I was wondering...

[Watchman]

...although the Ottomans apparently started out as Turkish refugees from Mongol territory. Anyway, the fact is that even amongst the infamously rapacious steppe nomads, who were always reviled by their settled neighbors for their penchance for pillage and devastation, the Mongols were a class by themselves. Just about everyone else during the period only engaged in massacres and wholesale slaughter as a side effect of the unavoidable pillaging the troops indulged in, and it was normally of a very localized nature (such as the sack of any city taken by storm).

The Mongols intentionally annihilated entire cities and depopulated whole regions as cautionary examples.

Of course, a good director could undoubtly make a pretty good movie that simply waves off any modern sensibilities and takes the steppe marauders as they were; they themselves saw nothing wrong with any of it, after all, and among themselves had quite sophisticated and reasonably palatable codes of conduct. It could be treated as a sort of study on the internal logic of the sort of archaic barbarism modern sensibilities have - thankfully - outgrown. If properly done, the lack of unperiodic moralism should only add to the horror.

Look at movies like Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and the like to witness the basic point of that approach.

I'm none too convinced Hollywood could manage it, though; moral ambiguity isn't the strong point of the spectacle movies coming out of there.

[Rosacrux redux]

Ah, yes. The good'ole "Black and White" kindergarten morals that made Hollyweird what it is now.

Why would they stray from that recipe? I mean, look at Alexander. Stone didn't subscribe into the "Black-White" morals and he got massacred (a-la Chinghiz?) by all American critics... oh, well, maybe the fact that the film wasn't really much, did also play a part at it... Oh, wait. There is Gang of New York too. Excellent film (IMHO) but it again missed the "Black vs White" point, portraying everybody in shades of grey... and it went down like the Titanic (the ship, not the film) in the American box office. Maybe it's not Hollyweird, but the immature audience, methinks.

Hmm... can you think of one director that could handle the history in such a way (and has sufficient control over his work - final cut, that is) ? Scorceze, perhaps? He's not big on history, but all his films are handling shades of grey and glorify the underworld and the margins. And he is strong enough to do a film the way he wants it.

Oh, if only Kubrik was alive and sane...

[DemonArchangel]

There was a chinese movie on Genghis Khan.
Beautiful, beautiful combat (although too much flying)

Brutal too.

[Meneldil]

Well, Rosacrux, though I agree Mongols burnt a whole lot of cities, killed a huge number of people, I have to disagree about the fact they were less civilised than other.

Just have a look at the muslim conquest, it was the exact same thing (in lesser proportion). Muslims burnt cities, destroyed whole civilisations (Sassanid Persia ? Copte Aegyptia ?) killed a whole lot of innocents, and almost destroyed the Eastern Roman empire, though eventually they built the most advanced civilisation around mediterranea. However, can we say that they were not civilised ? Obviously not.
They took the best part from each civilisation they conquered, and that's what allowed them to be more advanced than christians.
Basically, that's what Mongols have done 800 years laters.

I don't want to be annoying or what, but I think you're opinion is kinda biased.
My sources might be wrong (though I doubt it), but I've read a lot of books on that topic. Many christians or muslims travellers (Marco Polo being one of them) who visited mongols' territories were simply astonished by their culture and their way of life.

And as I said in my previous post, (and from what I've understood from my readings) Mongols thought they were superior to other peoples (that's mostly why they didn't care about killing loads of innocents if that would save one of them) and that they were supposed to rule over the whole known world. Is that what you would expect from an uncivilised culture ?

[Rosacrux redux]

Just have a look at the muslim conquest, it was the exact same thing (in lesser proportion). Muslims burnt cities, destroyed whole civilisations (Sassanid Persia ? Copte Aegyptia ?) killed a whole lot of innocents, and almost destroyed the Eastern Roman empire, though eventually they built the most advanced civilisation around mediterranea. However, can we say that they were not civilised ? Obviously not.
They took the best part from each civilisation they conquered, and that's what allowed them to be more advanced than christians.
Basically, that's what Mongols have done 800 years laters.

The comparison is completely out of proportion and here's why:

- The Arab conquest was one of faith - they had an ideological background since they wished to spread the word of Allah and his prophet Mohammad. The Mongol urge to rule over everyone is hardly an ideological background.

- The Arabs have forced their culture, language and faith upon the conquered, while the Mongols only picked the local customs to create some sort of "culture" themselves.

- The Arabs, before and after the conquest, had magnificent poets, writers, philosophers. The Mongols had only magnificent butchers.

- The Arabs left a glorious culture, which became the apogee of the medieval world. Excellent works of architecture, science, poetry, thinking... The Mongols left us... the yurt.

