← Dan Carlin Hardcore History Archives
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December 7, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. It's one small step for man. The events one giant leap for mankind. The figures not quite to the mooring mass from this time and place. I take pride in the words Ish bin ein, Dina, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. The deep questions. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, it's hardcore history. I have a book idea. For those of you out there who are desperately searching for a winning book idea. Maybe you're an author or a historian or just somebody looking for, you know, a niche that you can exploit. I've got your book idea right here. And I don't want to say that I'm promising you you're gonna make a lot of money with this idea. I am guaranteeing you you will get attention. You know how the book deal works. Sometimes you get your attention with the first book and you make your money off the second book. Whatever. You don't have to cut me in for any of it. The reason I'm giving this idea to you is because it's worthless to me. I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. Makes me a little sick just thinking about it. But there are people out there who have stronger stomachs than I have. If you're one of them, here's your idea. Go write a book about this little explored angle of the famous World War II story. Go write a book about the long term positive effects, you know, things that made our modern world better today of Nazi Germany, you know, the upside of the Third Reich, I guess you could say, you know, the things that we have today that make our life better, that never would have happened if there had never been a not off Hitler, right? Go write that book. You will do more radio interviews about it. You'll get more attention on the book circuit. You'll probably even have all these protesters outside getting news coverage, which then of course just advertises your book idea even more. Have fun with that and realize that if you have any trouble with it, you know, if you get a little backlash or something for obvious reasons, that it's just because you're ahead of your time. Somebody's going to write this book. Might not be for a couple of centuries, in which case you're going to pay a terrible price, of course, for being early, for being a visionary. Nonetheless, the way history works and the way history writing works pretty much guarantees that any gaping vacuum in a popular story will eventually be examined. You leave a piece of a story untouched for a while, and when every other angle of that story has been examined to death, somebody's going to look at that vacuum and go, hmm, nobody's written a book yet on this side of Nazi Germany. And the reason you know that this is true is because you can see it happening in every other area of history where there's any interest at all. Revisionist history is a classic term often used by people who are sneering at the idea they wish that whatever view of history was in vogue 200 years ago stays the view of history. And nobody ever changes that, because then you're messing with the way things really were. The way things really were, though, of course, are in part determined by people's viewpoints at the time. We've always talked about on this program, haven't we, about getting a little distance from events allows you to become a dispassionate observer, get a more three dimensional, you know, view of things where the emotion leached out of the story. Now, most of the time that's an advantage. Most of the time it allows you a dispassionate observer status, but it comes at a cost. You lose something in the story once the emotions are gone. The main thing you lose is any feeling of loss in terms of human life. Communist dictator Joseph Stalin so famously said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. And what he's emphasizing with that statement is that once you stop knowing these people you're talking about, once you stop having a connection to these dead people, they're not going to matter anymore. It just becomes part of the long train of casualty lists that makes up human history. Nobody weeps for people who died 500 years ago. You go write that upside of the Third Reich book today. And people who still feel the pain of the loss of loved ones in a still relatively recent situation, in the Holocaust and the many wars, obviously, that were fought regionally as part of this giant war, the second World War, those people are going to picket your book signings because they still are attached to the dead. If you don't write that book and it doesn't get written for 500 years, you're not going to have very many picketers outside by then. Those deaths are a statistic, and the story loses something because of it. The story loses the sense of evil and outrage that today wouldn't let you say good things about Adolf Hitler's day, because who cares about the good things? Look at the bad things he did the Reason maybe I feel so strongly about this is I specifically ran into this situation back in college. A professor who's still at the University of Colorado, where I was a history major, was the teacher who taught the Chinese history courses. And I'd taken a bunch of his courses, and I was going to write a paper, and I thought he was the closest advisor to really having a good feel for this subject because he was Chinese. The paper was on Mongol military tactics, the tactics of the famous Mongol army, probably the greatest army of all time. You know, in the 1200s, I spent a whole semester focusing on this paper. You know, really long research paper type thing, all on strategies and tactics and stratagems and the theories behind what they did and blah, blah. I mean, just an intense paper on military tactics. And I turned it into this professor. He called me in next week, we sat down, he handed me the paper with my grade on it. It was a whole grade lower than I thought it should be. And I'm leafing through the paper while he's talking to me, not really hearing what he's saying. And. And over and over, he's writing in red ink in various places on the paper. What about the civilians? What about the deaths? What about the executions? I mean, it was over and over and over. It was all about the nasty things that the Mongols did, specifically in this story, the nasty things that they did to the Chinese people, you know, his ancestors. And when I asked him why this was something that lowered my grade, because the paper didn't have anything to do with that. It was a paper on tactics and strategies. He said, how can you divorce the military that made all of that Holocaust possible from the Holocaust itself. He said, if you were writing a paper on the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War, would you leave out the Holocaust? And I said, yes, because it has nothing to do with the Holocaust. One is about this angle of history. The other is about the other angle. He says the Wehrmacht made the Holocaust possible. I remember leaving that meeting thinking that he was too emotionally wrapped up in this whole thing because he was ethnically Chinese, and he was feeling this pain and suffering left over from the terrible Mongol conquest. And he wasn't seeing this straight. The emotion somehow of Deaths in the 1200s was still affecting my ethnically Chinese history professor. That came back to me when I was reading some of the stuff for this story I want to talk about today. We're in a period of revisionist history with the subject as we are with most subjects. Everything's in flux, right? But we're In a particular swing of the pendulum. I'm sure it will correct itself over time on this subject where historians and others are writing about this subject and minimizing the deaths completely. Considering that this is one of the greatest incidents of human caused mortality in the planet's history, minimizing the deaths here would be like minimizing the deaths caused, you know, as a direct result of the existence of the Third Reich and the Nazis. It'd be like saying, yes, yes, yes, lots of people died and we all know that. But make sure you focus here on the economics in Central Europe. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My Chinese history professor would say, don't lose track of the Holocaust in this. Now let me tell you why it puts me in a weird position. It puts me in a weird position because I'm a fan of these people. I want to talk about the Mongols, these same people I wrote this paper on in college. I've been interested and fascinated with them forever. I have an affinity for them. The problem is the stuff I'm reading today has swung so much to the other side of the classic image of the Mongol rapist and pillager, you know, from 100, 200 years ago, that I almost don't recognize the people anymore. I'm reading books that brush off 30 to 50 million deaths. Brush them off. A sentence here or there saying, yes, the Mongols did great damage in certain places, but that's dwarfed by their impact on globalization and trade and commerce. And you would call it the classic trade off of empire. There was a great line that was uttered at the time of the Roman Empire about the Roman Empire where the person uttering the line said, the Romans create a wasteland and call it peace. Just because you killed all the people and burned down all the houses doesn't mean the trade routes won't run fantastically in that wasteland. These are some of the classic empire trade offs and many of the greatest historical figures, greatest in air quotes. There are people who get a lot of credit for their achievements based on stuff that happened that they never intended, byproducts of their historical deeds. And if you took away those byproducts, that was credit given to them by later historians, their whole demeanor looks different. Take Alexander the Great as a perfect example here. Alexander the Great is one of the most admired historical figures of all time. There are many historians today who run against the grain trying to point out to you that that is totally undeserved. When you read about the things that some guy like Alexander the Great gets credit for. It's all stuff that he never intended to have happen. I mean, you read your history books and Alexander takes this fantastic killer army, kills untold numbers of people, conquers all these territories for himself, basically his future glory. His Macedonian nobles loot, spoil, you name it, Achilles and glory. And this has the byproduct effect of spreading Greek culture, for example. Alexander's conquests are noted, for example, for spreading Hellenism to the east, which then triggers the Hellenistic age, which is one of the great, you know, ages of mankind. And so therefore, whatever Alexander did that was terrible as part of his conquests is somewhat balanced out by this positive stuff, by bringing, you know, suffering, drama and lifelike statues and artwork to Eastern Iran. I guess when historians do that, they are shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it. Afterwards, they're acting as though that was somehow Alexander's intention and that he deserves credit for that achievement. Instead, it's a byproduct of what he did and he never intended it at all. And if you take away all those byproducts from his achievement record, he ends up looking like a very different character. Take Julius Caesar for a second. Here's a guy that conquers modern day France, known then as Gaul, destroys the Celtic domination of the region, kills millions of people. It's been called a genocide before. Does it for his own personal gain, for money, for political power in Rome, for the rich class in Rome. And Julius Caesar is often credited for bringing modern day France into the Latin and Mediterranean cultural sphere, hooking them up to the, you know, grid of that era, so to speak, bringing culture and literacy and all these things to that area. If you went to a modern Frenchman today and said, was it worth it that the Romans killed all those Gallic peoples but brought you into the cultural