Post

What kind of ahistorical bullshit is this? (The pic, mind, not you.)

look i've played enough ghost of tsushima to know what they were about

So "brutal conquest" is a definite yes, but "colonialist" seems like a tougher case.

Well, the Mongols did conquer Moscow at one point, I learned that from Age of Empires 4

the real irony here is like. gosh I wonder why mongolia uses the cyrillic alphabet in the modern day. who could have done that and why.

Clearly Central Asians still use the names Chingus and Ablai because they were just chill dudes back in the day

Mongols did indeed not really waste time on causes belli but once you surrendered they were quite benevolent until civil wars kicked off. Has to do with very rigid morality of protecting one’s vassals

And the arrows! The arrows get sad when you leave them out.

I also love reading about their history! The fact we're often single-sourced on most of the early imperial period, when the empire is still whole, is a bitter, bitter shame. They were monsters, though. Don't anyone go around thinking they weren't lol.

The museums I went to in Mongolia last summer were all very big on the “look how much of the known world we conquered at various points in time! (Also we never went to India because it was too fucking hot)”

(2/2) The result is that in some cases we have detailed stories of particular cities being razed, but absolutely no archaeological evidence. And the Mongols won themselves a very large empire *extremely* efficiently. (Will return in the morning with reading recs, if you're interested!)

Historian partner teaches Empires of the Steppe and yes, can confirm

it varies but iirc the third crusade had a similar time frame as the Mongol invasion chewing up the persians

"you're not the Mongols, are you?" "...candygram"

I must defend @paulmmcooper.com here. His narration is not sleepy. It's steady and emotional only where called for. And the length is appropriate for the complexity of the story.

“Obey us (and do not kill our messengers) and we will leave you alone.”

And hell, at least the Mongols brought dumplings. (The only two things I have in common with Genghis Khan is that I bring dumplings, and can appreciate a good horse.)

Yup.

If you have specialist skills, you count as tribute and will be taken to the capital to be permanently settled there or given to one of the various generals. Also those generals are debating whether killing everyone in particular regions to make more pasture for horses and aheep is a good idea.

You’re too kind. you’re just saying ethnic cleansing in a nicer way

Vaclav Havel made that point once — dissent is seen as much more of a threat when the government claims We Rule Because We Have The One True Answer To Everything.

as others have pointed out, one can imagine how mad Genghis Khan would be if you tried to claim he was really just doing a little bit of friendly cultural interchange

My recollection of what I'd read on their history was essentially that they had no interest in governance, were happy to leave that to whomever was already doing it (and was left alive) so long as the river of wealth flowed to them rather than the previous capital.

Perhaps on average, but uh... Belgian Congo? (I'm actually really curious about the ground truth on this one, do you know if there's any scholarship on "morally upright" vs "fuck it we're getting rich" colonialism?)

Also potentially somewhat better, a conqueror that isn't interested in moving his own population onto your land, even if it's because his worldview considers your way of life to be an inferior one which produces inferior men.

They say that's one of the reasons the Romans were so successful. Wade in, kill the army, then go "oh you have a thunder guy called Zeus? Yeah, we have him, we call him Jove but whatevs, nice temple BTW, tatty-bye, marching on Gaul now"...and also why it fell apart after adopting monotheism

Gonna craft my problematic online presence around 'Genghis Khan did nothing wrong!' I mean, someone's gotta make it their gimmick right?

Byzantium is an interesting study of this too. That era of conquest was pretty different from later empires; that so many ethno/religious nationalists see themselves as liberation projects today proves the fallacy in retrofitting power theories. See also: Viking raiders vs the Raj England became.

They were also pretty big on “surrender and you will become vassals, or die”

I think the friendliest expert take is that they didn't commit every atrocity they have been accused of. Sometimes they themselves pushed narratives that encouraged the people in their path to surrender or run.

Mongols, Romans, Akkadians, etc etc etc almost all allowed conquered lands to retain their religions and even sometimes their heads of state. It makes a lot more sense, really. And it's incredibly fascinating to learn about!

