Gone Medieval - Genghis Khan's Pax Mongolica

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Jeremiah Jenne to explore the incredible impact of the Mongol Empire on medieval history. From Marco Polo's travels, to the Mongol postal system and groundbreaking innovations such as paper money under the Pax Mongolica.The Mongols unified a vast territory, allowing for unprecedented cultural exchange and technological advancements leading to a unique era of stability and interconnectedness shaped the world far beyond the 13th and 14th centuries.More:Genghis Khan to Tamerlanehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/62GXJOJWKCOHEijcyVLUu8?si=8d698a9f680d4b91Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producers are Rob Weinberg and Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. In the late 13th century, a young Venetian merchant embarked on a journey that would change his life and shaped the course of European history. Armed with nothing but his wits and an insatiable curiosity, Marco Polo ventured into the heart of the Mongol Empire of Kubla Khan. a society whose incredible innovations could potentially transform Western Europe and its economic practices. Marco Polo described a realm of unimaginable wealth whose iron production dwarfed that of Europe,

where cities bustled with commerce and innovation, and where paper money it was widely used. Polo wrote, The Khan has such a quantity made that with it he could buy all the trade. treasures in the world. The system functioned smoothly throughout the vast empire with Khan's subjects willingly paying their taxes using paper money, demonstrating a high level of trust in the currency. It allowed for easier trade and economic management across the Mongol territories. Then there was the Mongol's sophisticated postal system, known as the Yam. This network of relay stations provided fresh horses, food, and lodging for merchants and official messengers,

greatly increasing the speed and efficiency of travel and communication across the empire. And unlike many European societies of the time, the Mongol Empire allowed religious freedom within its borders, which helped maintain peace among diverse populations. Add to that, the use of coal for heating, gunpowder, porcelain production, and a social welfare system which included provisions for the care of the elderly and the poor. If people were afflicted by calamities such as unfavorable seasons, storms, or locust infestations, the con would not only exempt them from taxes for that year,

but also provide them with corn for food and seeds from his own supplies. This level of social responsibility and disaster relief was uncommon in many other societies. This meritocratic system employed by the Mongols, where competence was valued over heredity in government positions, was so advanced and surprising to European eyes that some in Europe could not believe Marco Polo's accounts. What Polo was witnessing was the period of the Pax Mongolia, or Mongolese, a remarkable period of relative stability and interconnectedness that spanned much of Eurasia during the 13th and 14th centuries. At its height, the Mongolian Empire stretched from Pusan in the east to Budapest in the west, from Lithuania in the north to Vietnam in the south.

To find out more about this era of unprecedented peace and prosperity, which came about as a result of the vast Mongol Empire's conquests and subsequent rule, I'm joined by Dr. Jeremiah Jenny, author, historian, and co-host of the podcast Barbarians at the Gate, a podcast of Chinese history and Chinese culture. Jeremiah, welcome to gone medieval. Hello, thank you for having me. I am absolutely delighted to have you because this is probably one of my favorite medieval subjects

and one that often gets forgotten about because I think it's so easy for when we throw out the term medieval people to just think that that means Europe and absolutely nothing else. But obviously, further to the east, we have incredibly interesting things going on. And, you know, in particular, I think one of the big things that shapes, I mean, medieval Europe as well, is the Pax Mongolica, which gets set up. And I don't think that's hyperbole either, really. No, not at all. And I think it's also a strange phrase when we think about a Mongolian peace, because that's not usually the phrase that,

is associated with the Mongols are coming. And certainly for in the 13th century, in the 1200s, that was very much the case. The Mongols were something to be feared if they were coming to your neighborhood. But once the conquest was over, what they left behind, as you alluded to in introduction, it created conditions for connections that shaped both Europe and also in other parts of the world as well, as far east as Korea, Japan, and the islands off of Southeast Asia. And it's just such an incredible accomplishment. But of course, this is as the case of all empires, which are able to create some kind of peace.

There is, of course, rather a lot of conquest that takes place, which I don't think can be is swept under the rug, nor should it be. But I would also argue that we do have a tendency that when we're talking about the Mongol Empire, this is when we suddenly are like, oh, isn't it all rather violent? And isn't it terrible? You know, and, you know, yes, it certainly is violent. That's not what I'm saying. But, you know, more violent than the Roman Empire, than the British Empire? I shouldn't think so. But I do think there's a tendency to kind of other empires, especially from Asia, when they also achieve amazing things. No, I would agree. And I think coming at this from the perspective of someone whose research background is mostly in China and East Asia, I think that, othering is an important concept. Part of this is that how we talk about that great expanse of territory, the step, the great plains, if you will, that connect East Asia all the way west to

what is today Hungary nearly. There is a tendency, I think, among historians on both sides of the landmass, in China and in the West, to just consider that place, there be dangers, there are nomads. And I think because of the sources are written from often the settled civilizations that tend to incur the emergence of these different groups from that area, that's the only thing that is written about those areas. So the people who live there, of course, are innovators of themselves. They are also people who are living, who are trying to get by. And their interactions with their neighbors sometimes are conflict and sometimes their cooperation. But this idea that Central Asia, the land of the step is this great unknown wilderness full of tribal people, rubs a lot of people who study East Asia wrong in the same way that many medievalists hear the word dark ages and kind of immediately.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. And so I think that's important that we acknowledge that, that othering does occur. Absolutely. And I spare us within this in order to set us up, because, we're going to talk about one of the great innovations that comes as a result of an empire. But there are multiple steps along the way. And this is kind of the big story of the 13th century rise of the Mongol empires. And I mean, an easy place to start, I think is 1206 when Temujin becomes Jenghis Khan.

