← Dan Carlin Hardcore History Archives
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How about a little extra hardcore history? When we started this Wrath of the Khan series, I started it off by talking about something I consider to be an inevitability the day down the road, maybe 500 years down the road, maybe longer, maybe shorter, when a guy like Adolf Hitler will have a positive history written about him. And the reason why was because obviously we overuse the Hitler examples all the time on this program. But he's a wonderful foil because it would be difficult for most people to find a figure that more people in the audience could agree upon was an evil person, if you want to put value judgments on human beings. So he's the perfect foil to use for comparing and contrasting other historical figures. The reason to bring up this positive history book on Adolf Hitler from the future is to highlight the way that as you get farther and farther away from the events involved, modern history stops looking at good and evil. And this is both a blessing and a curse. And it's one of the things that fascinates me about the discipline. And we've talked about this before, it's called historiography, the process of doing history, I guess you could say writing, researching the whole thing, weeding out bias. History as a discipline is still in transition, but it's almost fully completed. The transition from a humanities subject to one that's really a science. Social science people will say, but really it's a completely different way of viewing the subject at hand. Once upon a time, as we've said before, history as a college course was put in the category with other very human oriented subjects that are difficult to nail down. Things like religion and literature and law, things that involve human beings in these weird slippery slope elements and hard to pin down, you know, spectrums of behavior and viewpoints. Nowadays history belongs with things like archaeology and anthropology. It's much more data oriented and much less value oriented than it used to be. The pluses of this are easy to nail down. History today is more accurate and more free of bias than at any time in human history. If you want to find out specifically something about the past, you're going to, not just in a good history book today, get that information. You're going to get copious notes on how we know that information. This dig turned up this thing which blah, blah, blah, it's going to be like reading a science textbook. The problem is that with every good development, you lose something. Modern historians might say you lose bias. The problem is that bias can be rephrased with another term that is a lot less biased. That term might be judgment and judgment may seem like an eye of the beholder thing, which is why a scientific historian would want to weed that out in a historiography class, right? You would want to teach your students. You got to weed out this bias. That's a viewpoint question. The problem is that you come with certain pitfalls when you take that out. And the pitfalls relate to what we started this Wrath of the Khan series with. If you can't get into the judgment question, can you really say that a guy like Adolf Hitler was evil Now? Everyone can say it now because the whole thing is recent and nobody would dare write a book unless you were like a Holocaust denier saying anything otherwise. And everyone today would realize, well, listen, that's a slam dunk. Nobody argues about that. The problem is that you can't say that you can create this value judgment about Adolf Hitler, but that he's the exception to the rule. He's the only one we can do that with. I chose him because he's the most extreme example. But let me tell you, when we did the Ghost of the osfront series, and if you haven't heard that, you can get that. You know, all the old shows are on our website and you can download them. I think it's $1.99 or something. We try to make them real affordable so you'll buy them. In our Ghost of the Ostrant series, I had said that the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a conflict between not good and evil, but two evil men, Stalin and Hitler. And I got angry letters from some modern Russians saying, how dare you say Stalin was evil? Stalin wasn't evil, Stalin was a great hero, blah, blah, blah. I mean, in other words, right there, showing something that's a judgment bias from an American. Although I don't see how, if you read the history of Joseph Stalin, if there are evil people, how he's not amongst them. But even that is something right there that a modern scientific historian, which you know I am not, by the way, would say. That's why you can't get into the whole question of good and evil, Dan. You make a judgment call and you make it from your viewpoint. This is why when you go read, say, histories, the Japanese school kids learn and they learn about their country's involvement in the Second World War. And they are often not taught many of the atrocities that those school children in China or in the west will learn that the Japanese army participated in. That's pretty normal, isn't it? History from the point of view of the beholder. Right. And that's what scientific historians are all about, weeding out. You try to get a non biased, culturally neutral, you know, history. And as I said, you get better histories in many respects that way. But you create anomalies, an anomaly, like not being able to say Adolf Hitler was evil. And we started off the Wrath of the Khan series by discussing the inevitable book that will come out one day, the Adolf Hitler's Good Points book. And as shocking as that is, realize that there have been many Adolf Hitlers throughout history and the vast majority of them have been subjected to now, the alternative treatment, the good side, the upside. You see this with empires like the Romans, for example, the ancient Romans, Republican Romans, finally the Roman Empire after that was something that people like the Victorian British admired. They admired them because in their eyes, empire was not a bad word. And you could find all sorts of upsides to empire. And you kind of had to, if you were British during the 19th century, because you were sort of obliquely defending your own empire when you did that. Look at the values of empire. Look at the values that one standard that, you know, when Rome takes over all these other separate states now you can have a single currency now you can have trade routes with standard weights and measurements and all these kinds of things. The benefits of empires as they're known. The problem is that there's another viewpoint to that Roman story, and it's the story of everybody that Rome took over to create that wonderful peace that people like the Victorian English, the British used to celebrate. It's a point of view thing, isn't it? And you can see the ebb and flow of historical figures based on who's writing the works and how much they like or dislike the figures. Alexander the Great was a very unpopular guy in a lot of histories until the Romans came around and lionized him. And they lionized him because they liked conquerors who created empires because that's what they were doing too. Again, history written, you know, with a judgment involved. And modern history is an attempt to weed out those biases. But as I said, then you get into these weird things where you can't say Adolf Hitler was a bad guy. Which brings me to a guy like Genghis Khan. Now, when history was still more of a humanities oriented subject, people had no problem saying Genghis Khan was a bad dude. The problem is, is that those people weren't generally Mongolian. And the Mongolians have a very different view of the guy. As a matter of fact, you land in Mongolia today, he's their George Washington. They name Airports after him. There are giant statues of him everywhere. He's a good guy. Can you imagine what his victims in, say the Middle east during the 1220s would feel like if you told them that the guy who wiped out massive numbers of their fellow Islamic, your brethren is a hero? Imagine telling somebody about to go into the gas chambers in a place like Auschwitz that the guy sending him to the gas chambers will be treated as value neutral someday by historians. Now that's not a slam. Again, these are all trade offs. I'm of the opinion you almost need history to split into two disciplines. One that's the more scientific version and one that harkens back to history when it was part of the humanities. Realizing that you're going to have bias and judgment in that, but that it's more like a philosophy that's the side of history that will allow you to accurately look at a figure like Adolf Hitler and decide whether or not he was good or evil. But here's the problem you get into when you do that. If Adolf Hitler is evil, does that mean all the Germans that supported him are evil? And if Adolf Hitler is evil, can we say that people who do similar things that come from societies who wrote the histories differently are also evil? I mean, we talked about Napoleon during the Wrath of the Khan series. There are a lot of people who don't think Napoleon was an evil guy. And yet if Napoleon doesn't live, millions of people don't die. So you get into these very weird areas. And I wanted to examine that a little in the show because some of the modern histories written by the Mongols are obvious attempts at what I call repair history. Repair history is something you've seen. Well, you see it all the time. It's an attempt to rehabilitate either figures or groups that have been treated perhaps unfairly, certainly in a one sided way by historians for a long time. The classic example I love to use, being an American, it's probably a natural thing, is the way that the Native Americans were rehabilitated in historical writings in this country. For those of you who are unaware, Native Americans, when they were, let's put it the right way, when they were dangerous, when people were being killed by Native Americans, when living on the frontier meant that you might be a victim of Native Americans, you got one kind of writing about them, one kind of history. And a lot of it is that Red Savage scalper, the participant and the creator of massacres and all these kinds of things. I've got wonderful old books with the pre modern standard of writing about Say the Plains Indians. And it is very one sided stuff. Now the truth of the matter is that what they're writing about is true. They're just emphasizing one part of the story and de emphasizing the other. And they're looking at it certainly from the white man's point of view and not the red man's point of view. Now people realize eventually how one sided a history like that is usually once the danger is gone. If you think about the Native Americans like sharks, when there's a danger of somebody eating you and you read about every now and then some person gets eaten by a shark and you're scared of them, then you get one kind of treatment. All of a sudden if you're down to your last five sharks and they're just in tanks somewhere and you kind of start to realize what the advantages of sharks are and now they're not dangerous anymore and you can appreciate the other qualities and you can lament what you've lost now. My goodness, we never should have killed off all the sharks. Look at what a beautiful creature it is. Look how important it is to the ecosystem. You get that with history too. Once the Native Americans cease to be so dangerous, all of a sudden you start to see histories about them pointing out their upsides. And what's more, when historians realize what a bad deal people like the Native Americans have received from histories for so long, there's almost an unconscious attempt to make up for it. You might even couch the whole thing in terms of a market vacuum, as we did with the Adolf Hitler book. Right. Someday histories are going to be written touting the advantages of the Third Reich simply because it's a giant, glaring black hole in the histories. And eventually historians and book writers like to cover the entire spectrum. Right? Well, everybody's written a book about how bad Hitler was. Who's gonna write a book about, you know, it's a glaring vacuum. Write something about how good he was. We'll get a ton of public go read a book like the late 60s, early 70s book about the Native Americans, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. That's a perfect example of what I like to call repair history. Some people will call it revisionist history because they're revising things. But revisionist history's gotten a bad name because a lot of people like to say, well, they're revising the way things really were. When in fact, revisionist history is a little like a scientist updating the data based on new studies. You always should be revising history. But this repair history goes a little too Far. But it goes too far for all the right reasons. The Native Americans get shafted in history up to a certain point. Now they're gonna go the entire other direction and make up for that. You get a book like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and all of a sudden you can't understand the point of view of the white settlers anymore. They just look like a bunch of Adolf Hitlers running around killing Indians and racists and xenophobes and, you know, you name it. Land grabbers. There's no attempt at centrism. It's simply mass stereotypes from the other point of view that had been postulated for so long. It's makeup history. And as we said in the Apache Tears program that we did a while back, nowadays you can get wonderful histories synthesizing those two extremes in a nice sort of centrist view that helps us understand everyone's viewpoint, right? So you synthesize the white man's point of view and the red man's point of view. And now you get these histories that are very balanced and nuanced and quite frankly, a huge pleasure to read. But it takes time to get there. And the story of the Mongols and Genghis Khan are not there yet. They got the treatment later, and so they're still in the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee