The History of China - #169 - S. Song 12: Instant Regret

Episode Date: July 14, 2019

Just off of the heady victory over the Jin Dynasty with their new BFFs, the Mongols, a first-in-a-century visit to the Imperial Tombs gives the Song court a brilliant idea - what if we just took them back without asking? What's the worst that could happen? Time Period Covered: 1234-1241 CE Major Historical Figures: Song Dynasty: Emperor Lizong Chancellor Zheng Qingzhi Chancellor Shi Miyuan [d. 1233] General Zhao Kui General Quan Zicai Mongol Khanate: Ögedei Khaghan Töregene Khatun Prince Khödan Prince Khöchu Ambassador Wang Qi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic

characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 169, Instant Regret. The golden flame of the Jurchen Jin dynasty had been snuffed out, and after 120 years of humiliation and being lorded over by those northern barbarians, who even went so far as to deny them their ancestral burial grounds. For the royals, officials, and even the populace at large of the southern Song, it was a happy funeral indeed. As the final gouts of smoke flicked out from the ruined husks of the once glorious, long-lost Kaifeng, and from Caizhou, where the last scion of the royal house of Wanyan

met the Mongol headman's axe, A strange repose settled over the south. At long last, it was over. Wasn't it? Or was it? Should it be? Could it be? After all, the imperial ancestral temples were still in barbarian hands, albeit different barbarians. Heads were scratched, beards were stroked, and long conversations were had over tea in backroom chambers. Ideas began to emerge. In the immediate wake of the final destruction of Jin, however, the Song armies were immediately pulled back. The court had sent a force of some 20,000 soldiers to assist their Mongol allies, commanded by none other than Subotai, as well as vast reserves of southern grain to feed their northern comrades-in-arms. Now, with the war seemingly at an end, the Song armies were content to retreat southward,

leaving the vast majority of Hanan to its new overlords. To its new overlords. The half-year that would follow this initial retreat is a confusing but interesting period of time, because even though source after source indicates that the vast majority of the Song imperial court was completely not in favor of any kind of overt or aggressive policy against the Mongol Empire, and even though the Song emperor himself seems to have been content to basically do nothing other than blithely accept whatever the majority of his courtiers wanted, before the year was out, Southern Song would nevertheless be committing a massive force in an attempt to retake its northern territories,

especially surrounding its two, well, rather three, former capitals, Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Chang'an, respectively. This period is therefore both a fascinating look at how, even when everyone seems to agree that something like a war is definitely a terrible idea, and that we should not do it, in a massive bureaucracy built and run largely on the concept of passing the buck, things can nevertheless begin to snowball out of control with just a little push by someone in the right place at the wrong time. This is also a fascinating incident in that it sets the stage for the next

four decades of conflict between the southern Chinese and the Mongol Empire, ultimately resulting in, well, we'll get to all of that in due time. So let's start out by looking at all the people across the entire gamut of Song government who were definitely not pushing for some war of reclamation against their new Mongol neighbors. Starting at the tippy-top and working our way down, first and foremost, the emperor himself, Li Zong. Li Zong was by pretty much every account the walking, talking antithesis of an assertive, strong-willed ruler, which you'll no doubt remember tends to be something of a running theme among these southern Song monarchs. He doesn't seem to have been particularly stupid or weak, so much as he's just unable to be bothered with the day-to-day running of government.

He trusted his chief ministers and seemed perfectly content over the whole of his reign to simply sign off on whatever they agreed was the correct decision. That is, after all, pretty much why he'd been chosen. Life is easy when you're a rubber stamp. So working our way down among these senior officials, the two of greatest importance to the issue were two of Li Zong's successive chancellors. First, the ever-cautious and reticent Xue Miyuan, who had died just the year prior, in the year 1233. And then, his replacement, Zheng Qingzhi, formerly the instructor of the now-sitting emperor, who supposedly possessed a much more revanchist bent about wanting to reclaim the north. But Davis writes that such policy differences between the two are pretty overblown.

Quote, There's nothing to document serious rifts between the two over border policy. Admittedly, it may have been politically expedient to distance himself from his highly unpopular predecessor, and a more ambitious foreign policy might provide a convenient vehicle for doing so. Even so, he must have known that there were much less risky ways of achieving the same political objective. In all, as an argument, it seems pretty thin. Moreover, the lower and assistant high councillors, as well as virtually the totality of the Bureau of Military Affairs and the Imperial Censorate, were staunchly against any such northern adventurism.

