Okay, hello there students. Welcome to this lecture on the Mongols. It's the first of two lectures we're going to have on the Mongol Empire.
This one is on sort of the Mongols proper, and then the next one is kind of on the after effects of the Mongols. For those who don't know, the Mongols will create the largest continuous empire in the history of the world. That's even true today.
So the only empire that's ever been bigger. then the Mongol Empire at its peak is the British Empire around the year 1900. But the British Empire was spread around the world, right? You know, like the British controlled parts of Africa, parts of Asia, parts of Australia, parts of the Americas.
The Mongol Empire was contiguous, right? It was just, you know, there was no borders, there was no water. And so it's the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world.
And it's made by the leaders of the Mongols are called the Khans. And the argument I'm going to make... in this lecture is that the Mongol Empire unmakes the medieval world, right? Just sort of, and we've talked about this, right?
We've talked about the progress that, you know, places like Europe are beginning to make. We've talked about the progress that was already being made in places like China or in Baghdad, right? And so we got these like emerging global centers of scholarship and learning and science and world trade is being revived and then here come the Mongols, right? And they sort of unmake that.
So In other words, if I want to argue that Mongols unmake the medieval world, I should probably establish that the medieval world is a thing that exists. So let's do a quick tour of the world. Alright, so in China, we've already mentioned the rise of the Song Dynasty.
And we had the Tang Dynasty, and then the Tang Dynasty breaks into 50 years of like war and fighting, and then the Song Dynasty emerges. The Song Dynasty would be dominant in China until the 1100s, when steppe nomads... our traditional historical villain and by the way the Mongols of course are like the arch steppe nomads anyway uh non-Mongol steppe nomads uh enter China from what is today Manchuria so Manchuria today is part of China uh but in the medieval world it was not right so Manchuria was only taken was only only became part of China sort of in the 16th and 17th centuries so in medieval times Manchuria was not part of China Manchuria is definitely part of the steppe and the people who lived there were typically called Manchu nomads. That's how they get the name Manchuria, right?
It's the land of the Manchus. And so Manchu nomads came into China and they took over the northern half of China, right? So the Song Dynasty had ruled all of China and then the Manchu people come in, they call themselves Jin, right?
The Jin come in, they take the northern half of China. The Song Dynasty continues on in the south, right? And so China then is sort of split.
between a couple of steppe nomadic kingdoms in the north and the Song Dynasty in the south. The Song Dynasty is still Han Chinese. It is the people who have ruled China, you know, since the Han Dynasty, right, in the in like 200 CE. Right, so they continued to rule southern China. And China in this period is extraordinarily technologically advanced, right, it is by far the most technologically advanced place in the world particularly regarding military technology.
All of the various Chinese states, all of the Chinese cities have massive, sophisticated armies, massive, sophisticated navies, very intricate fortifications, right? Double, triple-walled cities, you know, mountain-based forts, extremely detailed irrigation works, right, on the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, the two major rivers in China. And so this is a very much a thriving, technologically advanced society that's right on the precipice of really advancing gunpowder.
So they very invented gunpowder and they use gunpowder. And so they have some kind of a rudimentary artillery by the 1200s, by the 1100s, by the 12th century. But they don't quite have like firearms.
We're still a little bit away from like muskets and rifles, but we do have, again, sort of the basics of cannon. developed in the Song Dynasty as well. So China, most technologically advanced place in the world, but split between North and South. The North controlled by steppe nomads from Manchuria. The South controlled by Han Chinese.
China very much a player in the Silk Road trading routes, very much part of the world system. The Middle East, we've already discussed the Middle East quite a bit in the last few lectures. The Muslim world is still nominally united by the Abbasid Caliphate.
But it's fractious, so various parts of the Abbasid Caliphate have more or less independence or freedom than others. We'll talk about a few of these in the next lecture when we talk about things like the Mamluk Sultanate. But by and large the Middle East, again, still nominally united under the Abbasid Caliphate.
We get the rise of the Turks. Remember we talked about the Turks in the Crusades lectures? We've got these guys like the Seljuk Turks coming in.
And the Turks are, again, steppe nomads. And so this medieval world is a medieval world that is sort of constantly being negotiated between settled peoples in places like China and the Middle East. and steppe nomads who are entering those areas. In China, the steppe nomads are from Manchuria.
In the Middle East, the steppe nomads are the Turks. In Europe, by the 12th century, the administrative revolution is well underway, and we're creating new, richer, somewhat secular, very powerful governments, particularly in places like France, as we've discussed. Remember the Europeans sort of lack the military logistical capacity or the government administrative capacity to carry out long military campaigns. And these are problems they don't have in China.
China, very, very advanced bureaucracy, extremely detailed administrative state. The Chinese can carry out long military campaigns. They can't do that in Europe.
And then in Eastern Europe, we talked about this in a minute. Most recent lecture, Eastern Europe, we have Christian forces fighting the pagan Slavs, as well as the Viking kingdom of Kiev and Rus. We got the remains of the Byzantine Empire fighting German and Italian Catholics. They're also fighting steppe raiders as well.
So again, the steppe peoples are moving into Eastern Europe, just like they're moving into the Middle East and China. And so this is the medieval world that I was referring to. This is the medieval world that the Khans or the Mongols or the Mongol Khans will unmake.
And again, is it paradise on earth, this medieval world? No, it's not. This is a hard, brutish world where a lot of people die young, a lot of people die of violence, a lot of people spend their whole lives malnourished or chronically hungry. Disease is not quite rampant, but disease kills people.
Again, it's not necessarily a pleasant world, but it's a good and stable world. world. People are living better in the 12th century than they were living in the 8th century sort of across all of Eurasia. And this Eurasian world is connected through trade. I haven't mentioned India on this slide.
We'll talk about India briefly in the next lecture. India was being sort of united by force by a group called the Delhi Sultanate, who brought Islamic administrative practices but extreme religious tolerance. to India and sort of created a unified India that again, like unified China or like the unified Middle East, got increasingly wealthy off of trade and exchange and eventually the trade and exchange makes its way to Europe and begins to buoy European standards of living as well.
So that's the medieval world sort of in the 12th century, right? And again, this is what the Mongols will unmake. So let's talk about the Mongols, right? The Medi-Orik rise of the Mongols. I don't know if you're familiar with the term meteoric.
Meteoric basically just means rising very suddenly. Just out of nowhere, basically. The steppe is very large.
We've talked about this. The Central Asian Steppe, where all these steppe nomadic peoples are coming from. The Central Asian Steppe is quite enormous.
It stretches from basically the Pacific Ocean in modern day China and Russia, all the way across Asia, right through the countries of Russia. China, Mongolia, Russia and China again, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, right, through the Caspian Sea basin into Russia yet again because Russia is quite large, right, and then through Ukraine, right, and then from Ukraine on into basically Belarus and Moldova, Romania and Poland, right, the very eastern edge of Europe. It's an enormous bit of land. And so there are all kinds of people who live on the Central Asian steppe, right? It's not like there's one group of steppe nomads.
Again, a really good analogy is to think of the Great Plains in the United States. Think of all the different Native American tribes who live on the Great Plains. Right in the far south, you have the Apache. Kind of in the middle south, you have the Comanche. And as you move north, you get Cheyennes and Crows and Lakota Siouxs and various other tribes.