stage. If you read some of the latest books on the Mongols, which, by the way, if you read what it says about the authors at the end of them, they're often given awards by the Mongolian government now for what are seen as more equal, fair treatments of the Mongolian national figures in the story. But to me, that kind of points out a little bit of a bias on the part of the authors. Take a guy, and we didn't mention him by name in the series, like Jack Weatherford, who's written a New York Times bestseller on Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, it was called. That was the first book I sat down to read for the Wrath of the Khan series. And that pretty much determined how the whole thing was going to go, because reading that, I was appalled. That was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for Genghis Khan. Imagine Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for Adolf Hitler. In that book. Weatherford, who's not a historian, but that should not be a knock. Some of the greatest historians we've ever had in human history were not historians. But Weatherford plays up any potential good thing about Genghis Khan and downplays any potential bad thing. There's almost really nothing about massacres and Genocide. And when he does mention it, there's always a disclaimer about how those numbers couldn't possibly be true. Or how can you take the word of, say, the Islamic folks who were the victim of Genghis Khan, they have an axe to grind, which to me is a little like saying you can't include the viewpoints of Holocaust victims and their families about, you know, the Nazis, because, after all, they were a little too close to the story. I tend to be a little bit of a contrarian. There's this little bit of a side of me which tends to recoil at massive unbalance in any direction. And I think had I been doing this podcast on the Mongols a hundred years ago, I would have taken the point of view of a guy like Jack Weatherford, the balancing side, saying, listen, you're just. You're slamming the Mongols and the Khan, but look at it from this point of view instead. So many of the writers today are trying to play up the good sides of the Mongol conquest and say they've been unfairly treated by history. And Genghis Khan wasn't evil. He was a great builder, and, you know, somebody who swept away an old world to create a brand new fertile ground to create the new modern world. We owe him a debt of gratitude. And the deaths were exaggerated anyway. For me, that's just too far. That's Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. And you're going to have me say, you know what? Wait a minute, if you're going to do that, you would legitimize writing a book about Hitler and his good qualities? It's like saying, well, listen, there weren't 6 million dead Jews in the Holocaust. It was more like 2.5 million. As though that changes the intrinsic good or evil side of the question. And yet, at the same time, do you really want your scientific historians worrying about value judgments? To them, it's almost like data. Data is data. Data is neither good nor evil. It's truth or not truth. It's radiocarbon dating, right? You don't put a value judgment on radiocarbon dating. And while that's how I want my scientific historians, I miss the loss of history as part of the humanities. We. When you could have a great historian who's got a lifetime of the studying of history under their belt, and who studies what we call big history or universal history. Not this, you know, not the cultural food choices of the Roman Empire, but someone who studies world history over the ages. I mean, these grand thinkers, I think we miss out not having those people to help us make sense of these very complex questions like good or evil or the progression of the human species in terms of are we moving towards anything better or are things just more like the way they've always been? You need someone who can talk about history and label evil as evil when they say it. Now, the other question that fascinated me, and again, it's related to the same thing. This idea of what I call. There is no official name for this but the historical arsonist. This idea that they're. And this goes to the, by the way, the non scientific historians, this is part of the legacy of the past, where those people. And again, this is what scientific historians try to stay away from, where those people will try to create some sort of good narrative for why these killers who literally roll across the landscape like a scythe, wiping out populations in what we would definitely term genocide today, why that was a good thing. They sweep away the old dead wood of stagnant civilizations to, you know, like a Roto rooter sweeping out clogs in a drain, to once again open up the flow of changes so that, you know, we could progress to the next stage of human development. I've always found this to be a very weird idea anyway, but it's hugely popular and has been used over the ages. And I got a very interesting email from someone once the series was completed saying, how do the people who make a statement like that, how do they know that we wouldn't be in an even better place today had all those people not died and those civilizations been so trashed and those great work. I mean, look at what happened to Baghdad, for example, in the famous sacking by the Mongol heligu and the destruction of the scholars and all of the texts and the scrolls and all of this accrued knowledge. Maybe things would be better today had not Islamic civilization suffered such a loss back then. And when I got that email, I instantly thought back to the First World War, where there was quite a bit of talk after that about how many fabulously talented people had been killed in the war, how many great poets and people who were involved in literature and budding scientists and all these things, and how much world culture and development might have lost on those battlefields had those people not died and instead lived to do whatever it was they were fated to do in history. The old line we always say is, well, maybe somebody there had the cure for cancer. Considering what we know about cancer, I doubt that. But you get my point. Can you really say that it swept out the dead wood when you don't exactly know what might have happened had the dead wood not been swept out? Might have been some diamonds in the dead wood rough. So that historical arsonism thing always seemed to me a little like my favorite line. We've used it before, but shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it afterwards, it's sort of an after effect where you go, well, listen, the Roman Empire, of course lots of people died and civilizations were wiped out and the freedom of those individual people were destroyed. But look at how much the Roman Empire pushes history forward. And without them, think about where we might be. And of course we don't know where we would be. We simply can state that the data says that the Romans killed a lot of people while they did all these things. So when you talk about Genghis Khan and you talk about trade routes and you talk about the improvement in commerce and communication between east and west and all these things without factoring in the cost and then asking yourself whether or not that's worth it, it's very difficult to quantify how much that helped the world. What many of these writers recently writing about the great Khan would say is that, listen, those dead people are of no concern or difference to you. Now, if 50,000 less Chinese people were killed in Genghis Khan's conquest, you don't know anything about them, they don't affect your life. But let me tell you, the exchanges between east and west of technology still affect you today. What if there'd been no Renaissance, you know, that kind of thing. And what this email writer had pointed out was you don't know what those 50,000 extra Chinese might have contained in terms of people who would move human thought and society and philosophy and culture forward. I thought that was a great point. So that's how we kind of came up with the spine for this Mongol series. The spine, by the way, is what we call the sub theme that we sort of anchor the program on. The program itself though, is something that developed out of almost a stray comment I made once or twice about a long term intention on my part to do a countdown show. A countdown show sort of based on what some of the sports channels do. I always try to point out to people that the sports channels and the various sports, like the NFL football folks, they know how to teach history in a way that people find fascinating because they teach history all the time. But the people who are the audience, the target audience, don't realize that that's what they're learning. And one of the ways, for example, that a sports channel like ESPN and the NFL will teach the history of the NFL is they'll have these wonderful top 10 programs, the top 10 greatest linebackers of all time. And you will watch these clips and these people arguing over who belongs on the list. And you'll be learning history and the background of the NFL without even knowing that's what you're doing. It's one of the things I always try to tell people. You can teach history and make it fascinating. You just have to do it the way, for example, the sports channels teach the history of these sports. So I had said that I wanted to do a top 10 greatest armies list, you know, in my opinion, the Dan Carlin version. And somewhere along the line, I violated the number one rule of top 10 lists. And that's don't tell everybody what your number one choice is until the show is revealed. Right? That's like the moment where the curtain comes up and everybody, you know, drumroll, please. And of course, Dan Carlin violates that major rule under intense and persistent and extended questioning on the parts of very curious listeners. I let the cat out of the bag and told everybody that I thought the Mongols were the number one army on my list of all time. Now, there's an interesting thing when you think about that for a second. The interesting thing, number one, is that that's no big deal that you get a group of military historians together today, ask them for their top 10 list, and 90% of them or more are gonna have the Mongol somewhere, not just on their top 10 list, but somewhere in the top five positions. There probably broad disagreement over where they belong. Number one, number two, number five. But nobody's going to think it's strange if the Mongols are in the top five. And as a matter of fact, there might be some raised eyebrows if someone didn't have them in the top five. That's how widespread the consensus is right now that the Mongols were an absolute benchmark in the history of military science. Now, what's fascinating is how that is a complete 180 degree turnaround from just 40 or 50 years ago. 40 or 50 years ago. If you got the military historians around the world together and asked them for their top 10 list, I bet you 90% of them don't have the Mongols on their list at all. And again, what's interesting about that is I bet you most of the other armies on their list are exactly the same as modern military historians. By and large, they're all going to have Alexander's army on there, Caesar's army on there, Napoleon's on there, Not Much change over the past five or four decades. These Mongols will be an exception because it's only in the last 30 or so years, really the 1980s, when the big breakthrough happened and it happened fast, have people come to grips with the idea that the Mongols won their battles due to sophistication. You know, there's an ethnocentric. Isn't that a wonderful word? Ethnocentric stereotype about these armies from the east, whether they be Huns, Mongols, Chinese or anything, that they win their battle the way, you know, locusts win their battle against wheat. You know, they just show up in huge swarms and overwhelm you. The old stereotype when you fight these East Asian armies is they have more people than you have arrows or bullets to kill them with. As late as the Korean War in 1950, 1951, you still see the same stereotype. The Chinese aren't sophisticated tactically. They use human wave attacks because they don't care anything about human life. And they'll just overwhelm you with numbers. And if that's how you fight, well, then you don't add anything to the sophistication and development of military science. There's no science to that. That's just overwhelming via numbers. And that's one of the ways historians 100 years ago and 50 years ago thought the Mongols did what they did. You can go read maybe the most important military work in Western military history, Clausewitz's on war. That's debatable, but certainly he's one of the major works. Clausewitz was a Napoleonic era German officer, and he wrote about warfare in a way that's made his work a pillar of Western military thought. In a book hundreds of pages long, the guy mentions Mongol warfare three times, less than eight sentences. And he credits their victories to two things. One, numbers. He says that because every male was a fighting man, they were able to amass more fighting people than these settled societies, who of course, could only use a percentage of their population for military service. They had to have farmers stay on the farm, artisans stay doing their work. The whole economy would collapse if too high a proportion of the population were out fighting. And this gave the Step nomads a huge advantage in numbers. The other thing that he credits as a reason for their success is their absolutely pitiless nature and their brutality. He says that they were so nasty essentially in how they killed civilians and wiped out people that they intimidated enemies. They're like the old. If you think about football the way it used to be, it's not that way anymore. The Oakland Raiders used to be so intimidating that there were guys in Las Vegas who used to decide the point spread for these games. And they would give the Raiders like a two point advantage just on the intimidation factor alone. You're two points