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What you're about to hear is part three of a multi part series on the Mongol conquests in the Middle Ages. If you didn't happen to catch the first two parts, you might want to do that before venturing into the story in the middle. If you don't mind your history in sort of a jigsaw puzzle form, well, please feel free to jump in right now. So with that warning in mind and without Further Ado, Part 3 of Wrath of the Khans, December 7, 1941. It's history, a date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events have final, not quite to the mouth, the figures from this time and place. I take pride in the words Ish bin ein Bialina. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The drama gave six of Manhattan urgent Marine six now two 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 their presidenc the deep question. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, it's hardcore history. In the year 1200, we are told by one of the most important Persian chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the Khwarizmian Shah lay on his deathbed. Now, already in this series we've talked about the Khwarezmian Shah, a guy named Muhammad who plays an important role in the story. But this isn't Mohammed. This is Muhammad's father, a man named Takesh. And as he lay on his deathbed, the Persian chronicler says he had some very, very last minute advice for his son, the future Khwarezmian Shah Muhammad. And the advice concerned the people that existed on his eastern and northeastern borders. The people that we've told you in past episodes were called the Karachitai, the Black Cathayans, the Chinese called them the Western Lao dynasty. These people formed almost a geopolitical estuary. You know what an estuary is, right? It's where the freshwater rivers meet the saltwater ocean. And there's sort of this weird hybrid environment that exists when the two come together. That's what the Karachitan Empire was. It had a Mongol, a sinicized Mongol, so sort of a Chinese Mongol leadership at the top of the pyramid ruling over a Turkish, Muslim, Central Asian people. A combination of the two worlds that for all intents and purposes were completely separate galaxies from each other. And because of this hybrid nature, they were sort of able to keep Both sides in their respective galaxies, they were like a barrier. Which is exactly what Muhammad's father, who lay on his deathbed Takesh, told his son. He said, regardless of how vulnerable the karachitan may look, or regardless of how much trouble they're giving, you, leave him alone. The Persian chronicler says that Takesh told his son Muhammad that the karachitan were a wall behind which lie terrible foes, end quote. And he wasn't lying, because when his son Muhammad ignored his advice and undercut and helped bring down the karachitan, he brought down that barrier, he brought down that wall. And the people that burst through this geopolitical estuary into the classical world and, you know, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, what's known as the classical world, broke into the classical world from the separate galaxy that was East Asia, a place dominated by China and their culture and their civilization, their technology and their history. A place that had very little contact with the classical world. Now, there had been traders that went back and forth along that route, that famous route known as the Silk Road. There had been some Iranian dynasties that had maintained diplomatic relations with the Chinese. The Sassanids and the Parthians had diplomatic ties. From time to time, there had been some military endeavors. There was a famous battle known as the Battle of the Talas river, where the Tang dynasty Chinese met the fanatical young Arab armies recently converted to Islam and lost. Lost a battle they probably shouldn't have lost. But there weren't a whole lot of Chinese troops there. It was mostly an allied army. And at the last minute, during the Batt battle, all those Chinese allies turned on them. You don't tend to win a lot of those kinds of affairs. There was a famous military endeavor launched by the Chinese general Pan Chao during the Han dynasty, which were contemporaries of the Roman Empire. And he was able to conquer all the way out into Central Asia so far that he almost contacted Roman outposts in the East. But by and large, there was very little mixing of the technologies, especially military technologies, of these two virtually separate galaxies. So when the Mongols broke into the classical world, they brought with them military sophistication that was of a higher level than what the classical world had. They used to say about famed Baltimore Oriole third baseman Brooks Robinson that he played baseball like he came down from a higher league. The Mongols conducted military operations like they came down from a higher league. They did. They came down from the East Asian League, the league dominated by China. And they'd spent a generation, maybe more, depending on who you want to believe, and how you want to categorize it, Facing off against the greatest military power of the age, the Chinese with their great resources and discipline and sophistication and their generations long thousands of year long military tradition and unbroken and you know, written histories and they were able to initially fight them to a standstill and eventually start to roll back Chinese civilization. It would be as though someone today were able to fight the United States military toe to toe and then eventually they turn around and fight some third world country. When the Mongols broke into the galaxy of the classical world, they were taking on what might have been the most sophisticated and dominant army the classical world had to offer. The Khwarezmian Shahs, Muslim, Turkish, eastern Iranian military. The problem was is it was like someone coming down from the major leagues into the minor leagues. And Genghis Khan and his Mongols with a combination of military sophistication and incredible leadership and discipline, tore through the Khwarezmian Shah's military like a knife through butter, killing millions of people, destroying incredibly wealthy and beautiful and large cities, some of the largest cities in the world during this time period and inflicting pain and suffering on a scale that the people in the Middle east, in these eastern Iranian and Afghanistan areas haven't recovered from. If you believe some historians even to this day, the irrigation systems and the way of life and the level of, you know, wealth has never recovered. Now some historians will try to put a good spin on this and say things like well this facilitated all kinds of commerce and communication and the Mongols were connecting two worlds that hadn't been connected ever before. This East Asian world dominated by China and this classical world which had been in existence of course for a very long time. Also the Mongols brought the two together. The problem was is the people in the classical world didn't want them brought together. To them this was the greatest tragedy that they had ever known. In fact they compared it to the biblical apocalypse and they equated the Mongols and Genghis Khan with, with Gog and Magog, the biblical peoples who had been prevented from breaking into the civilized in air quotes world by a barrier. And they would only break through this barrier at the end times when the apocalypse happened and God's people fought a battle between good and evil that would eventually initiate the end times. Genghis Khan and the Mongols, like many other Central Asian people before them, the Huns, the Scythians and others had been tagged with this Gog and Magog label, were compared with the devil's spawn and the Muslims called Genghis Khan. Everything from the accursed to the damned to the punishment of God. As a matter of fact, Genghis Khan started calling himself that when he destroyed the Khwarezmian empire in the 1200s. This was a tragedy for Islam. And Islam was in a very precarious position when this happened, because this wasn't the only life or death struggle they were involved in. They happened to be fragmented during this time period, having a hard time working together to deal with outside threats. And they had another outside threat on their other western flank. This was the period where European Crusades were continually being launched against Muslim territories in what's now the Holy Land, what was then the Holy Land, too, and places like Egypt now, before the Mongol invasions, they'd been doing pretty well, very hard for the Crusaders to maintain a foothold in the Middle east, which were Muslim territories and far away from Europe. All of a sudden, Christians, though involved in these Crusades, began to hear rumors of what was going on in eastern Iran and Afghanistan. Now, they had no direct contact with these places that Genghis Khan was savaging. But like the telephone game where one person tells another person something, and then that person turns and tells another person something, and eventually, 100 people down the line, the story is completely altered from the original, you know, tale that was told. Information begins to filter back to the Europeans, and especially those in the Crusader states and the Holy Land, about the damage that's being done to their Muslim foes on their opposite flank. They begin to hear rumors of a Christian king in the East. They call him Prester John. And the rumors begin to be fanned by wishful thinking that maybe the Muslims are caught in a military pincer movement and they're being hit in their flank. So the Europeans are hitting them in the west, and Prester John and his Christians from the east are hitting them in the rear in the East. Now you can tell how the germ of this story might have started for the Christians and the Europeans, because, in fact, there were Christians in Asia. There were several different sects, but maybe the most popular and numerous were called Nestorian