- The Arabs shaped the world and almost all the countries they conquered back then still speak their tongue and trace their origin back to the Arabs. The Mongols, not having a culture of their own to spread, were practically completely assimilated in two generations wherever they laid foot.

I don't want to be annoying or what, but I think you're opinion is kinda biased.

How can I be biased? Never known a Mongol, live 20.000 km. away from their land now... how can I be biased?

My sources might be wrong (though I doubt it), but I've read a lot of books on that topic. Many christians or muslims travellers (Marco Polo being one of them) who visited mongols' territories were simply astonished by their culture and their way of life.

Actually most of the accounts, especially of Muslim travellers, speak with horror about the huge, once glorious cities, that now lie in rabbles and about endless mounds of skulls and skeletons that was the trademark of the Mongol passage. Of course M. Polo would speak the contrary, and glorify the Great Khan: he made him disproportionaly rich, why wouldn't he speak favorable about him? (that's if you are looking for "biased" sources)

And as I said in my previous post, (and from what I've understood from my readings) Mongols thought they were superior to other peoples (that's mostly why they didn't care about killing loads of innocents if that would save one of them) and that they were supposed to rule over the whole known world. Is that what you would expect from an uncivilised culture ?

Megalomaniac=cultivated?

[Watchman]

The Arabs were actually fairly nice, as period conquerors go. They didn't go out of their way to massacre people or demolish the very foundations of local culture - compare what happened to Mesopotamia during the Arab takeover, and what the Mongols did to it - and actually weren't even too interested in converting most infidels (although the reasons for that were pretty base). Where they went they usually melded into the local culture and populace, although they usually left a mark besides religion. Persian culture, for example, did not particularly suffer from the change of overlords and even the old ruling class largely kept its position - and later on the region would become a shining jewel of learning and high culture.

Well, it never really recovered from the Mongols, who on the side irrecoverably demolished the sophisticated irrigation system that'd fed Mesopotamia since men started building cities - all the engineers got killed, y'see.

A pretty fundamental difference is that in many places the Muslim conquerors were hailed as liberators by the locals (Palestine and Egypt for certain; both the Jews and the Egyptian Christians had some serious grievances with Byzantium). The Mongols, well, weren't.

It is true that for the brief period the Great Khanate held together the Silk Road saw some serious traffic; many historians postulate control over its riches was what the Mongols mainly were after to begin with, and the infrastructure of the realm was on a serius upswing. Well, that lasted until the Khanate fragmented and the pieces started squabbling, which severely reduced trade along the Road for some fairly obvious reasons.

And that brief stability was only achieved after incredible bloodshed and irrepairable damage to both the economy, the culture and the very demographics of vast regions...

No, the Arab blitzkrieg doesn't compare to the Mongols at all. The Arabs at least were only partially nomadic, and could appreciate the ancient cultures they met. The sons of the high steppes didn't much care, and all too often just torched the whole thing and sold the surviving inhabitants to slavery.

[Kraxis]

The Arabs had always been in contact with the middle eastern cultures, so they very much knew about highcultures, and they were both impressed and highly interested in them. They even had some rather impressive cities down in Yemen and along the Red Sea coast, the Mongols had 0 cities and 0 towns prior to their conquests. Their only contact with a highculture was their raids into China as they had always done (hence the wall).

If we look at Spain and the Muslim invasion it becomes apparent that they were hardly savage at all. They even tried to buff up and look more scary to the Visigothic troops. But they simply weren't. The Visigoths didn't really lose because they were overpowered, they were not, but they did not have the population on their side. How could the population be against a rather strict noble class, though hardly cruel, but for a deadly and butchering enemy? In that case they would either help the Visitgoths or try to stay neutral.

Afghanistan also suffered heavily, they too lost those vital irrigationsystems, and it hasn't even been brought up to that standard yet. That is why it is such a desolate place now... Bactria was a prosperous area when Alexander arrived and stayed that way after it broke off from the Seleucids, it even invaded northern India and won. After the Mongols the area simlpy vanished. Even the Timurids kept away from the area as it wasn't worth it. Timur himself invaded every opponent that tried to invade his lands, everyone but the Bactrians. He just defeated them and signed a good deal to keep them away, not because he had had trouble defeating them. Apparently it wasn't worth capturing.

The Mongols wiped out the greatest civilization west of the Indus, the Kwarazhmian Empire. They removed Kiev from the maps, one of the most splendid cities in Europe for no other reason than it had sent its armies into the field... It wasn't even besieged as far as I know. Don't say that they were not some of the most brutal conquerors ever.
That they adopted the local culture when they settled down doesn't make up for their extreme terrors.