down in the point spread because the Raiders get an intimidation bonus. The Mongols in the minds of these earlier historians had a huge advantage over their enemies because they were intimidators, intimidators with massive numbers. Now, a hundred years ago, you could forgive people for thinking that because they really didn't know any better. There were people who said that the Mongols were probably one of the greatest armies of all time. But ironically it wasn't your standard military historians. It was actually your amateur military historians who were able to sort of deduce things based on results. Guys like Edward Gibbon, you may remember him, he wrote that massive work entitled the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon mentions the Mongols in terms that again make him stand out from contemporaries. And so does science fiction author H.G. wells, another amateur historian. Both of them, basically, I'm summing up what they said, both of them without specific knowledge of why the Mongols were a great military, which were able to deduce that you couldn't have done what they did unless you had a great military. So it's almost like an algebraic way of deducing that Genghis Khan's military must have been fantastic. Nonetheless, guys a hundred years ago, like Hans Delbruck and Charles Ullman, who are brilliant military historians, also gave the Mongols no credit at all. Delbruck didn't even mention them. In his multi volume history of Warfare, Oman mentions them and parrots the line from Clausewitz a hundred years before his time. Numbers and brutality. Now the tide began to change on this in the 1970s and this is right when I was first starting to read my military history. And so any book that I bought that had been published more than about 10 years before the 1970s, you could get this old style attitude about the human waves of, you know, what were called the hordes, the hordes of Mongols, that would just overwhelm you. And the new stuff that started to come out really pointing to how the Mongols were an advancement in military science, that these were armies that were sophisticated, more sophisticated than the armies they faced. And it started with numbers. Once this idea that the Mongols had millions of men was dispelled, you couldn't just fall back on that as an excuse for how they did what they did. And now you had to look at other causes. Once Some of these historians started realizing that these Mongols were invading Europe with like 100,000 guys. Things changed drastically because how do you beat an army that you don't outnumber massively with 100,000 guys? Well, you either beat it because your commanders are geniuses or because your armies are just better, or both. Now, one of the things we like to use these extra shows for is to go into more military depth than I think the average audience member probably wants in a regular hardcore history program. So I'd like to kind of do a little bit of that right now. And I want to pivot off of the point we made earlier, this idea that Clausewitz and people like him postulated for so long that the Mongols ability to intimidate played a large role in their success. And by the way, worth pointing out that there are modern historians, one just died. John Keegan, he's very famous British historian. He wrote a fantastically influential book called the Face of Battle once upon a time. And we owe him a bit of a debt of gratitude here on the program because we utilize some of the same approaches that he did in that book. And he was one of the first people to do so. The Face of Battle was a book where the historian, in this case, John Keegan, tried to look at the experience of battle from the people who were actually fighting it. Not the generals, not at the army level, but the average soldier and what they were going through. That was very influential, very different. And as I said, we owe him a debt of gratitude here. But later works by Keegan are much more uneven in my opinion. Keegan is one of these guys who was raised on the old style historians like Delbruck and Oman, and never quite changed his mind about people like the Mongols. In fact, Keegan, in a work that I didn't like at all called A History of Warfare, basically sums up the Mongols as a bunch of people who scared enemies into giving up. You know, something he said, I think his exact words were, when word got around how, you know, brutal they were, everyone just started opening their doors to them. And while this is false and definitely from the old flawed style of history, when it comes to dealing with the Mongols, there's a grain of truth to that. And I'd like to start our discussion of the Mongol military approach with this idea of psychological warfare intimidation tactics, because this is not something purely Mongol. As a matter of fact, one would argue that most of the best militaries of all time had this intimidation factor working in their favor. Now, sometimes it's a byproduct of success, right? You conquer a bunch of people, you don't have to play up how nasty and dangerous you are. New enemies that you're running into. Know this. I mean, if you're the German army and you're invading Russia in June 1941, the Russians know what you did to Poland, and the Russians know what you did to France. And you don't have to brag about it. There's some intimidation that comes simply with success. But sometimes this intimidation is part of, you know, what's played up by the militaries of their time. And you could almost go back to, you know, the law of the prairie. When one animal tries to intimidate another by looking bigger, it works, believe it or not, in the animal kingdom. And somewhere along the line, people picked up on this, maybe from the very beginning. And you can see some of the great militaries of all time that make a science of this intimidation and psychological warfare. For example, we talked about it when we discussed the Assyrians in the podcast Judgment at Nineveh. We talked about how the Assyrians were so brutal, and yet historians for so long considered them to be a bunch of sadists. Because it's one thing to be brutal, that's a pretty human trait. After all, it's another thing to brag about it the way the Assyrians did. And historians, for the longest time couldn't get over the fact that the Assyrians wouldn't just do these horrible things to conquered cities, like impale the people in the city on stakes and flay them alive, which is to cut their skin off of them and then nail the skin to the walls and create these giant mounds of heads. But what got to historians was that these Assyrian kings would then carve what amounts to images of genocide on their palace walls, which is kind of how we know about them. The combination of the Assyrian kings bragging proudly about what they did to these cities, combined with the walls that have fallen into our hands as these places have been excavated, create a situation where the Assyrians appear to be sadists who are proud of their crimes. But more modern historians have taken a different approach to this and wondered aloud whether or not this wasn't a form of ancient logical insanity. To quote yet another of our podcasts, this idea, when we talked about the bombings in the Second World War as perhaps a form of rational thought when it comes to being brutal in the short term and how that might end up saving lives and being more humane in the long term, the Assyrians may have been practicing a very similar sort of an idea. We will be extraordinarily brutal to this city that rebels against us. We will then brag about it. We will put it on the walls of our palace waiting room so that the governors of other cities which might consider doing similar sorts of rebellions, see what happened to the city that did rebel against us and that will prevent future rebellions which will prevent us from having to put them down in such a brutal fashion. So that one city we had to make an example of saved us from having many other cities rebel and have to be brutally put down as well. If that's true, then the Assyrians use of intimidation and psychological warfare was genius. The Mongols did a very similar thing. They would go and they would destroy these cities and kill everyone in them and then make sure everyone in the surrounding area knew about it. So that when they went to these next cities and tell them basically surrender or die, they could say something to the effect of did you hear what happened to that city 50 miles to your east? Don't let that happen to you. And the Mongols had their own particular twists on the whole thing. The idea of going back to the city a couple days after you kill everyone in it to make sure you kill everyone that comes to bury the bodies and who crawl out of the cellars and who might have escaped you the first time, that's their own little twist, let me tell you. But in reality, I don't think that the attitudes of the Mongols, this way of looking at things that allowed them to massacre so many people that they are credited as being one of the leading causes of human caused mortality in world history, I don't think that attitude's a whole lot different from all of the step nomadic peoples that came before them. The Mongols simply were more successful. If you look at them as the cultural inheritors of the Scythians and the Sarmatians and the Huns and the Turks and the Magyars and all these people, I'm pretty sure that most of those people would have been just as merciless to captured populations if they'd ever had the success that the Mongols had breaking down city walls. Traditionally, what thwarts barbarian in air quotes armies throughout history are fortifications. The fact that the Mongols became one of the few step armies to figure out ways to deal with walls successfully gave them access to these populations that they could then deal with in such a brutal fashion. Remember, the Mongols figured out that if you simply impressed the siege experts from captured populations into your force and had them knock down the walls for you, you could Solve an age old problem amongst these steppe armies. I'm not sure that the Scythians, for example, operating in biblical times, weren't just as nasty to peoples that fell into their hands as the Mongols were. Now there's a certain way of looking at the Mongols that I think gives a lot of insight into what they are. To me they are the highest form of development of these step nomadic horse archer based armies. You know, you go back to the first time they appear on the scene and the DNA evidence is kind of sketchy right now, but it's thought that the horse was first domesticated in the area of modern Ukraine. And you can go read the writings in Chinese chronicles concerning these people that live on the borders of China. People that the Chinese call for example, the Rung and the T. These are future horse nomadic armies and the Chinese wrote about them before they got horses. This technology is supposed to have spread from modern day Ukraine east. So they would have been some of the last of the nomadic peoples to acquire this new. Whether you call it technology or cultural change or what have you. But the Rung and the T are minor mosquito like nuisances to the Chinese. When they get horses, they become real threats. And the first time you see horses appearing in a military sense, no one's riding them. Early on the horse wasn't capable, it's thought, of bearing the weight of a human being on its back. It would take decades or centuries of breeding to get it to that point. But it was capable of pulling carts. And the first military revolution involving horses, you can see destroying some of the greatest militaries of the age. Take for example the ancient Egyptians, you know, the people ruled by the pharaoh, in this case the Middle Kingdom Egyptians with a very sophisticated dominant army composed entirely though of footmen. And it gets conquered by a ragtag rabble basically in comparison, known as the Hyksos. Now no one's still sure who the Hyksos were, they were called the shepherd kings, but they arrived from the Egyptian north and the army had at its core horse drawn chariots. And the Egyptian military, as sophisticated as it was, found that impossible to deal with horses, provided such a military revolution that the mobility involved changed everything, leading to the fall of the Middle Kingdom, A dark age for the Egyptians. And when they rose again in what's known as the New Kingdom, they had in their militaries at its core the entire service based around horse drawn chariots. Now the horses were one aspect that helped make the steppe relevant because remember, peoples of the steppe are not as sophisticated as the settled societies around them, they don't have the organization, they don't have the money, they don't have the manpower. They're at such a disadvantage when it comes to what the settled societies can do. The great equalizer is this relationship between human beings and animals, which you would expect from a pastoral people who live so closely with their livestock. And another part of the equation that you would not expect these barbarian again in air quotes peoples to have developed. But it's absolutely integral and key. The composite bow. A composite bow is a sophisticated piece of technology involving anything from glue to horn to sinew to bone. There's a lot of different elements that can go into the creation of a composite bow, and it can take anywhere from six months to two years to make a good one. That's the sort of technology we would traditionally consider to be in the realm of something that the technologically sophisticated societies would come up with. It would be as though the steppe people invented the gun. You just wouldn't expect that sort of a, you know, invention to come out of the nomadic barbarian steppe. But when you combined that uber powerful bow with the horsemanship of people that were put on the backs of these horses from the time they could first toddle around the campfire, you created a weapons system that kept the step nomadic armies competitive with the civilized, so called civilized societies around