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What you're about to hear is the fifth and last episode of a five part series on the unbelievable Mongol conquest in the Middle Ages. If you don't mind getting your story starting somewhere in the middle of it, we don't mind it either, so carry on. If though you prefer your story having some sort of sequential order that makes some sort of narrative sense, you might want to catch the earlier episodes before you start off with this one. In any case, ready? Regardless of your preference and without Further Ado, Part 5 of Wrath of the Cons December 7th. It's history, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The events that's one small step for man, one triathlete for mankind. The figures not quite to the mouth from this time and place. I take pride in the words ich bin ein Bialina. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The deep question Marine Six now two has had a major explos 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 presidents of crook. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrines and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, it's hardcore history. For a long time, historians have tried to do what scientists try to do when it comes to nature and physics and natural phenomena like that. Historians have tried for a long time to come up with a template that helps explain history. You know, in the same way that a physicist might work on a universal field theory to try to come up with some organized way of thinking about natural phenomenon, the laws of physics. Historians over time have changed and altered their view of how history unfolds the way it does and why. I mean, forever. Historians were guided by what's known now as the great man theory of history. This idea that history was pushed along by gifted individuals, people who had abnormal levels of intelligence or resolve or ruthlessness or ability, charisma maybe even. And that these people have their own desires and motivations and they go off in their directions, use their gifts to push history and then humankind sort of follows along in the wake of the great people. Then along came another theory known now as the trends and forces theory of history. Hegel with the dialectic. And then Marxism and others come along and suggest that human beings are sort of pawns in a game of conditions, and that economic conditions and cultural trends and environmental forces set the stage, and human beings sort of operate within that framework. Now today, it's a blend of all these various things, that seems to be the overriding theory, because sometimes stuff happens that doesn't fit any template at all, and no one should be surprised. After all, history is about humanity, and if there's any variable you can't really catalog, organize, and predict, it's the human one. Case in point, when the gods of history decide to throw a wild card down on the table, which is exactly what happened in the year 1242. The year 1242 might be a good date to set as the most dangerous year in all European history. That's the year that the Mongols were preparing to follow up on their massive victories in Hungary and Poland that had destroyed the largest armies that Europe had been able to put into the field in centuries. A French Templar knight told the king of France that there was now no large force that could conceivably stop the Mongols from reaching all the way to the Atlantic. The Mongol Khan at this time is Ogedai, the chosen son and successor of the Great Khan Genghis. Ogedai and his advisors had estimated it would take them 18 years to conquer Europe all the way to the Atlantic in 1242. They're ahead of schedule. And then something that is common in history, but that completely defies any attempts of humankind to organize history in any sort of meaningful, logical way happens. The Great Khan Ogedai dies. And historians believe he dies due to alcoholism, either chronic or a sustained drinking bout that just pushed him over the edge. But either way, it might be the most influential death due to intoxication addiction in all world history, and it completely short circuits the Mongol plans. In a way, I've always thought of the Mongol military machine like a giant robot that operates through the whim of a single brain, and that brain is the Khan. And the only problem with this fantastically dangerous Mongol robot army is that when the Khan dies, the brain short circuits and the robot just sort of powers down. When the messenger arrives in 12:42, riding almost nonstop from the Far east to tell the Mongol armies operating in Europe that Ogedai had died, they pull back almost instantly. Within a mere couple of weeks, this army that was ready to follow up its victory against a defenseless Europe is gone. The Europeans are stunned again. Stunned first by the level of the violence and and their defeat, and then stunned that somehow they must have attributed it to heaven, since that was what, at the time, most people in the ancient and medieval world attributed all major events like this to. They must have thought that the gods had intervened, because what else explains the lack of A conqueror following up on their conquests. There have been what if? Scenarios that historians and fans of history have played with ever since 1242, wondering what would have happened had the Mongol Khan not died. Could the Mongols have actually conquered Europe? And all sorts of arguments have erupted concerning whether or not the dark, deep forests of Europe would have provided enough pasturage to feed Mongol horses, or whether the Mongols would have been able to deal with the intense level of castles and fortifications Europe had during this period, or whether the population would rise up and, through guerrilla warfare and banditry, have sapped the Mongol strengths. Considering that the Mongols were already maybe a little overstretched when it comes to controlling a large chunk of the Eurasian landmass, the only thing I would throw in to the debate is to remember that 700 years before this period, another steppe conqueror had managed to get all the way into France, which is very close to conquering all the way to the Atlantic. Before he was turned back, Attila the Hun had used local people to make up for the deficiencies of his own steppe people. The Mongols were prone to do the same thing. By the time they would have reached France, the Mongol armies likely would have consisted of a core of Mongols and a lot of people taken from Poland, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and, yes, even France, fighting other Europeans on pain of death. If they didn't fight well, this was the Mongol strategy they used in the Middle east. It was the strategy they used in Russia, it was the strategy they used in China. The Europeans likely would have been facing other Europeans controlled by Mongols by the time the Mongols made it to the deep, dark forests of Western Europe. Nonetheless, the death of the great Khan Ogedai, coming when it did, is a turning point in world history. The Mongols would never arrive back that deeply in Europe again. And writer Stuart Legge has compared what happened when the Mongol wave, which we described as a tsunami, but he also describes as a wave, pulled back towards Asia. He suggests that it sucked Europeans in, the undertow, back with it. Which helps explain why, all of a sudden, after the death of Ogedai, we start getting firsthand accounts from Europeans about what's going on in the Far east for really the first time ever. Author Stuart Legge says that the attitude of Europe was negatively impacted by the Mongol smashing of European arms, sort of dispelling any notions of superiority and leaving Europeans with a sort of stunned, depressed and resigned view of what might happen should the Mongols ever decide to return. He compared the pessimism of the people in the post Mongol European aftermath to the people in the 1950s, 1960s and maybe even into the 1970s, during the pessimism of the nuclear era, when at any time we might wake up to the news that the missiles were in the air and on the way. Nonetheless, as we said, the pulling back of Mongol forces which so stunned the Europeans sucked Europeans back into Asia as part of the process of an undertow almost. And most of these people that were with the initial undertow were not going with the Mongols willingly. During the Mongols first European incursion in 1221, they sucked back with them to Asia lots of Russians who would end up being slaves and concubines and toiling for the Mongols back in Asia this time around. Primary sources like Roger of Verad, among others, talk about long trains of prisoners being dragged through Hungary. And Roger of Verad was one of them. He says he was told by interpreters in no uncertain terms that once the Hungarian borders were reached, all of the non essential and those considered to be non valuable prisoners were going to get, as he put it, the edge of the sword. Primary sources say that the Mongols accomplished this by telling people that they didn't want to take back to Asia with them anymore. They didn't want to feed and clothe and deal with on the way in what was amounting to the equivalent of the baton death march that they were free to go. And they let them go. And then three or four miles later, they attacked them and killed them all while they were stretched out in refugee columns. Roger of Verad himself escaped through a tale that reminds one of the movie the Killing Fields and the stories of people who survived the Cambodian genocide by hiding in the woods and avoiding their captors. Roger of Verad pretended he needed to go to the side of the road to answered the call of nature, covered himself up with sticks and twigs and stayed for days until the Mongols and the refugees had left. And he says when he emerged from the hiding spot, he saw the aftermath of what the Mongols had left behind in terms of human carnage. Many of these individuals who weren't killed will be brought back into Asia and in a very strange way, contributing to that positive effect that many historians give credit to the Mongols for creating, connecting the various parts of the Eurasian world together in a way that they hadn't been connected before. You now had Europeans in Asia, but it wasn't always because they wanted to be there. Now there were some Europeans who did want to go to the east and make contact with the Mongols voluntarily, or at least wanted to based on orders they were given from the Supreme European authority during this time period, which was the Pope. A papal expedition will leave for the Mongolian steppes or Asia, or this ill defined area that Europe really knew nothing about in 1245. People often credit Marco Polo's famous book for being the first real information to come back from Asia. But Marco Polo's work is still quite a bit in the future. The papal expedition, sent out in 1245 and led by a person whose work we've already used in this series, John of Plano Carpini, will leave and sort of follow the Mongol wake of destruction all the way back to Asia with a dual one, to transmit a written message from the Pope to the Mongol ruler, and two, to spy on Mongol capabilities and to tell the Pope and Europeans in general as much as they could find out about this people. So if they ever came back, the Europeans might be better prepared to deal with them. John of Plano Carpini will be a European eyewitness to the crowning, for lack of a better word, of Ogedai's successor as Great Khan. But that won't come for several years after the death of Ogedai, because the Mongolian empire, now almost certainly the greatest empire in all world history in terms of actual size, is up for grabs. And it is almost certainly the greatest prize, imperial prize, lottery prize, anything you want to say that world history has ever had. Who was going to get it was a huge question and drama. When the great Khan Genghis had died, he'd handpicked a successor that made all the difference. Now there was no handpicked successor. There was no rule of automatic succession. You can't say, well, it goes to the oldest son of this Khan or that Khan. It was essentially something that the Mongols would decide amongst themselves at one of these great gatherings known as the Kuril Tai. But it also meant that the whole thing was kind of up for grabs. And now that aspect of Mongol history, we told you, was like a seed that had been planted and was going to grow into almost some sort of a poison plant had taken root. The Mongol children of Genghis Khan had done a wonderful job sharing their inheritance and deferring to the Great Khan's choice of a successor. The next generation of Mongols who were going to fight over this greatest of all, you know, imperial prizes were the grandchildren of Genghis Khan. And they did not feel the same level of devotion to the empire stability as the Khan's children did. In fact, I was looking up a quote that I specifically remember. I couldn't find it online that Bill Cosby had made the stand up comedian, the television actor, and many other things. I remember him talking about how difficult it was to raise his own children because he had grown up a poor child in Philadelphia, but he was the father of rich children, and how the differences in worldviews made it sometimes difficult to relate to your own kids. The Mongol Empire kind of falls into that same situation. These grandchildren of Genghis Khan who were going to fight over the succession were nothing like the Khan himself was and nothing like the Mongols were when the Khan was building his power base. Because