Christians. In fact, there were Nestorian Christians on the borders of China. And also, in fact, some of the Mongol tribes had many Nestorian Christians in them. That little germ and that little piece of information, by the time it made it all the way to the Holy Land, had developed into this whole idea of a Christian king who was smiting the Muslims from the rear and was giving new hope to the Crusaders that maybe Christendom was about to Triumph. Unfortunately for those Europeans, there was no Prester John. There was only a Genghis Khan. And while the Great Khan may have been tolerant towards all religions, it doesn't mean he was going to be nice. And very soon, Christendom was going to find out what the Muslim world already believed, that Gog and Magog had broken through this historic barrier, and that perhaps the apocalypse was upon them. Now, if European Christendom was unaware of the true nature and capability and intentions of this new people that had emerged from this separate galaxy of East Asia only very recently, the same could be said of the Mongols in terms of their knowledge of European Christendom. We in the modern world are so accustomed to having maps and a general idea of where states are and geographical features, it's easy to forget that back in the old days, you had to usually figure out those things yourself by traveling to them. Which is why, as we said at the end of the last episode, once Genghis Khan had conquered the Khwarezmyan Shah's territory, he acceded to the request made by his great general Subedai to take a bunch of Mongol horsemen and scout out this new territory. First of all, to make clear to the Khan what he now owned, but also to figure out who his new neighbors were and what their military capabilities were. The Khan thought this a wonderful idea. The Mongols had always been great at scouting. Anyway, subedai took between 20 and 30,000 Mongol horsemen in the autumn of the year 1220 west from Eastern Iran, and began to scout out the Khan's new territory. Now, in typical Mongol fashion, he didn't have a long supply train keeping his troops fed and maintained. And he was going to live off the land, which sounds a lot more benign than it really is when you're dealing with the Mongols. That meant taking whatever you needed from the individuals, the towns and the cities you encountered along the way. If what you needed was provided for you willingly, you might be allowed to live. If it was not provided willingly, you wouldn't be. Now, this is where we encounter an organizational problem in this program, and I've been trying to wrestle with how to deal with it. It's when do you decide that you've cataloged the Mongol horrors enough to make clear that this is what's happening all the time? It would be easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you needed to point out every time the Mongol sacked a city and killed everyone in it. I thought about having a little ding sound that we could just use every time it happened. But then I realized it would sound like an old rotary telephone with just one big long ring all the time. When you kill between 10 and 70 million people by hand, as the Mongols did, you're killing people all the time. Some historians try to downplay this level of violence, feeling like it gives the Mongols a uniquely bad reputation, you know, as compared with people like Alexander the Great or Caesar or some of these other historical arsonists. In truth, people like Alexander and Caesar and those folks were probably a lot more murderous and more like butchers than history gives them credit for. I don't see any reason to downplay what the Mongols did. Perhaps a re evaluation of what Caesar and Alexander did is in order. In any case, the city of Hamadan in what's now northwestern Iran received atypical treatment when Subedai showed up outside Hamadan's gates and demanded pretty much everything Hamadan had for his troops. The city wisely provided it, having heard of what the Mongols had done in the eastern territories of the Khwrizmian Shah. A year later, though, Subedai would come back to Hamadan and demand more stuff, something that the city could not provide because they'd given everything to the Mongols the year before. In retaliation for that refusal, Subedai had the entire city leveled, everybody in it beheaded. And for days you could see, the chroniclers say, the smoke on the horizon from the burned and devastated city, and in a very common move for the Mongols. But it's specifically mentioned by the chroniclers happening at Hamadan. Subedai displayed the horrific thoroughness of the Mongols when carrying out their orders, when they were told to kill everyone in a city, and that meant everyone. And a couple of days after leaving Hamadan, a corpse filled smoking ruin, Subadai sent a Mongol rear guard back to the city to go cut the heads off of everyone they'd missed the first time around, anyone who'd been hiding in basements or alive under the corpses of others, or who'd been out of town when the sacking happened and were there a couple of days later, you know, weeping over their loved ones and burying them, saw the Mongols returning in the distance, and they themselves got the same treatment that the people they were burying had gotten a few days before. That level of thoroughness in carrying out orders was part of what made the Mongols such amazing military figures during this time period. Nothing, for example, in Christian Europe could compare to this. That's something that was much more common in the East Asian galaxy. As we said, the Mongols were as though they came down from a higher league that higher league had a level of military discipline and obedience. Obedience that no one in the classical world during this time period, you know, equaled. Subhadai continued his raiding and pillaging and scouting all up through what's now northwestern Iran, until he came to really the first significant Christian state the Mongols had ever encountered. And it was in the Caucasus Mountains that they ran into a people known as the Georgians. If that sounds familiar, that's because there's still a state there called Georgia between the Black and Caspian Sea. Now, the Mongols showed up at a time that couldn't have been better in terms of the Georgians ability to defend themselves. Cause they had recently promised the Pope that they would take part in a crusade. So they had been gathering military forces this whole time. When the Mongols showed up, they had a lot of troops with which to resist. Unfortunately for the Georgians, they were fighting people coming down from a higher league, and they had no idea what they were in for. In the year 1221, they found out. It's around this time period, during this great Mongol cavalry raid, that you can begin to see the early signs that the Mongols are changing. They're becoming somewhat different than the people who fought the Chinese a decade or two beforehand and even than the people who had recently defeated the Khwarezmian shah. As we said in the first episode of this series, all steppe people tended to reflect the people that they traded with and that they looted and raided. The Mongols at this point had taken so much stuff from the Chinese and the people in the Khwarizmian Empire and all these other places that they were sacking that they were starting to look quite a bit richer than they traditionally did. You know, a decade or two before this period, you hear of the poor Mongols who are dressed sometimes in the skins of field mice that have been sewn together. I mean, you just get this idea of a people coming from abject poverty. It was supposed to be one of the things that made them so tough. But now for a couple of decades, they've been looting the best stuff from a bunch of these very rich societies. During this great cavalry raid of Zubidae's, he's supposed to have encountered Venetian traders in trading posts along the Black Sea. And the Venetians instantly were told, recognized that these Mongols are not your typical barbarians because they're dressed in fine silks and wearing really costly and expensive armor. This is stuff that they either took from other people or traded with other people. Or as in the case of Hamadan, just, you know, months before this time, pressured the city into giving them. Now, they still had the typical Mongol tendency to wipe their greasy hands from eating on their clothes and to not change them and to not wash them. So you have to imagine people dressed in the finest fashions of the time, the Gucci, the Ralph Lauren or what have you. But it's literally perhaps full of holes and rotting off their bodies. But that doesn't quite change the impression that the Venetian traders had of them. They didn't look like a bunch of people dressed in the skins of field mice anymore. Nonetheless, as they enter this great valley where the modern day city of Tbilisi is, they find the Georgian army waiting for them. Now, the Georgians don't know who these people are either, but they're accustomed to dealing with step nomadic tribes before. As a matter of fact, the Georgian king, a guy named Georgi iii George is the translation and his moniker is the Brilliant. George the Brilliant. George III the Brilliant is waiting there for him with his 30,000 man Cuman bodyguard. We're told the Cumans were another steppe people. As a matter of fact, they actually controlled much of the steppe territory all the way to the Hungarian plain. They had different names. Officially, historians refer to them as the Kipchak Turks. In Eastern Europe they were called the Cumans. The Russians called them the Polavsi. And these people had a similar cult cultural background to the Mongols, but were nowhere near their equals. George III, George the Brilliant had a, we're told 30,000 man Cuman bodyguard and 70,000 Georgian knights. Now that number's ridiculous and certainly he didn't have 70,000 knights. You'd be hard pressed to find 70,000 knights if you added up all the knights in Europe during this time period, I bet. But he might