A consolation of officialdom that, even if Chancellor Zheng had been the biggest warmonger on this side of the Yangtze, should have been sufficient to cool Li Zong's jets. Investigating censor Li Zongmian would prophetically point out in his memorial to the throne on the subject that just in terms of simple logistics, it was a fool's errand and an impossibility. The North, he and others pointed out, was beyond ruined, beyond devastated. Those were adjectives that could have been applied to it before the whole Mongol conquest, when the Jin Empire had, you know, only been wracked by decades of droughts, floods, pestilence, starvation, and rebellions. Now though? Now it was something else entirely. Sending an army north of the Yangtze would be akin to trying to send one to

the surface of the moon. It was a desolate wasteland, nearly devoid of life in any meaningful capacity, and certainly not capable of sustaining any kind of force that such an invasion would entail. It would therefore have to be supplied entirely from the South, to which Censor Lee noted, quote, Such well-reasoned and factually supported arguments were echoed in report after report from the censorate, the fiscal overseer, and scores of other high-level government agencies. In brief, don't even think about it. But then, less than six months later, they'd be doing it anyway. Why? How? It seems to have been largely a fundamental break between the metropolitan advisors of the capital and the major cities, and the opinions of many of the regional military command staff, all predicated on a, the commander of the army who had defeated the

Red Jacket rebels back in 1231, General Zhao Kui, whose close friendship to an equally militarist gung-ho imperial clansman gave him a wide array of contacts far more powerful than any mere military commander would have otherwise been privy to. Quote, Zhao Kui advocated a firm, even aggressive, border policy. Subsequently, he came to exemplify the opinion of many within the military establishment, and especially among the commanders in the eastern part of the Yangtze River basin, where Zhao had gained his experience. End quote. Still, it's worth pointing out that it wasn't as though every single military man in the empire

was all for war against the Mongols. Even Zhao's own older brother would disagree with him so fervently that he'd later disassociate with Kui completely and publicly shame him for having risked the safety of the empire. Support for the war position was neither of the capital city, Hangzhou, or then known as Linan, nor from the broader empire as a whole, but concentrated almost exclusively among the regional administrators and the military commanders of the lower course of the Yangtze, which was no coincidence at all. These armies of the east had not been widely involved in the final campaign against Jin,

and thus had not, unlike other commanders in the central and western parts of the empire, seen firsthand the conditions of the northern territories. They were therefore of a mind that, in the event of a Song northward push, it would be much like it had been in their own Shandong campaign. You bring some supplies with you, sure, but then you link up with loyalist forces in the region and they'll give you reinforcements and supplies of their own. What's the big deal? What was more, direct Mongol intervention in Shandong, in the east, had been comparatively little and light compared to that of the central and western border regions. The Mongols had instead been largely content to allow

their pledged underlings, like Li Quan and the Red Jackets, to do their bidding from afar. When the Song's eastern forces subsequently defeated the Red Jackets, then, they might have gained a false impression that the Mongols weren't all they'd been cracked up to be, after all. So there's this strong, albeit localized, push to make a go of it, and the great big final blowout victory at Caizhou must have already put most in song in a truly giddy, what-can't-we-do sort of a mood. But the real final push would be, of all things, a delegation sent to at long last pay homage and make sacrifices to the long-neglected eight imperial tombs just northeast of Luoyang. These sacred rituals to the spirits of the ancient, revered Song ancestral emperors had been unable to be conducted for more than a century

because of, of course, the Jin occupation of the north. But now, for the first time in lifetimes, the Mongols had allowed the Song to send a delegation to make those holy offerings. But the conditions that they found the tombs in was, well, what most places will tend to look like after a hundred years of absolutely no upkeep. They were in deep disrepair, even ruin, and had been at least partially flooded by shifting water tables and no one there to care about it. Such was the image painted by the Song delegates back to Emperor Li Zong upon their return to the capital. As the emperor listened to this report, the chroniclers say, quote,

He heaved a great sigh and fought back tears. In this emotionally charged context, the court, surrendering to sentiment, decided to dispatch armies north to recover the three capitals. End quote. So it's actually this incredibly emotional decision. No calculus, no rationality. Heck, throw all that out the window. What's about to happen in late 1234 is a straight-from-the-gut act of spiritual passion.