There's not one tribe that lives on the Great Plains, right? The Central Asian steppe is much larger than the Great Plains. So there are all kinds of groups that live on the Great Plains. The worst part of the Central Asian steppe, right, the driest, coldest, poorest part of the Central Asian steppe, again, the part of the steppe that has the worst grazing land, that has the worst weather, that has the least water, the most wind, the most snow. It's basically desert except in the winter when it gets riven by whiteout blizzards.
Just one of the worst places in the world to live, sort of objectively speaking, if you're just looking at the climate and what you can sort of make for food there. In that part of the steppe, there emerges the world's greatest empire, the Mongols. When I say this is the poorest part of the steppe, I mean the Mongols used to make coats out of like mice skins. They would take like mice that they would kill on the steppe.
And they take thousands of mice to make coats to try to keep out the winter cold. This is the driest, poorest part of the Central Asian steppe. So in other words, the Mongols then are like the poorest, weakest group on the whole steppe. They're sort of the people who are least respected, least powerful, least authoritative on the whole Central Asian steppe. And everyone on the steppe always picked on the Mongols.
And because everyone picked on them, they basically hid out in this dry, poor part of the Central Asian steppe where no one would bother them. Again, today it's modern-day Mongolia, of course. But again, they will grow into, again, the world's greatest empire, the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, even today, almost 900 years later. They do this when, basically, a singular great leader is born. Right.
Historians, we don't like this great man theory of history, right, where one person is born and wow, he's just, you know, he's Napoleon or he's Hitler. And boy, things change. Most historians think those kind of arguments are simplistic and stupid.
In the case of the Mongols, though, the great man theory has some appeal. It really does seem like the Mongols were just blessed with this, again, uniquely gifted. leader who just happened to be born at an opportune moment for him to take advantage of some weaknesses in his burgeoning medieval world that I've discussed. So this leader is born in 1156. His name is Timogen.
He, as a child, was proclaimed by a Mongol shaman. So the shaman, this is like a religious leader. The Mongol religion is called Tengri. Tengri has a really cool belief system.
One of the coolest things about it is to dispose of their dead. They feel like, so they basically worship the open sky. And so the dead need to return to the sky.
Well, how do the dead return to the sky? You basically let buzzards eat them, right? And so they have a whole sort of ritual system set up for how to expose the dead to make sure they get eaten by carrion birds and return to the great sky. Anyway, one of the religious leaders in the Mongol community was this guy called Kokachu.
And Kokachu proclaimed. that he had seen in a dream that Temujin, who's a boy at the time, he's like eight or ten years old, that this Temujin would be the future inheritor of the world. The gods have told me Temujin shall bring the Mongol people great riches, and he will inherit the world.
And the Mongols will fight behind Temujin as if they are on a divine mission. They do fight as if. as if they believe God is the gods in this case because they're not monotheists. They do genuinely fight as if the gods are on their side, and they treat other peoples as if they, the Mongols, are the future inheritors of the world. For instance, before battle, they would go up to their side and say, you know, the gods have told us we're going to inherit the whole world, so if you fight us in battle, we're going to win, so why don't you just go ahead and surrender?
They'd usually get laughed at, and then they'd just go and massacre that army. And so this whole idea of Kokachu proclaiming Temujin as the future inheritor of the world, I mean, we giggle at it because we're not Tengri, but the Mongols didn't giggle at it. They took this very seriously. And Temujin began his sort of political career by trying to unite the various Mongol tribes. The Mongols were a tribal people.
They lived in scattered tribes all across Mongolia. Again, very large country. It's about the size of Texas. It's a little bigger than Texas. And so he unites all the Mongols together.
He has to do this by force. So he takes his tribe and basically goes and fights the other Mongol tribes until they agree to follow him. And in 1206, all the Mongol tribesmen are united behind Timajun. And they proclaim Timajun as their great leader.
and says, yes, Temujin, we answer to you. You lead us, the Mongol people. And at this point, Temujin takes on a new title, right? He changes his name.
I'm no longer Temujin. I'm Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan basically means the great Khan, right? And Khan, again, would be the leader of a united steppe nomadic people. So if you take all, it's basically like the step nomad version of a king or an emperor.
And then Genghis is basically Mongolian for great or great one. I'm the great Khan, Genghis Khan. All the Mongols answer to me.
And Genghis Khan does not waste any time. Again, he will truly conduct his foreign policy as if he believes, Kokachu, that he is in fact the future inheritor of the world. And he immediately goes to war.
He fights one of those steppe nomadic kingdoms in North China. Remember, China is split between North and South. The South is still ruled by the Han Chinese via the Song Dynasty. The North is ruled by a couple of different steppe nomadic kingdoms.
One of these steppe nomadic kingdoms is called Western Jia. And the Mongols have had long-term animosities with Western Jia. They were always neighbors on the steppe. Mongolia borders Manchuria. Again, the people who were ruling northern China were originally Manchurian steppe nomads.
And the people who ruled western Zha were always a historic rival of the Mongols dating back centuries. And so the Mongols particularly disliked them, and so that's who they picked to target first. This is a, on paper, this is a really poor choice by the Mongols. Western Zha is a major military power. They're one of the most powerful countries in the world.
They're more powerful than anyone in Europe. They're probably more powerful than anyone in the Muslim world. They were the third most powerful Chinese country, right? But there are three major Chinese states, Western Xia being one of them. Western Xia is probably the third most powerful of those three, but they were probably, again, the third most powerful country in the world as well.
So again, not on paper a good choice by the Mongols, but the Mongols win this battle or this fight. um it's interesting how they do this um and it's worth discussing because it'll reveal a lot to you about the mongols and how they fight and basically why they are so successful again this is these people emerge from the poorest driest part of one of the poorest driest parts of the whole world right this would be like i don't know like uh if you made like a soccer team uh like uh deep in the you know mountains of Idaho and you just found like, you know, 11 kids to play on a soccer team and went and won the world cup, right? Like that's not where you think the best, the best soccer players in the world, right? They probably aren't from like, you know, the Idaho panhandle deep in the forest or something. That's basically who the Mongols are.
They just emerged from nothing and take over the world. And it's sort of, if you look at the campaign against Western Jha, you'll get sort of a feel for Mongol style. And so first to attack Western Jha, there's a lot of people who are, So basically to get off the step, there are certain sort of routes a society would take when moving across the step and when trying to enter or exit the step. Because the step would be surrounded by various deserts and these big salt plains, like a salt desert. I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of a salt desert, but it's exactly what it sounds like.
It might be 100 miles where the ground is just salt. You can reach over and just touch it, and it's just salt, like six inches deep. There's some really dramatic ones.
You can Google it. Google Salt Desert Djibouti Africa, and you'll see it. It's wild. But there'd be a lot of salt plains and salt deserts that bordered the steppe.
And so when you were leaving the steppe, you wouldn't go through the salt plain because you can't march. And remember, all steppe nomads are horse people, or you can't march 10,000 horses through 100 miles of salt. The horse's feet would rot, they would starve, they would die of thirst, and so would your soldiers.
And so Western Jha sort of is watching certain parts of the steppe to watch for invaders, right? Because again, invaders are only going to come from certain directions. The Mongols surprise them. The Mongols go through a desert, not a salt desert, a normal desert. They go through a desert that was considered impassable, right?