have had 70,000 men total with a hard core of European knights. And they were in formation, we're told, waiting for the Mongols at the other end of this long valley. Subedai didn't wait around. He launched his attack and he did so with the sort of tactics and discipline that were common in the galaxy that those Mongols were used to fighting in that East Asian galaxy. The Georgians had never seen anything like it. Here's how military historian Richard A. Gabriel describes the way Subedai tore the Georgians apart. The two armies drew up opposite of each other for a set piece battle. The Georgian cavalry opened the battle with a mass attack against the Mongol center. Subedai ordered his light archer cavalry to sweep across the enemy front, unleashing volley after volley of deadly arrow fire. The iron armor piercing tips of the Mongol arrows took a great toll on the knight. Despite heavy losses, the Georgians pressed the attack while the Mongols gradually retreated before the enemy advance, drawing the mounted knights after them until the Christian army was spread out across the entire plain atop exhausted mounts. Subedai had anticipated the Georgian tactics and positioned fresh mounts for his soldiers in a wood to the rear of the battlefield. Now the Mongols mounted their fresh horses and launched a devastating counter attack preceded by a storm of arrow fire. This time, the Mongol heavy cavalry aboard their new fresh mounts struck the enemy formation and drove a wedge into the Georgian army. The Georgian army broke and ran as the Mongol wings closed in and around the main body. With little hope of holding his ground, the king fled along with those knights whose horses could still stand the pace. A few brave knights made a stand on the road to Tiflis, which is a modern day Tbilisi, but were quickly overrun and slaughtered by Yebe's cavalry. For two weeks, George and the survivors of the army awaited the attack on the city itself. It never came. The Mongols had disappeared. End quote. Now, this force of Mongols that had destroyed not just the army of Georgia, but this army that had been preparing for a crusade, perhaps the greatest and largest army the Georgians had ever put together, was a mere scouting force of Mongols. That's part of the reason why they didn't launch this attack that George the Brilliant expected, this follow up attack on his capital city. They didn't have those kind of orders. Their job was to continue to scout. If they got worn down in all these campaigns to take a bunch of enemy cities in mountain territory, well, they weren't going to be able to conclude their mission. As a matter of fact, now they needed more stuff. So the reason that they had disappeared is they went back down into what's now northwestern Iran to take more stuff from the locals. In fact, this is where Hamadan gets asked for more supplies, can't provide them and get sacked. Now the Georgians had somehow convinced themselves that they had done much more damage to the Mongols than they really had. Now, this may have been sort of wishful thinking, or it may have been boastful, exaggerating, or they may have really thought that because the Mongols didn't, you know, follow up their victory, that they must have really damaged them. They didn't realize, of course, that this wasn't a giant Mongol army that they had faced, that it was nothing more than a scouting raid. So it must have surprised them mightily when, after reprovisioning themselves in northwestern Iran in the autumn of 1221, when most armies are disbanding because winter's approaching. There they were again, moving up towards the Caucasus Mountains, led by Subedai, and preparing to forge the mountains and head once more back to Georgia. To his credit, George the Brilliant, the Georgian king, managed to raise another army, managed to learn some significant lessons from the first battle he fought against the Mongols. And this time, instead of facing, you know, this very mobile swarm of bees type enemy in a very open plain where their mobility could really be used to the fullest. This time, when the Mongols, maybe a little bit surprised, even saw the Georgians waiting for them, they were waiting for them near the foothills in a constrained area, where if the Georgian knights could just keep their formation and move steadily forward, they would push this swarm of bees, in effect, up against a solid wall. That's a nice way to deal with the enemy's mobility, use the terrain as an anvil and then hammer them against it. When the battle started, King George was able to keep his troops disciplined, this time moving forward in slow, methodical motion, keeping their formation and pushing the Mongols back up against the terrain, just as planned. There was a hitch in the idea, though. There was a gap in the mountain range on the side of the battlefield, and it contained a pass. And in this pass, subedai had placed 5,000 Mongol horsemen in ambush. And as the Mongol swarm of bees slowly retreated backward, the main force under Subedai and the Georgian cavalry and knights pushed them forward. They moved beyond that gap, that pass in the mountain range, exposing their flank to the 5,000 Mongols who lay hidden. Those Mongols then charged the Georgian flank and smashed into it. Now, it is a testament to the fighting quality of the Georgians that they didn't just retreat at this point, because that would have been enough to turn most pre modern armies into a rout. The Georgians were able, though, while fighting, to turn their entire force 90 degrees to face this new attack from the side. Unfortunately for them, that exposed their flank now to the original swarm of bees they were trying to smash against the anvil. Subedai quickly turned his forces around to face the now flank of the Georgian formations and drove headlong into them, rolling them up like a line of dominoes. The Georgian forces collapsed. Almost all of them were killed in the pursuit that lasted days by the Mongols. King George the Brilliant once again escaped the pursuit, which thoroughly shows he may have been brilliant, but he didn't last very long. He would die soon afterwards, and the leadership of Georgia would pass to the only ruler who seemed available at the time, his sister. Someone who's known as the Maiden King. It's like something right out of the Lord of the Rings, isn't it? And her name was Rosudan. And she is left in command of a kingdom with no military, with this hideous force from their eyes, anyway, of these people from another galaxy, who've now killed a hundred thousand of their soldiers in a year. She writes the Pope to explain why there will be no Georgian military contingent in the next crusade in the Holy Land. As promised, she writes, a savage people of Tartars, hellish of aspect, as voracious as wolves in their hunger for spoils, as brave as lions, have invaded my country. The brave knighthood of Georgia has hunted them down out of the country, killing 25,000 of the invaders. But alas, we're no longer in a position to take up the cross as we had promised your holiness to do. That's called putting a brave face on what really happened. Because they couldn't have killed 25,000 Mongols, because Subedai didn't have 25,000 Mongols. In fact, they couldn't have killed very many at all, because it didn't slow Subadai down at all. He went to a nearby city right after the battle and brokered a deal with the Muslim ruler there. In exchange for your lives, he wanted guides. Guides who would take him over the Caucasus by the shortest route and allow him to break into Europe. Now, this Muslim shah was no idiot. He could quickly see that any disputes he may have had with any of his other neighbors paled in comparison to this new people. And while he made a deal with the Mongols and gave them guides, he told the guide secretly, instead of taking the Mongols over the shortest, easiest path, to take them over the most torturous and costly path, he used the shorter path. But he used them to send special messengers who could get across faster to the peoples on the other side of the Caucasus and warned them what was coming. He told them to bury their differences too, to work together, and to have an army waiting for the Mongols on the other side when they emerge from this torturous mountain range, full of glaciers and torrential rivers of glacier water that are pouring down into the passes and out of the mountain range, like most of these crossings in the mountains. You think of Hannibal crossing the Alps during the Punic Wars. You know, it's supposed to be this torturous trip, and at some points the road is so narrow, only one horseman can traverse it at a time. And the Mongols go through this terrible endeavor, finally emerging from the other side cold Starving, frostbitten, the whole thing. And what do they see? 50,000 men in formation, waiting for them right out of the pass. Well equipped, well supplied, containing many different peoples now all allied together against a common foe. And quickly, Subedai realizes he's been tricked. He also realizes that if he's been tricked this way, there's no point in turning back and braving all those horrors and glaciers and all that stuff again. Because surely there will be another army at the other side of the Caucasus where he first entered, trapping him there. Initially, he tries a quick attack to see what happens against the front of this giant allied army. It fails. He moves his troops back up into the mountains to think about things. Now, here's where the Mongol show their flexibility. They use something that many peoples in the west, especially in the United States, has forgotten how effective it could be. They use diplomacy. Now, diplomacy in the United States has been something somewhat sneered at since the Second World War. It's seen as a wimpy alternative to fighting. The Mongols understood better. They understood, as the Chinese did and the Byzantines and some of the most wily, clever, intelligent people throughout history, that diplomacy doesn't have to be a shield to protect