Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Mongols were an illiterate steppe tribe that got a taste of civilization after conquering the semi-settled and more well-to-do Jurched tribe of northeastern China. Genghis Khan and his followers instituted a sort of pyramid scheme encouraging more tribes to join them on their wars to gain more loot based on a promise that the spoils would be divided in equal shares. A key requirement of what the author describes as their "legal system" was to institute rules that would stop the tribes from fighting among one another for the limited resources available on the steppe (loot and women) so that no personal animosity or rivalries would hinder their ever-widening attacks on the rest of the world. Among the spoils were the educated elite of the Middle East and parts of Europe, whom the Mongols either took for themselves as slaves or had sold on the slave markets. Reports from eyewitnesses say that the Mongols were ruthless, barbaric and coldhearted. Genghis Khan started out life by killing his half-brother out of pique and things didn't much improve after that. His favorite way of executing his friends was to break their spines and leave them alive to die of starvation in the wilderness. Within three generations the Mongols had almost entirely killed each other off, and that, as we say, was that. They left nothing for future generations in the way of culture, art, architecture, language, or anything else. The author is strangely intent on redeeming the reputation of these killers. He contends that the Mongols didn't murder as many as were reported by eyewitnesses. The sum total of his evidence? If as many people actually lived in the cities sacked by the Mongols as were reported killed, "they could easily have overwhelmed" their invaders (p. 118). This is just after we have learned about the Mongols' superior gunpowder, cavalry, feint tactics and propaganda. Do we learn anything from this author about population estimates in Genghis Khan's time that would support this speculation? Of course not. Also unmentioned are the number of rapes, as modern science finds that 60 million people alive today are Khan's descendants. The author's reports of historical facts are radically distorted by his desired conclusion. One of Genghis Khan's first major acts was to order the killing of all males of the Tatar tribe who were "taller than a cart linchpin." (p. 51) The author has an elaborate and completely unsupported explanation of the ostensible centrality of the linchpin to Tatar civilization, thus turning a genocide into nothing more than a culture war. Reading this book, you would also think that the entire educated elite of the western world made its way to obscure Mongol capitols because of the superiority of the Mongol way of life. The reality, that they were captured and enslaved, goes unmentioned. The Mongol spoils system? It is evidence of "modern civic citizenship" (p. 58). Further, the Mongol looting was actually legitimate because it was "redressing [an] imbalance of goods" between those who wanted to steal them (Mongols) and those who had actually earned them (the rest of the world) (p. 77). Remaining in his hyper-romanticized haze until the very end, the author contends that the reason Genghis Khan "spen[t] his life attacking outsiders" is that he was actually forced to fight "to keep his own people safe from outside attack" (p. 271). Apparently he suffered severe psychological damage from an attack by a competing tribe that temporarily stole one of his many wives. The author goes so far as to "find" the site of this kidnapping in Mongolia and place a shrine there, since after all, this event precipitated all of the positive historical developments described above. And anyway, even if Khan **was** a ruthless killer, the end justifies the means, since the result of his attacks was a "shattering [of] the protective walls that isolated one civilization from another" (p. 267). I'm sure the families of the millions of slaughtered or enslaved Asians and Europeans were deeply grateful.