Opinion of the Mongols?
- Thread starter Tjakari
- Start date
Saphroneth
Banned
Unfairly maligned, in that people tend to think they only did bad; devastatingly competent; incredibly ruthless.
Not any worse than the Romans, which isn't a stellar endorsement from my point of view but the internet tends to have a dementedly perverse obsession with that particular bunch of brutal conquerors so they should apply the same standard to the brutal conquerors from the other side of Eurasia.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
In terms of ratio of global human population killed per year, the conquests of Genghis Khan went unmatched until WWII. It saddens me to think how, even if it's only centuries from now, it will be chic to say that the Nazis and Empire of Japan are "unfairly maligned".
I suspect Timur, in comparison to his lifetime and the areas he conquered was as devistating as any Mongol horde. As well for their time Assyria was perhaps more ruthless than the Mongol hordes.
guinazacity
Banned
Ruthless killers with a heavily romanticized image; or pretty much what the nazis will be portrayed as in a couple centuries from now.
An Empire that was largely a force for destruction, but I think they probably played an integral part in shaping Western dominance of the globe (transmission of Eastern knowledge, decimation of the Chinese and Muslim cultures) - and insofar as Western dominance is correlated with the dominance of a liberal world order, in the long-run the Mongols might have contributed a little to that (but then so would have every other butterfly-inducing event, I suppose).
In China there's a nationalist saying that says: "No China after the Song". So from a Chinese perspective, the discontinuity brought about by the Yuan conquest was an earth-shattering one indeed, and generally a 'turning point' where people posit the start of Chinese stagnation, insularity and imperial despotism.
I think this sums it up. The Mongols were fantastically effective rulers but also fantastically violent ones as well. They might have been moderate and tolerant of the people they controlled but their reputation for brutality was well deserved.
That isn't what I see or hear at all from history books. When my school as I recall had done our brief-look over, we barely touched over the horrors and genocide of the Mongol invasions, instead the focus is about the benefits of travel and the Silk Road from Europe to Asia. Yeah sure, the mongols did do good things, but was it worth killing scores of millions of people across Asia in an orgy of blood lust and conquest not truly seen since then?
As another poster commented, somebody will eventually be making the same comments about the Nazis and the Japanese, but given that they were both dismal failures in their hyper-militaristic stage, it should luckily be a but more muted.
Baghdad, 1258: The river ran black with the ink of books trashed at the site of the great library. The irrigation infrastructure was out of commission for seven hundred years. Without the destruction of Baghdad, I would bet that half the problems we hear about today would not be the same by a considerable margin.
I saw a high school world history textbook (of moderately recent vintage) that had TWO paragraphs for the Black Death. The party line seems to be, Gee, that was sad, but, overall, Europe was better off afterwards. wtf.
I'm a fan... but bearing in mind I also work in business reconstruction and recovery. Have been called an economic hitman...
