The Mongols have not always had a good press. Despite their extraordinary geopolitical success – the Mongol Empire stretched across Asia from China to Europe at its greatest extent in the 13th century CE – for many people their name is still associated with acts of cruelty and violence.
The Empire’s founder, Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan (“universal ruler”), named Temujin at birth in 1162 and dying in 1227 CE, succeeded in uniting his own steppe-dwelling people, groups of nomadic herders living in what is today Mongolia, and then sending them out on an empire-building mission almost without parallel across Asia.
In the space of just a few decades, this not only brought the other nomadic peoples of the Asian steppe under Mongol rule but also the sedentary populations surrounding it. Much of what today is Russia, most of northern China, the whole of Central Asia, and most of Southwest Asia including what are now Iran and Iraq were once under Mongol domination.
However, this empire-building came at a price, and those marked out as enemies by the Mongols could expect little quarter. The Mongol siege and then destruction of Baghdad, seat of the Arab world’s Abbasid caliphate, in 1258 CE was one of the most violent acts the mediaeval world had seen.
During a week of destruction following the taking of the city by Hulagu Khan in February that year, some 100,000 people were killed – up to two million according to some Arab historians – and the city was largely destroyed, including many of its famous palaces, mosques, madrassas, and libraries. The Abbasid caliph Mustaasim was killed.
According to the later Arab historian Ibn Kathir, the Mongols “came down upon the city and killed all they could, men, women and children, the old, the middle-aged, and the young. Many of the people went into wells, latrines, and sewers and hid there for many days without emerging. Most of the people gathered in the caravanserais [markets] and locked themselves in. The Mongols opened the gates by either breaking or burning them. When they entered, the people fled upstairs, and the Mongols killed them on the roofs until blood poured from the gutters into the streets.”
The destruction was a setback from which the city never recovered, and Baghdad, formerly the capital of the Islamic world, became at best a provincial town, with cultural and political power moving westwards. According to the 15th-century Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi, Hulagu then sent a letter to the Egyptian Mameluke sultan Saifeddin Qutuz warning him that Cairo’s fate would resemble that of Baghdad if it did not surrender to invading Mongol forces.
However, “Qutuz assembled the amirs, and they agreed to kill the envoys and to proceed to Salihiyya” in Palestine to take on the Mongol forces then occupying Aleppo and Damascus. “In Cairo, Fustat, and the rest of Egypt proclamations were issued to go to holy war for the cause of God and to defend the religion of the Prophet of God,” Al-Maqrizi wrote. Arriving in Salihiyya, Qutuz “summoned the amirs and urged them to fight the Mongols. He reminded them of the carnage, the enslavement, and the fire that had befallen other lands and struck fear in them that the same could happen again” in Cairo.
It was only the subsequent defeat of the Mongol forces by the Egyptian Mamelukes at the battle of Ayn Jalut in Palestine in 1260 that halted their advance towards the Mediterranean, possibly saving Cairo and other cities from the violence meted out to Baghdad.
With such a history behind them, it might be thought that it would be a rash historian indeed who would defend the Mongols’ record, so uncompromising are the writings of the mediaeval historians about them. However, a defence of the Mongols is precisely what French historian Marie Favereau aims to achieve in her new book The Horde, a history of the Mongols aimed largely at the general reader.
While Favereau cannot be expected to excuse the Mongols’ actions either in Baghdad or in the other cities they subjugated, she does do her best to put them into context, on the way providing an account of who the Mongols were, how they ran their affairs, and what motivated them on what became as far as most of Asia was concerned a path of world domination.
ABOUT THE MONGOLS: The Arab historians are unanimous in describing the death and destruction meted out by the Mongol invasions, seeing them as the cause of disasters on an unprecedented scale for the populations concerned.
They were not always careful to explain who the Mongols were, however, sometimes seeing them as a kind of natural disaster, sometimes as a scourge of God. One exception is the Persian historian Rashad Al-Din, born in 1247, who, having lived through the later Mongol conquests, became chief minister to the Mongol Ilkhanid Dynasty whose rule extended across what today is Iran, Iraq, and much of Turkey.
As Favereau notes, Rashad Al-Din’s history of the Mongols, commissioned by the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan and written in Persian, is one of the main contemporary sources on the Mongol conquests, another being the Mongols’ own Secret History, a chronicle-like account written in Mongolian by an anonymous author that takes the story to the death of Genghis Khan.