It was too dry. No one could survive going through that desert. But again, the Mongols are hardy, extraordinarily tough desert people, right?
So are their horses. Their horses are hardy, tough, desert horses. And so they come through the desert and they basically attack Western Xia from behind. Again, Western Xia is looking in this direction.
They're looking straight ahead and the Mongols kind of come in behind because no one can attack through that desert. The Mongols attack through that desert. They fight a battle. The Mongols win. And then Western Xia says, well, these guys.
they're just on horses. We'll just go hide behind our big walls, right? So the Western Jha army and all the government, they flee to their cities and they go behind these fortified city walls.
Again, China has the most sort of intricate defensive fortifications in the world. They have these really tall, really thick walls. Most cities are double or even triple walled, no big deal.
These horse nomads are going to tire themselves out. They're going to run out of food and then they're going to go home and leave us alone. That's the Western Jha strategy. Again, the Mongols aren't going to tolerate that. We're the future inheritors of the world.
You Western Jha people did not surrender. We are insulted. You must pay.
So Genghis Khan just goes to the capital of Western Jha, the biggest city. The whole army is hiding in there. There's like 100,000 troops plus like 150,000 civilians plus the whole government apparatus.
They're all in the city. The Mongols surround it. We're going to put your city under siege. Well, the Western Jha people are laughing at him. Great.
Go ahead. You guys have like sticks and swords. What are you going to do against them? 80-foot tall stone walls that are 8-foot thick.
Go ahead. Put us under siege. We're really scared of your sticks and swords. Well, the city was supplied. Almost all medieval cities would be built near or on a source of fresh water.
The city happened to be built on a river. Like all rivers in China, this river had all kinds of intricate... canals and dams and all kinds of irrigation works put along it both for flood control and also for agricultural use And they're basically had built a huge dike Right like basically think of like a dirt dam It's huge dike to keep the to divert the river from flooding the city And so the river is kind of built up There's like a there's almost like a lake built up behind this dike and so the Mongols just start tearing apart the dyke and the people in the city are going what are you doing if you do that you're going to destroy the whole city and gingus khan goes yeah i'm going to destroy your whole city i told you there's a surrender and you didn't surrender but into the western jaw people like this doesn't make any sense this isn't how you conduct warfare and you don't destroy cities the whole point is to take the city you sack the city you take its wealth You kill a few of the people, you sell some into slavery, you let the rest live, and you move on to the next city. That's how you do warfare. That's not how Genghis Khan does warfare.
That's not how the Mongols do warfare. We told you to surrender. You didn't.
Now we're angry. So now you must pay. We don't want your wealth. We want your obedience.
We wanted you to surrender. We want your respect. You didn't give us any of that, so now we don't care about you at all. You don't exist. We're going to blow up this dike and drown you.
Right. And basically the Western jaw, they send out a huge delegation and they beg forgiveness and they surrender. Right. And again, this teaches you a lot about the Mongols. Right.
Completely ruthless. No sort of you know, they don't have the same sort of rationale in warfare as everyone else. Again, they're not in this to get territory. They're not in this to get rich.
I mean, they will get a lot of territory and they'll get extremely rich. But that doesn't seem to be their goal always. What seems to be their goal is just to assert their will.
And their will is that Western Xia should surrender. So Western Xia surrenders. Western Xia becomes a vassal of the Mongol Empire.
This starts a trend by the time Genghis Khan dies in 1227. The Mongols control all of Central Asia and all of northern China. Again, this was amazing. And by 1300, they control basically the entirety of Eurasia.
and as i've already mentioned right it's the biggest contiguous empire in the history of the world even today so here's a little more detail on the invasion of western jaw right as i've already mentioned right chinese societies have gunpowder cannons massive armies they far surpass anything in europe or the middle east western jaws gingas khan's first target in 1209 goes to the capital sabotage the dike on the Yellow River, and he gets Western Jia to surrender, as I already mentioned. Once Western Jia is his vassal, he then continues on to the other steppe nomadic kingdom of northern China, the Jin. And he does this because the Jin insulted him. Now, I told you Western Jia is probably the third most powerful country in the world, but they're also the third most powerful country in China, right?
The Jin are either the most powerful or the second most powerful. sort of society, army, military in the world, right? It's the Song or the Jin in terms of who's the mightiest.
Most historians would say the Song, but the Jin were like a global superpower. And again, here are the Mongols that no one's even heard of. And sure, they defeated Western Xia, but that was a trick, right? They attacked through the desert and then tried to blow up the city by flooding it, right? So they cheated, right?
They're not a real power. and even with western jaws the vassal right they say no chance against the jinn and the jinn thought this themselves right and so when gingus khan has western jaw under siege the jinn send the delegation to gingus khan and demand he submit Look, Genghis Khan, we understand you're this mighty great Khan of the Mongols, whoever the hell they are. And look, you're doing some damage there in Westinja, but you can't mess with us. We're the djinn. And so how about you just become a vassal of the djinn, and we'll let you live.
We won't kill all of you if you go ahead and surrender. Genghis Khan basically sends him a middle finger. Whatever, sir. Whatever you say, Mr. Djinn Emperor.
I'm the inheritor of the world. I'm coming for you next. You're now on my shit list, basically, and I'm coming for you. The world's going to learn really quickly. The worst thing anyone can do in the whole world is insult the Mongols.
If you insult Genghis Khan, he's probably going to murder every person in your society. The djinn don't know that yet, but they're going to learn, and so will everyone else. So once he defeats Western Xia, Genghis Khan just continues on marching right into the djinn.
uh it takes him 23 years but he defeats the jinn again maybe the most powerful country in the world if not the most powerful the second most right cannons gunpowder just armies of hundreds and hundreds of thousands and the mongols just you know destroy them again not an easy war right the war lasts 23 years but think about that we were just talking about this with the crusades right genghis khan is 1,000 miles from home, maybe more, when he's fighting the Jin. And he's there for, they fight this war for 23 years. The Europeans can't do that, right?
The Europeans can't fight for 23 months, let alone 23 years. And so just being able to sustain a war for 23 years is quite impressive. And again, the Mongols will eventually win. And it wasn't enough for Genghis Khan to fight the Jin.
He wanted to fight on both sides, right? So the Jin were to the east, right, the southeast of Mongolia. He also goes to the southwest of Mongolia, right? So he moves into the west and fights the Khwarazmian dynasty. The Khwarazmian dynasty was the current rulers of Persia.
And he was basically angry at them as well because they also insulted him by massacring a Mongol trade caravan, right? He had sent traders down the Silk Road. The Silk Road passes through the Khwarazmian dynasty. The Khwarazmian dynasty demanded they pay a very high toll to pass through. The Mongols say, no, we don't pay tolls that high.
We'll pay a normal toll. It's basically a discriminatory toll. We'll pay the toll everyone else pays. And the Persians say, that's not going to do. You have to pay an extra toll.
The Mongols refuse. And so the Persians massacre the whole caravan and seize their goods, obviously. Again, that insulted Genghis Khan.
And again, the last thing anyone should ever do is insult Genghis Khan. So while he's fighting the djinn in 1219, he also invades the Khwarazmian dynasty, and he demands that his vassal help, right? Western Jha, he demands they help.