A sort of deep, abiding, all-consuming feeling of needing to protect the honor and souls of your ancestors. So much so that you'll throw rationality straight out the window for it. I think there's many of us, myself included, in the modern age for whom it can seem really difficult to get into that kind of headspace. It seems almost impossible, comical even, to get so bent out of shape about the conditions of tombs that have been sitting undisturbed for more than a century at this point. So much so that you're willing to start a war against the Mongol Empire over it.

But these kind of feelings, we have to remember, are very real. And the people who feel them are feeling them very powerfully, no less so than we feel feelings. And the Southern Song has shown this time and again. Remember way back in 1138, for instance, when Emperor Gaozong had been willing to formally cede the entire north to the Jurchen just to get back his father's coffin from them. And here again, we have the same sort of decision-making from the gut, from the top down. Davis writes, quote, The decision was not calculated. It reflected in some measure the naive optimism that the ancestral spirits would intervene on the side of humanity.

In fact, this reliance on spiritual providence was so intense that just two months before the offensive was set to commence, Li Zong posthumously restored all the honors and titles onto his murdered stepbrother, Zhao Hung, and authorized official sacrifices to him at his tomb for the first time. You remember Zhao Hung, right? He was the stepbrother who'd been 11th hour judoed out of the throne, and authorized official sacrifices to him at his tomb for the first time. You remember Zhao Hung, right? He was the stepbrother who'd been 11th hour judoed out of the throne, the one that he, or at least his government, had murdered to ensure the succession.

That Zhao Hung? Clearly, Li Zong wanted all the spirits, including the spirit of his disgraced brother, to support his sacred mission. The Song would unleash their armies in the summer of 1234, either in the 6th or 8th lunar month, in a three-pronged strike to reclaim the north. The first army of 10,000 marched directly from Luzhou to Kaifeng, encountering no significant resistance along the way. Yet even on the march, they began to realize exactly why there was so little resistance. There simply couldn't possibly have been. The cities and townships that the army marched by, last reported

as having flourishing populations of tens or even hundreds of thousands, were found one and all to have been reduced to barely a few hundred inhabitants barely clinging to survival across the devastated countrysides. Once they arrived at the once mighty Kaifeng, the Song army was greeted by a militia force of six or seven hundred guardsmen, who sadly informed the Song commander, Chuan Zetai, that the whole of the civilian population of the metropolis was now less than one thousand households in total. The Mongols had slaughtered untold numbers, to be sure, but their arrows, bombs, and swords were by no means the only reason for the apocalypse unfolding now before the southern troopers. Quote,

Floods had led to famine as well as disease, the scope and scale of which could scarcely have been imagined. During the siege of Kaifeng, for instance, plague had ripped through the trapped residents of the city for more than 50 days, and the Mongol force arrayed outside had, apparently by sheer blind luck, just managed to pull their troops back ahead of the disease, as Subutai had wished to reassess his options before continuing his assault. Following the final destruction of the Jin Dynasty at Taizhou, the Mongol armies had pulled back from the borderlands. The Song court had interpreted this move as an indication that the northern barbarians weren't scared to face their own mighty armies,

and were, therefore, trying to avoid conflict. In reality, the Mongols had pulled out of Hanan and the Yellow River Valley, because there was pretty much nothing there left to eat, and no one left to grow it. Like a swarm of locusts, they had destroyed and devoured all over the past two decades, and now they were moving on. They had bigger fish to fry. It was into this barren, despoiled hellscape that the Song now pressed. As such, the previous Song calculus that they would just live off the land or be provisioned by the local populace eager and ready to help them out with both men and material was, quite simply, not going to happen. In spite of the fact that they'd been reduced by as much as 9 out of 10 or more, they still had barely enough to feed even themselves, much less provision a sizable attack force. Just two weeks into the campaign, General Chuan's 10,000-man army was already running out of provisions and needed to await resupply being

sent from the south. The arrival of General Zhao Kui, soon thereafter with an additional 50,000 troops, which was meant to be a relief and strengthening force, instead now only compounded the dire situation. Quote, the original plan had envisioned combining the two armies, adding available conscripts from the north, and then proceeding to Luoyang. With provisions so scarce, troops were disinclined to move on. End quote. In fact, as many as three-quarters of the troops simply refused to go any further into the burnt-out hellscape of the north that they'd stumbled into.

