← Dan Carlin Hardcore History Archives
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:02]
A
What you're about to hear is part two of a multi part podcast on the Mongol conquest in the Middle Ages. If you're one of those people that don't mind starting a story in the middle of it, well, please, by all means stick around. If you're someone who likes to get all of the background and catch up to what we're talking about before the story begins, you might want to check out part one of this podcast series before you do. But now, without Further Ado, Part 2 of Wrath of the Cons. December 7, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. It's history. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events would have body power not quite to the mouth. From this time, the figures take pride in the words Ish bin ein Bialina. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The dramatic urgent Marine Six now. It too has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not they're deep questions. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, it's hardcore history. Around the year 1215, the up and coming ruler of a giant chunk of the Islamic world, a shah of a place known as Khwarezm, sent some spies to China. The shah's name was Muhammad, and he was entertaining the idea of maybe invading China, a place that he knew little about other than from rumors and things he heard from trade missions. The emissaries, or the spy mission was led by one Baha el Din. And sometime between 1215 and 1220, the spy mission arrived in a city known as Zhongdu, modern day Beijing. By the time the mission arrived there, they had already figured out that something was terribly wrong. On the way, they had encountered what they thought was a snow covered mountain when they saw it in the distance. As they got closer, it turned out to be an absolutely massive pile of bones. Then the road on the way to Zhongdu became unstable, the ground marshy, saturated with grease, the result of decaying human bodies of such incredible numbers that the road had to be abandoned and detoured around. The stench was so horrible, the Persian chronicler Giujani writes, that several of the mission became ill and some actually died. By the time the mission reached this former capital of northern China, they found the place devastated, and tales of 60,000 virgins who had supposedly jumped off the walls to escape capture by another People that the Shah of Khwarizm knew virtually nothing about. A people that must have been unbelievably powerful, because the city of Zhangdu and the ruins of this place that would later become Beijing must have overwhelmed Baha Al Din all by itself. Chengdu had a population of a million people, a giant metropolis by the standards of the time. It had walls of stamped clay that were 40ft high, with 900 battle towers around it, 13 gates, subterranean chambers that led to four fortified cities, each with about 5,000 soldiers in it. And Xiongdu had at least 20,000 men in its own garrison. The city had been devastated, the people wiped out. And Baja Al Din had to report back to his master that not only were the Chinese this amazing, magnificent civilization of immense power and sophistication, but that apparently there was some group of people out there with the power to destroy that. This was the Muslim world's first real encounter with Genghis Khan and his Mongols. They would not have long to wait before their next. But before Muhammad's Khwarezmians would feel the wrath of the Khans. It was the turn of the northern Jin dynasty Chinese. The war that will lead to Xongdu becoming the charnel house that supposedly Baha Al Din witnessed is still a few years in the future when we pick up this story. The war itself won't be launched until 1211. Zhangdu Falls in 1215. In between that time, the world receives one of the great shocks in all military history, when a people hitherto scorned by perhaps the greatest state in the Middle Ages, this Jin China, attacking with a paltry force, when you consider the magnitude of the task at hand, decides to launch its war against the most populous state in the world. In May 1211, Genghis sets out for Jin China with an estimated 100,000 horsemen. This is considered to be, at the time, the maximum amount he could put into the field. And of course, they weren't all Mongols. It should always be remembered that the Mongol confederation, like every other major steppe confederation, had a people at the tip of the pyramid. In this case, the ethnic Mongols ruling over and allied with the rest of the base of the pyramid, which included lots of other steppe tribes of various ethnicities, many of them maybe the majority of them Turkish. This 100,000 horsemen showed up outside China's outer defenses. By June 1211. These outer defenses were fabulous, sophisticated walls and channels and moats with battlements and towers. Now, it wasn't the famed Great Wall of China, the great tourist attraction that attracts so many people to China. Now, historians used to believe that the Great Wall existed back in these times. The most recent belief is that the Great Wall didn't, that it's a later invention of the Ming dynasty, But certainly the Chinese had for centuries, even before this, massive walled structures and fortifications designed both to keep the nomadic horse peoples out, but also to force them to go through certain predictable areas. The main danger you have with all these nomadic horse armies is their mobility. If you could control where they went, you'd know where to put your armies. If you could channel the attacks through certain passes, in mountain ranges, or down certain roads or valleys, you'd know where to station your formidable defense armies. The problem that the Jinn had was that they were internally weak on paper. Genghis Khan's attack against the so called Golden King. Golden Khan, Golden Emperor. He was called all three names. Looks like a fool's errand. The Jinn have more troops, by far, more people, by far, more resources, by far, better defenses, by far. Genghis Khan has no chance at all on paper. But wars are not fought on paper. And often, you know, when military strategists sum up situations, they focus on sexy things like numbers and weaponry and fortifications at the expense of the less sexy things that sometimes are the true determiners of, you know, who turns out to be the victor and who turns out to be the vanquished. In the case of the Northern Jin dynasty Chinese, it was unity. One can make a parallel comparison to the French in 1940 when the Wehrmacht invaded. On paper, the French should have been able to put up at least as good of a resistance as they had a generation before in the first World War. As a matter of fact, many in the German high command expected them to. That defense took years and cost millions of German lives trying to overrun. In fact, as most people know, the French had actually built huge defenses, the Maginot Line and others, based on the idea that the conditions were going to be the same. And if your defenses were ready for the Germans, you'd be able to counter them with even more casualties. But what if the Maginot Line was not held by Frenchmen and instead held by ethnic Germans from, you know, Alsace Lorraine? And when the Wehrmacht shows up, they decide to just hand the keys to the German generals because they can see which way the wind is blowing and they want to be on the winning side. That's exactly what happened in 1211. The outer ring of the Jin defenses was held by other nomadic horse peoples, and they didn't want to have anything to do with Going up against Genghis Khan, who seemed to have, you know, heaven's blessing, because those people were very well aware of the internal divisions inside Jin China. You see, the Jin were ruled by people called the Jurchen. The Jurchen were not Chinese. A hundred years ago, they had come from their homeland in what's now Manchuria. They had been a semi nomadic people who inhabited the steppe and the forest zones of Manchuria. And they came screaming down like Mongols of a generation before, really, because they're very close, and took over, you know, northern China. They took it over from another group that had done the very same thing a generation or two before that, people called the Chitan, now the Chitan, instead of being all wiped out or driven out, were kept in place by the Jurchen, and as a matter of fact, formed some of the most elite and important troops in this defense scheme. And yet they hated their rulers. It's never smart to base your defense on a bunch of people who hate you. Not just that, but the ethnically Han Chinese, the people who were the actual, you know, Chinese people who'd been there the whole time, didn't like the Zhirchen or, or the Chitan. To them, these were all foreign barbarian conquerors that weren't really worth dying for in the grand scheme of things. And not just that, but the times were not good. There were famines, there were floods, there were all kinds of things. The peasants were rebelling. Genghis Khan probably knew all of this. He had an intelligence service that is one of the greatest in all history. As a matter of fact, historian Richard A. Gabriel considers it one of the best in all history and says that the Khan was always, always looking for divisions amongst his enemies that he could exploit. On paper, the Jin were practically unconquerable. In reality, Genghis Khan knew that the entire structure of the Northern Chinese dynasty rested on a house of cards. The house of cards begins to tumble with astounding speed once the Mongols make it past the outer defenses. Chinese records from a later period, which is all you have to go on. The Chinese bureaucracies, which survived the rise and fall of dynasties for millennia, had a tradition. And the tradition was, once a dynasty fell, they sat down and wrote the entire complete history of it. So sometimes these histories of these dynasties are a century or two old by the time they're written. So you take them with a grain of salt. And sometimes they're not that specific. In this case, they talk about the Mongols getting past the outer defenses and swooping down on the Towns of the north. They are not specific about how the Mongols conducted themselves, but you can sort of infer their behavior by the way that they acted in later campaigns. In Eastern Europe, for example, in Persia and the Middle east, the Mongols tended