them until about 400 years ago, until the wide dissemination of gunpowder, until the Chinese in the east and the Russians in the west could methodically take over the steps on their border and sort of meet in the middle and turn what used to be one of the centers of world power and traditionally the place from where horrible invasions somewhat first cropped up. I mean, the idea of a womb of nations being somewhere in the middle of the dark deep steppe where no one knows, and new peoples would just sort of emerge out of it to break upon the settled societies at horrible intervals. That whole idea ended once the steppe was pacified. For most of human history it wasn't. And waves of successive people would challenge the civilizations of China and the Middle east and Eastern Europe up until relatively recently. The taming of the steppe is one of the great geopolitical events in all human history. Much, much, much more important than say, the American taming of the frontier. A similar kind of an idea, but much, much larger in scope. Now, as I said, I kind of consider the Mongols to be the ultimate evolution, the pinnacle of step nomadic horse archer armies, the ultimate development of that style and type. If you compare them to their cultural ancestors from biblical Times like the Scythians and the Xiongnu over in China, you see vast similarities. After all, all these armies are based upon the same core element, the same basic unit. The light cavalry horse archer, fighting probably in a very similar way to the way they fought 2,000 years before the Mongol horsemen broke out of the Eurasian steppe. That sort of weapon system had been pretty much perfected from a very early time period. It's how that light cavalry horse archer, though, was integrated into the army as a whole and how that army was organized and, you know, other elements of things that incorporated technological changes that people since biblical times had been exposed to that made the army more of an evolutionary different force than what the Scythians, for example, were putting in the field in 800 BCE, for example. Take into account what the steppe people are fighting and realize, which I imagine you already do, how much the enemy that you fight on a daily basis influences how you fight. You know, one of the truisms of military tactics and strategy is that any advantage you have over your adversary is temporary and that they will learn how to adapt over time as they continue to fight you. The same is true for the steppe people. They were not immune to learning, you know, from the people they fought. Not just that they got much of their equipment from the people they fought. Take for example, armor and how much of a difference this would have made over time. And it's one of the major changes you can easily point to if you were to bring a Scythian army from 700 or 800 BCE, you know, in your time machine and put it on one side of the field of battle, and then bring Genghis Khan's Mongols from 1200, you know, ADCE to the other side of the battlefield. You're going to notice that the Mongols have a heck of a lot more armor. Historians think maybe 5% of those early Scythian armies may have been armored nobles, people intending to charge the enemy, maybe involve themselves in hand to hand combat with an unbroken foe. The Mongols may have had up to 40% of their total force. That was certainly the optimum level that they prescribed. They wanted to have 40% of their force armored, some of whom would be on armored horses. Now, some of this armor would have been made in the steppes by people who utilized local products to create it. The armor was often known as lamellir, and it was layered, sometimes metal scales like a fish, but sometimes leather scales, you know, that were hardened with pitch and other products, boiled and provided a homegrown, you know, self protective Measure of a kind that you would see in the Huns and the Sarmatians and the Scythians. As a matter of fact, the Scythians may have been using a very similar kind of armor 2000 years before the Mongols, just not as widely or in, as, you know, significant numbers. Not just that the Mongols were the inheritors of several civilizations between their time and the time of the Scythians, all of whom would get subtle differences infused into their militaries based on who they were fighting and what they were learning from their foes. Take, for example, maybe the most important people between the Scythians and the Mongols, the Turks. An underrated group of people who were at the height of their power probably between 500 and 800 ADCE, a people that probably can be given credit for infusing modern organization onto these steppe armies. The better of the steppe armies anyway. In other words, if you looked at the Scythians from 700 BCE, you probably saw a group of people that was, you know, on the battlefield in somewhat of a randomized horde kind of formation. Whereas by the time Genghis Khan and his Mongols take the field, they are divided into, well, their own barbaric versions of what we might call today, you know, battalions and regiments and brigades and corps. And they have almost certainly the Turks to thank for that. But where did the Turks learn about it? Fighting people like the Chinese who were organized that way themselves? Not just that the Turks were probably, you can't put your finger on this, but probably the ones who first really infused the idea of battlefield signaling into the ideas of the step armies. This idea that you could use drums or flags to convey messages across the battlefield to units far away. If you're a sports fan, think about how sports teams will use signs. Well, on the battlefield, the more sophisticated armies would use signs as well. Think about how much an advantage that would give an army over a foe that didn't use signs. By the time the Mongols appear on the battlefield, they have a much higher proportion of their troops armored. They're using battlefield signals and signs. They're organized in an almost modern form of unit organization, in small units of 100 men in tight little clusters on the battlefield with intervals of spaces between them, so that light cavalry, horse archers, at the right time could ride right between the ranks of the heavier armed troops to get to the front of the battle line, shoot at the enemy, retire through those same alleyways created in the battle line when their arrows were spent, or it was time to withdraw them, to send the heavy troops in all this sort of stuff made the Mongols quite a bit more sophisticated than their cultural ancestors of a millennia or two before. One of the other things that certainly differentiated the Mongols from much earlier steppe armies is the command structure. And you can't emphasize this enough. The old line from, well, Alexander is supposed to have said one version of it, Genghis Khan is supposed to have said another. This idea that an army of donkeys led by a lion is preferable to an army of lions led by a donkey. And this sort of idea was infused into the Mongol leadership structure from the very lowest level to the very highest level. And those of you who've studied, for example, Roman military history, most people who do that can't say enough good things about people called the centurions. The centurions were like the Roman sergeants, the Roman non commissioned officer types, and they helped create leadership at the very low levels of the battle. Stuff that's normally beneath most people's notice, but that's tremendously important. Once the fighting actually starts, you could be several football fields away from your general. In an ancient or medieval battle, they can't do you a whole lot of good. Once the chaos gets going. In an ancient or medieval battlefield, the centurion or non commissioned officer standing, you know, three or four feet away from you has a much more direct impact on how you behave in a battle. Whether you run, whether you stand, whether you're able to rally, how you behave when, you know, chaos and fear takes over. The Greeks used to call the God of battles Phobos. He ruled the battlefield. That's the root word for phobia, fear. The person who was most likely to make sure you did your duty and to call you back from the panic that a God like Phobos could infuse on you. Was your non commissioned officer, your centurion, or in the Mongol battle line, it would be the commander of 10 or the commander of a hundred. The Mongols, like other steppe peoples, tended to use a decimal system of organization. So the first promotion you'll get is to be a commander of 10 men. The next promotion you get is to be the commander of 100 men, then a thousand, then 10,000. In the Mongol army, unlike most other step armies of their day, these promotions were done purely based on merit. And again, this can't be emphasized enough. Instead of it being based on nobility, someone's relationship to the ruling family and the clan, or you happen to be an important ally who brought 25% of the troops to the battle, so you get to command those troops. The Mongols did away with all that stuff and based command purely on merit. And they went so far as to include really good commanders that they fought. You know, as we told you in the series, Jebe, the era, one of the great Mongol commanders of all time wasn't a Mongol commander. He was a guy who shot an arrow at Genghis Khan when he was fighting the Mongols. And the Great Khan was so impressed by how he handled his troops that when he was brought, you know, probably to be executed in front of the Great Khan himself, the Great Khan spared him and said, I'm going to have you command some of my troops. Because you're a good commander. You do that often enough, and you improve the base level of command of your army. That is a huge, huge advantage. You know, once you infuse that idea up and down the line, the commanders of 10 are merit based. The commanders of 100 are merit based. The commanders of a thousand are merit based. And the leaders of your army are the best generals you can either create from your own ranks or the best ones you can find from the ranks of the people you fight. And it had a subsidiary benefit that the Mongols probably never intended, but they had a lot of enemy generals come over to them at very, you know, auspicious and fortunate times because it was known that they would respect a good general and give him a good job. In the wars against China, it was a recurring problem for the Chinese that they would put some of their very good generals in really important and crucial positions, only to see them go over to the Mongols at bad times for the Chinese, you know, cause. And they would do that because they knew that the Mongols wouldn't just not kill you if you were a good commander. They'd put you in charge of their troops and they'd give you a good life, and you could be a Mongol general. It helps explain why when Mongol armies went to battle, they were almost never out commanded. And even when they would run into armies that had really high quality leadership at the very top rung, oftentimes Mongol leadership was better at the middle and lower rungs of all officer leadership. Again, it's not the sexy stuff about the military, but it goes a long way towards explaining the nuts and bolts about how these Mongols achieved what they did. Most of the armies they fought did not promote people or put them in positions of authority based on how good they were at commanding troops. Let's not forget, though, about the troops that they were commanding, because one of the things that the chroniclers and the primary source material people talk about continually are the qualities of the average Mongol soldier. And to be fair, it's probably stuff that you would see in a lot of other steppe peoples. Remember, the Mongols may have formed the core of a so called Mongol army, but the army was fleshed out with people that the Mongols took over. Other East Asian step nomadic types, other Mongolian type tribes, but eventually also other Turkish based ethnic tribes from the steppe and other groups. And all of these people would have shared similar qualities. The things that the chroniclers often remarked upon. An unbelievable vision, eyesight that was just incredible. There are other tribal peoples throughout history that the eyesight is also supposed to have been quite remarkable things like memory. When you come from an oral tradition, people's memory is often something that the people from a more written tradition will comment about. Needless to say, all natural horse riders. I can't imagine you would think a Mongol horseman would be any better than a Turkish horseman who lived on the steppe. And also incomparable archers, as we've probably said a million times in these hardcore history podcasts. Archers who could shoot birds out of the sky in flight. So the peoples that the Mongols took over, who came from a similar steppe culture, were probably of similar fighting quality. What tended to bind them into an even more efficient, amazing soldier was the iron law of the Yassa. This code that Genghis Khanna or his descendants put into the Mongol, you know, military handbook, I guess you could say that was so unforgiving for disobedience or mistakes, that if you weren't of a superior quality in terms of carrying out orders or doing what was expected of you, you didn't survive. There are tales of Mongols who were executed for simply taking an extra bowstring out of the royal armory and sticking it in your boot in case your primary bowstring broke. That's a capital offense. Same thing with if you're riding behind another trooper and they drop something and you see it drop and you don't pick it up, that's the death penalty after a while. Whether the person you're talking about is of Mongol descent or Turkish descent, or even these Indo European tribes that were often taken over by the Mongols and then employed as the equivalent of typical step soldiery. If you aren't obedient and a very good soldier and do your job as dictated by the Yassa, you aren't going to be around. Now, the Mongols also had a wonderful way to preserve their