School of War - Ep 99: Nicholas Morton on the Mongol Invasions

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Nicholas Morton, associate professor of history at Nottingham Trent University and author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, joins the show to talk about the Mongol invasions. ▪️ Times      •    01:40 Introduction      •    02:15 Central Asia before the Mongols     •    04:15 Mongol methods     •    09:15 Sailing the Eurasian Steppe     •   13:54 Temujin     •    18:38 A dearth of sources     •    21:50 Khwarazmian Empire     •    26:40 The Mongol secret     •   32:03 Selective savagery      •    36:30 The Near East     •    40:15 Mamluks    •    42:03 Mongol rule     •    45:17 Lasting effects

The 12th and 13th centuries were a pretty grim time to be alive in Eurasia, and a major reason for that was the Mongol invasions that swept from the east throughout this period, leaving vast destruction and ultimately a new political order in their wake. How did the Mongols operate, and how did they achieve such stunning successes, beginning as they did as relative barbarians compared to the Turkish, Persian, Arab, and European civilizations they defeated along the way? What was their secret strategic sauce. What can we learn from or about it? And how did targeted societies cope with the threat? Who succeeded, who failed, and who survived? And why? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. Nazi buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Nicholas Morton. He is Associate Professor of History

at Nottingham Trent University. He's the author of numerous publications, including most recently the Mongol storm, making and breaking empires in the medieval near east. Nicholas, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you. It's quite to be here. So we're obviously going to talk about the Mongols and Jenghis Khan and all of that. But before we get to the main business of the day, talk a bit for a minute, if you would, about what the Eurasian world looked like before the Mongols. broke out of their ancestral homelands and turned the 13th century into a rather, in my opinion, at least unpleasant time to be alive.

I'm curious to know what your opinion on that is as well. But what are the patterns of life in Eurasia that the Mongols break into? Sure. So Central Asia is fascinating. It's famously described as being an area of substantial pastoral or nomadic settlement. And so, yeah, so for large areas, you've got these huge expanses of grasslands where communities move from one area of grazing, bringing their herds of sheep or horses or goats from one area to another. And for the most part, they do so very peacefully and often in very small numbers.

People often talk about popular films or whatever of the hordes from Central Asia. In fact, the population density is very low. And the number of the armies, even when they invade a territory around the periphery, is often very small indeed. But you have these communities. They move from one area to another. They graze their herds and that's about it for decades, sometimes for centuries, until it changes. And then for one reason or another, you get the formation of a confederation. And there are many of these throughout the history of Central Asia.

And often those confederations will then attack a society around their periphery. And that could be, so for the medieval period, that could be China. It could be the Muslim world. in some cases they can push as far south as India and also on the western extension towards what today would be eastern Europe or even in some cases central Europe. So we've done a few episodes. One at least that comes to mind on the show about, if you like, raiding societies that become imperial societies that achieve levels of rule over other people.

We did a great episode a few months ago on the Normans. And so a broad question, I'll ask you about the world. the Mongols to start, is compared to, say, the Normans or the Arabs or the Turks who preceded them in Central Asia as sort of nomads turn conquerors. You know, what is distinct, what are the continuities with the Mongols? In what ways are they like all of these other societies that did something similar? And in what ways are they distinctive? Sure. The Seljuk Turks of the 11th century are a good point of comparison to the Mongols, because in the 11th century, they invaded in Central Asia. and I'm most interested in the Near East, they conquered much of the Near East.

And so the Seljuk Sultanate of the 11th century spanned from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean coast, and the Mongols, at least in the Near East, conquered much the same area. And there are various advantages that enable them to do this. I mean, a comparison I often strike is historians spend so much time discussing, how could the first crusade from Western Europe have been so successful? And yet this success, or so it is called, merely involves the conquest of a slither of land along the Levantine coast and three, arguably four major cities. The Seljuks and nature of the Mongols are able to conquer much of the Eurasian continent. And so there is a substantial difference in scale, where the Crusaders conquered a few hundred square miles.

the Mongols and Seljuk Turks, either side of them, are conquering vastly bigger areas. And for me at least, this shows that in this period at least, the nomadic pattern of society is a great deal more, adept and better prepared for the conquest of very, very large areas of land. And both the Seljuks and the Mongols do that in similar ways. wide-scale raiding, the invasion not just by armies, but by entire people groups on the move, and then on a more tactical level, just movement. They're faster than everyone. They will be in and they'll be out quicker than anyone else.

