IMO we should not look at Genghis Kahn's Empire fondly. After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group humanity has produced so far. Time seems to heal all wounds but Genghis Khan sure seemed to have made a lot of wounds.
I don't think pre-modern conflicts can be framed under the modern concept of genocide very well. In any case the Mongols did not set out to obliterate specific groups because of ethnicity, race, religion, etc., per se. Maybe wanting tribute or territory is a stupid reason to obliterate a city, but it's not motivated by ethnic or racial animus. Similarly, revenge on an empire for the death of ambassadors that leads to the utter destruction and death of said empire's populace is maybe technically genocide under the "destroying a nation" framing, but it doesn't fit into the modern cultural framing of nations in a nationalistic cultural sense, and would be considered a traditional casus belli. In any case I don't deny that they were rapacious, violent, expansive, or killed disproportionate numbers of people and reduced populated (for the time period) empires to grassland. But it was all very practical, not based on hate, and is totally in line with what other empires and civilizations would do in the time period if they had the means.
Lol, this seems a bit naive. It's hard to rape and pillage people you like.
Do you think we've lost the plot a little bit when you have to do these mental gymnastics to distinguish between murdering an entire nation out of some "approved" reason, vs say out of ethnic reasons.
AFAIK that isn't true. Political powers (e.g., feudal lords, kings, etc.) didn't have the resources to conduct warfare on that scale. As examples, centralized government and its resources didn't exist like today, troops had to go home to plant and harvest, and armies depended on local food production in order to survive.
Total war in particular usually involves civilians as targets, and most civilians were far from the battlefield. WWII changed that, when bombers could reach deep beyond the front lines. Without bombers (and missiles), London would have been untouched by the war, for example.
I agree that there's a particularly European tradition of non-total war where maybe you burn the crops and lay seige but let the peasants live because hopefully they'll eventually be your peasants, but the era was more than willing to utterly obliterate schismatics and heretics, and it's pretty obvious that various civilizations have fallen and been obliterated by conquerors of one sort or another throughout history, maybe not as a common norm, but not infrequently. Look at 1 Samuel 15:3 for example, not that I have a good sense of actual historicity of it.
This is essentially incorrect. While we can point to legendary incidents such as Carthage in the history of empires, the Mongols are notable in premodern history for systemically using this as a strategy to conquer large rivals by fear and hold a territory size that conventional pre-modern empire building would not allow. Regardless of morality, most empires were better positioned to preserve and exploit life and property than the Mongols. Archeological evidence supports this. This kind of conquest isn’t right either and we aren’t saying all non-Mongols aren’t evil (and I appreciate you were also trying to make this point.)
Total war is a separate concept from genocide. Though both can be practiced in the same war, targeting economic and political support for war does not necessarily mean systemically eliminating a population.
>that conventional pre-modern empire building would not allow
I dunno if I'd say this is truly the case. The Mongol Empire was the largest pre-modern empire, yes, but there were other ones spanning millions of square kilometers (multiple pre-horde Chinese dynasties) and several continents (the various caliphates) with these 'conventional' methods.
Most territories back then consisted of people of similar race. An empire attempting to eliminate another could technically be seen as perpetrating genocide. Esp because the treatment of surrendering opponents could go either way.
This is so absurd and disrespectful to the Native American warriors. Only a person completely ignorant of basically anything to do with Native American history would say something like this in this context.
What the fuck are you talking about the original commentator stated how mongol should not be talked about because of the things they did. I just pointed out that Americans have done similar or worse. Are you aware native american population is estimated to be around 100 million year 1500 and only 5-6 million were left by 1650.
A lot of that reduction in population was from diseases that weren't in the new world before invasion by Europeans. Not many diseases went the other way, I think syphilis is the only major one I've head of that went from the Americas to Europe. Separate from that the Euros were sure following the path of murdering, genocide, and even after the wars were over the US was sending kids to schools to destroy their knowledge about their own cultures. More recently we started learning about the large graveyards at those schools, and the same thing was happening in Canada.