to kill everyone. Townspeople, farmers in the field, people in the marketplace, people you just ran into. Now, some of this may have been wanton cruelty. After all, man's inhumanity to man is one of the favorite themes in literature, isn't it? But it also was probably calculated for effect. People with absolutely mathematical, cold, calculating precision, like the biblical Assyrians, were known to do the same thing because it put your defensive adversary in a terrible position. It seized the initiative from them. The Jin emperor would love to just be concentrating on his defenses, getting his troops in the right places, fortifying them and all that. Instead, he's getting these frantic calls from his northern territories, from the civilians and the governors of these towns, saying, come and help us. Where are you? We don't see our armies anywhere, but the Mongols are raping, burning, looting. Who's going to save us? The temptation, of course, is to simply ignore those sorts of pleas. Except if they do that, these people are liable to surrender. Instead of locking the doors to these fortified cities and putting up a good fight and taking maybe a bunch of Mongols with them. The Mongols, like many peoples, had a policy. You surrender and you can live. Sometimes you put up a fight, and we're going to kill everybody once we take the city. All of a sudden, the Jin emperors and generals have to think very strongly about abandoning whatever their defensive plans were and going and rescuing all these people that are being killed, you know, piecemeal. The divisions within the Jin dynasty surface immediately. Once again, one of these towns in the north, a place called Wining, is surrendered completely. The governor of the town switching sides, joining the Mongols, and given a plum command. He'll command a Mongol regiment for a long time. After this period, the Jinn wake up to what's going on very quickly. They've already had the outer defenses turned by treachery. Now, one of these major towns in this area, you know, goes over to the other side. Genghis Khan biographer Paul Renevsky says that at this point, the Jin court is terrified and arguing, you know, over the right policy. The emperor decides to ask Genghis Khan for a peace deal. Genghis Khan turns him down. So the emperor sends a general to consolidate the defenses up in the north. This general gets the bright idea to send a negotiator that personally knows Genghis Khan. To him Maybe the little personal touch will make all the difference. Unfortunately, the negotiator happens to be a chitan, and as we said, they're not too pleased. Anyway, living under Jurchen rulership, he goes to Genghis Khan and promptly defects as well, bringing all sorts of military information with him. Next, Jebe, one of the great generals of Genghis Khan, is dealing with his own problem in one of these strategic passes that the Chinese have fortified and are holding with their most elite troop, the Jurchen and Kitchitan cavalry. Now, there are two stories on how this went. One is that you had another act of treachery and the whole defensive arrangement was simply turned. When the commander went over to the Mongols, again, this seemed to be happening left and right. The other story is that Jebe, known as the Arrow, uses the age old step trick of pretending to flee, drawing out the defenders who think that they've just won a victory and they need to pursue and kill all these Mongols who are running away. And once they get out of their prepared defensive positions, they are surprised by Mongols who are waiting for them in ambush, who destroy the whole thing. It doesn't matter which of those two stories are true. The bottom line is all of a sudden, an already terrified, you know, Qin rulership has just lost the very best troops they have. At the very same time this is going on, another column, you know, heading in a completely other direction, swoops down on the imperial pastures in the north, driving off all of the cavalry and the horses that are just sitting there getting, you know, fattening up for use, you know, later in the war. Boom. In a moment, they're gone. All these things happening in quick succession is like a, you know, medieval version of a blitzkrieg. The Qin are reeling. The entire Jin dynasty might have collapsed very quickly at this point had it not been for one of those strange little happenings in history that can, you know, turn things on a dime. In this case, according to Genghis Khan biographer historian Paul Rich Nevsky, the great Khan is struck by a stray arrow. Now, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, he's not gonna die or anything, but he has to turn over command to his underlings. And things don't go quite as well with them as it did with the Khan in command. And the Chinese are able to stabilize things a little bit, right? We had dominoes tumbling here, and at the last moment they're able to sort of, you know, like the Battle of the Marne for the French in the First World War, save the day and at least stabilize things for a minute. And the problem for the Mongols is they're not dealing very well with the climate at this point. Apparently the combination of several factors, the fact that the defenses had been stabilized and the Mongols were stuck there a while longer, the climate seemed to be inducing disease in the Mongols soldiers and their horses, and maybe the fact that the Khan had been wounded by an arrow made the Mongols more open to the idea of a peace deal than they had been the first time that they rejected the Golden Emperor's offer. Now, the secret history of the Mongols, which is a much more contemporary source than the Chinese records, but is also difficult to understand and very convoluted when it comes to the war against the Chinese, a people that the secret history calls the Cathayans, as in Cathay, they describe an aborted attempt on the Chinese capital, Zhengdu, the place that the spies from the Khwarezim and Shah will later find. You know, the roads covered with grease and the mountains of bones. Supposedly, according to the secret History, Genghis Khan makes an attack on the capital, it is rebuffed, and then they make another one. And here's the way the secret history describes it. Quote. When they attack Zhang Du once again, the Golden King of Cathay's great general, Prince Fu Xing, advised his destiny is with the Mongol. Heaven and earth are on their side. Has the time come when you'll be forced to give them your throne? The Mongol army is so powerful, they've killed the finest and most courageous soldiers of Cathay, the Jurchin and the Chitan fighters, and slaughtered so many of our armies. Destroyed, they've captured our trusted fortress at Chuyong Kwan. If we reform our army to attack the Mongol again, and once again they defeat us, there'll be nothing to stop them from taking all of our cities. And if these cities are forced to fight the Mongol army, they'll most likely turn against us and surrender to them. I say we should offer tribute to the Khan of the Mongol for now and negotiate some settlement with him. Once we've negotiated a settlement and the Mongol army has returned to the north, then we can consider among ourselves what more we can do. I've heard it said the Mongol men and their horses are consumed by diseases and find this southern land unfit for their way of life. Let's give one of your daughters to their Khan. Let's give the men of their army heavy burdens of gold, silver, satins and other goods. How can we know they won't agree to these terms? The Golden King agreed with Prince Fu Xing's advice, and he said, we will do all these things. He sent a message offering tribute to Chinggis Khan and gave him one of his daughters as a wife. The gates of Xiang Du were opened and they set out great quantities of gold, silver, satins and other goods, letting the men of the Mongol army divide it themselves, depending on how many beasts each had to carry the load. Prince Fu Xing went on to negotiate with Genghis Khan, and Genghis agreed to talk with him, accepting their tribute, and ordered his men to stop fighting and return all the towns that they had taken. The army withdrew to the north. Prince Vujing rode with Genghis Khan as far as the ridges of Mochu and Wu Chu, and then he returned to the court in Xiongdu. And our soldiers carried off as much satins and goods as their beasts could hold and went on their way, securing their bundles with ropes of silk. End quote. Now, this is part of a very confusing part of this story. The entire campaign against China in this period is confusing. The sources differ. They don't really get specific. I mean, for example, several times you get this feeling like the Mongols have taken the capital of Zhangdu, only to find out later that they haven't. What it really looks like is like many great cities the world over, and Zhangdu may have been the largest city in the world at this time. They had suburbs. You had this great walled city with the 900, you know, battle towers and the triple moat and the giant 40ft high walls and all that stuff. But you had this, you know, growing area outside the main defenses where people started living and then marketplaces would crop up and you'd have this, you know, suburb essentially, and this was what the Mongols had taken and were besieging the main city from there and apparently having real problems with both disease and starvation. Now, this shouldn't surprise anyone because none of the step nomadic armies throughout any period in history before this time had been particularly good at supply trains and bringing in, you know, stuff for the troops. They were expected to sort of live off the land, live off their herds. And if you were camped outside a giant city like this for a very long time, food might run low. According to some of the sources, the way the Mongols dealt with this was by eating each other. Supposedly they resorted to cannibalism. Now, most of the historians from modern times that I read think that this is a confused account of an earlier. While the Mongols may have feasted on dead bodies, they don't think what Some of the earlier sources said happened, happened. What people like John of Plano Carpini say happened was that the commander ordered some troops to be killed in the army to feed the rest of them. You know, sort of maybe they draw lots and the losers get thrown into the pot and the winners get to eat their, you know, former