Within a generation of uniting the nomad tribes of the Eurasian Steppes into one unified Mongol nation in 1206, Genghis Khan and his sons gained control of the largest contiguous land empire in history. This year's 800th anniversary of the rise to power of Genghis Khan offers a welcome opportunity to look at the immeasurable impact that the Mongol empire and conquests have had on Europe to this day.
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  Click to listen to the documentary |
At his death in 1227, Genghis Khan and his nomads had expanded the Mongol empire to an area twice the size of the United States today. Eventually Mongol power extended from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, over an area the size of the African continent.
The Mongols conquered China, most of present-day Russia, Central Asia, Persia, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. Mongol armies advanced to the fortified gates of towns in Hungary, Ukraine and Poland.
"Certainly he was a warrior of his time. He had his own cruelties, he killed personally, and he also killed spontaneously in a rage or when he was jealous. " "But all sources, enemy and friend, agree on the point that he was very generous, he was not small-minded. He was very modest, he said he had no need for personal adornments or riches, and he would give to those who had nothing." "He was very far-sighted. He did not consider his own person important, he was the great Khan, he was very fair-minded. Otherwise how could he have attained the loyalty of such different people who followed him? In short, and although I say this with the necessary caution, he was certainly a charismatic personality. And that makes him a great leader." Dr Veronika Veit, professor of Mongol Studies at Bonn University in Germany |
They came with little more than 100,000 men and nearly half a million horses. Travelling in winter without infantry, their surprise attacks were carried out with a speed unknown to their European targets.
From Hell
Europeans were at first mystified by the Mongolians, believing them to be from Hell, from Tartarus. Indeed the Mongols were fierce and could be cruel to those who resisted. One third of the Hungarians, for example, were killed or imprisoned.
Professor Jigjidiin Boldbaatar, director of the Institute of Historical Research at the National University of Mongolia argues:
"Historians from Central Asia or Marxists point at the alleged millions who were slaughtered during his campaigns. For example, certain scholars maintain that during the siege of Jand nearly one million people were butchered by the Mongol army. But cities with a population of one million or more are a 20th-century phenomenon. Perhaps during that time, the population did not exceed 100,000."
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Professor Boldbaatar |
This was not to be the case, but European curiosity had been aroused. Kings and popes sent envoys to the Mongolian courts in Asia, resulting in the first lasting direct and conscious contact between Latin Christians and the Asian Orient.
Pax Mongolica
Under the Mongols, one ruler controlled the entire length of the Eurasian continent, and this made it possible for people and services to travel huge distances freely. Merchants like Marco Polo were able to journey safely for thousands of miles from Italy to the Far East.
This Pax Mongolica, as it was called, led to the most advanced system of communication known to man up to that time, including an army of interpreters and a postal system with relay stations through which mail could travel up to 400 kilometres a day. As Professor Boldbaatar points out, "Some scholars say that phenomenal speed was the medieval equivalent then of modern-day Internet technology today." Under Mongol control, the Steppes had become open thoroughfares for a global exchange of people, ideas and goods.
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No European country has been more deeply affected by the Mongol invasions as Russia has. The very shape of the fur-lined 13th-14th century crown of the tsars, the Monomakh Cap, reflects the influence that the Mongols had on the Russian concept of what a ruler should be. "The Mongols were actually the founders of the modern Russian state, of the Muscovy Khanate, as some historians call it", says Dr Irina Morozova, a specialist in Mongolian history and a research fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies of the universities of Amsterdam and Leiden. As she explains in the programme, the main political legacy of the Mongols was the concept of the super-legality of the Russian autocracy. Russia's pull into the Mongol and Asian sphere also restricted the country's contacts with the West, however, and left Russians with a permanent ambivalence about where they belong, to Asia or to Europe. Click to listen to Cavalry, caravans and Christians |
As Jack Weatherford, professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota points out:
"The Mongolians were not craftsmen, they did not invent new things but they moved them around and suddenly after the Mongols arrived, you began to get things like the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass. These are items that created the Renaissance, they all came from the Far East and they all came as a result of the Mongol trade system."
Historical shake-upDr Weatherford is the author of the book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Three Rivers Press, 2004). As he explains in his book and in our documentary:
"The unique genius of the Mongol civilization is not that it created anything, it did not give the world a new crop or craft or inventions. What it did is move them around from one regional civilization to another, so we began to develop a universal civilization."
"At the same time we began taking in information about printing and the compass and the abacus to Europe, they were bringing information about the making of glass and steel out of the West to the East. So there was this awakening of each civilization to the other."
Text and photographs by © RNW/Marijke van der Meer
Tags: conquest, cult, empire, europe, genghis khan, hungary, Mongolia, russia, ulan Bator