back then, as we had mentioned, some of these Mongol tribes were so poor that they were said to create clothing out of the skins of field mice sewn together. These grandchildren of Genghis Khan had never known such poverty. They were some of the richest people in the world. And as Bill Cosby had said, there was a great difficulty in trying to infuse the values that you yourself developed and maintained while poor in people who from their very earliest ages were anything but poor. As one chronicler had written, the Mongols were not now what they once were in terms of their material prosperity. The generation that had for pretty much their entire lives been clothed in silk was about to inherit the empire, an empire won by a generation who had known a much poorer existence during their upbringing. And there were a lot of possible candidates for the top job. Ogedai was picked by Genghis. It kind of ruled out the idea that anybody else could have the gig. Oged had a chosen successor, but he chose someone really young, a grandchild. It wasn't going to work. And they were lot of possible people who had a realistic chance of getting elected to the top job instead. And that's key. The Mongol Khan may have had virtually dictatorial powers, but he didn't get that job unless he was elected to it by consensus. The other family members had to agree who got the top job. And this consensus was determined at one of these grand get togethers, these curl ties. The reason that the European campaign by the Mongols was brought back to Mongolia was so that they could have this giant get together and decide who the new Khan was going to be. Now, it's worth remembering a little bit what the Mongol system was like. I've always thought it reminded me a little of like the United States system, a federal system, sort of the executive authority in Mongolia with the imperial Khan and all that. But all those giant chunks of Mongol territory that Genghis Khan had left to his sons became like separate states in the United States. And the ruler of those areas was like a governor in a sense. You could think about it if you want, because I sometimes do, as the United States of Khan and those governors all were liable to get the next, you know, imperial job. What's more, Genghis Khan had, you know, some siblings still alive who thought that they could be liable for the job and everything else. So they're gonna hold this big Kural tie, and everybody's gonna pick the new Khan. And there's only one problem, and that's that Batu one, the grandsons of Genghis Khan won't go. He boycotts the Kuro Tai. He says he's ill and he can't make it all the way to Mongolia. The problem is it's like not having enough people, you know, to form a quorum at a business meeting. The business meeting doesn't count if you don't have a quorum. The curl tie doesn't count. If Batuu's not there and Batuu won't go, why won't Batuu? Well, it actually stems all the way back to maybe a tragic flaw, if you want to call it that, to the youth of the great Temujin. Remember, Temujin becomes Genghis Khan. His firstborn son was born after Temujin's wife had been stolen by a rival tribe. By the time Genghis Khan got his wife back, she was pregnant. And no one ever knew if the child she carried was his or some, you know, chieftain from another tribe's child. This affected the succession when Genghis Khan died, because Genghis Khan had picked a middle son, Ogedai, to rule for him instead of his oldest son, Jochi, because nobody knew if Jochi was really Genghis Khan's blood. Now, that was managed okay because the Great Khan was there to do the managing himself. The problem was now the prime grandson. Batu was the son of Jochi, which meant he might not have been Genghis Khan's blood at all. And that came into play when it was time to decide who the new Khan was going to be. Now it seems like Batuu was not, you know, set on becoming the Great Khan himself. He would have been fine with someone else. The problem was, is the guy who was most likely to get the job was a guy named Kuyuk. And Batuu and Kuyuk hated each other with a passion. If Kuyuk gets the top job, Batuu's life might not be worth a plug nickel, as they used to say in the Old West. So Batuu didn't go to the Kuril Tai, so they couldn't pick a new khan, which meant Kuyo couldn't be elected and Batuu was safe. That's not a state of affairs that could continue forever. And it paralyzed the Mongol Empire while it went on. In the interim, though, an interesting thing happens. The Mongols are ruled by a woman, an empress. Regent is the way a lot of historians describe that role. It's basically Ogedai's wife, and until they pick a successor, she's the boss. You know, I thought about this a little bit, and I am at pains to think of a woman in all world history other than another Mongol empress regent later on in the story, who's ever held more power than this person, ever. And if this really is the most powerful woman in all human history, isn't it interesting you have to be a bit of a Mongol fanatic to have even heard of her. She's known. Well, I've seen it spelled, like, nine different ways, and I'm going to mispronounce it because I've seen different pronunciations. The Empress Doragin or Doragini, she is in charge of the Mongol Empire until they pick a new khan. And Batu keeps boycotting these curled ties. Now, he doesn't say, I will not come. He says, oh, I'm sick. Gout is what they commonly say he had. And so because he can't go, they can't have one. And so she's in charge. Now. This is the time period when you see the Mongol Empire break down by houses. We told you earlier this was going to be a big problem. The House of Ogedai, you know, for example, the House of Jochi, these are the sons of Genghis Khan who have now broken down into grandchildren, right? So Batuu's got a lot of relatives. They're all part of the House of Jochi. This Kuyuk we told you about a second ago, they're part of the House of Ogedai. And these houses begin to be rivals. And they're all ready to pick a new con and decide who gets the job. Batu keeps boycotting. So there's no Kuril Tai. That can happen in 1243. In 1244, Batuu boycotts again. In 1245, Batuu once again claims ill health. And they can't have the decisive picking of the new Khan then, either. This is three years that the greatest, most powerful, most feared empire in world history is operating on autopilot, sort of. Because even though she's the most powerful woman in the world. The empress regent has limited authority to do anything new. She can control taxation. She can handle ongoing affairs, but they've got to have another Kural tie. If, for example, she wants to launch a new war in a different direction, got to have a coral tie for that. Can't have a Kural tie because Batuu won't come. As we said, this giant monster iron robot that's, you know, fighting all over the world at the same time. As far away as, you know, the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea on the other. The robot's brain isn't functioning because there is no con. And there can't be a con until, you know, Batuu decides to let there be one. As the year 1246 rolls around, the empress regent and the members of the royal houses not connected to Batuu decide that the state of affairs can't continue. Batuu cannot be allowed to hold the entire empire hostage. And he's told this. He's told that the Kuro Tai at 12:46 will happen with or without him. And if he wants his families, you know, interest represented, he better be there. The way Batu gets the interest of his house represented, the House of Jochi could also be called the House of Jochi. Like many of these Mongol names, you can go with a couple different pronunciations. Instead of going himself and risking his own life, as we'll see later, a very smart decision. He sends other family members to represent the House of Jochi, House of Joki at the great Kuro Tai of 1246. Now someone else shows up to this great kuril tie of 1246, John of Plano Carpini with his message from the Pope, maybe, maybe the first European to ever voluntarily travel from Europe to the outskirts of China and come back. When The Pope in 1245 sends John to find the Tartars, no one knows how to find them. He basically says, okay, you go to Russia, and then you keep going until you run into Tartars, which is exactly what John does. And he runs into Batu and his westernmost state in the United States of Caen. He gives Batu this letter from the Pope. Batu probably has very little idea who the Pope is. And it has to be translated, like four times to get it from Latin into Mongolian. It's got to go from Latin to Russian, from Russian to Turkish, from Turkish to Uyghur, from Uyghur to Mongolian. And finally, Batu reads this letter from The Pope and says, oh, what we have here is an envoy and better send him along to Mongolia to talk to the Great Khan. But the Great Khan isn't enthroned yet and he's about to have his great coronation ceremony. Wow, you better be there for that because all the other envoys are gone. You better hurry. It's happening soon. And so this 65 or so year old John of Plano Carpini is put on a horse and whisked away to Mongolia. Now it sounds like it takes him a long time to get from Western Europe to Mongolia. Takes him four months in reality. This is like warp speed in medieval travel time, right? He gets there just in time for this great Kurotai. And he writes about it. The first European observer that I know of. I could be wrong about this, but I think he's the first European observer ever to come back with information from Mongolia to bring back to Europe. And he writes about the Great Khan's curl tie and the enthronement of of Koyuk could be Guryuk Koyuk. As I said, these Mongol names can go a couple of different ways. But the point of who gets the job is that it's exactly who Batuu was worried about getting the job all these years that he'd avoided the curl tie in the first place. The Empress Regent's oldest son, Ogedai's son. A man that even Ogedai didn't want to get the job because of his insubordination to Batuu all those years ago. Nonetheless, he's elected by the rest of the royal family members who are there. He tries the same thing many of the Caesars in Rome try. There's a custom that develops where they basically say, kuyuk, we want you to have the job. And he goes, oh no, no, no, I'm not the best guy for this job. So and so would be better than I would, and this other person would be better than I would. And they insist and finally says, okay, well if you insist, I'll take the job, but on one condition. And the one condition was he'll become Grand Khan. He'll inherit this greatest of all prizes in world history if you make sure and write a rule that you will keep it in his family, only his house, the House of Ogedai. This shows that the Empress Regent and that the new Grand Khan all understood that Genghis Khan's empire was fracturing along the grandchildren's various lines, the houses. And this was his attempt to solve this problem and keep it in his own direct line. The other Mongols agree to this. Guryuk is elected, and he becomes the new Great Khan. Now, John of Plano Carpini, when he arrives at the location for this curled tie, is blown away with what he sees. He says, There's 4,000 envoys, dukes, kings, princes, sultans, people from all over what these people would have considered the world. Right, Eurasia. The Mongols are not a poor people anymore. This is a grand gathering of people bearing gifts and petitions and scrambling to show that we are your good friends. Don't come in and hassle us. And here's what John of Plano Carpini writes to give you an idea of the grandness of this whole thing. First of all, he talks about the tent that Gulyuk is in, and he says, it's so big, it will hold 2,000 people. The entire plain is so filled with tents, you know you can hardly walk. Here's how he describes the richness of what these envoys are bringing to the Mongols for this coronation. So many gifts were bestowed by the envoys that it was marvelous to behold. Gifts of silk, samite, velvet, brocade, girdles of silk threaded with gold, choice furs and other presents. The emperor was also given a sunshade or little awning such as is carried over his head, and it was all decorated with precious stones. A certain governor of a province brought a number of camels for him, decked with brocade and with saddles on them, having some kind of contrivance inside which men could sit. And there they were, I should think 40 or 50 of them. He also brought many horses and mules covered with trappings or armour made of leather or iron. We, in our turn, were asked if we wished to present any gifts, but we had by now used up practically everything, so we had nothing to give him. There, up on a hill a good distance away from the tents, were stationed more than 500 carts, which were all filled with gold and silver and silken garments. And these things were shared out among the emperor and his chiefs. He continues leaving there, we went to another place where a wonderful tent had been set up, all of red velvet, and this had been given by the Catayans There also we were taken inside whenever we went in, we were given mead or wine to drink, and cooked meats were offered to us if we wished to have it. A lofty platform of boards had been erected on which the emperor's throne was placed. The throne, which was of ivory, was wonderfully carved, and there was also gold on it and precious stones If I remember rightly. And pearls, end quote. So you get an idea of the wealth now of these grandchildren of Genghis Khan. As I said earlier, they've come a