And at this point, the Mongol tribes are theoretically unified. I mean, it's almost glib. think to say this, but am I being too easy and saying, oh, yes, let's start at 1206. Yeah, I mean, I think 1206 is a good place to start, in part because we could get into the whole politics of the step, the different clans. And the way the terms of some of these clans have been conflated with ethnic terms like Mongol, Tatar, and these. I think a lot of the terminology we use tends to obscure some of the things that are going on. So let's skip that for a moment. Let's say that one thing that the person that history knows, as Jingas Khan did, was not only does he emerge

as the leader of his own confederation, but he also works to bring in disparate groups of different levels of sophistication militarily, politically, socially, into one larger organization. And he does this both through charisma, through force, and also, frankly, through a little bit of innovative ways of organizing people. So for example, breaking down the different groups and reassigning them into military units that aren't necessarily dependent upon, oh yeah, all of our uncles is that guy. And the result is that these are things that hadn't, and it didn't experimented with, this isn't completely coming from nowhere. But at the same time, he makes it part or central to his rise to power. The whole biography of Jingasahan, there's plenty of information out

It's a great podcast series by Dan Carlin, for example, and others. It's an amazing story. It's a real epic. Skip the movie that stars John Wayne as Genghis Khan, please. And go, go check out Dan Carlin or someone like that. But beginning at 1206, he is selected, nominated. There's a process by which the great leaders of this area come together, and he is the one that emerges as the one they all choose to lead him.

And what's amazing about this is not a lot. only do they pick him, but he stays in that position because lots of people get picked. But then their kids or their grandkids, it all falls apart. And what's amazing about this story is that the things he puts together have a staying power that exceeds almost every other attempt to organize the people of the step, at least for the preceding few centuries. You'd have to go way much further back to find an equivalent. It's an absolutely huge amount of territory that he ends up controlling as well. It goes from the Pacific to Eastern Europe.

You know, it's the largest contiguous land empire in history, which is no small feat at a time, you know, when you cannot fly airplanes. You know, there are no trains. There are, there is nothing other than, I suppose, diplomacy and the correct way to administer a state. on horseback. It's incredible, you know. No, I agree. But I do think sometimes when we think about Mongol Empire, you know, it looks like such a huge expanse of territory. When you look at a historical Atlas, you see the big shaded area between Korea and, you know, Kiev. And you think, my goodness, that's just such an enormous space.

It's almost the whole, quote unquote, known world. How was it done with only, you know, a million people or however? how many Mongols were there really? But I think two things about this. One, it's not necessarily, a Mongol Empire is not the same thing as a Roman Empire or a Tong Empire of China or even a British Empire later.

All of these different polities, although we give them the same title, are different in how they construct their rule. And it's not like the Jingas Khan or some of his descendants would send out you know, they had forts at every single place or they tried to control every single town and city. It was a much looser confederation than that. And also very importantly, and this is where we, again, we kind of conflate ethnic terms with organizational terms. Even at the time of 1206 when Jinges Sahan is consolidating his power, it's not just Mongols, as in the people who are ethnically classified as a Mongol or Mongolian.

already it's people from other areas, other places, people who have conquered, people with whom they have made alliances. And that just grows to the point that by the time the Mongolians or they're just, the Jenghisan and his descendants are ruling, you know, what's today Russia, ruling what's today Iran, Iraq, this area, or ruling what is, you know, today China. they're doing so with the help of a lot of people. And these people are coming from all over. And this is the part I think makes Pax Mongolia so great. They're sharing their ideas of how to do this better. They're sharing the ideas of how to administer territory, how to govern, how to run an economy,

technology, all of these things. For the first time, in a long time, it's not that these ideas were completely foreign or unknown, but they're in the same room. And that's what makes their empire such as it is so special. And in some ways gives it a, you know, its own particular place in history. I think this is such an important point because I think that there's a lot of emphasis placed on, you know, the military conquest of this area. But this isn't just a case in of Jinges Khan just coming in and taking out everyone who's, in their way and it's just kind of like a tour to force. Now, I'm not saying that there wasn't any

military, anything. But this is also kind of an alliance situation as well, no? Well, it was. And I think you know, we're walking. We have to walk that kind of thin line. We don't want to exaggerate the extent of Mongol and Mongolian army brutality, especially in the beginning. Because again, a lot of the sources we have about this are from the people who are being attacked. And for them, and again, I don't want to minimize their trauma either. I'm sure. it was terrifying. At the same time, we have so many accounts from so many different sources that would suggest even if we are to take it in the context of its time. And of course, as you know, medieval warfare was conducted according to standards in many places that would be shocking.

