The scourge from nowhere

Nearly a thousand years after his death, the name of Genghis Khan still reverberates down the ages. Scourge of the known world, he sprang out of nowhere to bring death and destruction.

For the world of Islam in particular, the Mongol onslaught was a veritable holocaust. From Bukhara to Baghdad, Genghis laid waste to flowering cities and prosperous countries. Operating on the principle of "surrender and live; or resist and die", he and his generals led his ravening hordes in unceasing campaigns from Beijing to Budapest.

Even after his death, his successors carried on his mission to bring all mankind under Mongol rule. Western Europe was fortunate in that a possible dispute over succession prompted the Mongol hordes to return to their steppes and grasslands as suddenly as they had appeared.

In 1995, the Washington Post proclaimed Genghis Khan as 'the most important man in the last thousand years' because he led a single species to dominate the entire known world.

His conquests made one nation aware of the existence of other remote countries. They 'realigned the world's major religions, influenced art, established new trade patterns. The effects remain as keystones in Eurasian history.' But for the world of Islam, Genghis Khan's coming was nothing short of apocalyptic. Until he and his successors traumatized much of the Middle East, Damascus and Baghdad were at the cutting edge of science, philosophy and the arts. Travellers went there to learn at the feet of renowned scholars. The refined products of the Arab world were avidly sought after by western kings and queens.

The Mongol invasion brought this civilization to a premature end. With the destruction of libraries and laboratories and the slaughter of thinkers and scientists, the great progress the Muslims had made was halted. Many believed that the irruption of the Mongols was caused by the wrath of God.

A wave of reaction set in as science and philosophy were discouraged, if not altogether prohibited. The orthodox claimed that the disaster was caused because Muslims had turned away from the literal words of the Holy Scriptures.

Indeed, it can be argued that the Arab world went into a decline from which it has still not recovered. Muslim Spain escaped the holocaust and continued to thrive for some while still.

When Ottoman Turkey rose to power, it absorbed vast swathes of Arab territory from Makkah to the Maghreb into its empire. In the East, the Moghul Empire rose, again under a Central Asian tribe.

Since the Ottomans conquered them, most Arab nations have seen their borders drawn and redrawn by foreign powers, their leaders imposed on them and their resources plundered. Small wonder they are confused by and angry about being constantly exploited by an avaricious and incompetent leadership.

Now, as this frustration and dissatisfaction expresses itself in extremism and terrorism, people like Osama bin Laden talk of the Americans as 'crusaders'. A comparison with the Mongol hordes would be more appropriate.

Now, as then, Muslims blame a perceived deviation from God's commandments as the cause of their plight. They do not see that they are weak because of ignorance and their refusal to master science and technology.

Genghis Khan learned the use of gunpowder and siege-busting weaponry from the Chinese after he had engaged them in prolonged warfare. And while maintaining the mobility of his fast-moving cavalry, he integrated this new technology into his tactics.

Who was he, this vision of hell for the civilized world of the period? To this day, Genghis Khan's birth place and grave have not been located. When he died in 1227, his inner circle kept his death a secret to prevent the disintegration of his vast empire.

They buried him quietly, according to his wishes. His descendants and his generals took over various territories as he had wished them to. For the period, it was a remarkably smooth transition, and the lack of fratricidal strife allowed the momentum created by the Great Khan to carry the expansion of the empire forward.

To learn more about this illiterate but wise ruler, you could do no better than read John Man's new biography "Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection". Simultaneously, a travel book about the wild steppes and grasslands from where Genghis sprang, it is also a marvellous history of the Mongol people.

Relying heavily on 'The Secret History of the Mongols', a work the author thinks was commissioned by Genghis as well as supervised by him, The author has visited many of the remote places the Great Khan was reputed to have been in. On his travels, he comes across strange customs and fascinating people.

On this journey to one of the least known parts of the world, you learn, among other things, how to cook a marmot. (You skin it; sew up the holes in the skin after stuffing it with pieces of the animals together with hot stones; and blast the outer fur with an acetylene torch).