They'll take somewhere before the relief forces can arrive. And in many cases, defending forces of many different civilizations are very intimidated by this, and their response is to freeze. They locate themselves in fortified cities and stay there. there, hoping that the invaders will go away, which they don't. And of course, the more they freeze and the faster the invaders move, the more the networks of defence begin to break down, defenders become isolated, the Seljuk Turks move in and later on the Mongols to an even greater degree. But where the Seljuk Turks managed to conquer much of the Near East,

the Mongols are vastly more ambitious. They conquer not just the Near East, but also China, Central Asia and its entirety, and up to what day would be in most. most of Eastern Europe up until the borders of Hungary and Poland. And so there are a great deal more effective. And so whilst the Mongols are similar in some respects to previous step invaders, there are a great deal more effective reasons for that. One of the reasons would be that the Mongols are very adept at incorporating conquered people. So if you are overthrown by the Mongols, well, they do kill quite a lot of people typically, but they also recognize the value of captured soldiers.

The ones they like, they will forcibly enroll into their army. And that means you don't get a choice. It's not a case of would you like to become a Mongol. It's that you are now a Mongol. You will fight and live as a Mongol. And if you refuse, we will execute not just you, but the entire squad in which you have been placed. And so you don't get a choice.

You're going to fight for the Mongols. But what that does mean is with every victory, the Mongol armies get bigger and bigger. and even those they don't want to enroll into their forces, what they will do is they'll herd these captured soldiers, in some cases just captured civilians in general. They'll herd them together and then push them in advance of their assault troops against the walls of the next city,

the next society they want to conquer. And of course, those levies of forcibly gathered, well, soldiers, or in many cases, arrow fodder, you might say, They're driven against these enemies ramparts. They die in huge numbers. And then when the defenders, ammunitioners run out, that's when the Mongols stage they're real offensive. And so, I mean, these are brutal tactics, but they're also brutally effective.

Can I just ask a question sort of from the perspective of strategic analysis? So we've had a few conversations on the show so far about Halford McKinder and his notion of the Eurasian heartland. And you keep mentioning the step. We should talk about the step a bit and about what it's like. Like, for starters, what is it? What does it look like? What does it like to live on it? And then my question is, is it, you talk about speed, one of the things that, you know,

characterized Turkish success and then Mongol success with superior speed. Is there a way in which the step operates as a kind of ocean? And if you can figure out if you were, as it were, had a sale on it, you get real, real advantages. Just talk about how you think about the step as a place for warfare. Sure. I mean, the steps often conceived as, and in a sense I've already leaned into this a little bit already, by describing it as a huge area of grassland. It is a great deal of grassland. It's very suited for the pastoral way of life, but it's also very varied. It includes coastal regions around the Caspian Sea. There's areas of lower rainfall, which tend towards or include actual desert. And the further north you go,

colder it gets until you get to the forest belt in what today would be northern Russia. So it is varied, but nonetheless, it inclines towards large areas of grassland, which is suitable for pastoral and nomadic societies. And these are societies where, because you are moving from area to area, it is natural to raise your children, male and female, to ride for a very early age and to shoot from an early age. And it is natural. And it is natural to raise your children, and indeed to conduct wide-scale hunts, which is part of the Mongol way of life and part of many, many nomadic people's ways of life.

And all of this sets itself up for a society that can move very rapidly and at short notice. And so one of the great panoramas, and I think if ever I was to sort of go back in time and pick my spotten era, this would be one of them. Mongol societies move in wagon cities. and this isn't just a sort of a quaint group of 20 or 30 wagons with a few herds around them. This is a landscape on the move.

You should be imagining thousands of wagons, some of them very large. I mean, one traveller described the Mongols' wagons having axles as thick as ships' masts. These are very large vehicles. And they're travelling by the thousands from one area to another. And this, of course, goes back to the culture because they move from area of grazing to areas, grazing and these wagons carry their tents and other belongings. But of course, all of this is an exceptionally effective vehicle for conquest. So where agricultural societies or predominantly agricultural societies, such as areas of the Islamic world or the Byzantine Empire or Western

Christendom, where they struggle with logistics because they've got to make sure their wagon trains can still make rendezvous with their armies. Step armies don't work that way. They have these wagons with them and their herds with them too. And so their entire civilization can move many miles, possibly tens of miles a day, whilst their raiders can go much further afield. So the entire society is in motion, with the raiders just being the fastest of them all.

And that makes them very, very hard to combat by an agricultural society because they're simply moving in on their territory. And in the near east, the Mongols' opponents, had enormous difficulty trying to defend them. Well, very few could. And indeed, if you go back a century when the Seljuk Turks were establishing their empire in the Near East, and the Crusaders were coming in from the West at the same time. The Crusaders, or later on the Franks, as they were known, they had very similar problems.