And those few who did were quickly reduced via exhaustion and hunger to being scarcely any more combat ready than the shambling semi-corpses they were trudging past. Meanwhile at Luoyang, a smaller Song force, perhaps only a few thousand strong, had retaken the city without backup. They too, however, had been anticipating linking up with the other two armies and then being reprovisioned by them. Thus, when the remnants of the Kaifeng force staggered into the secondary capital with absolutely nothing to eat even for themselves, armies and then being reprovisioned by them. Thus, when the remnants of the Kaifeng force staggered into the secondary capital with absolutely nothing to eat even for themselves, they were all quickly reduced to slaughtering their own horses just for meat. But then it got even worse from there. Because now it was time for the Mongols to come back.

They'd been off doing their Mongol things up in Mongolia and in the great unknown western reaches beyond the edges of the map. Or at least most of them had. Some of them had just been hiding in wait. But word had now reached the ears of the great Khan, Ogedei, of Little Southern Song's delusions of grandeur and reconquest. And he quite simply wasn't having it. The Yellow River Valley might well be a ruined graveyard full of nothing but despair and

ashes, but they were Mongol ashes now, and no weak little southern doughboys were going to get it into their rice-eating heads to change any of that. The Mongol armies therefore lured the starving Song forces into seemingly undefended northern towns, and then ambushed them from the suburbs to lethal effect. Already starving, their morale quickly broke, and the Song offensive utterly collapsed. In fact, the rout from Luoyang was so devastatingly total that something like 80-90% of the retreating soldiers were lost to death or injury. It had only been one month since the beginning of this glorious reconquest of the North, and it was nothing short of a fiasco.

Returning to the South, the survivors of this catastrophic campaign, first and foremost its general trends its high, was quick to point the finger of blame at any and everyone except himself. There hadn't been enough provisions, there had been political undermining of the operation from its opponents, delays on purpose, the sun was in my eyes, you name it. In the end, though, any real blame needs must lay in the very underpinnings that made it seem like a good idea in the first place. It was, and I'm going to go ahead and use the technical scientific term here, a complete shitshow from start to finish. There was, as already mentioned, a, quote, glaring lack of

planning by the campaign's proponents. Earlier visitors to the North had reported, often in grim It was naive, moreover, to expect them to prevail without encountering significant resistance, either from the Mongols or their surrogates. The small contingent initially sent to Luoyang, perhaps fewer than 10,000 men, suggests precisely this naive assumption. End quote. It really does appear to have been a war carried out on the justification that these spirits will provide. Because there was no contingency plan, no fallback scenario, and everything, everything was bet on the idea that the first army would find enough just stuff lying around to feed themselves and the second, and then in turn the

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Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. They'd sent 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers to Kaifeng and found it empty, but only a few thousand to Luoyang, which turned out to just be chock full of Mongols. Where was the intelligence here? Well, the answer is there was, quite apparently, and in every respect, none to be had. The history of Song reports a catastrophic loss of life as a result of this ill-conceived offensive, as much as 100,000 total deaths, both civilian and military combined. That seems a bit high, given the size of the army sent on the campaign, the dearth of civilians left to be able to die, and the brevity of the offensive. Yet this much is certainly true. Regardless of how quote-unquote honorable the Mongol Empire

had ever intended to be in its alliance-slash-truth with the Song Dynasty, any such notion of peace between the two powers was effectively torched when the Song decided to take back Henan in 1234. The ramifications of this unconscionably stupid decision would last for the following 45 years, and result in the utter destruction of the Song regime altogether, and the loss of uncountable millions of lives in the process. The following figures give by no account a complete picture. They don't, for instance, take into account people who left, people who died of old age or other factors, or people just missed or not counted by census takers. But it does help us at least get a sense of things.

In Southern Song, the population count as of about the year 1200 was somewhere between 110 million, with some estimates ranging up to 140 million people, which is about 35-40% of the total global population at the time. A hundred years later, the first Yuan census, taken in the year 1300, showed between 60-75 million people, which dropped that down to a mere 21% of the global population. Though I should say that the population numbers will bounce back by the year 1350, perhaps due at least in part to a more settled society and better record

keeping. Again, this is not saying that 40 to 60 million people died. No, what this is saying is that society was thrown into complete disarray and millions of people certainly did die. The Mongol response to the Song incursion was slow. There was a good reason for this. Ogedei Kayan was, in 1234, a man with a great many irons in his particular fire, and as of the ill-fated Chinese invasion of Hanan, the goings-on of the Yellow River were all but beneath his immediate notice. At the time, he sat some 900 miles away at the newly permanently constructed city some 900 miles away at the newly permanently constructed city of Karakorum at the foot of the Altai Range, conferring and