Genghis Khan was raised by his mother when he lost his father at a young age, and struggled to survive in a region where tribal rivalries were rife. Gradually, using his courage and his cunning, he built up a network of loyalties among the local tribes. In a series of battles, he strengthened his hold over his people and then burst out eastward, to capture large parts of China.

He then turned his attention to the West, and sent his generals in an extended raid into Russia and Eastern Europe. Nation after nation fell before the Mongol cavalry.

A Georgian queen, having been asked by the Pope to send help for the current crusade, wrote in her letter of apology: "A savage people of Tatars, hellish of aspect, as voracious as wolves in their hunger for spoils, and as brave as lions, have invaded my country..."

According to contemporary sources cited, Genghis Khan had a special grudge against Muslims: his envoys to King Mohammed of the Muslim Central Asian state of Khwarezm were killed when they brought proposals for trade and good relations.

The Great Khan was furious, and according to his Persian historian Juvaini, 'flew into a whirlwind of rage, the fire of wrath driving the water from his eyes so that it was only to be quenched in blood.'

According to the Secret History, Genghis Khan proclaimed: "Let us ride out against the Islamic people, to gain vengeance!" The current state of confusion in the Muslim world is a measure of his success.

BTW, the "Golden Age" of Moslem accomplishments includes, ta-da, Islamic Spain.

Besides providing a degree of religious tolerance not found in most of the world, Islamic Spain provided a safe haven for Jews for half a thousand years.

They were the "industrial" and "scientific" workforce that kept Spain on top in the Mediterranean, and later on provided much of the intellectual infusion into the more primitive Western European countries as they pulled out of the Dark Ages.

You cannot look at Moslem Spain without dealing with the Jews ~ they kept the place worthwhile to live in.

Until recently I hadn't realized that the Jews in Spain had their own special language. It is called Ladino. You can learn it on the net. Jews did not develop Yiddish until they moved to Eastern Europe.

No, but they came from an area not to far away. I think there has been several threads here about Huns being decendent europeans(Austrian/Hungarian) that had settled in Western China area. Only to come storming back centuries later.

I don't think any of the major languages in India are part of the Uralic-Altaic family, but the Dravidian languages are part of a group strongly related to ancient Sumerian, and it (with it's modern cognate, Sa'ami) seems to arise out of the same larger group from which the Uralic-Altaic family arose.

There simply never were enough Mongols who moved to India to make a serious, long term impact on the place. In fact, India made an impact on them!

Similarly China absorbed the Mongols and turned them into Chinese in two generations!

BTW, take a good look at Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti clan ~ you can see their Mongolian backgrounds. They really don't look like true Arabs or Levantine people.

The Mongols left behind in the conquest were "absorbed" with a vengeance in Iraq and Iran. They don't even know who they are anymore.

Mooselimbs will always blame someone else -- they forget that the Islamik 'culture' was really just an amalgamation of Greek, Persian, Egyptian and Indian cultures -- the conquered peoples. Around the time of the Mongol invasions, these were being completely forced to convert. After that happened, the civilisations decayed.

It would be easy to confound the Huns with the Hurrians because of the similarity of their lifestyles. Still, I think all the Hurrians had assimilated with nearby Chinese many centuries before the Huns popped up.

They knew where West was, however, and went there on horses.

Where did Attila the Hun come in? Were Huns also Mongols?

The Huns were a Turkic tribe. They migrated west under pressure from what would become the Turks and the Mongols. They, in turn pushed the Slavs who pushed the Germans who pushed the Celts. A lot of this could be stated to have started when the Emperor Ch'in of china attacked the nomads to the north fo his territories and joined the walls to form the great wall of China.

You are overlooking the impact of the event that brought about the Dark Ages ~ 500 years in Western Europe and 300 years in China.

The Arabs in Arabia recovered first. They became the great engine of the economic transformation that lifted the Middle East out of the Dark Ages.