sphere of, you know, Roman life? And I imagine many Frenchmen today would go, well, yes, certainly worth it to us in the long term to have that happen. Of course, the person you're interviewing on the street didn't know any of the people on the Celtic side who had to die to make that possible. How many Celtic deaths is the introduction to Mediterranean culture worth? How many Iranian deaths is the spread of Hellenism worth? Well, if you don't know them and it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago, the number of deaths really don't matter anymore. We're still benefiting from the fact that Hellenism spread and we didn't know any of those people who had to die. If you take away or exclude these byproducts of these historical conquerors, careers, things like the spread of Hellenism for Alexander. These conquerors end up looking a lot more like people who came on the scene and inflicted a horrific amount of killing and suffering on others for no good reason. Unless of course, you consider conquest a good reason all by itself. If the conqueror in question happened to be an ancestor of yours, you might indeed, you know, consider it a good thing. It's interesting how countries will associate their own greatness with the largest spread of their territory, geographically speaking, or the greatest domination over other peoples. You know, you look at a map and the high water mark of nations is when they encompass the most territories and have the most people under their control and, you know, win the most victories in battle, whatever it is. We still think of national greatness the way they thought of it in earlier times. We just aren't as enamored with the overt use of the powers it sometimes takes to achieve that. Historians are just as susceptible, by the way, to looking at the bright side of conquest. They will almost argue for the need sometimes for these people to appear on the scene. These people, in the minds of some historians over the ages, have been agents of change. There's a term used in economics that I think applies here, creative destruction. The best way I could think of to describe creative destruction's concept is when you think of an old forest, one that's rotting and bug infested and choking the light from the ground. And nothing can grow and it's just stagnant and dying and not going anywhere. It's a waste of time. And then a fire comes and burns it all down. The ashes regenerate the soil. The clearing allows the sun to reach the ground. The space that's been created allows new seedlings to pop up. And you create the conditions for new growth and regeneration. The way historians have written history casts certain individuals in that role of historical arsonist for a good cause. The world is stagnant. All these cultures are literally in rotting houses that just can't seem to fall from their own weight. And then Alexander the Great comes in with gasoline, lights the whole region on fire, and, you know, creates the conditions for the next world to sprout up. Julius Caesar does the same thing. All of a sudden, these people who never had any intention of starting a new world so it would be better for all of us, get credit for that. And as generations pass and we forget the names of all the people that died to make that possible, all of a sudden, these people who don't deserve maybe A good label attached to them. When you look at their motivations for what they did begin looking increasingly benign and great over the ages. The figure that I want to start this story with today falls into the same category. It's a category of people that you have to call great men. You know, in the classic sense, great in quotation marks. The great men of history. There was a historian, also a member of Britain's Parliament about a hundred years ago, named Lord Acton. Lord Acton had a great line about these people. He said, great men are almost always bad men. And what he means by that's pretty obvious. Let me ask a question to you this way. Would you be willing, under certain conditions, to order the killing of an innocent woman or child or old person? If you said that you would not be willing to do that, you are already off the potential great person list, at least in terms of world leaders. Even the most humanistic world leaders when it comes to their own personal outlook. I think of a guy like Jimmy Carter, a president that might have been so humanistic that he had a heart time doing his job. Sometimes a guy who builds Habitat for Humanity houses. Here's a guy who probably was responsible for less deaths as an American president than any other president I can think of in modern times. And yet there's still certainly quite a few people who died because Jimmy Carter made a decision one way or the other. I couldn't handle that. Hence I'm off the potential great person list. Some of these great people, the Alexanders, the Julius Caesars, and these people had to be willing to kill millions. How should history treat that? As Lord Acton said, great men are almost always bad men. But what happens if they're the ones who are historically necessary to go around lighting the dead wood of these decaying societies on fire so we could create the conditions for a new age? Enter the seed of this story. The seed of this story is one of the more exceptional human beings that's ever been born, especially in terms of achievement, certainly in terms of gifts as well. He's not the beneficiary of some wonderful luck in terms of his birth. He's not like Alexander the Great. Doesn't get the best army in the world handed to him instantly. I mean, have the plate all set. He's born into a clan of poor, tribal, pastoral nomads and given the name of one of his father's defeated enemies. He was called Temujin, but he was a Mongol. And the only history that exists from anyone who might know about the birth of this person. It's called the Secret History of the Mongols, claims he came out of his mother's womb clutching a black blood clot the size of a knuckle bone that is symbolic of where this story is going to go. And if you find yourself a little squeamish at that description right there, you best turn this story off right now, because it gets bloody and deadly and tragic. And if you're looking at it from the Mongol side of things, it also gets glorious. Yet at the same time, it's hard not to think about how many people might have survived this time period had that child not been born. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people are going to exit this earth during this child's lifetime as a direct result of what this child does and decisions this child makes. It's a touchy subject, too, because this Temujin is the greatest figure in Mongolian history. He's revered as the founder of the nation. He's the George Washington. He's on their money. But what if George Washington had killed millions and millions of people? Of course, Americans have the advantage of the moral high ground in that argument, because our Founding Father comes at a time when that was so comparatively genteel. It was called the Enlightenment, and they wore powdered wigs and they bowed to each other. And when one side defeated another side in war, the general of the defeated side would hand the sword over to the victorious general, who would often hand it back in this symbolic, genteel, gentlemanly way of conducting affairs. Americans didn't have a founding father who came from, say, the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, where the manners and customs of the time were rougher. Mongolia's founding father comes from one of the roughest times and roughest places you can ever imagine. If we're all a product of our environment, this guy is exhibit A, that that can literally transform a story. This Temujin is born in what in Europe and the Middle east is the Middle Ages. He's born in 1162 or maybe 1167. The year of birth is not exactly known. He's born at a time where Europe is living in the era of knights and crusades, and there's actually a crusade going on in the Middle East. He's born into an environment that has changed surprisingly little in more than a thousand years. His pastoral nomadic lifestyle is shared amongst a wide range of people stretching thousands of miles to the west of where he's born. He's born in this geographical feature on the Eurasian land map that's known as the steppe. The steppe is like an Ocean with the water taken out of it. Matter of fact, it's the size of two Atlantic oceans almost put side by side, east to west, stretching from the plains of Hungary all the way to the Pacific Ocean surrounding China on two sides, and consisting of geographical and, you know, weather patterns that just are not conducive to the growth of big cities. This era lends itself to a certain lifestyle. And the Mongols are just one of many, many peoples who exist with that lifestyle. And you should think of it like the great American prairies, but stretching on for 5,000 miles. Sometimes you're in grasslands, sometimes you're in savannah, sometimes you're in desert type climates. There are some mountains here and there, some very big ones in some places. There are some rivers here and there, a lake or two. But by and large, this is a harsh environment that's flat for the most part. And the winds whip through it and the weather changes moment by moment. And you can have snow in the middle of July and winds that'll knock you off your horse at all times. The horse is the key feature somewhere, and historians argue over this point viciously. Somewhere between 1000 BCE and 4000 BCE, these nomadic groups of people, probably in what's now modern day Ukraine, did something that will change history in major ways and will prove that human history is not always about humans. They will domesticate the horse. And when the nomads of Eurasia get their hands on the horse and integrate it into their population, an entire new era of world history begins, one that has only ceased to be a reality on the geopolitical scene in the last 500 years. They will create a relationship, maybe is the best word, because some people would call it an alliance between humans and animals. If you're a real animal rights activist, you might call it a master slave relationship. But somehow these people that had to walk in the Eurasian steppe in prehistory all of a sudden could ride. This whole flat expanse of ocean with the water taken out of it seems to lend itself to horses. And pastoral nomadic societies all around the world tend to focus on a certain animal to base their society around. There are peoples known as donkey nomads in some places, other peoples known as camel nomads. These peoples of the Eurasian steppe would be the horse nomads. These horses became such a part of these people's cultures that they developed skill sets that allowed them to stand apart from other riders in the world. I just had my H.G. wells out recently. The sci fi author who wrote amateur history 100 years ago, and he had this fascinating bit where he was talking about how human beings in various environments develop skills and mechanisms might be a good way to put it to cope with that environment that give them almost special abilities in a role playing game. You would call it a special ability. If somebody comes from a mountain culture, you're going to see things that that person can do in a mountain culture that we flatlanders can't. For example, some of the changes will be physical. Their lung capacity might be increased growing up, you know, in a low oxygen environment. Right. You think of the Sherpas who guide people up the mountains in the Himalayas. They're also going to have cultural knowledge that's transmitted by their mountain people about the best ways to survive in the mountain and where you can find food, the do's and the don'ts. And you're also going to have training years of experience in the mountains because you grew up there. Those factors apply to these people on the Eurasian steppe too, who start riding their horses at age 3, who ride them constantly, who develop a relationship that is hard for us today to understand. It's