The History of China - #219 - Intelligent Speech 2021: Escaping the Mongols (Or at Least Trying!)

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

A live retelling (wart & all) of Genghis Khan's invasion of Khwarazmia ca. 1221, and the doomed flight of all who stood against his wrath... followed by a Q&A. From the 2021 Intelligent Speech Conference! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Oh, thank goodness. Okay. Okay.

Jeez. Sorry. Okay. Sorry for the delay, everyone. thanks thanks for helping me out uh isn't technology wonderful right up until it isn't um so okay um well we're off to a rough start but hopefully we can make up for lost time here uh this is, I've got a story of escape today that I've been loving ever since I first started researching it. I wanted to tell a much larger story, so I started writing all this about many different peoples who were

trying to escape from the Mongols, and then, of course, I realized I only got the 20 minutes, really, and change to work with, so I had to really scale it back. So I picked out just one particular story, which has always been one of my favorites. So just to drop right in, in media res, right in the middle of the action, we're in the lifetime of Genghis Khan, Temüjin, who's at the top of his game. And this is the tale of one exceptionally foolish governor and his boss, the Shah, in an empire called Khwarizmia. The year is 1217.

The Mongols rule not only their own lands but also northern China, and they've just gotten an effective stranglehold over the critical link of the Silk Road between the Chinese and Muslim worlds. So they're not just the central artery of the global trade network in the 13th century, but they're also its guardians and gatekeepers. The Khan himself was nearing 60 years old, which is venerable enough in this day and age, but it was positively ancient by the standards of the day. And in the course of his single life, he'd done more than any one of his people or forebears could have possibly dreamed. They had more goods and luxuries than anyone had ever known before, more than they could use in a dozen lifetimes, and with more pouring in from all corners of the world day after day. So as he's getting into his winding down years, he's trying to shift gears and become Genghis, the emperor of of Trade rather than the world conqueror. He reaches out to the most likely candidate, the emir of his powerful new neighbor far to the west, the emir of Khwarizmia, whose own mighty Turk-Persian empire extended all

the way from Afghanistan all the way to the Black Sea. The ruler of this empire is Ala-Ad-Dinmad ii who'd come to the throne at the age of 31 in the year 1200 just six years after his kingdom's formation so his dad wins the kingdom for the most part but he completes the conquest and he spends a subsequent decade and a half following up his father's campaign to expand and consolidate khorizmian rulership over the whole of his region. Simply put, he was every bit the conquering king within his own piece of the world that Genghis Khan was in his part of the world. Yet by 1215, neither had heard of the other.

They were a literal world apart, with another kingdom, Qaraqatan, firmly between them and acting as kind of a civilizational buffer state. That mutual ignorance would crumble following Muhammad learning of a, what he termed a golden empire of the Jurchen, which was northern China. And so he sends a mission, expecting to find a vast, thriving civilization that he can do trade with, but instead he stumbles upon the aftermath, the still smoldering ruins of the former Jurchen capital, Zhongdu, which is modern Beijing, after Genghis had gotten through with it, with sun-bleached bones stacked atop one each other all the way to the horizon. As of 1217, in the course of pursuing an old rival into Khwarezmian territory,

Genghis Khan also now learned of a seeming mirror image of himself to the west. This is Khwarezmia, a ruler with whom he had no grudge or feud or any history and someone far enough away that didn't not seem like any kind of a physical threat to him. So that meant someone that you could open trade relations with. So he, toward the latter end of the year, sent three ambassadors with presents to ask that their people might be traded with safely. The Mongol embassy would arrive in the spring of 1218 and deliver the message and the gifts, the friendship of the great Khan. The letter reads, I have the greatest desire to live in peace with you. I have no need to covet other dominions. We have an equal interest in fostering trade between our subjects. After several days of further negotiation,

Amir Muhammad at last agreed with a trade treaty to be struck. Upon learning of the Amir's acceptance, the great Khan begins making arrangements to send forth an initial shipment, a show of good faith and investment in future details. This consists of about 500 merchants and their retinues into a giant caravan with their mounts and cards laden with all forms of luxury goods to the awaiting Muhammad at his capital city in Samarkand. Faithfully though, the Mongol caravan's route passed through the Khwarezmian province of Sirdaria and its regional capital, the city of Ochar.