Weird comment. The USA didn't treat the Indians with white gloves but there are surely more egregious examples in history. Vlad the impaler? Ivan the terrible? Various African warlords?
I don't know if we can call them the most evil. There are plenty of contenders, even if the death rates don't match up.
If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union.
If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.
Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior.
imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun.
literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings.
they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses.
Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.
I mean Mongols depopulated entire large cities. E.g. the entire population of Merv, which was one of the world's largest cities at the time, was killed.
yeah but I was talking about brutality vs numbers.
the commies killed far more than anyone by numbers and in barbaric ways, but their brutality was beaten by those who killed less in more gruesome ways.
the mongols excelled at both but I argued by brutality imperial japan was a bit worse.
Raw death toll and percentage of total world population slaughtered seem like the two most objective measures. The Horde win the dubious blue ribbon for the latter.
Mongol conquests were roughly comparable to the European conquest of the Americas. Both toppled great empires and may have killed ~10% of world population in a few generations. And both were more noteworthy due to their large-scale success than their brutality. While both waves of conquest were brutal even by contemporary standards, they were not extraordinary brutal. Being an absolute monster is a part of the job description of a conqueror.
I think the comparison works in terms of percentages, but falls apart because the Europeans were not unified. Something like 3 or four great powers colonized America vs a single ethnic group for the Mongols (even if they did fight with each other)
The Mongol Empire was not a single ethnic group. The top leaders were ethnic Mongols (much in the same way as Europe used to be a family business), but the troops were mostly from conquered peoples. I would assume that the field army was mostly Turkic, as Turkic peoples were more numerous than Mongolic peoples and their societies and styles of warfare were similar.
Right. Europeans in the Americas and Mongols in Eurasia did what was rational: both had significant, incomparable advantage in military technology and both used it for their advantage according to the standards of their time.
I believe the accepted narrative insofar as the New World is concerned is that it was largely disease that eliminated the population. There's a theory that is posited in Charles Mann's book 1492 which indicates a probable explanation for extremely high mortality rates due to susceptibility to the pathogens the Europeans introduced. The gist: natives of the New World had immune systems conditioned and selected for parasites, which appears to be an either/or proposition, which may explain, in part, the relatively disproportionate fatality rates among the native populations. Relative to that I think the warfare conducted by Europeans pales in comparison.
The best explanation I’m aware of for the disproportionate death rates by Europeans vs Native Americans by disease is mainly population density of European cities was dramatically higher, leading to a lot of diseases that would permanently spread throughout the population until the combination of evolution and immune systems brought it to a symbiotic, fairly neutral relationship.
Which didn’t remain so neutral when applied to fresh populations.
Native Americans simply weren’t playing host to as many diseases, and persisting virulent ones
The Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas. They collapsed by themselves due to the sickness brought over by the Europeans before they made contact. It would have been logistically impossible to topple an empire overseas.
"Invaders led by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire by force and captured Tenochtitlan in 1521, bringing an end to Mesoamerica's last great native civilization ... The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody... European diseases like smallpox, mumps and measles were also powerful weapons against the local population, who lacked immunity to them...By 1520, smallpox had reduced the population of Tenochtitlan by 40% in just one year." [1]
Maybe an oversimplification to assert "the Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas"?
I think it's either an intent thing or a causality thing.
Imagine a hit man showing up to work one day, only to find his targets already dead along with their entire town... and only much later finds out that it's because he'd been an asymptomatic carrier for weird space germs when he was casing the joint the previous month.
no but you don't understand "muh freedomz" erases the destabalization of the middle east and large swaths of africa despite us doing it for zero reason.
it also erases our allies killing and starving the yemenis and the starvation in afghanistan post-war we caused by freezing all their funds.
clearly loosely defined ideals erase human suffering.
> If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.