one of these places where we're more cut off from our forebears in the modern world. We don't have the same kind of relationships with animals that they had in most of world history. You know, there are some things that people three or four hundred years ago would be able to relate more to people of thousands of years ago than they're able to relate to us now because they still have certain connections to animals that we didn't. I mean, take transportation for a second. If you wanted to travel overland 200 years ago from one city to another, the fastest speed you're going to be able to go is the speed of a horse. That's the same speed that would have been your top speed a thousand years before that time and a thousand years before that. You get an idea of how unchanging this dynamic was and how long something like the horse was actually cutting edge technology. The Mongols lived 500 years after the Huns, who lived 500 years after the Xiongnu, who lived hundreds of years after the Scythians. All these people had societies that seemed virtually the same minor differences here or there, especially since they had a tendency to raid their neighbors. And as their neighbors changed, the stuff they stole from their neighbors changed. So they might have a more updated wardrobe, because instead of stealing from the Chinese in 200 BCE they were now stealing from the Chinese in 500, you know, CE the stuff you steal looks more modern. You're Going to look more modern, too. But the lifestyle was relatively unchanged. Temujin's Mongols were living very much like, you know, Scythian tribesmen were living more than a thousand years before. The pastoral nomad lifestyle was a tried and true lifestyle. It didn't have to change very much. After all, it had been in existence a heck of a lot longer than the lifestyle of its sedentary rivals. People who lived in cities and practiced agriculture were, historically speaking, the new kid on the block. The way Temujin lived, that's an ancient lifestyle, and it creates people with special abilities. And you see these kinds of special abilities anytime you find native societies, tribal groups of people who live sort of more close to the earth. You think of the Native Americans or the tribes in Africa or all these people that could track and had what you would call special abilities because they're, I mean, the Apaches, just their ability to hide or their ability to track or their ability to find, these are all great advantages. And the nomadic tribal peoples needed all of them because they were constantly rubbing like sandpaper against their settled society neighbors or against their tribal neighbors. These tribes on the steppe often fought with one another more than they fought with anyone else. But when they fought societies like China and Byzantium and Rome and, you know, these Middle Eastern societies in Persia, they were fighting societies that are sort of like our own in the sense they're constantly, you know, developing new technologies, constantly, you know, honing military science and building off of experience from the past, you know, via books and learning, having huge organizational advantages over the tribal peoples. To compensate for this, the tribal peoples use their native ability. This alliance with the horse was really one half of what made these steppe people so formidable on the battlefield. The other half of the equation that was necessary to turn this into the weapon system that's one of the most famous in all world history was the bow. These Eurasian steppe nomads are horse archers, most famously, anyway. All the tribes you can name from world history from the Eurasian steppes base their whole military on riders wielding bows, people who are so good at it that you must think of an army composed of nothing but trick riders from some circus somewhere. Those are the only kind of people who come close to your average step horse archer's abilities on horseback. And not just trick riders. You have to imagine trick riders who are also expert archery marksman at the same time. I mean, the steppe nomad was able to famously shoot birds out of the sky in flight. Think about how hard that is for a moment. As a matter of fact, we're told that the Mongol specifically, although I would imagine other tribal peoples of the steppe also had this same situation happening. We're told that the Mongols were trained not to let their arrow fly until that precise moment in the horse's galloping motion when all four of the hoofs were simultaneously off the ground, thereby to not have your aim jostled, I guess. And the relationship between Mongol and horse, again, I would assume this is a typical steppe thing, reminds an observer from a subtle society more like the close relationship between, say, a shepherd dog and the sheep herder. These horses were told, I mean, historian Richard Gabriel says they would come at a whistle, which is something right out of a Lone Ranger movie when you think about it. But he also says that they would follow their owner around like a dog. This is really handy if you're a Mongol trooper traveling with tons of extra remounts, which is what they did, 3, 5, 7, 20, sometimes extra horses with each trooper. If you have to actually herd those horses and keep track of them, it's really hard to move the army if they follow you naturally. How helpful is that? It should also be pointed out that the women in the Mongol society, again, like women in other steppe society, were far from helpless when the menfolk were away. In fact, the steppe is the original, you know, ground zero for where the legend of the Amazons comes from. And there were tribal societies of the steppe. For example, the Sarmatians, who had women who fought in their ranks, supposedly weren't allowed to get married until they had killed a foe in battle. There is some incentive for you. So the Mongol women were told, could shoot almost as well as the men, if not as well as the men, and ride as well as the men. After all, they were in the saddle virtually just as often. And it was they who trained the toddlers of the Mongol tribe, both boys and girls, how to shoot and ride. So if you were an enemy of the Mongols and you stumbled on a Mongol encampment and the menfolk happened to be away, it wasn't as much of an advantage to just be facing the women as it might normally be. I should also point out that this Mongol bow was like a Bowflex machine, you know, a weightlifting machine. It was 160 pound pole, and the Mongol supposedly could shoot 12 of these arrows a minute and had 150 arrows in their quiver. We're told that at the openings of battles, they sometimes expended their whole ammunition load, you know, relatively quickly. How many times could you pull a 160 pound bow back before your arms wouldn't do it anymore. You have to imagine these people as, in a muscular sense, ripped from their, you know, the strength of their hands all up their arms into their neck and shoulder muscles and their back. These are sinewy, strong people who shoot all the time. It's like using a weightlifting machine in battle. They fought like a swarm of bees. They would give you nothing to really lash out at. If they were pursued in battle, they often just ran away, shooting the pursuers as they did. They provided no solid object that pursuers could get their hands on, and they couldn't catch them because usually, of course, these horse archers had a lead on them. So you would just tire yourself out if you chased them. You would get away from the protection of your formation. You would likely fall into an ambush, since that was one of the preferred tactics of all these nomadic horse archers. Their favorite, by the way, stratagem. And everybody knew about it, who fought them regularly, and they still fell for it time and time again. It must play on some battlefield. Human emotion is something called the feigned flight. The feigned flight is exactly what it sounds like. It's a fake route. The Mongols, especially, had a unit that was designed almost like a great unit of actors. They were to go up there and almost suicidally fight with the enemy army, and then turn around at a certain command and flee in terror. And from the records, it makes it sound like they were kind of taught to do a good job of making the enemy think that they were scared and running away. And then when the enemy would pursue them, these mangadae, they were called, would lead them into an ambush. Until the invention of gunpowder, no society will ever get a really good way of handling these horse archers on the battlefield. The best way of handling them is to hire some just like them, go find some tribe that's, you know, an enemy of the one you're fighting and get them to help or lead them into terrain. That's not the step. You know, if you could get these people out of their element, they were a little like, you know, a bunch of Atlanteans who have an underwater civilization, and they're really powerful in the water, but if you get them out of the water, they weaken. As a matter of fact, all of these steppe conquerors, they would sometimes conquer these societies and settle down, you know, and kind of become agriculturalist and settled people themselves. And they would quickly lose all their, you know, battlefield edge. A generation or two later, all of a sudden, they don't have steppe nomad horse archers anymore. Because they don't live on the steppe. This would be a recurring problem, and one that later steppe civilizations would figure out. You have to keep sending people back to the steppe or they lose their special abilities. As dangerous as these horse archers were, though, on the battlefield, they really only presented terrible dangers when they would unify into big confederations, when these individual tribes would coalesce under a powerful, influential leader, and then they went from being a nuisance to being an existential threat. And this happened many times in history. Mao Dun did it with the Xiongnu. Tumen did it with, I believe, the Turks. Attila did it with the Huns. But the greatest of all these unifiers in all history happened to be that Mongol boy we introduced a little while ago, Temujin. And it's possible his name doesn't ring a bell, which is understandable, because once he unifies these tribes, he's going to be given a new name, a more familiar name. Temujin, grows up to be Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan is, simply put, one of the most stunningly impressive figures in all history. And you have to judge him almost completely on what he did, because there's so little actually known about the guy. He's one of the great mysteries of history. When you think about it. Nobody as large as he was is as little known as he is. He comes from a time, really the high Middle Ages, where you would expect to at least know what he looked like. I mean, think about kings from this era and how much is known, whether they're Chinese or Byzantine or European. He's a greater figure than any of them. And historians don't even know what he looked like. They don't know the year he was born. They don't know how he died. They don't know where he's buried. He's a very mysterious figure. We don't have anything from him directly that you could legitimately say. He said, everything is from a later writing. You know, somebody said, this is the oral tradition. We write it down, whatever. There are no proclamations that you could specifically say Genghis Khan said these words, you know, in Mongolia, and exactly like that. I mean, there are some tantalizing clues that he might have had red hair, for example. It was a Persian historian said he was surprised that his grandson Kubla, who will be a famous figure in his own right, didn't inherit his red hair, Believe that or not, as you want. Also, supposedly he had what were called cat's eyes or the eyes of a cat. Some people have chosen to believe that this means his eyes were green. I choose to believe that it means that they were like a cat's in broad daylight, sort of like the eyes of Sauron. Again, believe what you want. It's not that unusual, though, to