World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 12: Civilizations of East Asia

Mon, Dec 2, 2013

26. Tue, Dec 3, 2013

There's a story: a boy, born to a great destiny, was disinherited and not permitted to rule his father's clan. Surviving the wilderness without a tribe, perhaps captured as a slave, he eventually began to put together a new clan, buying the services of some warriors with a fur coat. However he arose, the man called Temujin arose from obscurity among an obscure people to become a conquerer everyone had heard of and everyone feared, the Genghis Khan: ruler of all.

This title, though not strictly accurate, was hardly an idle boast. The Mongols, at their peak, ruled nine million square miles (roughly sixteen percent of all land on earth) and around one hundred million people. Only the British Empire was ever larger, and that was not built in the space of a lifetime; growing faster than even the Muslims, the Mongols swept out of their homeland under Temujin and in less than a century ruled from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.

How did they do it? Much of it can be attributed to the drive of Temujin and his heirs, who first had the dream of uniting all the Mongol tribes and then simply never thought to stop. Some of it is because most of their conquests were over fairly disorganized city-states — but then, they also conquered China. More answers still lie in the Mongol way of life. Most essential was the incredible discipline of the Mongol forces, which proved key for winning battles and long-range movements.

• The Mongols were nomadic to begin with; how did that influence their rapid sweep? What advantages do nomadic peoples, especially highly mobile ones, have over agricultural civilizations? How might their nomadic nature have given the Mongols their skill and discipline?
• Strange as it may seem to us today, with all our technology so dependent on civilization, in many ways the Mongols just had better equipment than their enemies, particularly the horse-bow. In what ways might technology, particularly military technology, prove crucial for empires?
• Though the Mongols could be brutal, they also could be remarkably adaptive. Whenever they captured a city, they would sort out all the skilled professionals and recruit them into the army, leading to Chinese engineers serving as their siege engineers in all subsequent conquests. The Mongols could also be fairly tolerant rulers. We have already discussed how tolerance could strengthen an empire; what do you think about a people so prone to rape and massacre also being religiously tolerant — and even curious? How do you think the conquered peoples responded to these conflicting tendencies?
• Finally, how did the Mongols collapse? What lessons can we learn from the fall of this vast empire? The Mongols were what historian's jargon call a "lateral ethnie," meaning a group that spreads out thinly over a large area and a large foreign population; is there any lesson in that?

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