But even by the standards of the time, there was a clear sense that this was a style of warfare that was one step above. And so terror was clearly part of this. So we were walking. a line here between, we don't want to make the Mongolian seem like these brutes that rode down and then destroyed and left nothing in their wake. They did that. But they also, over time, developed and created the conditions by which many of these areas came back. Maybe not the same way. And in some cases, not at all. But still, there is aspects to their story, as you said, that involve far more than just destruction. So can we talk about that? a little bit because, you know, obviously there is a lot of destruction as well. But, you know, say

a Mongol horde shows up outside your city and you say, yeah, that's great. Amalgamate me. You know, is that going to be enough if you agree or is there still going to be some light brutality? Like, I like you. Please, please select your menu options for the Empire Update. Would you like the full destruction package or would you mind just some light brutality? Who doesn't like a little bit of light brutality? I have to say there were options available to many of the cities and people when the Mongols or their armies showed up. There were times when it was already decided upon arriving outside the gates that an example was going to be made. But there were plenty of other times when the Mongols would show up and they would send emissaries ahead. And they would say things like, listen, this is happening.

You can either come with or you can't decide not. to, but the longer you decide, the harder it's going to be for you. There were cities or there were states that said, you know what, this is going to be bad, but, you know, it just seemed, we've heard what happened to this other city. We heard what happened to this other people. Do what you must, but just, you know, spare us as best you can. You will pay up whatever it is. There were other cities that were like, you know what? They sent their Mongolian emissaries back with their heads chopped off or their bodies, at which point they got,

I believe Jenghisan didn't refer to it as, quote, the full treatment. I don't know what the Mongolian gloss for that is. But, you know, you can look in all of the records of the pyramids of skulls and the various other, just, and much more traumatic and horrible things that were done as a point of making an example.

There was one group, though, that often made out pretty well regardless of the circumstances of their neighbors. And that was this, and this is really important, ladies and gentlemen, if you're ever in a position where you're about to be overrun by a marauding army, be useful, like have a skill. I mean, this is true in life, you know, but you don't want to just be like a communications professional.

You want to be a communication professional that's also a really handy blacksmith or leather worker or, you know, a talented singer that counts for something. because the Mongol armies were always looking for people to add, they saw them as a kind of slavery. Although I want to be careful with that term, because that's obviously a term. It comes with a lot of different connotations in history. But the idea was that many artisans,

many people, crafts people, things like that, were actually taken out of the cities and then redistributed to the various Mongolian lords and princes for their own retinue. I'm not saying that's a great option. But it does beat, you know, having you laid out and trampled with horses or whatever the execution du jour was. Oh, absolutely. I think that it is important to kind of contextualize this. And, you know, it's not as though we see further west that there is an enslavement of conquered peoples because there's rather a lot of that going back and forth. And, you know, even to the point where you see people pick fights with people who are not their religion in order to. enable some light slaving when you're getting to the battlefield. So, you know, I'm not saying it's great.

I'm not in favor of it, but I do think that it is important to understand how this plays out worldwide at the time. And so I suppose if we fast forward then, right? So you have this really terrible period when, you know, the army comes to town and your city is taken over and maybe people are redistributed and cities are there. and cities are then going to be administered in this other block. Is there a resulting, I don't know, high quality of life for the individuals who are living under this 50 years on, 75 years on, something like that? You know, it, unfortunately, the old saw, it depends, comes in here because there are some cities, you know, that were just, they never came back. I mean, the populations were dispersed. This is especially true in some of the Central Asian cities that were among the first targets of the armies. But I do believe that later on, the Mongol rulers and the different members of the extended clan began to realize that destroying a city wasn't necessarily always as useful as becoming, as utilizing the city.

Thinking about where the Mongols come out of, they're not really urban people. And so their first encounters with cities are, they don't really understand them. They don't particularly enjoy them. They don't like living there. I mean, even to the point where we get to the end of the 13th century, and Kublai Khan, going down a couple of generations, is building his version, an early version of the forbidden city and what would become Beijing. But in the courtyards of these palaces are these giant felt tents where people feel

actually more comfortable sleeping. So the point about this is early on, many of the places that were attacked were treated with a certain amount of disdain, contempt, and destruction. That would change later on. And you could also make an argument that some of the people who were removed or who agreed to collaborate, they ended up making contributions far beyond perhaps what they could have imagined. You know, you think about mathematicians who were transported from what was, you know, today, Iran, to work on a hydraulics project in North China along with a Chinese mathematics.

mathematician or, you know, people who were metal workers from as far, you know, even into Western Europe, who were transported to the middle of the Mongolian step where there isn't a tree to be seen and said, given the instructions like, there's no trees here and we like to drink. Make a tree that we can also do keg stands under. They did. I mean, I don't want to be too glib, because, again, this, I'm sure for the people involved, this was a very, some because of a very frightening experience. But at the same time, it did transform places, I mean, for obvious reasons, but then for more subtle ones, it transformed the places that were made part of this larger empire and the lives of the people

who live there. And I mean, it transforms the world as well and the lives of a lot of people who are going to be living under it because, you know, we've got a lot of really interesting things that happen under the resulting Paxmongoloka. And, you know, obviously the big one is trade, right? We wax lyrical all the time about the Silk Road, and that's one of those things that is instantly recognizable. But this commercial activity really thrives under the Pax Mongoloka, right? One of my favorite sources for this era are the traveler's tales. I mean, we know of Marco Polo, and a lot of people argue whether he made it or not. let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he and his father and uncle did.