have that be the case. As a matter of fact, green eyes and red hair, you can still find that occasionally in the Mongolian population of today. It's one of the wonderful ethnic things that you'll see in this mixing of different peoples on the steppe. You'll see, you know, different features that you wouldn't expect to find on one person. I mean, the Turks were famous for having a strain of peoples in them who had blonde hair and green eyes. And Turkish features always reminds me of that famous National Geographic photo of that Afghan girl with Middle Eastern features and hair color, but with those bright blue green eyes. She's a wonderful example of some of that wonderful genetic mixing that happened on the step where you could have people from three or four major different racial groups in the same tribe together and mixes of all of them. Genghis Khan may very well have been an Asian featured man of unusual physical proportions. He's supposed to have been big, who also had red hair and green eyes or Sauron's eyes, depending on whose opinion you want to believe. But I'm not a historian, as you know. Now, physical features aside, what makes Genghis Khan so impressive is that he's almost like watching a human version of a piece of metal, you know, beaten and over and over hardened into his final form. He grows up in an almost perfect laboratory experiment of survival of the fittest. In play, he's not handed an empire in a perfect army like a guy like Alexander the Great gets handed to him. Genghis Khan works for everything. By the time he unifies all the tribes, this guy has lived through a life that it defies all the odds that he was even alive. Forget that he managed to bring himself up to such an exalted level. His life as related in the Secret History of the Mongol. So take it with a grain of salt, is one adventure after another. It would make a great movie. It's not without its dark side, though, biased as it is of the portrayal of the Mongol Khan, the eventual Mongol Khan. I mean, here's a guy who's assassinating his brother, his older brother, with the help of his younger brother, when they're still kids, shot him full of arrows because he stole fish from them. And it was the final straw. His older brother had been lording himself over the two of them. For a while. So Temujin and his younger brother sneak up on the older brother as he's sitting there in the grass. The older brother perceives that they're there and basically says, you know, are you sure you have to do this? And if you do, spare my younger brother, would you? And then they shoot him from two sides. The mother freaks out and calls them destroyers. It's almost as though she knows her son's destiny. Genghis Khan is going to be one of the best examples history provides of one of these people you could call a creative destroyer. The impetus of that creative destruction dynamic we talked about earlier. If the world is a tinderbox at this point, Genghis Khan's gonna come through and light it all. He was this age's greatest historical arsonist. And those who say that the climate was ripe for a good rejuvenating fire will point out that the conditions in life on the steppe had grown to become intolerable. Everybody was being captured. Women were being raped. There was no law and order. Raids were constant. Everyone was fighting with everyone else. Life was miserable. Temujin himself had been kidnapped twice in his life. Everybody in the story seems to have spent some time in the custody of their enemies. The women often came back pregnant. I mean, the whole thing was intolerable. Now, there are two schools of historical thought on this. One is that this was an unusual time and that law and order had broken down because, you know, the power of one unifying tribe had disintegrated. The other school of historical thought is that anytime where there was any law and order on the steppe, those are the exceptions to the rule. And that normally it's like the Wild west out there, and that what Genghis Khan's early life consisted of was pretty normal. Regardless of which school is correct, the admirers of Genghis Khan will point out that he was bringing law and order to the region. Every time he conquered another one of these tribes and absorbed it into a confederation, he was bringing the benefits of empire. Sure, it's going to cost a lot of people, but you'll have law and order and peace and commerce and justice when, you know, we put a central authority in place. Make no mistake about it, though, this guy was a disciplinarian, and the Mongols were ruthless. After destroying the fighting ability of one tribe in battle, he forced every male to walk past a wagon, and anyone who stood higher than the linchpin of the wagon had their heads cut off. In his rise to power, Genghis Khan destroyed whole tribes Ironically, one of these tribes, where Genghis Khan kills every male above the age of a child, will actually lend its name to the Mongols. When the Mongols first appear in Europe and in the Middle east, they will be called Tatars or Tartars. That's the name of the tribe that Genghis Khan cut the head off, essentially, during his rise to power. It's an example of what happened to many other tribes. His defenders will point out that the creation of nation states is not always, you know, violence free. If you want to make an omelette, you got to break a few eggs. And part of creating the kind of climate where there can be law and order and justice and commerce and all those things, a sense of personal security, is breaking the power of all these independent tribes and especially their ruling aristocratic nobles, who don't want anything to do with kowtowing to Genghis Khan. This is all part of creating the empire or the proto nation state amongst these nomadic peoples. And the Chinese are becoming aware at this time of Genghis Khan because the Chinese are always trying to stay abreast of what's going on in the various power struggles on the steppe. Chinese foreign policy for, like, 3,000 years is all concerned with how do you keep all of these nomadic, dangerous horse peoples on our borders from combining into a powerful, dangerous confederation. Use barbarians to fight barbarians. Same strategy the Byzantines were using, you know, on the other side of the step. Keep the tribes divided, keep them fighting each other, play one off against the other, and if anybody looks to be garnering too much power and authority, you know, find some adversary that also resents it and use them to cut them down to size. When the Tartars are being a problem. There were supposedly, historians have estimated, 350,000 members of the Tartar tribe. When they're becoming a problem, the Chinese enlist Genghis Khan's help, supposedly to help break their power. They will continually interfere in steppe affairs, and Genghis Khan's rise to power begins to concern them. And if they hadn't been aware of how significant it was becoming by 1206, Genghis Khan himself made it obvious he had it declared. One of the seminal moments in Genghis Khan's life occurs at a Mongol assembly known as a Kuril Tai. That happens on the bank of a river, but it's a giant affair with huge tents and people coming from all over, mostly Mongols, to proclaim Genghis Khan the ruler of all who dwell in felt tents is the way it was put, meaning all these pastoral Nomads who exist on the steppe now forget for a moment that there are tons of tribes to the west that have no idea of the existence of the Mongols, who have direct contact with places like Russia and who have no idea that this assembly is going on, have never heard of Genghis Khan or anything. They are, without knowing it, now subject to his dominion. And when his representatives eventually find them and point out that they are, their choices are to submit or die. Any sort of wavering on this makes them rebels. Ignorance of the new law is no excuse, and many tribes will essentially have their doom pronounced on them for not knowing that at this 1206 get together on the bank of a river, their existence was put into the hands of a sovereign they've never heard of. Nonetheless, many of the great tribes of the Eurasian steppe were covered by this and understood what was going on. What was going on is this was the proclamation of a new steppe confederacy being formed. The worst nightmare of all of the settled societies who bordered the steppe. The only time these tribal people became dangerous to your entire way of life is when they combined. And all of a sudden, this leader, this Temujin, this Chinggis Khan, which everyone argues about what that means. I'm not a historian, so I'm not going to take sides. Many think universal ruler, oceanic ruler. There are other interpretations, but his name was Temujin, his title sort of was Chinggis Khan. And now Genghis Khan, at least in his own mind, ruled everyone who dwelt in felt tents. And if you had a different opinion, you were going to have to fight him over it. Now, the actual get together, where he's proclaimed, you know, emperor, basically is important for a lot of reasons. One, right there and then he issues proclamations that basically begin the process of breaking down old, you know, tribal barriers, of turning the traditional culture of the steppe into something that's more organized and more like, as I said, a modern nation state without buildings and cities and any of that. A nomad, pastoral version of a structured society, turning it from tribal to something perhaps more feudal might be a good way to put it. And changing the leadership of all these tribes from people who got that way through their birth to people who, Genghis Khan believes, you know, deserve it. It's still an entire society devoted to Genghis Khan, but now the people that are most devoted to Genghis Khan and who are most competent at serving his interest are the ones who get promoted. Your bloodline doesn't matter anymore. Genghingis, by the way, was the descendant of, you know, great Mongol nobility once upon a time, but grew up because of the poisoning of his father when he was merely nine, in circumstances that were anything but royal. Those years of privation had taught him the importance of good people at all levels. And this is one of the things that truthfully sets the man apart. He has an amazing eye for talent, and when he spots it, he grabs it and he puts it to his uses. And he doesn't care if it comes from an enemy or from someone who just shot his horse out from under him or whatever. If he thinks you can help, you know him, he's going to bring you in. The second you make a mistake, the second you screw up, the second you turn against him, your head will be lopped off in one second. But Genghis Khan tended to foster amazing loyalty amongst the people that he brought into his circle. It'll trickle down to the very lowest levels of Mongol society, too. Whenever cities are sacked, the Mongols will go through the city and find people and question them as to what they can do. Can you read? Can you write? Can you make weapons? What can you do? And anybody who's got any skill to would be useful to the Mongols. They just grab them. The truth of it is, is that it was sort of the opposite of what happened when the Khmer Rouge came over in Cambodia and it was known as the Killing Fields, you may have heard of it. And they would go in there and anybody who had reading glasses or seemed to have any education or skills in the modern world was executed because those people were contaminated by modernity and they needed to be wiped out. The Mongols had the other attitude. If you could be useful to them and all those skills were useful, you might survive the sacking of a city. Those that didn't get pulled out of the crowd for having useful abilities were the ones who were massacred. One of the reasons the Mongols did better than any other steppe confederation, and there were many over time, was their incorporation of people who had skills above and beyond what your typical nomad had. Now, to give you a feel for Mongol society at this time, it's worth quoting something from the Secret History of the