you. Diplomacy can be a weapon that strikes at the heart of your enemies. In this case, Subidai looks at this allied army and realize it's composed of a bunch of people who don't really like each other that much. Could you work to detach some of them from the rest of them? Now, this allied army is composed of Christians and Muslims and pagan people from the steppes. It has Elans who live in cities. It has Muslim folks who live in the foothills. It has tribal peoples who are culturally similar to the Mongols, including these people we've talked about before, the Kipchak Turks, also known as the Cumans, also known as the Polafsi people the Mongols have been dealing with now ever since they invaded the Khwarizmian shah's territory. And there they were again. Subedai sends diplomats to them and says, we have no quarrel with you. Which is a crazy thing to say since they've just killed a bunch of their cousins, you know, in the last year or two. But he says, look, we're all people of the steppe, brothers of the steppe. We have problems with these Christians and we have problems with these Muslims that are here at this battlefield with you. But we don't have any problem with you. What do you want from us? We'll give you loot and spoils and money and clothes. What do you need? And let's not fight. We don't want to have any problems with our brothers from the steppes. And crazily enough, the cumans listen to them. Well, we'll take some stuff, we'll take some loot, we'll take some money, and we'll be gone. And the Mongols give it to them. One morning, the allies wake up facing the mountain range that has the Mongols trapped in it, and they see that a good half their force has left them. Subedai quickly takes the Mongols, swoops down on this now diminished and demoralized force and destroys them. And a couple of days later, riding at top speed, catches up to those cumans that they'd made a deal with, saying, we have no problems with our brothers of the steppe, and swept down on them unawares of what was going on, and killed them all, took back the loot and the spoils and the clothes that they had given them as a price for their defection, and then took all of their stuff. In addition to that, as one historian wrote, they got back their original bribe magnified tenfold. Now the way was open to the European steppes, the first European states to actually contact the Mongols. Remember, during this time period, no one had ever even seen one. They may have heard of a prester john or Christian king of the east in the holy land, or amongst some of the crown heads of Europe that were privy to sort of inside information that the pope sometimes possessed and sent out. The people who first actually had contact with the Mongols, though, probably knew nothing of this yet. They probably knew more about the steppe nomads from the east than any other European people. It was the people that now inhabit what's Russia. At the time, historians referred to this area as part of Kievan Rus, was what it was called. And these were a bunch of what's probably best termed city states, places like Kiev or Suzdal or Novgorod, grand cities where the leader of that city also controlled a lot of the surrounding countryside, the way you would have found in ancient Greece with Athens and Sparta and Thebes and all those places. And these cities were independently ruled by people with titles like grand duke or duke or boyar. Boyar is like a lord or a baron. Sometimes these people worked together, sometimes they were at odds with each other, sometimes they intermarried, sometimes they wrote treaties. It's a disorganized, disunified, feudal sort of system. Now, the people in this area had more contact and more understanding of the ways and the tendencies and the culture of these nomadic steppe peoples than anyone else. In Europe, after all, these Kievan Rus had been the neighbors of the steppe people since time immemorial. The names of the tribes would change, but the lifestyle remained the same and the tendencies remained the same. During this time period, as we said, their next door neighbors to the east were these Kipchak Turk people. The Eastern Europeans called them cumans. The Russians had their own name for them, the Polofsi. And the Russian relationship with them was complex and changing. Some of these Russian dukes and grand dukes and boyars had good relationships with the Polofsi. They were good people to trade with. You could get furs from them, you could get slaves from them, and sometimes that you would marry, you know, the boyar's daughter to a pahlofsi prince's daughter and, you know, cement relationships. Other Kievan Rus princes, though, couldn't stand. The pahsi dealt with them in more of a military fashion. The palafsy would come in and raid their town, steal their stuff, loot their, you know, villages, and take their women and children off and vice versa. So when these Polafsi people arrive at the Russian cities screaming about a horrific people from the east that they all have to band together to fight, some of these Russian princes listened. Others were positively happy with the turn of events. After all, why would I, as a Russian prince who've been trying to fight off palafsy raids forever, be upset with the fact that, oh, one of your other Steppe peoples has turned against you and is messing with you? I'm very sorry to hear that. It took almost a year of convincing for the Polofsky to explain to the Russians, you don't understand. This isn't like anything any of us have ever seen, and we're all gonna die if we don't, you know, combine together. Now, in typical European fashion, probably in typical human fashion, the Russians were not that worried. They had a pretty high opinion of themselves, and they didn't think these Mongols sounded all that nasty. Just another step people from the east, we've been dealing with them forever. We're not afraid of them like you're afraid of them, you cowardly Polofsi. And there wasn't a whole lot of energetic movement to do anything about it, even though the Polafsi were giving them stuff and loot and all kinds of bribes and trying to put the fear of the Mongols into them. Until, of course, word arrived that the Mongols were on the way, and Subedai and Yebe and their forces were coming up these rivers and heading towards Kiev and burning and looting and raping along the entire path. First of all, there was an outrageousness to this cavalry raid and how it was being conducted, because Subedai's forces are completely unmoored from anything. It's like a band of brigands that doesn't have any supply lines. I mean, they're totally unattached. They can go wherever they want at high speed and don't have to have any connection to where they were a month ago. You don't know where they're going next. All of a sudden, the Polofsi made the Russians understand, these people are here now. Look at what they're doing in your communities, and they could be on us you tomorrow. That shook the Russians to the point where all of a sudden, these disunified areas began cooperating quickly. Well, as quickly as a feudal European place could at this time period. They arranged a rendezvous point. Everybody sort of was told to raise their own armies together, get your nobles together, get your peasants together, get your foot troops together, and meet here by this date. And everybody slowly started making their way to the rendezvous point. The Polofsky Cumin did the same thing. And as these forces are massing, the Russian princes get their first look at what a Mongol is like. Because one morning they wake up, and Mongol emissaries are outside their tent. These emissaries, by all accounts, were eloquent, civilized, and with a message. The message was recorded in Russian records, One specifically that's called the Chronicle of Novgorod. And here's how it describes the first contact with Mongol emissaries and what they said. It starts off with explaining the coordination of the armies. And then they began to organize their forces, each his own province. And they went, having collected the whole Russian land, against the Tartars and were on the Dnieper at Zaruba. Then the Tartars, having learned that the Russian princes were coming against them, sent envoys to the Russian princes. Behold, we hear that you are coming against us, having listened to the Polafsi men. But we have not occupied your land, nor your towns, nor your villages. Nor is it against you that we have come. But we have come, sent by God, against our serfs and our horse herds, the pagan Polopsi men. And do you take peace with us? If they escape to you, Drive them off thence and take to yourselves their goods. For we have heard that to you also they have done much harm. And it is for this reason also that we are fighting them. Historians who know well the Mongol tactics are suggesting that this is very similar to what the Mongols did to break up the alliance. When Subedai came out of the Caucasus Mountains, he's trying to take the Polofsi and disengage them from their allies, the Russian princes. Perhaps. It's certainly not true that the Mongols have done the Russians no harm because they've been raping and pillaging and burning all the way up to Kiev. But they may not understand that this is Russian territory and that these Rus think of themselves differently than the Polafsi. Nonetheless, the Russian answer to the Mongol envoys is swift. They kill them. And as you can probably understand by the programs we've done so far on this subject, that's about the worst thing you can do. That's a declaration of war. When the combined allied forces, the Russians and the Pahsi, first encounter any Mongol troops at all, they don't seem to want to fight. They keep encountering these small groups of Mongols who either allow themselves to be captured or a couple hundred men who will fight to the death, or a few herders who will run away at the first sight of the army. The allied army keeps capturing stuff. I mean, it looks like they're just getting all the Mongol food. I mean, they're capturing