I was wondering...

[Rosacrux redux]

Wizard

I am afraid your admiration of the Mongols is distorting your view towards them. You do admit that they were irredeemably cruel and savage, yet you think that’s justified because …they were nomads and lived in harsh condition?????

Yes, and Hitler wasn’t really responsible for the holocaust, because he had a traumatic child age.

Also, you might attribute the fall of the East to the plague, which was quite worse in Europe, btw and not all East experienced the plague anyway – China didn’t. India didn’t. Why did they stay behind? I find your reaction theory rather unfounded as well. I think that’s wrong as well. A couple other posters have illustrated how the Mongols destroyed the infrastructure and the fact that they depopulated Asia is not my speculation but a well-established historical fact.

You might like the Mongols because they were great warriors and such. But that shouldn’t hinder you from understanding that they were also the worst thing that happened to humanity ever.

BalkanTurist

Thanks for the suggestion. I am not extremely keen on conquests per se, I am more into critical interpretation of them and scientific evaluation of the various factors that preceded the conquest and of course of the consequences for all parts involved.

If the book you suggest is anything like what I described, I'll look it up.

[BalkanTourist]

It talks about how conquests affect cultures and shape civilizations. It is more of a social sciences book, rather than a historical book. It analyzes rather than tells.

[Rosacrux redux]

Then I think I'm gonna love it. I'll try to find it.

thanks!

[The Wizard]

Wizard

I am afraid your admiration of the Mongols is distorting your view towards them. You do admit that they were irredeemably cruel and savage, yet you think that’s justified because …they were nomads and lived in harsh condition?????

Perhaps you missed my comment... I said it was not justified in the least by it, but it at least explains their attitude to warfare. Mongols weren't those to torture and maim... they 'limited' (with lack of a better word) themselves to killing and sacking 'alone' (again, with lack of better wording), and usually from a distance.

Yes, and Hitler wasn’t really responsible for the holocaust, because he had a traumatic child age.

Er... I do not understand where this comment comes from... if you insinuate that I excuse Hitler because I said his lust for killing was because of his sick and twisted mind, then you either entirely missed my point or you are just plain very wrong. My point was that reading a book on the Mongols does not make one want to go on mass-murderings all on its own.

Also, you might attribute the fall of the East to the plague, which was quite worse in Europe, btw and not all East experienced the plague anyway – China didn’t. India didn’t. Why did they stay behind?

Why was the plague 'quite worse' in Europe? Did I not mention that the European reaction to the disease cost more lives on the short term but let the Europeans recover faster on the long term, and the other way around for Asia? Then, looking at the statistics alone, it was worse in Europe, but that is not the whole story, as I explained above.

China wasn't exactly staying behind in any way at the date of the Mongols. The Ming and Qing dynasties were extremely powerful forces, but the latter failed because of bad leadership, child emperors, court intrigue ruling politics, and because it had isolated itself from the world and was therefore backwards and ignorant of the threat that the Western powers posed. And all that only happened in the end of the 18th century, because before that China under the Qing dynasty could easily rank itself amongst the most powerful nations in the world -- it even conquered Mongolia! No, the Mongols had nothing to do with the Mongol conquests.

And in my opinion, the Mongols had absolutely nothing to do with the weakening of India. All they did to India was a raid led by Chingis, which wasn't half as destructive as the defeat of the Khwarizm-shah Empire. India became very powerful and very prosperous two centuries later, when a Timurid, Babur, descended from the Hindu Kush into the Indus valley and eventually conquered all of the Indian peninsula, and founded the Mughal dynasty. The Mughal empire was also one of the most powerful and advanced civilizations on the world, until the 18th century (a century where European fortunes rose greatly and the fortunes of the rest of the world seem to have fallen greatly -- it was in this period that the Middle East also lost much of its power... think of the Ottomans, Persia, etc.) when a massive defeat of the Mughals at the hands of the 'Napoleon of the East', Nadir Shah of Persia, caused the sacking of Delhi, after which the Persians left with the Peacock Throne, a huge amount of Mughal treasure including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and a massive amount more of treasure. It is estimated that Nadir Shah's army doubled in size just by the camp followers needed to carry all this loot (elephants, camels, etc.).

To me it seems you overestimate the destruction caused by the Mongols, and it isn't the first time we've disagreed over that point of the Mongols. A while back we had another argument in a thread about how to defeat the Mongols. There I also pointed out that every region conquered by the Mongols and then incorporated into their empire saw a period of economical rebirth and prosperity. Regions that were not incorporated into the empire for various regions, such as Hungary, Poland, and India, were left hurting for a while. Perhaps that is the explanation of some people's belief that the Mongols only brought bad things?

I find your reaction theory rather unfounded as well. I think that’s wrong as well. A couple other posters have illustrated how the Mongols destroyed the infrastructure and the fact that they depopulated Asia is not my speculation but a well-established historical fact.

Why do you think it's wrong? I'd like some arguments for this, for I am interested in why you chose to disbelieve it, for I don't think the rest you say in the quote has anything to do with my arguments for a good casus belli for Chingis concerning the Khwarizmians.

And, regarding that rest of the quote, I would like to know why you believe that a medieval army was able to cause such widespread destruction and depopulation as the Mongols apparently did according to you. I find that very hard to believe. They didn't have carpet bombers, they didn't have WMD's, they didn't have million-man armies and neither did they have armored divisions (tanks etc.). How could they have brought Asia such decline with only sword and bow and muscle power? And how could it have stayed bad for more than 800 years solely as a result of the Mongol conquests? You'd think the Mongols and their successors in the area would've done something to make the regions strong, looking at the duration of the Mongol khanates remaining after the death of Qubilai Khan (which were still mainly ruled by Mongols or at least people who had Mongol blood), and the efforts of such rulers as the Safavids and Mughals. No, on such a long term the Mongols had very little effect, and what effect their was, was positive in the end.