The governor of Ochar, a guy named Inalchuk, was the one who stopped the caravan's procession and after meeting with their ambassador and the other heads of the group, ordered them all detained. Though excuses were offered, it was painfully obvious that the governor simply meant to seize the caravan's cargo and take it for himself. Upon taking the Mongol caravan captive, he sent a message to his boss, the emir, telling him that he'd captured a host of Mongol, what he called spies, and proposed that they be immediately executed. Now, whether the emir actually believed the governor's accusations or just saw a very convenient opportunity to seize the goods for himself and take his cut without the need to pay

it back in kind, he agreed to the execution of the entire party and that the stolen goods should all be taken to the nearby trade city of Bukhara to be sold off and their profits divided out. And so it was done. And it might have simply ended there with this giant Mongol caravan just disappearing somewhere en route. Nobody ever knew what happened. That happened all the time. Except one guy manages to get away and flees all the way back to Mongolia to bear witness to the Khwarezmian's treacheries. So this is a no-no.

And in spite of the fact that this is one of the most egregious offenses that you could do, especially against the Mongols, Genghis Khan is not quite willing to throw in the towel on this whole enterprise yet, and he makes one final attempt to avoid all-out war. A new embassy is sent to the Khwarezmian capital, this time consisting of only one Muslim and two Mongols to demand an explanation from Amir Muhammad for this unforgivable breach of etiquette.

Perhaps after all, the Amir himself was blameless and the blood lay on the offending governor's hands alone. If that were the case, and that was explained as such, then Muhammad simply needed to turn over the governor of Ochar to them in chains to be taken back to Mongolia and face the Khan's justice. At this, Muhammad balked. He'd do no such thing. Muhammad II's response was swift and damning. The Muslim ambassador was executed on the spot, and the two Mongols were instructed to ride all the way back to Mongolia and inform whatever little king they served that if he wanted his treasure back so badly he'd have to come and take it if he could. Yet before they were allowed to leave with their lives the emir had one final insult which was to shave their beards off,

an extreme sign of humiliation, and the executed ambassador's head was then put in a box and sent back with them. They arrived back at the Great Khan's yurt in late 1218, bearing their fateful response from the emir. Now, obviously, Muhammad had calculated to humiliate the Mongol leader and teach him his place in the world order. Yet instead of putting Genghis Khan in his place, he'd unwittingly signed the death warrant not just of himself, nor even just his entire nation, but the entire civilizational order upon which it was all established. The writer Juvaini would later put it that the governor of Ochar's attack wiped out not just a caravan, but laid waste to the whole world. And he wasn't wrong. It was 1219, the year of the hare, that the Mongols set out for Khwarizmia to bring justice to its leader. As they rode out, the Khan took stop of the intelligence his spies and informants had been able to gather about this latest foe. As ever, Genghis prided himself on

knowing all he could about his friends and foes alike, sussing out any areas of strength that should be avoided and weak points that he could fracture. This last his agents had found in abundance. Muhammad, you see, had built his empire on a much different combination of factors than the Mongol regime. The mass of the people across Khwarezmia were regarded as workers and obliged to show utter submission. The primary Islamic population of

these regions was only aware of a tribal relationship. There was no notion of nationalism. Also, the Khwarezmian army was recruited mainly from foreign mercenaries of Turkish origin, and they terrorized the people with savage cruelty. This army of mercenaries was, however, the only support that Muhammad had to his throne. This was all bad enough, but it was compounded and exacerbated by his own apparent lack of realization about the precarious position these circumstances put him in. Although he was, in comparison with Genghis Khan, highly educated, he was also obsessed with delusions of grandeur, and he imagined that the mere size of his empire was enough to ensure his ultimate success.

This would soon be put to the test. Famously, Genghis employed one of his favorite tactics in this initial invasion of Khwarizmia, that of attack from a direction that the enemy thinks to be impossible. Though a division of his warriors kept the appearance of a typical line of attack by advancing the usual direction against the border cities, Genghis and the backbone of his force instead headed into and through the Kizil Kum, which is also known as the Red Sand Desert in Uzbekistan. Summer temperatures there could get to more than 125 degrees Fahrenheit, and so it was with good reason that caravans along the Silk Road for more than a thousand years had detoured hundreds of miles around this deadly wasteland. But by allying with the local desert nomads, Genghis was able to plunge his army through it and arrive more or less intact on the other side, leaving the Khwarezmian forces not just outflanked, but totally, their minds are blown. In droves, the populations fled to the Mongol lines in order to submit themselves before

