Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World book cover

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Paperback – March 22, 2005

by
Price
$13.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
312
Publisher
Crown
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0609809648
Dimensions
5.2 x 0.73 x 7.95 inches
Weight
9.3 ounces

Description

"There is very little time for reading in my new job. But of the few books I've read, my favourite is Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (Crown Publishers, New York). It's a fascinating book portraying Genghis Khan in a totally new light. It shows that he was a great secular leader, among other things." —Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India “Reads like the Iliad . . . Part travelogue, part epic narrative.” — Washington Post “It’s hard to think of anyone else who rose from such inauspicious beginnings to something so awesome, except maybe Jesus.” — Harper’s “Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongol’s reputation, and it takes wonderful learned detours. . . . Well written and full of suprises.” — Kirkus Reviews “Weatherford is a fantastic storyteller. . . . [His] portrait of Khan is drawn with sufficiently self-complicating depth. . . . Weatherford’s account gives a generous view of the Mongol conqueror at his best and worst.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-?ve years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made. Jack Weatherford is the New York Times bestsellingxa0author of Genghis Khan and the Making ofxa0the Modern World;xa0Indian Givers: Howxa0the Indians of the Americasxa0Transformed the World;xa0The Secret History of the Mongol Queens ; and The History of Money ,xa0among other acclaimedxa0books. A specialist in tribal peoples, he was for manyxa0years a professor of anthropology at Macalaster College in Minnesota andxa0divides his time between the USxa0and Mongolia. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Blood Clot There is fire in his eyes and light in his face. The Secret History of the Mongols Of the thousands of cities conquered by the Mongols, history only mentions one that Genghis Khan deigned to enter. Usually, when victory became assured, he withdrew with his court to a distant and more pleasant camp while his warriors completed their tasks. On a March day in 1220, the Year of the Dragon, the Mongol conqueror broke with his peculiar tradition by leading his cavalry into the center of the newly conquered city of Bukhara, one of the most important cities belonging to the sultan of Khwarizm in what is now Uzbekistan. Although neither the capital nor the major commercial city, Bukhara occupied an exalted emotional position throughout the Muslim world as Noble Bukhara, the center of religious piety known by the epithet "the ornament and delight to all Islam." Knowing fully the propaganda value of his actions by conquering and entering the city, Genghis Khan rode triumphantly through the city gates, past the warren of wooden houses and vendors' stalls, to the large cluster of stone and brick buildings at the center of the city. His entry into Bukhara followed the successful conclusion of possibly the most audacious surprise attack in military history. While one part of his army took the direct route from Mongolia to attack the sultan's border cities head-on, he had secretly pulled and pushed another division of warriors over a distance longer than any other army had ever covered--two thousand miles of desert, mountains, and steppe--to appear deep behind enemy lines, where least expected. Even trade caravans avoided the Kyzyl Kum, the fabled Red Desert, by detouring hundreds of miles to avoid it; and that fact, of course, was precisely why Genghis Khan chose to attack from that direction. By befriending the nomads of the area, he was able to lead his army on a hitherto unknown track through the stone and sand desert. His targeted city of Bukhara stood at the center of a fertile oasis astride one of the tributaries of the Amu Darya inhabited mostly by Tajik or Persian people, but ruled by Turkic tribesmen in the newly created empire of Khwarizm, one of the many transitory empires of the era. The sultan of Khwarizm had, in a grievously fatal mistake, provoked the enmity of Genghis Khan by looting a Mongol trade caravan and disfiguring the faces of Mongol ambassadors sent to negotiate peaceful commerce. Although nearly sixty years old, when Genghis Khan heard of the attack on his men, he did not hesitate to summon his disciplined and experienced army once again to their mounts and to charge down the road of war. In contrast to almost every major army in history, the Mongols traveled lightly, without a supply train. By waiting until the coldest months to make the desert crossing, men and horses required less water. Dew also formed during this season, thereby stimulating the growth of some grass that provided grazing for horses and attracted game that the men eagerly hunted for their own sustenance. Instead of transporting slow-moving siege engines and heavy equipment with them, the Mongols carried a faster-moving engineer corps that could build whatever was needed on the spot from available materials. When the Mongols came to the first trees after crossing the vast desert, they cut them down and made them into ladders, siege engines, and other instruments for their attack. When the advance guard spotted the first small settlement after leaving the desert, the rapidly moving detachment immediately changed pace, moving now in a slow, lumbering procession, as though they were merchants coming to trade, rather than with the speed of warriors on the attack. The hostile force nonchalantly ambled up to the gates of the town before the residents realized who they were and sounded an alarm. Upon emerging unexpectedly from the desert, Genghis Khan did not race to attack Bukhara immediately. He knew that no reinforcements could