deliberating about how best to further prosecute his simultaneous wars against Arabia, the Caucasus, the Russian principalities, and the ongoing anti-guerrilla campaign in Korea. Thus, it was only at year's end that the Great Khan found the time to at last dispatch his envoy, a man named Wang Qi, one of the very few ethnically Han servants of the Khan directly, indeed perhaps the very first of his kind, and the same man who had orchestrated the Mongol-Song alliance against Jin the year before. Wang was now sent to castigate the foolish Chinese and let them all know what they'd just called down on themselves. Apparently, the court of Ogedei had been preparing to send Wang Qi on just such a southward mission

even before the Song had gotten their brilliant invasion idea. This was likely in large part to try to convince the Chinese to not start anything they might instantly regret against their new northern neighbors, since actually the Mongols were otherwise engaged at the moment, so if they could please just wait patiently in line to be conquered in their due turn, that would be great. That whole arrangement had of course just been totally upended, and so what now? Acting as intermediary, Emissary Wang had, well, he had a really difficult role to attempt to fill. Keep in mind, for one thing, that neither the Mongols nor the Song could really claim the diplomatic high ground here. The Chinese were by this point well aware of the Mongols' propensity to promise leniency and forgiveness and to secure their desired outcome,

and then, you know, forget their promise the moment the city gates were opened. And as for the Song? Well, they'd just broken an alliance unprovoked by invading their ally, so no one is really in contention for the world's most honest and trustworthy dealmaker here. Still, between 1233 and the year of his death in 1240, Wang Qi would make no fewer than five such ambassadorial journeys from his home in Yanjing, the new name of the former Zhongdu, aka modern Beijing, and Hangzhou in the south. Still, other, more important wars are known. Ogedei Kayon would not simply let a faux pas like invading his Henan go unpunished. Thus, following Wang Qi's apparently inconclusive first mission to Hangzhou, the Mongol armies would make their vengeance known on the south

in the summer of 1235. The initial strike was against the Chinese general who had dared to incur their wrath in the first place, expelling his occupying force from the Tangzhou region, and then in late autumn ruthlessly plundering Cao Yang and Yingzhou, carting off all that their horse transports could carry, when they last chose to withdraw. These and the subsequent raids between 1235 and 1236 were conducted by none other than two of Ogedei's own sons, his second son, Kodan, and his third son and designated heir, Hochu. Though they withdrew

northward at the end of autumn, they were far from finished. Intent apparently not on conquest, but rather simple pillage and sowing terror, He Chu would return early the following spring, reinforced and emboldened. This time, he plunged nearly 120 miles into the Song interior, crossing the Han River. This enemy penetration, coinciding with a mutiny in the strategically vital border city of Xiangyang, threw the Song defenses into disarray. Meanwhile, his brother, Huodan, would make his reappearance later that year, at the head of reportedly some 500,000 soldiers along the Song's western frontier.

From Davis, quote, Commanding half a million men, Mongol, Tangut, Jurchin, and Uyghur, Huodan initiated a formidable offensive against Da'an commandery, south of Mianzhou and deep in Sichuan. These numbers were certainly exaggerated, but the force was still large enough to overwhelm Song armies. Within weeks, Da'an capitulated. The Song commander, Cao Yuwan, and his brother perished in Da'an's defense. Plunging further southward and killing Song soldiers and civilians by the tens of thousands, Khotan penetrated as far as the great fortress city of Chengdu itself, and managed to even seize it, albeit only temporarily. What might have happened from there, had the campaign continued unabated, we can only speculate. Because it was here and now, in November of 1236, that

Khotu unexpectedly died for unknown reasons, prompting his brother's quick withdrawal from the western reaches. Still, even without Erhuoqiu, the punitive campaign continued unabated through year's end. In 1237, the focus of the fighting shifted to the Huai River Valley, between the Yellow and Yanzi, and threatened the political center of the Song. Zhengzhou would face the full brunt of this campaign, ultimately falling into Mongol hands

at the cost of reportedly more than 100,000 Chinese lives, both before and after the taking of the city. Yet it was here and now that the Song were finally able to assert their own defensive counterpressure against the invaders, and demonstrate why the South would prove a difficult nut to crack. Across 1237 and into 1238, in battle after brutal battle, the Song would regain almost all of their lost territories in the Huai region. By early 1238, the Mongols thought that the Song had probably learned their lesson and learned it