facing destruction, and also bring with them further information about the Khwarezmians' weakness. Elsewise, many more fled in the opposite direction, to the nearest great city of the region, Bukhara. As far as the Mongol commanders were concerned, this was actually the better outcome. As before, they now used terror as a means to stretch the supply limits of this society to and then past its breaking points. They would hide behind their walls, and if they did that, then why not fill them as much as possible with useless mouths that they would then have to feed? Okay, so as I said before, the greater part of this Charismian army were, in fact,

mercenaries, who'd rather early on in the conflicts begun doing the math in their heads and determining that no matter what they were being paid, it wasn't enough that they were going to be dead by the end. As such, entire garrisons of Khwarezmian troops closed and sealed their city gates, but then just began negotiating with the Mongol armies once they arrived. They appeared to think that, given the fact that a large number of these Mongol soldiers were actually Turks like them, that they could bargain their way out of inevitable death and join the winning side, maybe even get a better deal in the process. The Mongol armies patiently listened to what these people had to say and their terms. Sure thing. Yeah, sure. Open the gates and we'll talk about it. We'll let you live. You can join us. Uh-huh. Yeah, whatever you say. Just open the gates first. And so when the Turks were sufficiently satisfied that they were totally about to be in with the Mongols and join up, they would open the gates and promised and let the

conquerors inside to be duly disarmed and mustered in the city square alongside everyone else, and only to realize far too late that all those nice and honeyed words that they had been told from the outside of the wall now meant exactly nothing, now that the Mongols were inside the walls. What possible use could the great Khan or any of his commanders have for cowardly soldiers who fought only for money, and would turn their cloaks to the first sign of trouble? The Khan valued above all else loyalty, and just because you cheated on your prince for money, and would turn their cloaks to the first sign of trouble. The Khan valued above all else loyalty, and just because you cheated on your prince for me,

that doesn't make you any less of a cheater now. Therefore, the terms of the treaty, the deal, were retroactively amended. They would one and all receive precisely the award to their service to the Khan that their actions deserved, a traitor's execution to the last man. The city of Ochar would fall in the night through one of the many acts of self-serving treachery by the Turkic guardsmen opening the gates to the Mongols in an attempt to spare their own skins. In short order and without much resistance, as much as 90% of the soldiers garrisoned in the city were either killed as they slept or in the subsequent slaughter.

That left perhaps as many as 2,000 to 6,000 troops alive and within the central citadel, where they were able to bar the gates and man the walls with the governor protected inside. The siege would last for five months. Until at last, they messed up, once again through an act of cowardice. The senior commander of the guard attempted to flee through a postern gate, but was immediately caught and executed, for treachery of course, by the Mongol besiegers. Then they forced their way in. Governor Inalchuk barricaded himself in the inner sanctum with several hundred defenders.

Since the Mongols had ordered to take Inalchuk alive, there followed a slow, methodical attack that lasted another month. Realizing they were doomed, the defenders started staging suicide-style attacks on these Mongol spearmen and bowmen, some 50 at a time. Until finally, Inalchuk and his few surviving bodyguards were trapped on the upper floor. At last, the governor was taken in chains. After the appropriate pomp and ceremony for one so infamous to the Mongols for his crimes against them, he faced his execution. Now there's two different versions of this. The more colorful telling is a truly karmic death for the greedy governor. All this had been started over his lust for gold and silver

and so that it led it thus end that way. The governor was restrained, and then ingots of precious metals were melted down in cauldrons, and then, yeah, just like in Game of Thrones, the molten streams were poured into his eyes and ears. Does it sound really awesome? Yeah. Did it go that way? Probably not. In the end, creative and poetic though it would have been, it's not very Mongol. Mongols tended to view things in a much more simplistic, down-to-earth term. Why waste the time, and more importantly, why waste the gold on such an exotic method? Much more likely, given the Mongol aversion to shedding noble blood,

they probably sewed him up into a sack or one of his own carpets, and then either had horses run over him repeatedly until he died, or threw him into a river to drown. Less flashy, but much more typically Mongol. Okay. February 2020, the year of the dragon. Genghis Khan reaches the great city of Bukhara with a population of some 300,000 and where his stolen treasures have been taken as sold marking it out as a real target for him they invest the city in a siege

which lasts for only three days this time before the Gerasen force within the city 20,000 soldiers strong sallied forth but not to try to fight the Mongols but try to break out through the Mongol lines and escape. A few managed to reach the far banks and make good their escape, but almost everybody else was wiped out as they tried to cross the river. The Mongols then were able to turn back to the now completely undefended city, and abandoning all hope, the populace surrendered and opened the gates, allowing the conquerors inside.

