wait for it…

THE MONGOLS.

So you probably have a picture of the Mongols in your head.

Yes, that’s the picture:

brutal bloodthirsty, swarthy, humorously mustachioed warriors riding the plains, wearing fur, eating

meat directly off the bone,

saying bar bar bar.

In short,

we imagine the Mongol empire as stereotypically barbarian.

And that’s not entirely wrong.

But if you’ve been reading recent world history textbooks like we here at Crash Course

have,

you might have a different view of the Mongols,

one that emphasizes the amazing speed and success of their conquests—

how they conquered more land in 25 years than the Romans did in 400.

How they controlled more than 11 million contiguous square miles.

And you may have even read

that the Mongols basically created nations

like Russia and even Korea.

One historian has even claimed that the Mongols

“smashed the feudal system”

and created international law.

Renowned for their religious tolerance ,

the Mongols, in this view,

created the first great free trade zone, like a

crazy medieval Eurasian NAFTA.

And that’s not entirely wrong either.

Stupid truth, always resisting simplicity.

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

So remember herders?

We talked about them way back in episode one as an alternative to hunting and gathering

or agriculture.

Here are the key things to remember:

1. Nomads aren’t Jack Kerouac:

They don’t just go on like random road trips.

They migrate according to climate conditions so they can feed their flocks.

2. Nomads don’t generally produce

manufactured goods

which means they need to trade,

so they almost always live near settled people.

And 3. Because they live in generally live close

to nature and in harsh conditions,

pastoralists tend to be tougher than diamond-plated differential calculus.

Like, think of the Huns,

or the Xiongnu.

Or the Mongols. [sweet, familiar horns of the Mongol-tage

blare]

Okay, Stan. That’s enough.

Back to me. Stan.

I AM THE STAR OF THIS SHOW

NOT THE MONGOLS!!!

Hi. Sorry about that.

Right, so one last thing:

Pastoral people also tend to be more egalitarian,

especially where women are concerned.

Paradoxically,

when there’s less to go around, humans tend to share more,

and when both men and women must work for the social order to survive,

there tends to be less patriarchal domination of women.

Although Mongol women rarely went to war.

I can’t tell your gender.

I mean you’ve got the pants,

but then you also have the floopity flop,

so...

That’s the technical term, by the way.

I’m a historian. [suspiciously lacking a mustache]

If you had to choose a pastoral nomadic group to come out of central Asia and dominate the

world,

you probably wouldn’t have chosen the Mongols.

Because for most of the history we’ve been discussing, they just hung out in the foothills

bordering the Siberian forest,

mixing herding and hunting,

quietly getting really good at archery and riding horses.

Also the Mongols were much smaller than other pastoral groups

like the Tatars or the Uighurs.

And not to get like all

Great Man History on you or anything,

but the reason the Mongols came to dominate the world really started with one guy,

Genghis Khan.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The story goes that Genghis or Chingus [?] Khan

was born around 1162 with the name Temujin

to a lowly clan.

His father was poisoned to death,

leaving Temujin under the control of his older brothers,

one of whom he soon killed during an argument.

By 19 he was married to his first and most important wife,

Borte, who was later kidnapped.

This was pretty common among the Mongols, Temujin’s mom had also been kidnapped.

In rescuing his wife,

Temujin proved his military mettle and he soon became a leader of his tribe,

but uniting the Mongol confederations

required a civil war, which he won,

largely thanks to two innovations:

He promoted people based on merit rather than family position,

and second he brought lower classes of conquered people into his own tribe while dispossessing

the leaders of conquered clans.

Thus he made the peasants love him.

The rich hated him—

but they didn’t matter anymore, because they were no longer rich.

With these two building block policies,

Temujin was able to win the loyalty of more and more people and in 1206 he was declared

Great Khan,

the leader of all the Mongols.

How?

Well, the Mongols chose their rulers in a really cool way.

A prospective ruler would call a general council

called a khuriltai,

and anyone who supported his candidacy for leadership would show up on their horses,

literally voting with their feet.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Horses don’t have feet they have hooves.

I hate you, Me From the Past.

Also,

NO INTERRUPTING THE THOUGHT BUBBLE!!

After uniting the Mongols,

Genghis Khan went on to conquer a lot of territory.

By the time he died in his sleep in 1227, his empire stretched from the Mongol homeland

in Mongolia

all the way to the Caspian Sea.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So that’s a pretty good looking empire,

and sure a lot of it was pasture or mountains or desert,

but the Mongols did conquer a lot of people, too.

And in some ways with Genghis’ death the empire was just getting started.

