!!”. Do you disagree with any of this, Razib?
@jim
Yet who is saying either thing here, could you point out?
” that the Mongols were stopped in Hungary and Poland by the natives of these countries ”
They weren’t really stopped though, they defeated the forces sent against them, iirc the Hungarian king fled to some island in the Adriatic. After that they left and didn’t come back.
Question is if they could have ever achieved lasting conquests in Europe, as I wrote in my comment above there’s the argument that in most of Europe their way of war couldn’t have been sustained for a long time due to ecological constraints (not enough grass land for their horses).
@German_reader
You’re remembering the first invasion of Hungary, where the Hungarians were completely beaten by the Mongols, who then withdrew.
But the Hungarians learned their lesson, and the second invasion ended quite badly for the Mongols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Mongol_invasion_of_Hungary). The Poles did the same in the 3rd Mongol invasion. Their answer was heavy knights and stone castles. So, the question of whether the Golden Horde or any other sucessor could have razed the rest of Europe should take that in cosideration.
Mind you, the Mongols were terrific at war, and I’m not saying it was impossible for them to circumvent these new defenses if it became an existential need – I’m saying that, from what happened, we know that they tried, and overall failed to do so. They were not invicible, nor could they only be resisted by Mongol-like nomads. Much like the Vikings, the Mongols get the fame of being some sort of super-men, but there’s more romanticism than truth in it, regardless of their impressive career.
(Interestingly, we don’t get nearly as much wide-eyedness for the Romans, despite they being very much valued in the West. Maybe it has to do with we having many more Roman sources, leaving fewer gaps for romantic imagination)
@Moscanarius
Thanks, I hadn’t been quite aware of the 2nd invasion of Hungary, very interesting.
I don’t believe decline of the Islamic World is related to Mongols. They didn’t invade there but Islamic North Africa declined too. If you have the human capital you easily rebuild things (Germany & Japan) Human capital lost in MENA. Compare non-Muslim / Muslim MENA people.
@obs, academia, it’s true, does perhaps often tend to favour things which tends to flatter the non-Western Christian outgroups (e.g. Crusades).
For instance, downplaying the Germanic invasions as “the Migration Period”, or the Vikings as mere traders. There is a “softening” and “positivity” given to these groups and their impact.
But in those cases, there is also academic and economic scholarship that tries to put into context the degree to which those invasions and movements. They can at least back up that declines in Roman economic activity preceded those Germanic invasions, for instance.
Again, I guess why I am interested in this for the Mongols is that it seems very easy to leap into this kind of frame of “destructive, inscrutable invaders for the east, uniquely cruel and treacherous” who were deeply harmful to historical development. But this is sort of hard to test. Yeah, it’s one thing to have websites for enthusiasts who want to hear exciting military stories, and I’m not saying that conquests were not extremely violent, but are the Mongols really held to account for the whole trajectory for hundreds of years after?
As I’ve mentioned and Cpluskx also notes, I tend to doubt that there is much evidence the Mongols really were responsible for relative decline of the Islamic world (or East-Central Europe really), relative to Western Europe; the reasons seem more internal to them and not really a change of trajectory, and more do to Western Europe trending up than their post-Mongol situation trending down.
The trajectory of the Islamic civilization did not change much beginning from the establishment of the Seljuk hegemony in the mid 11th century to the Ottoman economic collapse in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was towards increasing feudalization but also increasing centralization (so semi-feudal rather than full feudal as in medieval Western Europe, see the iqta’ system), increasing interconnection between the state and the Islamic clergy (ulama), increasing importance of madrasas, and decline of the importance of cities, merchants and independent scholars, ulama and philosophers. The major Islamic powers after the Seljuks followed the Seljuk example, the Ayyubids, Khwarezmians, Ilkhanate, Mamluks, Ottomans, to name just some. But by the 16th century the centralization came to such a high level under the Ottomans with over-taxation and overuse of resources that it led to a total economic collapse in all the Ottoman-ruled territories by the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A breakdown of the central government and increasing power of the newly emerging local dynasties followed it throughout the Ottoman realms, which would last well into the 19th century when the Ottoman central government would finally reestablish its central rule throughout its provinces with the help of the Westernizing reforms in the guidance of Western European advisors. But the Ottoman economic collapse was so fatal that the territories under the Ottomans never fully recover from it and this includes the mostly Christian Balkans too. The civilization collapsed too with the economy.
But South Asia was not much affected by this process, so remained rich, civilized and productive even under the Islamic rulers until falling into the hands of the British East India Company. The succeeding British Raj was benevolent and positive for South Asia, but when it had come to power in the middle of the 19th century, the British East India Company had already stolen the riches of South Asia and turned it into a backwater, it was too late for the Indian subcontinent.