When Asia Was the World

Let’s take the Joker out of the deck, shall we?

In its formative stages, the Mongol Empire was likely responsible for the deaths of millions, the leveling of cities, and the ruin of countless communities across the known world—primarily in the Islamic heartlands, but also in China and West Asia (and that region referred to by a few esoteric historians as Europe). This devastation was a deliberate tactic designed to smooth the path for future conquests and stifle rebellion before it could begin. Even if we concede that populations were only annihilated when they resisted, the scale of the carnage was staggering; vast swaths of Central Asia and Iran remained desolate for generations after the empire itself had vanished.

And that is that. This is the last time I will mention the scale of ruin the Mongols brought to Eurasia. I leave the concern for human rights and the sanctity of life to my modern self, where such preoccupations have meaning—not to a distant era in which things were felt and valued quite differently than they are today.

My interest in the Mongol Empire lies in how a single tribal leader, emerging from far beyond the borders of the civilized world, managed through sheer grit to forge nomadic tribes into a lethal, well-oiled military machine. In short order, this force toppled political entities far more sophisticated than itself, establishing what would become, by the time of his grandsons, the largest contiguous land empire in history.

Joker.

But beyond the somewhat fetishistic worship of raw power common among Mongol history buffs, my interest is primarily cultural. The Mongol Empire stitched the vast majority of Eurasia into a more or less continuous political and economic unit. For a brief but significant window, it allowed for the seamless flow of people, goods, ideas, and technologies from Eastern China to the Christian West.

The Pax Mongolica is what enabled the writing of the first historical work to ever attempt a universal history of mankind—a project that brought together a Jewish convert, a Christian monk, Buddhists, and Muslims. The Mongol Peace is what allowed gunpowder to travel west and evolve into the tools that redefined how we kill one another; it is how the Chinese learned the secret of cobalt blue for their famous porcelain, and how they learned to prepare those appalling desserts made of kadaif noodles and sweet beans.

Fascinating anomalies—Chinese Islam, Buddhism in Muslim Iran, a Chinatown at the foot of the Caucasus, or a Franciscan monk dragged from the Vatican to Mongolia to plead for the life of the West—would likely never have existed had the cavalry regiments not ridden out from the steppes to wherever a horse’s hoof could reach.

And this is before we have even touched upon art, technology, military science, or agriculture.

But there is still time for all that.

Source: ancientbooks.blogspot.com