barracks mates. Historians think that this may have actually been a real incident, but not with the Mongols, with their forebears, the Chitan, the people who were fighting the Jurchen. And supposedly during that conflict, the Jurchen had gotten the Chitan into a situation where they were starving and they may have perhaps eaten thousands of their own troops, you know, losing some people in the army to ensure that the rest of the army survived. Nonetheless, the story is believable because the Mongol's diet was repellent to the settled civilizations. Again, it shows a certain level of affluence that people, for example, like the Islamic societies who had very strict dietary codes, could turn their nose up at things that people like the Mongols or the Huns or the Turks or the Scythians would eat. After all, they usually weren't forced to to the very borders of starvation, these nomadic societies were. They'd eat anything that was edible. Mice, dogs, insects. And maybe, if the situation warranted it, people. There's a particularly nasty story that a Moslem chronicler tells of a Mongol horseman who's eating, and apparently this is something they ate all the time, the intestines of a recently killed animal. But they don't wash them, they just roll them up, you know, pushing out the material inside the intestine as they go and eating the intestines. This. This was the sort of stuff that just made the Islamic societies just shudder. Made the Mongols extra scary, too. Nonetheless, it sort of explains if the Mongols really were on the verge of cannibalism, why the Great Khan, who was, you know, literally inches away from victory, would be willing to, you know, cease and desist, even after all of the trouble he'd already gone to. He goes back to Mongolia, they say, in the second month of 1214, the year 1214. And the little peace agreement with China doesn't even make it to the end of the year. By the end of the year, the Mongols are back. They're back because the Chinese rulers made a horrible mistake. They decided that Zhang Du was not defensible. 900 battle towers, 40ft, walls of stamped clay, you know, subterranean chambers. Doesn't matter. We can't defend this capital. It's too far north. Let's move it south to Nanjing. The problem is, moving the capital south was a little like telling Genghis Khan you were preparing to strengthen yourself to fight him again. He was not prepared to allow the Jinn to recover. Bingo. You're back at war. What's more, the southern Chinese state, the people known as the Song, didn't know quite how to handle any of this. Some of the advisors were looking at this as a great thing. Yes. Our enemies, the Jin who've defeated us before, are now being defeated by these Mongols. Fantastic. Maybe we should help. The other half of the advisors were sitting there going, are you crazy? You get rid of the Jinn, and all of a sudden, the only thing standing between us and Genghis Khan is gone. And all of a sudden he's our neighbor. So the Song, who maybe could have turned the tide here had they seen the collective threat, were enjoying their main enemy, the Jin, being in trouble too much to do quite anything. This time when the war resumes, Zhangdu is going to fall. And this time we're told that when the Mongol surround the Chinese capital city, perhaps as I said, the largest city in the world at this time, there's no getting away. The government may have moved down to Nanjing, but the million inhabitants of Zhangdu were still up near modern day Beijing, surrounded by the Mongols. And when the Mongols surrounded the city and they began to starve in Zhangdu, we're told that they began to resort to cannibalism inside the giant, you know, imagine a million people unable to get food. The, you know, Golden King, Golden Khan, Golden Emperor sends a relief column of supplies to, you know, solve the city's starvation problem. But the Mongols destroy the whole thing. As soon as the commander of the city hears, you know, sees the starvation all around him and hears that the relief column has been destroyed, he takes poison and commits suicide. Apparently the suicide, along with the starvation and the destruction of the relief column sapped the will of the people to resist, and the final assault of the Mongols was accomplished relatively quickly. Military historian Paul Lococo picks up the narrative. The Mongols accomplished the final assault that captured the city very quickly. When the Mongols rode into Xiongdu, the sack of the city was terrible to behold. For several days, the Mongols set loose and devastated the city. Thousands were slaughtered and raped and allegedly 60,000 women and girls committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be ravished by the Mongol soldiers. Caravans with thousands of carts hauled loot to Mongolia for weeks, and the fires started in the city reportedly lasted for over a month. The Mongols finally left Zhongdu with their last carts full of plunder when the stench of dead bodies became too much even for these men accustomed to large scale death. Even years later, travelers reported the area around the city was littered with the skulls of those killed. Lococo continues. Surprisingly, the capture of Zhangdu and the devastation of the lands of northern China did not end the war. Even while looting took place in Zhongdu, the Jin court in Kaifeng sent another relief force. The Mongols intercepted this force and the whole unit was slaughtered. Nearly the whole of northern China was devastated. Enormous tracts of cropland were burned, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. Hundreds of villages, towns and cities were leveled and destroyed. Many more emptied as a result of the deadly diseases that always accompany such death and destruction. In some cases, the Mongols forced whole populations to leave an area. They joined the millions of newly homeless wandering throughout the land looking for food and security. Constant streams of people clogged the road and waterways going south away from the dreaded Mongols. Banditry became the leading occupation after scavenging, and there was tremendous societal breakdown. End quote. Now, this would not end the Jinn, as we said, this was a massive, you know, empire with lots of fortified cities that could continue to hold out and prolong the agony of the death rattle for years to come. Nonetheless, people like the Chitan were turning on them. The Han Chinese people in these areas went over to the Mongols very quickly. Genghis Khan's attention, though, was drawn to the west, and he left the rest of the conquest of the Djinn to his underlings. And the final nail in the Djinn coffin wouldn't actually happen until after Genghis leaves the scene. Nonetheless, the destruction of what was almost certainly the greatest city in the world at this point, is a massive holocaust. There's no way to sugarcoat it, and yet people do. In the first episode of this series, we talked about this idea of creative destruction, where historians and others will look back and notice the byproducts of terrible events and hail them as milestones towards progress. I have, for example, an app that I keep on my phone that's intended to spur creativity. And one of the sections in the app is called Stir Things Up. And in it, the creativity director who wrote the app quotes historian Chester Starr and says, every so often, civilization works itself into a corner from which further progress is virtually impossible. Along the lines then apparent, if new ideas are to have a chance, the old systems must be so turbulently shaken that they lose their dominance. Then the author of the app, Genghis Khan's Mongol Invasion of China in the 13th century shook up what had become a stagnant country. The ensuing mixture of Mongol military tactics and expert horsemanship with Chinese iron technology and administrative know how led to political unity, a flourishing commercial sector and expanded trade routes. End quote. Now, I'm not picking on the creativity author of this app. His view is a standard revisionist view today. Think about that though, folks. The greatest Holocaust of this time period probably is merely in our minds, the minds of people who knew none of the dead. Shaking things up to open up new venues of good things. I've often said, and many others have too, that the political system in the United States is somewhat stagnant and maybe could use a little shaking up. How would we feel if the shaking UP process killed 10 to 50 million of our countrymen? What's worth that? But let's take it out of the realm of the purely hypothetical for a second. There are a great many historians who have cited the role that the horrific murder of 6 million Jews during the Second World War's Holocaust played in laying the groundwork and creating the conditions for the creation of the modern state of Israel. And let's remember that the modern state of Israel, the new Jewish homeland or the refounding of the Jewish homeland, is something that Jews had prayed for and hoped for and worked for for millennia, literally. Was it worth the loss of 6 million of them to get there? Well, I would suggest that it depends on who you ask. I can almost guarantee you historians 500 years from now will think it worth it, because they seem to do that most of the time. My Chinese history professor with the unusual ability to tie into the pain of his ancestors is a rare example. Most of the time, historians look at big picture things like trade and commerce and world events, and the individual lives, as we pointed out, tend to fade into the background. What if you asked Israelis, though, 500 years from now if they thought the price of 6 million of their ancestors was worth it? Well, I bet that they're still feeling the pain even 500 years from now. But I bet you they would think that that was a, you know, a price that was worth it for what they got, that those people sacrificed themselves for millennia of Jewish hopes and dreams. But again, they're not the ones to ask. They're not the ones who paid the bill. They're just the beneficiaries of it. The ones to ask are the ones that paid with everything. Go to a Holocaust survivor that lost their parents and their children and their cousins and everyone in their family and ask them if it was worth. Seems to me the only way it would be fair is if you offered the. The people who paid the bill a refund if they wanted it. Go to those tragic figures who survived