leave the border cities under attack by his army, and he therefore had time to play on the surprise in a tortured manipulation of public fear and hope. The objective of such tactics was simple and always the same: to frighten the enemy into surrendering before an actual battle began. By first capturing several small towns in the vicinity, Genghis Khan's army set many local people to flight toward Bukhara as refugees who not only filled the city but greatly increased the level of terror in it. By striking deeply behind the enemy lines, the Mongols immediately created havoc and panic throughout the kingdom. As the Persian chronicler Ata-Malik Juvaini described his approach, when the people saw the countryside all around them "choked with horsemen and the air black as night with the dust of cavalry, fright and panic overcame then, and fear and dread prevailed." In preparing the psychological attack on a city, Genghis Khan began with two examples of what awaited the people. He offered generous terms of surrender to the outlying communities, and the ones that accepted the terms and joined the Mongols received great leniency. In the words of the Persian chronicler, "whoever yields and submits to them is safe and free from the terror and disgrace of their severity." Those that refused received exceptionally harsh treatment, as the Mongols herded the captives before them to be used as cannon fodder in the next attack. The tactic panicked the Turkic defenders of Bukhara. Leaving only about five hundred soldiers behind to man the citadel of Bukhara, the remaining army of twenty thousand soldiers fled in what they thought was still time before the main Mongol army arrived. By abandoning their fortress and dispersing in flight, they sprung Genghis Khan's trap, and the Mongol warriors, who were already stationed in wait for the fleeing soldiers, cut them down at a nearly leisurely pace. The civilian population of Bukhara surrendered and opened the city gates, but the small contingent of defiant soldiers remained in their citadel, where they hoped that the massive walls would allow them to hold out indefinitely against any siege. To more carefully assess the overall situation, Genghis Khan made his unprecedented decision to enter the city. One of his first acts on reaching the center of Bukhara, or upon accepting the surrender of any people, was to summon them to bring fodder for his horses. Feeding the Mongol warriors and their horses was taken as a sign of submission by the conquered; more important, by receiving the food and fodder, Genghis Khan signaled his acceptance of the people as vassals entitled to Mongol protection as well as subject to his command. From the time of his central Asian conquests, we have one of the few written descriptions of Genghis Khan, who was about sixty years old. The Persian chronicler Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, who was far less kindly disposed toward the Mongols than the chronicler Juvaini, described him as "a man of tall stature, of vigorous build, robust in body, the hair on his face scanty and turned white, with cats' eyes, possessed of dedicated energy, discernment, genius, and understanding, awe-striking, a butcher, just, resolute, an overthrower of enemies, intrepid, sanguinary, and cruel." Because of his uncanny ability to destroy cities and conquer armies many times the size of his own, the chronicler also goes on to declare that Genghis Khan was "adept at magic and deception, and some of the devils were his friends." Eyewitnesses reported that upon reaching the center of Bukhara, Genghis Khan rode up to the large mosque and asked if, since it was the largest building in the city, it was the home of the sultan. When informed that it was the house of God, not the sultan, he said nothing. For the Mongols, the one God was the Eternal Blue Sky that stretched from horizon to horizon in all four directions. God presided over the whole earth; he could not be cooped up in a house of stone like a prisoner or a caged animal, nor, as the city people claimed, could his words be captured and confined inside the covers of a book. In his own experience, Genghis Khan had often felt the presence and heard the voice of God speaking directly to him in the vast open air of the mountains in his homeland, and by following those words, he had become the conqueror of great cities and huge nations. Genghis Khan dismounted from his horse in order to walk into the great mosque, the only such building he is known to have ever entered in his life. Upon entering, he ordered that the scholars and clerics feed his horses, freeing them from further danger and placing them under his protection, as he did with almost all religious personnel who came under his control. Next, he summoned the 280 richest men of the city to the mosque. Despite his limited experience inside city walls, Genghis Khan still had a keen grasp of the working of human emotion and sentiment. Before the assembled men in the mosque, Genghis Khan took a few steps up the pulpit stairs, then turned to face the elite of Bukhara. Through interpreters, he lectured them sternly on the sins and misdeeds of their sultan and themselves. It was not the common people who were to blame for these failures; rather, "it is the great ones among you who have committed these sins. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." He then gave each rich man into the control of one of his Mongol warriors, who would go with him and collect his treasure. He admonished his rich prisoners not to bother showing them the wealth above the ground; the Mongols could find that without assistance. He wanted them to guide them only to their hidden or buried treasure. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • NEW YORK TIMES
  • BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in
  • Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan
  • .
  • The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

