Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Author(s)	Jack Weatherford
Illustrator	S.Badral
Cover artist	Stapleton collection/Corbis
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre(s)	History/ Biography
Publisher	Crown publisher and Three Rivers press
Publication date	2004
Pages	312
ISBN	0-609-80964-4
Preceded by	The History of Money
Followed by	The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (ISBN 0-609-80964-4) is a 2004 New York Times Best Seller book by Jack Weatherford, Dewitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. It is a narrative of the rise and impact of Genghis Khan, and of his successors. In addition to various accounts in English, it refers to three major non-Western sources: The Secret History of the Mongols, the Ta' rīkh-i jahān-gushā of Juvayni and the Jami al-Tawarikh of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani. Weatherford has the ambition to present Genghis Khan in a far more positive light than traditional Western historiography. The last section of the book deals with historiography of Genghis Khan in the West and argues that his earlier image as an "excellent, noble king" was converted into that of a bloodthirsty pagan during the Age of Enlightenment.

The book is a revisionist work more sympathetic to the Mongols. It has also been seen as a part of a number of other re-estimations of Genghis Khan, as in the work of Ratchnevsky, who focuses on his knack for forging alliances, his fairness in dividing the spoils, and his patronage of the sciences. Similarly, Saunders and H.H.Howorth have argued that the Mongol empire contributed to opening up intellectual interactions between China, the Middle East, and Europe.

Mongol Image

This book highlights the military brilliance of Genghis Khan; while the Roman empire took 200 years to reach its fullest extent, Temüjin's conquests covered an empire nearly four times its area between 1206 and 1227. Eventually, by the 1270s, the Mongol Empire would cover an area "considerably larger than [all of] North America" (p. xviii).

The book suggests that the western depiction of the Mongols as terrible savages that destroyed all civilization was due to the Mongol's dealings with the opposing hereditary aristocracies. In battle, the book claims, the Mongols always annihilated these ruling classes in order to better subdue the general population. Since, according to the book, it was these aristocratic classes that could write, their treatment at the hands of the Mongols was what was recorded throughout history. However, still following the book's line of argument, what was less well known was the treatment of the general population (peasants, tradesmen, merchants) under Mongol rule. The book states that in general Mongol rule was less burdensome on the masses due to lighter taxes, tolerance of local customs & religions, less capricious administration, and universal education for all.

These benefits were only enjoyed by populations that surrendered immediately to the Mongol invaders. Those populations that resisted in any way could be annihilated in a massacre as a warning to other towns/cities. These massacres were a method of psychological warfare that was used on populations not yet conquered. The resulting terror helped color the historical portrayal of the Mongols.

Since the Mongols were horsemen of the steppes and didn't possess any arts or crafts of their own, they were dependent on taxes from the subjugated peoples for wealth and luxury goods. Weatherford's book claims that the Mongols sought to increase that wealth by encouraging their subjects to be more productive and enterprising instead of increasing the tax burden on them. They did this by sponsoring lucrative international trade, and it is alleged that they also encouraged scientific advances and improved agriculture and production methods. Many innovations came from the combination of technologies from different cultures within their huge empire.

Legacy

The book puts particular emphasis on what it perceives as Genghis Khan's legacy; it attributes many aspects of the Renaissance such as the spread of paper and printing, the compass, gunpowder and musical instruments such as the violin, to the impact of trade that was enabled by Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. In a 2005 review, Timothy May comments that passages such as

In the end, Europe suffered the least yet acquired all the advantages of contact through merchants such as the Polo family of Venice and envoys exchanged between the Mongol khans and the popes and kings of Europe. The new technology, knowledge, and commercial wealth created the Renaissance in which Europe rediscovered some of its prior culture, but more importantly, absorbed the technology for printing, firearms, the compass, and the abacus from the East. [p.xxiii-iv]

are "without question, controversial. Many would scoff at the notion that a horde of illiterate nomads from Mongolia created the Renaissance. There is something to be said about Weatherford's view"... "presents his case very eloquently and with an abundance of evidence demonstrating not only the indirect influence of the Mongols in Europe but also the transformation of the Mongols from agents of innovation in the Renaissance into agents of destruction in the European mind during Enlightenment."