And when you're a vassal, when the overlord tells you to supply troops, you supply troops. And if you don't, there's going to be consequences. In other words, the Western Jha have insulted him.
What did that just tell you the last thing you want to do is insult Genghis Khan, right? So now he's fighting. A war basically against three people, right?
So basically he tells Western Jha, you've insulted me. I'm busy at the moment, but when I'm not busy, you're going to pay for that. And then he goes off to punish the Persians. He's already punishing the Djinn because they demanded his submission. Now he's punishing the Persians because they massacred a straight caravan.
And then he's going to come back and punish Western Jha because they refused to assist him in his war against the Persians. As I said. Insulting Genghis Khan, very bad idea. So Genghis Khan defeats the Khwarazmians in 1221, and then he goes back to punish Western Jha, and he invades them in 1225. And he did a lot of damage against the Persians in the Djinn. But what he does to Western Jha is, I'm recording this on Halloween day, right?
This is a Halloween story, right? This is a nightmare story, what happens to the poor people of Western Jha. The troops hide in the capital. And the Mongols just run roughshod across the whole empire. They murder every living thing in the region.
And when I say every living thing, I mean literally every living thing. Dogs, chickens, sheep, cattle, children, vegetables, fish, if they could find them. They kill everything.
Their Khwarazmian dynasty sends basically a delegation to apologize. While Genghis Khan is scorching the earth in Western Jha, and this traveler from the Khwarazmian dynasty... He talks about he was traveling, you know, to find Genghis Khan, and he'd never been to China.
No one from Persia had really ever been to China. And so he's kind of, you know, it's all new territory to him. And he's talking about he's walking through the steppe, and it's dry and hot, and he's miserable, and it's dry and hot, and he's miserable. You know, he's sweating, and he's dehydrated, and he's about to die of heat stroke. And oh, thank God, thank the gods, there are mountains on the horizon, right?
This poor Persian traveler, he can't wait to get to the... to the relief of the mountains. There's mountains, there must be rivers, the weather will be cooler, there might even be shade trees, I can get off this hot scorched Central Asian steppe. As he comes to the mountains, he's horrified. They're not mountains.
Well, they are mountains. They're not natural mountains. They're not made out of stone. They're mountains of human skulls. Whose skulls are they?
The people of Western Jha. Why did Genghis Khan make mountains of the skulls of the people of Western Jha? Because they pissed him off.
You don't anger Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan dies putting the capital of Western Jha under siege. The capital is called Inchun.
He dies during the siege of natural causes. As we'll come to see, the Mongols die early. They're raging alcoholics, typically.
most of the Mongol rulers. And Genghis Khan basically just drank himself to death and his liver more or less exploded and he died. The Western capital fell, right, of Yanchun, and they killed the entire population. And again, made mountains out of their skulls.
Again, you don't anger the Mongols. Genghis picked his third son as his successor. His third son is called Ogedai Khan. He becomes Khan once he takes over. His name is Ogedei.
And once he replaces Genghis Khan, he becomes Ogedei Khan. Again, Khan is just the Mongol version of king. And he continues his father's conquest in every direction. He charged his best general, a guy called Subutai, to finish off the Jin. And Subutai does that in 1234. And they kill hundreds of thousands of Jin peoples.
While doing this, again, making mountains out of the skull, because remember the Jin had insulted them by demanding their submission. And again, you don't do that to the Mongols. The Mongols had friends to help them here.
They made allies with the Song Dynasty. Remember, the Song Dynasty doesn't like the Jin. The Song and the Jin are arch enemies. The Jin had invaded China and taken away northern China from the Song. So the Song were more than happy to help out the Mongols.
What the Song don't know is that the Mongols don't have alliances. They have friends of convenience. They don't have real friends. And it's only a matter of time before they'll come for the Song as well.
He also, Subutai and Ogedai Khan, they complete the conquest of Persia in 1234. Killing everyone but that order of the assassins that hides up in those mountains I talked about if you've listened to the castles lecture for your essay if you haven't listened to the castles lecture yet You don't know who I'm talking about But if you have then you've read about the assassins like the famed order of the assassins by 1240 They have conquered the Caucasus region So the Caucasus is kind of the gateway to Europe right a lot of Europeans consider the Caucasus as part of Europe So the highest mountain in Europe is in the Caucasus. But the Caucasus today is basically, it's between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In modern day Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. That's where the Caucasus are. Again, very large mountains.
I think they're the fourth highest mountain range in the world. And that's where they are. And the Mongols invade into there. It's on the edge of the steppe, the southern edge of the steppe.
Basically, if you can conquer the Caucasus, then all of Europe is open to you. You can just travel right down the Eurasian steppe and run right into Poland and Germany and Hungary. And from Poland, Germany, and Hungary, it's not that far to France, not by Eurasian standards.
Again, the Mongols, it's much farther from Mongolia to the Caucasus than it is from the Caucasus to Paris. And so the Mongols then are coming for Europe. Ogadai Khan orders Korea invaded only so they weren't going to mess with Korea at all But the Koreans killed an envoy So basically the Mongols while they're fighting the Jin sent an envoy to Korea to basically demand they surrender And you know live in the Mongol Empire and the Koreans are like no we're not doing that and the envoys like oh you really Should you don't want to piss off our ruler right? He he doesn't have a sense of humor about these things The Koreans go oh, he doesn't have a sense of humor about this. We shouldn't make you mad so they kill the envoy Ogadai Khan does not have a sense of humor about this.
So Ogadai Khan invades Korea and murders tens of thousands of civilians. Again, you don't insult the Mongols. You just surrender and hope for the best.
We'll talk about this at the end of the lecture. Those who just surrender... They actually have a pretty good time of it. Those who resist, right, they make a mountain out of your skull, right?
So Korea now gets mountains made out of Korean skulls. In 1235, right, the Mongols begin invading Europe. They take all of the Russian and Viking kingdoms that we talked about in the last lecture, right, on the Crusades and the Northern Crusades and sort of Russia, you know, early Russian history, right? So that...
kingdom of Kiev and Rus, right, and all those Slavic tribes that, you know, were sort of running around Russia, places like Ryazan and Muscovy and Perm, right, the Mongols wiped them out by 1240. And when I say they wiped them out, I mean Kiev and Rus, they completely destroy the entire population. They go to Kiev. Kiev was one of the biggest cities in Europe at the time, right.
Tens of thousands of people live in Kiev. The Mongols show up. The Mongols by this point, they've learned from China. So the Mongols show up.
They have cannons. No one in Europe has ever seen a cannon. Here come the Mongols. They just emerge out of nowhere.
Hundreds of thousands of horse warriors coming from all four. They usually ride into a place from all four directions just to scare the hell out of you. So they come riding out of the middle of nowhere in all four directions.
Hundreds of thousands of them dragging cannons. They have these enormous siege engines. They have trebuchets that can fire stones the size of a city bus. And they just appear out of nowhere. And all of a sudden, they're at the gates of Kiev.
And they say, surrender now, and we will spare some of you. And the people of Kiev are like, no, we're not going to do that. A week later, there's no one left. They start firing stones and cannons, tear the walls down, go in, and murder everybody. right mountain the skulls a few refugees live they run to the next town tell them to run right they go to the next town run where should we run run west how far run till you can't run anymore run west as far as you as fast as you can run as far as you can go it starts a panic in europe no one in europe believes them by the way again europeans they're catholic they've been crusading against these kiev and rus For centuries, or for decades, they don't like each other.