the loss of everything in the Holocaust and ask them if they wanted everyone back and would they trade the resulting State of Israel to get that. Like to ask those Chinese people, too, who lived in that, as that one individual suggested, that stagnant society, that country that had come to a creative, you know, impasse, asked them if they'd be happier to have the losses restored to them and continue to live in a stagnant society or to, you know, embrace the creative destruction that was being brought to them by the, you know, historical arsonist that was Genghis Khan. Well, in 1216, they get a temporary break and the historical arsonist returns to Mongolia for a while because he's got issues that require his attention besides what's going on in China. Now. The war in China never stops, but without Genghis there monitoring it personally, it's a lot less blitzkrieg like than it was. And the Chinese are able to, you know, hold their ground for a while while Genghis deals with issues in his rear and over to the West. The issues in his rear involve people that he thought he'd already dealt with, tribes that he had conquered during his rise to power that formed, you know, part of the core of this Mongol confederation who had decided that the Mongols were so involved in China right now that perhaps it was a good time to see if you could get your independence back. And some of them rebelled, thinking that the Mongols were unable to really respond in force, busy as they were in these largest countries in the world at the time. Countries being a modern term, of course. For example, a people known as the Merkits, a Mongol Turkic people, rebelled, and the Khan sent his generals out there to destroy them, destroying the leadership, destroying most of the people in the tribe. The Merkits, according to some historians, cease to exist after the Khan punishes them for their insurrection. His generals go to a couple other locations, deal very harshly with some of these other insurrectionists, and then he turns his mind towards a figure in the west that's rather unique in the history of Genghis Khan. It's one of the few of the Khan's enemies ever to survive his wrath. And his subsequent activities sort of proved to Genghis Khan the wisdom of making sure these people don't live to fight again another day. The figure's name is recorded as several different versions, but Kuchlug is the one you see most often. This Kuchlug was a member of the Naiman tribe. As a matter of fact, he was one of the leaders of this tribe. His father had been the Khan who had fought against Genghis Khan during Genghis rise to power and had died on the battlefield. Kuchlug got away. Genghis became busy with China and he sort of forgot about, you know, the danger that this Naiman prince posed. Kuchlug ran to a empire in the west and sought protection and sanctuary from, you know, his pursuers that Genghis had on his tail at all times. I mean, he was relentless. But Kuchlug finds safety amongst these people known as the Karachitans, or the Halachitons. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because it involves the same people we've talked about many times, the Chitons, the people who ruled northern China before the Jin did. The Jin dynasty was a conquest dynasty from Manchuria. A people called the Jurchen came down and displaced the rulers of northern China. Those rulers had also been a conquest dynasty of outsiders. They were called the Chitan. Many of them stayed where they were and fought for the Jin against Genghis Khan before changing sides, as we said. But not all of them. Some of them fled westward and took over this region in modern day Kazakhstan and became a military dynasty there. To outside observers, they would have seemed thoroughly Chinese by now. In fact, the Chinese had a Chinese name for the whole people. They called them the Western Lao dynasty. In reality, though, they formed a ruling elite or over a mainly Islamic people, and were very powerful for a while, forming a major buffer state that separated Genghis Khan in the east from this rising empire in the west, this Turkic Islamic society run by Shah Muhammad, the Khwarizmian Shah. The Shah's territory didn't specifically touch Genghis Khan's territory because this Karachitan empire was in the way. And now these Karachitans are giving Kutchlough protection. Now, here's where the story gets interesting. And if we had a hundred episodes to deal with this, we could go into a lot of detail. But there's two really important points that come out of this part of the tale that need to be related. One of them is religious. Kuchlug happens to be a Nestorian Christian. Now, that's not that unusual. A small percentage of the steppe people had been converted to Nestorian Christianity. It's rather interesting to think of Christianity on the edges of China, and it would end up creating Some very interesting legends and whatnot in the west down the road, which we'll get to eventually. But Kuchlug marries the daughter of this karachitan leader, who gives him sanctuary. She happens to be a buddhist. He. He converts to buddhism. While all this is going on, he's asking for favors from the karachiton leader. One of the favors is, can he please gather the naiman tribesmen that genghis khan had scattered, you know, hither, thither and yon, you know, also under the protection of the karachitans. Probably saying something like, listen, these are great fighters. You'd love to have them, you know, fighting for you, too. And in a move that's, again, in hindsight, looks incredibly stupid, the karachitan leader says, sure, you can, you know, get your naiman tribesmen back together. Now, let's just point out the existence of these naiman tribesmen don't even seem possible, if you believe the mongol sources. They suggest that they wiped out all the naiman at the foot of a mountain after they defeated them in battle. Other historians suggest that many of the naimen were killed, but others were scattered. The revisionist historians trying to portray genghis in a more positive light suggests that the naiman were just incorporated into the mongol tribes. That doesn't sound that viable, though, because if they were working for genghis khan and fighting for him, how the heck does kuchlug ever get them, you know, to desert and come to him? Nonetheless, he asks for permission, it's granted. He starts bringing in his own soldiers into this karachiton empire and building his own strength and then secretly working with the khwarezmian shah on a deal. The khwryzmian shah is not too happy with the karachitans. He has to pay them tribute. That's how powerful they are. He doesn't want to do this anymore. And kutchlook basically makes a deal with him, saying, listen, you support me, I'll take over this karachitan empire, and you won't have to pay tribute anymore. The shah's all on board with that. In sort of a secret arrangement. They bring the karachetan empire down. They do this through warfare. There's a big battle, and the sources differ who wins, Kuchlug or the karachitans? It doesn't matter, though, because when the battle's over, whatever's left of the koracheton army is immediately swept down upon by the entire massive force of the khwryzmian shah, who's been waiting sort of outside the battlefield to see who wins, and waited until the karachitans had been weakened and then wiped out whatever was left of them, leaving Kuchlug in charge of that former empire. He now adopts the name Kuchlug Khan and begins persecuting this people that he just became the ruler of. The karachitans ruled over a population of almost entirely Islamic people. Kuchlug, the former Nestorian Christian converted to Buddhism, now starts forcibly trying to convert Muslims and doing things that are not calculated to make you look like a good ruler in front of a Muslim population, starting with one of their most revered imams. He has this religious leader thrown in prison, naked, in chains, gives him no food, no water. Several days later, drags him out and crucifies him on one of the main religious schools. His people begin to hate him. This is exactly the sort of dissension within the ranks that the Mongol intelligence service was wonderful at. Picking out. A chink in the armor, a crack in the unity of opponents. In the year 1218, 20,000 Mongols show up outside of one of the cities of Quuchlug Khan's new empire and proclaim that Genghis Khan is a believer in religious liberty, that he believes everyone should be allowed to worship the gods of their fathers. Now, modern historians who see Genghis Khan in a very positive light often use the Khan's views on religion as a way to show how tolerant the Mongols were, how comparatively modern and liberal they are. You can worship anyone you want. How unusual for the times, right? That's not why Genghis Khan was doing it, though. He was doing it for the same reasons that many other great empires in history that you would never call liberal or tolerant or nice did the same thing. I mean, take the Romans, for example. Throughout most of the Roman republic and empire's rule, you could worship anyone you wanted to. As a matter of fact, it was positively encouraged not just to believe in your own gods, but to believe in the gods your neighbor worshiped as well. Empires want stability. They want peace within their borders. They want people to be content and pay their taxes. Other than some attempts to destroy the Zoroastrian religion in Persia, even Alexander the Great didn't require you to worship this God or that God again. Just be quiet and pay your taxes. The reason the Romans, for example, had so many problems with first the Jews and then the Christians was this whole idea that there was one true God implied that anyone who wasn't worshiping that God was wrong. That was a threat to the stability and passivity of the empire. And that's exactly the sort of thing Genghis Khan didn't want to happen either. In fact, he used this toleration of people's faiths as a weapon. And it worked wonderfully on Quuclug Khan because his people hated him intensely. And the idea that Genghis Khan would come in and restore religious liberty to, to the Moslem people who lived under Kuchlug's dominating and persecuting temperament resulted in them rebelling and overthrowing Kuchlug. Now, a little about this Mongol religious toleration. It's fascinating the way especially some of the earlier historians deal with it, the way