And in fact, they never really managed to overcome those problems in just dealing with the sheer speed of the opposition they were meeting in the Near East. You know, it's extraordinary when you think about the scale of Mongol conquest, Turkish conquest before it is for that matter. But, you know, part of the answer for how they're so successful does seem to me to be, you know, if you zoom out, if we imagine Eurasia looking at it from Google Earth, you know, that the step that you describe, I mean, it stretches, right, the length of the of the supercontinent from, I mean, there's a way in which it goes from from, right? You could say it goes through the, is it the iron gates into Hungary, right? There's a way in which you can kind of stay on grassland all the way into central Europe and then pop out, you go through Ukraine, and you can keep going all the way to Mongolia on what is sort of a unitary, sort of difficult place to live unless you know how, the space

for great mobility. Can I ask you how does it all start? I mean, you start with the Mongols as one group among many and Jingaskan's subset is one group among many, way out on the eastern edge of that complex, much more part of Chinese politics or Chinese affairs than anything further west. How does this remarkable story begin? Sure. Well, it starts with someone called Temergin, and he just proved he doesn't meet universally with success, but through a series of battles and victories and defeats and alliances with family members or with rival communities, he is.

able to weld together a confederation of communities until in 1206 he takes on the title Chinggis Khan, which is often referred to as Genghis Khan. And it's from that point really the Mongols begin to embark in earnest on the conquest of neighbouring societies. And in time, it's not quite clear whether this was something that began with Chingis Khan or later on with his successes. But in time, the Mongols came to adopt the view that they had a right to planetary conquest. And by that, I mean the entire Earth, all of it. Wherever a human society exists, it has a responsibility to acknowledge Mongol rule. And the spiritual background to this is that Mongols felt they had received a mandate from Tengri, the eternal sky. Now, some people render that just as a

sort of a variant on God. It seems to be more sort of a sky spiritual force, but who invested the Mongols in the right to conquer and rule the entire planet. And that's a powerful idea, and it gets even more powerful when they carry on winning. And it actually looks quite likely that they're actually right. Because for the first few decades, no one's really able to stop the Mongols. They do suffer the occasional battlefield defeat, the occasional setback. But when they do, they submerge whoever has had the effrontery to defeat them in battle with an array of additional campaigns to make sure that resistance does not survive for long. And so no one's really able to stop them. And so it seems perfectly valid in those years to say, well, maybe they're right.

Maybe they do have a right to conquer the entire world. And so that will only act as an enormous and continually self-reinforcing morale boost for the Mongol civilization itself, whilst at the same time, the remaining unconquered civilizations, their armies are backing away from the battlefield even before they've engaged in battle because, well, no one stopped the Mongols so far, so why should they be any different? And the idea of the right to rule, it sounds very similar to sort of Chinese, Han Chinese mandate of heaven is, do we think that the idea of migration? from sort of Chinese imperial thinking to the Mongols? Or how do we think, where do we think this

idea comes from? Sure. It does seem to manifest itself in various forms in other step societies before the Mongols, but it does also seem to have achieved a more complete form and certainly very much more assertively delivered form under the Mongols who, yeah, they very, very much believe in this. If I could ask sort of a professional historian question for you, how do you work with the sources, what are the most important sources for this early period? Because I assume, I know very little about the Mongols, but from looking at other sort of historical phenomena from pre-modernity, you know, as one of these invading societies breaks out and takes over a lot of other countries, well, all of a sudden you're rich in source material, typically that comes from the, if you'll

permit the blunt phrase, less barbaric, more civilized places that are getting taken over. And you you have a lot of material to work with as time goes on. But when you're talking about that form, period of where the where the original how the original group forms and how their leadership works. It's it's much scantier. And even the name, Chingas Khan, you know, if you're being skeptical, it starts to raise doubts, you know, spent a little bit of time looking at the history of early Islam. And once you have the early Muslim conquests of the Levant in North Africa, you have, you know, a lot of Greek language sources. Then you have middle Persian. sources in the other direction telling you all about people who just conquered them, right? But the contemporaneous Arab sources from the 7th century are much thinner, Arabic sources,

to be more clear, are much thinner on the ground and more difficult to interpret, such that, you know, if you're being a sort of source critical historian, it's just harder really to swear that you really knew, you really know what happened in, for example, the 620s and 630s compared to, you know, what you might know about what happened in the 720s and 730s, just because of the nature and the way in which the acts of these, you know, largely, you know, sort of preliterate societies, you know, the ways in which they function, you know, before they burst out into the world. So how confident are you that we know that much about early Mongol society and how do we know what we know? Sure. Well, the simple answer is not particularly. And they say that history is written by the victors.