best troops. They would employ people to catch arrows, is what we used to call it cannon fodder is another word. If the Mongols took over a city, not only would they take the people of that city and say, listen, we'll spare you, but we need you to help us fight your, you know, the city next door that we haven't taken yet. And they would drive the civilians in front of them like a human wave in front of their troops, to suck up all the arrows and the stones and the missile weapons that the defenders of this city, maybe people who were friends of the city that had just fallen and whose people were now being used against their walls. They would utilize those civilians as a way to, you know, suck up casualties on the battlefield. They would do this with newly acquired troops that you know were from the armies of enemies who had given up to them, let the new troops take the brunt of the enemy's attack, put them in the front of the battle line, put the Mongols behind them or on the flanks to exploit opportunities. And when the battle's over, you know, the Mongol armies tended to suffer fewer casualties anyway. And the hidden statistic in the middle of all that is that many of the casualties they did suffer weren't of the ethnic core of Mongols anyway. They were from the arrow catchers and cannon fodder that had been put there just for that purpose. Now, the way the Mongols tended to launch a campaign involved something that every army worth its salt today understands, the importance of reconnaissance. Remember, reconnaissance is scouting, and scouting is important because this becomes, you know, part of the intelligence service. What your commander knows about the enemy, where they are, the lay of the lands, and all this stuff is determined by, you know, what the troops you have out ahead of your army see and report back. It's a huge advantage if you have one army doing good reconnaissance and the enemy not. And it's rather astounding when you study history, how many ostensibly really good militaries were poor reconnaissance armies. I mean, take a look at the Romans who get mentioned in any good military conversation in the world. They were pretty bad scouters, as a rule, and ran into ambushes that they shouldn't have been caught in on a relatively regular basis. The Greeks weren't good scouting troops. The knightly armies of Europe were not good scouting troops. The Mongol commanders would likely have known a ton more about what was going on with the European armies than the European armies would have known about what was going on with the Mongols. When they would send out light cavalry to do this reconnaissance, they would send them out in very large groups, sometimes a whole tomb and 10,000 men in several columns out into the enemy lands, sowing all kinds of fear and panic by killing individuals that they ran into while allowing some to escape to spread the message. They would magnify the size of their force to scare people, let them think it was bigger than it was. They would make sure that they heard rumors of what had happened to other peoples that they may have known about. You know, did you hear about Nishapur and what we did to Nishapur? Don't let that happen to you. Give up now while you still can. If they saw enemy forces, they would advance toward them and attempt to take them out if they could. Very Napoleonic guys like Clausewitz, who had very little respect for step nomadic tactics as they understood them, would praise Napoleon to high heaven, not realizing that Napoleon's tactics, which were considered to be so forward thinking, were but a poor slower imitation of what guys like Genghis Khan were doing hundreds of years beforehand. The main thing Napoleon was known for was advancing at a faster pace than most armies of his day could do, and marching divided and then converging upon enemy detachments before those enemy detachments could link up into a larger army. Genghis Khan and the Mongols did this all the time. They did this in Poland and Bohemia and Hungary in ways that just confounded the European army's no end. When they would come upon troops in a tough defensive position, which is never a good thing for cavalry to have to deal with. They had a group of very interesting troops known as the Mangidae. The Mangidae have been called by some historians suicide troops. I'm not sure that's the best name for them. Also sometimes known as a group of very good actors because they were in a sense, designed to play a part on the battlefield, and the part was designed to fool the enemy into thinking that they had defeated the Mongols. The way it works is it took advantage of something that is apparently common on battlefields all throughout history. You can infer that it's common by how often troops pursue enemies who run away. I often think of like the animal kingdom and how, you know, you take a cat for example, or a jungle cat or anything like that. They can't seem to avoid chasing something that's running away. Well, on the battlefield you see people doing this same thing. Take a look at the Battle of Hastings with William the Conqueror and how that battle literally hinged upon the fact that the Saxons on top of that hill couldn't resist chasing Norman troops that appeared to be running away, even leaving the protection of their wonderful defensive position in order to do so only to get slaughtered as they ran down the hill and broke formation. All the steppe armies understood this human quality, which is why the light cavalry's famous tactic, going back to biblical times, is called the feigned flight, the pretend flight, pretending to run away, getting people to pursue them, and then taking advantage of the fact that they're doing what you want them to do. And all this step, nomadic light cavalry could shoot behind them while someone chased them. So the fact that you were chasing them didn't mean that they weren't killing you while you were doing so. These mangadai were famous for running up to a tough defensive position, engaging the people in that position, making it look extremely real, and then at a precise signal, turning around and we're told, you know, doing a great job of acting completely panicked and frightened, turn around and run away at full speed, hoping and usually succeeding in getting those people to run out of those prepared, tough, strong defensive positions, chasing this group of people they think is fleeing in order to wipe them out. And the mangadai, doing what Mongol and other steppe light cavalry also did, would attempt to take their pursuers into rough ground, uneven terrain, wooded country, wherever it took. That would break up their formation even more and hopefully run them right into an ambush, certainly to tire them out and get them in a position where they're strung out so a counter attack can smash them. The mangadai are just one of the elements in a Mongol commander's toolbox that would help them deal with whatever given situation they ran into. To me, what's so intriguing about studying the Mongol way of war is that it doesn't take very much expertise to see the similarities between the way the Mongols fought and what they intended to do, and basically the ideas behind why they did what they did and how thoroughly modern that all appears in a military sense. In fact, there are historians who can trace the direct connection between Genghis Khan and modern military thinking. This is part of the reason why it's hard for me to respect historians like the late John Keegan, because John Keegan, in the same way that Clausewitz would praise Napoleon, but not realize that Napoleon was a cheap imitator of Genghis Khan, John Keegan will praise, you know, the Germans in the second World War, for example, for their so called blitzkrieg doctrine. Without realizing the debt of gratitude that the German high command owes to Genghis Khan as well, people that I consider to be better military historians like Richard A. Gabriel trace this development directly. Gabriel says that the way that Genghis Khan's military Ideas made it into the German army so that the Germans could use it as part of the Second World War was transmitted to the Germans via the Russians. Remember, unlike Western Europe, which had the luxury of, of ignoring the lessons of Steppe warfare, Clausewitz didn't have to fight Steppe peoples. The only time Napoleon ever had to deal with them, really, unless you count the Cossacks as step people, was when the Napoleon grand army invaded Russia. A almost antiquated group of step nomads showed up to fight in the Tsar's army, a bunch of people known as the Circassians. And, and they showed up wearing chainmail armor, riding horses and carrying bows. The Napoleonic cavalry called them cupids because they weren't very scary to Napoleon's forces. Of course, there weren't 120,000 of them and they weren't led by Genghis Khan. But whereas the Western military thinkers could sort of discount that style of warfare because they didn't have to deal with it, the Russians didn't have that kind of luxury because long after Genghis Khan was dead and buried and the Mongols were no longer a significant threat, the Russians still had wave after wave of steppe nomads to contend with, well up until the 1800s. And the style of warfare was something that Russian military thinkers studied. In the 1800s, the first military modern military writings on the tactics of the Steppe peoples was transmitted through Russian writers to the Russian Royal Military academy. By the 1920s and 30s, the Russian High command had commanders who were so forward thinking, they were trying to recreate the tactics and strategies of people like Genghis Khan. And instead of using horsemen in the old fashioned sense, we're now using tanks and aircraft and artillery to do the same things in a more modern way. Gabriel describes this as the recreation of the Mongol army in a modern military sense. He describes this as the solution to the problems created by the First World War when all of a sudden mobility seemed to be a thing of the past. Trenches, barbed wire, machine guns and all this seemed to have relegated maneuver warfare to something from the history textbooks. And Gabriel says the Soviets figured out how you get around that. And it dates back to the Genghis Khan way of war. Gabriel writes, only the Soviets saw the problem correctly. In the Soviet view, the problem was not achieving a breakthrough against in depth defenses, something that had been done many times during the course of the war. Nor was the problem only one of surprise, which under most conditions was a temporary circumstance that was quickly lost if the offensive could not be sustained. To the Soviets, the problem of modern Warfare came down to the seizure and maintenance of the offensive over a long period of time, so that the continuing battles at the tactical level were but means to the larger strategic goals of destroying the enemy's will to resist across the whole spectrum of his forces. In short, the Soviets were the only ones to develop a concept of war that incorporated both strategic and tactical dimensions. This, he writes, is the concept of deep battle incorporated in the field Regulations of 1936. It was the brainchild, he writes, of Marshall after his promotion, Tukhachevsky, Chief of Staff of the Red Army. He continues, the central concept of the deep battle doctrine was the seizure of the offensive across the whole range of the enemy's tactical deployments, conducting long range attacks deep into the enemy's rear areas against his troop concentrations, road junctions, communications cities, supply depots, etc. The goal of deep battle, he writes, is to paralyze the enemy's ability to concentrate in force, always forcing the enemy to react rather than plan an act in the offensive. This is, of course, he says, the Mongol practice of war in the strategic sense, a sense that also guides its tactical application. The Soviet emphasis on surprise maneuver over long distances, maintaining the offensive and striking the enemy in depth all have their origins in the Mongol experience. Likewise, he says, the Soviet use of fire to prepare for the assault, the reliance on tank columns, and the stress upon maneuver, encirclement and annihilation of the enemy wherever he can be brought to battle. By 1937, Gabriel says, the Russians had recreated the Mongol army in a doctrinal and tactical sense and had designed and deployed new equipment, primarily the tank combat support fighters, trucks to transport infantry, and radios to command units in prearranged battle drills to support this doctrine. The stimulus for this revolution in military thinking, he says, can be traced to Ivanin's analysis of methods of the Mongol armies. End quote. In other words, what Gabriel says is that the Soviets, previously known as the Russians, who had never had the luxury of giving up fighting the Steppe people, had incorporated many of the steppe nomadic ideas of warfare into their forward interwar military doctrines. And they transmitted these ideas to the German High Command after the Treaty of Rapallo's secret corollary agreement that allowed the two militaries to exchange ideas with each other. The Treaty of Rapallo, as every World War II buff knows, was one of many treaties that ended the First World War, but this one was between the Soviet Union and Germany. And the secret corollary that was signed and not found out about till later was one that allowed the Germans to circumvent the restrictions on warfare that had been imposed on them by the Versailles Treaty. Couldn't have an army of more than a hundred thousand men, couldn't have submarines, couldn't have tanks, couldn't have aircraft. That was intolerable to the German High Command. They needed those things. The new Soviet Union needed things too. So the two of them worked together secretly in military cooperation. And one of the things that happened due to this cooperation is that the Germans were exposed to these ideas that the very forward thinking Red army was developing, including these doctrines that would help the Germans flesh out what would eventually become known, correctly