long way from the days of wearing the skins of field mice sewn together. This first Western observer, John of Plano Carpini, describes the new emperor. The present emperor may be 40 or 45 years old or more. He is of medium height, very intelligent and extremely shrewd and most serious and grave in his manner. He is never seen to laugh for a slight cause, nor to indulge in any frivolity. So we were told by the Christians who are constantly with him. The Christians of his household also told us that they firmly believe he was about to become a Christian. And they have clear evidence of this. For he maintains Christian clerics and provides them with supplies of Christian things. In addition, he always has a chapel before his chief tent and they sing openly and in public and beat the boards for services after the Greek fashion like other Christians. End quote. Now, what's confusing, perhaps John of Plano Carpini here is the Mongol, you know, as we called it earlier, insurance policy. When it comes to the gods, instead of choosing any particular religion, they tended to be kind of like nature worshipers might be a good way to describe it, although perhaps not. They sort of thought anybody could potentially be right on the religious question. So why take any chances? You know, have all the gods prayed to by all the different people who believe in all the different religions and take no chances? What John of Plano Carpini was seeing was the Mongol's tolerance towards other religions, although he wasn't totally wrong, because when John got to the Far east, he ran into other Christians from various other denominations, some of which he wasn't even aware existed. Like Nestorian Christians, for example. These people weren't far wrong because there had been Christianity among a bunch of these Mongol and Mongol like tribes for a long time. In fact, Koyuk's mother, the Empress Regent, was herself thought to be a Christian. This becomes another of the great what ifs in this story. What if the Mongol Khan had actually converted to Christianity? Talk about an absolutely world changing event. Because considering what the Mongols are going to do in China in the next generation or two, you could literally have China ruled by a Christian ruler in the Middle Ages. That's a fantastic what if when it comes to the Mongol Empire. Nonetheless, the letter from the Pope is one of those communications that if Kuyuk was thinking about converting to Christianity, that letter might have talked him out of it because the letter translated four different times that John of Plano Carpini hands to the new Mongol ruler is untranslatable when he reads it. And by the way, they have found this exact letter and the response in the Vatican's records. And when you read it, the first thing you think of is that it's the most idiotic letter you've ever seen written to anyone who's totally unfamiliar with the Christian doctrine, because almost the entire letter is this attempt to explain the divinity of Christ and the Trinity and the virgin birth and all this kind of stuff. But it's not written like you're speaking to someone who doesn't know about it. It's written like you're speaking to someone in your own flock who's heard this story a million times. One of the things the Mongols eventually will answer about this story is you said this about that, and we don't understand what you're talking about. I've read it over. I know the whole story of the Trinity and what we would consider now to be Catholic doctrine, and I almost can't understand it. It's one of the most poorly written and thought out letters from one ruler to another you can imagine. And it must have confused the Mongols unbelievably, especially when you imagine it translated several times before they get their hands on it, including translated probably by Muslims, somewhere in the mix. Just to give you an example of the wording, let me read you a paragraph or two from the beginning of the Pope's letter to the great Mongol ruler. Now remember, the Pope doesn't have a very clear idea of who this guy is either. All he knows is that the very Eastern edges, you know, kind of up to Austria, so into central Europe, has been ravaged by this people that had hitherto been unknown. Now they know a little about him. He sends this envoy to the ruler with a note. The note is there to admonish the ruler for doing bad things in Europe. But it starts off trying to explain a little about the religion. Here's what the note says. From Pope Innocent iv, addressed to the Emperor of the Tartars, as it says from the beginning, God the father of his graciousness, regarding with unutterable loving kindness the unhappy lot of the human race, brought low by the guilt of the first man and desiring of his exceeding great charity, mercifully to restore him, whom the devil's envoy overthrew by crafty suggestion, sent from the lofty throne of heaven down to the lowly region of the world, his only begotten Son co substantial with himself, who was conceived by the operation of the Holy Ghost in the womb of a forechosen virgin, and there clothed in the garb of human flesh, and afterwards, proceeding thence by the closed door of his mother's virginity, he showed himself in a form visible to all men. End quote. It goes on and on and, you know, nine tenths of this note is that kind of stuff. The Mongol ruler must have been completely befuddled by all this. Even modern readers who know this story will read it and go, really? That's how they chose to explain the Christian religion to this guy. But finally, the note gets to the point, right? The Pope is going to read the Mongol ruler, the grandson of Genghis Khan, the person whose people had just recently been on the gates of overthrowing many European monarchies, the riot act, seeing that not only men, but even irrational animals, nay, the very elements which go to make up the world machine, are united by a certain innate law, after the manner of the celestial spirits, all of which God the Creator, has divided into choirs in the enduring stability of a peaceful order. It is not without cause that we are driven to express in strong terms our amazement that you, as we have heard, have invaded many countries belonging both to Christians and to others, and are laying them waste in a horrible desolation. And with a fury still unabated, you do not cease from stretching out your destroying hand to more distant lands, but breaking the bond of natural ties, sparing neither sex nor age, you rage against all indiscriminately with the sword of chastisement. We therefore, following the example of the King of peace, and desiring that all men should live united in concord in the fear of God, do admonish, beg, and earnestly beseech all of you that for the future you desist entirely from assaults of this kind, and especially from the prosecution of Christians, and that after so many and such grievous offences, you conciliate, by a fitting penance, the wrath of Divine Majesty, which without doubt you have seriously aroused by such provocation. End quote. It continues like that for a while. Again, the Mongol ruler, when he gets this letter from John of Plano Carpini, thinks John of Plano Carpini is there to give him the Pope's submission. Remember, at this time, the Mongol word for peace and submission are the same thing. So this Mongol ruler is thoroughly confused. But he answers the Pope with a letter that's in the Vatican archives, and it's just wonderful. Typical Mongol. Not wrath of God stuff, Wrath of Khan stuff. Here's the answer Kulyuk has drafted to the person they call the Lord Pope. This is the Latin translation, by the way. Quote. Having taken counsel for making peace with us, you, Pope and all Christians have sent an envoy to us, as we have heard from him and as your letters declare. Wherefore if you wish to have peace with us, you, Pope and all kings and potentates in no way delay to come to me and make terms of peace. And then you shall hear alike our answer and our will. The contents of your letters stated that we ought to be baptized and become Christians. To this we answer briefly that we do not understand in what way we ought to do this. To the rest of the contents of your letters, for example, that you wonder at so great a slaughter of men, especially of Christians, and in particular Poles, Moravians and Hungarians, we reply likewise that this also we do not understand. However, lest we may seem to pass it over in silence altogether, we give you this for our because they did not obey the word of God and the command of Chinggis Khan, but took counsel to slay our envoys. Therefore God ordered us to destroy them and gave them up into our hands for otherwise. If God had not done this, what could man do to man? But you men of the west believe that you alone are Christians and despise others. But how can you know to whom God deigns to confer his grace? But we, worshiping God, have destroyed the whole earth from the east to the west in the power of God. And if this were not the power of God, what could men have done? Therefore, if you accept peace and are willing to surrender your fortresses to us, you Pope and Christian princes, in no way delay coming to me to conclude peace. And then we shall know that you wish to have peace with us. But if you should not believe our letters and the command of God, nor hearken to our counsel, then we shall know for certain that you wish to have war. After that we do not know what will happen. God alone knows. End quote. There are other translations of this that are just as horrifying in separate parts. But basically he says in response to all this God talk, listen, if God didn't want us to be able to conquer the world, why did he let us conquer the world? This is the great medieval and ancient way of justifying the way things are. If God is all powerful, or the gods are all powerful, then reality is what the gods wanted. This is reality. Wake up and smell the coffee. He wants the Mongols to be run in the world. And if you don't come here soon you're the one defying God. Koyuk Khan's letter to the Pope, in terms of style and tone, is pretty standard for Mongol communications with other world leaders during this time period. The Mongols, as we said earlier, considered themselves by this time to be the leaders of a universal monarchy, a divinely oriented and ordained leadership whose job it was to put the whole world under their control, you know, for the better. They were going to infuse all of these areas with the same laws and rules and regulations that trade could be, you know, handled and people could live in peace and all that kind of stuff. It's very, very Roman when you think about it. You know, create a wasteland and then call it peace. Nonetheless, the ascension of Kuyukan puts the Mongols back on track. This empire that had come to a grinding halt with Ogedai's death now has a strong ruler at the helm again and is poised to pick up where it left off, which is not good news if you're one of those peoples who's not come under the Mongol hegemony yet. And Guk begins to reimpose a stern discipline on the empire. He thinks things have become lax since the days of Genghis Khan. He thought his father, Ogedai was a bit mellow. As we told you, that was the conception amongst the Mongols that Ogedai was lenient. I'm sure that comes as a shock to all the peoples of Russia and Eastern and even Central Europe who felt the Mongol wrath under Ogedai. If that's a mellow Mongol ruler, what the heck is a stern one? Well, Kuyuk was a stern one. And everyone was about to find out what it meant to have a taskmaster, old school Mongol at the helm. And the first thing Kulyuk was going to do was reign in some of these governors of these territories that he thought were getting a little uppity, getting a little independent. Remember, it's like the United States of Khan, and these states are getting a little bit independent for Kuyuk's taste. So he starts to rein in all these people. He has a bunch of the advisors for his mother. And Ogedaj, his father executed, puts in new people, sends some new generals to take over for old generals, starts some fighting again in a bunch of regions the Mongols have already been active and sends a message to his cousin Batu, the one who was so afraid of Koyuk becoming Khan, that he kept the Kuril Tai from happening year after year after year, and told Batu that now that Koyuk was Khan, you need to come over here and bow in front of me and swear allegiance. Batu was no fool. He understood the dangers in such a move. But he also couldn't say no to the Great Khan without there being a civil war. So Batu begins to make his way from, you know, what's the Russian steps, basically slowly east towards Mongolia, very slowly, and he brings troops with him, and it takes a long time. Meanwhile, Gu all of a sudden decides that he's not feeling well. Now, Goyuk was supposed to be, if you believe the primary sources, a kind of a sickly Mongol anyway, always beset with this or that, you know, health issue. And all of that was exacerbated by his habits. He was another alcoholic, like his father. The primary sources say he would get up in the morning and start drinking wine and drink all day long until the end of the day, and he goes to bed. Also, he had a thing for the ladies, as many of these Mongols did, and a huge harem. And according to, for example, Persian chroniclers, the combination of the drinking and the continual carousing in the harem, even while he was running the empire, was not good for his health. So one day, according to Persian chronicler Rashid Al Din, he says he decides that the air and the water