Well, that's only kind of true for the Mongols because we have so few sources written by them themselves. Nearly all the sources were either written about them or on their behalf. We actually have very few sources from the conqueror's eye. And actually it's very similar with the Seljuk Turks. They too wrote virtually nothing down. All we have from the vast majority of it comes from people they encountered or people that they conquered in one way, shape or form. So one cluster of sources comes from writers or travelers who went to the Mongols to try and work up. who these people were and how they were to be stopped. And so you have various emissaries from across Eurasia, traveling to the Mongols, having negotiations with them, returning home, and then

sharing their stories. And people who did that include Marco Polo, who's very well known, an Italian merchant who went out to make his fortune because the Mongol Empire is huge and very rich, so why wouldn't he? But also you've got accounts by conquered civilizations too. And so in the area I'm most concerned about, which is the Near East, the Mongols conquer the region, but they tend to make use or come to make use of local bureaucrats, local systems of government, and many of those bureaucrats tried to win the Mongols' favour by writing reports of the history of their era that they thought might please the Mongols. And so whilst it's not the Mongol's own voice, it's not their own narrative. It is nonetheless

narratives that have been written with an attempt to please the Mongols. But these writers, these bureaucrats, they've got their own agendas too. Often what they're trying to do is to steer the Mongols into a version of their own history that the Mongols will see as being pleasing and positive

for which nonetheless steers them into something that might help them protect their own people group, their own religious group, or whatever community of which they're part. So it's a negotiation process. They're trying give the Mongols the history they want, whilst maneuvering them into a way of thinking that would work for them too. So you open your book with the story of this trade convoy that is sent from

the Mongols to, I suppose, what is now, is it Iran or Kazakhstan? It's sort of the Persian cultural complex, broadly speaking, right? Yeah. So in this era, Persia is sort of a much bigger area than modern there on, this is on the upper boundary, really. Yeah. What's called Tran's Oxyana, an area of land to the north of the Oxus River, which is the northernmost bastion of the Khorasmian Empire, which is an empire which controls perjure in many outlying areas as well. So, yes, absolutely.

You fell for my elaborate ruse to get you to say that Corasmian, I got you to say the word first. Talk a bit about this polity. Because following these sort of wars in the east that are occurring between the Mongols and trying to write, this is the first definitive Mongol explosion West. Talk about the series of events that seem to lead to that and the strategy of this empire and how it all falls apart so quickly. Yeah, sure. So the Mongols have been expanding for some time by the moment that they encounter the Khorasbians, but this is the first of the Mongols really moved towards what could

be described as the Middle East or in that direction at least. And the Quaresmian Empire itself, it's actually a successor state to the Seljuk Empire. So back in the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks invaded out of the Central Asian Stept region, conquered the Near East. The Seljuk Sultanate then collapsed in the 12th century, and the Khorasmians were originally one of the Seljuks governors that governed essentially much of Persia and surrounding areas. So they're a success of dynasty from the Seljuks previously.

So their culture, their way of life, in its origins at least, is not so very different from the Mongols themselves. But they've got a series of big fortress cities facing the Stept region. These cities are very heavily fortified because this is a known invasion route. And so in the year 12, 12, 18, the Mongols sent a group of merchants to a trial, which is a border town facing on the edge of the Khorasbian Sultanate. And these merchants are there ostensibly to conduct trade, although there are suspicions that they're there to spy. But for reasons that aren't quite clear, the governor of a trough arrests these merchants, and then with the full support of the Khorasmian Sultan, has them all executed.

Now, we don't know quite why. Is it because they were thought to be spies? Perhaps. Is it to do with some kind of disagreement that broke out in the town itself? Perhaps, we're not quite sure. What we do know is the reaction, because one member of that trading convoy got back to Jingis Khan and told them what had happened. And this is then the beginning of the invasion of the Khorasmin Empire. The Mongols arrived with a huge force. Now, the interesting thing about Mongol armies

is the Mongol civilization itself is not particularly big at this point. But because the society is nomadic and mobile, all male members of society are born to ride and shoot and many female members of society as well. As the Mongols can raise big armies on small populations, and it's more than enough to invade the Khorasmian frontier. And rather, as I mentioned earlier, the Khorasmians' strategy, if such, it can be called to defeat the Mongols, is to focus their garrisons on the big cities and to wait for the Mongols to attack them one by one, which is ruinous because the Mongols do their deal with them one by one, which sees the collapse of the Khorasmian frontier.