There were certainly Uralic-Altaic speakers living in what is now Hungary BEFORE the Mongol invasions. However, the Ghengis Khan event was the big one and dwarfed everything that had happened before.

In the end the Germans, Slavs, Latins, and Hungarians, including the Magyars and other Turkish tribes who'd lived there for centuries, adopted the language of the Mongol invaders.

Again, you want to learn Hungarian, attend Indiana University ~ they have a long tradition of teaching it. They are also the only school in North America to teach Sa'ami!

IIRC, it was towards the end of the Crusading period most of the Mongol states converted to Islam.

There were conversations between the Christian powers and the Ilkhanate of Persia about an alliance versus the Muslims in the middle east. Even a small chance of the Ilkhanate converting to Christianity - one ruler married a Byzantine nobelwoman (well, she was a probably a bastard, but the Byzantines didn't see fit to mention that to her Mongol husband). The Ilkhanate of Persia, Golden Horde, and Chagatai Horde all converted to Islam eventually though.

When the Ilkhanate sacked Baghdad it caused serious animus with the Golden Horde to the north, so they had probably already converted by that point, or were about to.

The Arabs in Arabia recovered first. They became the great engine of the economic transformation that lifted the Middle East out of the Dark Ages.

Well, No. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, but the Eastern still survived and was the economic engine for the Mediterranean while the Persians did the same in Persia and North-Western India. The Muslims didn't come on the scene until the 7th century and they merely took over the workings of these two empires

Thanks Cronos.

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To all: I highly recommend "Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1700" by Eric Hildinger as a wonderful introduction to the peoples of the steppes, from the Huns to the Mongols, who are very different peoples, by the way, and not from the same part of the steppes.

The Huns cam from an area around what is now Ukraine, more than 1000 years before the incursions of the Mongols. Many Huns settled eventually in what is now Central Europe, and specifically in Hungary.

OK, you can believe that the City of Byzantium managed to do it all by itself ~ after all, they usually kept a 7 year supply of food on hand. They even kept records.

Unfortunately for the theory that the Eastern Mediterranean was untouched by the Dark Ages, Byzantium and Persia were both substantially overrun and conquered by the previously penniless Arabs from Mecca in a couple of decades! Byzantine legions joined the Arabs ~ probably because they got paid, and the Persian conquest followed the same pattern.

In the 7th and 8th Centuries the smart guys gravitated to the Arabs. This wasn't because the Arabs were the most cultured of folks either, but in terms of value added economics, they were putting it together and the other lingering civilizations were burning up stored capital .

BTW, the actual date of economic collapse of the entire world was about 538 AD. The event occurred in the Spring. All hell broke loose after that.

This is 6th Century stuff. The Western Roman Empire had a political collapse in the 5th Century, but the economic collapse happened later!

China was also removed as a working entity for the next 300 years as well!

Right ~ that's when the Huns came to the notice of anybody in the West. They have a Far Eastern history too. I suspect that's only been discovered in recent times. FUR SHUR the Huns were not all that couth and cultured! Wouldn't have expected them to keep historians around.

An of course, this is from a Pakistani newspaper. Just an injection of false bravado and jingoism to keep the country's Islam-based nationalism rejuvenated. No Pakistani journalist would miss the chance to omit the misleading phrases like 'Glory of Islam', 'Golden Age', 'Advanced Muslim civilisation' etc.

I seem to recall that the Mongols started their invasion of the Middle East with a state called Kwarzim (sp?) that would probably be about where Pakistan is today. The local Muslim ruler had decided to kill some Mongolian traders and diplomats and this rather PO'd the Khan.

The Muslims fielded more men that the Mongols, but were routed with ease. The Mongols captured the man and killed him by pouring molton silver in his eyes/ears/mouth/etc, I guess for his greed.

After that, the Mongols speed west until they were defeated, once, by the Egyptians, and then became preoccupied with other concerns.

So I guess if there is a lesson to be learned for the Muslim world it is this, don't f*** around killing the civilians of those you can't beat on the battlefield.

Any idea about the Mongol-to-Mughal transition?

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