It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations. What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
Adding to the list of steppe empires, not an Asian one though, the Commanche Indians are way up there in terms of barbarism as well. Not just against the encroaching westerners, but other tribes as well. They really did not mess around with the sadistic torture of their war prisoners. Proper nightmare fuel.
There might be some form of selection bias by the OP? Neither the colonization of the Americas by various European "tribes", nor the brutal colonial empires in Africa in the 19th century seem to make the cut, and for some reason not even Nazi Germany is listed.
When it comes to the number of genocides, it is probably difficult to beat out the British, but they were always quite jolly about it, so I guess it wasn't that bad.
>It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations.
Google tells me the Timurids were Mongol descendents of Genghis Khan, so not really. 100% of that relevant data set is one extended family.
>What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
The Mongols were little more "psychopathic" than many societies at the time, only distinctive in terms of their relative success, not their cruelty. Alexander the Great tortured and slaughtered people by the thousands, and Westerners don't consider him a barbarian or psychopath so much as a tactical genius and founder of the civilized world.
>Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.
On the other hand, the United States committed genocide against an entire continent, was the only nation to drop atomic bombs in warfare (and did so against civilians) continued Nazi and Japanese human experimentation and bioweapons research going under MKULTRA and other secret programs (as well as recruited Nazi scientists for their space program,) raped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam and Korea (and used Agent Orange), and went on a 20 year temper tantrum of violence and war crimes across Iraq for no discernable reason other than Afghanistan not being enough to satisfy their post 9/11 bloodlust.
Not to excuse Imperial Japan or the Nazis or anyone else but ranking evil against evil is always a matter of perspective, and it's often less about which evil is greater than which evils you're willing to excuse and which not. A similar list of sins could be made about the Soviet Union, China, Britain, or just about any nation or empire in history. Humans are bastards everywhere.
Mongolia today has Genghis Khan on their money, particularly the 20000 Tugrik banknote. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean Mongolians generally approve of what he did, just like Americans today don't agree with everything the guys on our money did.
Mongolia sees Genghis Khan as a George Washington type figure, which I think is relatively fair. It's not like Italy does of a lot of introspection of the "bad" sides of its Roman heritage.
The Mongols were a mix of modern and violent and ruthless before he (Chinggis Khan) died that you don't really see elsewhere.
This seems to be an ongoing trend, and this article continues the trend by casting the Mongols as some kind of egalitarian society.
20 years ago-ish, a book came out about Chingis Khan that extolled the virtues of his multicultural, pantheistic regime and totally glossed over the many genocides the Mongols perpetrated. Not to mention the guy probably raped more women than anyone else in history.
Edit: To add to this, a lot of what is written about Mongols in Chingis Khan's time is conjecture. They were not a literate people, so there are almost no records. They were nomadic and buried their leaders in secret locations, leaving scant archeological evidence. Many conclusions that have been drawn about the Mongols are speculative. Fast forward to the Yuan dynasty where there are records in Chinese. That era and locality have better documentation.
People tend to have starry eyed views of successful empires that not only conquered a lot of territory, but were able to rule for some time. Because there is inherent difficulty in administering areas spanning many cultures, ethnicities, creeds.
Most of those things you said can apply to the Assyrians, the Romans, the British, or any other similar empire, and people still idealize those places today. If your empire holds together long enough to get a period of Pax named after you, it means you've made it in the eyes of history.
Do you really think whoever wrote this article fondly reminisces of the Mongol Empire? If I list some positives of Byzantium does that mean I am fond of whatever they did in aggregate?
Interestingly, Neo-Nazi groups were some of the first to establish a relationship with the more right wing civil rights groupsm. George Lincoln Rockwell had a personal relationship with Malcom X, on the basis of shared views of anti-semitism and racial separatism. Which, of course, Malcom X would later change his opinions of and denounce.