After the collapse of the Khorasmian frontier, the Mongols then invade into Persia proper. a big invasion that takes place in 1230. And from there, they extend into the 1230s, into the Caucasus region. What today would be sort of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, that sort of area. In 1243, they take modern-day Turkey, Anatolia as it was, then the Anatolian Seljic Sultanate. And then in the 1250s, there's another big wave of invasions. Or from this occasion, the Mongols conduct their very well. known and very brutal overthrow conquest, overthrow of the city of Baghdad, during which they execute the Abbasid Caliph outside the city, and following that they invade into Syria, where they conquer

the big cities of Aleppo and Damascus. And so there's wave after wave of Mongol invasion that takes place in the years after their initial entry into the Khorasbian Sultan. This is the process by which they conquer so much of the Middle East. Let's talk a little bit in more detail about, about the Mongol way of war. I don't know if you're, there's no reason you should be familiar with sort of American military debates about operational and strategic practice from the course of the last 50 years. But the Mongols do figure in there. And they were, they were a matter of some fascination for an American thinker named John Boyd,

who would talk about the way in which their sort of columns independently maneuvered through the step. He would, he would talk about as an example of generating strategic confusion for the other guy, That is to say that with a relative economy of force, the way in which the Mongols could proceed separately and then strike suddenly at different, perhaps predetermined points was an enormously powerful way to operate. Does that seem fair to you? I mean, there's just a puzzle here that you see I keep sort of bringing us back to, which is, you know, if you did the sort of the relative GDP of the Mongols and their resources compared to everyone who they were going to conquer in the coming couple of generations, well, you would never. begin, would you? I mean, you would seem absurd and preposterous. And yet, and yet they do. So there's some secret sauce that I'm trying to get the ingredients for here as we talk. Sure. And you're right.

The Mongols initially are not especially wealthy. They're certainly a great deal less wealthy than much more affluent regions such as the Muslim world or China or anything like that. Their advantages are that their military strengths do not depend on the purchase of arms in anything like the same way as anyone else. They make their bows, their arrows, of course, their horses are part of their herds anyway, they can source all these things from the natural environment. They don't require traffic to produce their armaments or armour. And yet, even with those weapons, they're still able to more than outperform the armies of agricultural societies for all they're equipped with metal armor, metal weapons, armored horses. They're just slower.

The Mongol's great strength, as I mentioned, is this, you're right. They have raided. who can act quasi independently, but hard up behind that first rank of raiders, you've then got the wagon cities that are moving right in behind them, providing logistical support right up behind the advanced forces. So with that kind of environment, the danger that you'll become overextended, that your raiders or invading armies will move out beyond their bases of supply, that's not really a danger, which means you can cover a lot of territory very quickly. and that speed has lots of knock-on effects.

As I mentioned, fear is the big one. And the Mongols are very good at maintaining a sense of terror among the peoples that they have conquered and the peoples they haven't conquered. And there's actually a story by someone called Ibn Anathir, who's a famous historian from Muzul in what today had been northern Iraq. And he talks about so great was the Mongols fear that a single horseman could ride into a village

and just demand the local people tie themselves up. and they would because they're just so afraid of what the Mongols couldn't do. And so it's that kind of environment. It's speed, but it's then because they're moving so quickly, they can then generate that kind of response. And the Mongols then supercharged that with two other major lines of approach, one of them which is to, they're very good learners, and they don't have the technological sophistication of many of the societies that they attack,

but they learn very quickly. So as soon after they initially start to conquer northern China, they begin to pick up Chinese siege engineers, who they then press into service and makes them produce siege catapult, siege ballisters, other weapons for them that they can deploy elsewhere. So they learn very quickly, they adopt technologies very fast. They recognize their deficiency in that area. And the more they can do that, the better they can handle the big fort for cities of the near eastern elsewhere, which only increases the speed of which they're moving. So there are these various different advantages.

And the other one is the diplomatic dimension. Because if the Mongols send out emissaries to unconcored civilizations, and there's basically two choices, you can submit to the Mongols and become a client state. And if you do that before the Mongols have invaded, they'll be very lenient with you. Or you can face invasion, at which point you'll be forced to become a client state,

enormous loss of life, and if you really resist the Mongols, they will inflict very substantial casualties on your population as a whole. You will then become a client state in a much-reduced form and have to pay a much, much higher tribute. And so what they're doing with that approach, and of course that's linked into the fact that they're winning nearly all the battles they're fighting. With that approach, there is a very, very strong incentive that many societies take, particularly the smaller ones who know they've got no chance against a main Mongol field army to submit early, to acknowledge the Mongols' claims and just to play along because they know they're not going to defeat them and the Mongols have made it clear.