a herd of goats, a herd of sheep, a herd of cattle, and they're being weighed down by all these animals that are now trailing behind the army. Some historians think this is just wonderful generalship on the part of Subadai and Yebe, who are allowing things to fall into the hands of the Russians and Polo that just make them even slower and more disorganized. The Russians are beginning to think the Polofsi are just cowards, because every time they're running into any of these Mongols, they're just dying. They're running away. They're cowardly. They keep advancing into the steppe in pursuit of these Mongol forces. By the way, this is an army that may have numbered 80,000 people. Subedai has got between 15 and 20,000 guys right now. The Russians think this is going to be easy, and they keep advancing farther and farther away from their home into the desolate, you know, steppes. Nine days, 12 days. Historians have a different number of days. This battle that's about to happen is very poorly understood. But what isn't in doubt is that the Russians and the Polofsky's forces are getting more and more strung out. There's 50 miles between the front of the column and the rear of the army, which has all these, you know, animals now in its train. One day, the front of the column enters into a valley, and on the other end of the valley, behind a river, are the Mongols waiting for them in formation. What's more, as the front of the army begins to advance towards the Mongols, all of a sudden, smoke appears all over the battlefield. The Mongols have taken pots of oil and pitch and lit them on fire at strategic places across the battlefield so that the smoke blows across the Mongol front and hides whatever maneuvers the Mongols are doing. The Mongols have a perfectly organized force that can respond to the commander's orders at the drop of a hat. The Russians and Polofsi can hardly communicate with the troops right around them, much less the troops of each separate prince that are commanded by their own commander and strung out in a long column. Now, historians differ on the course of this battle. It seems, though, that the Russians and the Polofsi attack with the front of this long column, while the rest of the army is strung out throughout the entire valley. As a matter of fact, the last contingents in the long Russian column will never even make it to the the battle. Unfortunately for the Russians and the Polofsi, the front of the column does. They either plunge into the Mongol ranks or the Mongols plunge into theirs. No one quite knows how it goes, but the front of the Russian column gets smashed, as does the front of the Polofsi column. And the people in the front of the column turn around and run with the Mongols hot on their heels. And they run right into the next contingent of troops that was waiting behind them, who turns around and runs and smashes into the next contingent of troops behind them and so on and so on, like a bowling ball smashing into a lineup of pins. Eventually, the panic just sets in and the Mongols begin to just pursue an enemy that is disorganized, fleeing, and extremely confused. I mean, the battlefield is a mess of smoke and screams and yeah, I mean, it's a disorganized rout. Eventually, in a heroic maneuver, the Prince of Kiev, with 10,000 of his own men will stop, turn around, wrap his forces around with a wagon lagger, as it's called, sort of a bunch of wagons chained together to give him a little bit of fortification, protection, and try to hold off the Mongols so that perhaps the Russian Pahlavsi army can reorganize and fight again. It doesn't matter. The Mongols continued to pursue the rest of the army for 150 miles, killing at least 40,000 of them, including 70 important Russian nobles, six Russian princes, and the Prince of Kiev will eventually be forced to surrender himself and his 10,000 men. Subedai promises them safety and when the Russian prince surrenders to them, they begin killing the Russians anyway. The prince himself is locked up into a box and suffocated because the Mongols don't believe in shedding noble blood outside the battlefield. Of the 10,000 Russians that are not killed after the fake peace overtures, the Mongols tie them up, lay them down, stack them like cordwood alive, and build a wooden floor on top of them. The Russian chroniclers call it a bridge on top of this wooden floor that is crushing all these tied up and stacked men underneath them. The Mongols have lunch, served food and drink, and enjoy themselves immensely, while the groaning and suffocating men underneath them can be clearly heard and felt beneath the floorboards. That is said to be a refinement of cruelty, designed as payback for the terrible Russian diplomatic faux pas of having the gall to kill the Mongol emissaries. The Russian and Polofsi defeat at the hands of the Mongols is traditionally dated as happening May 31, 1223. It's commonly known as the Battle of the Kalka river. And the results could not be more disorienting to the Russians. You see, the Russians are an Orthodox Christian people and they're a medieval people. And they tend to see the world in terms of their religious beliefs. And in the same way that the Muslims who saw the world similarly couldn't understand what they had done to displease God so much that they sent Genghis Khan to punish them, the Orthodox Christians that the Russians were couldn't understand what sort of sins they'd committed to allow such a result as what happened at the Kalka river to occur to them. In fact, they were still completely confused as to who the people that defeated them at the Kalka river even were. Remember, as far as the Europeans are concerned, this is a people that has emerged just recently from another galaxy, the galaxy of China, another place that they've never heard of and do not know. The Russian Chronicles from this period plainly show how confused and demoralized and disoriented the Russians were by this attack. Under the heading of the year 1224, the Chronicles of Novgorod say the same year, for our sins, unknown tribes came, whom no one exactly knows who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor of what their faith is. But they call them Tartars. And just to make the confusion and the disorientation even more profound, just when the Russians are trying to figure out what they're up against, these Mongols, these Tartars disappear, the Sudden disappearance of the Mongols must have been inexplicable to the people of the Eastern European steppe. After all, they had come out of the east like a lightning bolt, smashed all these eastern steppe armies and Russian armies, and done so with ease and with a fraction of the numbers that they were opposed with. And then when they've got them down and vulnerable, instead of delivering the coup de grace, the death blow, they leave. This whole thing must have seemed like a bad dream to people like the Russian princes who survived, because of course, many of them didn't. They treated it almost as though it was a lightning bolt thrown from the heavens. A unique affair not to be repeated. In fact, historians often play with the what ifs, the counterfactuals of this affair, and wonder how things might have been different for history had the Russians taken this attack by Subedai and this Mongol scouting force as a warning and prepared for the next blow. Instead, they went back to their normal disunited ways, assumed that this was a one off and you were never going to see this strange Gog and Magog type people again. The people farther west were completely unaware of any of this. The crown heads of places like Germany and France and England never even heard of this stuff. They didn't even know about the Mongols at this point. And the Russians seemed to want to just forget this thing had ever happened. They didn't know why the Mongols arrived and they didn't know why they left. And they didn't seem to be asking too many hard questions. The truth of the matter was Subedai and his Mongols left because Genghis Khan had recalled them. He'd send a messenger to them, telling them, you know, time to come back. Subedai and Yebe the Arrow, the other great Mongol general involved in this cavalry raid, went back to Mongolia through a different route than they arrived. They decimated a couple more tribal nomadic groups on the way, suffered a little reverse at the hands of a people called the Bulgars, and then paid them back for that. Yebe would die before the force got back to Mongolia. But when the force did get back to Mongolia, Genghis Khan got a wealth of information about what lay to the west of his new conquest in the Khwarezmian Shah's former domains, but also what Europe was like. Subedai had not just scouted out in Europe, but he'd run into people like the Venetian traders along the Black Sea and made deals with them in exchange for the Mongols going around and destroying all the other trading posts of the other Peoples the Venetians competed with near the Black Sea. The Venetians gave the Mongols maps. Sounded like a good deal at the time. Here's the way historian Richard A. Gabriel describes sort of his wrap up of this great cavalry raid. Subadai and Yebe had been gone for three years. Yebe died of a fever and never reached the Mongol capital. Subedai left behind scores of spies and secret messengers to provide regular reports on all that went on in Russia and Europe. This information was passed to the Mongol Intelligence Service, which began compiling dossiers on the various European countries and the political and religious rivalries that divided them. Subedai's reconnaissance into Russia was history's longest cavalry ride with over 5,500 miles in about three years. On that ride, Subedayanyebe won over a dozen battles against superior numbers. Perhaps most important, the information gained from the reconnaissance showed that a vast corridor of steppe land ran from Mongolia to Hungary. And along that corridor, the armies of the Mongols could move faster than any army in the world. Subadai's great cavalry