Appreciation: Mongol

Did I mention how much I enjoyed Mongol, Sergei Bodrov's biopic about Genghis Khan (link)? I don't usually hold still for this kind of thing but Mrs. Buce, the commander of the good ship Netflix, brought it on board and we gave it a whirl. It's beautiful to be sure, and fascinating with all those Mongol actors. But from what little I know, it captures the spirit of the young Temujin (before he took on the trappings of regality) and the grim, harsh anarchic world from which he emerged. Per Wiki, the director says he found it “difficult making the film because of the lack of recorded Mongol history.” But I wouldn't get carried away with that; in fact we know quite a good deal about the Mongols—they did, after all, make a world-class nuisance of themselves, which is enough to inspire curiosity in their adversaries. And scholars like René Grousset, Thomas Barfield and Jack Weatherford have been able to develop a plausible picture of the traditional culture of steppe nomads.

Bodrov takes Hollywood-style liberties: he turns the relationship with his wife Börte into a People Magazine love story. And I know of nothing in the record to support Bodrov's story of Genghis' capture, enslavement and rescue. Still, Bodrov captures the essence of the chronicle as we know it: Genghis (Chinggis, Temüjin), virtually without assistance, clawed his way from nowhere. Thomas Barfield summarizes:

Chinggis Khan rose to leadership of a great nomadic empire from an extremely marginal position. He lacked a secure base of tribal support and encountered a series of obstacles in his attempts to gain power and unite the nomads. His bitter experience with steppe politics and the fickelness of tribal military units shaped his ideas about military strategy and political organization which gave the Mongol empire a unique structure. Chinggis Khan took more risks in battle than other steppe leaders because he needed victories to establish himself. … At the time of Temüjin's birth the steppe was in anarchy. … Any leader who gained power also gained enemies and provoked new alliances against himself.

--Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier 188-9 (1989).

For all his impact, it is hard to believe that Genghis Khan didn't really appear on the world stage until he was around 40, and that his presence as a world figure lasted less than 20 years (the lasting conquests were achieved by his sons and grandsons). Plenty of material, then, for the promised sequels, but Mongol remains as convincing an account of where he came from as you are likely to get.

Hitler Economics

I wrote the other day about how Genghis Khan didn't understand the economics of subject peoples. Turns out he has some distinguished compoany:

Alfred Rosenberg, later hanged at Nuremberg as one of Nazism's prinncipal war criminals, ... saw that the German empire needed goodwill from at least some of its subject peoples, so that they might function economically in the Reich's interests. ... 7.5 million men were aabsent at the front, so to sustain Germany's economy, replacement labor was needed for mines and factories. Hitler's captives and subject races provided the only plausible manpower pool. Yet Himmler's SS, with robust assistance from the Wehrmacht, was killing millions of prospective slaves. ... Having no interest in or understanding of the complex relationships of international trade, [Hitler] sought merely to loot the occupied nations for the advantage of Germany. He was oblivious of the consequences not only for subject populations, but ultimately for the entire continent. Germany continued to ship food from Greece, heedless of the fact that the Greeks themselves were dependent on imports to live. ...

That's Max Hastings, reviewing a couple of promising new books on the internal operation of the Nazi Empire ("The Most Evil Emperor,"New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008, 46-9, 47-8). One big difference between Genghis Khan and Hitler: Genghis showed a spectacular capacity to learn from his mistakes. His empire lasted--well, not for a thousand years but for many generations, and changed the face of the continent forever. Hitler's--well, you know about that.

Genghis Khan on Tax Policy: Oh, I Never Thought of That

Truth is, Genghis Khan didn't know the first thing about tax policy. The first thing being: don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg:

At the time of Jenghis Khan's last campaign in Kansu, a Mongol general pointed out to him tht his new Chinese subjects would be useless to him, since they were unsuited to warfare, and that therefore he would do better to exterminate them--there were nearly ten million--so that he might at least make use of the soil as grazing land for the cavalry. Jenghiz Khan appreciated the cogency of this advice, but Ye-lü Ch'u-ts'ai protested. "He explained to the Mongols, to whom any such idea was unknown, the advantage to be gained from fertile soil and hard-working subjects. He made clear that by imposing taxes on land and exacting tribute on merchandise, they might colect 500,000 ounces of silver yearly, 80,000 pieces of silk, and 400,000 sacks of grain." He won his point, and Jenghiz Khan ordered Ye-lü Ch'u-ts'ai to draw up a system of taxation on these lines.

--René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes:

A History of Central Asia 251(English Trans. 1970)

Afterthought: Might be more correct to say that Genghis Khan understood tax policy well enough (or parasitology: don't kill the host); he just didn't understand settled peoples. By all accounts, Genghis Khan set foot in a city just once in his life (Bukhara, around 1221), and he didn't like it, and didn't stay--one is reminded of the Saudis coming to meet with Presidennt Roosevelt, and pitching their tents on shipboard.