The misery of the Mongols' wrath is made apparent by the decline of Iran and China, hitherto on par with if not ahead of the West, but some 800 years after the Empire we see the regions least affected (South India, Vietnam, Japan, Oman) still performing as regional standouts on a troubled continent. You could throw out Myanmar and Yemen as counterexamples but they've both seen nasty recent wars.
Often people forget that there isn't a dominant empire that existed for hundreds of years without insane brutality and cruelty against anyone considered to be an enemy. With the area Genghis Khan's Empire had under control, I don't doubt they pillaged every opposing enemy without mercy.
Or the British Empire which intentionally starved "between 12 and 29 million Indians ... as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.
In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.
Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” [1]
Not to mention the United States who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings which caused long-term side-effects on the populace, imposed sanctions, and even today control Japanese policy decisions and have permanent military occupation in Japan.
This part sounds very similar to the traditional role of women, and it is quite dishonest to frame it as "Running Genghis Khan’s Empire":
> Chinggis Khan’s senior wife, Börte, is responsible for a camp. She’s responsible for their home, the yurt or ger that they live in. She’s responsible for the kids. If merchants come through, she’s going to talk to them about economic activity. She is going to oversee or perform the typical daily herding activities. There’s food preparation. There’s clothing preparation. There are religious rituals. There’s entertainment. It’s often a woman’s job to be the hospitable partner, to bring in food and welcome guests.
The thing to remember is that a "camp" comprised thousands of people, livestock and other moving parts. She was essentially project and logistics manager of a massive project, with no automation tools or modern mechanical equipment. The logistics of it would have been mind boggling. Not sure what you mean by "traditional role of women", as that would differ between cultures, but her job would be no mean feat, in my opinion.
which is a fair point, but its a far cry from the claim of running the empire.
The wives of many leaders tend to be important politically and have a hand in the nation's affairs, but its a large leap to claim that means they ran it.
She was important absolutely, but the article was just using too much hyperbole.
also the army stat was complete bs, we know they were not in need of resorting to female soldiers due to their large enough population.
Household economics were often controlled by women, as well as structuring/securing social alliances or solidify social status. So it isn't hyperbole, so much as this aspect is entirely lost with more "modern" ideas about gender roles, rather the lack thereof.
In older societies it was common to view women as playing a central role in bringing great ruin or great fortune to men, and by extension "their" empires, for this very reason.
>In older societies it was common to view women as playing a central role in bringing great ruin or great fortune to men, and by extension "their" empires, for this very reason.
Honestly, even if we don't talk about it, it still is this way. If you want to achieve success, the single most important decision you make is who you marry.
>but its a large leap to claim that means they ran it
I don't think it is, not just women in particular but also bureaucrats and diplomats in general is what actually ran and does still run empires and nations. Today you'd call it the administrative state. Both historically as well as today people vastly overstate the importance of visible leaders and vastly underestimate the role that administrators, managers, and so on play.
I think Robert Moses is a good modern example of an unelected bureacrat who accumulated lots of power and used it in pretty sinister ways when he all but ran New York City.
I think part of the issue is that the title of the article is using the word "ran" in "ran Genghis Khan's Empire" to imply that Börte made strategic, judicial, or political decisions, and then the text in the article talks about more operational or logistical work. It's hyperbolic.
The reasons are obviously: precious, precious clicks.
A title like "The Women Who Kept Genghis Khan's Empire Running" would have been better.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for pointing this out. She was responsible for "their" home. Not the tens of thousands of households across the empire. There was also a sentence where the scholar being interviewed estimates that women made up to 20% of Mongolian armies of that era. That just seems flatout unbelievable.
he is being downvoted for the same reason this article exists, pc culture doesn't like being corrected. There is a war against historical accuracy for the sake of adding in women or random races that wouldn't be there.
The annoying thing is that it makes no sense to do this because there are plenty of non-male or non-white leaders to pick from anyway.