Mongols. This apparently was a book that was only to be shown to members of the Mongol royal family to give them information about their heritage. Somehow, apparently, it got out, because, of course, we have translations of it today, and much of it is a very heroic story about the rise of Genghis Khan and the early Mongols and sort of their genealogy. That's debatable about how useful that is for A history point of view. But what isn't debatable is how this document, written only a generation after Genghis Khan's life, reflects Mongol culture and values. You get an idea of what was important to them and how they thought. Some of it, of course, is symbolism in these sorts of writings, but some of it is very clear as to what the mentality was. Now, all during this 1206 Kurultai, it's all Genghis Khan laying down laws and rewarding vassals who've been good to him and all that. But a few years before this, he's proclaimed Khan of the Mongols. And in the secret history, they sort of run down the oaths that are made to him when he's made Great Khan. Listen to this and get an idea for the cultural aspect of the Mongols during this time period and of steppe people as well. And then they moved the whole camp to the shores of Blue Lake in the Gerelgu Mountains. Altan Kukar and Sasha Beki conferred with each other there and then said to Temujin, we want you to be Khan, Temujin, if you'll be our Khan. We'll search through the spoils for the beautiful women and virgins for the great palace tents, for the young virgins and loveliest women, for the finest geldings and mares. We'll gather all these and bring them to you when we go off to hunt for wild game, we'll go first to drive them together for you to kill. We'll drive the wild animals of the steppe together so that their bellies are touching. We'll drive the wild game of the mountains together so that they stand leg to leg. If we disobey your command during battle, take away our possessions, our children and wives, leave us behind in the dust, cutting off our heads where we stand and letting them fall to the ground. If we disobey your counsel in peacetime, take away our tents and our goods, our wives and our children. Leave us behind when you move. Abandoned in the desert without a protector, having given their word, having taken this oath, they proclaimed Temujin Khan of the Mongol and gave him the name Chinggis Khan, end quote. I often reread that passage when I'm thinking about the Mongols to remind myself that no matter how much it's in vogue today, to talk about the higher minded motives of Genghis Khan and his Mongols, if you're reading the stuff they wrote themselves from their own value system during that period, you can't ignore the desire for loot. And by the way. It's not a Mongol thing. It's not a tribal people's thing. It's an everybody thing. I mean, first of all, look at any of the Germanic tribes. They're looting till the cows come home, right? But you could just cover it up a little bit with a veneer of civilization. And it doesn't look so much like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and all those people are looting. Doesn't look like Napoleon's looting, you know, when he spreads Republican values across the European continent, but he sure as heck is. There's a wide stream of goods and people flowing from the conquered territories back to Paris, or from the conquered territories back to Rome, or from the conquered territories back to Pella in Macedonia, or from the conquered territories back to wherever Genghis Khan and the Mongol leadership happens to be camping today. And listen. Part of this story that's hard to get around but is almost completely ignored today by many of these historians that want to portray this as some 100% positive thing is that this is a story that has a lot to do with rape. A lot to do with rape. As a matter of fact, DNA tests have shown that more people in my listening audience right now are probably direct descendants of Genghis Khan, direct descendants, father to son, than of any other person in the world in history before that time, 1 in 500 Asian males are direct descendants. 15 to 16 million people in the world, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. It's also a pretty good bet that many of you had female ancestors that were not there willingly. This mixing of DNA that makes you a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. There's a pretty good chance that that wasn't voluntary. You have to be careful when you read something like the Secret History of the Mongols, because I don't know if it's the way it's originally written or the way it's translated or just a cultural difference in understanding, but the secret history will call people who are obviously rape victims wives. And it looks a heck of a lot more legitimate. It may be more like a harem where they have 50, 70, 100 wives, but at least they're all wives, right? Gotta get past that a little bit. For example, there's a wonderful story. Well, wonderful in a horrible way that's indicative of this whole thing that happens to Genghis Khan. As he's consolidating his power on the steppe, he's busy wiping out a tribe of mostly Turks. The Turks were perhaps the most dominant ethnic group of step nomadic peoples, although their tribe probably had Mongols in it too, a people called the Naiman. And when the Naiman decide to go to war against Genghis Khan, their ruler, a Khan, has a mother. And this mother makes a statement that's recorded in the Secret History about how the Mongols just stank and how they were filthy, which, by the way, may have been very true, because apparently they had this prohibition against washing clothes. Some historians think that it would have offended the Mongol God of water. So they would wear these clothes continuously until they just rotted off of them and obviously not wash them. If that's true, well, they probably did stink. She said this openly, according to the Secret History. She said that the most beautiful and pure Mongol girls, if they would wash their hands, would only be fit to milk their animals. And in the Secret History, after Genghis Khan defeats this tribe in battle, kills their Khan, executes their population, according to the Secret History, they gathered them all at the foot of the Altai mountain range and they disposed of them. This mother of the Khan who'd made these statements about the Mongol's smell was brought before Chinggis Khan. This is how the Secret History puts it. Lastly, Chinggis Khan commanded that Girbisu Tayyang's mother be brought before him. He spoke to her, saying, it was you who said the Mongol stink and their clothing is filthy. If we could only make their most beautiful girls wash their hands, they'd only be fit to milk our cows and our sheep. Then why are you here? And Chinggis Khan took her as one of his wives, end quote. Now, this kind of meshes with a quotation that was probably not said by Genghis Khan, but that he's famous for saying, you know, that one of the greatest pleasures in life comes, you know, by conquering your enemy, sleeping with their wives and children and all those kind of things. I mean, it's a well known statement that probably was never uttered by the Khan. But that's exactly what that incident, recorded in the Mongol's own history of themselves seems to indicate. Some pleasure, you know, in taking revenge. Here's a woman who is the mother of the Khan that Genghis has just killed. He's then wiped out her entire people. She hates Mongols, the smell of them and everything. And now he's making her his wife. That's torturous and it's certainly rape. And so when the, you know, Mongol historical records talk about wives, realize that that's not always a voluntary relationship, again, it should be pointed out that this is no different than most other conquerors. During, you know, ancient times or the Dark Ages or medieval times, the Romans did stuff like this all the time. The point is, is that because the Mongols are perhaps the greatest conquering nation in history, perhaps the greatest series of conquests ever, and were the most successful, the rapes matter more because there were more of them. Wasn't a higher percentage of rapists in the Mongol army just more success conquering other people? Hence more actual people probably raped as part of the Mongol conquest than probably any other period you can think of, simply because of the vast scale of it. A lot of DNA got spread around during this period, and it has to be considered, at least for the female carriers of the DNA to have been a tragedy of its own, was a tragic period for the steppe people. This whole rise of Genghis Khan, whole peoples were wiped out. That's the destruction part. The benefits, though, that Genghis Khan brought to the steppe are the creative part in the creative destruction. At 1206, at this great Kuriletai assembly that he holds, he unveils. Well, most historians think so. There are some, like David Morgan, who doubt the whole thing. But he supposedly unveils his code of laws, his famous yassa. And this is a set of rules designed to create that order and justice and personal security on the step that's been missing. The penalties for many of the violations of this new law code are draconian. They will cut your head off for any number of things. One thing that the people, like the Europeans, noted when they fought the Mongols, was this unbelievable level of obedience. Well, it was really a one strike and you're out. Unless you had a special dispensation from the Khan. And one of the special dispensations was you get nine chances or you get five chances before you get the final warning. Most people got no chances. You screw up once, don't pick that string up, that the guy in front of you riding his horse dropped, and boom, your head's off, tended to foster a high level of obedience. And the draconian nature of these laws and the fact that they were rigorously enforced created a step that was probably a better place to live in terms of peace and security and justice than anyone had known for a very long time. The cost was very great. The benefits perhaps worth it. You'd have to ask a step person living at the time. Nonetheless, what Genghis Khan now had created, this steppe confederation, another steppe confederation had been sought by the people of Central Asia for some time. So you'd have to think that the fact that it was around was considered to be a very good thing. It was one thing from the viewpoint of a Central Asian. To see a new Central Asian nomadic confederacy form was another thing entirely. To look at that same development from one of the sedentary civilizations that bordered the steppe. If you're a place like China, you've just seen years, centuries, more than a millennia of foreign policy attempting to prevent just this from happening. Failing Genghis Khan is your worst nightmare, and he proves it. Soon after he's managed to quell the disharmony of the step. But once you deal with the disharmony of the steppe, once you create this confederation of nomad tribes, what do you do with it? This becomes a place where historians start to diverge on their view of what Genghis Khan's motivations were. What did he want to do now that he created this unbridled power? What he ended up doing was turning his attention to the various Chinese states. The question of why is a disagreement historians fight over. The standard view is that China was on his radar because China was where all the good loot was and that this confederation of Eurasian nomads required the Khan to deliver the stuff when it came to, you know, promised benefits. And they had a sort of a trickle down way of those benefits reaching the average Mongol. All booty taken belonged to the Khan. The Khan would then distribute the booty to various nobles and leaders that he thought deserved it, who would then distribute it to their followers. And all the way down the line. Some historians believe that there was a lot of pressure at all times to keep this flow of stuff coming. And that the more loot these very poor people like the Mongols got their hands on, the