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Most Helpful Reviews

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Interesting, but with a surprising number of factual errors

For the most part, I enjoyed this book. I discovered a great deal about the Mongols and I believe that the author proves his basic case that the Mongol Empire provided an unprecedented flow of goods and ideas between East and West.

Unfortunately, the author is so enthusiastic about promoting the achievements of the Mongols that he often ventures into hyperbole, and worse, miss-statements of fact, especially about the histories of the nations he is comparing to the Mongols. This undercuts his credibility.

Some examples:

The author's claims that the Mongol invasions introduced wearing trousers in battle to the West. In fact, trousers were popular among the Celts (including the Britons) for thousands of years, as they were among invading "barbarians" such as Goths and the Parthians. The Greeks and Romans wore kilts, but many of their neighbors wore trousers long before the Mongols.

The author says that in World War II, the Red Army was imitating the Mongol tactic of feigned retreat when they "lured" the German army deep into Russia to destroy it. In fact, Stalin repeatedly ordered his generals to stand fast and not give an inch. The reason the Red Army repeatedly fell back was because they were repeatedly beaten. This is not an esoteric point. How could a professor writing history on a global scale not know this?

The author says that the last Mogul Emperor's sons were executed in India so that Queen Victoria could take the Imperial title. This is just plain silly. The Emperor himself was sent into exile with other family members. His sons were executed for their purported roles in the Sepoy Rebellion as part of a bloody reprisal. There is no evidence that the motivation for this was to clear the way for Queen Victoria to assume the imperial title -- 20 years later.

There are so many more examples of this kind of factual error and false analogy that at times the book feels more like an overheated term paper by a sophomore stretching a point than the product of a learned professor. Such errors make me wonder how much I should trust the author's other pronouncements in areas that I'm not so familiar with.

The fact that the author is also prone to needlessly repeat himself doesnt help his case. He cites the fact that his source is the "Secret History of the Mongols" so often that I felt like I should be reading that book instead. Maybe I will
356 people found this helpful
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Good account, some flaws

This is a well-written account of Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols who conquered an amazing chunk of real estate. Weatherford debunks the nonsense about "millions" killed in cities of 100,000, and so forth, and correctly notes a lot of this came from Mongol propaganda intended to scare people into submission.

The best thing in the book, to my taste, is Weatherford's own knowledge from anthropological on-the-ground research. He knows the steppe and the feel of a Mongol horse under him. He can thus get a real perspective on how the Mongols actually experienced the world (like the great old-timers--Pozdnyev, Curtin--but unlike many modern Mongolists). Next best is his proper crediting of the Mongols for introducing new knowledge all over Eurasia--gunpowder and printing and much else to Europe, Greco-Persian-Arab medicine and foodways to China.

