Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Not everyone lived in villages. Not everyone lived in global
trading hubs like Samarkand or Malacca. Not everybody was so sedentary.
In fact, the world was full of nomads, hunters and predators.
Many who combined migratory as well as settled lives.
One important
example of this way of living, were the Mongol peoples, who could
not rely exclusively on local resources to get past
that level of basic self sufficiency that we talked about in the world of villages.
And in many cases, had to survive
given the ecosystem that they inhabited by predation.
The interactions and divisions that were produced by the
expansion of Mongol peoples, and they were not the only people who lived this way
by, by any means, but we're going to use them for, we're going to
invoke their example for reasons that will become clear in just a minute.
But the interactions of divisions provoked by the expansion of Mongol
peoples will intensify after the 13th century, in part because of the
booming. Silk roads and commercial byways of that
Afro-Eurasian system that we talked about in the last few segments.
That is that they were greater and greater opportunities for predation itself,
kicked off by above all, this man. Genghis Khan.
He's an example of the ways in which sometimes peoples from the backlands,
from the remote areas of the world, can have decisive effects on global history.
By the time Genghis Khan's conquests were over, more than any other
man, he had connected up the world's parts.
In 25 years of conquering, he had laid claim
to more than what Rome had been able to conquer over 400 years.
By the early 13th century. Southern Russia,
Poland, to China, Genghis Khan and his family members spread
out, fanned out, something called the Mongol
Empire. The size of Africa, larger than
North America. The only major exception for his conquest
was the heartland of south Asia, in part because the Himalayas and
Afghanistan were impediments. Another major impediment though, there was
an effort to try to invade this island, was Japan.
But some of the great regimes of the world would be toppled by Genghis Khan and his
family members, the Caliphate in Baghdad, the Song dynasty in China.
In some senses, and I'm going to refer to this metaphor
over and over again in the course, Genghis Khan's conquests
were the first world war. What was most astonishing
was that the Mongol peoples comprised a tribe of only about a million
people. Living in an arduous environment.
Dry, cold.
And therefore, dependent on neighboring peoples for their sustenance, through
tribute.
Through trade, and of course through plunder.
The Mongols, organized, effective fighting machines.
To plunder the wealth, the surpluses, of their neighbors.
And it was from this that they developed a very particular equestrian culture
able to cover very long distances. Indeed, this equestrian
culture shaped of the very logic Of Mongol warfare.
They would sweep into towns on horseback or on chariots
often using an element of surprise to strike a blow.
Often at powerful wealthier neighboring peoples.
In fact these armies
could be huge. When Mongol cavalries
and chariots took the city of Khwarez, Khwarezm in the year
1219 from the Sultan of Baghdad, there
were fully 125,000 horsemen involved in that battle.
It was a huge army. In many ways,
the Mongol people were constituted as an army itself.
Along with Chinese doctors, and Turkic allies who would
join in the Mongol armies themselves, as their allies.
Or sometimes subject peoples, forced to do the fighting alongside them.
Mongols also relied on the use of terror to strike fear in
the hearts of their enemies with skulls hanging off ropes from the
saddles of their horses to frighten their foe into submission.
What was decisive though was the use of the element of surprise to
quickly submit a an enemy or threaten to destroy it.
When the Mongols took a new target. they
deployed, very strategically, specific kinds of atrocities.
To use the element of fear to subdue their enemy.
Usually taking men from the aristocratic ranks.
Relying on public desecration. Use of horror and spectacle as
a way to subordinate the enemy.
the violence was of course also, I should say reciprocated as a result.
when 400 Mongol prisoners were taken at the Battle of
Jalal al-Din in the year 1228,
they were dragged around the city streets behind
horses until nothing was left at the ends of the ropes.
Persian armies put nails into the heads this is where it was
believed that the Mongol spirits lived, according to Mongol
belief. So the result was often very
destructive kinds of warfare in this first world war.
The Baghdad Royal Library was destroyed. And it was said that the Tigris
River ran blue for weeks, because of the ink that was dissolved into the waters.
But in order to cover so much ground, Mongol armies had to travel light.
Which is one of the reasons they had
to rely on predation as they went along conquering.
They couldn't carry the supplies with them.
It meant that they had to live off the land that they themselves were conquering.
They had to live off the very conquered people themselves.
And one of the long-term effects of this pattern of conquering, was in fact, the
Mongol people often borrowed and adapted to the very same people that they
subordinated and oppressed. In other words, the Mongols did not
sweep in to a new city or civilization in
order to wipe it out or to kill their neighbors.
But rather, what they were looking for was
subordination, fealty, and transfers of wealth through tribute up
to the conquering peoples, not to be wiped out,
the Mongols did not want to clean the slate.
After all, the Mongols relied on local populations to deliver their surpluses
to them to keep them going. Livestock, food, precious goods.
So here we see something that is cyclical.
A form of economic dependency of the conquerors on the conquered themselves.
And so this kind of warfare was not
for revenge or for hatred, for ethnic animosity.
And in fact the captives and
the captors often wound up adopting each other and in fact it became in some
senses and in many places very hard to distinguish, the
between trading from marrying and from fighting.
Right?
As Mongol warriors often picked up wives along the way.
So we have to think about these practices
of warfare and of conquest in cultural context.
And I say this now, because it's going to become very
important for you to understand how other kinds of conquests function.
So just a warning why this is so relevant for us.
Ultimately, in the end, the Mongols created an empire of
this sort with a very small population by ruling through proxies.
They had to rely on allies and kinship members and adopting families
into the ruling household, adopting family members into the
ruling households in order to keep the empire together.
And inter marriage was crucial to it all.
In a sense the alliance was of men who married into local,
elite women members of, women members of elite families.
This was a brotherly empire. Weddings and diplomacy, gifts, trade and
conquest all in a sense blended together, living off the bounty that was being
produced by the silk roads and the trading routes that we
talked about in the earlier segments.
And Genghis Khan would put his sons on the thrones
around the world that he had conquered.
So when the Mongols went conquering, they often followed the very same routes that
the merchant caravans and Buddhist monks had
been following earlier in creating that networked system.
That pulled the Afro-Eurasian system together and
they did not seek to destroy it.
We have this image of the Mongol empire being this plunder machine
that destroyed everything it ran into. That is wrong.
Rather, what they wanted to do was
to absorb it into their tributary and predatory
system and even to the extent that
they integrated into what they had defeated militarily.
The Mongol Empire was also important because it
took these commercially and religiously interconnected worlds and
gave it more political integration now. They brought German miners to China.
They took Chinese doctors to Persia. They introduced carpets everywhere.
Lemons and carrots from Persia traded to China.
Noodles and playing cards transported to Europe.
But the very
nature of this kind of empire.
Of this model of conquest and expansion, did make it ephemeral.
For, not long after the second generation of
Genghis Khan's sons, and the successions that would ensue.
The empire soon collapsed. And broke apart.
But for a moment,
at least, under the Mongols, there was a political form of integration that layered
onto the economic and cultural integration that we talked about earlier.
So we could ask ourselves, were the Mongol conquests the
events that kicked off what we might now call globalization?