How do you see Genghis Khan?

[Dachs]

Dachs, you're in the danger of becoming a hipster. "I liked Mangukhai Khatun... 'till she became popular, that is".

Good thing I don't actually connect how interesting something is to how popular it is, then.

 

[Phrossack]

I see him as the boor he was. I honestly don't care how much of an military genius he was. See this from Tamim Ansary:
http://books.google.com/books?id=vx...&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

If you don't feel like reading it, he gives this anecdote: When the Mongols reached the now backwater town of Balkh, the Khan decided to dump the contents of Balkh's library into the Amu Darya, a river so broad it is impossible to see from one side to another. The sheer volume of the books nonetheless managed to block the river for THREE DAYS before washing away. That much knowledge, unrecoverably lost, forever. Something like that is simply an unforgivable crime.

Pity the author writes in a highly biased manner and doesn't seem to cite sources.

 

[Mosher]

Comments in red.





I started laughing at "hero."

Let me read between the lines of your post:



I sincerely am wondering if this is just a trolling attempt.

Women played an important role in governing the Mongol Empire - there were SEVERAL women leaders of government, and women played a large part in sustaining the Empire.


On the caravans; Genghis Khan did not go to war immediately... he ASKED for reparations from the governor in question. In response, the governor basically told him to f*** off. ANYTHING like that is a decleration of war.

The "ripping the fetus' out of a mother's womb," WAS barbaric. There is no denying it, and I don't condone it at all - BUT, it served its purpose. It pacified conquests, those shows of brutality.

 

[Traitorfish]

Good thing I don't actually connect how interesting something is to how popular it is, then.

Although that's exactly how a hipster would defend themselves, so you're not exactly foiling anybody's accusations...

 

[TopGearFanatic]

On the caravans; Genghis Khan did not go to war immediately... he ASKED for reparations from the governor in question. In response, the governor basically told him to f*** off. ANYTHING like that is a decleration of war.

Are trying to say the governor declared war by refusing to pay money to Genghis?

 

[Phrossack]

Are trying to say the governor declared war by refusing to pay money to Genghis?

If this is about the Khwarezmian governor of Otrar... First things first. As they were returning home from pursuing the Merkits around 1210, the armies of Jebe and Subedei came under attack by the Khwarezmian Sultan Muhammad II, probably because they'd gone into Qangli territory to catch the Merkits, and the Qangli Turks were mostly part of the Khwarezmian Empire. It was a close battle, and the Mongols, who'd been strictly ordered to avoid fighting the Khwarezmians, slipped away in the night. This incident didn't provoke Chinggis Khan, however.

Eight years later, a Mongol caravan full of diplomatic presents arrived in the Khwarezmian city of Otrar to negotiate trade rights. The governor accused the emissaries of espionage (the Mongols did use merchants as spies of sorts), massacred them, and plundered the caravan. Chinggis Khan was pissed, but decided not to invade, as he was busy with the Jin Empire. Three more emissaries were sent to demand compensation; one was executed, and the other two had their beards burned off. So the Mongols split their forces and invaded Khwarezm. It wasn't a case of Chinggis Khan extorting payment by threat of war.

 

[Mosher]

What Phrossack said; it looks like he knows a lot more about this than I do!

Sorry I wasn't so detailed, heh.

But yeah, that's who I was talking about.

 

[Linkman226]

Doesn't...
justify...
DESTROYING...
KNOWLEDGE

The destruction of books should be labeled as a crime against humanity.

 

[Lord Baal]

Doesn't...
justify...
DESTROYING...
KNOWLEDGE

The destruction of books should be labeled as a crime against humanity.

I'm with you, so long as the writing of certain books also qualifies. Stephenie Meyer needs to be tried at The Hague.

 

[Linkman226]

As I like to say, even terrible books like hers deserve to be around for the purposes of comedy.

 

[Traitorfish]

Doesn't...
justify...
DESTROYING...
KNOWLEDGE

The destruction of books should be labeled as a crime against humanity.

To be fair, 90% of it was by definition worthless.

 

[aelf]

I was going to say maybe Chinggis destroyed a whole lot of bestseller books about teenage love drama involving vampires and boy wizards. Libraries these days seem to contain quite a lot of those. I'd support dumping them into the river if that didn't cause so much pollution.

 

[Linkman226]

To be fair, 90% of it was by definition worthless.

Right, but usually libraries in those days were collections of the 10% that were good.

I was going to say maybe Chinggis destroyed a whole lot of bestseller books about teenage love drama involving vampires and boy wizards. Libraries these days seem to contain quite a lot of those. I'd support dumping them into the river if that didn't cause so much pollution.

Well, sometimes they're good for comedic purposes.

Boy wizards? As in Harry Potter? That's hardly the same category as Twilight.