raid had been a reconnaissance mission and his army was far too small to attempt conquest. The next time the Mongols came to the west, they did so in force, end quote. Try telling the European step victims of the Mongols that the Mongol 15 or 20,000 man force was too small to attempt conquest. It sure looked pretty large enough to them when it was pursuing them over hundreds of miles after the battlefield, continuing to kill Europeans as they ran every step of the way. Now I spent a bunch of time on this mission because to the Europeans this was a shocking affair. To the Mongols, it was a footnote. If you look at their own history, the secret history of the Mongols, they devote a mere four lines to this whole affair. They'll devote pages to the question of the Mongol succession. But this scouting raid by Subidai, his destruction of all these people, just par for the course as far as they were concerned. Here's all that the Mongol secret history has to say about Subedai's great cavalry raid. He sent Subedai the brave off to war in the north, where he defeated eleven kingdoms and tribes crossing the Volga and Ural rivers, finally going to war with Kiev. So Subedai's cavalry raid is almost beneath notice. As far as Genghis Khan is concerned. What he's about to do that requires the help of his great general. Subedai gets quite a bit more play in the secret history. He's going to settle a score, he has a little revenge to mete out. And this was Always something that was important to the Great Khan. He may have, if some historians are to be believed, he may have felt his time on Earth getting short, and he wanted to make sure that the scores that were still on his balance sheet were settled before his life ended. By this time, the Great Khan is around 60 years old, and historians, many of them, seem to see in his actions at this time in his life those of a man trying to tie up the loose ends of his existence and to see to it that his life's work lives on after he's gone. Now, that doesn't mean he's giving up all hope. There's a wonderful story about him summoning a daoist monk who is supposed to be 300 years old, into his presence. The monk turns out to be more like 70. The Great Khan, though, wants to know how he's managed to live so long. Is there some potion or elixir or magical talisman that you know of that will allow me to live forever? One historian says it's called the Philosopher's Stone. Sounds like something right out of Harry Potter, doesn't it? The Taoist monk informs the now crestfallen Khan that there is no secret to immortality, although he might be able to extend his life a little if he'd stop eating so much greasy broiled food or slept in his bed alone from time to time. The Khan didn't like either one of those prescriptions, but he did like this Taoist monk. And historians report that he would be seen taking long walks with this guy, discussing sort of the nature of heaven and reality and life and all these deep philosophical things to his Mongol lieutenants, these murderous killers who had been with him since the very beginning. It looked to them like the Great Khan was mellowing, getting soft, losing his edge, which is ironic, considering the last campaign he's about to embark on and what a bloody mess that's going to be. Nonetheless, this is the time period in the Khan's life when many historians point to his greater qualities coming to the fore. Up till now, in many ways, he resembles an Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin or an Alexander or Julius Caesar. At this time in his life, though, you see many of his great lasting benefits come to the fore. For example, he has the Mongols adopt the Uyghur Alphabet. The Uyghurs are a Turkish people from Central Asia who had their own Alphabet. And like many illiterate barbarians, the Great Khan was fascinated by the almost magical nature of the written word, and knows that if his Mongol people are going to continue to dominate and exist longer than these other steppe empires, which collapsed as soon as the leader that built them died. They were going to have to do things like civil administration and writing, so they adopt the Uyghur script. The Great Khan begins to have discussions with more and more of these advisors from places like China and the Muslim world about proper ways to go about administering things. There'll be a wonderful story in this campaign that he's about to launch when his murderous Mongol lieutenants suggest that it would be a good idea to wipe out the millions of farmers who inhabit this area he's just conquered, because they're nothing but useless, you know, eaters of food and resources. It'd be better to destroy them, destroy these cities and turn the whole area back into pasture land for their horses, only to have a Chinese advisor explain to the Khan that if you let these people live, they'll be able to provide you with tons of tax revenue and stuff and grain. It'd be better to have that and farm them as people rather than wipe them all out. Perhaps the Great Khan, at 35 years old, would have seen it the way his murderous lieutenant saw it. The Khan, nearer to the end of his life, saw the wisdom in this Chinese advisor's suggestions. What's more, it's at the end of his life, at this time period, where he issues two important decrees. One that says anybody who tries to usurp the Khan, you know, meaning not him, but the people who come after him should be put to death mercilessly. The other commandment is that his people should conquer the whole world and shall live in peace with no people who had not freely submitted to them. This is a variation of ideas that the Mongols had already thrown out there, that the Great Heaven had promised them the entire world, and even places that they hadn't discovered yet were already subject to them. And when they contacted these hitherto unknown people, if they didn't submit right away, they were the equivalent of rebels and could be treated as such. That, by the way, is traditionally the harshest treatment you could ever receive from the Mongols to be rebellious subjects. If you are rebellious subjects for not giving in to the Mongols the minute they first knock on your door, well, that's a heck of a thing. I mean, even when the Pope first makes contact a generation or two after Genghis death, the first thing the Mongols write back to the Pope is, hey, nice to meet you. Come over here and bow before us, because you're one of our subjects, and if you don't, you're Rebellious, Kind of convenient, isn't it? There's also the matter of who's going to take over after the Great Khan's not around anymore. There are problems with this, and they involve his oldest son. Now, his oldest son, if you recall the very first episode we did on this, was of perhaps uncertain parentage. Genghis Khan's young wife was taken from him by another tribe. When he got her back some nine months later, she was pregnant. Now, no one knows if this first son born to him was his or a rapist from another tribe. Everyone had the good sense to keep quiet about that. Not a good idea in front of one of the most murderous people in all history to start questioning his oldest sons parentage. But his other sons did. And there was a real worry that if the oldest son was left the empire, although that was not standard Mongol practice, it could be left to any of them that it might break up like many step empires before this time. Also, there are rumblings that the oldest son was feeling like his father was a little too murderous. There are statements that some historians have found where perhaps this oldest son is suggesting that he would be doing the world a favor if he poisoned his father. And then coincidentally, the son dies at about 40 years old. And many people think his father ordered his poisoning not because he didn't love him, but because perhaps like Augustus Caesar, killing people close to him, it was the right thing to do for the empire. It's at this time that the Great Khan, mellowing though he might have been, conducts the last campaign of his life, one against a people that he's already defeated, but when he needed them, refused to come to his aid. The people of Xisha, the Chinese western province, that was the first place in China that the Great Khan had conquered. They had promised when he eased up on them and didn't destroy them utterly, that they would be his right hand. And when he needed them, all he had to do was call. So when he invaded the Khwryzmian Shah's empire, he called and they basically said to him, if you need our help, what kind of Khan are you? You can't conquer these Muslims by yourself. Now, Genghis at that time was in no position to punish them while he had a war on his hands in the Muslim world, that war was now over. It was the day of reckoning. And the people of Shisha were not going to live to see the after effects of that. Historian Paul Lokoko describes the war against this people that the Mongols called the Tanguts. This Tibetan Chinese People who lived in the kingdom known as Xisha. Of course, Genghis Khan had already been to war with Shisha once. This is how he got their pledge to help him when he needed them. And this is where they broke their pledge. And now he was coming back to sort of pay them back for breaking their promise. But there was another geostrategic reason why this may have been a good idea. Anyway, the rulers of Xisha had buried their differences within the Northern Chinese, the Jin dynasty, and now they were working together against the Mongols. Remember, Genghis Khan had attacked the Northern Chinese more than a decade before this time and had been fighting them ever since. The last thing he needed was them to get a powerful ally on his flank. And so this had the dual effect of punishing the Tangut Xisha people for breaking their promise and eliminating the Northern Chinese main ally. It was going to be one of the most brutal wars of extermination Genghis Khan would ever fight. And obviously, given what we've already talked about in this series, that's really