The worst is his inattention to detail. He makes some astonishing errors. Some reviewers have picked out a few. He retails the old chestnut (reportedly from a romantic novel) that the Mongols introduced noodles from China to Europe. No, Europe had them 800 years earlier. Worse is his repeating (p. 87) the old nonsense about the Mongols eating raw meat warmed between their thighs and the horses' backs. This factoid was spun by Ammianus Marcellinus, talking about steppe nomads centuries before the Mongols. It was almost certainly wrong then, and it is quite certainly wrong for the Mongols. The Mongols had the good sense to avoid raw meat, especially dirty raw meat.

So, read with caution. If this book whets your appetite, the next step is the books by Paul Ratchnevsky (on Genghis) and Morris Rossabi (on his successors and their world). And you might even tackle the Secret History, now made available (though expensive) by the indefatigable Igor de Rachewilz, who is properly acknowledged by Weatherford.
320 people found this helpful
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In need of a good editor

As Strunk and White advise in the classic guide to writing, _The Elements of Style_, "Do not overstate. When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise."

I wanted to like this book, because I find Genghis Khan and his empire to be fascinating, and yet the author so completely overstates the significance of the Mongols that he loses all credibility, and pollutes an otherwise highly readable and interesting set of facts with so much fiction that it is often difficult to distinguish the two. For example, he claims in the introduction that the Mongols had founded the first unified nations of Korea and China, apparently ignorant of the fact that Korea had been unified since AD 668, and that China was first unified by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Similarly, he states on p. 237 that "[the Renaissance] was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture." Although the evidence for Greek and Roman influence on the Renaissance is overwhelming, the evidence for Mongol influence is flimsy at best. The more outsized the claim, the less evidence the author seems to provide.

Furthermore, he tries to give the Mongols credit for inspiring Renaissance art, which he calls a hybrid of Eastern and Western styles; he gives the Mongols credit for disseminating Arabic and Indian mathematics (the Arabs themselves had disseminated Indian mathematics throughout the civilized world, long before the Mongols); he gives the Mongols credit for introducing the compass to the West (the compass was mentioned in Alexander Neckham's De Naturis Rerum, written in 1190, before Genghis Khan had even ventured out of Mongolia); and he gives the Mongols credit for inventing the Silk Road, which had already existed for thousands of years.

What the book desperately needs are a fact-checker and responsible editor to curb the author's literary excesses. The author clearly sympathizes with the Mongols and wants to promote their case as responsible bearers of civilization. His biases are so blinding, that he frequently makes irrelevant comparisons to the worst excesses of the Catholic Inquisition to try to justify the mass slaughter of the Mongols, and even tries to deny the scale of Mongol genocides altogether, lamely asserting (p. 118), "It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumber the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them." The gigantic flaw in logic is that the Mongols never faced odds of 50-to-1 at any one moment, but rather wiped out city after city in a process that took many years. His claim the the people could "have merely run away" is laughable, given his constant reminders that the Mongol cavalry were the fastest and most efficient army of the day. He could just as easily have applied the same ludicrous argument to any other historical genocide in order to deny their scale and seriousness.

I still like the subject of Genghis Khan, and Weatherford has whetted my appetite: I may eventually pick up one of the other, more serious and scholarly books on the topic. However, I will never again make the mistake of reading anything written by Mr. Weatherford.
212 people found this helpful
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In need of a good editor

As Strunk and White advise in the classic guide to writing, _The Elements of Style_, "Do not overstate. When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise."

I wanted to like this book, because I find Genghis Khan and his empire to be fascinating, and yet the author so completely overstates the significance of the Mongols that he loses all credibility, and pollutes an otherwise highly readable and interesting set of facts with so much fiction that it is often difficult to distinguish the two. For example, he claims in the introduction that the Mongols had founded the first unified nations of Korea and China, apparently ignorant of the fact that Korea had been unified since AD 668, and that China was first unified by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Similarly, he states on p. 237 that "[the Renaissance] was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture." Although the evidence for Greek and Roman influence on the Renaissance is overwhelming, the evidence for Mongol influence is flimsy at best. The more outsized the claim, the less evidence the author seems to provide.