So these Kievan Rusyn and these other Slavic pagans, they show up as refugees. What do you mean run? What's coming? The Mongols.
What's a Mongol? Bad news. Well, what is it?
It's an army. Well, should we just raise them up? No.
Running. If they go to Germany, run. Well, should we get an army?
No, just run. They get to France, run. There's nowhere to run.
That's the ocean. Well, shit, maybe you should get an army. We should get an army? Well, it probably won't do you any good, because when the Mongols get here, it doesn't matter how big your army is. But yeah, you should probably get an army.
The entire Hungarian army is destroyed at the Battle of the Titsa River in 1241 in less than an hour. The entire army. And Hungary was like a European power.
And to the Mongols, they're a speed bump. The Mongols are fighting. They just defeated Jin and Western Jha and Khwarazmian Persians. All of them are way more powerful than the Hungarians. The Hungarians, again, they're nothing to the...
Mongol war machine. Once the Hungarians get wiped out, now Europe is listening. Like, oh my god, we should have ran.
Let's get our troops together. The Europeans begin plotting troops. All of Europe is open for the Mongols to crush. There's no way the Europeans are going to withstand this. It doesn't matter if all of Europe joined in and sent all their troops.
Again, if Jin couldn't fight the Mongols, Europe isn't going to fight the Mongols. All of Europe is there to crush and then just as suddenly as they arrived the Mongols vanish Again, the Europeans know nothing about these people a couple of Europeans have heard of China Right like maybe like one one hundredth of one percent of Europeans know that China is a place and they know it's in the east They know how far east it is. They don't know anything about it. I might know that silk or tea comes from there And that's way off in the east. That's literally all they know of China.
They've never heard of Mongolia. They've never heard of the Mongols. They've never heard of Ogedai Khan.
They don't care that the Mongols have been told by the gods that they're the future inheritors of the world. The Mongols just showed up. They just appeared out of the steppe, just out of the grasslands, just from nothing.
They must have been dropped out of UFOs as far as the Europeans were concerned. They're completely alien, foreign peoples. They've never heard of them. And here they are, they're going to murder every European and make a mountain of their skulls. And then they just disappear just as suddenly as they appeared.
The Europeans didn't know where they go. Why did the Mongols disappear? Ogadai Khan died without an heir. Europe is spared because Ogadai Khan dies in 1241. All the heirs of Genghis Khan return to Mongolia.
They return to their ancestral homeland to hold a Kuril Thai. A Kuril Thai is a general council to pick... the next great Khan.
We didn't have one after Genghis died because he'd picked Ogedei, but Ogedei died and now no one knows who should be the next successor. So we're gonna hold a curl tie. All the grandsons of Genghis Khan who are now all accomplished world conquerors, right, like because you know they're the ones who have conquered Europe and the Caucasus and Persia and Jin. And Korea, they're all world conquerors, and they all hate each other.
They're all rivals for glory, for riches. This is a new Mongol generation. This isn't the generation of Genghis Khan.
This is 80 years after Genghis Khan was born. Remember, Genghis Khan was born in the poorest, driest part of the Central Eurasian steppe to a bunch of nobodies. That's not these kids, right?
His grandkids did not live in that world, right? His grandkids were born to a powerful, conquering, you know, sort of all-powerful, all-conquering Mongol Empire. They were born wealthy, and they were born powerful, and they don't remember the hardships, right?
And the importance of unity, like Genghis Khan and that generation. new right this is a new generation and you can make it like a you'll think about like uh in the united states i think of immigrants to the u.s right so you get like a family coming from out of the philippines and they move to the u.s they still speak tagalog right they're probably very poor they probably have some really terrible job in the u.s like meat packing where they work you know in like an industrial laundry you know just a job that no one wants right that's usually what these you know first generation immigrants who aren't who they should come with an educate like a college degree If you're not coming with a physics degree as an immigrant, you're probably getting some just terrible job that no one wants. But your grandchildren will be normal, quote unquote, normal Americans.
They'll be native English speakers who grew up with cable television and just expect to go to college. So this is sort of the same situation here. Genghis Khan was the meatpacker. His grandchildren are these spoiled brats, basically. And so we get a lot of infighting at the Kuril Thai.
They pick a guy called Guik as the next Khan, but Guik was distrusted by about half of Genghis Khan's grandsons, including Batu Khan. Batu Khan was the guy leading the fighting in Europe. He's the guy who defeated the Hungarians and was just about to invade Germany and then destroy all of Europe. He doesn't trust Guik at all. The two nearly start a civil war.
Guik summons Batu to come see him. This means that Guik is going to basically murder Batu. and Batu hides out to avoid fighting Guik.
And Guik's trying to decide, does he go looking for Batu, or does he continue fighting the Chinese? And if he goes looking for Batu, it's going to be a civil war. So he decides not to do that. And Guik will die quickly.
He doesn't last very long. He drinks himself to death, just as Ogedai and Genghis had done. So Guik Khan will drink himself to death. The next Khan is a guy called Monkey Khan. And Monkey Khan takes power in 1251. He's very nearly assassinated at his inauguration.
So the inauguration was this really special event. And all the Mongol tribes would come in. And it's basically like a 10-day party in Mongolia.
And then you would all go back to world conquest and making mountains of skulls and the various things Mongols do when they're not having parties. And it's also, it was forbidden to have weapons at the inauguration. At the inauguration, you come after a curled tie, right?
So you can't bring weapons to a curled tie because it's a negotiation. It's not a fight. And Monkey Khan is there.
Everyone knows he's going to be the next Khan. And then we're going to have this big party. And one faction shows up, and you would bring gifts with you for the party. And gifts to give to the new Khan to show that you appreciate and respect this Khan. And again, you're also bringing drinks and food for the party.
And so every tribe and faction is showing up with these huge wagons just full of... You know... basically liquor and meat uh and uh this one faction shows up and you know have all their wagons and one of monkey khan's guards just absent-mindedly leans against the wagon he sticks his hand in the wagon and he feels steel and what is that and he lifts it up and realizes it's a sword they've brought weapons they were going to assassinate monkey khan at the curl tie and take over the guard alerts everyone else and then the rest of the mongols just destroy those people and prevent Monkey Khan from being assassinated. And that sort of near assassination was enough to sort of overcome the infighting and factionalism that had arisen.
And so in 1251, then, the Mongols are kind of reunited. And once they're reunited, they can continue with world conquest. Batu dies of natural causes in 1256. Again, on the doorstep to Europe.
He'd gone back to Europe. He'd heard about this Europe. place and decided he wanted to take it over. That was going to be his region.
He's on his way there and drinks himself to death and dies in 1256. None of the other Mongol commanders or leaders, none of us of them care about Europe, so Europe is again spared. Nowhere else will be spared, though. The rest of Eurasia will fall to the Mongols. Mongke personally led the invasions of Syria and Iraq. He wiped out the Order of the Assassins on his way.
He sacks Baghdad. Remember, Baghdad's probably the greatest city in the world in this period. They have the House of Wisdom.