Religion versus Barbarism

It is said that one of the functional virtues of religion is that it helps to lift us out of barbarism. I grant that sometimes it does. But it's a mixed bag Here, René Grousset compares the devastations inflicted by Tamberline in the 15th Century with those of his predecessor Genghis (Jenghiz?) Khan in the 13th.

It has been noted that the Jenghiz-Khanite Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century was less cruel for the Mongols were mere barbarians who killed simply because for centuries this had been the instinctive behavior of nomad herdsmen toward sedentary farmers. To this ferocity Tamerlane added a taste for religious murder. He killed for piety. He represents a synthesis, probably unprecedented in history, of Mongol barbarity and Muslim fanaticism and symbolizes that advanced form of primitive slaughter which is murder committed for the sake of an abstract ideology, as a duty and a sacred mission.

--René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes:
A History of Central Asia 434 (Trans. 1970)

Earlier, Grousset has argued that Mongol warfare, however savage, was more "natural," in that it was a matter of nomadic warriors preying on their richer settled brethren, using techniques they had developed in the hunting of (other?) animals.

Genghis Khan's Supreme Joy

To live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man.

No, wait, wrong bin. Genghis Khan's Supreme Joy, Take Two:

To cut my enemies to pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those dear to them, and embrace their wives and daughters.

There, that's more like it. And to think I would have settled for "to outlive your enemies."

Source: René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: a History of Central Asia (Trans. 1970) at 249, quoting Rashid ad-Din, Persian/Jewish polymath and historian.

Afterthought: But GK understood that the good times would end:

After us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold; they will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms the loveliest of women, and they will forget that they owe these things to us. ...

Id.

The Biggest Fathead of the Second Millennium AD

Many have said that Genghis Khan may be the most important political/military leader of the last millennium. I wonder if we have paid enough attention to the issue of the greatest fathead. I don't mean “monster,” in the sense of Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot. I mean someone more on the order of of, oh, say Ala al-Din Muhammed, aka Muhammed of Khwarizm, who (per René Grousset) “brought the Khwaraizmian empire to its peak ... during his reign it became the dominant state in Central Asia.”

Ah yes, Khwarizm—here it is, the area around Khiva and—well, pretty much the territory in Uzbekistan where I was traveling last week. Muhammed succeeded his father about 1210. Over the next seven years, more or less, he pasted together an empire of sorts that extended out into Afghanistan and Persia. It was impressive on the map, although on close scrutiny, it appears to have been pretty fragile. Muhammed also seems to have had a knack for irritating near neighbors who might otherwise have become his allies.

At this point, Muhammed may never even have heard of his great contemporary, Genghis Khan, for it is a remarkable fact that Genghis, as a world leader, got late start. He didn't really consolidate among the Mongols until he was around 40, i.e., around 1207. He spent the next several years embroiled with the Chinese. It was only after that that he turned his attention to the west and found himself face to face with Muhammed.

Genghis' first approach seems to have been benign. He came looking for trade. But in 1218, a Khwazmarian governor robbed a Mongol caravan and put 100 of its members to death. Genghis was not amused. He demanded compensation and, being refused, made ready for war.* By the summer of 1219, Mongol forces began popping up all over Central Asia. In February of 1220, Genghis himself destroyed Bukhara. He moved on to loot Samarkand, reducing its population by about three quarters. In April of 1221, the Mongols finally took the old Khwarizm capital of Gurganj, modern Urgench: they drowned it by rerouting a river.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Mongols on into India and Iran. Genghis himself lived only until 1227—by a narrow reading, his entire career on the world stage lasted not much longer than seven years. But his sons and grandsons dominated China, Persia, Central Asia and the hinterland of “Russia” for generations to come.

*I'll say. "[T]he whirlwind of anger cast dust into the eyes of patience and clemency while the fire of wrath flared up with such a flame that it drove the water from his eyes and could be quenched only by the shedding of blood."--The Persian chronicler Ata-Malik Juvaini, quoted in Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World at 107 (2004).

What Part of "Nine Sacks of Ears" Don't You Understand?

One of the central issues of information economics is the problem of “signaling”—how and when can you deliver an assurance to your bargaining partner that your message is accurate and reliable? At the Battle of Liegnitz in Silesia on April 9, 1241, the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan seem to have come up with a workable solution:

In this horrific battle the Mongols defeated the Europeans completely—on their own terms—and virtually annihilatd them. Duke Henry [Henry II the Pious of Silesia] was killed trying to escape with a handful of men, and the Mongols sent nine sacks of ears to [their commanders] Batu and Subotai in Hungary to show them the extent of their victory.

So Erik Hildinger in Warriors of the Steppe (1997) at 144. Hildinger adds that “Duke Henry’s head was set on a pike and displayed befor the walls of Liegnitz,” which is a gesture with a certain signaling value all its own.