But there's a lot of other people other than Marco Polo who are going east. The polos are following well-defined routes. They're not exploring. They're just following a road. And there are people who are going west as well. There are emissaries from the Mongol who are associated with the Mongol court who end up in today's France, you know, meeting the kings of France and the king of England. So there's a lot of people going back and forth, and one of the reasons they can do this in its trade or its ideas is that for the first time they can travel, this amazing expanse of terrain, territories, cultures, languages, and it's all theoretically under one set of rulers.

And not only is it under one set of rulers, but it's under a set of rulers who have a relatively standard set of rules. there are laws in place about what happens to you if you molest a traveler. There are laws in place about what happens if you break a contract. And we think about what it might have been like in the years before the Pax Mongolia, maybe the 10th century or the 9th century or the years afterwards. The 15th century or 16th century, we're traveling across Asia and we're going through every hill, every valley. I mean, there were parts of England you couldn't travel more than 15 miles without having to pay

up to like two different kinds of bandits and a third one who just happened to be related to the second one. Imagine having to do that the entire expanse of Asia. Now, it's much easier. And many, many people take advantage of this. And some of the stories they bring back are just remarkable, just fresh new ways of looking at culture, looking at people. And I think it's one of the most special aspects of an era that began in trauma, but ended up

being really a time of great contact. Yeah, I mean, just incredible innovations in terms of what it's going to require to make a world-class system for caravans, you know, and the empire really facilitates trade and communication and this movement of people, right? Because I think the number one thing that always springs to mind for me is the Yam system within this. Can you talk a little bit about that? So the Yam system, and no, this has nothing to do with root vegetables, this is a system by which, it had existed in its own forms in China for centuries, but the Mongol Empire, because of the sheer expanse that they have to rule, and we're not even talking about thinking about all the way to West Asia, imagine just trying to rule something as vast as China if you're from the outside. You need to get people and communications from one place to another very quickly. You needed to do it.

in the most effective way possible, and the relay system was the best way to do that. But relay system, one, like, think Pony Express, if you're into U.S. history. It does require infrastructure. It requires roads. Not everywhere is step. So you can't just simply ride across the grassline.

Even where there is step, we say step, it's not all grass. It's also hills and marshes and things. So you need roads. You need these roads to make sense, and you need these roads to have stations, at least every, you know, let's say, 20 or 30, sometimes 4,000.

40 miles apart that would be stocked with horses, food, water, everything you would need. As you build this out, as you build this network out, it allows travelers, once they kind of reach the outermost outpost of this system, they can move at surprising speeds. You know, there's some talk about like 200 miles a day, 300 miles a day, depending upon what time you get up in the morning. And that's a pretty amazing speed for land travel in this. period. And, you know, there was some talk that messages could be delivered from what would become the capital of the Mongolian Empire, at least the Eastern Mongolian Empire, which today's

Beijing, then known as Kambalak. And some of the Khan there could send threats to relatives out who were stationed out in Persia, you know, in three to four weeks. It may not be a WhatsApp, but that was pretty, that was pretty instant communication for the period. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And this gives rise essentially to a postal. system, right? And this functions super, super effectively for something in the medieval period. Yeah, absolutely it does. And it's something that is one of the contributions that the Mongolians leave for China. The Mongols only rule China for really the whole, the whole country for really not less than 100 years. But one of the things they leave in place are these relay stations and so subsequent

dynasties after make use of this. Now in some other areas, of course, the infrastructure requires investment and it requires upkeep. So not every place where these relay stations were put, you know, survives after the Mongols themselves or their descendant states stop caring about them. But I'll tell you, there are still towns just outside of today's Beijing that exist today because they were on the postal route. And you can still see remnants, very faded remnants of what they were. while we're going back almost 700 years, 800 years. Now, you've already mentioned a big thing that happens that really facilitates trade here is a unified system of law, a unified system of contracts.

But there's also this really cool innovation that the Mongols come up with, which is a standardized system of paper money, right? Which is incredible. And how does this help trade? You have to imagine for a moment that you're like Marco Polo or say a trader from like West Asia and you're, and you show up. You're like, so how do I buy this? Like, do you have any paper? Like paper.

What strange alchemy is this that we can turn paper into silver? It must. It really blew people's minds. Paper money had existed in China for this. If nothing else, the Mongol rulers were very good at seeing an idea, not caring where it came from, and saying if that works, Let's do it. It was one of their strengths, really. And paper money was one of them, and especially under Kublai Khan, who's a couple generations

removed from Jingas Khan. He's ruling in the late 13th century. You know, he's one of the ones who begins a system whereby he backs paper money to be used as bills of exchange. And, of course, as anyone who knows economics, this really helps to facilitate trade over vast areas. Now we're not bringing giant bags of coins. We're bringing papers, bills of exchange.