It's definitely the most learned city in the world in terms of science and philosophy and that sort of thing. Mungi Khan sacks Baghdad in 1258. When I say he sacks Baghdad, he destroys the city. The death toll is estimated to be nearly 200,000.
And they're not Mongols. 200,000 Muslim Arabs. Killed in and around Baghdad.
They make mountains out of the skulls, of course. And then the Mongols destroy the House of Wisdom. It was said that the Euphrates River ran black for two weeks from all the ink of all the books that the Mongols dumped into the Euphrates River. They just completely destroy the city of Baghdad.
Again, the greatest city in the world, maybe. And from Baghdad, they continue on to the Levant. They conquer Syria, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs.
All of this, they're still fighting in East Asia, by the way. They take over Korea, they seize Tibet, they invade Southeast Asia, sort of modern day Cambodia and Vietnam. And then they decide that they will eventually fight the Song.
They're going to go to war with the Song. And by this time, the Song... against either the Song or the Mongols, right?
Or by far the two most dominant military powers in the world. This would be like, I don't know if the US and China went to war today, right? By far the two most powerful countries in the world. And so the Mongol Song War is quite a war. We'll come back to that in a moment.
It's probably worth asking, why are the Mongols so successful? Why are they able to just go and just massacre and murder and rape and pillage and conquer far and wide? I mean, for them, the answer is obvious, right? It's because the gods told them they were the inheritors of the world. But for the rest of us, we need to look a little deeper.
The number one reason is speed. This is the 12th century, the 13th century, right? The 12th and 13th, mostly 13th century, I guess, right? In the 13th century, there's nothing in the world. faster than a horse, right?
There's no trains, there's no airplanes or helicopters or cars, right? You only move as fast as your own feet will take you or the feet of something you can ride. And the fastest thing humans could ride were horses, right? If you had really favorable winds and a very well built ship, a ship could maybe go about as fast as a horse, but that's not on land. So on land, there's literally nothing faster than a horse.
The Mongols have the best and fastest horses in the world. And Mongols spent their entire lives on horseback. And I mean, literally, when you were eight months old, you would be put on a horse by yourself with no saddle.
You'd just be tied on. And the Mongols then got very good at riding horses. They could ride for 40 or 50 consecutive hours without their feet ever touching the ground. The Mongols took great pride in not getting off their horses to do things. Even when they were out hunting, they'd shoot a rabbit with an arrow and go gather their rabbit.
on a dead sprint without getting off the horse, right? They would just sprint past the rabbit and bend down and scoop the rabbit up as they were riding past. They never get off the horses. So they have the best and fastest horses in the world, and they are the best riders of horses in the world.
So therefore, they are the fastest people in the world, right? No one can compete with them for speed. So speed is one of the key reasons that they're so powerful, so successful.
Another thing is that they are horse archers, right? And their bows were extremely powerful bows, right? They didn't make their bows out of wood. They made their bows mostly out of bone. And their bows had a pull of about 150 pounds.
Now, I don't know how familiar any of you are with archery, right? Or with bow and arrows, right? But if you're an archer today, right?
If you're like a competitive archer, if you're like a deer hunter who hunts with a bow. Your bow probably has a pull of anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds. I had an uncle who was extremely strong, had lived on a farm his whole life, just had a big NFL offensive lineman-like chest, just a super strong man, and he had a bow of a pull of 70 pounds. A 70-pound bow can launch a modern arrow about 50 yards at accuracy.
The Mongols have bows... the pull of 150 pounds. Again, the average adult human today couldn't even pull an arrow, couldn't even like pull this bow back, right, to make a shot let alone actually fire it, right.
If you tried to pull this back it would probably knock you down. If you somehow managed to pull it back with an arrow notched when you fired, it would fire so powerfully it would knock you down, right, and they're pulling these on horseback while sitting and riding horses, right. So Very, very powerful bows.
They're bows with a 150-pound pool, right? The pool and the bow is so powerful that they could launch an arrow through iron armor at 70 or 80 yards distance. Right? Through iron armor.
Think about that. More importantly, the Mongols were extremely accurate shots, right? They rarely missed a shot. We have thousands of stories, right?
If you have thousands of stories, it means they're probably true. We have thousands of stories of Mongol archers, right, riding on horseback, sprinting on horseback across the steppe. Just a dead sprint on their horse. They see a rabbit 70 yards away. They see a bird flying 80 yards away.
They pull their bow out, draw an arrow, fire it, hit the bird while it's flying from 80 yards on a horse at a dead sprint. So they have extremely powerful bows. extremely fast horses and they don't miss as you've already seen they're also extremely ruthless and perfectly happy to use terror as a tactic right when they invade a new land right when they invade say the khorasmian dynasty in persia or they come to the first khorasmian city they demand its surrender that city doesn't surrender so they destroy the city they murder every person in the city They kill every living thing in the city. They break every building in the city.
They make a mountain of the skulls of the people who live there, and then they burn the city down behind them. They go to the next city. It surrenders. So they're absolutely ruthless.
They use terror. They're very happy to gain surrender or obedience via fear. Surrender to us or that will happen to you.
And they point to the next city. The one they just left. And you can see the mountain of skulls.
You can see the smoke rising from the burned city. Do that. You know, surrender. Or we'll do that to you.
Right? So that's another reason they're so successful. Another thing that they're really, really good at, and they don't get enough credit from other historians for this, is that they are masters of strategy.
They have extremely good generals. And they were really good at attacking in multiple roving bands. Again, often coming from all four directions at the same time.
So they cause... an incredible degree of confusion. They make it look like they are everywhere. And again, they are.
They're moving incredibly fast, so they would get on. They would, again, just arrive at destinations, and the people had no idea they were even in their lands. Again, when they get to Kiev, the people of Kiev and Rus didn't even know the Mongols were there. They didn't know that there had been an invasion of Kiev and Rus. They didn't know the Mongols existed.
And here come the Mongols at the gates of Kiev, riding in every direction. Where in the hell did these people come from? It was a great strategy because, again, it sows terror and confusion. Where did you people even come from? Because they're so fast on horses, they were really good.
Like we talked about the Vikings, right? They're really good at reconnaissance and scouting, at mapping the territory ahead, like they would ride ahead, map the territory, come back and report, you know, we want to attack through this mountain pass, not that mountain pass, because this one's less defended, no one can sneak up behind. They were really good at just recon and scouting and planning really good strategies. And they would ride in these multiple roving bands. when they would enter a new territory, they would just split up, right?
So again, think of these invasion armies. These Mongol armies are enormous. They might have as many as 100,000 soldiers with like 300,000 horses, right? Because every soldier would have three or four horses so that one horse would never get tired.
And again, they would just ride at the sprint, right? So they'd come into a new land, just like 80,000 troops, and they'd split into like three groups of like 25,000 to 30,000 and then just ride in every direction. looking for places to attack, looking for sources of water, looking for sources of food, looking for weaknesses.
One of their favorite tactics was a feigned retreat into an ambush, right? So they would ride up against an army that had never seen Mongols before, and the Mongols would ride up, say, and fight the Russians. And so they'd ride up and they'd meet the Russians, you know, these Viking Russians, who were probably pretty terrifying, right? We talked about how terrifying the Vikings could be. And so the Mongols would ride up and They'd get within bow shot, and they'd shoot a couple bows, and the Vikings would growl and take off running at them.