Appreciation: Hildinger on Steppe Warriors

You wouldn't want to call Erik Hildinger's Warriors of the Steppe exactly "scholarship." There are nol footnotes. The bibliography is extensive, but not exhaustive. And the tone is too easy and direct. But he's got a remarkable story to tell, which he presents with crisp conviction.

Executive summary: for something like 2200 years--until the implementation of gunpowder--nomads from Central Asia repeatedly made a nuisance of themselves with their more "civilized" neighbors and more than once, bid fair to put these neighbors permanently out of business. They succeeded in doing so for two reasons: one, they deployed a set of lethal tactics that their neighbors--unaccountably by any measure--persistently refused to learn. And two, they forced these neighbors to accept their (nomadic) definition of war.

Genghis Khan was their prime avatar--with his descendants, perhaps the most successful and effective military presence in history, certainly in the last thousand years (yes, counting Napoleon and Hitler). But there were many others: Scythians, Parthians Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Seljuks, Crimean Tatars, even the Jurchids who imposed on the Chinese their last foreign dynasty.
There were failures: not every oppporunistic nomad became Genghis Khan. Sometimes, the invaders failed because the defenders used their own tactics against them (think Mamluks); sometimes because they fell into anarchy and lost their fighting edge (think Dmitri Donskoi). But it is impossible to name any other culture that so persistently and so consistently inflicted pain on its neighbors.

The complex of tactics is as simple as it was devastating. Ride light, durable, fast-moving horses. Take the opponents by surprise. Surround them and devastate them with a hail of arrows. Retreat--or appear to retreat, but wait until your pursuers have broken ranks and then turn and open fire. The surprise is not that it worked once, but that it worked time after time after time. And there was no mystery: the first account is in Herodotus, about 450 BC. One cannot escape the notion that arrogance and indifference and cultural blindness had at least as much to do with the nomads' success as any peculiar virtue in technique.

The matter of "choosing their own war" is perhaps more complicated, but at least as interesting. The key point is that the step nomads, at least traditionally, weren't interested in conquering cities. They were interested mainly in pillage, and cities were merely an incidental detail. So they had no interest in the war of position and domination so central to the strategic thinking of the West. Even Genghis Khan, who used siege engines (he learned about them from the Chinese), and who build a semi-durable network of polities---even Genghis Khan, so they say, was actually in a city only once in his life.

One invigorating lesson from Hildinger's narrative is that all war is stylized, conventional: even "total" war hasw its norms and its conventions, and a fabric of values from which the protagonists cannot easily escape. It's a lesson profitably to be learned by anybody who hazards combat with an enemy whose reading from a wholly different page.

"Have Her Stripped and Washed and Brought To My Tent"

Here’s a cute irony for your holiday enjoyment. The subject is Genghis Khan, man of the millennium, ruler over all the tribes, coordinator of the Mongols and the Tatars, and heavy hitter in the DNA leagues, with an estimated 17 million living descendants (link).

It seems that Genghis, for all his transplanetary rutting, was in his own way something of a family man, with his faithful wife, Börte, and their four recognized sons who fought alongside their father but eyed each other warily as time approached for the inevitable succession. Genghis died in in 1227; in the event he outlived the eldest of the four sons, Jochi, who died earlier the same year. Effective power passed to his number three son, ögödeI. This ögödei died in 1241 leaving a whole raft of potential succession claimants. One was Batu, son of the deceased Jochi. Another was Möngke, son of Tolui, himself the fourth son of Genghis.

An uneasy kind of stasis ensued, as each of the claimants positioned himself and assayed the strength of his adversaries. Batu had perhaps a better claim to succession was his cousin. But Batu was off in Europe at that point. Whatever his appetite for power, a reasonable evaluation suggested that he wouldn’t be able to control both his European holdings and the steppe empire from a single center.

And so Batu made a far-sighted offer: he agreed to yield the steppe empire to Möngke, in exchange for independence in the west.

And that is how it came to passs. Möngke became the Great Khan. Batu became the progenitor of what history knows at “the Golden Horde,” the dominating force for generations in Russia, the person who imposed what Russians still talk of as “the Mongol-Tatar yoke.”

So, where is the irony? Just here. Over Batu, son of Jochi, there lay a disabling shadow: evidently Börte, wife of Genghis, mother of Jochi, had been kidnapped just nine months before his birth. Mongol sources pass in silence over this episode in the history of the ruling family. But Jochis’ very name means “visitor,” or “guest.”

Translated: of all the 17 million descendants of Genghis, one who may never have qualified is the Khan of the Golden Horde, the old man’s eldest son.

Credit: irony spotted by Mrs. B, during a Christmas-Eve chat in the hot tub. Family history from Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (Blackwell Paperback 1992) and Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan (2004).