that a guy like David Morgan, for example, a historian of this period talks about it is perfect. He says the Mongols believed in taking out all the celestial insurance they could. That's a great phrase and that's the way he said it. Celestial insurance. The Mongols weren't necessarily believers that their own native religion, which is considered to be shamanistic, you know, worshiping the sky and the gods of nature, they weren't always sure that they had the right answers. Why take chances? Maybe the Christian God was the right God or maybe the Muslim God was. All they wanted from these subject peoples was that they would pray. These subject peoples would pray for the good health and welfare of the Khan. By the way, this is the same thing the Roman emperors required. They didn't care if you were this, that or the other religion. Just bless the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor and you know, you could go about on your way. Celestial insurance. The Great Khan simply wanted to make sure that whomever the right gods turned out to be, they had people out there praying for the Khan's good health and welfare. Celestial insurance. In this case, the celestial insurance paid off. Kuchlagh is overthrown by this Muslim people who can't stand him. Genghis Khan is portrayed as a religious liberator and Kuchlug runs away and dies. The religious tolerance aspect is one of the biggest, most important parts of the Karachitan Empire side of the story. The other one is what happens to the map of the world once Qun is erased from it and the Karachitan Empire goes away too. All of a sudden, this buffer state that had separated, you know, these two great rising empires, Genghis Khan's Mongols in the east and the Khwarizmian Shahs, you know, Turkic Islamic Empire in the west was gone all of a sudden. The Khwarizmian Shah and Genghis Khan were next door neighbors and that wasn't likely to turn out well, but for once you can say that this resulting holocaust that was going to occur because of this, you know, side by side neighborly situation was almost certainly not Genghis Khan's fault. The question of fault is very important here too, because for the first time in this story, we get multiple sources. The sources broaden out for historians now that Genghis Khan breaks into another literate part of the world. And instead of getting these bureaucratic, sort of government style Chinese sources written, you know, a century or two or three later, kind of emotionless when you consider the horrific emotions that were part of the Mongol attacks in China, and instead of the Mongol's own secret history to themselves, where, you know, it reads like something Homer wrote, the Iliad or the Odyssey, you get to read from the point of view of the victims in the Islamic world. And it's important to point out that you get a kind of a Rashomon effect. That's when you get to see the same events from several different viewpoints. Because there are numerous Islamic historians who write about the Mongols contacting the Muslim world, but they're not all writing in the same conditions. And who you decide to listen to and who you decide to believe colors your entire view of this story. Some of these Islamic historians that future historians, current modern people give a lot of attention to were not free to write whatever they wanted to. They were writing from just after this period when they were under the control of Mongol overlords, people who got to look at their work and approve it before it was allowed to be seen by the public. People who would cut your head off if you displeased them. These are people who, when you read them, seem to me to bend over backwards sometime to explain away the. The bad things the Mongols did. They couldn't out and out lie sometimes. They couldn't say the Mongols didn't kill all these people in this city, but they could come up with a good excuse why they did. A lot of the revisionist historians who try to tell you that the Mongols weren't as bad as history portrayed them tend to favor those people and they will tend to discount the people who had more freedom to write what they wanted to before the Mongols took over, and they'll say that they're exaggerating and that there's a lot of hyperbole and you can't believe it. A lot of it's just over the top, except for one thing. Thing they would be ignoring the fact that the Mongol eruption, as they call it, into the Islamic world is profoundly embarrassing to the Muslim people, just as it will be profoundly embarrassing to the Christian world when they break into Christendom. You have to have a similar view of God that those people had to see why it would be embarrassing. If you believe in the right God and it's the only God and you are faithful, how could your God allow these terrible things to happen to you when it comes to Russia? A little bit farther on in the story, historians will talk about what they call a conspiracy of silence in the sources because the sources are so embarrassed and have such a hard time explaining why this would happen if your God is the right God. In fact, some of the Russian sources will try to twist it around and say, well, it must be because of their sins that God is sending these people to punish them. In other words, why would God do this to you? What's God's good reason? In the Muslim world? The best historian, in my opinion is a guy named Ibn Al Atir, a guy who was contemporary to the events that are happening and who spoke to people who were there. Atir writes the most horrific accounts of these Mongol attacks into the Middle East. And I don't know how historians, revisionist or otherwise, can downplay what he says when they say he's exaggerating. Why would he exaggerate? Listen to how he frames this. And you can tell that it is destroying him to even have to write it. Now he's written a great history. He talks all about the contemporary crusades. You know, the Europeans are launching crusades against the Muslim world during this time, and. And Athir writes a great history of that. What he can't handle is writing what's happening now that Genghis Khan's Mongols have turned their attention to the Islamic world and are beginning to destroy. Will start with the khwrizmian Shah in 1218. It won't end there, but here's how Al A'tir begins his history of these events. And you tell me if he sounds like he's magnifying, you know, how bad they are. To me, it looks like he would try to find anything he could find that would show that he and his people had not been abandoned by their deity. Instead, he is crestfallen. The chapter is entitled Account of the Eruption of the Tatars into the Lands of Islam. And Al Atir writes, for several years I continued to avoid mention of this disaster as it horrified me and I was unwilling to recount it. I was taking one step towards it and then another back. Who is there? Who would find it easy to write the obituary of Islam and the Muslims. For whom would it be a trifling matter to give an account of this? Oh, would that my mother had not given me birth. Oh, would that I had died before it occurred and been a thing forgotten, quite forgotten. However, a group of friends urged me to record it, although I was hesitant. I saw then that to leave it undone was of no benefit. But we state that to do it involves recounting the most terrible disaster and the greatest misfortune, one the like of which the passage of days and nights cannot reproduce. It comprised all mankind, but particularly affected the Muslims. If anyone were to say that since God, glory and power be his created Adam until this present time mankind has not had a comparable affliction, he would be speaking the truth. History books do not contain anything similar or anything that comes close to it. End quote. In fact, Ibn Al Attir actually sort of from the grave, addresses future historians. He acknowledges that the stuff he's talking about is almost unbelievable, but then he goes on to say that the people who lived through it can attest to it and they know it happened, sort of pulling rank on later historians when Alethir writes this. Indeed, these Tatars had done something unheard of in ancient or modern times. A people emerges from the borders of China, and before a year passes, some of them reach the lands of Armenia in this direction and go beyond Iraq, the direction of Hamadan. By God, there is no doubt that anyone who comes after us when a long time has passed and sees the record of this event, will refuse to accept it and think it most unlikely. Although the truth is in his hands, when he deems it unlikely, let him consider that we and all who write history in these times have made our record at the time when everyone living knew of this disaster, both the learned and the ignorant, all equal in their understanding of it. Because of its notoriety, he says, may God provide for the Muslims and Islams someone to preserve and guard them, for they have been forced to meet a terrible enemy and reduced, as for Muslim princes, to those whose aspirations do not go beyond their bellies and their private parts since the coming of the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace. Until this present times, the Muslims have not suffered such hardships and misery as afflict them now. But Ala'tir, along with all the other historians from this particular period and afterwards, put the blame squarely on a Muslim for causing this disaster, someone who had the bad decision making to decide to poke Genghis Khan with a stick. Who would ever do that, well, Muhammad, the Khwarezmian Shah would. And he's been vilified for it ever since. Now, I would like to suggest that he might not deserve quite as much blame as he's given. Let's remember something, that Genghis Khan was absolutely fearsome during this period and well known and august and all that stuff. But much of Genghis Khan's reputation for fearsomeness will be made in this war that's about to start with the Khwrizmian Shah. He wasn't quite the destroyer that he's going to be. So the Khwarizmian Shah didn't know all that. And in addition, the Khwryzmian Shah is himself one of the great empire builders of this time period. The war that's about to break out is like a war between two famous undefeated boxing champions. Until the boxing match actually happens. You'll have people on both sides suggesting how person A or boxer B can win this fight. And then afterwards it might be 90 seconds long. And