well. Well enough, at least, that they ought to be able to keep their noses out of the north while the Khanate dealt with more pressing matters. Thus, they dispatched, once again, who else but Wang Qi to offer up terms of a new truce. The terms were fairly straightforward. You used to pay an annual tribute to the Altan Khan of the Jurchen, which we've replaced both territorially and politically, so pay us that and we'll call it good. This, to the Mongols, seemed fair enough given the circumstances. We've got better things to do, and we'll call it good. This, to the Mongols, seemed fair enough, given the circumstances. We've got better things to do, and while you did demonstrate that you can be a tough little cookie when you want, you definitely got the snot kicked out of you just now, and we showed you that we can

go a-hunting in your backyard anytime we want, so what do you say? To which the Song replied, hmm, I can see your point, but we sort of just got out of a long-term thing with someone else, and we're just not ready for that level of commitment at this point. Can we just be friends? No, seriously, that's more or less what the counteroffer dispatched to Karakorum said. In Hangzhou, the imperial court was stacked with officials who opposed even the mention of even the most modest of concessions to the Khanate, fearing that if you give them an inch now, they'll take a mile later, which was, it should be noted, not wrong. And others very concerned that, well, if we just roll over and sign a peace treaty now, then the troops on the border will suffer in their morale

should fighting pick up again later. Then again, the question was also raised of Mongol trustworthiness in their peace dealings, with ministers bringing up the fact that their deeds suggested a brutal indifference to their own promises, which again was also not wrong, but glass houses song, glass houses. And so combat operations dragged into 1238 and 1239, and going rather unexpectedly well for the Chinese given the whole way this war had started. They managed to recover, for instance, the border city of Xiangyang, after they managed to capitalize on a defection from within the defending Mongol camp there. Then, between late 1238 and early 1239, two massive offenses by the Mongols were turned aside, one after the next, at Luzhou in the east. Reports list the Mongol armies as each having been more than 800,000

strong, which is, as ever, likely significantly overblown, but as Davis puts it, quote, even a large fraction of that number would have overwhelmingly outnumbered defenders at Luzhou, a city of less than half a million residents, end quote. The major offensive in 1238 and 1239 would, in the end, amount to very little in terms of geographic gains or losses, but they are very notable for their sheer purported scale. The fact that the Mongols were, time and again, willing to invest such tremendous manpower into these campaigns shows, most likely, just how offensive the Song refusal to accept their peace terms had been to Mongol

sensibilities. But even though the Song's ability to deflect their hammer blows time and time again must have given heart to the southern defenders, the fact that their enemies could just muster time and again armies of half a million men or more just to throw at them must have been a daunting realization indeed. Moreover, these weren't just one tribe or clan, or even nation, or even empire, as the song understood the idea. Instead, arrayed against them, there were the Mongols in command, yes, but also people from every corner of the known world. The Tanguts, the Jurchen, other Han Chinese of the north, Koreans, Persians, Arabs, Uyghurs, the list went on and on, and they were, it seemed,

inexhaustible in number. Cut down 10 and they would simply be replaced by a hundred more. For the Song, meanwhile, the only reinforcements they could reach for outside of their own, already fully committed population, was a trickle of refugees from Northern China, marking them out as having a severe and permanent numerical disadvantage. Even worse, though, was that this alien collective bearing down upon them was adapting, not only in their battle tactics, but even in their very ethnic makeup, to make them better at fighting in the southlands. Earlier Mongol raids had largely been confined to the cooler months, because, as had been the case since the time of Cao Cao trying to cross the Yangtze Red Cliffs, the northmen of the steppes just couldn't

take the heat or disease of the south. However, quote, by the 1230s, partly because of their now more ethnically diverse armies, their movements became far less predictable. A brief assault in mid-1239 on Chongqing, a city famous for its dreadfully humid summers, must have caught Song defenders off guard, as a historic pattern for Mongol armies was to retreat northward at the peak of summer. End quote. It is a testament, therefore, to the class and ability of the Song armies, that in the face of all this, they just kept repulsing and turning away the Mongol attacks. Now, allow me just this brief aside to simply marvel at that

for a minute. I've spent much of my time researching and writing about the Song, and especially Southern Song, in relatively, not exactly denigrating, but certainly not exultant terms, militarily. With the exception, of course, of guys like Song Taizong and Yue Fei, Song and its armies are generally regarded as one of the weakest Chinese dynastic orders, going from being the superpower of their half of the world to just one state among close equals or even junior partners in subsidiary relationships. And that has largely been because of repeated military incompetence. But that military incompetence has almost always been in launching, as they've done here today, ill-thought-out, ill-planned, and ill-advised offensive operations to try to make