However, the most controversial statement in the book is possibly the statement that the European Renaissance was a rebirth, not of Greece or Rome, but of ideas from the Mongol Empire:

Under the widespread influences from the paper and printing, gunpowder and firearms, and the spread of the navigational compass and other maritime equipment, Europeans experienced a Renaissance, literally a rebirth, but it was not the ancient world of Greece or Rome being reborn. It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture. [p. 237]

Some of the points mentioned are:

• Astronomy: "New knowledge from the travel writings of Marco Polo to the detailed star charts of Ulugh Beg proved that much of [the Western] received classical knowledge was simply wrong." p. 236

• Paper money: experiments in Persian Il-Khanate (p. 204-5), also p. 236

• Art: The Franciscans, who had wide contacts with the Mongol court, and Mongol/Persian art influenced Giotto di Bondone and his disciples, so much so that St. Francis' life was depicted in Mongol dress - "literally wrapped in silk". Also, a 1306 illustration of the Robe of Christ in Padua, the golden trim was painted in Mongol letters from the square Phagspa script commissioned by Khublai Khan (p. 237-8)

• Democracy and Government: Suggests that some of Kublai Khan's reforms in China, which localized power and gave political strength to individual farms, was the first democratic experience in China, and continued only when the Republicans and Communists began to reintroduce local government. The author also suggests that the tribal government of the Mongols had many democratic elements, and refers to Mongol leaders being selected by council (khuriltai) as "elections", although, these like the Athenian or Roman versions, may be more properly called election by an elite (an oligarchy). In addition, he repeatedly declares that the Khans ruled through the will of the people.

Beneficial aspects of Mongol empire

The book argues that the Mongol Empire was the impetus for the European Age of Discovery. Europeans two centuries later were trying to reclaim the lucrative global trade that was lost when the Mongol Empire collapsed.

A brief list of some of the ways in which Mongol influence, according to Weatherford's claims, helped shape Renaissance Europe:

• Unprecedented religious tolerance
• Low level of discrimination toward other races
• Low level of meddling with local customs and culture
• The idea of rule by consensus within Mongol tribes
• Culture of meritocracy
• Culture that believed in the rule of law
• Strong sponsorship of Eurasian trade
• Building of roads to support trade
• First culture to promote universal literacy
• First international postal system
• First widespread use of paper money
• Reduction of the use of torture in the penal system
• Belief in diplomatic immunity for ambassadors/envoys

Reception

The book "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" stayed on the New York Times Bestseller List for two weeks in 2004.

Kirkus Reviews summarize "Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongol’s reputation, and it takes wonderful learned detours. . . . Well written and full of surprises.” Washington Post applauded “Reads like the Iliad. Part travelogue, part epic narrative.”. "There is very little time for reading in my new job. But of the few books I've read, my favourite is Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (Crown Publishers, New York). It's a fascinating book portraying Genghis Khan in a totally new light. It shows that he was a great secular leader, among other things.", Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India said.

For the first time in tournament history of audiobooks by Audible.com, the book was honored along with its final competitor, Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn, as 2011 Champion of the 4th tournament. It was the book of the week by CNN in 2011.

Timothy May concluded that the book is well-written, despite some errors according to his findings.

Historiography

Chapter 10 of the book traces the record on Genghis Khan in European texts. In the very initial phases certain writers appear impressed with him, but in the following centuries, Genghis is seen as a barbarian, particularly, it is stated, with scientists claiming that the oriental race was biologically inferior.

Adulation

During the late Mongol Empire, most European nations had established different degrees of trade relations, and the image of the Mongols in Europe was, according to Weatherford, largely positive, as evidenced by the reaction to Mongol envoys such as Rabban Bar Sawma, (p. 218-219), who was received by the crowned heads of Europe. Weatherford refers to the writings of Bar Sawma to focus on his surprise at the lack of religious freedom in Europe; no religion other than Christianity was tolerated, which was far from the heterogeneity of the Mongol empire.

Geoffrey Chaucer, who had travelled widely in Europe, writing in the Canterbury Tales (14th c.), the tale of the squire: "This noble king was known as Cambinskan / noble king of great renown / That there was nowhere in the wide world known / So excellent a lord in everything". However, the exactitude of Chaucer's knowledge can be challenged since the poem states that the great ruler resided in Old Sarai, which was not under Mongolian control in Genghis Khan's day, was not called Old Sarai at the time and was furthermore situated in Russia, which Genghis Khan never visited.