then everyone will say, well, how did we ever think boxer A had a chance in this? You don't know till it actually happens. Now, there was a little bit of a preview that might have given you a little insight into what might happen, because during the previous war with the Karachi Tai, the Khwarezmian Shah's forces ran into a detachment of Genghis Khan's forces under one of the Khan's generals. The Khan's general said, listen, we don't want any trouble from you. I actually have strict orders not to get involved with any conflict with you. And. And the Khwarizmian Shah, perhaps showing a little arrogance here, said, I don't care what your orders are. I want trouble with you. He said, basically, you're all heathens and idolaters from where I stand. And they fought. The Khwarizmian Shah had a big army, the Mongols, a small force of 20,000. And some sources say the battle went three days long, you know, saying that the blood ran into the streets and the horses were slipping in it all and just terrible stuff. And then supposedly either both sides or the Mongol side, in the middle of the night before the fourth day of the battle, you know, decamped and left. This supposedly freaked the Shah out because if you can't beat, you know, a small detachment of Mongols, what are you going to do when the entire, you know, Mongol army shows up at your door? This may have determined how some of the tactics would be used later on in the conflict. It should also be pointed out that if you think that Genghis Khan is going to go to war with you eventually anyway, maybe you poke him with a stick now and get him to attack you when he's already tied down in China. Maybe it would have been dumber if you're looking, you know, down the road to wait till he conquers China, absorbs all those resources and then turns everything against the Khwarizmian Shah's empire. Nonetheless, people will speculate forever about, about this, but the Khwarezmyan Shah is often given the lion's share of blame for the absolute rivers of blood, Muslim blood, that are going to flow from this series of events. It starts with a really poor decision involving trade. Genghis Khan supposedly, and many of these sources are from the later period where the Muslim writers are kind of always finding good reasons for Genghis Khan to do what he does. Little bit of a apologist sort of an approach. Genghis Khan supposedly sends a message to the Khwarizmiya Shah saying that, you know, that Genghis Khan is the Emperor of the east, the rising sun. And he acknowledges the Khwarizmian Shah as the Sultan of the west, the setting sun. In other words, basically saying, I'm an undefeated boxer over here in champion, and you're an undefeated boxer over there in champion. And I acknowledge that we're both great. Let's trade. Trade is the benefit of the world. And he sends a caravan from the Mongol Chinese lands across Central Asia to the cities that are controlled by the Khwarezmian Shah. Now, understand how trade worked in this period. You had these trade routes, these paths or roads. Don't think of Roman roads with the pavement and stuff, but just these well traveled routes. And sometimes you just have a few merchants and a few camels and a few wagons. But sometimes you have giant amounts of trade between states where you'll send out a caravan with thousands of camels and wagons and thousands of merchants, you know, stretching off in a long line, you know, past the horizon. That's what this was, filled with valuable silks and money and stuff. Throughout the entire ancient and medieval world, these caravans have been tempting targets for bandits and attacks of all kinds. And you read about this, you know, over and over again. A lot of times protection is afforded to them. In this case, it seems like Genghis Khan was expecting his reputation to protect this giant caravan. After all, who would ever poke Genghis Khan with a stick? Right now the story becomes a little convoluted because the sources differ. On what happens. One thing they don't differ on is that this caravan is seized when it arrives at this destination. The stuff is taken and the Mongol merchants are either all put to death or some of them put to death being accused of spying and spreading propaganda, which modern historians say is not uncommon for any big caravan from this period. Nonetheless, what's not clear is whether or not this was Mohammad Shah's idea or whether or not the governor of the city involved was acting on his own accord. But when he then checked with the Shah, the Shah was cool with it. He just wanted his cut, no problem there. This is the casus belli for what's about to happen. The Khan goes berserk. You know, he says that this is not how rulers act, that these caravans and these emissaries are protected individuals. And then he offers the Khwarizmian Shaw an out. Rather nice thing for him to do. When you think about, you know, Genghis Khan's character, he tells the Khwarezmian Shah, if you didn't do this, if this governor was acting, you know, in a rogue fashion, no problem, we can be cool again. Just turn him over to me and I'll punish him. The Khwarezmian Shah, in a move that Muslim writers say cost the blood of untold numbers of Muslims, responds by killing some of the emissaries, delivering this message to him and cutting off the beards, a horrific insult to the others and sending them back to Genghis Khan. Now the trash talking begins. And it reminds me to keep with our championship fight, you know, theme of a pre fight press conference where the insults are being hurled at each other because Genghis Khan starts it. And according to Ibn Al Athir, Genghis Khan sends this message to the Khwarizmian Shah, Quote, you kill my men and my merchants and you take from them my property. Prepare for war, for I'm coming against you with a host you cannot withstand. And in perfect trash talking fashion, the Khwarezmian Shar responds with a similar I am coming to you, though you were at the ends of the earth to deliver punishment and treat you as I treated your followers. End quote. So it sounds like the showdown is set and the throwdown is imminent. And in the year 1219, the bell rings. When that bell rings, the Khwarizmian Shah is stunned by what happens. The Mongols hit him from so many different angles, he must have been caught completely off balance. As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons it's so difficult to explain In Blow by Blow, detail how this war progresses. The Mongols don't fight like ancient or medieval armies do. They fight like modern armies do. Normally, in a military history class, if you see a map showing you the progress of an ancient or medieval army, it's relatively straightforward and easy to understand. There will be an army and it'll be in one group, and if it's very sophisticated, maybe two groups, and you'll see some arrows. Where those armies progress, the really sophisticated ones might come at you from two directions. Normally, it's one body of troops that gets supplied and a very long supply train. And you can see them move from point A to point B to point C. The Mongols don't operate like that. When you look at a map of a Mongol military advance, it looks like something from the Second World War. Open up your history books and look at those advances and what you see. Instead of a single arrow or maybe two arrows advancing along a line of attack, you see arrows all over the map. Look at the German advance into Russia, for example, or the Allied advance into Germany. You see 50 different arrows in every direction, encirclements on all sides. I mean, it's so complex, it makes your head spin. That's the way the Mongols advanced. Separate columns, all operating independently, at least five attacking the Khwarezmian Shah's empire from all different angles. This was not something a military general from that era would have been prepared for. In fact, historians believe it accounts for why the Mongols numbers are consistently overestimated by their foes. To them, it appeared like they were attacking everywhere at once. The Khwarizmian Shah's answer to this was not to meet them in the field at all. Now, as I said, he gets a bit of a bad reputation for competence or lack thereof. But at the time, the guy was known as a second Alexander the Great. So he might have been a little bit more formidable than we give him credit for. He knew things, though, that are often not paid enough attention to. One of the things he knew was that his giant army on paper might not be very trustworthy. If you got it all into one place at one time. It may have been as large as 400,000 people, but even his own troops couldn't stand, you know, some of his other troops. He relied on mercenaries a lot. A lot of the people in his newly won empire didn't like each other. The Mongol intelligence services once again would have informed the Great Khan of the disunity of this group. He was facing the second Alexander, the Khwryzmian Shah's answer to all this was a gamble. He decided not to meet the Mongols in the field, but to shut up his troops in garrisons in fortified cities. He was gambling on some mistaken evidence and assumptions, the idea that the Mongols would not be good at siege warfare. Remember, most Steppe troops weren't. He felt that if he could keep his soldiers in pockets of 20, 30, 40,000 men in these large cities with walls and moats and defenses, he could wear the Mongols down, tire them out, maybe even bore them and force them to go home eventually. What he didn't realize is that the Mongols that he was facing in 1219 were not the Mongols of 30 years before. These were the Mongols who had thousands of Chinese siege engineers captured in the wars with China fighting for them. These siege engineers were the most sophisticated in the world. And when the Mongols came to these fortified cities, they put these siege engineers to work. The war between the Mongols and the Khwarezmian Shah is a war of sieges. And the Mongols, as part of their propaganda, declare to these people before the sieges start that if they surrender before the siege begins, which is, by the way, pretty standard operating procedure for this time in history for most people, they'll be spared. If they don't, every man, woman and child will be killed or sold into slavery or impressed into the Mongol armies, and the devastation will be total. The story of this war consists of several different Mongol columns, maybe as many