or incorrectly, as Blitzkrieg. These ideas that go back to step warfare. And ironically, of course, in June 1941, the German High Command will use some of those tactics and strategies and doctrines against the very people who transmitted that knowledge to them in the 1920s. Also ironic, if Stalin hadn't wiped out his entire officer corps in the late 1930s, the Russians would have been using Genghis Khan's tactics against the Germans when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. How far ahead of its day were Genghis Khan's tactics, strategies and doctrines? Well, historian John Lawrence in his book the History of Russia wrote, the Mongols at their best could probably have beaten any army that Europe put into the field before the invention of the breech loading rifle. End quote. Let me just point out that the breech loading rifle did not come into widespread use in Europe until the 1860s and 1870s. In other words, John Lawrence would take the Mongols at their best, maybe over someone like Napoleon and his French armies of the late 17, early 1800s. And I'll tell you what, when you realize that the Mongol's number one strategic imperative was always speed and a Napoleonic field army needed two to five hours to actually set up its battle line and get everything into place, which normally in a giant field battle, their enemy would also need. Realize that Genghis Khan's not going to give them the chance to do this. And all this wonderful weaponry that would be a great equalizer against the at. People like cannons are probably not even going to get a chance to be deployed. Napoleon and his troops will likely be attacked while on the move, though that artillery will probably be a half mile back in the supply train. And Napoleon's going to have to fend off, you know, attacks out of nowhere from an enemy that's more mobile than he is and probably has a better idea intelligence wise of the lay of the land than he does. I'll tell you this, I don't know who would win. But to even be contemplating the idea that the Mongols would stand a chance against Napoleon's forces, an army hundreds of years after the medieval era that Genghis Khan was fighting, gives you an idea of how forward thinking the concepts employed by the Mongols were. Now, explaining how the Mongols fought doesn't really explain why they fought. There are justifications that are worth getting into, and these are argued about. There's no clear cut answer, for example, about why the Mongols fought their neighbors or why they were so brutal. But these sort of questions come up a lot, especially in these modern histories where people are trying to show the Mongol side of things more and more. Oftentimes downplaying things like the casualties and making Genghis Khan, for example, out to be more of a George Washington character and less like a Joseph Stalin character. And oftentimes those same writers will throw out justifications for why the Mongols did what they do, sometimes suggesting that, you know, yes, they won these wars against their neighbors, but maybe they didn't start them. So I thought about maybe, and I don't know how much we dealt with this in the actual series, and if we did, it was in a sort of a light and shallow way, I would imagine. I'd like to get into the whys of two why were the Mongols so brutal? And why did they fight their neighbors at all? Now, there are no right answers that anybody can definitively point to, but there are theories to both of these subjects. First, the brutality. Now, before you even get into this subject, you need to deal with the fact that human beings are brutal. Human history is brutal. And you see it today in ways where people will revert to form, so to speak, and we will all be so shocked when it happens, somehow thinking as though we had progressed past something like this. I remember when the former Yugoslavia broke up and people who had been living relatively peacefully side by side, Serbs, Croats, Muslims in places like Bosnia, these people all of a sudden began to treat each other in ways that you could easily describe as medieval. And what was so shocking wasn't that they were doing that because most of human history has that kind of behavior. What was so shocking is that we somehow fool ourselves that we're past that. I think in some ways, the Second World War hits you the same way. Whenever people revert to form, we're always a little surprised. You know, we think that that form is indicative of another era and people in a lower level of philosophical or ethical development, when in reality, as we've said on earlier hardcore history podcasts, we have this thin veneer of civilization, and it doesn't take as much as we would hope that it does to rip it off and have us behave in very similar ways to our ancestors. So when you talk about the whys of Mongol brutality, it's important to try to figure out how much of this is extraordinary. Gee, the Mongols were extraordinarily brutal, and how much of it is just human behavior. Or we could even suggest human behavior on the part of steppe nomads. As we said earlier, are the Mongols really so different than the Turks and the Sarmatians and the Huns and the Scythians and all these people who were part of the same cultural tradition that they were, or were they just more successful at knocking down the walls that gave them access to these people who they then treated in a way that many of their forebears might have treated as well? We also brought up the idea of psychological warfare and maybe a medieval form of what we called in an earlier podcast logical insanity. The way the Assyrians did it. Maybe Genghis Khan and his descendants were practicing and approach that maybe saved lives in their mind in the long run. Some extra brutality here in this one city would prevent you from having to be brutal at all in a bunch of other cities. I mean, one of the more shocking justifications you'll read from some of the modern writers about the Mongols trying to portray the Mongols in as positive a light as possible is this idea that they were merciful. And one or two of these writers will say things like, well, listen, if people submitted to the Mongols without a fight, you know, once that message from the Great Khan arrived and said, you know, you're part of the Mongol Empire, come and deliver tribute to the Khan. If you did that, you were spared. You know, how much more tolerant can you be? Totally ignoring the fact that once you did that, you were essentially a slave. Like that one Russian city said when the Mongol said, you know, open up your gates, deliver to us part of your wealth. And the Russian city delivered a message back and said, when we're all dead, everything will be yours. I mean, you need to realize that what the people who write about the Mongol occupation make clear is that if the Mongols wanted to come in and take your daughter because she was beautiful, they could do that. That's a kind of slavery. So to suggest that the Mongols were tolerant because you could just give up and they wouldn't kill you, well, that's pretty much the same almost everywhere, isn't it? I mean, it's a rare Conqueror that won't spare you if you decide to become their slave. But maybe this had a sort of a logical insanity, a psychological component that makes, you know, sense. If you think about it, maybe you could even justify it as merciful in certain circumstances. Now, besides that, though, there's other possible ideas and theories that have been proposed over the ages. A lot of it has to do with the different ways that steppe people and the people from the settled societies view each other. Now, anyone who studies even modern propaganda in wartime understands that the dehumanization of your opponents is a key feature in propaganda, in getting people to become more excited, more fanatical about waging war. It's a lot easier to kill people if you dehumanize them first. Look at the way the Nazis turned Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, all those people into subhumans. Well, a lot of historians have suggested over the ages that the people in the settled societies and the people of the steppe didn't always, or maybe most of the time, view their opposing number as totally human. The steppe people were always viewed as some kinds of bandits and brigands and fleas and all sorts of things. I mean, you can even go look at the way the Chinese portray them in movies. And what a bandit, outlaws. But the people of the steppe had a very weird, twisted view of the people in settled societies too. They almost seem to have seen them as livestock. That's the way some historians portray it. Or that Genghis Khan and his descendants often saw people who tilled the land as no better than slaves. Some of these stories you read will talk about the Mongols discussing, and probably doing in many cases, eliminating whole human populations simply to allow the land to revert back to pasturage. Somebody wrote me after the series was completed and said they'd found some statistics somewhere that suggested that because of the massive number of lives snuffed out as a part of the Mongol conquest, a giant amount, I don't remember what the exact number was, but a giant amount of carbon was removed from being dispersed into the earth's atmosphere, sort of making Genghis Khan out to be, you know, one of the green conquerors, because he eliminated so much of human caused pollution from the environment. That's a very weird way of looking at it, but not that dissimilar to the way some of these modern, you know, writings about the great Khan sort of portray him. Trying to find all these little pluses you could throw into the equation that might modify the way we've traditionally seen the great Khan. When you hear that interesting line from Genghis Khan's son Ogedai that he's supposed to have said to the Chinese advisor of Genghis Khan. Genghis was trying to decide what to do with one of these Chinese cities they took. And his generals were advising that they should just wipe out all the people and destroy all of the walls in the city and the streets and all those things, because this whole area would be better used for pasturage for the Mongol horses. And the Chinese advisor, as we said in the show, was trying to explain to the Great Khan the advantages of leaving these people alive. You couldn't just say, well, please don't kill them. That would be wrong. You have to explain to him why it's good for him to leave these people alive. And the Chinese advisor was explaining, if you taxed them every year, they could provide this amount of clothing for you, this amount of money for you. This, you know, essentially pointing out how valuable humans left alive could be. And then Genghis son Ogedai, who will be the future Khan, turns to this Chinese advisor and says, weeping for the people again. And of course, what's extra interesting about that is Ogedai is always portrayed as the tolerant, lenient Khan. So you get an idea that there wasn't a ton of value attached to, to the life of settled peoples when you looked at it from a step nomadic point of view. The same was true from the sedentary societies, though also they didn't exactly value the life of a step nomad all that much either. Finally, a last reason that's been proposed for a logical and understandable reason the Mongols might have been so genocidal when it came to wiping out whole populations in these cities is a desire to protect their flank and their rear of their armies as they continue to move forward in conquests. All these steppe armies tended to be very quick moving. You know, there's a truism about military movement that an army moves at the speed of its slowest component. Well, usually when you're talking about the sedentary societies, you're talking about a man walking. That's usually your slowest component in an army. And the settled societies always tend to have these long supply trains that need to be protected. You need to take some of your army strength that normally would be devoted to fighting the enemy and use it to protect these long columns. The Mongols tended to not have these long columns. And even when they did, they tended to be more mobile and require less protection. You know, fighting men taken out of the battle line in order to keep them safe. But one of the ways you could help protect them was to make sure you didn't leave any enemy alive in your rear to threaten your rear. And there are military historians out there that suggest that it's a completely logical calculation that if you think that this city that you just, you know, conquered or that just opened its doors to you and submitted, might instead turn after you left and revert to being an enemy, well, now you have an enemy in your rear threatening to cut you off from your base of operations. If you don't have a whole lot of respect for human life anyway, why not just eliminate them? Which brings me to another point again. I don't remember how much we did or did not deal with this in the show, but I'm fascinated with the way the Mongol solved an absolutely horrific engineering problem. Imagine if I tasked you with the job of taking out every human being from the largest sports stadium in your country. Imagine 110, 120, 130,000 people, and I task you with killing all of them. How would you go about doing that in one sense? I mean, I think when you don't think about it for very long, it sounds easy. But when you realize how much trouble people in the 20th century committing genocide had doing it, you start to realize it's not such an easily solved issue. Killing a lot of people is more difficult and time consuming normally than you would think. As we said in the shows, the way the Mongols did it is a simple case of division. It's a mathematical problem. If you had a 20,000 man army and a 100,000 person city submitted to you, you simply divided the number of troops you had by the number of people you want executed and give each soldier that number. If you have 20,000 going into 100,000, that's five per soldier. Each soldier gets five tied up civilians, and their job is to kill those five people. You could do