From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Mongols
Date: 15 Oct 92 16:55:57 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.europe
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


The previous posting went to soc.culture.asian



from;

Russia and the Golden Horde:Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History,
Charles J. Halperin, Indiana Univ Press, 1985.

p.21

Mongol rule over Russia is traditionally considered to have lasted from
1240 to 1480, a century longer than in China or Persia, where the Mongols
had maintained their supremacy for nearly a century and a half. The longevity
of the Mongol Empire and its successor states, including the Golden Horde,
owed much to  their flexible and creative administration and to the legacy
of Chingis Khan's charismatic leadership and political acumen...

Evaluations of Chingis and his accomplishments tend toward the extremes. For
some historians he is the noble savage, the illiterate skyworshipper whose
inspired leadership, flawless judgments of human character, and military 
genius catapulted the obscure Mongols to the height of world power.  For 
others he is a monumental gangster whose bloodthirsty cruelty and indifference
to human life mobilized the barbarian Mongols for a worldwide rampage of death
and destruction. Both images derive from uncritical reading of the medieval
sources. The demigod emerges from the pages of the so-called Secret
History of the Mongols.  Though the origin and often the meaning of this text
are obscure, it has the virtue of expressing the Mongol point of view.
Critics of Chingis have relied on chronicles written in the sedentary
civilizations overrun by the Mongols, in particular China, Persia, and Russia.
These sources attribute the excesses of Mongol conquest to innate depravity.
Obviously neither of these views can be taken at face value.  Empire building
is an invariably destructive process, unwelcome to the conquered.

Tacitus immortalized the darker side of Roman expansion when he noted that
Romans made a wilderness and called it peace.  Chingis Khan's military and
political genius and charismatic leadership cannot be questioned; neither
can the number of lives lost during his pursuit of glory.  The same is true
of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napolean.  Chingis was no more
cruel, and no less, than empire-builders before and since.  Moral judgements
are of little help in understanding his importance.......


Chingis Khan's great abilities were not alone responsible for his success, 
which depended on the conditions of the Inner Asian steppe and
the culture of the nomads who dwelt there.  The central unit of 
nomadic society was the clan, which served all economic, social, political,
and military functions. Women and children looked after the herds, which
feed the men for warfare.  Males were trained from boyhood as mounted 
archers.  They fought as a unit under the command of the clan elder, who
also determined the political allegiance of the clan as a whole. Steppe
wars could arise over grazing rights, politics or personal feuds but
the nomads fought no more often than medieval European knights.   
one clan defeated another, the victors assimilated the losers into
their own clan as a military unit, perhaps with a new officers.....


Chingis had a divine mission and a higher purpose than glory and 
booty; Tengri, the Inner Asian Great Blue Sky, had granted him the
right to rule over all who lived in felt tents....


To storm cities he needed experts in siege warfare. He drafted these
from among the Muslims and the Chinese and built an army capable of
besieging any city in the world...With this advantage and the tactics
and iron discipline of all nomad armies, Chingis fashioned an almost
unbeatable war machine, capable of coordinated operations on on
immense scale....The armies were held together by the nomadic
clan-tribal system, and as they advanced their ranks swelled with the 
peoples they conquered.  Though Chingis' original Divine Mandate
applied only to nomads, his armies did not stop when they reached 
the ends of the steppe.


p. 24

Chingis Khan's empire did not fragement after his death as had those of
Alexander and Charlemagne....When the Mongols converted to Buddhism in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chingis became a Buddhist
saint.


  The significance and power of his name and memory in the successor
states of the Mongol Empire is reflected in the Yasa, the fictive legal code
created after his death but attributed to the great conqueror....

Clerics and chroniclers of each faith recorded the Mongol era largely in
religious terms and from vantage points of their own religions.  Thus,
depending on the source, Chingis quotes from the Koran, favors Nestorian
Christianity or holds Taoist beliefs. These sources, concerned mainly
with religion, fail seriously to adress the administrative structure of the
Mongol Empire and thus create the impression that it had none....

The enormous destructive cost of Pax Mongolica cannot be denied, but the
Mongol Empire made significant contributions to the political institutions,
economic development and cultural diversity of many lands.  No history of the
Mongol Empire, no matter how erudite, which dwells only on Mongol
destruction can be satisfactory.
-- 

	mark	


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