Given its singular position in the mind of the Great Khan, Bukhara would serve as a lesson. Genghis broke with his lifelong tradition of avoiding setting foot in the disgusting confines of settled cities. He was playing to the cameras here, as it were, a sweeping propagandistic gesture that he would ride into the city gates surrounded by his honored guard of no-core companions and into the city's general square. The townspeople had been herded like cattle by their conquerors to amass here. Genghis proceeded to the largest and most ornate building in the city and asked if this was the house of the ruler. No, he was informed, it was in fact the great mosque, and housed not of an earthly was the house of the ruler. No, he was informed it was in fact the great mosque and housed not of an earthly ruler, but of God himself. Genghis made no reply to this. He seemed to not really understand the concept because for the Mongols, the one God was the

eternal blue sky that stretched from horizon to horizon in every direction. God presided over the whole earth. He couldn't be cooped up in a house of stone like a prisoner or a caged animal. Nevertheless, he dismounted, proceeded in and proceeded inside in the only known instance of him ever going inside a permanent building. When he emerged at last from the great mosque,

Genghis Khan strode to the center of the square and called out, demanding that the wealthy tradesmen, merchants, and heads of family of the city, 280 in all, be brought forth. When they'd been amassed and assembled, Genghis strode up the steps of the mosque before turning to the waiting crowds, elite and commoner alike, and through interpreters, he lectured them on the nature of sin and the specific sins that had been committed by their emir and the elites of the city. Once again, Giovanni would have put it to parchment and write it down, the great Khan's words. Oh, people know that you have committed great sins, and that is that it is the great ones among you who have committed these sins.

If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. Now, fearsome enough in their own right, but these were understood by the notable present to be not truly personal or vindictive in nature, but fitting of the circumstances arounding them. Perhaps God had sent such a fate unto them for their blindness and arrogance. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse. From the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877. From Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. To Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.

The Great Khan turned at last to the great redoubt of Bukhara, the citadel at the city's heart. Within the impenetrable stone walls, 400 cavalrymen who had not received the memo about trying to break out sat in wait. They resisted the Mongol storm for a further 12 days. That's when the Chinese designed and manned siege engines began rolling in and being assembled. Catapults, trebuchets, mangonels, hurling stones and explosives at and atop the structure. Moreover, the Mongol commanders were only too happy to demand that these surrendered populace, man and woman, old and young alike, now serve their new Khan in the further liberation of their city, forcing prisoners, man and woman, old and young alike, now served their new Khan in the further liberation

of their city, forcing prisoners, in some cases the captured comrades of the men still in the citadel, to rush forward until their bodies filled the moats and made live ramparts over which other prisoners pushed engines of war. When the surviving soldiers in the city had finally had enough and surrendered, they were let out of the fortress, divided into units of ten, and then exterminated to the last man with a sort of ruthless, almost industrial efficiency that the world had virtually never seen before. It was the last time for the remaining populace of Bukhara to learn of their own collective fates. For the wealthy, merchants, and traders, it would be absolute exile. Genghis decreed that their city and everything in it, save the clothes currently on their backs, were forfeit.

They were to leave immediately and never return, and anyone caught trying to remain or hide or return to seek their possessions would be ruthlessly slaughtered. To the populace at large, their sentences proved little better. They were now servants of the Great Khan, and they would be utilized exactly as such. Finally, either by accident or simply malice, the city was set ablaze, and made almost entirely from wood and straw as it was, burned almost entirely to the ground.

The fate of Bukhara would serve as a grisly template for the remaining conquest of Khwarizmia. Genghis's juggernaut rolled eastward toward Samarkand, where Muhammad II finally realized that he'd made a huge mistake. Facing this once unthinkable but suddenly inevitable prospect, Muhammad II fled, abandoning his capital and populace to their grisly fates and riding out at top speed across the countryside as fast as his mount could carry him away from the Mongols who eagerly pursued him. In each place he stopped, he desperately warned all who would listen what was coming for them all, and that they should likewise abandon

their lands, take what they could, and burn what they couldn't take, and then flee with him. Genghis, being now 60, simply wasn't quite feeling up to chasing the emir across central Eiza, but knew that it needed to be done if this war could truly end in victory. Thus would fall to his trusted Jeb and Subedai with their own combined tumens to hound the emir across modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, coming as close as a mere day's ride behind the fleeing prince at times, until they arrived at the shores of the Caspian Sea. Abandoning his possessions, Muhammad II and a small retinue,

including his son, Jalal al-Din, rode out to a small island beyond the reach of the Mongols, where, having at last evaded his tormentors, Amir al-Aldin Muhammad II of Khwarizmiya, who'd once thought himself king of kings, died in poverty, despair, and shock at all he'd lost at the age of 50. So I think that was 20-ish minutes. How did I do?