in a certain part of the steppe would improve his constitution. So he decides he's going to take a little trip there and sort of hang out and let his health recover. He brings the royal army with him when he does, and he begins to make his way west. So Batu and his armies making its way east. The great Khan, for his health, ostensibly is making his way west with the royal army. And all of a sudden, Batu receives a message from a powerful woman named Sorka Thani. Sorka Thani is the widow of Genghis Khan's youngest son, Tuli, or to Louis, you may recall, he's the one who in Mongol history is revered for sacrificing his own life to placate the evil spirits of China when they had struck Ogedai dumb during the Chinese campaign. So to Louis decides he'll sacrifice his own life, says, take care of my family after I do. Ogedai says, I will. And boom. To Louie leaves the scene. But he leaves a widow. Sorcitani Batuu gets a message from Sorkhotani. She says, warning, the Great Khan is coming and he intends to do you violence. So now what you have set up here, ladies and gentlemen, as we told you, is the fracturing of the Mongol Empire into the different houses, and the houses are about to have a war with each other. The new great Tahn Koyuk is going to smash Batu, or the other way around. Somewhere around the city of Samarkand, though, history deals another wild card and Koyuk dies unexpectedly. He's under 45 years of age. The historians seem to think it's not a universal idea that he died from his alcoholism and his carousing, although, who knows? It's possible he was poisoned. Nonetheless, all of a sudden, two things happen. One, this giant Mongol civil war, a fight between, you know, the greatest troops of all time on each side of the battlefield, is averted, but at the cost of once again throwing the Mongol Empire into the situation that merely a year before it had finally solved. They had just gotten a khan. The Mongol brain had been put back into the giant Mongol military robot. It was ready to, you know, strike out again. And now, less than, you know, a year and a half later, everything was happening all over again. The Mongols were without a khan, and Kuyuk's wife takes over as the regent empress. Just like his father, Ogedai had had his wife, Kuyuk's mother, take over as the regent empress. In less than two years, the entire situation had gone back to start, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. Writer DS Benson sums up this situation by writing, once again, the Mongolian political situation would begin to unravel as the imperial system faced a second crisis before the first one had even been resolved. Following the earlier precedent, he writes, Koyuk's Empress Kamish assume the powers of a caretaker regency. But that regency would last three years before this strange and awkward period, first dominated by Kuyuk's mother, then himself and now his wife, would come to an end. This time, when it does come to an end, it's going to be because the senior family member intervenes and dominates it. That's Batu. He's determined not to allow this situation to get out of hand in a way that will hurt him. And so he organizes it with the help of Sorcitani, the woman who had warned him of Koyuk's evil intentions. Sorka Thani is one of the most interesting Mongol female figures in history. First of all, it's very likely that she herself was a Nestorian Christian, as many of these powerful Mongol women were. She also happens to be the mother of an absolutely remarkable brood of children, including the person who will be the next khan, another one who plays a huge role in history, named Heligu, and maybe the most interesting Khan in the entire history of the Mongols, Khubilai, they're brothers, they're the sons of Sorkhotani. It's an amazing group of children. And Batu recognizes this. After several years of the Empress Region Kameshes Regency, Batu organizes a Kural tie, but he doesn't do it in Mongolia, where the rules of Genghis Khan mandate that it's gonna be. He has it in Turkestan right by him. Now, this is fine for his clan, the House of Jochi or Jochi, and it's fine with Sorcitani's clan, the House of Tului or Tuli. It's not fine with some of these other clans. The House of Ogedai doesn't like it. The House of Chagatai doesn't like it. The people who've been running the show since Guryuk was put in charge, protest, doesn't matter. Batu gets the situation split in two. He gets around the law by saying, we'll choose a successor here in Turkestan and then we'll have the actual coronation in Mongolia so that Genghis Khan's laws are kept valid. And he working in concert with the other House of Tuli, Pixor Qhotani's son, Monkey or Monku or Manka. You will see it three different ways. @ least this infuriates the other houses because remember, the one condition that Kuyuk took the Great Khan's position under was that it stayed in his family and Batu had been able to circumvent that new requirement written into the laws. What's more, he'd managed to outmaneuver the other sides of the family. He, representing the House of Jochi, working with the House of Tuli, had circumvented the rest of the Mongol grandchildren and put his own preferred candidate on the throne. This would cause a violent and intrigue filled reaction on the part of the houses that were now frozen out of power. Now, as we said, this is perhaps the greatest prize in all human history up to this point, certainly, and maybe in all human history ever. The people who had now ostensibly been frozen out of power were not about to sit down and simply take this. And a fantastically interesting response occurs that's talked about in many different histories. I like the way the Persian chronicler from right around this period, Rashid Al Ad Din, describes it, but it basically involves a plot, a plot that occurs while the Mongol coronation festivities are underway and everybody's getting drunk and enjoying themselves and partying and we're told that the amount of tribute and goods and presents flowing in from all over the known world are cluttering up the skyline with wagons full of stuff. I mean, the Mongols are so unbelievably rich at this point that whenever a Mongol Khan is put on the throne, everybody sends tribute and gifts and all kinds of things. And so there's these wagons everywhere stretching out to the horizon. And then one of these wagon trains gets infiltrated by accident by someone friendly to the new Khan and his family. And Rashid Aladdin describes it this way, talking about, you know, what happens as the party and the coronation festivities are occurring. Quote they were still awaiting the arrival of the other princes and continued to be excessive in their joy and revelry. None of them dreamt that the ancient Yassav Chinggis Khan could be changed or altered, and there had been no kind of quarrel or disagreement amongst his family. In their revelry, therefore, they had neglected to exercise precaution. Meanwhile, Shuramun and Nakhu, the grandsons of Ogedai Khan and Tokk, the son of Karachar, having reached agreement amongst themselves, had drawn near with many wagons full of arms and meditating guile and treachery in their hearts. All of a sudden, by a lucky chance indicative of fortune, a falconer called Kesage of the Cankli Bon, one of Monkey Khan's falconers, lost a camel. He was wandering about in search of it when he stumbled into the middle of Shereman and Naku's forces. He beheld a great army and wagons without number, heavily loaded, allegedly with food and drink for the feast of congratulation. Ignorant of the secret purpose of all this, Casage continued to search for his stray camel. As he moved about, he came upon a young lad seated behind a broken wagon. The lad, thinking he was one of their horsemen, asked for his assistance in mending the wagon key. Sidge dismounted in order to help him, and his glance fell upon the weapons and warlike equipment which they had stacked in the wagon. He asked the lad what this load was. Arms, replied the lad. The same as in all the other wagons. Kissage realized they're coming with wagons filled with arms was not devoid of guile and treachery, but he feigned indifference. When he had finished helping, he entered a tent and became a guest. And having established friendly relations with his host, he gradually discovered how matters lay when he was appraised of the truth, and knew for certain that the thoughts of these people were full of guile and hypocrisy, and that they Intended in the course of the auspicious feast, when all were drunk, to step aside from the highway of decency and stretching out the hand of oppression to put into effect what they had planned. Key Sidge let go of the reins of free will, bade farewell to his camel and traveled three days journey in one end quote. Rashid then says Kasich bursts in at the coronation to tell the now brand new Khan, still celebrating his, you know, new position, that assassins were on the way. Now it sounds like everyone at the coronation is drunk and are having a hard time grasping the idea of that. Any one of this family remember, this is the family that Genghis Khan himself had given that lesson to, where he took the single arrow and broke it, and then he took a bundle of arrows and showed his sons that they were unbroken. You couldn't break this bundle if only they would stick together. And now here was this falconer telling the Khan that not only was that actually happening, but the assassins with wagonfuls of arms were on their way to take advantage of of he and his people while they were in a vulnerable position, because they didn't expect their own family to come as assassins. Now, I was trying to think about what I could compare this to. It reminds me, and you folks who know your British history will remember this, of Guy Fawkes being discovered in the process of trying to blow up Parliament. And they actually find him with all of the gunpowder underneath the Parliament building. And now the process of trying to grasp them and figure out what the heck was going on begins. These assassins are caught in the act and there's a lot of them. This isn't like one or two people who are coming to stab the Khan. These are wagonfuls of weapons stretching off into the horizon with troops. This was going to be a military coup that wiped out whole branches of the Mongol family line. And when they're discovered, all sorts of retribution will be taken. Think of when Adolf Hitler survived the assassination attempt on his life in 1944. And then they start grabbing generals and people and interrogating them under torture and then executing lots of people who are perceived to have either taken part in the crime or have known about it and not told the authorities what was going on. Before the whole thing is over instantly, there will be like a hundred Mongols, you know, tortured and executed for having some role in this. Many more will be removed, either, you know, overtly or covertly in the near future. The most prominent people involved include other grandsons of Genghis Khan who are dragged before the Khan and who swear they had nothing to do with this. And most of them are ostensibly pardoned, but they're sort of put in positions where they're gonna die. Some of these people are, like, sent to the front lines to command troops in situations where they know they're not going to survive. The most high profile person, though involved in all of this is the wife of the now defunct and buried Kuyukan, the Regent Empress Commish. She's brought in because it's believed that nobody had a bigger role in setting up this whole thing than she. She's dragged in naked in front of the new Khan, and she points out to him and everyone in the room that her naked body is something that has only been seen before by an emperor, and she has the dignity and authority of an Empress. And when he basically asks her if she had any involvement in any of this, she comes back with the retort that all of these people in the room, including the new Khan, had promised that they were going to only choose emperors from the line of Ogedai. And what of your promise? This is supposed to have outraged and infuriated the new Khan, who ordered the Empress regent, the now former Empress Regent, sewn up in a bag and thrown into a river. Her neck was spared from the axe, no doubt, and the sword because of her royalty. The Mongols never like to kill anyone from anywhere who was of royal blood in a way that shed their royal blood. So they always found ways to do it. Otherwise, in this case, the Empress Regent is tossed into the river, sewn up in a bag. The former Empress Regent will be far from the last person to lose their life as part of the bloody purges that happened in the wake of this failed coup attempt. This coup attempt does a great job of highlighting the tragic flaw in the Mongol governmental system, the part that probably deserves the lion's share of blame for bringing it down. This requirement, instilled by the Great Khan himself, that every successor to himself be elected by all the different houses of the family by consensus. Monkey Khan was not elected by consensus. And those that didn't agree to the deal, and who protested it in an almost bloody way, met a bloody end. No Khan after Monkey will ever be elected with any sort of unanimity at all. And as a matter of fact, Monkey will be the last of the Khans to enjoy the full authority that Genghis and Ogedai and Ghouyuk has had had. You begin to see the Mongol system deteriorating, even though probably the people living through it at the time didn't realize it. And to me, this reminds me of a comparison