They will be lenient if you submit early. And so why not do that? Why put yourself through the misery of an overthrow that's almost likely to be almost inevitably going to be successful for the Longgles? And the terror and fear that's generated is built on the back of, I'm going to use. use a loaded term here, but then I'll defend it and ask you a question about it. Built on the back of real savagery, and my defense of the use of that term is even by the standards of the day, right? And I'm curious to know if you agree. I mean, you have the, you have the, you have the

sack, you know, the practice of sacking these cities, of mass murder of all the inhabitants, which is, I guess, pretty, pretty frequently used by the Mongols. You also have, I mean, just looking, looking at the accounts of the time that you chronicle in your book, I mean, it's, Chingis Khan's death and the procession with his body, when I guess this happens again, with his son accounts in the sources that it was so important that news of his death not get out that anyone who was witness to the procession which should have to be quite a lot of people because the procession had to go quite a long way was murdered was murdered to keep news of his death a secret i mean these are not to not to be flippant but you i mean these are this is the kind of you know sort of

culture from which you know conan the barbarian is drawn from in sort of modern modern popular culture i mean it really, it wasn't a happy time in general, and the standards of the day were more violent than they are in the 21st century. I think it's fair to say. But nevertheless, even by those standards, it does seem like the Mongols bring something even harder edge to the table. Sure. I mean, the words of barbarian or savagery evokes indiscriminate violence. And on that front, at least, the Mongols can be defended. Their violence was rarely indiscriminate. It was, however, considerable and extensive. what they didn't do is just to attack it attacking kill anyone they wanted to

they were very selective in their use of violence and as I mentioned if a society chose to submit to them they would be made very sure that society was spared because they'd want to encourage other civilizations to follow suit why massacre someone who has submitted to you because other people say well there's no point submitting when you get massacin anyway so the Mongols are not indiscriminate

but for those who show considerable resistance particularly those who hold out pretty fortress cities that will not submit to the Mongols, but have to be taken by storm. There the Mongols can be very, very violent and looking at near total loss of the entire population. Typically, the only people the Mongols spared were high-level artisans because they wanted to make use of their skills. But even that shows a systematic quality because the Mongols didn't just go into a city and kill everyone. They would often line them up. Establish you had skills and who.

didn't take those artisans who they wanted for their own uses and kill everyone else. So it's brutal. It's very violent. But it's not unrestrained violence. There is a logic to it, even if it is very brutal. Now, whether that makes the Mongols more violence than other civilizations, well, I mean, there's lots of wars in the Near East before the Mongols arrive, the Seljuk Turks, and their invasions, the invasions of the Crusaders, there's wars involving Byzantium and various Muslim societies, and the rule of thumb in those societies is actually fairly similar in that if a city, for example, submits, it's normally expected it will be treated reasonably positively or it will be spared a sack. If it resists to the end, then typically the population will massacre.

It's been very good research done on this by Peter Jackson, His argument is that the Mongols were not so very different in many cases to other civilizations in that same rule of thumb. But there are a few differences as well, which is that as far as the Mongols are concerned, if you resist them, that's not just a military choice. But the act of resisting the Mongols is also an act of denial against their concept of universal global rule. So you are showing that you are not sufficiently enlightened or aware or, what's the word? You have not recognized the truth that the Mongols do have a right to rule the entire world. And so there's a spiritual dimension to this too. So your resistance is not just military resistance, it's spiritual resistance.

And that's a problem as far as the Mongols are concerned. And so there is one account, for example, of a castle in northern Persia, where the defenders not only resisted the Mongols but actually managed to shoot one of Chinggis Khan's relatives. Now that is an enormous affront, not just to Chingers Khan's family, but also to the broader concept the Mongols have a right to rule the world.

And so in that particular case, the Mongols didn't just kill the defenders of that castle. They killed everyone in the entire area, and then they killed the animals and birds as well, because they want to make the point that resistance not just to the Mongol armies, but the concept of their global right to rule is simply unacceptable. Got it.

I'd like to read that Jackson book then. Now, I'm fast down by the argument. I mean, it does seem to be to be sort of defining civilized down to use the principle that if there's any discrimination in the violence whatsoever, then, you know, we can kind of call it on some level, not barbaric. But it's interesting. I'm curious to learn more about the argument. You mentioned the choices that these.

conquered or to be conquered or might be conquered people's face, you know, and you put as sort of a stark choice between early submission or, you know, very severe consequences. Talk a bit more, if you will, about these sort of strategies for survival. Because, of course, for those who submit or for those who are conquered on some level, for some of them, life does go on. How do societies make their way in this new world that is suddenly thrust upon them? Sure. And this is what makes the area so interesting, because you've got so many different societies, you've got the Blizantan Empire, Abbasid Caliphate, the Anatolian Seljuk, Sultanate, the Crusader States, the Ayubid Empire, that Saladin's empire. You've got two major areas of Armenian settlement. You've got the Kingdom of Georgia,

and I'm sure there's others I've missed too. So it's interesting to see how different societies respond to the Mongol invasions. And some societies, they respond in a way that could be described as proportionate. In other words, they've heard of the Mongol invasions. They've kept their lines of intelligence open. They've tried to understand better the Mongol threat. They haven't responded to the Mongols directly. But then when the Mongols do invade, they prepare their defenses and then try and defend their frontiers against the Mongols.