The Vikings would charge, and the Mongols go, hey, I got an idea. These Vikings don't know anything about us. Let's pretend we're scared.
They'd turn and run, and the Vikings would chase them. Yeah, we got them. Those foreign invaders, the Mongols, whoever they are, we scared them off, the losers. Let's go row them. We'll chase them all the way home.
The Vikings take off running after them, these Russians or Vikings or whoever they are. They'll chase after the Mongols, and the Mongols sort of run out of sight. They run over the next hillside, or they run through a mountain pass, and the Vikings keep chasing them.
And then all of a sudden, hidden in some forest or hidden somewhere where the Russians or the Vikings didn't see, there were more Mongols. And those Mongols come up behind the Vikings. And then the Mongols who are running up front, they turn around, and now the Russians or the Vikings or whoever it was that was chasing the Mongols, now they're surrounded.
They're Mongols on both sides. Now you're ambushed. Another reason the Mongols are so successful is they're bringing Chinese warfare to places that aren't used to Chinese warfare.
Again, gunpowder. China, again, the most technologically, particularly military technology, the most technologically advanced society in the world. They're decades, centuries ahead of the Middle East and Europe in terms of the military technology.
The Vikings bring that military technology with them. The Europeans have no idea what hit them. They haven't seen cannon. What the hell is that?
Oh, that's scary. That's what that is. As I've mentioned, they're really good at spying and scouting and use superior intelligence.
And again, they use their speed for quick strike tactics. The Mongols would prefer not to fight a pitched battle. And they were really good at diplomacy, as we saw with the song. They got the song on their side.
They're really good at... making deals and exploiting existing animosities, right? Because they're so good at scouting, but they'd ride ahead and they'd figure out what the talk of the town was, right?
Who does this society hate? Who do they not trust? Or they'd start rumors and conspiracies. They'd turn, you know, various, you know, say Muslim caliphates, right? Little Muslim sultanates against each other and just get the Europeans to backstab each other and that sort of thing.
When they're riding through the Caucasus, they would make a deal with one king, and then they'd go fight another king. And after they defeated that king, they would betray the guy they'd made a deal with, and they'd kill him. They were really good at making deals.
Monkey Khan dies in battle in China against the Song in 1259. He has two younger brothers, Kublai and Arikboka. And both Kublai and Arikboka want the throne. And the Kuril Tai can't resolve it, and they plunge the Mongols into what's called the Tulid Civil War, which lasts for about five years. Kublai wins the war. But the empire remained disunited, and another civil war kicked off basically immediately called the Kaidu-Kuble Civil War, and it lasted nearly 40 years.
And never again after the death of Mongke Khan would the Mongol Empire be united. It basically breaks into four parts that became increasingly separate over the next century. So the four parts originally all recognized that there was still a great Khan. and that they owed their ultimate allegiance to the Great Khan. But say 50 years later, they stopped doing that, right?
They basically began functioning as four different countries. The four countries are Yuan, I think the Yuan Dynasty or the Yuan Khanate, which is based in China. The Chagatai Khanate, which was based in the steppe homeland, right?
So it's basically all of Central Asia. The Ilkhanate, which is based in the Middle East, sort of Mesopotamia and Persia. And then the Golden Horde.
And the Golden Horde was based in basically Eastern Europe, right? Most of what would be modern-day Russia. Let's leave our lecture for now.
I want to show you just a time-lapse video of the Mongol Empire. So hopefully you're seeing the screen, and we'll play this. So here's Mongol Empire 1206 before they start conquering.
That's 1219 after they've taken on Western Zha. Now they're moving into the Khwarazmian dynasty by 1223. Genghis Khan has died. Now they're taking on the Jin.
This is Manchuria up here. You can see here's Batu Khan moving into Asia. He's defeated. This is Kiev and Rus over here. Now see, we've moved into Kiev and Rus by 1259. Look how big the Mongol Empire is.
By 1279, they will have defeated the Song. Spoiler alert, they're about to destroy the Song. They begin to shrink and here they break into their four component parts Right. So the yuan dynasty the chagatay khanate the golden horde and the ilkhanate and the largest empire See here, uh At this point right the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, right korea all of china all of central asia Right all of it afghanistan pakistan Iran, that's Iraq, most of Anatolia, most of Russia, right?
This is sort of Central Russia. This is Moscow, for instance, into Hungary and Poland. Back to our PowerPoint. So let's talk about Kublai Khan and the war against the song.
So Kublai Khan, again, is technically the great Khan. after winning the disputed secession against his younger brother. But again, the rest of the Mongols kind of start ignoring him. And so he kind of just comes off on his own.
And again, he'll run the Yuan dynasty after winning the war against the Song. And the war between the Mongols and the Song is the most advanced, terrifying war in the history of the world up to that time, right? In terms of the technology being used, in terms of the tactics and strategies being used, in terms of the death tolls.
There had never been a war of this magnitude before in the history of the world. Both sides have absolutely horrifying weapons. Fire lances. A fire lance is basically like the earliest version of a musket. It's not quite a musket, but it is like a lance.
A lance is like what a knight would carry, like a big long spear basically with a metal tip. But the metal tip was explosive. It was gunpowder activated. And when you would stab it into someone, you'd basically activate the gunpowder and explode it.
Thunder crash bombs were kind of like early mortars or early grenades. And again, both sides have trebuchets. A trebuchet is kind of like a reverse catapult that can hurl stones the size of a concrete truck or a city bus.
And so obviously the death toll in this war is enormous. Just as a for instance of the fighting, the very famous Dayu Fortress, I have a picture on the next slide of the Dayu Fortress, repulsed more than 200 Mongol attacks. Kublai was able to eventually take the two biggest fortresses on the Yangtze River, the Xiang and Fanjing Fortresses in 1273, which opened up the Yangtze Valley to the Mongols. And then the Song, remember if you can recall a previous lecture, was the first society to have a permanent standing navy. like a professional military navy.
So Kublai realized he needed a navy if he was going to be able to take on Song. So he built a navy of more than 5,000 ships and takes a fight down the Yangtze River. He defeats the Song at the Battle of Yamin in 1279. We've talked about this before, right?
The title, Largest Naval Battle in History, is very difficult to determine. Like, what makes it the largest naval battle in history? Does it mean the most boats?
Does it mean the most fighting men? Does it mean the most deaths? Does it mean the most boats sunk?
How do you determine what's the largest naval battle in history? So they're like... seven or eight battles that claim to be the largest naval battle in history.
The Battle of Yaman is one of them. We'll talk about another one in the next lecture, by the way. A lot of them involve China. This battle was really cool.
The Mongols used fire ships, something again we'll see in the next lecture, to basically burn a lot of the Song fleet. They had erected these massive naval chains, and they were basically catching Song boats in these chains. And the Mongol warriors would jump off their boats onto the Song boats with swords, right?
And they'd fight out on the boats. It's like straight out of a movie, the Battle of Yaman. After winning the Battle of Yaman, the Song were sort of definitively defeated, right? It took, again, several decades for the Song to be defeated.
Kublai Khan then renamed the area the Yuan Dynasty. With him in charge, he moved the capital to Beijing, right? He created the city. Beijing and then Beijing served as the capital of the Yuan Dynasty.