we made earlier in this series. What if we had said the Third Reich had existed for hundreds of years after its initial establishment and had to deal with leaders that succeeded Adolf Hitler and then leaders that succeeded that leader, and then leaders that succeeded that leader? Would the complexion of the Third Reich had changed over time? Because what you're seeing now with Monkey coming to the fore is really a new generation of Mongol leadership and something that you should expect to happen over time. Makes me wonder if it would have happened in a Third Reich type setting as well, where the initial leaders were like these historical arsonists, as we put it, who mowed down whole civilizations and left a huge body count behind to establish an empire. People who essentially, as we used in our Bill Cosby example, grew up poor and suffering and then had children and then grandchildren who grew up in a very different environment, one that had wealth and abundance and education. I mean, Manki Khan and his brothers, as we said earlier, are a fabulously interesting brood of people. Monkey Hulagu Khubilai and other brothers with interests in philosophy and alchemy and astrology. And in these days, astrology was a combination of what you would consider to be astrology now, but also astronomy. Very scientific for the Middle Ages. That's something that a Genghis Khan would not have been able to relate to at all. What's more, the influence of these older cultures that the Mongols had conquered is now thoroughly, you know, built into these rulers. I mean, the Chinese and the Islamic societies most of all, have taken these Mongol rulers and imparted ideas and motivations and codes of conduct and morality on them that the grandparents of these people never knew. These are the people who, while they try to maintain the Mongol continuity of the universal monarchy, and it's their job to bring the whole world under the laws of the great Genghis Khan and the Yassa and all this. And if you're not submitting, you're our enemy instantly. At the same time, they're very concerned with governing and the improvement of the situation of the people that live under their rule. This is where you start to read about all the advantages that some of these authors today who will laud Genghis Khan as this wonderful enlightened ruler. This is where you start to see these people actually implementing rules that improve the lives of their subjects. The great Khan himself, in my mind, is much more like a Hitler or an Alexander or a Stalin or one of these rulers that mows down millions of people in A bloodthirsty way. But he paves the way for these later Khans, who are much more enlightened, much more generous, much more concerned with the welfare of people, even though they're still darn merciless when it comes to enforcing the law and punishing opponents. To be honest, though, that doesn't make them a whole lot different than most of the other rulers of this era. If Genghis Khan really is, as we portrayed him earlier, this historical arsonist, this creative destroyer, as some historians portray him as, that's plopped down on the planet, just when someone needs to come in and clear out all the historical deadwood and burn down these old rotting forests so that new trees can be planted in the cleared land to grow and benefit everyone. Well, these grandchildren of Genghis Khan are the replanters and the reseeders of these forests who begin to rebuild and correct some of the damage caused by their grandfather. While they're doing this, on one hand, though, that doesn't mean they're not still burning down strands of trees that may have survived, you know, Genghis burning of the old forest. When they find them, they're still murderous and they still destroy and they still do all these bad things. But there's no arguing the positive benefits that they deliberately try to carry out as well. Some will say from this period that a girl with a pot of gold on her head can walk from Asia to Europe and not be touched or molested or robbed at all. Considering that a person actually walking that route would be traversing one of the most famously banditry, brigand robbery oriented paths on the planet. You can see the positive effect happening because of the harsh laws of the Yassa that were being enforced, you know, by the descendants of Genghis Khan. And harsh it was. I mean, there are stories of Mongols being executed simply for being found with an extra bowstring in their boot that they might have taken out of the armory without permission. These were harsh laws, but these were some of the most historically untamed and difficult to deal with parts of the world. And for the first time in recorded history, these were safe paths and people were traveling on them all the time. Now, this is considered a major benefit of the Mongols, and it's Genghis Khan's grandchildren who are deliberately setting out to do these things. Kublai Monkey's brother may be the most enlightened ruler in the entire Middle Ages anywhere in the world. That's a far cry from his grandfather, Genghis, you know, the scourge of God, the flail of God, the punishment of God, as he had so joyfully described himself. Now, one of the things Monkey wants to do when he gets control of this empire is to carry out the same sorts of attacks that people like Ogedai carried out. Remember, Ogedai was so powerful in his reign, he was able to launch offensives in the three major directions of the world at the same time. Attack China, attack the Middle east, attack Europe. All at once. The Mongol Empire suffered more from this precarious change of leadership over and over since Ogedai's death than is obviously apparent. And you can see it because it took several years for the Mongols to ramp their power back up. They remind me of a person who was a gym rat and was always working out. And then all of a sudden they get injured. And a year later, after taking a year off from the gym, they decide they want to go back and start lifting weights again and working out. But they can't just pick up where they left off. They're out of shape. They have to ramp back up and work their way up to their former level of intensity. The Mongol military found itself in a similar situation. Mong Ki Khan will spend the first couple of years of his reign consolidating his power and building up the strength of his forces to do what he wants to do with them, which is to continue the Mongol mission, God inspired mission, as they saw it, of conquering the entire world. And as usual in Mongol history, it starts once again with China. In 1253, at a major Kuril tie, the new Khan organizes attacks in several different directions. Now, the Mongols have still been fighting in various places. They conquer Korea during this time period, they launch attacks into what's now Vietnam. But in 1253, the decision is made to once again, with full force, renew the war against the Southern Song Chinese, a war that had flagged somewhat since the days of Ogedai. It's going to be such a major affair that Khubilai will lead it. The Great Khan himself will go into the field leading troops. Another column will be led by another Mongolian. They're going to go in and make a concerted effort to finish off this last and greatest of the Chinese realms. And it will be a war that will be the most unrelenting slogging match probably of any war in the entire Middle Ages anywhere. The Chinese put up a dogged defense. They resist with all their might. And once again, they have these amazingly fortified cities that are able to withstand the Mongols better than any cities anywhere. They will put up a fight that will last decades. And once again, they have an advantage that they didn't have when it was the Northern Chinese. The Mongols are now fighting in geographical locations where the environment is unhealthy for them. Provinces like Sichuan that they have a hard time conquering are semi tropical. And it creates a situation that's difficult for the Mongols to exist in. What's more, in 1251, after coming to power, the new Khan Monki decides to change the status of the Middle east in the Mongol Empire. Because ever since Genghis Khan first conquered into Iran and the Middle east, he'd sort of had that area governed by military governors. It hadn't been incorporated into the Grand Mongol Empire under the family. Now he put his brother Heligu in charge of it and told Heligu to conquer everything. Now, the first thing that Heligu did was conquer a group known to history as the Assassins. The actual name is the Ismailis. And these are a feared group of people that if you wanted to compare them to the ninjas of Japan, a secret society feared by everyone for their ability to kill and assassinate anyone, regardless of their level of grandeur and security, you wouldn't be far off. Although there's religious components and other things that make the Ismailis different than groups like the ninjas. But that didn't stop the amount of fear that they had in the region. And for 200 years before this time, they'd been responsible for killing lots of different important people. Christians, Muslims, rulers, princes, dukes. I mean, everything you can think of. Everyone was going around with armed guards because of what these assassins the Ismailis could do to them if they wanted to. What's more, unlike the ninjas who struck in the night and with stealth, the assassins in this part of Iran where the Ismailis were based enjoyed doing so in broad daylight. They wanted to spread the fear and this idea that no one was safe. And so they struck with their daggers right when everybody could see them and were watching. This had intimidated several rulers in the region. Saladin himself, the great Muslim ruler, had had two attacks on him. One that was so close, apparently he was wounded by these assassins and then came to an agreement with them. The Mongols were not about coming to agreements with dangerous people. And the first group that Heligu went after when he inherited this new part of the Mongol realm was to go after that danger. The assassins thought themselves immune from attack because they controlled all these fortresses that were like something out of a Tolkien novel, you know, on the sides of cliffs and built into the most inaccessible locations. You just couldn't imagine taking them. But the Mongols did easily, I mean, shockingly easily, and they captured the head of the order and sent him back to Mongolia and he was eventually killed. There are different accounts of how this happened, but they proved to be almost no problem for the Mongols to deal with at all. Once again, showing you the level of sophistication of their siege engines and the core of artillerists from China and Persia, maybe even using gunpowder weapons to completely nullify this inaccessible fortification, sophistication of these assassins that had kept them safe for so long from so many powerful people who wanted them eliminated already. But next it was the turn of the caliph in Baghdad to feel the heat. The reason it happened was because of the claims that the Abbasids they were called, and this caliph at this time period is like the 32nd, 33rd in a long line of these caliphs who claim to have a sort of pope like authority. Not quite like that. Islam is different, but a similar sort of authority over the faithful. And the Mongols could brook no competitors when it came to this. They had tons of Muslims within their empire and they were not going to accept anyone from anywhere saying that they had the right over the Mongol khan to tell these Islamic people within the Mongol empire how to believe what to do or anything like that. The Mongol supposedly gave the caliph in Baghdad the option to essentially give up this control for now to the Mongols. It's something that had been done with other Muslim people in the past, like the Seljuk Turks, for example. The caliph though, had recently just gotten the job and he wasn't very good at understanding when you have to play ball with the really powerful people. And he gave the Mongols a response that they didn't like. The letter from Helagu to the caliph in Baghdad said, and when he speaks of the heretics, he's talking about the recent campaign against the Ismailis, the assassins that Heligu has just finished. The letter says to the when the heretics fortresses were conquered, we sent emissaries to request assistance from you. In reply, you said that you were in submission, but you did not send troops. Now, a token of submissiveness and allegiance is that you assist us with troops when we ride against foes. You have not done so and you send excuses. No matter how ancient and grand your family may be, and no matter how fortunate your dynasty has been, Is the brightness of the moon such that it can eclipse the brilliance of the sun? Talk of what the Mongol army has done to the World and those in it, from the time of Genghis Khan until today may have reached your hearing from common and elite. And you may have heard how through God's strength they have brought low the dynasties of the Khwarizmians, the Seljuks, the Dalamite kings, the Atabegs and others, all of whom were families of might and majesty. The gates of Baghdad were not closed to any of these groups and they kept thrones there. With the might and power we possess, how shall they be closed to us? Helgu's letter previously we have given you advice, but now we say that you should avoid our wrath and vengeance. Do not try to overreach yourself or accomplish the impossible, for you will only succeed in harming yourself. The past is over. Destroy your ramparts, fill in your moats, turn