And that makes a lot of sense to us, I think, in the modern day world, because it sounds logical. It sounds as a sort of a phased approach. It sounds proportionate to the level of threat. yeah, those societies all get slaughtered. And that's an interesting point because in many ways our instincts on that front might be to say, well, that doesn't make sense to us because surely a proportionate, a measured response is logical, it is calibrated to the level of risk.

That's a reasonable reaction. What's interesting is the societies that survive, or at least survive longest, they don't respond proportionately at all. they respond in extreme ways. And so, for example, Silician Armenia, it realizes what's going on, and it submits to the Mongols, before the Mongols have got anywhere near them,

and it survives. The Mongols appreciate the fact they've submitted to their rule. The tribute is light. There is no Mongol garrison inflicted on the Armenians, although they need to ask for one, but that's because they've chosen to do, so rather it being inflicted. So they do rather well.

But their reaction isn't proportionate at all. They have chosen deliberately to adopt an extreme course of action, and they have profited from it. And another society that profits from an extreme course of action is the Mamluk Empire. Now, the Mamluk Empire is an Islamic empire based in Egypt, and it also does not respond proportionately. Because as soon as the Mongols send emissaries demanding the Mamluk surrender, the Mamluk execute those emissaries or shave their beards off, and send the remainder back, and in doing so they flag up, they are going to resist. And then so far from waiting from the Mongols for the Mongols assault,

they march out beyond their borders and seek battle with the Mongols. And they, in time, will prove to be the civilization that manages to defeat the Mongols, at least in the Near East. And this is what I find so fascinating, that actually the logic of peace, which would prioritize a reasonable and phased approach to a threat, that's not what works in a time when it's really about survival and it's a much more disordered as much as huge amounts of upheaval as populations in motion. Society as a whole and the norms of existence have been ripped up in that kind of

environment actually. It's extreme choices that do better than proportionate ones. And presumably extreme choices that track with your resources, right? So if Silesian Armenia had decided to sally out beyond its borders and defeat the Mongols, I confess I don't know much about Silesian Armenia. But I suspect it would not have gone well, whereas the Mamelukes are in command of substantial. I mean, they have the now River Valley, right? I mean, they have a real set of resources to work with.

Is that fair? Sure. I mean, Silesian Armenia is small. But the mandukes are harder to explain. Yes, they've got Egypt and all the, as you say, the agricultural and commercial revenues that brings. but the Mongols, when the Mongols invaded northern Syria in 1260, their armies thought to have been around 100,000 strong. And in this era, at least, Egypt, Egyptian armies are really bigger than about 12 to 15,000 max. And so the Mamluk marched against the Mongols with an army of about 12,000 troops.

I mean, to be fair, there were commanders in the Mamluks ranks who were basically saying, look, this is suicide. Why are we doing this? But the overall commander had a view of what he was doing. and so he marched out to fight the Mongols in the event. Things worked out well for him, not least because the great Khan in Mongolia died, much of the Mongol army withdrew, leaving a garrison in Syria,

which the Mamukes then met, but that garrison was only a fraction of the Mongol's main army, and so as a result, the manor could defeat it in battle, and a battle called Aynjolut, following which they then spent the next 20 years, fortifying their position in Syria and Egypt, against the next big Mongol invasion,

so when the Mongols returned in force, in 12-8 to 81, the man were able to defeat them, even if they were still very much outnumbered. So let's talk about Mongol rule. Talk about, you know, we have a people who go from being step raiders to step conquerors and then, you know, then rulers. They have a sort of, I guess, sort of a shamanistic faith of sorts at first. How does what they bring to the table, if you like, in terms of thinking about politics and in society, then map onto the local populations that they are in charge of and how does it all play out, just in terms of patterns and broad currents over the course of the next century or so.

Sure. And this is fascinating because there's so many different cultures that mix and combined often, not in very nice scenarios, but nonetheless they ideas and concepts and cultural practices and religions do get shared across much of the continent. And there's all sorts of strands here because, of course, the Mongols have invaded. So they will set the rules according to their own rule, but because they're in charge, so why wouldn't? But nonetheless, they do make use of local bureaucracies, they make use of local administrators, and that begins to shape the way they govern, because in many ways it's in their interest to continue to govern the way things always have been governed,

because that's often, those are the traditions of the societies that have taken over. And in times, the Mongols in the Near East, at least, they begin to adopt the culture of the societies under their control, and in many cases they adopt Islam, just as they adopt Islam further north in what's today to be parts of Eastern Europe and much of Russia, in what's called the Carnies of the Golden Horde. In China, they adopt Buddhism. So the Mongols do adopt the cultural religion of the societies under their control. But what's also interesting is that they exchange technologies and ideas. So when the Mongols conquer China, they experience the concept of paper money.