And it works really well. until it doesn't. And of course, as many people who are historians of economics will know, strong fiscal administration early as historians will know, or anyone who follows U.S. politics, good fiscal administration will have faith in your securities and your bills of exchange. But once you start printing money because you have to say invade Japan and you're out of money, then things can go wrong very, very quickly, which does happen to the Mongols. But that's not taking anything away from the original innovation, which was to make paper money available

make it useful, and also to tell people that they had to accept it or they'd be executed. To know, who amongst us has not been kind of broken attempting to invade and or move to Japan? That's relatable content. That's of life it has to be said. So this is it though, right? You know, you have to accept the paper money or, listen, we're going to kill you. That's a story at least. Yeah, right, right. You know, it's not unbelievable. We'll put it that way. Maybe apocryphal. but it sure does illustrate something. But, you know, also we have the system of laws.

And is this the same kind of thing? You know, surely even if it's kind of like 40 miles between various yam stations, you know, you might be tempted to do a little bit of highway robbing, you know, but there is a pretty good enforcement of laws along the routes as well, yes? Well, I think there's a sense that, Even if the postal station is 20 miles away or 30 miles away or however far it is, that's still a lot closer than it would have been before this system. I mean, imagine you're a traveler in West Asia.

You're crossing over a high mountain pass and you're robbed, stripped of all your clothes and left for dead. I mean, you're done. You could be hundreds of miles from anyone to help. On the postal relay, you're not that far away. And of course, because these are set routes, somebody is going to be coming down that pike at some point soon. And it could very, amidst the same routes that the

soldiers used as well. And if you're a highway brigand, if that's your particular line of work, you're going to try to find places that aren't patrol, that aren't as necessarily the possibility of running into someone who's an official. It's the same logic that would apply to much

later era, you think about pirates on the high seas. If it's a route that the Navy always takes, that's a route that they're probably not going to be hanging out in. I mean, absolutely. And So I guess there's this legendary saying, right, which is that a maiden bearing a gold nugget in her hand could travel across the empire without being harassed. And that is probably a massive exaggeration. But also it probably means, yeah, if you stick to the right roots, right?

Not if you go completely off-piece. Allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, I think that given what people had experienced up to this point or what people may have experienced in other parts of the world, it may very well have felt like that for some. people. And you think about some of these travelers who are coming from Europe. You know, think about what you and your listeners know quite a bit about what medieval Europe would have been like for travelers. Some places it was very secure and other places, not at all. But now you get out to what is today China and you get into this system and you see the relay stations and you see the officials and you hear all about all these laws. And there's a tendency perhaps to romanticize that a little bit. You know, it's not, it's something different. But I do think that there was something to these observations,

that it was qualitatively a safer way of traveling. Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely. It's certainly, you know, even in Europe, we know that it varies kind of ruler to ruler. You know, and I don't even mean in terms of borders, it just means like if you are a pretty good king, then you will make sure that your roads are safe. But if you get cut one of the kind of crap ones, you know, maybe they don't care about that so much. They care about going to tournaments, right? And they're not going to administer the system. So if you've got a system that has a bit of a bureaucracy behind it, it kind of ticks over, right, which is what we see more in the empire. And what's interesting, too, about these laws is that we think of the Mongolians, we think, oh, of course, yeah, I mean,

it's the Mongolians. You step at toe when it's an execution. It's a capital offense. But it seems, and again, there's a lot of research on this system of laws. There's a lot of questions about who developed it and how codified it actually was. But one of the things that many of these studies have argued is that in terms of the things that you could get killed for doing, it was actually fewer capital offenses than in a lot of other legal codes in the same era. and that the number of executions carried out, for example, in an average year under Kublai Khan, would favorably compare to other parts of the world and certainly compare to some of the states to practice capital punishment today, namely China and the United States. And so there is an aspect of this, that we're talking law, not necessarily just fear.

I think that's an important evolution, not just in terms of world history, but also in terms of how the Mongols saw themselves and how they saw the places that they were ruling. I think that's an incredibly good point because, you know, having a legal code that's understood and well distributed is a really, really big deal. You know, it takes a lot for people to understand that there are systematized rules across an area. And that's kind of a public education project. It's not just about fear. It's about establishing norms. And having the bureaucracy to back it up.

It's not just soldiers. It's also officials. And this is where, again, the Mongols, and other people have done this too, but the Mongols are very effective at using whoever was available, regardless of religion, regardless of ideology, and using them as administrators or as officials. If you are educated and you're capable, generally speaking, you are useful to them. I give you an example, that in China, for example, which is a very big place, very big population, You know, the Krublai Khan and his descendants, they ruled China using a four-tier system.

They had the Mongols on top who were in charge, but also somewhat extracted, but needed help of a lot of other people. Well, you didn't want to entirely trust the Chinese. They had all these people coming in from all over the empire, people from as far away as West Asia, people who are Muslim. Marco Polo probably didn't actually serve as an official, but the idea that he's at court isn't a weird thing. And this was a group, there'll these people coming in, the Chinese refer to them as the colored eyes. There's a sort of theory that this is due to the multi-ethnic makeup of the group. I don't know, perhaps. And then under that, you have one group of Chinese, the Chinese has surrendered early.

