Download PDF | Genghis Khan And The Mongol Empire ( World History) , By Don Nardo , Gale, Cengage Learning 2011.
Pages: 98
Foreword
Each year, on the first day of school, nearly every history teacher faces the task of explaining why his or her students should study history. Many reasons have been given. One is that lessons exist in the past from which contemporary society can benefit and learn. Another is that exploration of the past allows us to see the origins of our customs, ideas, and institutions. Concepts such as democracy, ethnic conflict, or even things as trivial as fashion or mores, have historical roots.
Reasons such as these impress few students, however. If anything, these explanations seem remote and dull to young minds. Yet history is anything but dull. And therein lies what is perhaps the most compelling reason for studying history: History is filled with great stories. The classic themes of literature and drama— love and sacrifice, hatred and revenge, injustice and betrayal, adversity and overcoming adversity – fill the pages of history books, feeding the imagination as well as any of the great works of fiction do. The story of the Children’s Crusade, for example, is one of the most tragic in history. In 1212 Crusader fever hit Europe.
A call went out to the pope that all good Christians should journey to Jerusalem to drive out the hated Muslims and return the city to Christian control. Heeding the call, thousands of children made the journey. Parents bravely allowed many children to go, and entire communities were inspired by the faith of these small Crusaders. Unfortunately, many boarded ships captained by slave traders, who enthusiastically sold the children into slavery as soon as they arrived at their destination. Thousands died from disease, exposure, and starvation on the long march across Europe to the Mediterranean Sea. Others perished at sea.
Another story, from a modern and more familiar place, offers a soul-wrenching view of personal humiliation but also the ability to rise above it. Hatsuye Egami was one of 110,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II. “Since yesterday we Japanese have ceased to be human beings,” he wrote in his diary. “We are numbers. We are no longer Egamis, but the number 23324. A tag with that number is on every trunk, suitcase and bag. Tags, also, on our breasts.” Despite such dehumanizing treatment, most internees worked hard to control their bitterness. They created workable communities inside the camps and demonstrated again and again their loyalty as Americans.
These are but two of the many stories from history that can be found in the pages of the Lucent Books World History series. All World History titles rely on Foreword ■ 5 sound research and verifiable evidence, and all give students a clear sense of time, place, and chronology through maps and time-lines as well as text. All titles include a wide range of authoritative perspectives that demonstrate the complexity of historical interpretation and sharpen the reader’s critical thinking skills. Formally documented quotations and annotated bibliographies enable students to locate and evaluate sources, often instantaneously via the Internet, and serve as valuable tools for further research and debate.
Finally, Lucent’s World History titles present rousing good stories, featuring vivid primary source quotations drawn from unique, sometimes obscure sources such as diaries, public records, and contemporary chronicles. In this way, the voices of participants and witnesses as well as important biographers and historians bring the study of history to life. As we are caught up in the lives of others, we are reminded that we too are characters in the ongoing human saga, and we are better prepared for our own roles.
Introduction
In the thirteenth century, Mongolia, the region of eastern Asia lying north of China, became the launching point for a series of events that shocked and forever changed the world. Under their leader, who came to be known as Genghis Khan, Mongol armies pushed outward from their ancestral homeland. Like an unstoppable wave, they swept across the continent, destroying or seizing control of city after city and nation after nation. China fell to them. So did central Asia and much of the Middle East. And eventually, led by the Khan’s successors, the fearsome invaders attacked Japan in the east and Europe in the west.
In the span of a mere two centuries, hundreds of thousands of people died and tens of millions were conquered or displaced. Partly for these reasons, later generations developed an extremely unflattering image of the Mongols. Even well into the twentieth century, most saw them as a primitive, barbaric people who raped and pillaged without mercy. In this view, they and their most famous leader, Genghis Khan, demolished everything in their path without a thought for preserving the fruits of civilization. Both Good and Bad Qualities Although this ugly portrait of the Mongols does contain some grains of truth, more recent studies have shown that it is also exaggerated and misleading in a number of ways. In particular, modern scholars have significantly reevaluated and refurbished the image of Genghis Khan. They do not dispute that he was a ruthless conqueror responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Yet, some of these experts point out, so were a number of larger-than-life Western military leaders, including Greece’s Alexander the G re a t a n d F r a n c e ’ s N a p o l é o n Bonaparte. And no one calls Alexander or Napoléon a barbarian. Rather, such leaders are usually described as having both bad and good qualities, with some of the good ones canceling out, or at least balancing, the bad ones.
Alexander, for instance, was undoubtedly an arrogant and cold-blooded dictator. Yet he also built dozens of new cities and fostered cultural exchanges, trade, and intermarriage between Greeks and the peoples he conquered. Similarly, the reevaluations of Genghis Khan reveal him as a sometimes callous and cruel leader who also possessed certain positive qualities. Granted, he was not as noble and lofty as the renowned English writer Geoffrey Chaucer made him out to be. In his poem The Canterbury Tales, penned in about 1380, Chaucer presents a highly romanticized version of the Mongol leader, whom he calls Cambinskan. Chaucer writes, There was nowhere in the wide world known So excellent a lord in everything; He lacked in naught belonging to a king. As for the faith to which he had been born, He kept its law to which he had been sworn; And therewith he was hardy, rich, and wise . . . [And] in warfare ambitious As any bachelor knight of all his house.
