From The New Yorker:
On September, Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church ever to visit Mongolia. It must have been a humbling stopover. The country has fewer than fifteen hundred Catholics. The welcoming ceremony, in Ulaanbaatar’s main square, attracted a few hundred spectators—a crowd less than a thousandth the size of one that had gathered to see him in Lisbon a month earlier. One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event.
Not everyone understood why the Pontiff was there. A caterer at a banquet for the Vatican entourage asked a Times reporter, “What are Catholics again?” But the Pope came prepared. Speaking to diplomats, cultural leaders, and the Mongolian President, he celebrated the religious freedom protected under the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—“the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.” He also celebrated “the Pax Mongolica,” the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia, citing its “absence of conflicts” and respect “of international laws.”
Many earlier Christians would have been staggered by Francis’s words. The first recorded mention of the Mongols in Western Europe is from a Benedictine monk who, in 1240, recorded testimony that the Mongols were “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan . . . thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings.” Five years later, Pope Innocent IV sent Güyük Khan, the third leader of the Mongol Empire, a letter expressing “our amazement” that the Mongols “have invaded many countries belonging to both Christians and to others and are laying them waste in a horrible desolation.”
Muslims, too, saw the Mongols as bloodthirsty savages. When Hulagu Khan stormed Baghdad, in 1258, bodies were heaped on the streets; drains reportedly ran red in the heart of Muslim civilization, while Baghdad’s great library, the House of Wisdom, burned. For many historians, the sacking marked the end of five centuries of cultural and scientific flourishing—the Islamic Golden Age. In November, 2002, Osama bin Laden claimed that George H. W. Bush’s Administration had been more destructive than “Hulagu of the Mongols.” Months later, in the run-up to the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein referred to the United States and its allies as “the Mongols of this age.”
The image of Mongols as brutes outlasted their conquests. In a Voltaire play, they appear as “wild sons of rapine” who set out to “make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.” Today, the name of the empire’s founder remains so tied to tyranny and fanaticism that it’s become a cliché to describe politicians as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.” In Russia and Eastern Europe, the “Mongol-Tatar yoke” denotes not just the period of Mongol rule but also other forms of despotism; days after Francis’s comments, the Ukrainian political consultant Aleksandr Kharebin used the phrase to describe Putin’s Russia.
But Pope Francis was far from alone in challenging the old tropes. “We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueller.
The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
The Eurasian steppe is a vast curtain of grassland that stretches from Hungary to Manchuria. Its size is almost impossible to fathom: a vista of green and tan whose termini are farther from each other than Anchorage is from Miami or Cairo is from Johannesburg. Its historical significance derives from a curious quadruped that has lived there for roughly a hundred thousand years: the horse. Long-legged, with powerful lungs, elastic tendons, and a gut capable of digesting tough grass, the creature thrives on the open steppe. Horses were well equipped to weather the Ice Age, their hard hoofs able to break through snow and ice to expose grasses underneath.
“The horse has been the most efficient and enduring means of transport humans have ever used,” Sattin, a British journalist, writes in “Nomads,” “and the ability to ride a horse transformed life on earth, perhaps nowhere more so than on the steppe.” Horses were bred in captivity on the western steppe at least five thousand years ago. The wheel was invented around the same time, and the two innovations, combined, allowed nomadic pastoralism to flourish.
The people of the Yamnaya culture were the first to take advantage of the new technologies and dominate much of the steppe. Starting north of the Black Sea about 3000 B.C., they used horses and wheeled carts to traverse astounding distances; geneticists have found second cousins buried almost nine hundred miles away from each other. They and their descendants also spilled into Europe, India, the Near East, and western China, as Harl, a professor emeritus of history at Tulane, recounts at the beginning of “Empires of the Steppes.” The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali. (Today, more than three billion people speak an Indo-European language.) Roughly seventy per cent of us have some Yamnaya ancestry in our DNA. More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies.
In the millennia after the Yamnaya expansion, the makeup of the Eurasian steppe changed. By the seventh century B.C., a people known as the Scythians occupied the western end. The Scythians—whose mounted archers wielded composite bows and rode on saddles with leather toe-loop stirrups—controlled much of the steppelands between the Black and the Caspian Seas. They also helped bring down the Assyrian Empire and, according to Herodotus, twice defeated the King of Persia. Travel to the eastern steppes and jump forward a couple of centuries, to around 200 B.C., and you find the Xiongnu, who for a period collected payment from Han China in exchange for peace.
As with so many steppe nomads, much of what we know about the Scythians and the Xiongnu comes from what sedentary people wrote about them. (Sattin tells us that the name Xiongnu derives from a Chinese word meaning “illegitimate offspring of slaves.”) Harl and Sattin combine these accounts with newer genetic and archeological evidence to construct a richer story. Both the Scythians and the Xiongnu, it turns out, were multiethnic confederations. The Xiongnu encompassed a range of tribes across a stretch of steppe about as wide as the continental United States. Under the leadership of a charismatic ruler named Modu Chanyu, they established a complex governing apparatus, complete with Chinese scribes, a bureaucratic hierarchy, and, according to Harl, their own system of writing. “In constructing the first imperial order on the steppes, Modu Chanyu wrote the script for subsequent steppe conquerors from Attila the Hun to Genghis Khan,” Harl writes.
. . . .
Among the nomads covered in “Empires of the Steppes,” Harl is most impressed by Genghis Khan and his Mongols. Attila the Hun helped bring down the Western Roman Empire, while campaigns by the later conqueror Tamerlane helped propel the rise of Mughal India, Muscovite Russia, and Shiite Safavid Iran. But the steppe-straddling superpower established by Genghis Khan was uniquely long-lived and expansive. It was through the Mongol Empire, Harl writes, that papermaking, block printing, and gunpowder moved from the East to the West, hastening the spread of knowledge and catalyzing Europe’s conquest of the seas. “The global economy of the modern age was thus born thanks to the Mongol legacy,” he declares.
The idea that the Mongols were the architects of modernity is a mainstay of the new scholarship. Sattin presents an argument similar to Harl’s, adding the compass to the list of innovations sent westward, although he acknowledges that other nomads, such as the Arabs, helped deliver them to Europeans. Both authors are able to draw upon such earlier work as the anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” (2004), a charming, poetic, and laudatory introduction to the Mongols that, more than any other book, helped advance the steppe restoration.
All these chroniclers tell a similar story of the Mongols’ ascent. A modest, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless hunter-nomad named Temujin, having been abandoned by his clan as a nine-year-old, united the tribes of the eastern steppes for the first time in four centuries. In 1206, at a gathering of steppe leaders, he was bequeathed the title Chinggis Khan, which means something like “fierce” or “oceanic” ruler. (The English “Genghis” comes from translations of Persian sources.) In the next two decades, he and his followers became the first to bring under one dominion the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an area nearly as wide as the steppe itself.
After his death, in 1227, Genghis Khan’s domain continued to swell until it covered some twenty per cent of the world’s landmass, from Syria to Korea. In the east, his son Ogedei subdued northern China. When Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, overtook the south, he unified the country and founded the Yuan dynasty. The events of the west, meanwhile, feature in Morton’s “The Mongol Storm” and Favereau’s “The Horde.”
Link to the rest at The New Yorker