And then the last group is the Chinese are surrendered late. But the idea was that, you know, the Mongols were, they weren't saying, well, if you're a part of, we can't use you if you're a foreigner. They didn't say that. And I think that's an important distinction. And because of that, they had a bureaucracy. that could back up the system of law. So if you had a contract dispute, you had someone to go hear about it. And some of the Western travelers to the eastern edges of the Mongolian Empire said, you know, when there's a dispute, it's heard and it's heard according to the law, not according to whoever is closest to the Lord.

And again, this may be a little overly idealizing the system, but I do think there was something there. Yeah, I mean, I think you don't write it down unless you're kind of impressed. by it, right? Sure. And of course, we have to control for some romanticizing, but there's got to be a kernel of truth there. And I suppose for me, one of the things that's really important is this mix of people that we see and in understanding that people from varying cultures can really enhance an empire or enhance a place. And as a result, we see these really great technologies that begin to move around. You know, sometimes firstfully, because, you know, you'll bring a really good engineer east, possibly against their will. But you get this great transfer of knowledge and tech across, you know, partially because it simply can move back and forth. And partially because the Mongols are really on the lookout for new ideas. And, I mean, can you talk to us a little bit about some of the techniques or technologies that develop and spread as a result of what's going on? Sure.

I think if we think of kind of in the northern part of this world, we think about kind of the three zones. So we think like Western Europe, we think of the area of Western Asia and we think of East Asia, you know, centered around China. All these three areas, maybe the slight exception of Western Europe, had a lot of really advanced ideas about medicine, mathematics, engineering. But they tended to come out of it from different ways. Like, for example, Muslim medical practitioners were often very good at things like surgery. The Chinese had a better idea about diagnosis. What's interesting is as they're moving around, these ideas are coming together. And, you know, Kublai Khan, for example, sets up colleges of medicine.

Other Mongol rulers set up institutes of learning where people can share these ideas about medicine. Mathematics is another one. Mathematics is incredibly important. if you're trying to rule a vast empire and you need to keep track of taxes and these sort of things. There are ideas and trust me, I'm not the best person to talk about this. I got into history because I was under the impression there would never be a math test. But the idea is that there were ideas of mathematics that of course were well developed in Western Asia that were then brought to China and vice versa. I'm talking about these two expanses as if there's nothing in

between. Of course there is. These ideas are filtering through all these different places and each place adds a little bit or takes away a little bit. So navigation, engineering, hydrology, calendar making. The descendants of Muslim calendar makers who came as part of the Mongol Empire to what's today Beijing were still, their descendants were still part of making calendars and being astronomers down to the 17th and 18th century when they got their jobs taken away from them by the Jesuits. that the idea that people from afar could come with them and bring with them ideas that we could then adopt.

One other example, if I may. In Beijing, if you go there today, you'll see that there are canals that run through the city. Beijing is a strange city, and that's one of the few major capitals of the world that doesn't sit on a major river or body of water. It has canals. These canals were designed under Kublai Khan to connect his capital that he was building with the water ways that were connected to the rest of China. To do that, he employed a remarkable Chinese prodigy in mathematics named Guo Shoujing. At the same time, this young master Guo was working in consultation with Persian hydrological engineers and mathematicians to design this system. It was

an incredible moment of cross-cultural collaboration in the sciences. Now, maybe not everyone's there by choice. I get that. But at the same time, you know, especially in an era where cross-cultural communication and collaboration in anything seems to be breaking down. It's sad when you think that the Mongols could put this kind of thing together better than in modern day. And yet they did. You know, not to make it too depressing, but I think that one of the things that the Mongols really had, and again, perhaps this is a romantic way of looking at it, is it is a fairly meritocratic system. You know, the competence is something that is valued in.

incredibly highly within this system. So if you are a really great hydraulic engineers, they're like, yep, we'll have you. Here you come. And for Europeans at the time, who are living in a really stratified system that is based on hereditary rights and who you are in a society. And the idea that this is almost innate, that was really quite shocking to see, I think. And, you know, I would argue that now one of the the problems that we're having is this idea of competence not having anything to do with anything, which is kind of getting us in trouble. But, you know, the Mongols really do seem to kind of make it work. I mean, how do you administer that? How do you say, no, sorry, guess what, we're just going off of who's really clever now? Is that something that people take well to,

or does it take a little bit of stick along with the carrot? Well, I think certainly in the context of its time, we could make an argument for greater meritocracy than was in the case of, say, for example, some of the states in Western Europe. Given, for example, how did the Mongols traditionally choose their rulers? Well, they had a big meeting, and if you showed up to the meeting, you got a vote. And if you didn't show up to the meeting, you had to take whatever the people who showed up decided. I'm sure there was a lot of whose son you are, and I'm guessing that the skill sets were things like, how many cities have you sacked. So meritocracy within the bounds of marauding. But still, just because that guy was

your daddy did not necessarily mean you were going to be chosen. And then you graphed that system, too, onto China. But first, it takes a little while, but the Kublai Khan and the Mongol rulers, after a couple of decades, they revived the Chinese system of examinations for positions, which 17th and 18th century, many Western Europeans were like, wow, you're testing to see who's the most competent person and giving them the job? That's white novel. So for that era, you know, there were easier tests for the Mongols and the non-Chinese than they were for the Chinese,