Of handsome person, he was fortunate, And kept always so well his royal state That there was nowhere such another man.1 Although Genghis Khan was not the idealized European monarch pictured by Chaucer, the writer correctly drew a portrait of a great ruler rather than of a pitiless, thoughtless savage. Indeed, a reading of the available evidence shows the famous Mongol to be a leader of amazing talent, versatility, and at times wisdom. Further, these qualities did not emerge solely on the battlefield, where he frequently showed brilliance. He also demonstrated highly effective political skills and vision, created a strict but fair law code, and championed religious freedom for all. Moreover, no great or wise ruler or thinker taught Genghis Khan these skills and abilities. They came to him— the product of a poverty-stricken upbringing on the edge of the civilized world—quite naturally. Along with the awe he inspired in millions of people, such abilities allowed him to achieve remarkable deeds, including carving out the largest land empire in human history.
One of his chief modern biographers writes, In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a freetrade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level … the scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenges the limits of imagination and taxes the resources of scholarly explanation.2 Deciphering the Mongols’ Secrets It is only natural to ask why the Mongols and their greatest leader, Genghis Khan, were so thoroughly reevaluated in recent times. Why did their image as monstrous barbarians with no redeeming qualities give way to one of aggressive conquerors who balanced their warlike acts with numerous constructive policies and achievements? To be sure, for a long time peoples throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe routinely blamed the Mongol “destroyers” for their own shortcomings.
Soviet Russian leaders in the early twentieth century are a good example. When Russia fell behind Britain, the United States, and other Western countries in developing modern technologies, leaders claimed it was largely because of devastation wrought on Russia by the Mongols centuries before. Similarly, Chinese, Indian, and Arab leaders all cited centuries of Mongol brutality and oppression as a reason that they, too, were less technologically and militarily advanced than the West. Later, both the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein complained about the long-ago Mongol invasions of their lands; they also compared the intervention of U.S. troops in their countries between 1991 and 2003 to the those medieval invasions. Such arguments no longer carry much weight for two main reasons. First, some reliable old literary works that recorded the Mongols’ constructive deeds, as well as their destructive ones, surfaced in the twentieth century.
The most important is a work titled The Secret History of the Mongols. It is called “secret” because it was extremely difficult to decipher and for a long time remained mysterious. Although written in Chinese characters, each character stood for a sound in the Mongolian language of the thirteenth century. When the work was finally decoded and translated in the 1980s, it was clear that it had been composed by an anonymous Mongol author in the years immediately following Genghis Khan’s death in the early thirteenth century. Thus, the writer had witnessed at least some of the recent Mongol conquests firsthand. Although the text contains elements of folklore and is sometimes inconsistent, it also includes a wealth of factual and reliable information about Genghis Khan’s life and exploits and about Mongol culture in that era. One way that modern scholars can tell what is or is not reliable in the Secret History is to compare its statements and claims to those in other existing histories from other Asian lands and peoples. Another way is to conduct archaeological digs in Mongolia and surrounding regions.
Tombs, houses, weapons, human remains, and other artifacts can often verify if a claim made in a literary source is true or suspect. The Tingling of a Bell Such studies and artifacts are the second main reason that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were reevaluated in recent years. In 1990 the Soviet Union, ruled by a repressive Communist regime, collapsed. And Mongolia, which had long been under Soviet rule and cut off from the outside world, was suddenly free. Scholars from the United States and other Western nations hurried into that country and for the first time in the modern era began studying the Mongolians, their culture, and their historical sites and heritage up close.
This research, which is still ongoing, has produced a large amount of valuable information about the Mongol Empire and its creation by Genghis Khan. “Gradually,” recalls one of the researchers, anthropologist Jack Weatherford, “we pieced together the story [of Genghis Khan] as best we could with the evidence we had. By finding the places of [his] childhood, and retracing the path of events across the land, some misconceptions regarding his life could be immediately corrected.”3 In these ways, a truer and morebalanced view of the great Mongol leader’s deeds, both destructive and constructive, has emerged. In the words of distinguished University of London scholar George Lane, “Beneath the rhetoric and propaganda, behind the battles and massacres, hidden by the often self-generated myths and legends, the reality of the two centuries of Mongol ascendancy was often one of regeneration, creativity, and growth.”4
This new picture of Genghis Khan reveals that, although he invaded nations and slaughtered many of their inhabitants, he also remade them and set them on new historical paths, some of which eventually led them into the turbulent political and economic currents of the modern world. As Weatherford points out, Although he arose out of the ancient tribal past, Genghis Khan shaped the modern world of commerce, communication, and large secular [nonreligious] states more than any other individual. He was the thoroughly modern man in his mobilized and professional warfare and his commitment to global commerce and the rule of international secular law. … Like the tingling vibrations of a bell that we can still sense well after it has stopped ringing, Genghis Khan has long passed from the scene, but his influence continues to reverberate through our time.
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