Absolutely. I don't know if he got that directly from Giovanni, but it's certainly, it's kind of almost to the letter, isn't it? I'm sure he pulled from that. Oh, great. Okay. So what's the history of China episode I'm most proud of? Ooh.

Well, I really like my Mongol series, if you couldn't tell. Another episode that I like is the Song of Rice and Flour episode, which is a one-off strange one about rice and how to make rice, which is more interesting than you probably think it is. Let's see. Those ones leap immediately to mind, but one of the things

I am very happy to be able to say that as I go on and I keep making more and more episodes, I become progressively happier with them. So I'm very much enjoying the early Ming that we're doing right now as well. Did anyone manage to successfully set up diplomatic Well, let's see. They had a really bad... No, there was not a whole lot of great luck with Genghis Khan. Probably the closest we could say is the Koreans,

who kind of managed to only be sort of conquered and sort of made themselves this special status where they would, the Korean princess would then be married into the Khan's extended family, marrying daughters, and that would kind of afford them this sort of special status. But it was also not exactly a wonderful marriage relationship anyway, because by marrying into the Khan's family, your new wife, the princess, would basically go to your place and rule in your name as queen, and you, the new husband, would then be sent as now a general in the Mongol armies to the front lines, and you might be sent somewhere on purpose where you weren't expected to really come back.

Otherwise, the problem with diplomatic relations with the Mongols, and especially the early Mongols, was that there linguistically wasn't yet a word in Mongolia that meant peace without surrender. It was conceptually one and the same. So the first thing they do is, hi, nice to meet you, or the Mongols bow down to us or else. And then if hostilities commenced, then that meant that you were doomed.

There wasn't a partial victory that the Mongol Empire was going to be happy with. Okay, let's see. Next question. Prior to Mongolian unification, the Mongols are split into various tribal groups. Yes. There were religious differences between Mongols. Yes. Did the Chinese and Arab Persian world comment on or notice the variety of faiths among the Mongols?

Yeah, so the Mongols are pretty interesting in the 13th century because of their wide tolerance of a lot of religions. They have this policy where they have their own religions. I mentioned it in my presentation. It's called Tangriism, where they believe in the great blue sky, and it's shamanistic. But then they would go and say, we don't really care. You can be whatever you want to be. You want to be a Muslim? Fine.

You want to be a Christian? Fine. As long as you say a prayer for the health and success of the Khan and the empire, it's cool. And no fighting amongst yourselves while you're here. So later on, they would get Mongol princes who were Muslim, some who were Christian. In fact, Kublai's mother, Kublai is Genghis's grandson who conquers China. Mother was a Naiman Christian, so a church of the East. So he had respect for that as well.

Did the Chinese or Arab Persians comment on that? I mean, they were sort of so terrified about what was going on and the destruction being wrought that they didn't really find the time to super comment on that. The European Christians certainly weren't very happy about that. Although they also thought for a while that they were fighting the Crusades against the Islamic world at the time. And they started getting these weird reports from this other army attacking from the east against the Arab world as well, and for about five minutes they thought that it might be this mythological Christian king come back to life. That's disabused pretty quickly, but they still think that maybe the enemy of my enemy can be my friend, and it turns out, no, you're not going to make friends with the Mongols. Is the story well known in the Middle East today? Yeah, it is. A lot of the writers, a lot of the sources that we have are actually

in Arabic, or initially, and then translated. And it is well known in the Middle East as sort of the nightmare boogeyman of the 13th century. This is the closest the Muslim world really comes to ultimate destruction. Far more damage than the Crusades would ever do. And there are some writers at the time who tried to just sort of pretend it didn't happen. They want to think, okay, well, maybe we'll just not talk about it and they'll kind of go away. But today, it's very well known. Okay, let's see here. Let's see. Okay. What was the case as Bel-I for the conquest of countries west of Quarism?