saying something. Here's the way historian Paul Lococo describes the Mongol army entered Xisha territory in February 1226 and immediately sacked several towns and villages on the border. They were delighted to find these towns heavily stocked with food and other provisions. The army mercilessly cut down the populations in accord with Genghis Khan's intention to punish the people of Xisha. As the armies moved deeper into the land, the slaughter continued. In the words of one Chinese writer at the time. Now quoting that Chinese writer, men strive in vain to hide in caverns and in mountains. As to the Mongol sword, hardly two in a hundred escape it. The fields are covered with the bones of slaughtered people. Now back to the historian. A war of extermination, not just conquest, was intended. And Genghis Khan wanted as many of Shisha's inhabitants killed as possible. Only parts of Persia and Afghanistan suffered a similar level of devastation. By the summer of 1226, Lokoko continues. The Mongols converged on the two main remaining cities, one of which was Ningxia, the capital. The Xisha armies had fled behind the walls of these cities. Indeed, during this campaign, the Mongols rarely faced large enemy armies in the fields, making Mongol progress much easier and allowing them to engage in systematic slaughter with relative lack of interference. To prevent relief forces coming from Jin China, another Mongol army under the Khan's son Ogedai, besieged the Jin capital at Kaifeng. End quote. In the space of the next year, the Mongols would take the capital of the Tangut people. And they would kill every man, woman, child, and some sources say dog and chicken and other living thing in the cities, while continuing to do that in the countryside. This is the place where Genghis Khan's lieutenants suggest that they just kill everybody, tens of millions of people, destroy all the structures and allow the whole entire urbanized area to revert back to pasture land to feed Mongol horses. And where the Chinese advisor, one of many that the Great Khan was starting to surround himself with, convinced the Khan that it would be better in the long term to allow all these people to live so that they could continue to work and produce for the Khan. Nonetheless, that wasn't going to stop him from paying these people back. It was part of the nomad way of looking at the world. Revenge was a motivating factor. Heck, it's a human motivating factor. But in these nomadic barbarian societies, it was particularly important. You can see the importance when you read the Mongol's own account of these events. As I said, they give four lines to Subidai's great raid into Europe. They devote pages to describing this payback against the Shisha Tangut people. Here's the way the Tangut destruction is described in the Mongol secret history. Their own accounts quote, Chinggis Khan took everything from the Tangut people. He gave their ruler, Bur Khan, the name Shitturghu, and then executed him. He ordered that the men and women of their cities be killed, their children and grandchildren, saying, as long as I can eat food and still say, make everyone who lives in their cities vanish, kill them all and destroy their homes. As long as I am still alive, keep up the slaughter. This is because the Tangut people made a promise they didn't keep. Chinggis Khan had gone to war with the Tangut a second time. He had destroyed them. End quote. Many of the Tangut who managed to survive this extermination attempt were given by Genghis Khan to one of his wives as property. That gift will be a postmortem one, because the Great Khan doesn't quite live long enough to see the end of the Tanguts. He leaves the equivalent of a last will and testament, though, spelling out the exact level of destruction, which is pretty much total, that he wants inflicted upon them, going to initiate payback, whether or not he's actually physically here to see it. In August 1227, the great Khan ascended to heaven. That's the way the Mongol secret history puts it. They can't quite bring themselves to say he died. He ascended to heaven. And in keeping with this guy's mysterious nature, as we said in one of the earlier episodes, he's maybe the most mysterious great historical personality in the last 2000 years. If you go back and you want to talk about an ancient Assyrian ruler from 3,000 years ago, you expect there to be a lot of uncertainty. The Great Khan didn't live that long ago, historically speaking, and he was so huge you would expect to have more basic information about him. Don't know when he was born, don't know how he died, don't know what he looked like, and don't know where he's buried now. In the Mongol histories, he dies as a result of a fall from a horse. That leads to a fever and then a sickness and he dies. Other sources claim that in this war against the Tanguts, he was struck in the knee by a stray arrow and that that led to illness and death. Another story, probably not true, talks about him raping a Tangut princess and she planning for this, inserting some very pointed sharp device into her body. And when he tried to rape her, he gets mortally wounded. There are other stories out there. Nonetheless, after his passing, his body is taken back to Mongolia and buried somewhere. Nobody knows where. The tomb has never been found. There are all sorts of stories about the extreme lengths that the Mongols went to make sure nobody would know where he was buried. There are stories about, you know, whether true or untrue, everyone who took him to the grave was then killed. And then all the people that killed them to keep the secret were also killed. Stories of 70 moon faced virgins being sacrificed and put in the tomb with him. No one knows, you know, hundreds of horses being ridden over the ground so that it would obscure the tomb again. After all this time and all this searching, they're still looking. The tomb has not been found. And what's more, judging from the way the Mongol people today still view Genghis Khan, they probably don't want it found. The question that arises, though, upon his death is twofold. The most obvious is, what now? Because throughout the history of nomadic steppe empires, usually when the person whose force of personality was able to build these empires and bring them together leaves the scene, they tend to fragment. You only have to look at the great Attila to see an example of that. So what was going to happen now that the unifying force, the person whose incredible force of personality had held this thing together literally with bonds of steel and blood and fear. When he's gone, what happens? The second question that arises is, what do you make of this person? Because Historians ever since have been conflicted about him. You cannot deny the incredible nature of this human being. He was utterly merciless and nothing stood in the way of what he saw as his own destiny. And in this sense, it puts him in league with almost all the great other historical arsonists you could think of, from Hitler to Napoleon to Caesar to Alexander. I've been naming the same ones, but there's others, and there are similarities between them all. They're almost like these recurring figures that come around from time to time, and they have this extraordinary sense of their own destiny, that somehow heaven or the gods or fate is on their side. And sometimes they will expose themselves to obvious foolhardy danger because their belief in their own destiny is so extreme that they can't quite grasp the idea that, you know, the heavens would allow anything to happen to them before their great world mission was completed. In fact, historians like Paul Reyniewski, who writes a great biography about Genghis Khan, suggest that it's this sense of his own destiny in this greater mission that he's on that allows him to just ignore the massive amounts of damage and killing that he inflicts. It's all minor compared to the greater good that he's, you know, involved with. And what's interesting is there are historians and writers today that buy right into that. I think it's been plain that normally I try to give you many different points of view on these history programs, but my own bias comes into play in this story because I have a hard time buying into this idea of Genghis Khan as this force for good, as we said. My Chinese history professor, who said this in the first episode, was so intent on making people remember the dead. Because if you forget those people and you just sort of set the tens of millions of people who died as a result of Genghis Khan living aside, all of a sudden everything starts looking pretty good. Well, he did this, he did that, he did this other thing. And as long as it's not balanced out by the horrificness and the casualties and the rape and the slavery and the suffering, why the guy was a positive for civilization. The entire question changes, though. When you put those dead people back on the balance scale. Many of the same things that some of these admiring historians and writers say about Genghis Khan would fit equally well for Adolf Hitler. Had the Nazis won the Second World War, had he created this unified Europe that was a part of his long term plans, you better believe that the Nazis would have created a eu, a version of the EU dominated by Germany before the regular EU was created. And historians, a thousand years after that would say that the Germans and the Nazis created a single state that unified communication and commerce and all these things. And once again, all you have to do is take all the dead people that Hitler was responsible for off the balance sheet, and it looks like a net positive. The other thing that both Genghis Khan and many of his admirers have credited him for is bringing this giant region under a single rule. Once again, this is something historians love, not all of them, I'm obviously generalizing here, but they love it with the Roman Empire too. You bring these giant areas under a single rule, with a single set of laws and standards and practices and