the kingdom over to your son and come to us. If you do not wish to come, send all three, the Vizier, Sulayman Shah and the Datwatar, and they may convey our message word for word. If our command is obeyed, it will not be necessary for us to wreak vengeance. And you may retain your lands, army and subjects if you do not heed our advice and dispute with us. Line up your soldiers and get ready for the field of battle, for we have our loins girded for battle with you and are standing at the ready when I lead my troops in wrath against Baghdad. The Even if you hide in the sky or in the earth, I shall bring you down from the turning celestial sphere. I shall pull you up like a lion. I shall not leave one person alive in your realm and I shall put your city and country to the torch. If you desire to have mercy on your ancient families heads, heed my advice. If you do not let us see what God's will is. End quote. Nobody quite does a good threatening ambassadorial letter like the Mongols, do they? The response from the Caliph was somewhat evasive and at times both friendly and warning. He wrote back, young man, you have just come of age and have expectations of living forever. You have not seen your 10 days, meaning your quick days of life pass prosperously and auspiciously in dominating the whole world. You think your command is absolute? Since you are not going to get anything from me, why do you seek? You come with strategy, troops and lasso, but how are you going to capture a star? Does the Prince not know that? From the east to the west, from king to beggar, from old to young, all who are God fearing and God worshipping are servants of this court and soldiers in My army. The Caliph's reply was deemed by the Mongols to be somewhat devious. Heligu responded to it by saying that evidently the Caliph was as crooked as a curved bow, but he would soon be rendered as direct as the flight of an arrow. From three directions, the Mongols converged on Baghdad, perhaps the largest city in the world outside of China. Historians have argued forever what the size of the Mongol forces were, as they have throughout Mongol history. Supposedly, Heligu had at his disposal two out of every 10 Mongol warriors in the empire, which would give him between 100 and 150,000 men. Sounds a little high to me, considering that they don't need that many men to devastate an area that has been under the Mongol thumb since Genghis Khan first smashed into it with about 120,000 men about two decades before. Nonetheless, the Caliph calls for his devout followers from all over the place, and not too many arrive. This happens for many reasons. One has to do with the fact that the Caliph is not as powerful as he thinks he is. And there have been theories for a long time that one of his main advisors, who was not of the same faith exactly as he was, he was also Islamic, but a Shia instead of a Sunni, and that he may have been in the pay of the Mongols. In fact, when all this is over, he will actually survive and be promoted by the Mongols. Which lends even a little bit more support to this conspiracy theory that the Mongols were working from within to subvert the Caliph's power. But the Caliph was also trying to get help from a lot of other people that were both terrified of the Mongols already, who'd spent 20 years dealing with them, and who also thought that right after Baghdad was done with, they themselves were going to be next on the target list. After all, Helgu wasn't advancing on Baghdad to take Baghdad. He was advancing on on Baghdad as part of taking the entire Middle East. And they thought if they were going to be next, it would behoove them to have forces to defend themselves with. And not just that, but we must also recall that there are still Christian crusaders in the Holy Land to the west of Baghdad, and new crusades being launched by the King of France in Egypt. Islam is beset with enemies. It is factionalized, it is divided. Many of its elements actually don't get along with each other. This is a very precarious time for the political side of the Muslim religion. And the Caliph in Baghdad finds that this impacts his ability to create support. The troops that do show up outside of Baghdad try to make a defense outside the walls of the city, a city that may number a million people, although probably more like 400,000 normally. The problem is that this is not a normal situation. And the Mongol's standard tactic of killing people all over the countryside as they advance has caused all of the peasants and the merchants and the people who would normally exist in villages and towns outside of Baghdad to flee for the protection of the walls of the great city. The forces that meet the Mongols in the field outside the great city are quickly routed. In January 1258. At one point they put up a spirited response in a very difficult defensive position. So the Mongols break a dam in a canal nearby and flood the whole defensive position so that all these troops that had created a nice place where they could ward off Mongol attacks were standing in water. When they broke and fled, the Mongols killed them from behind. They then began chopping down the palm trees that lined all the waterways around Baghdad. And the people could hear, the historians say, the tell tale sound of the axes and watch these trees disappear. Baghdad didn't have a lot of stone around it. The Mongols took two weeks to set up their stone throwing engines and their naphtha hurling devices, which hurled flaming debris and flammable liquid over the walls. And where stone had to be imported it was. But the date palms would provide a somewhat unique form of artillery that the people inside the city would first see as February rolled around. And they could see giant trees being flung in their entirety at the walls of Baghdad, at the gates of the city, and even over the ramparts and into the streets and alleyways of the town, destroying mosques, palaces, buildings and homes. By early February, it was clear that the Mongols were going to be victorious. Several negotiation efforts had been rebuffed by Helagu. Finally, the Caliph himself came out and surrendered on February 10. The Caliph had tried to get the Mongols to promise the people would be spared. Most historians say that that promise was given and then reneged upon, which had happened many times in Mongol history as well. The garrison surrendered on the grounds that they were to be spared. But instead they were all divided amongst the Mongol soldiery and killed individually in the method we described earlier, where every Mongol warrior was required to cut the heads off a certain number of people given to them for the task. A pre mechanized version of almost a human killing machine. And then the Mongols broke into the city. The numbers of people that they killed is unknown. The estimates range as high as 2 million. Now that is almost certainly way too high. Persian chroniclers have often bandied around the number 800,000 people. Heligu himself, in a letter to the King of France several years later, said more than 200,000 had been killed by his troops. Modern historians put the low number at 80 to 90,000 people. The damage done to this amazing educated city, in terms of the cultural value lost, was a shock to the entire religion. The Tigris river was said to run red with blood from the philosophers and the scientists that were murdered and black with the ink of all of the literature that was thrown into the water. The city burned for days, and the Mongol looting of it went on anywhere, depending on who you want to believe, from 15 to 40 days. Historian will Durant, who's from the old school when it comes to the ideas of the Mongols as builders versus destroyers, had this to say. After a month of siege, the caliph sent Helagu presents and an offer of surrender. Lured by a promise of clemency, he and his two sons gave themselves up to the Mongol. On February 13, 1258, Heligu and his troops entered Baghdad and began 40 days of pillage and massacre. 800,000 of the inhabitants, we are told, were killed. Thousands of scholars, scientists and poets fell in the indiscriminate slaughter. Libraries and treasures accumulated through centuries were in a week plundered or destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of volumes were consumed. End quote. Author Stephen Dutch wrote this about the long term impact quote. Iraq in 1258 was very different from present day Iraq. Its agriculture was supported by canal networks thousands of years old. Baghdad was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers in the world. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was a psychological blow from which Islam never recovered. Already, he says, Islam was turning inward, becoming more suspicious of conflicts between faith and reason and more conservative. With the sack of Baghdad, the intellectual flowering of Islam was snuffed out. Imagining the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle obliterated by a nuclear weapon begins to suggest the enormity of the blow. The Mongols filled in the irrigation canals and left Iraq too depopulated to restore them. Many historians have said that Iraq only recovered to the levels that it had been in the 1200s. In the 20th century, other historians have suggested that the Mongol damage inflicted on both China and the Islamic world, the two leading civilizations of their day, left Europe in a commanding position. Europe had not been one of the leading civilizations for some time, but the destruction and laying low of two civilizations that led them in so many ways left the door open for Europe to take control over the next several centuries. Historian David Nicole says that Europeans, Christians and others rejoiced at the destruction of Baghdad. But, he writes, Sunni Muslims were, on the other hand, appalled. The cultural costs of the Mongol invasion were already enormous in terms of cities, libraries and schools destroyed, and teachers and scholars killed or dispersed. The damage wrought to Iraq's irrigation system, he writes, is only now being reversed with 20th century technology and oil wealth. Some scholars have even suggested, he says, that the rise of Western European civilization from a position of cultural and technological inferiority to world domination was in part due to the devastation inflicted on the Muslim world by the Mongol coming so close after the Crusaders sack of Byzantine Constantinople in 1204. End quote. In other words, the Europeans who will begin to dominate the world in the next couple of centuries benefited mightily from the fact that the Mongols brought down two civilizations that were without doubt or question ahead of the Europeans in cultural and civilizational sophistication the Chinese and the Islamic world. We can talk all day long about the benefits that Mongolian conquests brought to the world in terms of trade and the diffusion and spread of culture from areas that did not have previous contact with each other. But let's remember at what cost that arrived. Historian David Nicole also writes what happened at the Caliph of Baghdad. He says for a while he was treated well by Heligu, and then various stories are told of the manner of his death. Nasir al din Tusi, who may have actually been present, tells how a tray of gold was set before the caliph. Eat? Demanded Helgu. It is not edible, answered the caliph. Then why did you keep it and not use it to pay your soldiers? Asked Helagu. And why did you not make these iron doors into arrowheads? And why did you not come to the river and try to stop me crossing? That was God's will, the caliph replied. What will now happen to you is also God's will, was the Mongol's chill response. Some say, Nicole writes, that the caliph was then locked in a tower with his own treasure and starved to death. But this is almost certainly a myth. Others speak of him being cut down by Heligu himself, or by his commander, or by Prince Hassan Brosh, who led the Georgian cavalry. The most convincing account tells how the Caliph was wrapped in a carpet and kicked to death, a much more likely Mongol method of execution for someone of noble blood. The execution of the Caliph was merely one death among perhaps hundreds of thousands. As the city of Baghdad was choked with corpses in the heat, rotting. We're told that the stench was so bad and so potentially illness inducing that Heligu and his command staff leave the area of Baghdad for their own safety. Remember, Heligu is a Mongol commander who must have seen this same scene repeated over and over and over again during his lifetime. The fact that he leaves the scene seems to suggest that the amount of death and destruction in Baghdad was extraordinarily large. But it wasn't total. As a matter of fact, there were some parts of the city that were completely spared. They involved no death, no destruction, no molestation, and no looting at all. This by the orders of Heligu himself. For example, the Christian churches in the city and all Christians who took refuge there had been spared by the Mongols. One of the reasons why, while the Mongols already had a tolerance attitude toward religions, they were fighting Islamic foes. Perhaps they saw no reason to kill people who were not part of the resistance to them. But remember, Heligu's mother was also a Christian. So was his favorite wife. The Christians inside Baghdad. In fact, the Christians in the Middle east were starting to look upon the Mongols as potential deliverers from a state of subjugation. Remember, 40 years before this time period, the Europeans had heard vague rumors about a Christian king in the east they called Prester John. And they thought this Christian king in the east was attacking the Muslim world from the east, trapping them in a vice where the Christians would attack in the west as part of their Crusades, while Prester John pushed from the east, trapping the Muslim world in a fatal vice. They learned to their horror that instead of Prester John, they had a Genghis Khan to deal with, and that that Mongol ruler and his descendants would end up attacking Christianity with just as much vigor as they attacked Islam. Now, 40 years later, for reasons that were completely their own, the Mongols were damaging the Muslim world in a way that might prove fatal. This was something the Christians looked upon as a sort of divine retribution and a potentially wonderful thing. Historian Rene Gruset writes, the Armenian Kyrakos of Ganga has spoken of the joy and even triumph of all these Eastern Christians at the fall of Baghdad. Now quoting Kyrakos. 