more loot they wanted. Created a dynamic where you had to keep the conquest coming so you could keep the flow of goods heading to wherever the Mongols were camped. This week. Remember what we said? Heading to Rome, heading to Pella, heading to Paris, heading to the tents of the great Khan. I've seen other theories where historians say that drought conditions and climactic problems on the steppe may have forced these people into rubbing up against their neighbors in a way that provoked disagreements and eventually warfare. Steppe societies always sort of rubbed up against settled societies in a sandpaper like way. Their culture and values were so different, often involving things like raiding and slave taking, that oftentimes it was hard to avoid conflicts breaking out. In his book Russia's Steppe Frontier, author Michael Khodorkovsky has a whole chapter called the Sociology of the Frontier or why Peace Was Impossible about these Sandpaper like relations between steppe nomads and the settled societies in the same way that Native American tribes sometimes found it impossible to stay at peace while rubbing up against European colonists and settlers. Same thing was true on the steppe. Steppe peoples going back to prehistory had had a very similar relationship with the settled societies to what the Native Americans had, sort of a trade and raid policy, where sometimes they were trading and sometimes they were raiding and sometimes they were doing both at the same time. Some of the revisionist historians who like to downplay the negativity around the Mongol conquests will suggest that the Mongols were simply responding to what we would call today retaliatory trade policies on the part of the Chinese and whatnot. The steppe peoples always needed the Chinese and the settled society stuff more than the settled society needed the step nomad, you know, trade offerings. And so sometimes the people like the Chinese or the Byzantines or the Middle Easterners would put the screws to the steppe people. And some of these historians would suggest that that's a reason right there that modern countries might go to war. The Mongols are sometimes portrayed as retaliating towards bad, negative trading practices, heavy handed trading practices, and oftentimes portrayed these days as fighting a sort of a defensive war. The Romans were said to have conquered the world in a defensive war or in a fit of absentmindedness. There's a trend amongst some historical thinking to put the Mongols in a similar category, conquered the world due to a trade dispute. Now, the Chinese had traditionally divided steppe barbarians into two types, what they called cooked and uncooked. The cooked barbarians were the ones that had already absorbed some of the Chinese culture. It made them easier to deal with. It softened them somewhat. They became more tractable and you could negotiate with them. It also helped in some ways to eliminate some of the more rough edges, you know, what might have been savaged barbarians when they first showed up from the middle nowheres of the steppe, after a couple generations next to China would mellow a bit, become a little bit Chinese. Even the uncooked barbarians were the ones who were farther into the interior of the steppe, who had less direct contact with the Chinese states and who were considered to be more barbaric and more dangerous. The whole goal was when one of those new societies appeared, was to cook them as soon as you could. When the Mongols formed this confederation, you get an entire steppe society led by a group of, in Chinese terms, uncooked barbarians. They were extremely dangerous. And the first of the Chinese states to find this out firsthand is a Place that I will mispronounce the name of, but it was called Xisha. It was one of three, or if you believe some historians, four Chinese states that were in existence at this time. It's a little bit confusing. Suffice it to say that in the periods where China is strong, their borders encompass a huge area. In the periods where the Chinese dynasties are weaker, those areas shrink and are ripped off, sort of in pieces, leaving a certain center core that's still Chinese, but with other areas belonging to dynasties that may be comprised of foreigners. In this period, it's a place called Song China in the south that is still truly Chinese from top to bottom. In the north, the traditional area around Manchuria, but even around modern day Beijing, this area is so vulnerable to attack by steppe nomads that it's often under their control. And some historians have a name for those dynasties. They're called conquest dynasties. And things like the Great Wall, which is so famous, are put up in these areas because this is a completely vulnerable spot of China and many times have fallen under foreign domination. In this period, it's under the domination of a people called the Jurchen, originally from Manchuria, and a group of steppe and forest nomads. They ousted a people called the Chitan, who were almost Mongolia, almost, you might even call them proto Mongol. In the west, there was another sort of Chinese state called Xisha. Now, this was a sort of a Buddhist, Tibetan, Uyghur, Chinese mix of a place. But it was the weakest of the three current big Chinese kingdoms. This is where Genghis Khan decided to attack first. For the first time in his life, Genghis Khan is now going to be commanding his army against a very different kind of force. One of the armies of these settled societies. He's been fighting for decades, but he's been fighting against other pastoral nomads of the steppe who fight with troops very similar and with tactics very similar to his own. Genghis Khan's Mongol army is not some brand new thing on the scene, no matter how much we military fans of history like to pretend that it is. It was maybe one generation better than the Chitan army, which was one generation better than the army that came before it. I mean, it was part of the normal evolution of steppe military tactics. You kind of cheapen the real thing that made the Mongols so effective. If you blame it all on having a superior army. The main thing that made the Mongols so great militarily was leadership. And it starts off with Genghis Khan, who was probably the greatest military strategist who ever lived. Remember, tactics are battlefield command. Strategy is what happens on the larger level, you know, while you're maneuvering to get to the battlefield. Might be a way to put it. To be a great strategist like Genghis Khan was and to have a nomadic step army, you know, as the Mongols were at your disposal, is to put the perfect weapon into the hands, you know, of the man who knows how to use it. He's like a great swordsman. And of all the weapons you could hand him, you hand him a sword. The Mongol army was probably the most strategically mobile army until the invention of the internal combustion engine. Nothing moved like a step army. And the Mongols were the best step army that ever took the field. First of all, they didn't have a supply train most of the time. Every now and then they would. But most of the time, especially in this period when Genghis Khan is leading them, the Mongols have no slow train of wagons and civilians and support elements to slow them down. The entire army is mounted and it moves at the speed of a horse. Each Mongol soldier is self sufficient. Now oftentimes the army would drive herding animals with it. You know, just have usually Mongol boys too young for battle, in control of the flocks of sheep and other animals that kept the army fed. But even if the army didn't have these animals trailing along with it at full speed, they didn't need it. The Mongol society built around the horse as it was meant that these horses that the Mongols were riding carried everything they needed to live. Now the Mongols didn't just have one. Each cavalryman had at least three remounts with him. So you have to imagine when this army goes on campaign, it kicks up a lot of dust. This is a big army where animals outnumber people, you know, five, six, seven to one. But you could live off those animals because they were the same animals the Mongols often lived off of when they were at their encampments. First of all, the horses were all female and you could milk them. Mare's milk was a staple of the Mongol diet. They could even create their famous alcoholic beverage out of it. They also had no problem at all borrowing a little blood from their horses as needed. This is an age old step tactic to put a little slice in the horse's neck, put a cup underneath the stream of blood that comes out, mix that with milk or water and drink it on down and you're good to go. These Mongol armies could move so quickly that these settled societies couldn't deal with Them, they would appear out of nowhere. As a matter of fact, a lot of historians believe that the reason that chroniclers in the settled societies always thought these Mongol armies were huge is because they would see them everywhere and never think that it could be the same elements being seen over and over and over again, just moving really fast from one place to another. They assumed it was another unit entirely. I had a teacher once that said the role of a good strategist is to win the battle before your army even arrives on the battlefield through superior maneuvering and whatnot. The Mongol army was built for maneuvering, and Genghis Khan was the greatest strategist, in my opinion, who ever lived. That's a marriage made in heaven. Or if you happen to be one of these Chinese states, a pairing made in hell. One other aspect of Genghis Khan's leadership needs to be mentioned, though, as well. His ability to spot other great leaders and to incorporate them into his forces. And we touched on this a little earlier, didn't we? No matter how great of a leader Genghis Khan was, he's one man at the top of a pyramid. The Mongol army is so well led at every level because Genghis Khan makes it a point to grab any gifted people he sees and impress them into his forces. He would find enemies. One guy who turned out to be one of his greatest generals of all time was actually a person who supposedly shot his horse out, the Khan's horse, out from under him. And when he was brought to the Khan, he admitted it, which the secret history says Genghis Khan said most people wouldn't admit to. That guy turns out to be a gifted general. Boom. Genghis Khan puts him in command of some of his forces. This was the great Jebe, known as the Arrow, just because of that incident with the horse. Another one of Genghis Khan's generals, a guy named Subedai, Jebe and Subedai probably both belong on the top 10 greatest generals of all time list themselves. So imagine if you yourself belong on that list as Genghis Khan, and now two, maybe three of his underlings belong on the list too. That's an amazingly well led army. And all through the ranks, Genghis Khan was promoting people based on their ability to lead. Only this was a departure from normal practice on the steppes, where one's relationships and alliances and family and all that sort of stuff determined, you know, you're moving up through the ranks. One can think of a system like the British system in the 17 and 1800s, where you know, you could buy commands and you would move up because of the importance of your parents or your family or whatnot. That was normal practice among steppe tribes, too. Genghis Khan turned this into a system of merit. And the benefits were all through the army's leadership. I mean, you had the equivalent of centurions and sergeants down at the very low level. He was training the next group of great commanders with his Imperial guard. And his generals were some of the best who've ever lived. And there are parallels. Again, I'm sorry to bring up Alexander so often, but these world conquerors sometimes have some intriguing similarities. Alexander the Great was maybe the greatest tactical general of all time, and yet around him was a core general staff of people who were unbelievably gifted, too. They have their own name. They're known to history as the