so meritocratic again within limits. But still, I think compared to a lot of other parts of the world, I think that's an argument that could definitely be made. Yeah, I mean, and obviously you also have the limitations of who's got time to educate. their kids to a level that they can take an examination, right? There's always going to be these levels like who can really play the game, right? But I do think in terms of if we compare this to what's going on in Europe at the time, it's looking pretty good to me. I guess I would prefer it,

certainly. But I also think that it's interesting, you know, when we look at, you know, obviously you get advantages if you're Mongolian and then you get advantages if you are not Chinese. And this means that there are a lot of people in the empire that have really differing religious backgrounds. You can't just move someone from Persia over to China and say, okay, yeah, like get into it. Like we're kind of a mix of Confucian and Buddhist, and I don't know, he's kind of into the, you know, it's going to look like a lot of different things. And this is something that the Mongols are interested in preserving people's right to continue practicing their own religion. Is that fair to say? I think they're interested in preserving their own right

not to care. And I think they, they, Mongol rulers, many of them based on the record, are very intellectually curious. I think that's something that maybe people don't always associate with the Mongols, because they are very curious about other cultures. And religion's a big one for them. And they're always asking people like, what do you believe? And of course, if you're a Western, say a representative of Latin Catholicism or Latin Christianity, and you hear the ruler has asked me all about Jesus, and I can't wait to tell him all about this stuff, and I'm going to convert him. That may not exactly be what's happening here, because he just asked the Taoist monk that on Tuesday. But at the same time, they're very curious about all of this, and they often say, that sounds like a great idea.

I may adopt some of that. And this kind of gives a very syncretic worldview. And many of the people who were part of this Mongolian confederation, there were many people who later converted to Islam. The Mongols practiced their own form of religion that was based upon the worship of the sky. And we might think of it a kind of problematic term, but we may think it as kind of a certain kind of shamanism. Tibetan Buddhism became very important in later years. And of course, you know, the Church of the East, what some people refer to as Nestorian Christianity, but the Church of the East, the Syriac right. was, in fact, one of the last places it existed after it had been almost completely wiped out in Western Asia was in pockets of the Mongolian steppe. And so you had all these different religious traditions coming around, and there didn't seem to be a desire to make people conform to any one of them.

What the Mongols really resisted was making them conform to anything. The idea that you had to believe in one, they thought that was just weird. Like, they couldn't understand why, particularly Islam and Christianity, were so insistent that it had to be this with this set of rules. And if you would, you were wrong. And for the lot of the Mongolians, and to be honest, frankly, for a lot of cultures in Eastern Asia, that kind of firm distinctions. And it was just something that really, it was hard to understand. I personally love that for them and us. I'm absolutely team. Let's get all of the ideas here and mix them in a bucket and see what works. I think that this is a really great way to approach spirituality myself. So we've got this great system. You know, we've got wonderful things like printing presses and paper and passports and United Laws and all of this really great stuff that is absolutely popping off. And then, And we get to the 14th century and things start going downhill, right? And there is, unfortunately, a bit of a shattering of the Pax Mongolia.

And what are some of the things that bring about this very good thing's end? Well, the challenge, of course, was always going to be, how do you hold together an empire of this size? Especially among a people that was known to divide up upon it for inheritance, often dividing up between different, sons or different relations. And so very early on, you see within a couple of generations, this huge Mongolian empire, if you will, being divided between one group that is in Russia, kind of the gold, what's called kind of the golden horde. You have another group that's based around Baghdad. You have, of course, Kublai Khan in the late 13th century, establishing not just, you know, his great Khan capital in what's today, China, but also a

establishing himself as a Chinese dynasty, adopting an entirely different political, the trappings are a very different political culture. It is only natural. And of course, many of these groups, we talked about religion, some of the groups in Western Asia, for example, converted to Islam. And so the fragmenting politically leads to a fragmenting culturally and a fragmenting of worldviews that becomes very hard. It seems almost impossible to think it will ever be knit back together again. There are later cons who try, but it is unsuccessful. And with that, they start fighting with each other. And when they start fighting with each other, they become susceptible to other

other groups pushing back. And so they no longer become this unstoppable force sweeping and expanding. They become fixed entities with other groups nibbling at their boundaries, not unlike what the historic Mongols had done. And of course, in some parts of their empire, the people who were living there chafed under Mongolian rule, particularly in China. We think of China sometimes, at least in the medieval period, the Song Dynasty, as being a rather militarily weak dynasty. But it's important to know, southern China held out against the Mongols far longer than almost any other part of Asia. And probably it shouldn't come as a shock then that it was Southern China and the Chinese people who were one of the first and most successful to throw.

off the Mongol yoke. And they did so beginning in the mid-14th century. And once that happened, the great unity of the step fell apart. And with that, the Pax Mongolica. The trade roots were not closed, but there was obstacles. And new routes had to be discovered. And some of those roots, of course, were by sea. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that it's really easy to think that Silk Road means a literal road. A lot of the time when we're talking about it, we're talking about ships. You know, the one thing about having roads, right, is that it's a great way to facilitate trade and cultural exchange and a postal service. But it's also a really great way to get a disease that comes off of the fleas that were on marmots and spread that around Asia and Africa and Europe as well, right? Because by the time we hit the 14th century, you suddenly get the black death popping off.

