The Largest Empire ¦ The Animated History of Mongolia

The Samurai Limited Edition pin is available now. Hurry and order yours now before they run out. Or get one for free by signing up at Patreon like all of these nice people. This episode is supported by ExpressVPN. Head to expressvpn.com slash sweeney to start protecting your online world for free for 3 months. Great Man Theory is a political and sociological theory of history, whereby the course of events can be wholly, or largely, attributed to the actions of a few great men. Extremely popular since the middle of the 19th century, this theory has its roots in not only European folklore, but also in tales of warlike bravado and heroic deeds of the past that was popular in the ranks of soldiers during wartime. And we've sure had a lot of that in the past 150 years. Alexander the Great, Winston Churchill, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan. Great Man Theory is now thoroughly criticised for its ignorance of vast underlying issues that shape history, but the problem we encounter when looking at both what came before and what came after Genghis Khan in Mongolia, is that it's very difficult to imagine the course of history without him. Half of Eurasia today wouldn't exist as we know it without the conquests of this great Khan. We've managed over the last few decades to really strip away at the layers of complexity surrounding figures like Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and even tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. Less so for Genghis Khan's Mongolian Empire. Establishing stronger connections with East and West Eurasia, indirectly inspiring European colonialism with the Silk Road, and even changing the very course of history of the nations that they conquered, raided, or invaded. It's going to come up quite a lot on this channel. So with that challenge all laid out, here we are going to at least attempt to talk about the Mongols in some broader context, by examining three questions. How did the Eurasian steppes of the Mongolian homeland lend itself to so many nomadic empires wreaking havoc on the world? How did Genghis Khan change the way life operated on the steppes? And how were the Mongols different from all the nomadic empires that came before them? The Eurasian steppes have been home to various Turkic and Mongolic proto-cultures for centuries, using it as a highway of source for migration across and through Central Asia. Why? While river valleys the world over were flourishing with civilizations who needed water for farming, this was not so with the nomad. A nomad's wealth is in his herd. It is the source of their food, their clothing, their building materials, even their alcohol all made from animal products. And herds migrate when they need new grazing land. So too then, the nomads were always on the move. Soon an economy had developed when these clans encountered settled peoples. The Chinese and the Persians bought all their best horses from the nomads. So too did banditry develop when one clan would raid another, creating a cultural society based on mobile warfare and plunder on the steppes. Soon enough, raids were happening outside of the steppes too, in those southern settled kingdoms. What's a horde of horse-mounted raiders anything but just a large army of bandits, after all. The Chinese have been writing about the barbarians of the steppes since as long as China has been a thing, which begs the question, why did the steppes in particular lend themselves to such large trading empires? Well firstly, the steppes are huge, stretching from Manchuria in the east to Hungary in the west, with plenty of settled kingdoms to plunder along the way. Secondly, the often overlooked thing about the geography of the steppes is that the further west you went, the generally warmer and wetter the steppe became. So any tribe that rose up in power tended to raid further westward where the most wealth was, in this case, wealth being measured in better grazing land. Time and time again, we have seen these large nomadic confederations of tribes aggressively expanding along this vast steppe, running out of grazing land or kingdoms to plunder, and then having a rival tribe rise up and conquer them. This all before Genghis Khan even arrived. The Turkic Xiongnu fell to the Mongolian Xianbei, then the Ruran followed by the Turks of the Altai Mountains, also called the Gokturks. The Gokturk Khanate would set a precedent followed by nearly every khanate that came afterward, controlling nearly the entire length of the steppe by moving westward. West, remember, means warmer weather, which means more animals, which means more wealth, which means more plunder. And as they advanced, so too did other small Turkic tribes migrate to get away from them. Power soon collapsed in the Gokturk Khanate which split in two, the eastern half in the Mongolian homeland then falling to the Turkic Uyghurs, then overrun by the Mongolic Khitans who established the Lao Dynasty in China. Stop me if you're seeing a pattern here. The very thing that allowed the nomadic empires of the steppe to conquer in the first place, their raiding for wealth, was the very thing that would always be its undoing. Power and wealth was determined by the ability to patrol the land you conquered. But if you stretch yourself too thin, or your subjects migrate too far from your control, or you lose one important battle, it could all come crashing down like a house of cards. Multiply this by a few decades and what you end up with is a map that looks like this. So how exactly did Genghis change this cycle on the steppes? Well, as you can imagine, growing up in the Mongolian plateau was a pretty difficult affair for young Genghis Khan, birth name Timujin, who was born to a life of poverty, meaning that he needed to climb the greasy pole by making smart alliances and friendships. And because of his humble position, he tended to reward those most loyal to him. One of his earliest innovations was distributing plunder and wealth equally among the ranks of his horde, and this even spreading of wealth won him more loyal followers. You go, Timujin, you communist boy, you! Timujin was also intolerant of injustices. He punished those who betrayed him with malicious brutality, and promoted those in his ranks according to their abilities rather than their family ties. Thus, Timujin's horde became one of the few meritocracies of the time, upending the traditional Mongol aristocracy. Slowly, he was able to unite all the Mongols and took the name Universal Ruler, Chinggis Khan, or as we know him, Genghis Khan. And now that the previous warring clans had united, they would follow the same pattern of expansion to the south and to the west. The Shah dynasty of the Tungguts, the Jurchens of the Jin, and the Karakhanid Khanate. And then, that same brutality the Khan inflicted on his enemies in Mongolia, he unleashed upon the world. After his