~Wiz

[Sethik]

I seriously doubt Ghengis Khan/mongols hindered western culture as much as you seem to be thinking. Still nowadays, we can't say if mongols' impact on Russia was neither negative nor positive.

Didn't he retard Russia's development by several hundred years? Because Russian was under Mongol rule it did not participate in the Renaissance. Up until Peter the Great (1700s I think) Russia was a back water country still stuck in the middle ages.

Alexander on the other hand pretty much IS Western Culture enbodied. Greek Culture is Western Culture.

Please elaborate. I find that statement completely false.

[Watchman]

Boys and girls, let's stop apologizing for the Mongols, shall we ? There's no point in idolizing them. Conquering armies are always a veritable plague on any region they capture; nomads tend to be doubly so, as they are more mobile and can thus pillage and devastate better, and - let's be honest here - more often than not tended to consider settled people barely human (even by the low general standards of the time).

The Mongols were really just a reductio ad absurdum of the Conquering Nomad phenomenom. They conquered more land than any other nomad empire before or after them; fielded bigger armies, and possibly better too; and in some places brought such utter ruin to whole populations and entire regions so as not to have an equal anywhere* else in history, expect perhaps the conquest of South and Central Americas and even there the big killer was disease and not violence. And then they collapsed to squabbling little splinter khandoms inside about a hundred years.

* And I do mean anywhere; the only other case I know of where military violence was enough to cause permanent damage to demographics is the Albiguensian Crusades/Cathar wars, and that's a maybe. In any case the scope of those was far smaller.

The Mongols also took terror tactics to a whole new level. One of their basic SOPs was to utterly annihilate any city that tried to defy them as a warning to others, although they were pragmatic enough to spare armorers and similar useful craftsmen. This was rather helpful in terrifying enemies into surrender and convincing fortifications to give up without a fight, and to be fair they usually treated such cases reasonably humanely.

But then, for example Khwarimzam was totally razed on general principles due to the Khwarimzamshah having "personally insulted" the Khan... Ditto for Persia, far as I know, and Hungary seems to have gotten a more limited version of the same treatment.

If there were no piles of skulls, that was only because the Mongols didn't bother. They'd actually have welcomed such wild tales to further terrify their foes, though.

The bottom line is, these people took conquering nomad violence to such heights and scales as to have no equal, did so very much on purpose and out of the sheer savage joy of pillaging (something all armies tend to fall guilty of), and were quite proud of it.

Trying to excuse away their atrocities is quite pointless revisionism. They lived in a world entirely different from such modern sensibilities and would probably have been offended at such slander. In any case such anachronistic romanticism is silly and shallow; why should they even be tried to be made into something else than the terrific warriors and terrible conquerors they were and gloried in being ? Accept them as they were, both awesome and horrifying. Trying to pass judgement, positive or negative, from modern standpoints on them is really nothing more than cultural imperialism, imposing one's own values on entirely different people.

Trying to excuse away the mind-boggling massacres they carried out, however, is vulgar apologism for sheer barbarity that shocked even their thick-skinned contemporaries, as was the whole idea.

[Kraxis]

The whole 'fear of terror' theory falls apart to a great extent when we see that the Mongols practiced the wholesale slaughter of people and animals, then left for a few days, then sent back the entire rearguard to mop up any survivors that had escaped the killings.
How can you induce a practical fear if you make certain it won't get spread? Yes, others would rather soon know of the total destruction, but largely when it was too late, when they were told by those that had been drafted (armourers and egineers), and then it was too late.
Genghis died, and on his deathbed he demanded the sack of Ning-hsia, and it happened... What kind of last wish is that?
Merv was so utterly destroyed that the land could be plowed over afterwards. Hardly a case of mere cruelty, that was extreme destruction on an unneeded level.

The simple fact that a single mongol rider could enter a subjugated Persian village and begin to kill off people and nobody daring to stop him says something about the amount of cruelty they showed people (these people would know of the destruction of the cities).
There is even an instance where a mongol warrior captured an enemy but had no weapons (wonder how he did that), he then ordered the poor man to put his head on the ground, left him to get his sword, returned, found the man still there and promtly beheaded him. Why did the man stay? Out of terror.

And since both muslim and christian sources are equally apalled by the Mongols, they do not share the same view of each other. Yes, they hated and loathed each other, and said plenty of bad stuff, and did as much bad stuff as they said about each other. But to them the Mongols were always top dogs at outright slaughter. How can that be if everyone had been equally bad? The simple reason is that the Mongols had been worse. And it wasn't as if the christians loathed the Mongols any great amount really. In 1259 Armenia sent an army to help the Mongols attack into Syria, not because they had been subjugated but because they genuinely wanted to help. Hey, they were anti-muslim and that was good enough, those accounts of the brutality for the moment reserved for the muslims. So we can't say that the christians were more biased than normally.

The Kara-Khitai were an independant empire who had dared to harbour Kuchlug... Hardly renegades.

The simple message to the Mamlukes (just prior to Ain Julut) was something like 'bow down to the Khan or be destroyed'. A formal declaration of war really... Needed? No, but it is certain that they would not have been treated any differently than others who had done something to 'deserve' their fate. But luck had it that Hulegu sent most of his forces towards Mongolia.