Furthermore, he tries to give the Mongols credit for inspiring Renaissance art, which he calls a hybrid of Eastern and Western styles; he gives the Mongols credit for disseminating Arabic and Indian mathematics (the Arabs themselves had disseminated Indian mathematics throughout the civilized world, long before the Mongols); he gives the Mongols credit for introducing the compass to the West (the compass was mentioned in Alexander Neckham's De Naturis Rerum, written in 1190, before Genghis Khan had even ventured out of Mongolia); and he gives the Mongols credit for inventing the Silk Road, which had already existed for thousands of years.

What the book desperately needs are a fact-checker and responsible editor to curb the author's literary excesses. The author clearly sympathizes with the Mongols and wants to promote their case as responsible bearers of civilization. His biases are so blinding, that he frequently makes irrelevant comparisons to the worst excesses of the Catholic Inquisition to try to justify the mass slaughter of the Mongols, and even tries to deny the scale of Mongol genocides altogether, lamely asserting (p. 118), "It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumber the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them." The gigantic flaw in logic is that the Mongols never faced odds of 50-to-1 at any one moment, but rather wiped out city after city in a process that took many years. His claim the the people could "have merely run away" is laughable, given his constant reminders that the Mongol cavalry were the fastest and most efficient army of the day. He could just as easily have applied the same ludicrous argument to any other historical genocide in order to deny their scale and seriousness.

I still like the subject of Genghis Khan, and Weatherford has whetted my appetite: I may eventually pick up one of the other, more serious and scholarly books on the topic. However, I will never again make the mistake of reading anything written by Mr. Weatherford.
212 people found this helpful
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Schlock history

The Mongols were an illiterate steppe tribe that got a taste of civilization after conquering the semi-settled and more well-to-do Jurched tribe of northeastern China. Genghis Khan and his followers instituted a sort of pyramid scheme encouraging more tribes to join them on their wars to gain more loot based on a promise that the spoils would be divided in equal shares. A key requirement of what the author describes as their "legal system" was to institute rules that would stop the tribes from fighting among one another for the limited resources available on the steppe (loot and women) so that no personal animosity or rivalries would hinder their ever-widening attacks on the rest of the world. Among the spoils were the educated elite of the Middle East and parts of Europe, whom the Mongols either took for themselves as slaves or had sold on the slave markets.

Reports from eyewitnesses say that the Mongols were ruthless, barbaric and coldhearted. Genghis Khan started out life by killing his half-brother out of pique and things didn't much improve after that. His favorite way of executing his friends was to break their spines and leave them alive to die of starvation in the wilderness. Within three generations the Mongols had almost entirely killed each other off, and that, as we say, was that. They left nothing for future generations in the way of culture, art, architecture, language, or anything else.

The author is strangely intent on redeeming the reputation of these killers. He contends that the Mongols didn't murder as many as were reported by eyewitnesses. The sum total of his evidence? If as many people actually lived in the cities sacked by the Mongols as were reported killed, "they could easily have overwhelmed" their invaders (p. 118). This is just after we have learned about the Mongols' superior gunpowder, cavalry, feint tactics and propaganda. Do we learn anything from this author about population estimates in Genghis Khan's time that would support this speculation? Of course not.

Also unmentioned are the number of rapes, as modern science finds that 60 million people alive today are Khan's descendants. The author's reports of historical facts are radically distorted by his desired conclusion. One of Genghis Khan's first major acts was to order the killing of all males of the Tatar tribe who were "taller than a cart linchpin." (p. 51) The author has an elaborate and completely unsupported explanation of the ostensible centrality of the linchpin to Tatar civilization, thus turning a genocide into nothing more than a culture war.

Reading this book, you would also think that the entire educated elite of the western world made its way to obscure Mongol capitols because of the superiority of the Mongol way of life. The reality, that they were captured and enslaved, goes unmentioned. The Mongol spoils system? It is evidence of "modern civic citizenship" (p. 58). Further, the Mongol looting was actually legitimate because it was "redressing [an] imbalance of goods" between those who wanted to steal them (Mongols) and those who had actually earned them (the rest of the world) (p. 77).