And the Yuan Dynasty would rule China for about a hundred years when Ming Chinese forces will take it back. This is something I'll discuss in the next lecture. The Ming Chinese coming in and taking control of the Yuan Dynasty away from the Mongols.
This is the Dayu Fortress. On these steps there were 200 battles. Who knows how many?
People were killed, right, so the defenders would be up here firing arrows and boiling lead, and who knows what ungodly devices of pain and torture. But lots of fighting on these steps. All right, so all that there. The Mongols, largest contiguous empire in the history of the world. It takes them less than a century, like 80 years, basically, to emerge from this poor, dry, brutally cold, windswept pile of dirt.
right in the middle of the eurasian step and now they're the the conquerors of the entire world uh if they didn't conquer a place it's because they didn't feel like it is because that the place defended itself right so they didn't conquer europe but that wasn't because they wanted to spare it wasn't because the europeans sort of defended europe but they didn't conquer europe because they didn't want to or they didn't care enough to do it so what's the historical importance or what's the historical impact then of the Mongols. Well, obviously, the most immediate effect of the Mongols is their violence. Again, they make mountains of the skulls of the people who disagree with them. Historians estimate that 40 million people died in the Mongol invasions.
40 million people, right? For perspective, World War II killed 90 million people, and World War II had nuclear weapons, okay? 40 million people died in the Mongol invasions.
That's approximately 11 percent of the world population. That's one in nine people. The equivalent today would be a billion people almost, right?
Like 880 million would be the equivalent today. So these were absolutely horrifyingly violent wars. You ever talk about the whole world population here, 11% of the whole world population?
The Mongols never reached the Americas, and the Mongols never reached Africa, and the Mongols never reached Indonesia or Australia, right? So in places where the Mongols actually were, the death toll is probably closer to 20 or 25 percent. No country suffered worse, probably, than Kiev and Rus, where it's estimated that around half the population was destroyed.
Half the population destroyed. Millions and millions more were displaced as refugees who had fled in general terror. As we'll mention briefly in the next lecture, a lot of them flee to India.
Because for whatever reason, the Mongols never crossed the Himalayas. They came to the edge of the Himalayas in all three directions, but they never actually crossed them. And so the Himalayas, people fled into India. It is the largest, deadliest act of mass killing in human history. If you're looking at percentage of the world population, more people died in World War II.
But there was a lot more people alive when World War II started. This is the largest, deadliest act of mass killing in the history of the world. It also created something called the Pax Mongolica.
And this is a little difficult to wrap our heads around, right? Because I just told you it's the largest, deadliest act of mass killing in the world. It also creates the Pax Mongolica, right?
You know what the word Pax means, right? This is a play on the idea of the Pax Romana, right? The Pax Romana was the Roman piece. The Pax Mongolica then is the Mongolian piece, right?
The Mongols create a century of economic growth and political stability throughout Eurasia. Why is that? Because the Mongols were in control of Eurasia. They controlled the entirety of the Silk Road, and so technology and trade goods could freely flow from China all the way to Syria and then from Syria into Europe.
Whereas before, this was always a dangerous trip. There were all kinds of bandits. Or you might, you know, the merchants, if you're traveling from China to the Levant, right, you might run into bandits or, you know, a rebellion, some kind of violence along the way. There's no violence on the Silk Road when the Mongols are in charge because the Mongols say there's no violence, right? And if you defy the Mongols, right, they will murder you, right?
So there's no banditry on the Silk Road for the first time ever. There's no violence. It's stable. The Mongols control it all and no one defies the Mongols. No society along the Silk Road, no society in Eurasia is going to rise up in rebellion against the Mongols because if you do, again, they will murder you.
So the Pax Mongolica, much like the Pax Romana, is a sustained period of political stability, lack of warfare, of economic growth, of flourishing trade and cultural exchange, just like the Pax Romana. And just like the Pax Romana, it's created solely because of the threat of Mongolian violence. You don't defy the Mongols, so there's peace.
Because if you go against the Mongols, again, they make a mountain out of your skulls. It's also in this period that the Black Death will spread to Europe. The Black Death, or the Bubonic Plague, originates in Yuan, China. And it travels down the Silk Road and comes to the Middle East and to Europe.
And the Bubonic Plague will wipe out the populations. It's carried by fleas. These fleas live on rats. These rats would be on the big trade caravans, these big wagons full of trade goods that are coming out of China down the Silk Road.
They would get on Italian merchant ships in the Black Sea or in the Mediterranean Sea and then be carried into mainland Europe by Italian trading ships. The Bubonic Plague was carried by fleas that lived on rats. Those fleas would then by humans, give the humans the Bubonic Plague, creating the Black Death.
the Black Death killed we have no idea how many people, right? Anywhere between 75 and 200 million people globally, right? 75 to 200 million people globally die of the plague or the Black Death, up to 60 percent of the people of Europe, right? Depends on which country you're in, in terms of the specific death toll, but historians estimate it's probably closer to 45 or 50 percent of the population of Europe, but it might be as high as 60 percent of the population of Europe. And one final sort of legacy or element of historical importance related to the Mongols is the Mongols helped pave the way for European dominance in the modern period for several reasons.
The most obvious of which is they murdered everyone else. Again, when the Mongols start their invasion, if you're doing most advanced to least advanced in terms of science, culture, technology… Technology and general learning of world regions. It's China, number one. India, number two.
The Middle East. Middle East and India are kind of tied, right? So it's China, number one. Middle East and India are like 2A and 2B.
Europe is number three in terms of their, again, level of intellectual and scientific sophistication. Well, the Mongols murdered everyone in China and the Middle East, right? So now it's just South Asia, just India and Europe, right? Left.
And the Mongols leave the Middle East completely devastated. And so there's a political vacuum, and new forces emerge in the Middle East that sort of alienate European traders. Remember European traders are playing European traders connect the Middle East to Europe, right, these Italian ships.
The new political bosses who move into the Middle East after the Mongols are done with it. They push out the Italians, and so Europeans find a new way to go around. basically to go around the Middle East to get to China, so they invent sailing and navigation technologies.
So if you were taking the second half of the survey, basically the first lecture, you would start with Henry the Navigator. Henry the Navigator was a Portuguese sailor who started sailing around the coast of Africa so Europe could get to Asia on its own. European sailing technology.
is the reason for European dominance, right? So the two reasons for European dominance are both related to the Mongols, right? One is that the Mongols just disrupt the established political and commercial sort of relationships that existed between Europe and the Middle East because they destroyed the Middle East. And the second is that the Mongols prepared the way for European domination just by wiping out all the competition, right?
You and I are gonna... go play basketball against some NBA players. The NBA players are going to win, right?
If some maniacal invader came in and murdered all the NBA players, you and I are going to win, right? That's sort of what happens here, right? Europe emerges as the dominant power because only Europe wasn't wiped out by the Mongols.
This has been a long lecture. I get a little long-winded on the Mongols because I find them quite fascinating. We will have a... second lecture on the Mongols.
It won't be this long, and it's sort of on the who comes... Basically, I'll pick up the story from here. What comes next?
We've got the split Mongol Empire that's split into four pieces. Chagatai, the Ilkhanate, the Yuan Dynasty, and the Golden Horde. We'll talk about what comes next.
I will see you then. Hopefully you're enjoying these lectures, and again, I'll see you then.