Denigration

According to the books' narrative, the view of Genghis Khan changed during the 18th century:

Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth century Enlightenment in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective... 254

Montesquieu writes disparagingly of the Mongols, as having "destroyed Asia, from India even to the Mediterranean; and all the country which forms the east of Persia they have rendered a desert." (The spirit of the Laws, 1748)

Voltaire, in adapting a Mongol dynasty play as an allegory on the present French king, described the Mongols as "wild sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots, and in the fields." They "detest our arts, our customs, and our laws; and therefore mean to change them all; to make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own."

Soon, the Asian inferiority model came to be regarded as the scientific view. The widely influential French naturalist Comte de Buffon, in his encyclopedia of natural history after many remarks disparaging the Mongol physique, described them as "alike strangers to religion, morality, and decency. They are robbers by profession." Translated from French into many European languages, his work became one of the classic sources of information during the 18th/19th centuries.

The Scottish scientist Robert Chambers wrote in a widely-read book:

The leading characters of the various races of mankind are simply representatives of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type. ... [in comparison, the] Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born.

Soon it became clear that the Mongoloid race exhibited a close relationship to the orangutan, not only in facial traits but also in posture; both like to sit with folded legs in the "Buddha" position.

Mongolian features were linked to retarded people (as "arrested children").

Re-Evaluation

One of the first to re-evaluate Genghis Khan was "an unlikely candidate", the Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru. In a series of letters on world history written to his daughter from British jails in the 1930s, he wrote "Chengiz is, without doubt, the greatest military genius and leader in history.... Alexander and Caesar seem petty before him."

According to Weatherford, during World War II Russian and German military tacticians looked to Mongol models for cavalry strategy for managing their mobile artillery units. After great effort, a German translation of the Secret History of the Mongols was prepared in 1941, but it could not be distributed because the stored copies of the books were destroyed during an Allied air raid. However, the idea of blitzkrieg is claimed to be loosely modelled on highly mobile Mongol tactics. Even the Russian strategy of letting the Germans penetrate deep into Russia where they became too thinly spread, is claimed to be based on Subutai's tactics at the Battle of the Kalka River, though the scales involved are utterly different (p. 263). Stalin in particular, is said to have entertained a particular fascination for Timur and Genghis Khan.

Misrepresentations

• Weatherford consistently calls the thousands of women dragged off by the Mongols as sex slaves "wives", and the thousands of male slaves "servants", thereby glossing over a grim aspect of the Mongolian campaigns.

• The silver tree constructed in Karakorum by a French artisan who had the misfortune to be in Belgrade when the Mongols captured it is declared to be a great marvel. However, such toys were popular at courts all over Europe.

• It is stated that during William of Rubruck's visit to Mangu's court, William and the Nestorian Christians allied with the Muslims in an attempt to refute the claims by the Buddhist clerics. By William's own statement, he despised the local variant of Christianity, which was heavily infused with what he calls "the Manichean heresy"; he regarded the Muslims as the only true monotheists present beside himself. Weatherford's claim that the Christian clerics started to sing hymns because they had become drunk is not borne out by William's account.

• The book claims that the Nestorian Monk Rabban Bar Sawma, who made a pilgrimage from Kublai Khan's capital to Jerusalem in the Ilkhanate, was then, in 1287, "sent by his superiors" to the courts of Europe to offer a peaceful alliance between the Mongols and the Europeans. That is not supported by the only known narrative of his mission, the one Weatherford himself relies on. Rabban Bar Sawma was asked by the Ilkhan Arghun to offer the Christian monarchs a war alliance against the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, but the Christian monarchs were not interested. Their lack of enthusiasm became the more pronounced since the Mamluks had in 1262-63 secured an alliance with the Golden Horde in Russia. This was another Mongol principality ruled by the descendants of another of Genghis Khan's sons than the one the Ilkhans were descended from; by now, they were bitter enemies of the Ilkhanate. The Europeans vividly remembered the previous Mongolian invasion of Europe and did not desire a repeat. Furthermore, by the middle of the 13th century Europeans were well aware of the Mongolian strategy of making alliances against peoples nearby with peoples further away and then, after victory, turning on their former allies.