Chris Doss Looks like an interesting book. But what this amounts to is saying that the Mongols were less evil than usually imagined, not that they were the good guys, unless one thinks people enjoyed coming up with the annual slave and concubine quota.
^^^^^
CB: My "Mongols were actually the good guys" was partially tongue in cheek. I still thing "fascist" is a more appropriate term for current US-rightwingers than "Mongol".
Anyway, the last time we talked about this on PEN-L , Yoshie found some better sites on the revisionist historical theme that anthropologist Weatherford is pushing. I had happened to see him lecture on Khan on C-Span.
Part of it was that the first law that Khan instituted was No kidnapping of women. So, he gets big progressive points for feminism. Evidently, his mother had been kidnapped when he was a child, and she and all the kids were then left for dead. But they survived , hunting and gathering. Became real fierce, obviously.
To make a long story short, Khan "empire" may have had a touch of the revenge of the Nomads against the sedentary civilizations for prior conquests/dominance, maybe including kidnapping of women, I don't know.
Here's Yoshie's post
Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalester College <http://www2.macalester.edu/facultypubs/publist.cfm?FacultyID=123>, wrote in _Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World_:
<blockquote>The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next.
The only permanent structures Genghis Khan erected were bridges. Although he spurned the building of castles, forts, cities, or walls, as he moved across the landscape, he probably built more bridges than any ruler in history. He spanned hundreds of streams and rivers in order to make the movement of his armies and goods quicker. The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge. The Mongols brought German miners to China and Chinese doctors to Persia. The transfers ranged from the monumental to the trivial. They spread the use of carpets everywhere they went and transplanted lemons and carrots from Persia to China, as well as noodles, playing cards, and tea from China to the West. They brought a metal worker from Paris to build a fountain on the dry steppes of Mongolia, recruited an English nobleman to serve as interpreter in their army, and took the practice of Chinese fingerprinting to Persia. They financed the building of Christian churches in China, Buddhist temples and stupas in Persia, and Muslim Koranic schools in Russia. The Mongols Swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization's unrivaled cultural carriers.
The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan's empire exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell-casting technology, they produced the cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance, the larger impact came in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids.
The Mongols displayed a devoutly and persistently internationalist zeal in their political, economic, and intellectual endeavors. They sought not merely to conquer the world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages. Genghis Khan's grandson, Khubilai Khan, introduced a paper currency intended for use everywhere and attempted to create primary schools for universal basic education of all children in order to make everyone literate. The Mongols refined and combined calendars to create a ten-thousand year calendar more accurate than any previous one, and they sponsored the most extensive maps ever assembled. The Mongols encouraged merchants to set out by land to reach their empire, and they sent out explorers across land and sea as far as Africa to expand their commercial and diplomatic reach.
In nearly every country touched by the Mongols, the initial destruction and shock of conquest by an unknown and barbaric tribe yielded quickly to an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and improved civilization. In Europe, the Mongols slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent, but, disappointed with the general poverty of the area compared with the Chinese and Muslim countries, turned away and did not bother to conquer the cities, loot the countries or incorporate them into the expanding empire. In the end, Europe suffered the least yet acquired all the advantages of contact through merchants such as the Polo family of Venice and envoys exchanged between the Mongol khans and the popes and kings of Europe. The new technology, knowledge, and commercial wealth created the Renaissance in which Europe rediscovered some of its prior culture, but more important, absorbed the technology of printing, firearms, the compass, and the abacus from the East. As English scientist Roger Bacon observed in the thirteenth century, the Mongols succeeded not merely from martial superiority; rather, "they have succeeded by means of science." Although the Mongols "are eager for war," they have advanced so far because they "devote their leisure to the principles of philosophy.
Seemingly every aspect of European life -- technology, warfare, clothing, commerce, food, art, literature, and music -- changed during the Renaissance as a result of the Mongol influence. In addition to new forms of fighting, new machines, and new foods, even the most mundane aspects of daily life changed as the Europeans switched to Mongol fabrics, wearing pants and jackets instead of tunics and robes, played their musical instruments with the steppe bow rather than plucking them with the fingers, and painted their pictures in a new style. The Europeans even picked up the Mongol exclamation hurray as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement.
With so many accomplishments by the Mongols, it hardly seems surprising that Geoffrey Chaucer, the first author in the English language, devoted the longest story in The Canterbury Tales to the Asian conqueror Genghis Khan of the Mongols. He wrote in undisguised awe of him and his accomplishments. Yet, in fact, we are surprised that the learned men of the Renaissance could make such comments about the Mongols, whom the rest of the world now view as the quintessential, bloodthirsty barbarians. The portrait of the Mongols left by Chaucer or Bacon bears little resemblance to the images we know from later books or films that portray Genghis Khan and his army as savage hordes lusting after gold, women, and blood.
<http://www.duboislc.net/read/GenghisKhanWorldHistoryInfluence.html></blockq uote>
Cf. "The Squire's Tale": <http://www.librarius.com/canttran/squitrfs.htm>
At 10:11 PM -0600 1/2/05, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Those who had been the city's most rich and powerful he wasted no
>time in killing, remembering that the rulers he had left behind
>after conquering the Tangut and Ruzhen had betrayed him soon after
>his army had withdrawn. <http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h11mon.htm>
This bit about wasting no time in killing the rich and powerful must have given him a bad name. -- Yoshie