Remaining in his hyper-romanticized haze until the very end, the author contends that the reason Genghis Khan "spen[t] his life attacking outsiders" is that he was actually forced to fight "to keep his own people safe from outside attack" (p. 271). Apparently he suffered severe psychological damage from an attack by a competing tribe that temporarily stole one of his many wives. The author goes so far as to "find" the site of this kidnapping in Mongolia and place a shrine there, since after all, this event precipitated all of the positive historical developments described above. And anyway, even if Khan **was** a ruthless killer, the end justifies the means, since the result of his attacks was a "shattering [of] the protective walls that isolated one civilization from another" (p. 267). I'm sure the families of the millions of slaughtered or enslaved Asians and Europeans were deeply grateful.
121 people found this helpful
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Ghengis Khan; More Important than you probably thought

Totally changed my perception of geopolitics-really! This book, thoroughly researched, blasts the myths surrounding Ghenghis Khan and demonstrates his wisdom and courage as a leader. Perhaps more importantly, it contributes invaluable knowledge about the role of the Mongols in reshaping the world to forge trade routes, developing societies where many religions coexisted peacefully and exploding many of our prior myths about the savagery of the Mongol Horde. One of the most fascinating books on history I have read.
76 people found this helpful
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An example of a bad book

Oh, my....
This book is so bad it is not even funny.
Here are a few quotes:

"In Easter Europe, the Mongols united a dozen Slavic principalities and cities into one large Russian state.
In eastern Asia, over a span of of three generations, they created the country of China..."

"As the Mongols expanded their rule, they created countries such as Korea and India that have survived to modern times in approximately the same borders...."

"He (Genghis Khan) lowered taxes for everyone and abolished them altogether for doctors, teachers, priests, and educational institutions."

The above quotes are form within the first ten pages of the book.
I could not force myself to read on any further.
Sorry about that.
55 people found this helpful
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Don't waste you money.....

...on this Mongol apologetic. I only give it one star because the option of zero stars or a negative rating does not exist. I'm not going to rehash the criticisms of H. Yang and Reader in their reviews. I agree with their assesments. The book is full of inaccuracies and contradictions. For instance, on page 223 the author asserts "Khubilai Khan made the strategic decision {in approx. 1267} to transport food within his empire primarily by ship because he realized how much cheaper and more efficient water transportation...was......" The brilliant KK made this illuminating insight approximately 3000 years after the seagoing people of the Mediteranean had begun transporting bulk goods by ship as the Athenians did to import grain from the Black Sea region. But to Weatherford it was a novel insight from a Mongolian genius. Never mind that earlier on the same page he points out that the Mongols ..."expanded and lengthened the Grand Canal that already connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers..." Why would the Chinese have built the canal in the first place if they did not recognize that water transportation was more efficient? But to Weatherford all that is good, novel and useful is directly attributable to the Mongols. Heck, if the feckless Christian Europeans had embraced Mongol domination and the peoples subject to the Mongol domination had not shortsightedly thrown off the misnamed "Tartar yoke" as soon as they had the chance we probably would have had supercomputers and the internet by the 16th century under the benign tutelage of the inherently brilliant Mongols.

The Mongol Empire as described by Weatherford can easily be compared to the Nazis using Weatherford's own words. Page 100 to 101: "In all the years of raiding and trading no leader had brought back to his homeland nearly the amount of goods as Genghis Khan. But vast as the quantities were, the appetites of his own people were insatiable....The more he conquered the more he had to conquer."

A better assesment of the effects of the Mongol conquest on one subject people, the Russians, comes from Chapter 1 of Peter Hopkirk's Book "The Great Game" (5 stars). "For well over two centuries the Russians were to stagnate and suffer under the Mongol yoke-or the Golden Horde, as these merchants of death caled themselves...In addition to the appalling material destruction wrought by the invaders, their predatory rule was to leave the Russian economy in ruins, bring commerce and industry to a halt, and reduce the Russian people to serfdom."
49 people found this helpful
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Absurdity

This is primarily a work of fiction. Although references are made to sources for the basic information, the book is written as if the author were an observer present at the various events described, including details of the emotions felt by the participants. It is not a valid history.
41 people found this helpful
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If you are expecting something new, it is not in this book

Like most authors on this subject matter, WEATHERFORD focused his research of the Mongol military campaigns in the Middle East and the brief but devastating incursion in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, he too, like other authors, lacked sufficient research on the Chinese campaign, which ended in 1279 under Kublai, and was the lengthiest of all Mongol military campaigns. He also misinterpreted the Chinese campaign in more ways than one, and provided little information in terms of the political interactions between China and Mongolia during the 13th century.