Song great again. Even, and perhaps especially, when it flies in the face of every rational and logistical piece of information on the game board. The Song have been, and will contend to be, phenomenally bad at offensive warfare. They're only allowed back into that particular casino time and again because they've got almost bottomless stacks of chips and the bad sense to keep putting it all on the 00. But on the defensive? I mean, holy smokes, it's a completely different story.

Southern Song makes the Spartans of Thermopylae look like a pad of butter being cut by a lightsaber. They're going to go down, yes, to be sure. But they're going to go down kicking, screaming, clawing, stabbing, and biting the whole way. And they're going to drag it out over another 40 years. Just to throw that into perspective, it took Genghis Khan, beginning in 1206, the last 20 years of his life to conquer almost all of northern China, Manchuria, Korea, Qara-Katan, Khwarezmia, and burn a searing hole across Eurasia with 20,000 of his guys. Before the southern Song regime finally gives up the ghost to Jengis' grandson, Kublai, in 1279, it will have added the entire Middle East, Russia, most of Anatolia, and Eastern Europe to that list. How were the Song able to hold out like that, despite their disadvantages? Well, for one, infrastructure. Thanks to their command over the rivers and canals of the South, they were able to use them as an extremely efficient internal supply line to move men, material, and information

wherever it might be needed, and in quantities that not even the stepwriters could hope to match. This would be an advantage that they would hold for decades before the Mongols could find a counter to it. Moreover, the Song would, apparently by sheer force of habit, be proved willing to take the L, that is, to realize that it could not win a suicidal confrontation, and rather than Stalingrading it, tactically retreating and regrouping to fight another day. This is all, of course, in concurrence with the fact that at no point up to after Kublai's enthronement in 1260 would Song ever face anything approaching the full brunt of Mongol attention.

Not even under our next Khan, Monk, who will take personal command over the attack on Southern Song will the Mongol war machine be totally focused on China. It still has all these other things going on. As for our current Khan, Ogedei, he, over the course of his entire reign, never really appeared truly interested at all in the conquest of the South in any real or immediate sense. Right up until his death in 1241, he would dispatch mission after mission seeking some kind of mutually amenable agreement between the two. Mutually amenable meaning, of course, you pay us homage and tribute and we let you live. That sort of mutually amenable. As I mentioned before, Wang Qi would be sent on five total missions of negotiation with the Song between 1233 and 1240, though to little ultimate effect.

Even months after the second great Khan's death in the opening months of 1242, the Mongols, under their temporary but long command of Ogedei's queen in Khatun, Toregin, sent yet another large delegation, at least 70 in number, to Hangzhou to reopen peace talks. This, however, did not go well. Davis writes, Approaching from the west, the chief envoy and perhaps the entire delegation was jailed at Changsha by a Song regional commander, ostensibly angered by the envoy's arrogance. The Song court apparently offered no formal apology for the incident, and the envoys advanced no further. Nothing developed from the northern initiative. The extent of Song intransigence is difficult to understand. End quote.

One possible explanation for this particular instance of boneheadedness was once again a simple misreading of what was going on within the internal political machinations of the Mongol juggernaut. Ogedei Kayan had just died, and pretty much all operations had been temporarily called to a halt as the Borjigins all went back to Karakorum to elect a new Great Khan in their ritual curl tie. And the many, many shenanigans that all entailed, side note, which we will discuss in far more depth in the bonus feed when we get there,

what the Song understood from their position was that there was apparently disorder at home in their enemy's royal house, and that a lull in the fighting had resulted, perhaps permanently. So that's where we're going to leave off today. The Song has managed to immediately regret its decision to try to invade the North and reclaim their ancestral capitals, but has then proved surprisingly resilient in the face of repeated, if offhanded, Mongol reprisals. They've turtled down, and they've done it well, but they will never again have the chance to unturtle. After rejecting the outstretched hand of peace offered by Torigin Katsun,

they will face down the full storm of the third great Khan, Monk's Wrath. Thanks for listening. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, the French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous reign of terror, you can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today.