as five to seven, going off in their own directions, besieging cities, and then massacring the inhabitants of them, the Khwarezmian shahs. You know, on paper, massive military numbers are wasted in siege after siege after siege. The first city to feel the Mongol wrath is the one commanded by the governor who first started this war by killing Genghis Khan's merchants in the caravan originally sent from the Khan to the Khwarizmian Shah. The city will hold out for five months of siege operations before capitulating. The people of the city actually surrender and are spared, but they don't know what they're in for. The troops know. You know, the ones who are in the garrison know that they're not gonna be spared. So they don't surrender. They fight to the last man in the. In the citadel. But the problem is, is they're not really fighting the Mongols because Genghis Khan doesn't want to waste any more Mongols fighting people who are behind fortifications. He takes the civilians who just surrendered and herds them like cattle up against the walls of the citadel to do his dirty work for Him. This is something that the Mongols had done in China and would do throughout this war as well. This is how they keep their casualties as low as possible. They force the civilians that they've just spared to take up the casualties for them. They throw them up against their own soldiers, force them to fill in the moats with sometimes even their own bodies, to be the ones who become the shields that suck up the arrows and the stones and the missiles that are thrown from the defenders. We're told from the chroniclers that more than once, the defenders are horrified to recognize people in the herd of civilians that are fighting them as people they know. It's almost a part of the Mongol psychological warfare, and it's part of what makes the Mongols sparing these civilians a little less wonderful than the revisionist historians often make it out to be. They'll say something like, well, Genghis Khan spared everyone, yes, he spared everyone to be used as human cannon fodder. Eventually, the citadel will fall, the defenders fighting to the last man, and Genghis Khan will have the governor killed, either by the relatively merciful means of having his head struck from his body, or, as some sources say, the relatively less merciful means of having molten silver or gold poured into his eyes and ears. A little bit of a psychological message addressing the greed of the governor. After this city falls, it will be Bokhara's turn next. This famous Silk Road city with limited defenses will be the next place that Genghis Khan's Mongols strike. They will enter that city after it's also surrendered by the civilians. And. And a similar scene will play out where the civilians are used as cannon fodder to go after the troops that are locked up inside the garrison. When this happens, there will be one of those moments recorded by the historians of the time. That's just one of those dramatic incidents where maybe you actually get a direct quote from the Khan, a very rare instance where you may get a feel for Genghis Khan when he arrives and all but declares himself the flail of God, as recorded by the Persian historian Giovanni, who says that the Khan rode into the center of the town after having the people of the town of the city of Bukhara assembled. And he tells them, quote, o people, know that you have committed great sins and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you. End Quote. Now the story of what happens to Bokhara is portrayed in different lights. Some historians say he then burns Bokhara down. Other historians say it was an accident. Bokhara is a tinderbox anyway. And a fire starts and the thing burns down. The Khan supposedly spares the civilians, then he kills the civilians, according to historians like the great Ibn Al Atir, who writes about the capture of Bokhara. Having finished with the citadel, Chinggis Khan proclaimed that a list of the notables and headmen should be made for him. This was done, and when it was handed to him, he ordered that they be summoned. They came and he said, I want from you the bullion that the Khwarezmian Shah sold you for. It is mine. It was taken from my followers and you have it. Anyone who had any of it says Al Athir brought it before him. Then he ordered them to leave the city. So they left, stripped of their possessions. None of them had anything with him but the clothes he was wearing. The infidels entered the city, plundered it and killed anyone they found there. He had the Muslims surrounded and ordered his men to divide them amongst themselves, which was done. It was a dreadful day from the amount of weeping by the men, women and children. They were scattered to the four winds and completely torn apart. They divided the women amongst themselves too. Bokhara became a wasteland, collapsed on its roof timbers as though it had not been thronging with people just the day before. They committed horrid acts with women while people looked on and wept, unable to defend themselves from any part of what befell them. There were some who did not accept this and choosing death instead fought until they were killed. Among those who did this and chose to be killed rather than see what befell the Muslims, were the lawyer and Imam Ruskan Al Din Almamzade and his son. For when they saw what was being done to the womenfolk, they fought until they were slain. The Qadhi Sadr Al Din Khan acted in the same way. Those that gave up the infidels took prisoner, and then they set fire to the city, the madrasas and the mosques. They tortured the inhabitants in various ways in search of money. End quote. When Al Athir says that the Mongols divided the people up, what he means is what we talked about in the first part of this series, that that was the way the Mongols executed large numbers of civilians. You know, imagine you are tasked with a massive engineering problem. How do you kill a hundred thousand people by hand? The Mongols did it by dividing the people amongst the number of soldiers they had, and then required each soldier to do away with a certain number of people. When Al Athir says the Mongols divided the people amongst the soldiers, he means that these soldiers then had a responsibility to kill any number of people. But they could also often take the women for themselves. Again, this is a hidden part of this story, the rape. And Ala Thier points out over and over again how the women weren't just raped, they were often raped in front of the townspeople, the people who knew them and their relatives. And in that story, he's pointing out that sometimes it just drove the men crazy and they would attempt to intervene or resist and then they would be killed. These are horrific scenes. Let's not pretend though, that they are unique to the Mongols. This is stuff that history has seen over and over and over again. Heck, during the Second World War, when the Soviets were moving into Germany as sort of payback for what they had had inflicted upon them by the Nazis, you saw many of these same scenes. As a matter of fact, you can go online now and see the after effects effects. Needless to say, rumors of the Mongol's treatment of women spread widely. After all, there was that anecdote that when the city that preceded modern day Beijing fell, that 60,000 virgins and ladies jumped off the walls to avoid what they thought was going to happen to them. Two of the chroniclers from this period, both of whom the revisionist historians actually like, tell the same story about some of the locals trying to prevent their daughters and women folk from being carried off by the Mongols. They tried to marry them in advance as a way to hopefully prevent them from being taken by the Mongols as wives. When the son of the Great Khan, Ogedai was his name, he would become the Great Khan eventually, himself a severe alcoholic who would die young because of his alcoholism. This was a problem that plagued many Mongols. When Olgadai heard that the townspeople were trying to sort of circumvent the chance for these Mongols to get these women as spoils, he organized a payback. Here's the way historian Paul Rezhnevsky quotes these two primary source historians from the era. There were, it is said, rumors that the girls of one clan were to be forced into marriage, meaning with the Mongols, whereupon these girls were all immediately betrothed or married to their own kinsmen. When Ogedai heard of this, he ordered that all girls over the age of seven should be brought together and that wives of less than one year should be taken from their husbands. Of the more than 4,000 girls, thus assembled, the daughters of the emirs were singled out, and those present were ordered to consummate marriage with them on the spot, an act which caused the death of two girls. Of the remainder, those who appeared worthy were selected for the harem. Others were distributed amongst the keepers of the leopards and wild animals or among the palace servants. While some were sent to the brothel or the diplomatic rest house to serve travelers, the remainder could be carried off by those present, Mongol and Muslim alike. According to Rashid Al Din, the fathers, brothers, husbands and relatives of these young girls watched this happen without having the courage or the opportunity to oppose it. End quote. That incident also demonstrates something else that several chroniclers describe about the Mongol invasions of this area. It absolutely paralyzed the locals. I mean, Al Ahtir has many stories where, unbelievably, the people were so paralyzed with fear from the Mongols that they simply wouldn't fight back, even when they outnumbered them and they were armed. He tells three stories where a Mongol comes and finds a crowd of, you know, Islamic folks, but forgets his weapon and tells that crowd of people to stay right where they are, that he's going to cut their heads off as soon as he goes and gets his sword. And they stay there. And then one by one, you know, these Mongols kill the captives who could have run at any time or overpowered their captor at any time, but they're absolutely paralyzed. In fact, there are several historians that make the case that the Mongol terroristic activity had a purpose, sort of a logical insanity purpose, to use a term from one of our earlier shows, where it was a calculated effort to terrorize the enemy so that the next time you came up to an enemy city, they