My favorite empire is the Ajuuran sultanate that was a very powerful african sultanate in modern day somalia. It traded as far as china and it had many victories over great powers like portugal.
A great female leader that actually existed was queen boudica, one of the greatest celtic anti-roman rebels. She led her people and dealt a lot of damage to the roman invaders before she inevitably lost to the chads that are the roman legions.
Rather than blackwash or add in random women we can just look to the parts of history that already contain that.
I think they’re basing that claim on some buried women exhibiting archery and horseback riding strength in their skeletal structures. I doubt they routinely fought in the army, given the lack of contemporary accounts observing any women in the Mongol army.
This contrasts with, say, the ancient Sarmatians, where we see female burials with actual weapons of war, and have contemporary accounts that women did fight extensively in battles. There, a figure of 20% would be roughly accurate.
Suddenly everyone is an expert on the logistics of running an empire! Is it so hard to believe that women were in positions of real power there, especially when men were overwhelmingly occupied with warfare? If you read the article you find she later ran the whole shop. It's not dishonest at all, quite the opposite, as the scholar in the article notes, it is dishonest to _downplay_ the role women had in running and expanding the empire. They just weren't riding to battle.
"The traditional role of women" and "running an empire" are not mutually exclusive. What did you expect the day-to-day business of keeping the Mongol empire running to look like?
There's no point in grinding one's teeth and squeezing one's fist at an ancient construct that predates your birth by nearly a millenium. At some point you'll want to let the steam out of your ears, sit down, and hit the books. And the same will be true of the Third Reich in a couple centuries, when anyone even remotely associated to anyone else even remotely associated with the atrocities committed by Germany will be long since dead. And the 1933-1945 period in Germany will become more of a subject of historical curiosity than a source of outrage.
Interesting to me that the only authority mentioned in the article has written a book about the same subject, published by Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Mongolians destroyed Baghdad, ending the Islamic Golden Age. Maybe the role of women in the Khanate was noticed by Muslims as they rewrote the place of women in their societies.
I see they are trying to push a narrative here, but they picked a weak example. Wu Zetian started in a harem of some Chinese emperor, but climbed to the top, captured the throne and ruled for 15 years officially (and who knows how many years before that unofficially). She wasn't shy of killing her own newborn for a timely political move, and obviously wasn't constrained by morals in her climbing after that.
And Genghis Khan was just a powerful savage who wiped out entire chinese cities who dared to defend themselves. His take on chinese civilization was that it was occupying land that could be used to grow grass for his horses.
Hundreds of years later... the US, unconstrained by morals, was doing the same, overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii to control more land to grow grass (sugarcane).
Ahh, the modern take on war and nations, the desire for moral superiority and the silly game of pretending there are rules in war.
As hard as it maybe to wrap one's head around this, historically, war was a way to obtain resources, or rather resolve conflicts over resources. Genghis wanted a resource for his horses, he resolved it. If your city was wiped out by him, it was your fault for being weak. You should not expect peace between nations or compassion. Nations are built on stolen land, their borders drawn by blood. We live in a world where nuclear powers maintain balance and modern technology has resolved many of the world 's resource scarcity issues. Our countries are ruled by law, not people. People allowed themslves to be ruled by the most cruel and ruthless in the past because that meant obtaining the most resources for them, even if done on a wh im to satisfy their rulers. People sit back and judge empires from the romans to the british and criticize their morals. It is utterly absurd. I mean, even these days the US invades the middle east and Russia its neighbors for resources. And the terrible thing about democracy is that people think the whole world runs on some system of rules where people's wills and lives matter at a global scale. It sounds nice but that isn't reality. It can be that way in a country but between countries, when you have food shortage your government will not hesitate to wipe out cities and commit genocide on your behalf. My point is that such criticism should be based on reality not on how things should be in an ideal world. The primary directive of any government is not just to secure its borders but the nation itself, whatever that stands for. Be it the elected ruler's will or the monarch's whim.