515 years had passed since the founding of this city. Throughout its supremacy, like an insatiable leech, it had swallowed up the entire world. Now it restored all it had been taken, it was punished. For the blood it had shed and the evil it had done, the measure of its iniquity was full. The Muslim tyranny had lasted 647 years. Now quoting Crusade. In the eyes of the Nestorians too, and of the Syrian Jacobites and Armenians, the terrible Mongols appeared as the avengers of oppressed Christendom as providential saviors who had come from the depths of the Gobi to attack Islam in the rear and shake it to its foundations. Who could have imagined that those humble Nestorian missionaries who in the 7th century left Seleucia on the Tigris or Bet Abbey to spread the gospel in the bleak lands of eastern Turkestan and Mongolia, would sow the seed of so great a harvest? In truth, though, you can make the case that they were sowing a very different seed, a seed that was taking root in what's called the Khan of Kipchak, what will eventually be called the Alten Orda, the Golden Hoard. This is the area that was ruled by Batu, the Kingmaker, who put the current Mongol khan, Monkey, on the throne. Batu had died right before this era, in 1255, before his 50th birthday. His son took over, and then another Mongol took over. But within two years, the ruler of this westernmost Mongol territory was Batu's younger brother, Berki. And where Heligu seemed to favor Christianity, Berkey favored Islam. And the destruction of Baghdad and the killing of the caliph angered Burki and created a poisonous relationship between he and his cousin Heligu. The historian Rashid Al Ad Din says this of Burki's reaction to his cousin's killing of the caliph and the sacking of Baghdad. Quote, he has sacked all the cities of the Muslims and without consulting his kinsmen, has brought about the death of the Caliph with the help of God, I will call him, to account for so much innocent blood. Historians have other potential reasons why Burki might have been upset with Heligu, including not sharing enough of the treasures of Baghdad with him. Heligu had taken extreme amounts of wealth from Baghdad and brought it up north of the city to a great lake with an island in it. And he built a giant fortress a thousand feet high and put the treasure in the fortress for safekeeping, like a treasury. Burki felt that some of that rightly belonged to the other states in the United States of Caen, if you will. Not just that, but when Helagu removed his troops from the area around Baghdad, he took them back up to Azerbaijan, where the wonderful pastures were, so he could refit the army and fatten up the horses again. And he sort of occupied that area, an area that Burkey believed rightly belonged to the Khan of Kipchak, the Golden Horde. It would be as though one US State sort of took over a wonderful area of resources that another US State claimed heligu was concerned with none of this at this time period. He was looking forward to the rest of his mission, which, now that Baghdad was in his rearview mirror, meant Syria and the Mediterranean and Egypt. With 100 to 120,000 men, including a significant number of Georgian and Armenian Christians, he bore down on Syria. Syria at this time was divided between Muslim principalities and Christian Crusader states. Two opponents that had seen their geopolitical situation as very black and white. Up till this time period, it was easy to know which side you were on. You were either part of the Christian west or the Muslim East. And now, all of a sudden, a third geopolitical player arrives on the scene, confusing everything. What was the proper recourse for these rulers? Many of the Muslim rulers instantly submitted to the Mongols, terrified by the fate of Baghdad. One who didn't had his city sacked. The people all killed, men, women and children, and he himself tied to a stake while the Mongols cut his flesh off his body and crammed it in his mouth until he died. Christian rulers in the region, in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as they were called, didn't know what to do either. Some went over to the Mongols and joined with them, figuring that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Some of the other Christian rulers, remembering what the Mongols had done in Eastern and Central Europe, decided that as bad as they considered the Muslims to be, they were preferable to these barbarians who killed and conquered so indiscriminately. The Muslims themselves were facing an existential threat. Modern Muslim writer Amin Malouf writes this about the current situation Islam found itself in. As Heligu and the Mongols bore down on the last great part of the Muslim political world. The tragic end of the Abbasid Caliphate stunned the Muslim world. It was no longer a matter of a military battle for control of a particular city or even country. It was now a desperate struggle for the survival of Islam. In the meantime, he writes, the Tartars continued their triumphant march toward Syria. In January 1260, Heligu's army overran Aleppo, which was taken rapidly despite heroic resistance. As in Baghdad, massacres and destruction raged throughout this ancient city, whose crime was merely to have stood up to the conqueror, end quote. He then writes, how far would the Tartars go? Some people were convinced that they would go all the way to Mecca, thus dealing the coup de grace to the religion of the Prophet. In any event, he writes, they would reach Jerusalem, and soon all Syria was convinced of this. Just after the fall of Damascus, two Mongol detachments quickly seized two Palestinian Cities. Nablus in the center of the country and Gaza in the southwest. When Gaza, he writes, which lies at the edge of Sinai, was overrun in that tragic spring of 1260, it seemed that not even Egypt would escape devastation. Even before his Syrian campaign had ended, Heligu dispatched an ambassador to Cairo to demand the unconditional surrender of the land of the Nile. The emissary was received, spoke his peace, and was then beheaded. The Mamelukes were not joking. Their methods bore no resemblance to those of Saladin. These sultan slaves, who had now been ruling for 10 years, reflected the hardening the intransigence of an Arab world now under attack from all directions. They fought with all the means at their disposal. No scruples, no magnanimous gestures, no compromises, but with courage and to great effect. The Mamelukes had taken control of Egypt only about a decade before this time period. They had been slave soldiers of the Egyptian rulers, mostly made up of those people who've played a significant role throughout this whole story. Kipchak, Turks. Now they were running Egypt, and they were prepared to resist the Mongols. The message that Heligu had sent to the Mameluk rulers, you know, that was spoken, and then the emissaries who delivered the message had their head cut off. Was typical Mongol, you know, horrific stuff. But it's interesting that it also contained a bit of the Mongols view of what they were doing. They saw themselves as purifying the world, creating the conditions where, you know, Mongol rulership of everything would usher in a better age. It reminds one of, you know, the way the Nazis would sometimes portray the killing of Jews and Slavs and Untermenschen, that this was somehow for the. For the betterment of the world down the road. And here's the message that Heligus sent to the Mamelukes. You have heard how we've conquered a vast empire and have purified the earth of the disorders which tainted it. It is for you to fly and for us to pursue. And whither will you fly? And by what road shall you escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as the mountains. Our soldiers as numerous as the sand. Fortresses will not detain us, nor arms stop us. Your prayers to heaven will not avail against us. We mean well by our warning. At present, you are the only enemy against whom we have to march. End quote. That last line was meant to convey to the Mamelukes that the Mongols were not divided. Their entire army in this part of the world was going to bear down on Egypt, and 120,000 troops were about to take Egypt and sweep it away. And then, at just this time, the gods of history deal another wild card. The same wild card that 20 years before this time period had saved Christian Europe from the Mongol wrath. And that same card comes up again, the death card. Helagu receives word that the Mongol Khan, his brother Monkey, has died in China, perhaps of dysentery, but no one's really sure. And once again, the entire situation, eight years after it had last been resolved, repeats itself. The Mongol military robot machine has just lost its brain, and the powering down begins anew right when the Muslim world needed it. Monkey's death in 1259, which Helgu didn't hear about until 1260, creates the need once again to come up with a new con by consensus. But as the election of Monkey eight years before had proven, that consensus had completely broken down. And this time, instead of a very difficult transition, you get all out war. Khubilai, Heligu's brother and Monkey's brother, is fighting in China with Monkey. When Monkey dies, he goes to war with his younger brother, who's in Mongolia and who tries to claim the throne. Fighting breaks out in Asia. In addition, Burki, in the Khan of Kipchak that will become the Golden Horde, who's not happy with Heligu anyway for all the things he's done in Baghdad and elsewhere, ends up making an alliance with the Mamelukes against his own brethren, Heligu. The Mongol world empire, which was just at its zenith, you know, six months before, is breaking apart. Heligu withdraws all but a token force of about 20,000 Mongols from the region of the Mediterranean just outside Egypt, pulls them back toward Persia. The Mamelukes are heartened by an agreement and some sort of an understanding with the Mongols in Eastern Europe and the beginnings of Central Asia. And a battle will happen when the Mamelukes attack the Mongol general, the Christian Mongol general Kitbuga, and his force at a place called ain Jalut in 1260. Ain Jalut is considered to be one of the most important battles in terms of turning points in all history, because at that battle, the Mamluks defeat the Mongols. Now, this is often portrayed in a way that makes it look like the Mongols finally met their match, someone who could, you know, defeat them in open battle. But truthfully, this is a small mongol force. The 120,000 men that had been bearing down on Egypt would have swept away The Mamelukes, almost certainly the small force that's left over gets crushed by the Mamelukes. And Kit Buga, this Christian Mongol general, is either killed on the battlefield or, as Rashid Aladdin says, captured. And he gives a wonderful message to the Mameluke ruler who's got him in custody, explaining what's going to happen to him once the Mongol military machine powers up again. The Persian historian Rashid Al Ad Din has a conversation between Ketbuga, the Nestorian Christian Mongol commander, and the Atabeg of Egypt, a guy named Quduz. And this is the way that Rashid Al Ad Din describes this despicable man. Said Quduz, you have shed so much blood, wrongfully ended the lives of champions and dignitaries with false assurances, and overthrown ancient dynasties with broken promises. Now you have finally fallen into a snare yourself. If I am killed by your hand, said Khetbolga, I consider it to be God's act, not yours. Be not deceived by this event for one moment, for when the news of my death reaches Heligu Khan, the ocean of his wrath will boil over, and from Azerbaijan to the gates of Egypt will quake with the hooves of Mongol horses. They will take the sands of Egypt from there and in their horses nose bags. Heligu Khan has 300,000 renowned horsemen like Katbuga. You may take one of them away. Kadduz said, speak not so proudly of the horsemen of Turan, for they perform deeds with trickery and artifice, not with manliness like Rustam. As long as I have lived, replied Katbouga, I have been the padishah's servant, not a mutineer. And regicide like you. Finish me off quickly. Caduz ordered his head severed from his body. That last slam by Khetbuga referred to the fact that Caduz and his masters had killed their employer and taken over Egypt. Whereas Khetbuga was a loyal servant of the Khan. Khatbuga's threat, though, could never be adequately carried out, because what he didn't know was that never again would a Mongol army, supported by the entire united Mongol world empire, take the field. Those days were over, and already war was brewing between several of these