peaceful envoys were slaughtered, Genghis unleashed a furious invasion of the Khwarazm empire in Persia, for example, the news of which would spread fear and terror around the continent. Genghis Khan is not someone you want to mess with. By the time of his death in 1227, half of Asia was under his control, and the wealth that traversed the land all passed through his borders. The Mongols were nothing if not excellent merchants, if you really think about it. And though his armies were undoubtedly brutal conquerors, the Mongols engaged in sophisticated propaganda, using their own reputation as a weapon. By creating a refugee flood in all the lands they conquered, they helped spread the word of their formidability, so often cities would just surrender without a fight. All they really wanted was plunder, or tribute, after all. For by creating their empire, they created the largest common market the world had yet known. This goes back to what we talked about before, how raiding, and thus wealth, dominated the early cultures of the steppes. Under the rulership of his grandson Kublai Khan, the Mongol Empire would reach its territorial peak, conquering the Song Dynasty, Kievan Rus', Tibet, and the Middle East, and stopping only where geography made conquest impossible. So this begs the question, what makes the Mongolian Empire different to the ones that came before it? How were they able to conquer so much land, so quickly, and operate a huge, diverse empire with a complex bureaucracy? The answer lies in how the Mongols broke with the old school in favour of innovation. Religious freedoms were granted in the empire, since the Mongols tied their own religion to their homeland, and didn't expect anyone else to take it up. This meant that any people of any religion could find equal opportunity within the empire, provided they weren't part of an already established aristocracy. Genghis also promoted unity by forbeying enslavement of fellow Mongols. They adapted to new forms of warfare by capturing engineers and generals from conquered lands, and quickly learned all there was to know about siege warfare, gunpowder, and trebuchets, and even engaged in an early form of biological warfare by deliberately infecting some cities with plague. But perhaps the most often overlooked important factor is how the Mongols sought legitimacy to rule those whom they conquered. Kublai wasn't simply Khan of China, but adopted the title of Emperor, claiming the throne by heaven's mandate. In Tibet, they established a patron and priest relationship with the Buddhist lamas, leading to a deep religious connection. In Iran, the Ilkhanate converted to Islam and placed themselves in opposition to the other Muslim state in the region, the Egyptian Mamluks, as did their successors, the Timurid Empire, thus filling the role that Iran usually played as a counterweight in the Muslim world. And this had far-reaching effects. Besides a few petty family squabbles, the era soon after the conquest was known as the Pax Mongolica, the Mongolian Peace. Trade was booming, and everyone in the four corners of the empire benefited from contribution to that trade. And so the Mongols had a vested interest in making it all run smoothly by establishing order. It was said that a young woman could travel from one end of the empire to the other with a gold plate on her head without fear of being robbed. And then we also have just some dumb luck. The Mongol Empire existed at the peak of something called the Medieval Warm Period, meaning food and resources were a lot more plentiful. Like with all the nomadic empires that came before it, the Mongol Empire did eventually get spread out just that little bit too thin, and the Mongolian ruling class would assimilate into the lands they conquered, fracturing into four main branches, three of which are all stories for their own time. In the Wan Dynasty, the Mongols would become a settled people and fall victim to a practice all too familiar to the Chinese, Sinicization, assimilation into the dominant Han culture, the Mongol court at Khan Balik becoming indistinguishable from the Chinese over whom it ruled. But lingering resentments did what they do best, linger. And when disease, famine and flooding struck the empire in the 14th century, the Red Turban Rebellion concluded that the Mongols had lost heaven's mandate. The rebellion coalesced in the formation of the Ming Dynasty, slaughtering whatever Mongols they could find who were unable to flee, the remnants of the Yuan becoming trapped behind the Great Wall, with the Ming fearing them to an almost paranoid level, provoking infighting to keep them weak. And soon the title of Great Khan meant very little. With the sun setting on their empire, two new states would rise up around the same time, in one last epic showdown to see who would claim supremacy of these eastern lands, the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty and the Oriat Mongols of the Janggar Khanate. Both would turn south, conquering their neighbours before ultimately butting heads with each other to decide who would rule China. At the Battle of Jao Modo, Golden Khan of Janggar was defeated, the Qing committing a horrendous genocide against the Mongols and settling the area with Han Chinese. The Qing now stretched from the Mongolian plateau to Tibet, the final nail in Genghis' great empire finally in its coffin, more than five centuries after his death. The Boyut Mongols, the last remaining truly nomadic free Mongols left, were then subjugated by the Russian Empire. The wild, open frontiers of the steppes had been subjugated by outsiders for the first time in its history. The progress in technology and the territorial ambitions of geopolitical imperialism had finally, after centuries, tamed the steppes. Or has it? Fast forward to today and you'll see that nomadic life still thrives in these lands. Outer Mongolia is still very nomadic and rural, but even in Inner Mongolia, where Han Chinese settled illegally in the millions, Mongolian culture is still alive. Its 20th century is a testament to that, even as the lands fell victim to the geopolitical games of China, Russia and Japan. Even after declaring independence from Chinese rule, or when it was invaded by Chinese cliques during the warlord era, when the White Army General, Baron Ungern invaded during the Russian Civil War, even after the Bolsheviks stoked a communist revolution, its countryside was a hotbed for anti-communists. Though Kurulgin, Choibalsan, the so-called Mongolian Stalin perched tens of thousands of dissidents and anti-revolutionaries, though years of political oppression and propaganda overshadowed its post-war era, Mongolia was not tamed. And so with time, patience and endurance, the Mongolian people endured their communist dictatorship until, like all other nations in the Soviet sphere, it collapsed with peaceful revolution in 1990. 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