His son Ogedei Khan expanded the empire even more.

And Genghis’ grandson Mongke was the Great Khan in 1258

when Baghdad, the capitol of the Abbasid Empire,

fell to the Mongols.

And another of Genghis’ grandsons,

Kublai Khan,

conquered the Song Dynasty in China in 1279.

And if the Mamluks hadn’t stopped another of

Genghis’ grandsons at the battle of Ain Jalut,

they probably would have taken all of North Africa.

Genghis Khan sure had a lot of grandkids...

It must be time for the open letter.

[gladly glides gracefully to faux glow]

An Open Letter To Genghis Khan’s Descendants:

But first,

let’s check what’s in the secret compartment today.

Oh.

A noisemaker and champagne poppers?

Stan,

you know I suck at these.

Ohhh, it’s because it’s a

BIRTHDAY PARTY!! YAY.

Happy birthday to Genghis Khan’s descendants.

How do I know it’s your birthday,

Genghis Khan’s descendants?

Because every day is your birthday.

Because right now on the planet Earth,

there are 16 million direct descendants of Genghis Khan,

meaning that every day is

the birthday of 43,000 of them.

So, good news, Genghis Khan;

Your empire might be gone, but your progeny lives on.

And on, and on, and on.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Best Wishes, John Green

Unfortunately for the Mongols,

those guys weren’t always working together, because

Genghis Khan failed to create a single political unit out of his conquests.

Instead after Genghis’ death,

the Mongols were left with four really important Empires called Khanates:

1. The Yuan Dynasty in China

2. The Il-Khanate in Persia

3. The Chagadai Khanate in Central Asia and

4. The Khanate of the Golden Horde in Russia.

If you remember all the way back to the Hellenistic period, this is similar to what happened to

another good general who wasn’t much for administration,

Alexander the Great.

Also,

neither of them ever conquered India.

The Mongols succeeded primarily

because of their military skill.

Genghis Khan’s army,

which never numbered more than 130,000

was built on speed and archery.

Just like this guy.

[No arrows on the pitch, please.]

Mongol mounted archers were like super fast tanks,

compared to the foot soldiers and knights

they were up against.

But wait,

all the military history nerds are saying:

once people knew that the Mongols were coming, why didn’t they just hole up in their castles

and forts?

It’s not like the Mongols had flying horses.

EXCEPT THEY DID.

They didn’t?

Stan, why are you always making history boring??

So the Mongols apparently didn’t have flying horses, but

they were uncommonly adaptable.

So even though they’d never seen a castle before they started raiding, they became experts

at siege warfare by interrogating prisoners.

And also adopted gunpowder,

probably introducing it to Europeans,

and they even built ships so they could attack Japan.

That might have worked, too

except there happened to be a typhoon.

Also,

people were terrified of the Mongols.

Often cities would surrender the moment the Mongols arrived,

just to escape slaughter.

But of course,

that only happened because there were occasions when

the Mongols, did, you know,

slaughter entire towns.

So with all that background,

let us return to the question of Mongol awesomeness.

First, Five arguments for awesome:

1.

The Mongols really did reinvigorate cross-Eurasian trade.

The Silk Road trading routes that had existed for about 1000 years by the time the Mongols

made the scene had fallen into disuse,

but the Mongols valued trade because they could tax it,

and they did a great job of

keeping their empire safe.

It was said that a man could walk from one end of the Mongol empire to the other with

a gold plate on his head

without fear of being robbed.

2.

The Mongols increased communication

throughout Eurasia

by developing this pony express-like system of weigh stations with horses and riders that

could quickly relay information.

It was called the yam system and also included these amazing bronze passports, which facilitated

travel.

3.

Another thing that travelled along the Mongol trade routes was cuisine.

For example, it was because of the Mongols that rice became a staple of the Persian diet.

Which I mention entirely because I happen to like Persian food.

4.

The Mongols forcibly relocated people who were useful to them,

like artists and musicians and, especially administrators.

As you can imagine,

the Mongols were not much for administrative tasks like keeping records so they found people

were good at that stuff and just moved them around the empire.

This created the kind of cross-cultural pollination that world historians these days get really

excited about.

And 5.

The Mongols were almost unprecedentedly tolerant of different religions.

They themselves were shamanists, believing in nature spirits,

but since their religion was tied to the land from which they came,

they didn’t expect new people to adopt it and they didn’t ask them to.

So you could find

Muslims and Buddhists and Christians

and people of any other religion you can think of prospering throughout the Mongol empire.

And it’s that kind of openness that has led some historians