all these things, and it's a. A net gain for civilization, Completely ignoring the fact that to live under it may have been a nightmare. I mean, ask the people in Eastern Europe how much they felt good about the Soviet Union dominating their countries after the second world War and bringing a single rule and a single system and a single set of laws and practices to them. They never gave up the idea that they would be willing to fight and die to get out of that situation. The Roman Empire was the same way. Those people were not brought into the Roman Empire voluntarily. They were conquered. And they often rebelled at great human cost to try to get out. To them, being under a single ruler was not a positive, it was a negative. People will suggest things like, well, the Mongols brought a single law to all these people. Yes, but it allowed the Mongols to come in whenever they wanted to and decide that your daughter was beautiful and should be, you know, in the Khan's harem. I mean, those are the kind of things that people ignore when you talk about living under the rule of an absolute. You know, these are proto czars here. I mean, John of Plano Carpini writes that he would be talking to people that he would meet in the Mongol camp of other nationalities, and they straight up told him if they thought they could, they'd break away and rebel right now. This was a single state under a single ruler that was held together by terrorists and force and killing. It's easy to look at the positives of this super state, as long as you don't put the negatives of it on the balance sheet as well. Once you do that, the equation becomes a lot more complicated. I always ask, when you look at all of the Khan's achievements on the balance sheet, how much good would this historical arsonist have had to accomplish to make the lives of between 10 and 80 million people worth it. Another question is how do you judge the man's lack of concern over killing? Was he a sociopath, you know, like Hitler, or was this a cultural question? You'll see a lot of historians try to explain away the Khan's lack of concern over human life by the cultural environment he was raised in. They will say that these nomadic peoples often looked at the sedentary societies as consisting of people that weren't of the same human species as they were, especially people who farmed untilled the land. They were less than slaves or animals in the minds of these people. So you can't so much blame a guy like Genghis Khan for not thinking that he was doing very bad stuff when he wiped those slaves or animals out. In fact, historian, French historian Rene Griset specifically exempts Genghis Khan from this question by saying he didn't know better. And then he says Tamerlane, a later Turco Mongol conqueror, deserves much more blame because he was raised in civilization and taught the value of human life. When a guy like that goes out and commits all these atrocities, he knew better. You can hold him to a higher standard in a sense, Genghis Khan, if you believe people like Rene Gruset didn't know that, he should feel empathy at all these people that he was wiping out. To him, they didn't seem to be human. I mean. Historian Rene Grise quotes the great Khan's son Ogedai, speaking to one of the Chinese advisors who's pleading for the lives of the people who live in this city that the Khan's about to destroy. And Ogedai says to him, in an almost mocking sort of tone of voice, are you going to weep for the people? Again? That gives you an idea of the general point of view they had about whether the destruction of human life was worth even pleading for. One can pick another parallel with the Nazis and suggest that if you went to Jews or Russians or Frenchmen and asked them what they thought of the Thousand Year Reich, assuming Hitler had won the war, you'll get one impression. If you asked Germans 400 years into the Thousand Year Reich who were dominating the world, what they thought, they might have seen Hitler as more of a George Washington figure and the loss of all these Jews and others that died as part of the process, to be merely, you know, the killing of people that were less than animals. Now that sounds atrocious, doesn't it? Well, that's because it's recent. The longer you go from these events, the more easily the dead are forgotten and the more easily atrocities are explained away. As we said, someday some writer is going to write a book about the positive things that came out of the Third Reich. That's appalling to us, just as it would have been appalling for people who lived through Genghis Khan's conquest, that somebody would write a good book about him and compare him to someone like, you know, the father of our country in the United States, a George Washington, or another peaceful figure. Now, it's worth pointing out, though, the man's good qualities because there were some. First of all, who can deny he was an extraordinary figure? He had no formal education, and yet if you could do an IQ test on this guy, assuming that IQ test actually measured intelligence, there's no question that he's fantastically intelligent. He was physically gifted and imposing in a way that many of the barbarian peoples traditionally respect. I mean, the Vikings always wanted to have some Scandinavian ruler who was nine feet tall and could wield giant two handed swords in each hand. I mean, you know, these physically imposing figures, it helps, it helps your rise to power. The Khan followed the traditional step ruler pattern of bestowing great gifts with great generosity amongst all of his, you know, people in his retinue. That's how you kept them happy. You gave them all the silks and all the gold, everything, while you yourself lived a simple life. You can go back to the Roman accounts when the Roman diplomats met Attila the Hun and they went into this room and here are all these, you know, Hunnic peoples with their gold goblets and gold hilted swords and they're just slathered in riches. And Attila's the one guy in the room who's got a wooden bowl and a wooden cup and no jewelry. There's almost a stereotype of the, you know, simple pastoral nomad ruler that stays in touch with his simple past while he enriches those around him. It's part of what these great rulers bring to their people. And the great Genghis Khan was par for the course where that was concerned. He also realized, if you believe the sources, that his very victories and accomplishments were going to affect his people in ways that would soften them again, step history is replete with these examples of conquering richer societies and then those richer societies, both the wealth of them, the luxury of them, the ease of them, and also the culture of them, undermining the very qualities that the steppe infused these people with in the first place that gave them the ability and the toughness and the hardiness to Conquer those societies to begin with. There's a wonderful epitaph that the Great Khan has when he talks about, you know, what will happen after his era, and he says, quote, after us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold. They will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms the loveliest of women. And they will forget that they owe these things to us. End quote. I think it's only fair to relate Rene Grusset's comments on Genghis Khan's finer qualities to balance out this picture I've given you somewhat. He writes, quote, in the framework of his way of life, his milieu and his race, Genghis Khan appears as a man of a reflective cast of mind and sturdy common sense, remarkably well balanced and a good listener. He was also firm in friendship and for all his sternness, generous and affectionate, he had the qualities of a true administrator, an administrator, that is, of nomadic peoples, not of sedentary ones, of whose economy he had only the vaguest conception. Within these limits, he displayed an innate sense of order and good government combined with ruthless barbarian sentiments. There is in him a certain nobility and loftiness of mind whereby the accursed of Muslim rights regains his proper status as a human being. Again, whether or not Genghis Khan deserves accolades is an eye of the beholder question. Think of people more recent to us who killed similar numbers of people for some greater goal. Then ask yourself to evaluate them, and you decide whether or not you can set aside the negative things on the balance sheet enough to laud the positive stuff. Now that Genghis Khan was gone, perhaps it's the equivalent of the Third Reich without Hitler. What would happen at that point? Well, in this story of the great Mongol conquests of the Middle Ages, we're about to find out in the next episode of Wrath of the Khans. This greatest of all historical figures, the Genghis Khan, is no more. The people who live under the Mongol yoke are probably breathing a sigh of relief because of this thinking that this empire will now break up and go the way of other nomadic steppe confederations that came before it. Little do they know that part of what will make Ginga such an enduring and important historical figure was his ability to organize his empire in a way that allows him to avoid the fate of past step conquerors. In addition, his sons turn out to be worthy successors to the Great Khan's genius. And they will, instead of watching the empire contract without their father, expand it. If the people of China and the Muslim Middle east and Europe think that the danger has passed. Now that there's no Genghis Khan anymore, they are sorely mistaken. They are about to find out that the blows that they suffered under the father are a mere appetizer. The sons of Genghis Khan are going to deliver the main course, and it is served raw. All that and more in the next episode of Wrath of the Khans. Want to get your hands on all the older hardcore history shows? Just go to dancarlin.com and click on the Merchandise tab and catch up on what you've missed. Want to help the podcast? 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