 

[Phrossack]

Doesn't...
justify...
DESTROYING...
KNOWLEDGE

The destruction of books should be labeled as a crime against humanity.

Pity the author writes in a highly biased manner and doesn't seem to cite sources.

Dude, I'm with you in despising the destruction of knowledge. But first, I'd like to see where the author you cited got his sources. From the excerpt I read, it would seem he's not a historian, his book isn't about history, and his bias shows when he calls the Mongols "a massive bunch of slobbering boors" out to destroy civilization itself.

 

[aelf]

Boy wizards? As in Harry Potter? That's hardly the same category as Twilight.

They're both teenage fare to me. I don't care enough to assess the actual merits of the respective writings to meaningfully compare the two, so I can only conclude that Twilight is probably worse on the basis of the fan base. Harry Potter, though, seems to have a rather distinctive Tory flavour to it.

Both should go.

 

[Dachs]

Although that's exactly how a hipster would defend themselves, so you're not exactly foiling anybody's accusations...

Trust me, I didn't like Činggis before he was popular, either.

 

[Linkman226]

Dude, I'm with you in despising the destruction of knowledge. But first, I'd like to see where the author you cited got his sources. From the excerpt I read, it would seem he's not a historian, his book isn't about history, and his bias shows when he calls the Mongols "a massive bunch of slobbering boors" out to destroy civilization itself.

Point taken, I can't find any proof of his veracity at least from googling. But I can confirm the destruction of the Library of Baghdad:

...in the Battle of Baghdad (1258) libraries, books, literature, and hospitals were burned: some of the books were thrown into the river, in quantities sufficient to "turn the Euphrates black with ink for several days".

 

[Thormodr]

A visionary and certainly one of the most influential persons of the last millennium.
Loyal to his allies and ruthless to his enemies, his image has been demonized over the years. A lot of the accounts we can read about his destruction of cities and mass slaughter were written by his enemies. Furthermore, some of the numbers of people killed are a fair degree higher than the city's population at the time.
Also accounts of the Mongols supposedly killing 2 million people in one hour are basically a mathematical impossibility. All in all, I think he was no more ruthless than other leaders of his time.

Good quote here. His accomplishments were staggering.

“In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents.”

http://hesomagazine.com/featured/genghis-khan-man-of-the-millennium/

Anyway, Čingis Xaan was certainly the GREENEST conqueror.

Spoiler :

The Mongol invasion scrubbed nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to surprising new research.
** Bryan NelsonMon, Jan 24 2011 at 6:44 AM EST 144 Comments

Genghis Khan GENGHIS GREEN: The founder of history's largest contiguous empire cooled the planet while taking a body count. (Photo: Wiki Commons/public domain)

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com.


Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered ** the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan's unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere.

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," said Julia Pongratz, who headed the Carnegie Institution research project. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago ** changing the vegetation cover of the Earth's landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

Pongratz's study, which was completed with the help of her Carnegie colleague Ken Caldeira, as well as with German colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, measured the carbon impact of a number of historical events besides just the Mongol invasion, including the Black Death in Europe, the fall of China's Ming Dynasty and the conquest of the Americas.

What all of these events share in common is the widespread return of forests after a period of massive depopulation, but the longevity of the Mongol invasion made it stand out as having the biggest impact on the world's climate.

"We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil," explained Pongratz. "But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion ... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon."

The 700 million tons of carbon absorbed as a result of the Mongol invasions roughly equals the amount of carbon global society now produces annually from gasoline.

Though Genghis Khan's legacy as one of the world's cruelest conquerors isn't likely to change because of the unintended "green" consequences of his invasions, Pongratz hopes that her research can lead to land-use changes that someday might alter how future historians rate our environmental impact.

"Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle. We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained," she said.



"My three main goals would be to reduce human population to
about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure
and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species,
returning throughout the world."
-Dave Foreman,
co-founder of Earth First!



"The Earth has cancer
and the cancer is Man."
- Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

 

[Linkman226]

You know, right after the illiterate slave destroyed 90% of all the books found between Brazil and Canada, as well as farms and irrigation systems, and so on and so forth.

 

[TopGearFanatic]

A visionary and certainly one of the most influential persons of the last millennium.
Loyal to his allies and ruthless to his enemies, his image has been demonized over the years. A lot of the accounts we can read about his destruction of cities and mass slaughter were written by his enemies. Furthermore, some of the numbers of people killed are a fair degree higher than the city's population at the time.
Also accounts of the Mongols supposedly killing 2 million people in one hour are basically a mathematical impossibility. All in all, I think he was no more ruthless than other leaders of his time.

There's a good reason his image has become demonized as opposed Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, or any other great leader who conquered, but wasn't obscenely cruel.