And so I think this is a rather good idea. and they try and a few decades later impose it on the Near East. And it's an enormous failure because no one's prepared to accept that a piece of paper can reflect precious metal-based currency. But it's an interesting way in which ideas and concepts get shared. One other thing the Mongols also seem to have facilitated in terms of the exchange of technologies is gunpowder. Because gunpowder was pioneered by the Chinese, who then developed it over many centuries,

but it doesn't seem to have got out much beyond China until the advent of the Mongol. But when the Mongols arrived, possibly not by the Mongols themselves, maybe by merchants within their empire. Gunpowder technology suddenly reaches other parts of the world, India, Mediterranean, and therefore within the Mediterranean, the Muslim world and the Byzantine Empire and ultimately Western Christendom. And so you can see the Mongols as an agent for the sharing and dissemination of all sorts of technologies. A maritime compass also is another key technology that gets shared in this era, among others. So the Mongols, not only do they adopt technologies and cultures and religions of the peoples they've

overthrown, but they also serve to exchange these things across very great distances as well. So last question, in addition to the technology sharing that you just described, what are the lingering effects of the Mongol conquest that we can see today? I mean, you mentioned the Golden Horde. I mean, the Crimean Tartars were a factor in, you know, world history, regional history up until well until the 20th century, right? And there are still, you know, there's still issues there. I mean, what is it that we can look around?

I mean, see, Mongolia today is sort of sandwiched in between effectively the Russian and Chinese empires and is a relatively less powerful state in the 21st century. Where are the impacts? What can we look around and see today? Sure. Well, as you say, moving also beyond the sort of technology and things like that.

One would be just the enormous political reconfiguration of the regions that they conquered. So for the Near Eastern example, before the Mongol conquest, the really big players were the Ayuribid Empire and the Anatolian Seljuks,

to some extent, but the Byzantine Empire, to some extent, the Abbasid-Canifate, and to some extent, the Crusader States. By the time the Mongol Empire's conquests had grounds to a halt in the Near East, the big players are completely different. The Ayuban Empire is gone. The Anasthan-Seltic Empire is gone. The Macedo-Seltic Empire is gone. The Abbasid-Kanafate was overthrown, and the Mamlux set up a continuation of it in Egypt. The Byzantine Empire is in hard retreat,

and the big players are the Mamluk Empire, and increasingly the Ottoman Empire in the northwestern and part of what today would be Turkey. So the political reconfiguration of an enormous area of land is part of it. But for me at least something that I think is, and this is a point made by many historians, but it's an important one, is about horizons. And that is the process of creating an empire that spanned from the Pacific coastline in the east through to the Egyptian border in the west

or to the borders of Hungary and Poland in the northwest. that's a huge area of land. And that means that envoys from not just within the Mongol Empire, but beyond it too, they travel across the Mongol Empire to find out what this empire is, what it's about, who the Mongols actually are. And so you have emissaries from the Muslim world, from Western Christendom, from India and elsewhere, sending travellers to go to Mongolia. And in the process, they cross thousands of miles of terrain.

Now, what's interesting is that for many of these societies, much of this territory was just blank space as far as they were aware before this. They didn't know it was in Central Asia or Mongolia or indeed many of the other regions that their agents passed through. And so what you've got is these missionaries or ambassadors or merchants returning home to their various different territories across Eurasia and reporting what they've found. And so suddenly, where previously you might have a, what could be called a here be dragons territory, because they have no idea what's out there, suddenly they now they know, or they bought some idea. And so the frontiers of myth and legend get driven back. And suddenly regions as weird and obscure as Western Europe, for example, suddenly they become better known. And the same thing's true in the reverse.

And you might compare this perhaps to the planet Mars. And of course, there's been all sorts of lurid fantasies about Martians and things like that. Well, that's being driven back by Mars rovers and expeditions and satellites. As the known area of Mars grows, we begin to get a much better, a clearer idea of what's out there in the same way. Societies across Eurasia, and Kingdom Mongols themselves get a much clearer idea of what's out there than they had done previously. So the horizons of those societies are being driven back and driven back really quite dramatically.

And so it's that for me, which I find so fascinating, that question of how do people cope with, how do they engage with, how do they make sense with, societies, cultures, geographies, animals, birds, fruit, food, recipes, and all the rest of it, they encounter, in some cases, from their society's perspective, from the first time. Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm, making and breaking empires in the medieval Near East. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.