And I mean, this is something that is really kind of exacerbated by what is going on with the empire as well, right? Well, you think about how globalization in modern times has changed the way diseases travel and the effects they have across populations. We think about what happened with COVID, for example. And of course, when you open up trade routes, when you open up the exchange of people and the exchange of goods and the exchange of biology, that there is going to be examples of good things, plants, crops, you know, lemon trees and Guangzhou and other fruits going to West Asia, but you'll also have the exchange of microbes. And in some places, some people have experience of those microbes and other places they don't. And of course, I'm not a scientist, but from what I understand, there has long been reservoirs of some of these diseases that are in rodent populations on the step. And once people start moving around, and some of these rodents were also kind of, they were used as a snack food. Like, you know, it's pretty easy to, like, stuff like six dried marmots in your bag and, like, pull them out and eat them like jerky.

I don't recommend it. I don't have a recipe, but it is. And so if you're. Living in a situation where you're exposed to animals, eating animals, it's going to happen. And, you know, the Black Death affects populations in China and Asia as well. It's perhaps it's written about differently than it was in Europe. The existence of these roots certainly led to one of these great biological exchanges. And the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague and the Pneumonic Plague were both examples of this.

We have a fracturing of power. But this also means that we have these new powers that kind of emerge from the ashes of the Mongolian Empire, you know, the Ottomans over in Western Asia. And then suddenly, you know, we start seeing the Ming in China and things like this. Is this something that the Mongols are able to push back against or do they just kind of go, I'm going back to the step and we'll deal with this later? I think there's a variety of strategies. I think it depends on what was existing there before there was the pushback or there was the rebellion. Let me speak about China, if I may. When the Chinese rebel against the Mongolians, they do push the Mongolians back into the step.

And the remnants of the Mongol armies do try to regroup as confederations beyond what is the day, the country of Mongolia, Siberia, North China. The new dynasty, the Ming dynasty, sees them as their greatest threat, at least early on. And it's one reason why the Ming dynasty, for example, invest so much money in things like building a wall to try to rebuilding walls, to try to keep the Mongolians on the other side and as a platform to attack the Mongols and push them further and further back into the step. But it's generations. I mean, the Mongolians are still a threat.

to the Ming Dynasty in different forms going into the 16th century, almost into the 17th century, and the only reason the Mongols cease being a threat is because they themselves, as they had done to people in the past, are co-opted into a larger confederation, this time led by a group from the forests of Manchuria, we know as the Manchus. So the point being is that in many ways, the Mongols, at least in that part of Asia, went back to the step and then suffered from some of the same problems they had prior to Chinggis Khan, which is we're many different groups of many different people. We sometimes get along. We sometimes don't. But if no one's going to unify us together, this is what it's going to be. We're going to be people of the step, trading when we can,

raiding when we must, and trying to get by as best we can in a rather difficult ecological environment. I think that it was such an incredible achievement, considering how many people you had to bring together how much land was involved. And, you know, it's very sad, in my opinion, that it fractured. But there's still a kind of lasting legacy of the Paxh Mongolica. I mean, here I am in the year of Our Lord 2025 dragging you on to talk about this. I mean, what would you say is something that our world has really gained from the Pax Mongoloka? I think there's two things. One is theoretical and the other one is practical. The first one is, is we talk about globalization as if this is some sort of new phenomenon.

And of course, as historians, we know this is not the case. China has never been closed. It's always been connected to the world. There has been contact between, quote, east and, quote, West going back throughout history. But there's times when it was supercharged. And this was one of those times during the Pax Mongolia. The other thing I would take away from this, too, is that sometimes when eras end, When era's end, it causes people to think, okay, now we have to find new ways of doing things.

The Mongolian empire is gone. We can't travel over land anymore. And we have now learned that there are people on the other side and products on the other side that we want to reach. How do we get there? And so, for example, about 70 years after the rebellion that kicks the Mongolians out of China, we have the Ming Dynasty sending out great fleets of ships into the Indian Ocean Basin, reestablishing contact with all these different places that were once part of the Mongolian trade network.

Of course, in Western Europe, it's not too long after that that some of the Western European, we think of eventually as the maritime power, start saying, well, we can't go overland. Let's try to reach them by sea. And of course, those expeditions, those explorations, They dramatically changed our world, but the impetus to go by sea started with the points of contact that were made during the era of Pax Mongolia. Without that, we wouldn't have the next step. And of course, that next step is just so important for understanding how our world is shaped down to 2025. This has been such an absolute delight.

Jeremiah, thank you for coming on and watching me be too enthusiastic about your area of expertise. No, it's a great topic to discuss. I can't thank you enough for inviting me. And anytime you want to talk about all things, Mongol, all ears. Thanks to Dr. Jeremiah Jenny and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent episode on the medieval apocalypse, and add-free podcasts by signing up at HistoryHit.com.

forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.