that in about half a minute or a minute per person. A Mongol army could wipe out 100,000 people in 15 minutes. And the Mongols were pretty darn perfectionist about making sure that the job was done right. Remember, these are people who did something that I've never heard anybody doing ever, and that's sending their troops back a couple days after the massacre to make sure that you mop up any people that were hiding in cellars or that were away from the city when the conquest happened, or that came from outside the city to bury the bodies and make sure you got them too. That's pretty darn Thorough. And the Mongols required of their soldiers proof that they had executed the people that were put in their care to do just that. And usually the proof was an ear. And you'll see after a lot of these major massacres, the number of dead measured in how many giant bags of ears were carted off to be counted by the Khan's accountants. So, again, the simplistic and yet extremely effective way the Mongol solved problems that bedeviled other genocidal people. I mean, the Germans in the Second World War, carrying out Hitler's final solution for several years considered this to be a very difficult problem. The Mongols didn't see it as difficult at all. Now, why did they fight? This, to me, becomes a key issue in some of these revisionist writings lately, when people try to portray the Mongols in a better light. And I'm not saying they don't deserve to be portrayed in a better light. As I said, if I were doing this podcast 100 years ago and the Mongols were portrayed as evil incarnate, I think I would be, with my contrarian nature, likely to take the other side and explain the upsides. It's only with these modern revisionist histories that I care to make sure that people understand the other side of the issue. But some of these modern writers will try to point out legitimate reasons that the Mongols were fighting their neighbors. I mean, I think when you study this story, you tend to just assume human conflict is a normal thing, and you don't have to have the same sorts of reasons that we would require today. No Cassius Bellies needed to go to war in the old days, Right? But the fact that that's a term in Latin that goes back to an earlier period should, you know, point out the flaw in that thinking? And even the Mongols used to come up with reasons for why they were going to war. One of the reasons often cited as a possible justification for why the Mongols went to war is something that modern people can understand very well, because it's often cited as a contributing factor for why people go to war in more modern times. The question of trade. There's even a relatively recent historical line that says that when goods do not cross borders, armies will. Well, the Mongols didn't require trade to survive. As we said earlier, they had a lifestyle that was eminently sustainable. That explains why it had existed for so long before them and why it would continue so long after their time. As a matter of fact, there are still people who live in the Eurasian steppe today in a not that different lifestyle than the Mongols lived. You had everything you needed, but it didn't mean you had everything you wanted. The Mongols, for example, could make their own clothing. We said that when they were very poor, it was not that unusual for them to fashion clothing out of the skins of field mice sewn together. How many times did I mention that? But would you want to wear a field mouse cloak if you could trade for a nice Chinese silk one instead? So much of what the Steppe people wanted from the settled societies were things they either couldn't make themselves or things they couldn't make themselves, as well as what their neighbors could make. And the settled societies around the Steppe people forever understood the power that their ability to manufacture luxuries gave them over the Steppe people, and would often use this as a carrot and stick to control them. One can only imagine how much that must have grated on people after a while. And to see this really in stark relief, you need to look after the Mongol period. You can read interesting books like China Marches west or Michael Khodorkovsky's fabulous book Russia's Step Frontier to see how the tsar of Russia or the emperor of China controlled the behavior of the step nomads through a policy of giving them what they wanted if they did what the emperor or the tsar was requesting or denying them what they wanted in cases where they didn't. And you can also see lists of things that the nomads requested from the settled societies. And as I said, it's not the staples of life usually as much as it is the luxuries that people sometimes want. For example, in the case of the Russians, there are, you know, requests that have survived very specifically where the step ruler will want, for example, a gorgeous suit of armor made just for themselves. And when they didn't get these things, they were often willing to go to war to compel these other societies to give it to them. Now, if the Steppe people were particularly strong and their settled societies nearby particularly weak, then the trade deal might not be all that good for the settled societies. And sometimes the deal that the Steppe people offered the settled societies was, give us this stuff and we'll give you nothing in return. We just won't come and take it by force. Give us this stuff and we won't march on you with 20,000 horsemen, things like that. One of the things that these step nomads constantly wanted, for example, from China, were slaves and people and women. Chinese princesses, for example, were one of the most sought after things by people like the Xiongnu, the, you know, sort of the people that have been called Proto Mongols before. And the way the Chinese would often keep them happy was to give them princesses, Chinese royal family members to marry. And you can look at the history of the Mongols and see where trade is often cited as a reason for conflict. In the case of why Genghis Khan invaded the Middle east at all in the 1220s to go after the Khwarezmian shah's territory, trade, trade routes and the protection of trade caravans is even today the number one reason. You know, Genghis Khan had talked about how trade is this great thing for the world and that he will be the ruler of the east and the Khwarizmian Shah can be the ruler of the west and they can trade and everyone will be enhanced. And then when the Khwarizmian shah takes or allows to be taken one of Genghis Khan's trading caravans and then kills the envoys that show up asking for their stuff back, you get this giant war that leads to the destruction and deaths of so many people in the Middle East. So trade. A key possible reason for why the Mongols went to war. Another reason that's often cited by more modern historians, you certainly don't see this very much in the past are environmental conditions. This is almost a Jared diamond sort of approach to why the steppe would, from time to time, erupt in violence. Another one of these waves of steppe nomads that break upon the settled societies. Remember, it was almost a domino effect. And this happened over and over and over again in history. And the settled societies were very aware of how it worked. There would be some very vicious, nasty tribe in the very center of the steppe somewhere where, due to privation and a lack of contact with the settled societies, they were more barbaric than their neighbors. Remember, the Chinese had a whole list of categories to describe steppe peoples. And the ones who lived next to them the longest were known as cooked. And the ones that were the farthest away from being influenced by Chinese civilization were known as uncooked. And it was always these uncooked barbarians in the most distant hinterlands, the dark, deep part of the steppe, that would start this chain reaction. They would attack their neighbors, sending their neighbors in headlong flight against another tribe, which would hit another tribe in domino sort of fashion, finally pushing the tribe closest to the border with whatever settled society you're talking about, the Byzantines or the Russians in the west, the Persians and Islamic folks after the Prophet Muhammad in the Middle east, or the Chinese civilizations in the Far east, smashing those people up against those societies. Some of These historians and writers who like to look at environmental circumstances to explain why this happened will say something sometimes like, well, you got drought conditions maybe in the center of the step, or Dust bowl conditions. You know, the American folks listening will remember, if they know their Depression era history, how places like Oklahoma and that whole part of the country, due to drought, turned into a dust bowl. And everyone in that area left the area because they couldn't feed each other. I mean, they couldn't find work and they essentially moved outward. And there are historians out there that will suggest that things like drought and plagues and infestation, I mean, all you have to do is have locusts come in and destroy whole areas to explain why maybe some of these people started to move, creating conflicts with their neighbors and starting a chain reaction. That maybe explains why all of a sudden these settled societies, seemingly out of nowhere, would have an invasion by a brand new group of nomads that had hitherto been unknown. Was Attila the Hun in search of more loot and more conquest? Or was he simply moving out from a steppe that had become an environmental wasteland like Oklahoma during the Dust bowl era? Perhaps the most likely reason, at least in my mind, it's the one I tend to favor for why you had so much conflict between steppe nomads and their neighbors and has to do with the nature of the culture. And we talked about this in the show we did on the Apaches, the Apache Tears show. It's available from our archives if you want it. But it has to do with. There are sometimes cultural qualities amongst civilizations that do not allow them to live side by side in peace. When we talked about the Apaches, it had to do with the question of raiding, because this was something that was ingrained in the Apache way of life. Part of what created the status of a warrior, made them attractive as a marriage partner, helped provide for the tribe, was the ability to go and take stuff, either stuff you needed or stuff you wanted from your weaker neighbors. It was ingrained in their society to such a degree that when they would run up against societies that had more of a law and order sort of approach to things, it kept them from being able to live in peace. We described it as two cultures that would rub up against each other like sandpaper. Well, these steppe societies were often based on raiding or had raiding as a large component of what they did as well. I mean, when you look at the way that the settled societies around them often viewed them, it was bandits, we would say today, terrorists, because of their constant seizing of slaves. I mean, there were times where people simply couldn't go work in the fields because the step nomads would swoop down on the people working in the fields, kill the men and take the women with them. So today we would call them terrorists. There was a whole problem of cultures with values that just clashed, you know, living side by side. And Michael Khodorkovsky does a very good job, I think, in his book Russia's Steppe the Making of a colonial empire, 1500-1800. He has a whole chapter that deals with this, you know, cultural question of rubbing against their neighbors like sandpaper that he entitles the Sociology of the Frontier or why Peace Was Impossible. And here's what he says about this entire chapter devoted to showing you the cultural differences that made it hard for societies that were so unlike each other to get along. He says, quote, in this chapter, I argue that the interests of the two sides were fundamentally irreconcilable and that the confrontation between them was unavoidable. This confrontation, he says, was a function of the ever present and growing incompatibility between two very different societies. On the one side was Christian Russia, a military bureaucratic state with urban centers and a dynamic agricultural industrial economy. On the other were various non Christian societies with kinship based social organizations and static, overwhelmingly nomadic pastoral economies. We shall see, he writes, how these structural differences, deeply ingrained in the social, economic, political and religious character of the societies on both sides of the frontier, led to persistent and intractable conflicts throughout the period. End quote. I would make the case, though, that these differences that Khodorkovsky seems to think are confined to the period 1500 to 1800 and the Russian frontier is equally applicable for other frontiers that the step nomads bumped up against the settled societies at and other eras. These are value systems that conflict and that make it difficult, once peace is established, to keep the peace. Then you get into some of the less modern sorts of excuses for war. I mean, all that other stuff, environmental, trade, cultural sociological differences, that's all very modern and very educational oriented. But there's stuff that would have been more understandable to our ancestors that are just as likely reasons for why these things happened. How about the idea of God wills it? This concept that the Westerners understand is happening during the Crusades when the Pope said, God wills it. That's why you need to go on the crusade. But the Mongols were not immune from this idea that this was a divine mission also. And one of the things that makes Genghis Khan's situation so unusual from A historical sense is it's not unusual at all to suggest that the deity is involved in pushing your success. We've seen this amongst many of the great conquerors throughout history. I mean, Hitler thought he was walking with destiny. Alexander, Napoleon, Caesar, all these people felt as though there was some supernatural force guiding their destiny and helping