Diadochi. And these commanders were so august that when Alexander dies at the tender age of 32 or 33, they split his empire up, each one taking a nice giant hunk and ruling them as kings. Guys with such august names who start whole dynasties like Ptolemy, the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy was one of Alexander's subcommanders. The Seleucid dynasty, Seleucus was one of Alexander's sub commanders. Guys like Antigonus, Lysimachus, I mean, it's a huge group of amazingly good commanders. So often in history, military history buffs like yours truly become engrossed with the weapons and armor and formations and whatnot of these armies, forgetting that these are just tools and weapons in the hands of men. And sometimes you can win against the other guy with completely inferior weapons based on your ability to both use them and plan for an outcome. There's a Mongol saying that sort of sums it up. An army of donkeys led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a donkey. The importance of leadership cannot be overstated. When Genghis Khan's armies first show up on the scene in this western Chinese state, the Khan himself arrives from the Gobi Desert utilizing his most famous tactic, which is a standard tactic amongst great generals, known as the indirect approach. Don't attack an enemy friendly where they think you're going to come from. Go to great lengths to come from a direction he's not expecting. In this case, the western Chinese state, run by people called the Tanguts. This Xi Xia thought that the Gobi Desert could not be crossed by an army of human beings. They would die and leave their skeletons somewhere in the vast wasteland. Genghis Khan not only gets through the Gobi Desert with his army just fine, but arrives from a direction unexpected against this Chinese state, ready to fight. And the Khan's arrival from, you know, the Gobi Desert area was a sign of how serious this was going to be for this western Chinese state. They had dealt with Mongols before. In fact, the Mongols had raided into their territory in 1205. And in 1207. In 1209, the Mongols were coming not as raiders to steal loot, they were coming now to conquer. And this was different. This was an existential threat, you know, before Genghis Khan. As we said, you get these nuisances raids which will kill people and take away slaves and burn towns and steal stuff, but it doesn't threaten the integrity of the state. Genghis Khan now is here to conquer this western state and incorporate it. That's a whole different thing. That's exactly what the Chinese foreign policy advisors were always worried would happen if all these tribes were consolidated under a single powerful leader. In 1209, the Khan arrives from the Gobi Desert ready to take down the western Chinese state of Xisha. Some battles are fought between these different kinds of armies. I mean, now the Mongols have to deal with disciplined Chinese infantry and infantry blocks, and it's a whole different kind of situation now. It's no problem on the tactical battlefield. The problem comes when these Chinese retreat to their cities. The Mongols have the same problem. Virtually every, not just steppe nomad, but every barbarian army anybody's ever run into has. They have a problem with walls and fortifications. These Chinese cities are all protected by defenses. And the Mongols really have very little ability to conduct sieges. They will actually just storm some of these cities, losing lots more people than they're used to in the process. This war in western China becomes a testing ground for the Mongols. They get a chance to see on a much smaller scale what it's going to be like if you decide to take on the other two big Chinese states, because this is a smaller version of the same thing. The Mongols try their hand at siege warfare and fail miserably. What they do is they take lots of prisoners from these territories and begin to do something that they will use throughout their conquest. They take the civilian population and they make them into cannon fodder. In this case, they have this very dangerous idea to dam up the Yellow river and then unleash the water onto one of these cities that they're besieging. They don't have siege weapons, but they can use the river. They don't want to conduct this dam building themselves because it's extraordinarily dangerous. So they make all these civilians that they've captured do it. And halfway through the process, the dam bursts. Now, it has a good and bad effect. The bad effect is that the Mongols get flooded while they're conducting the siege and, you know, the water's up to their horses shoulders or something, and they can hardly conduct operations anymore. The upside is that it tells the people in western China that this is eventually a losing battle and you should give up now while you still can. A deal is reached where the state gets to continue to exist. This western Chinese state doesn't go away, but they give the Mongols incredible amounts of stuff. But perhaps more importantly, in terms of the strategic vision of things, Genghis Khan had solidified, you know, one of his flanks by reducing this western Chinese state to a form of vassalship. He eliminated the chance for it to stab him in the back if he took his armies elsewhere. And it looked like he had a plan to do just that. In the year 1210, he calls a conference of all his commanders, brings them back to Mongolia, tells everyone that they have to attend. Or else, says one who remains in his own locality, instead of coming to me to receive my instructions, will have the fate of a stone dropped in water. He will simply disappear. End quote. At this meeting, the Great Khan tells them they need to study things like siege craft and they need to build scaling ladders, and they need to each of them have their own little contingent of troops whose job it is to, you know, besiege walls. Why would he want to do that? Well, because the great plum of, you know, money, gold, everything you could ever want in the world was sitting right over, you know, nearby an area that was so ripe for conquest that it had already been conquered over and over again by armies similar to his own. Northern China, now known as the Jin dynasty, and whose leader was called the Golden Khan. He was called the Golden Khan rather than the Golden Emperor because he really was a khan playing the part of an emperor. Now, a couple generations ago, these had been Jurchen tribesmen who operated similar to Mongols north of China in, you know, the Manchurian area. They came down a generation or so ago and defeated another steppe people who were even more like the Mongols than the Jurchen, were a people called the Chitans. Now, Jurchen, Chitan and the native Chinese were all living precariously together in this northern Chinese state, the Jin dynasty. Genghis had been receiving information and intelligence for years telling him that The Jinn were ripe for the taking, that they had degenerated, that their leadership had gone Chinese, gone native, which is what always seemed to happen to these steppe peoples. They would take over a settled society and in a generation or two, as we said earlier, they were no longer producing horse archers and they had turned into, well, in this case they call it sinicized step nomads. That didn't mean, though, that Jin Dynasty China wasn't extremely formidable. The Jin had just defeated the Song in a conflict. The Song, the southern Chinese, basically proving that they're the top of these Chinese states in terms of power. Modern historians estimate that the Jin could put an army of 600,000 men into the field, 120,000 of which are thought to be horse archers. That's more horse archers in the Jin army than the entire size of the entire Mongol army. At this point, the Jinn had more than 50 million people in its territories and unlimited resources. If any of those 600,000 soldiers died, the Jinn could replace them instantly. Practically tons of money, tons of history and literacy and learning and mercantilism and craftsmen and everything else. They were very intimidating because of the resources that they could bring to bear. The Mongols, though, were no slouches in the intimidation field either. Now they couldn't bring all these resources to bear. They weren't scary because of that. They were scary because they were scary. Whether this was a deliberate attempt, as some historians think, by Genghis Khan to create a ferocious sort of reputation so that you intimidated others into, you know, bowing before you and giving up without even fighting. And it worked in many cases. Many cities are thought to have surrendered. Perhaps whole peoples are thought to have surrendered simply based on the Mongols hideous reputation. A reputation not unlike, for example, the ancient Assyrians, who historians also think may have done this deliberately as a way to sort of, you know, gain a psychological edge on their opponents. But when the Mongols were fighting in western China, it quickly became apparent that if you didn't surrender to the Mongols right away, and sometimes even if you did, they were going to kill every man, woman and child in the city that didn't surrender. And they did it in an interesting way. Chroniclers from opponents of the Mongols would suggest that the Mongols tortured people. But historians don't think the Mongols did torture people. They think that they were absolutely clinical about the way that they killed people. If you recall the secret history of the Mongols, talking about them disposing are the exact words of the Naiman, although the Naiman continued to exist in history. So it's an interesting. Maybe it was just certain tribes of them, but basically the Mongols had worked out an almost mechanized way to execute large populations of people. They had it down to a science. They would literally do it in a short period of time, but they would do it using battle axes to cut people's heads off. And here's how the system worked, according to renowned Mongol scholar JJ Chingis was adept at psychological warfare of the most horrific kind. He deliberately set out to create a reputation for ferocious terror in the expectation, often realized, of frightening whole nations into surrendering without resistance. There is something indescribably revolting, he writes, in the cold savagery with which the Mongols carried out their massacres. The inhabitants of a doom town were obliged to assemble in a plain outside the walls, and each Mongol trooper armed with a battle axe was told to kill so many people, 10, 20 or 50. As proof that orders had been properly obeyed, the killers were sometimes required to cut off an ear from each victim, collect the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted. A few days after the massacre, troops were sent back into the ruined city to search for any poor wretches who might have been hiding in holes or cellars. These were dragged out and slain. Some modern critics have suggested several reasons for this bloody that the nomads feared and hated walled cities, and on taking possession of them, were seized with a kind of frenzy of destruction. Or that the killings were intended to prevent revolts in the rear as the Mongol army passed on. Or that Genghis and his successors, being convinced of their divine mission to conquer the world, treated resistance as an unforgivable crime against God and the Khan. But it is more probable, he writes, that terror was erected into a system of government to spread fear and panic and demoralize their enemies before a shot had been fired against them. End quote. So the Jin were intimidating because of their numbers and size and resources. The Mongols were intimidating because they were badasses, and they deliberately spread word of this to potential friends and foes alike. Now, it should be pointed out in their defense that the Mongols really weren't any tougher on anybody that they ran into, captured, fought, than they were on their own people. One of the reasons the Mongol army, and this, this goes back to leadership, too. This is a function of leadership. One of the reasons