So why do that? Well, what they do for the countries west of Quarism is it starts becoming much more of a because it's their situation um they send this this raid in force with the led by uh subedi and uh jeb 20 000 soldiers strong just to go see what's over there and they take this force of 20 000 soldiers and they just start raiding and pillaging all across the mid-east up through georgia up into russia and then they swing back around like, oh, that's over there, so we should go get that, and the case is, I think the closest thing the case is Belayid get to is that they've developed this ideology that we're not just gonna conquer Mongolia, we actually deserve to rule the entire world, that is our mandate, and so we're gonna do that,

and if we encounter you you and you don't immediately fall down to your knees and surrender to us, then that's cause enough. Why did the Mongols have the prohibition against drawing blood? Yeah, this is especially for nobility. And not only their own nobility, but the even captured enemy nobles as well. And the prohibition comes from their own religion, which is that the blood is kind of the essence of the soul, and to spill blood would offend both the sky and the earth. To spill it

on the ground would be polluting the earth, and if you do it within the sky and the earth. To spill it on the ground would be polluting the earth, and if you do it within the sight of the blue sky then that offends that as well. And it would dissipate the soul before it was ready to leave the body. Even when they're killing animals to eat them, what they would do is they'd go behind the tent into the shade where the sun couldn't see it and then hammer strike it and try to do it without drawing blood. Yeah. But for regular people, for normal folk, the many millions upon millions of commoners,

there was no such prohibition. They would be slaughtered in industrial capacity with the most convenient available method, usually sword decapitation. Did I miss anything? I think I got questions okay So I think I got through all the questions. I'll take a look again. Anything else? Oh, there's an unrelated topic, but any thoughts on Chinese baijiu? I've had a lot of it, and it's a little much for me. It's an acquired taste and a taste that I, even for all my years here, I've never really acquired or appreciated truly. I

can be made to drink it at weddings and what have you, but I don't do it of my own accord. I think George R.R. Martin, I think he's read enough. He's well read enough. He probably knows Giovanni. He probably knows the story. Or maybe it came down through another way. I would not be surprised if he knew the story. What was the metal color? Oh, so the question I think is,

like, how are they making all these weapons? They would capture populations, capture artisans, and bring them back to Mongolia and say, you work for us now. And so that's where they started getting these weapons. Before this, they were at the beginning of Genghis's reign, when he was not Genghis yet, but just Temujin,

they were really bare bones in it. The Mongols did not have good equipment. It was almost stone arrowheads sometimes and very little metal content. But then they start conquering and capturing these artisans. And if they discover that you're a captive and you know how to do something special like that, they're going to scoop you up and you are,

that's what you do for the rest of your life now. Why did so many Mongol leaders drink themselves to death? Yeah, it's a big one. They did that because in the culture of the steppe, it was common at every meal to be eating and drinking. And the drink of choice is something called IROG, which is this very low ABV fermented milk beverage. And so they just be drinking it by the cup full, not even thinking about it. And then they get up into North China,

especially, and the question came earlier about Baijiu. And that would, Baijiu is hugely alcoholic, it's sometimes up to 60% ABV, and so if you're drinking Baijiu, or these much stronger Chinese liquors, like you drink this very low ABV irog, you you know two to three percent uh that's going to do some serious damage on the body because the other cultural thing that these people uh had was to uh be uh very uh you don't eat a little bit you eat a lot and you drink a lot and we drink a lot and eat a lot all the time yeah oh good i'm glad i got the i'm glad i got the the gist of the question favorite period of Chinese history? Oh.

Culturally, I like the Tang. The Tang is probably one of my favorites. It's got a lot going on. Art, culture, warfare, fashion. So that's, I still have a soft spot for that. I also like the song song though, and just kind of how Barney Fife they are about everything. Sort of the lovable goofball of the dynasties. Okay. Okay.

What is the earliest age that the Mongols expected children to be able to kill a large animal? They would learn to ride and start learning arrows, the way of the bow and the horse, oftentimes before they were even capable of walking. They'd learn to ride before they were walking. As such, a child's first kill was considered a rite of initiation, a rite of passage from true childhood into adulthood. So that might happen around eight or nine years old or somewhere in that area where, yeah, and it was this whole ceremony.

Your father or your grandfather would take some of the blood of the animal. It might just be a rabbit or something or a deer, and they'd smear some of it on your face, and that meant you were officially a man now. Wait, I'm 8, 10, somewhere in there. When I get to the Republic period, whew, that's a long way down the line. There's that possibility. I don't know. We we'll see we'll see where I am physically in the world and how far that lets me go oh my so this this goes until 1130 is is that right? Okay. Awesome. So, I think we are just about there.

But maybe if there's another question. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Well, it was my pleasure. And again, thank you for putting up with the rough start. And glad we got that all sorted out and glad you all came. And please enjoy. Please enjoy all the rest of your day.

Okay. All right, so I'll turn off. 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.