them out in times of trouble. You even see this on the part of historical figures who aren't the great conquerors. I mean, Winston Churchill so famously felt the same way. What was unusual with the Mongol version of this is that Genghis Khan didn't just feel like he was walking with destiny and had the deity's support. He felt like this special favor on the part of the deity would follow his genetic line and transfer to his successors. In other words, when either Genghis or his son Ogedai gets it into their head that the Mongol conquests are the will of God, this continues to follow the Mongol rulership to the next guy and the next guy and the next guy. The Mongol khans considered themselves part of what's called by historians a universal monarchy. And you see through all their writings, for example, these exchanges we cited that they had with the Pope, that the sheer fact that they were able to be so successful was a sign of God's favor. Because if the deity didn't want the Mongols to be so successful against their opponents, why was the deity letting that happen? The Mongols may have seen themselves as a punishment sent by God, but they certainly didn't see themselves as spawned by the devil, which some of the Christian, for example, opponents and Muslim opponents often did think. Can you really explain the Mongol conquest as something that was inspired by God? Well, once you get it into your head that this is what God wants and that it is the destiny of the Mongols to conquer the entire world, this became a cause of war in and of itself. And you see it all the time in Mongol history, where essentially, once you first encounter the Mongols, if you live in a city, they come to you and say you're part of the Mongol Empire. And if you say, no, we're not, that is a direct challenge to their God. And it is a Cassius Belli event. It is a cause of war. Resisting the divine mission of the Khan and his successors is tantamount to declaring war against the Mongols. In other words, they often looked at this as though you declared war on them, not the other way around. Which brings us to the next possible reason for why the Mongols were involved in all this conflict to begin with. Revenge. Now, revenge is something of Course, that's a human quality, but you see it so often amongst barbarian peoples, peoples who do not live in literary societies that carry grudges for long periods of time. In the United States, we had a famous feud that went on between two families, the Hatfields and the McCoys. And yet, if you take that feuding dynamic between those individual families and overlay it over some of these societies, it works pretty darn well as explaining why these things happened. John Keegan, who I said I was not a big fan of, it's his view that Genghis Khan essentially conquers the world as part of an ongoing cycle of revenge. There's a famous line about the Roman Empire that the Romans conquered the world in a defensive war, which is a funny joke, sort of, but it's got little grains of truth to it, too. Perhaps the Mongols conquered the world as part of an act of revenge. When you read the Secret History of the Mongols, which is not such a good chronicle to explain why things really happened, but it is a very good primary source to look at to explain the values of the Mongol people, because this is the only history you really have that's written by Mongols, you see that revenge is an integral part of the entire affair, and not just the affair between the Mongols and other civilizations around them, but within the Mongol society, too. Revenge plays a key role. And it is very similar to the kinds of blood feuds you could see in, for example, the Germanic barbarians who were prevalent, you know, during the last years of the Western Roman Empire. You can see very similar kinds of blood feuds that lead to war between entire peoples because of a question of revenge between individuals, practically. So revenge is a possible reason that the Mongols were fighting their neighbors. And certainly when their neighbors would kill envoys that the Mongols sent kill ambassadors, this becomes, and often is a cause of war between societies throughout the entire history of the world. And the Mongols were no exception. So if you count, for example, an entire war against the Middle east, something that occurs because the Khwarizmian shah killed your emissaries, well, then you could look at that as perhaps a case of justifiable revenge. Unfortunately for the people of the Middle east, it meant millions of people had to die because of an act of provocation that one man or a few people around the ruler, the Khwrizmian shah, may have been involved with. Finally, there's an interrelated question that's involved with glory that might explain some of this, because when you look at why Napoleon did what he did, or why Alexander the Great did what he did. These are people who become drunk almost on their sense of reputation, legacy. I mean, you can go back to the earliest form of Western literature. We have Homer's, the Iliad. And you can see this question of glory brought to stark relief. It's an age old element of the human psyche. I mean, how much did personal aggrandizement and this idea of creating, you know, a long lasting piece of graffiti on the pages of world history play into why someone like Genghis Khan did what he did? You can throw another element into this too, that's related and it has to do with the way these steppe societies were organized. But you see the same thing in Germanic societies. You know, the so called barbarian era of the Germanic societies. You see it in the Celts, you see it in the Native Americans. How much these tribal coalitions required success on the part of their military leaders. You know, one of the things that the Great Khan had to do to keep his coalition together was to provide his underlings with stuff. You look at the way the Romans describe Attila the Hun when they send ambassadors to go out and meet this guy, and they arrive at the center where the Huns are located, and all the Huns around Attila, which are all of his commanders, and the leaders of clans and tribes that are under his confederacy, and they're all decked out in gold and furs and expensive jewels and stuff. But Attila himself has no jewelry on. He's dressed like a commoner, he drinks out of a simple wooden cup. He's not personally interested in all this wealth and riches, but he's required to keep bringing that in to maintain his position as the dominant head of a confederacy that essentially exists to continue to take stuff. Look at how much tribute from the conquered peoples going to the Mongols is a part of all of their writings. I mean, the secret history of the Mongols. When they ask the Great Khan to be the Great Khan, one of the things they promise him is the best stuff will get you the best women you could have. First pick of all the loot. And when the Chinese, for example, will buy the Mongols off, this is what buys them off. We'll give you lots of stuff. Okay, we'll take lots of stuff. How much did the lots of stuff stuff play into the motivation of the Mongols when if you gave them lots of stuff, they went home? You know, if an Apache leader, for example, could not provide well for his sub chiefs and his people, they'd get another one. The Mongols probably existed in a similar dynamic. So how did Genghis Khan maintain his rule at the head of a tribal confederacy. Well, it was a sort of a carrot and stick thing. The stick thing was massive violence if you rebelled against him. And we saw this when tribe after tribe after tribe of rebellious steppe nomads was wiped out by the Great Khan. But the carrots were all the stuff. Genghis Khan gave your tribe the best chance of getting the most loot from the surrounding civilizations. Now, it's on that note that I want to end this extra show, and I want to do so in a way that helps back up this idea of the transfer of loot, and it plays into so many of those reasons for warfare we talked about, whether it be trade or the one we just discussed, the taking of loot and the transfer of wealth from settled societies to the nomadic steppes. Stuart Legge, who wrote his history of the steppe in 1970, so the conditions were different than they are now. You had a Soviet Union in control of part of the steppe. You had Red China in control of the other part. But he wrote this coda to his work at the very end, trying to sort of synthesize everything he talked about before and to put the thousands of years of conflict and peaceful relations as well between the step nomads and their settled neighbors into some sort of understandable context. And he does so by suggesting that modern man is a fusion of those two kinds of people who throughout history had existed side by side, the pastoral nomads and the settled societies, with their farmers and their artisans and their merchants and their cities. Here's how he puts it at the end of his work. The barbarians of Asia. For the world outside its bleak skylines, the heartland of bygone ages held enduring mystery and fear. None could tell what stresses were at work within them, hidden beyond the howl of steppe winds, or when these stresses, bursting into clash and combat, would send their waves of fury rolling over grass and desert to break upon the settled peoples of the coastal belt. The nomads are integrated now. And the horse archer, save in his pale image, resurrected for ceremonial gatherings, is no more seen. But Lake Balkash reflects the arcing path of Soviet rockets under trial. The Mongolian rivers, the passage of Russian armor around the Ordos Loop stand China's nuclear installations in the sands of the Tarim Basin, her nuclear testing sites, new issues stirring within the ancient cauldron of inner Asia, and for the external world, the old apprehensions in new terms. Yet the heartland of yesterday, he writes, bequeaths to the giants poised across its corpse an aspect of itself. The mounted warriors of nomadic Asia through the millennia, when they held the greater part of mankind in fee, were striving to redress a basic imbalance of economic potential between the interior of the Eurasian continent and its oceanic rim. In that light, the terror they spread and the tribute they exacted can be seen as a primitive attempt to abolish inequality, as the most stupendous and continuous program of forced aid ever carried out. In return, for good or ill, the nomads imparted something of their own nature to the littoral peoples on whom their impacts fell. It has been said that the fusion of the qualities of step and soane has contributed to the emergence of what is now known as civilized man. That in his makeup are combined the peaceable, collaborative, reflective temperament of the cultivator and the disciplined, competitive, warlike spirit of the herdsman fighting for his pasture spaces and his plunder. End quote. Now, as a fan of the steppe people and their culture and their history, obviously the way Stuart Leg ends his wonderful work, the Barbarians of Asia, appeals to me. Yet at the same time, I need to remind myself to take three steps back and remember why it does. This nostalgic look at the steppe people is part of what you get, as we said, when they're no longer dangerous to you. It's like those sharks. It's one thing if you're swimming amongst them and at any time you could be bitten. It's another thing if they're an endangered species and you're only seeing them, you know, behind plexiglass in a water park. We also need to remember that this whole danger from the steppe did not end with Genghis Khan, as we had talked about the Russians he was, but the high water mark in a tidal tradition that would continue to lap waves of violence against the settled societies up until the 1800s. I mean, after Genghis Khan, you'll get a guy named Tamerlane, a distant relative of Genghis Khan, who will try to re establish the great Khan's empire and will kill an estimated 17 million people trying to do so. That is considered to be somewhere between 4 and 7% of the entire globe's population at this time period. And yet that still makes him a piker compared to Genghis Khan's casualty numbers. Another distant relative of Genghis Khan will end up moving into northern India, establish something that's known to history as the Mogul Empire, which is just sort of the term Mongol, said differently. And this will rule India, you know, eventually in a cooperative sense, shall we say that with the British into the 18 middle 1800s, the Chinese will almost fall to the Mongols again in the 1500s. More than 100,000 Mongols will be united under a single ruler and darn near take modern day Beijing in the 1500s again. And a people known as the Manchus from what's now Manchuria. A people who were almost certainly the same people that the Jurchen were. And you'll recall that they're the ones who created the Jin Dynasty in northern China that Genghis Khan overthrew as part of his conquest of China. These people, now called Manchus, would sweep down into China in the 1600s, establish a dynasty there that would exist until the Nationalists overthrew them in 1912. So lest we think that this is something from the deep, dark, distant past, it's barely a hundred years ago that the peoples of the steppe were still, in one way or another, exerting some form of influence on the geopolitical reality around us. And in the same way that I will romanticize and think back on that lost culture and civilization and the drama that came with it, in a romantic and nostalgic way, I know enough reality to know I wouldn't want to live next to it, in the same way that I might talk about the Apaches with all sorts of nostalgia and enjoyment, and I'd love to travel back in a time machine and see it for a couple of minutes. But I wouldn't want to live in northern Mexico next to a bunch of unpacified Chiricahua Apache anytime soon. It's the difference between seeing the sharks open and free in their native environment and seeing them in the safety of SeaWorld. Some things are just better experienced in hindsight. Safer, certainly. For more hardcore history, go to dancarlin.com.