would simply give up without fighting. In other words, be as cruel and horrific as possible now, and maybe it pays dividends later. That saves the lives on both sides. Now, I think that's a stretch myself. I think if you look at the history of many conquering tribal peoples, what you're seeing here is not out of the ordinary. And other historians have tried to explain that away. And the suggestion makes a lot of sense. It is the seeing of your opponent as something less than human. How often are the opponents in war dehumanized, even in modern times? Go look at the. Go look at the Allied propaganda turning the Japanese enemy into some sort of animal and subhuman. It wasn't confined to the Nazis, who certainly did that as well as anyone seems to be a human quality. In fact, these steppe peoples often saw the settled humanoids as akin to herding animals. And they killed them like that. This isn't a slam against the Mongols. This is a very human trait. Once you dehumanize people and put them on the level of vermin, killing them, harming them, mistreating them becomes so much easier. And you see it over and over and over again. It's one of the common themes of the horrific nature of human history. There's that line we like to quote that history is the autobiography of a madman. That's how this happens. The Mongols traumatized this region, and they did so through things like that. Mass rape involving girls 7 years old and older who get raped by the army in front of the entire populace. I'm not sure there's ever been that kind of nastiness on this scale in all human history. What Genghis Khan did to this part of the world, he did in three years. John of Plano Carpini will write after visiting the Mongols that they think of the slaughter of other people as nothing. Now, contrast this with what Marco Polo writes from his experiences with Kublai Khan a half century after this. Kubla or Kublai was perhaps the most tolerant, interesting, and wise of the Mongol rulers. And by the time he's ruling, already this. This different sort of view of Genghis Khan is coming into vogue. And that's the one Marco Polo is related from the great Mongol court, which is ruling over a giant slice of the world by that time. And he's taught that Genghis Khan is a bringer of peace and justice, and that his rule is so fantastic that people basically give up because they want to live under it. You can see the beginnings and the stirrings of what will become the revisionist histories of the Great Khan's tolerant and wise rule. A mere, you know, half century after the sorts of tales I just related to you actually occurred. It's the Mongol view of the Great Khan. He's their George Washington, and they understandably do not linger on the less beneficial elements of his background. In this war with the Khwarizmian Shah, the cities fall one by one, and the horrifying incidents multiply. Nishapur, Merv Ugrech, Samarkand. These cities all fall with massive losses of life. In some cases, they fall to clever deception, where the inhabitants agree to surrender on the grounds that their lives are going to be spared. And then as soon as they surrender and walk out of the city, the Mongol army falls upon them and kills them all. In several of these cities, every man, woman and child is put to death, and the animals, the Dogs, the cats are all killed too. In one city, a son in law of Genghis Khan is killed during the fighting. So afterwards, he has the wife of the son in law put on a chair, sort of a throne, if you will, right in front of the city, and then has the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the city beheaded in front of her. This wasn't a punishment for her. This wasn't a horrifying experience for her. This was her right. These are the kind of images, and I've said this before in this program, one wonders visually what those look like. Imagine if you could have modern helicopter news footage of the killing of the population of Nishapur, where the dogs, the cats, the men, women and children are all killed, their skulls and bones piled up in front of a throne with a Mongol woman sitting on it, presiding over the whole thing. These things happened. And the people in the Middle east, who were accustomed to violent warfare and campaigns of all kinds, I mean, they were dealing with the Crusades in the west, had never seen anything like this and to this day bear the scars of not just this Mongol invasion, but the one that will come afterwards too. Neither the Khwarezmian Shah Muhammad nor his empire will be around to see that second Mongol invasion. For after the capture of Samarkand, which was the capital of the Khwarezmian Empire, the Shah flees, only to have Genghis Khan send his best general, Subedai, with 30,000 Mongols in pursuit of him. The chroniclers say that Subadai's orders from the Khan were, do not come back until you have taken him prisoner. If he flees before you, follow him through his domains, whithersoever he may turn. Spare every town which surrenders to you, but destroy ruthlessly anyone who gets in your way and offers resistance. The Shah will flee through his territories, and as he passes through, he will exhort the natives to burn their crops, kill their livestock and run. Now, Muslim chroniclers often portray this as a form of cowardice. Some of the better military historians today suggest that the Khwarezmian Shah was pursuing what we would call today a scorched earth policy, trying to deny the Mongols any sort of ability to live off the land. While the Mongol pursuit is relentless, though Subedai often driving his men 80 miles or more a day, forcing them to change horses several times and sometimes just missing the Shah by a whisker, they may have even injured him in an encounter when they got really close. As they follow the Shah, they're taking cities and sometimes these Cities have disagreements amongst their population as to what the best course of action is. Do we surrender? Do we put up a fight? Military historian Richard A. Gabriel gives one account I found fascinating. Imagine being in your own city and having the population have such a serious and stressful pressurized debate. Outside the city of Rai, modern Tehran, Subedai's columns clashed with a loyal remnant of the Shah's army. 30,000 men took the field against the Mongols, but were quickly defeated. Within the city of Rai, the population was divided into two factions, one that favored resistance and one that favored surrender. The two sides came to blows, with the faction favoring the Mongols gaining the upper hand and slaughtering the other faction in the streets. Subedai rode into the city and watched with fascination as the two sides killed one another. At last, the pro Mongol faction carried the day, only to have Subedai turn his troops upon them. Who could trust such men? Subedai must have thought. And then he ordered the extermination of every male in the city. Gabriel continues. Between Hamadan and the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Mongols lost the trail, only to pick it up again and close rapidly on the Shah. Muslim legend has it that Subedai arrived on the shore of the sea only to see a sail in the distance carrying the Shah to safety. His men were so angry at having failed, so the legend goes, that some of them charged their mounts into the sea, swimming after him until they drowned. End quote. The Shah will find refuge on a Caspian island, only to die there, a broken, ill man with the Mongols still circling at the shoreline, lest he try to get back to his empire, which was now in the hands of his son, who was raising an army of resistance in the east. This army will be smashed relatively easily in November 1221 at the Battle of the Indus. The survivors drowning in a river as they run away, thus marking the end of the organized resistance from the Khwrizmian Empire. Subedai himself will return to Genghis Khan, somewhat ashamed at not having captured the Shah as per his orders, but with an interesting story to tell that he supposedly heard from the Turkish tribes that he was chasing. Remember, many of the soldiers fighting the Khwarezmian Shah were Turks. Many of these Turks inhabited the area that reached into Eastern Europe today. And they told Subedai of people who lived there. Narrow faced men with light hair and blue eyes. And Subedai, never having seen such men, requested from the great Khan 20,000 men to lead a reconnaissance mission to check out these territories and scout them and then come back and report to Genghis what existed there. The Khan liked the idea and gave him three years to conduct the mission and return home. That endeavor will turn into the greatest and most devastating reconnaissance in force in all military history and will introduce an entire segment of the Eurasian landmass to this strikingly ferocious people, the Mongols, that hitherto they hadn't even known existed. This is what will initiate the wonderful contact between Asia and Europe that so many of the revisionist historians tout as one of the lasting benefits of the Mongolian eruption. Outside of, you know, the steppelins into the settled societies around them. Unfortunately, just as in the Middle east, it will cost the lives of millions and millions of people. 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. Don't forget, you can buy and instantly download past episodes of classic hardcore history right from the website. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. In the next episode of Wrath of the Khans, the great reconnaissance in force by the Mongol general Subedai, who will take a detached column of Mongols move along the edge of the Middle east and then shoot up into Europe, introducing the trademark Mongol sword and flame and destruction and atrocities to a region of the Eurasian landmass that had no idea the Mongols even existed. And by the time they come to grips with what's going on, the Mongols have disappeared as quickly as they came, heading back to their homeland to deal with a tragedy in the Mongol world, the death of the Mongolian George Washington. But if the rest of the world thought that that was an end to their troubles, they didn't realize that this George Washington had descendants and they were just as hungry for conquest as their ancestor. Round two of the Mongol conquests begins, and it makes round one look positively pacifistic. All that and more in the next episode of Wrath of the Khans.