Their logic re: god/justification was pretty simple. If they didn't have god's sanction for what they did, then god would have stopped them. archive.org/details/yout...

Yes. Genghis Khan was persuaded *not* to depopulate Northern China on the basis that the farmers could pay more taxes than the area would produce as pasture. OTOH the guy who talked him out of a lot of atrocities was a Buddhist en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yel%C3%...

Did the check clear? We good!

Didn't they make an example of cities that made them siege them so that others would be like fuck it the khan is the boss now

turns out if you kill everyone eventually whoever is left will turn up so you can kill them too also how they broke up the khwarazmid empire

Also, if there's five thousand horse archers who don't need a supply train controlling the land for three days' ride outside your city, your city is going to starve if you can't find an army big enough to make them leave.

For the time, this was a genuinely revolutionary approach

*gulps* "When they were done conquering... What did they do with the horse?"

In the case of the Rus' iirc it was less a question of displacing anyone, and more just adding themselves as an extra layer on top. They were generally happy for the local rulers to carry on doing what they were doing, so long as they paid tribute.

No, you see, those skulls they piled up in pyramids after conquering a city belonged to the bourgeoisie. They practically deserved it, bunch of smug city slickers.

Ah, but is it truly conquest if you already know that you own everything between Heaven and Earth? Or is it simply a [blood] sparkling [on the blades of our swords] goodwill tour?

And I can confirm that most Mongols alive today would 100% be up for round 2 if anyone fancies

Dumplings are TRULY what is good in life

"We are conquering you guys and you can't stop us, and that rules for us" is basically the Mongol brand.

He was into bonesmashing long before our current looksmaxxing influencers, but not his own bones.

(I know that number is exaggerated, it's like 8% of men and who knows how many women)

My sense is that in the end they were comparatively light-touch, like "keep doing what you're doing, we'll open up more trade routes and take a cut," but getting to that point was "or else we'll kill you and everyone you know."

The Mongols were pretty honest about how they operated. You follow their rules, you get left alone aside from the occasional tribute. You don't follow their rules and your village gets all but erased from history.

I love the Mongols and I love the “so-and-so did nothing wrong” meme but you absolutely cannot combine the two

I don't super think of ancient Mongolians as having "colonies" or being "colonizers" because that term kinda erases the prior occupants of the land; that's part of the point. Mongolians wouldn't sweep the war/conquering/etc. under a rhetorical rug. But yeah they hella invaded a whole continent

a living former president—a great sign for any democracy

(The quote written down by a historian a century after Genghis Khan died, but there's no reason to think that it doesn't accurately capture the ethos)

"It's kind of our thing, really!"

Maybe not the least evil, but definitely wayyyyy below average in terms of suffering brought about per either person or unit of land conquered.

Oy. Like, I can see an interesting but pedantic discussion about whether the Mongols were more colonialist or purely imperialist, but that discussion has to start with the understanding that yes, the Mongols loved conquering peoples and ruling over them and they were very good at what they loved.

This guy doesn't believe that Epstein is dead.

I would argue against them being 'colonialist' in any descriptive sense, but not in any way that is exhonorative. Like the Greeks and Phoenicians were all about building colonies around the Med but I don't think that counts for what we call 'colonialism'. Imperialism also barely counts, imo.

Whereas the Russians established settlements as the expanded their empire eastwards ( and south) it could be argued the mongols didn’t settle , but demanded tribute from areas they controlled

it’s just that all colonizers have a different way of saying yeah colonialism is bad, but what we were doing was actually something completely different

unsurprisingly, they're on my Ukraine related blocklist

Yeah, they didn't know why it spread (they thought it was the gross smells) but they did figure out pretty quickly that all the corpses laying around didn't help. From what I remember, the first outbreaks in Europe are downstream of trade ships returning from Bagdad after the siege.

It's a complicated picture, reconstructing this particular narrative of the past thebulletin.org/2023/08/cata...

"it's not colonialism because they didn't use boats" seems to be the actual argument

Colonialism was invented in the 15th century by Southern Europeans.