the Mongol army is so incredible on battlefield is the extraordinary level of discipline amongst its troopers, something many steppe armies are not known for. This discipline was enforced with absolutely draconian sanctions. The first information about how rigorous Mongol discipline on the battlefield happened to be comes from something that might best be described as a European spy mission on the Mongols. A guy named John or Giovanni of Plano Carpini is sent by the Pope east to sort of go find the headquarters of these Mongols. He has no idea where this is. He's just gonna go and sort of, you know, ask people along the way who'll get, you know, information to send him to the next spot on the map. And he just keeps going east until he runs into, you know, big tents and very auspicious looking Mongols. But in the 1240s, which is a generation after Genghis Khan, the pope sends this guy to the Mongol khan as an envoy, and he's supposedly secretly supposed to spy on Mongol military capabilities and whatnot, because by this time, the Mongols had already come and dealt with some Europeans in a militarily significant way. So they weren't totally unknown, but no one had ever, you know, gone and seen them. It had always been the other way around. So John of Plano Carpini writes this piece for the Pope that has since made it into history and is either the first or one of the first accounts ever given by a European about what it's like on the steppe with the Mongols. And he talks about what the sanctions are for screwing up in the Mongol army. Here's what he says. And he had just finished talking about Mongol organization, by the way, which is decimal, which is how all the steppe or most of the steppe peoples were sometimes the Mongols get credited with inventing this. They didn't invent it. 10 troopers were one unit. 100 troopers were another unit. A thousand troopers were another unit. So John of Plano Carpini just tells you that. And then he follows up with. When they are in battle, if one or two or three or even more out of a group of 10 run away, all are put to death. And if a whole group of 10 flees, the rest of the group of a hundred are all put to death if they do not flee. Two, in a word, unless they retreat in a body, all who take flight are put to death. Likewise, if one or two or more go forward boldly to the fight, then the rest of the 10 are put to death if they do not follow. And if one or more of the 10 are captured, their companions are put to death if they do not rescue them. Now, as I said, this is a function of leadership here. These are the leaders making sure that the troops are held accountable, that they are praised and promoted when they do. Well, that's that system of merit that the Khan introduced, but also that screw ups are absolutely not permitted. The real possibility of you being a Mongol trooper and you getting your head cut off not only kept your mind on your work, but also made sure that boldness was rewarded and supported on the battlefield and acting, you know, on your own initiative and not supporting, you know, your fellow unit members, that was punishable by death. And not just death for you, death for everybody. You'll get the whole unit killed if you screw up. That's a level of control and discipline that almost no other army during this time period possessed, and it provided an enormous advantage on the battlefield. The story about things coming to a head between the Mongols and Jin China supposedly happens when a new emperor comes to the throne in northern China and his envoy goes to Genghis Khan to get him to kowtow before the new emperor. Now that Genghis Khan is dealing with a supremely, maybe the most literate society in the world, you begin to see his name in the Chinese records. In this case, this quote is from records written later, but people who certainly would have had access to contemporary accounts. And they describe the incident that touches off this conflict this the Jin emperor sent the Prince of Wei, Yung Ji to receive the tribute at Jing Zhao. The Emperor, meaning Genghis Khan, received the prince, but declined to offer the full ritual ceremony of greeting. Thereupon, Yun Ji returned to the court and sought troops in order to attack Genghis Khan. The Emperor Zhaozong died at this time and was succeeded as Jin Emperor by Yun Ji, who sent news of his accession to Genghis Khan by hand of an ambassador to whom Genghis should have kowtowed on accepting the message. When Genghis learned the identity of the new Jin Emperor, he made offensive remarks about him, faced the south, spat, mounted his horse and rode off to the north. End quote. Now remember, this new emperor of Jin China was someone who the Khan had met. He was the same Yun Zhi who'd been sent by the last emperor to negotiate with Genghis Khan. To begin with, the Khan apparently took the measure of the man and was not impressed to say the least. Now, a couple of rationales are used by the Khan to justify this war. On one hand, he turns it into a war of vengeance, tells the Mongols that past humiliations by these Jurchen on their people were inexcusable, cites a couple of relatives of his father and grandfather that they were kind of indirectly responsible for having killed, and says that it's time to avenge their blood. In addition, several sources say that he had a communion with God. The Mongols were at least Genghis was kind of shamanistic. Might be a good way to talk about it. Worshiping the gods of the steppe in the open sky, for example. Some of them were Christian, Nestorian Christians, some were Buddhist. But the Great Khan either went to a mountaintop, according to one source, or into a tent and stayed for four days explaining, you know, to the God or gods, you know, that he wasn't at fault for this. He didn't ask for it, it just was brought on him. And then after four days, one of the sources say he emerges from his tent and tells his people, heaven has promised me victory. Now we must prepare ourselves to take vengeance on the Altan Khan. End quote. So as far as Genghis Khan's motivations for doing what he's doing, you can take your pick. Maybe it really was vengeance, as he suggested. In one or two cases. We shouldn't underestimate the blood feud aspect that was common in tribal cultures. The Mongols are far from the only people who felt that way. So that might have been more important than we modern people in a different culture suspect. It might have been religious in nature. You know, later on in the Mongol's history, based on Genghis Khan's views, it's going to get very religious. Heaven's going to promise the Mongols world conquest. Maybe it starts now. Maybe the emergence from this tent or coming down off the mountain, Moses like is the beginning of this divine mission where God says, go conquer the world. And Genghis says, I'm just following orders. It could be for the obvious reason, loot, booty, stuff, money, slaves. These had been motivations for steppe peoples from time immemorial. Why should it be any different now? In fact, some historians suggest that this confederation, this newly formed confederation of Genghis Khans would break up if they weren't continually reinforced with stuff. The one motivation you can't ascribe though to Genghis Khan very easily based on the evidence, is any sort of positive, laudable reason for doing this. Some modern historians, as I said, have swung so far pendulum wise to the other side of the coin that they brush off. You know what the cost of Genghis Khan's inadvertent byproduct achievements were. Alexander wasn't trying to spread Hellenism. That's shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it afterwards. Genghis Khan wasn't fighting with northern China for any high minded reasons we would recognize as beneficial today. Maybe the Mongolian people would see it as beneficial because one of his reasons might have been to make his people better off. But we don't ascribe good motivations to other world conquerors if their goal was to make their own people better off. Hitler's conquests in Europe are not okay because he was trying to make Germany better off. Although maybe some Germans might think so. I think there'd be a very small crowd. But this war that the Khan is about to get into with Jin China will almost certainly cost more human lives than any war until the 20th century. Certainly if you add up the war with Jin China followed by the war with Song China, the last two Chinas left, there's no question about it. Nobody knows, by the way, how many people died in the conflict that's about to happen. They did a census before the Khan's invasion, and they did a census afterwards, and tens of millions of people are just gone. Now. Some of these people left, there's no question about that. The question is how many, you know, didn't? Those are the people that just disappeared. The Guinness Book of World Records used to say that 50 million people were killed in the wars of Genghis Khan. Nobody knows how many people have died to this point on the steppe. Steppe populations aren't that huge. This is a war with the most populous nation states in the world. And the people, millions of them, are going to suffer the fate Genghis Khan predicted for anyone who didn't accept his invitation to the important Mongol meeting. They're going to suffer the fate of a stone dropped in water. They are simply going to disappear. In the next episode of this series, Genghis Khan is about to introduce his brand new tribal confederacy to a bunch of major world societies that have no idea it even exists. It will not be a pleasant introduction as the historical arsonist that is Genghis Khan continues his efforts at creative destruction. As some historians would look at it, he will not just burn the Chinese empires down that he's currently attacking, but he will start fires that spread as far away as places like Russia in Europe, and that totally engulf some Middle Eastern societies and burn them beyond recognition. The next dozen years of human history will be some of the most tumultuous ever experienced by people on the Eurasian continent. It's a fate that almost certainly would not have happened had that child born, supposedly with the blood clot the size of a knucklebone, not been born. What would the world look like without Genghis Khan? Depends on which historian you consult. One thing's for sure, There are a lot of people who didn't make it out of his time period that would have liked a chance to find out the Mongols conquer much of the world in the next edition of the Wrath of Khans. If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. A buck a show, it's all we ask. Do you shop online@Amazon.com if you do, consider doing so through the Amazon search window on dancarlin.com your shopping experience will be the same as always, but Amazon will give Dan and Ben a little kickback for sending you there. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. Don't forget, you can buy and instantly download past episodes of classic Hardcore history right from the website. Go to dancarlin.com to get the shows. Hi everyone. Dan here, obviously with a little message for those of you who are not following us on the social media. You know, media outlets out there, Facebook, Twitter. The Twitter address, by the way, is ardcorehistory. Based upon all of the things you people tell me, I'm trying very hard to make good use of this social networking tool to try to spread word about the program we announced the minute we released. What I'm gonna tell you about now via the social media because of the time lag, the considerable time lag between Hardcore History episodes, sometimes you folks who aren't following us on the social media don't get this news for weeks. And my apologies for that. But the new, not so new anymore Extra Edition program that goes along with our last podcast, you know, the Logical Insanity Blitz Edition podcast that's available for download right now. If you didn't get enough bombing and invasion and, you know, horrific moral questions in the last program. 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