Rashad Al-Din was very much aware of who the Mongols were, as the author of an official history, and his account contains fascinating vignettes about Mongol decision-making. Explaining the decision by Mongke Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, to eliminate the Abbasid regime in Baghdad, he says that “reflecting that since the time of Genghis Khan some countries had been won by conquest or surrender, while others had not yet been liberated,” Mongke decided “he would send one of his brothers to every part to subjugate that country entirely while he himself would sit in the centre of his realm in the ancient home of the Mongols.”
The brother chosen to subjugate the Abbasids was Hulagu, whom “he appointed [to subjugate] the western countries of Iran, Syria, Egypt, Rum [the Byzantine Empire], and Armenia.” His other brother Qubilay, later referred to by the English poet S T Coleridge in his poem “Kubla Khan,” was sent off to subjugate the eastern countries of China, Tibet, and parts of north India.
The Arab commentators could not have known this background, and for some of them, like the 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldoun, the Mongols were a form of punishment. He sternly says that the Abbasid “state was drowned in decadence and luxury and had donned the garments of calamity and impotence [when it] was overthrown by the heathen Tatars [Mongols], who abolished the seat of the caliphate and obliterated the splendour of the lands and made unbelief prevail in place of belief because the people of the faith, sunk in self-indulgence, preoccupied with pleasure and abandoned to luxury, had become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in its defence.”
Fortunately, there were still benefits to be had from the Mongol invasions, like from the earlier arrival of the Turkic peoples from Central Asia who had themselves provided the fighting strength of the Egyptian Mamelukes. The latter, brought as slaves to the Arab countries and converted to Islam, had gained “the firm resolve of true believers while preserving their nomadic virtues unsullied by the ways of civilised living… and the profusion of luxury,” Ibn Khaldoun says.
Becoming the sultans of the Mameluke state, they had “directed the affairs of the Muslims in accordance with the divine providence and with the mercy of God… Thus, one intake comes after another and generation follows generation and Islam rejoices in the benefit it gains through them and the branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth.” Once appropriately incorporated into the Islamic order, the Mongols, too, could be expected to bring renewal.
In her book, Favereau takes readers from the foundation of the Mongol state by Genghis Khan through the period of its expansion under Mongke Khan and others to its eventual break-up in the 14th century when powerful warlords began to carve out their own dominions. Her overall intention is to show how this state functioned as a genuine political order – the Mongols were never simply bands of roving pirates – and how it underwent a process of continuous evolution such that it was able to absorb peoples of many different cultures and religions within a single empire and one that for a period connected China and East Asia with Europe.
She includes many fascinating details, including of the Mongol state on the move across Asia – the Mongols always retained their nomadic habits and so lived in cities of felt-walled tents that could be packed up and moved on to a new location – of the Mongol diet, mainly meat and fermented mare’s milk, and of the ways in which the system reproduced itself, with censuses being taken of conquered populations with a view to the collection of taxes.
Given her emphasis on the internal organisation of the Mongol state, Favereau has little to say about the campaigns in the Arab world – she devotes a single paragraph to Hulagu’s conquest of Baghdad – and she sees them as peripheral to the Mongol Empire as a whole. Even the victory of Egyptian Mameluke forces over the Mongol army at Ayn Jalut she describes as “a side effect of Mongol-on-Mongol war,” since the Mongol forces had been seriously depleted, Hulagu having earlier been called away to deal with internal political difficulties.
Many historians used to be dismissive of the Mongols, Favereau says, refusing to believe that a nomadic empire could achieve the political sophistication of a sedentary civilisation, or constructing genealogical stories from the point of liberation “from the Tartar yoke.” However, today, she adds, more understand that “Chinggis Khan had no grand design to conquer” and that he “assimilated dominated peoples.” They understand, or should understand, that “nomadism is not necessarily resistant to state building” and that “Mongol rulers developed unique, effective, and humane approaches to political negotiation and social integration.”
Far from conforming to Ibn Khaldoun’s theory, “the Mongols did not settle and did not become like their subjects” after a period of conquest, she says, “On the contrary, they absorbed foreign cultures into their own… and their power was mostly based on their ability to synthesise diversity.”
*A version of this article appears in print in the 21 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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