states. In the United States of Khan, which was united no longer. The year 1260 is the critical year in Mongol history, the one that most historians, although not all, usually cite as the end of Mongol unity. There will be times when rulers will try to recreate the empire of Genghis Khan, usually involving horrific amounts of bloodshed and violence, such as that caused by a distant relative of Genghis named Tamerlane not long after this period. Also, some of these Khans from these individual territories will be so great that the other territories will pay lip service to them. For example, Khubilai Khan will conquer China in 1279 all the way to the south, giving him control of the entire kingdom of the Chinese people, the greatest civilization on earth. And he'll be given lip service sometimes by all these other territories, but he'll never command them like the great Khans used to be able to command the United World Empire. All these major territories that had been given as sort of parts of Genghis Khan's will will form giant powerful states all by themselves. It's as if the United States of Khan breaks up, but these states are still powerful. The Golden Horde will rule the vast area of the Turkish and Eastern European steppes for a couple of centuries, dominating Eastern Europe. And the Russians, the Ilkhans, as Heligu's descendants will be known in Persia, will rule Persia for some time. Khubilai will become so dominant in China and so Chinese. And some have argued that he was almost kind of Chinese from birth. He was a very different sort of Mongol from the very beginning. Very fascinating figure and deserving perhaps of his own hardcore history episode sometime. But he will be hailed as the founder of the Yuan Dynasty in China, a legitimate Chinese dynasty. He will be the one that is encountered by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who gets to spend some time and really gets to know both Khubilai and China during this period, writes his famous book on his travels and transmits that to Europe. And it's from Marco Polo you can already begin to see the revisionist Mongolian narrative history begin to develop, because whereas the people in the Middle east remember the Mongol conquests as horrifying, the historians who have to write under Mongol control put a different spin on things, as you might imagine. Khubilai and his people tell Marco Polo that Genghis Khan was such a good, wise and benevolent ruler that most of the states that he conquered came over to him voluntarily. The Persian and Middle Eastern chroniclers, who have to submit their work to their Mongol rulers before it can be published, tried very hard to put the best spins they could on genocide. And the Russians in their chronicles practiced something known as the conspiracy of silence, to just pretend as though the Mongol yoke, the Tartar yoke as they call it, wasn't even happening in each of these territories. Mongol rule would eventually end in Persia and China. The Mongols would Basically, after a while, go native. A problem that Khubilai even saw during his own lifetime. He had to consistently rotate troops out of China back to the barren, cold, harsh steppes of Mongolia to keep their military edge. Otherwise, they basically, you know, became soft and were no longer these formidable warriors that basically kept the empire intact. He himself was aware of his going native, and he's said to have planted in his Chinese garden a patch of grass from the wide open plains of the steppe to remind him of his heritage. It was the golden hoard in the Eastern European and Turkish steppes that lasted the longest. And they did so because they never settled down in settled societies. They kept moving around as nomads in tent cities away from the states that they ruled, and so preserved their Mongolian steppe heritage the longest. But like the Ilkhans, they converted to Islam rather early on and became mostly Turkish. Eventually, the creation of gunpowder weapons, widely dispersed among the settled societies, would start to erode the edge that people of the steppe had always had on the settled societies. We did a show, maybe the number two hardcore history show we ever did called Guns and Horses, that talked a little bit about that. For thousands of years, the horse archers of the steppes had had certain advantages over the settled societies, and technology, for the first time in human history, changed that balance and did so forever. Now, that didn't mean the Mongols weren't still dangerous. Up until the 1600s, the Chinese were dealing with them as a potential threat. And again, the key was always the same. Could they unite long enough to have big enough armies to be a threat. They even captured a Ming emperor at one point, and almost, had they been more decisive, taken Peking. Slowly, though, Russia would move eastward into the steppes, China would move westward into the steppes, and these people of this area that was like an ocean where the water had been removed, would become subservient to the societies that they had terrified since before biblical times. The revisionist histories started early on. As I said, Marco Polo. But Edward Gibbon, who wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had parts where he said that the Mongols were unfairly tarnished as particularly evil. H.G. wells, the famous science fiction writer who wrote History as a fan of history as we do it a century ago, wrote these words about Genghis Khan and the Mongols, pointing out what we have when comparing them to people who were equally violent and butcher like, and yet we don't treat the same way when he wrote, now this story of Mongolian conquests is surely the most remarkable in all history. The conquest of Alexander the Great cannot compare with them in extent and their effect in diffusing and broadening men's ideas, though such things are more difficult to estimate, is at least comparable to the spread of the Hellenistic civilization which is associated with Alexander's adventure. For a time, all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed an open intercourse. All the roads were temporarily open and representatives of every nation appeared in the court of Karakora. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. End quote. Some of the effects of the Pax Mongolica, if you want to call it that, were very short lived by Kublai Khan's time. When it's time for Marco Polo to go home, back to Europe, he sends him by ship instead of overland, because already the brigands and the robbers were back in the spaces that separated China and Europe as they had been before Genghis Khan's Yassa became the law of the land. Other effects were more long term. The transmission of technology, the crushing of the superiority of Chinese and Islamic civilization in such a way that it left a vacuum that perhaps the Europeans were able to fill. A people that at the time were certainly number three on the great civilizations list at best, and all of a sudden were able to take charge of world affairs for the next several centuries. And as some historians do, perhaps claiming that the Mongols are responsible for the era of exploration that starts off with the finding of the New World, among other things. Although one might, if one were Native American, consider that to be just one more genocidal legacy of the Mongol conquests. It's all a point of view thing. Now it's worth examining a few questions concerning the Mongols and how you judge them. There's no question that we today have benefited mightily from the Mongol conflict conquests. It's also no question that the people who had to live through them paid an enormous bill for, you know, the meal we're metaphorically eating now. I've read historians who try to claim that you can't blame people like Genghis Khan for the amounts of death and suffering caused because he didn't know better. You hear this sometimes about other tribal peoples that because they were not raised in societies that frowned upon the killing of other human beings the way we do now, you can't hold them accountable. He didn't know that killing people in settled societies was this horrible crime against humanity. I've actually read that while Tamerlane can be held to account because he was raised in cities where this was taught to him, Genghis Khan, as a nomadic steppe warrior, was raised in a different culture with different values, and so should not be held to account the way you would hold an Alexander to account, for example, who knew better than to kill other human beings. I've also read historians and non historians recently who will try to play down the number of deaths as exaggerated so that we can examine the Mongol benefits in a more positive light. I read one recently who said that this idea that The Mongols murdered 80 million people, which is a high end number for sure, is a joke, and that it's no worse than somewhere around the 35 million mark. That to me strikes a chord that reminds me of Holocaust deniers who will say something like 6 million Jews didn't die in the Holocaust. It's much more like 3 or 4 million, as though somehow that lessens the evil significantly. The real unfairness to someone like Genghis Khan in the Mongols is when we treat the mass killings and sufferings and rapes and slaughters and slavery that they did differently than we treat the same deeds carried out by Alexander and Caesar and people like that. It's also worth pointing out the claim made by some that what the Mongols did was eminently justifiable, that they were acting to fill the needs of their people. For example, when the Chinese or the Islamic societies would cut off trade with the nomadic peoples of the steppe, that they had to do this in order to provide the necessities of life for their people. The Mongols are not unique in this. Every society that has ever raided their neighbors for the necessities of life has made this claim. The Apaches did the same thing. In fact, you can read histories of the Second World War published recently by economists who almost make the same case about the need for the Germany of the 1930s to conduct similar forms of 20th century versions of raiding their neighbors for the necessities of life. But one is probably justified in asking whether you need to kill 80 million or 50 million or 35 million or even 20 million people as part of getting those necessities of life. And if you can't judge a historical figure like Genghis Khan and his descendants by modern standards for doing those kinds of genocides because they didn't know any better, that really means that. But you can't judge most of the figures in all human history for not knowing any better. And that leads down some very slippery torturous moral paths. Because then you have to ask if Germans, for example, in Nazi Germany, who didn't think that killing Jews was the same as killing human beings or killing Gypsies was the same as killing human beings, or killing homosexuals was the same as killing human beings. If they aren't equally blameless by that standard, I don't believe they are. But then again, I don't believe Genghis Khan is, or Alexander is, or Napoleon is, or Caesar is. And I also don't believe that you can credit those people with these wonderful boons to civilization that supposedly balance out the bad things they did. Because, let's be honest, Alexander the Great's goal in killing all those people he did to create the empire that he did was not to spread Hellenism. So we would have the benefits of it today. It was much more personal and much more venal. That's the case with most of the conquerors throughout history. And just because we may benefit from it in today's modern world, I'm not sure that makes it right. As I said in an earlier episode in this series, it seems to me the people in a position to make that judgment are the ones who had to pay the bill. Hi everyone. Dan here with a reminder that there will be an extra show, one of our shows where we take a lot of our thoughts and the information that didn't make it into this show. You know, everything but the kitchen sink. We will put one of these together in the near future for this Wrath of Khans series. We'll put it up on the website, be a buck 99, you can download it from there and hopefully we can make a few extra bucks that way. If you want to be informed and make sure you get news of this right when it's ready to go, sign up for our Twitter feed @restreamhistory or go to our Facebook page and we'll make sure one way or another, we let you know right when it's available. It's only for the hardcore C O R P S as you call yourselves. Some of you out there like that name. For hardcore history fans, it's only for you people for whom five Mongol episodes are not quite enough to satisfy the need. Also, we're going to do some blitz shows in the future and some one off history shows that are single episodes for a while before we tackle our next big long multi parter. There are several good ideas looming on the horizon though for that. I just feel like for a while now it'll be nice to just have some. Well, I was going to say quick and dirty, but you know, it takes at least 45 to 60 days to put each one of these out, so won't be quick, won't be dirty, but should be, you know, encapsulated in a single episode, hopefully for the next few shows. Thank you for all your support. Hope this lived up to your expectations and as usual. Well folks, thank you for everything. We feel very lucky and fortunate to be doing this for you. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. Hey, buck a show. It's all we ask. 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.