The most destructive episode of medieval warfare occurred not in Europe, the Middle East, or the Crusades, but in China proper of the 1200s. Although initiated by Genghis, the Mongol-China War did not end until the reign of Kublai. The campaign included the greatest siege in pre-modern military history, where the fall of the fortified city of Xiangyang in 1273 served as a turning point of the Mongol-China war, and ended with the capitulation of the Sung Dynasty six years later (WEATHERFORD placed a three month siege by the Mongols as being protracted, yet he dismissed the fact that the siege of Xiangyang had lasted six years). Not surprisingly, the campaign drained vast amounts of resources, and millions of lives. The Mongol's China campaign also marked the very first time in history where guns, cannons & other types of firearms were used extensively. Yet, this event in history was ignored by WEATHERFORD, as he focused on the administrative reforms of Yuan China over previous Chinese dynasties, but not the military campaigns that made the reforms possible.

WEATHERFORD also ignored the episode of alliance between Southern Sung and the Mongols as they warred against the Northern Chinese dynasties, the Xi-Xia and Jin. Kublai did not complete the conquest of China out of personal ambitions alone. Rather, with the fall of Xi-Xia and Jin, the Sung Dynasty remained a looming threat to the Mongols. As the Sung continue to demand territories and other compensations, the Mongols had every reason to be cautious of a potential Sung attack from the rear. Kublai had to endure extensive campaigns to subdue northern India, South Asia, even launching an invasion against Japan to completely isolate and eventually terminate any supply and/or trade routes the Song Dynasty possessed. All these efforts were considered necessary in order to subjugate then the most powerful empire on Earth, an empire that accounted for 80% of the world's GDP!

In another blunt assumption, WEATHERFORD suggested that literacy amongst the Chinese were restricted to government officials and gentries. But in fact, China boasted the most flexible system of social mobility and the most sophisticated bureaucracy in the world during the Middle Ages. The Chinese bureaucracy never imposed a system to limit literacy amongst the peasantry. Whenever given an opportunity, peasant families sent their sons to private academies for an education. Technologies such as block printing also encouraged the distribution of written materials, thus promoting literacy. Voluntary civil examinations across China would then act as a measure of talent amongst learned peoples, where the chosen few are ranked and stationed in bureaucratic posts according to their skill. It is not surprising to find many Chinese officials with humble beginnings.

Moreover, WEATHERFORD seemed to imply the rise & subsequent popularity of Peking opera was due to Mongol administration. In fact, the rise of Peking opera was due to educated Chinese having no place to utilize their skills because the Mongols had abandoned civil examination & post selection altogether. Thus one of the few venues for learned men was writing opera scripts and other literature to vent their frustration against the government!

WEATHERFORD also wrote that the Chinese were `amazed' at some of the qualities of their enemies in a tone as to suggest that the Chinese were somehow `unfamiliar' with the Mongols. There is nothing further from the truth. The annals of Chinese military history indicated frequent warfare against the Nomads to the North. As early as the Qin Dynasty (221 BC - 207 BC), expeditions were directed against the Huns (ancestors to the Mongols) with notable successes achieved in later Han (202 BC - 220 AD) and Tang (618 AD - 907 AD) dynasties. Conflicts between the Chinese and Mongols continued until the last Imperial Dynasty of China, the Qing (1616 AD - 1912 AD). Among all Mongol rivals, the Chinese Empire had the most familiarity with the Mongols, and nominally best prepared for war against them. No wonder Genghis Khan, upon his deathbed, would instruct his descendants to complete the conquest of China, as his last will on Earth.
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