Mongolia: A great empire or waves of barbaric hordes?

[Dariush.Z]

Without the Mongols it's most unlikely we'd all be here in this thread discussing the question. The Mongol Empire set the stage for the cultural exchange between Europe and Asia that ultimately led to the emergence of modernity, capitalism, and all that stuff.

So yeah, the impact of the Mongols on history, I'd argue, was probably positive despite all the killing they did.



Forget stirrups, the wheel and the domestication of the horse appear to have been inventions of the Eurasian steppe nomads.

Cultural exchange......

Two and a half million to 250.000? Pyramids of severed heads? Just details.

Also I hope you know that Mongolians or Mongolids settled the steppes later right?

Before then a mixture of Turkic and Indo-Iranian people populated the area, before then there were just Scythians (an indo-Iranian) people.

So yeah, please give the credit to the greatness that was Chengiz and his Mongols, it's not like your Pollitically Correct agenda hasn't rewritten history before.

 

[r16]

reading some history magazine ı came upon the assasination of Philip , the father of that great Alexander . Was so involved with who was in bed with whom that ı lost track of what was going on . Let me see it involves a guy with a guy and marries his daughter to that guy and some so Asian parade goes on while some dude raped by the lot after intoxicated kills and gets killed and whatever . Such was the beginning of the Western Civilization . After surviving due to geography and various mundane stuff like that , taking over the East and creating a norm that still imposes itself on people that some white , round eyed bunch of guys must rule the world , on the basis of "civilization" and whatever .

murderers the Mongols were ? Who weren't ?

 

[Dariush.Z]

reading some history magazine ı came upon the assasination of Philip , the father of that great Alexander . Was so involved with who was in bed with whom that ı lost track of what was going on . Let me see it involves a guy with a guy and marries his daughter to that guy and some so Asian parade goes on while some dude raped by the lot after intoxicated kills and gets killed and whatever . Such was the beginning of the Western Civilization . After surviving due to geography and various mundane stuff like that , taking over the East and creating a norm that still imposes itself on people that some white , round eyed bunch of guys must rule the world , on the basis of "civilization" and whatever .

murderers the Mongols were ? Who weren't ?

Still unable to distinguish murder, mass murder and genocide + a significant lack of real historical knowledge.

Some dude killing another dude= reducing the population of a country from 2.500.000 to 250.000, creating a pyramid of severed heads.

Flawless, grade A, totally none PC biased logic you've got there.

 

[r16]

ı have always loved the World History subforum ; kinda miss the energetic old days when there were so many threads with stuff hurled across the boards . Not offended . But consider this , withour Mongols reducing the Muslims like twice in two centuries all those good people of Europe would be speaking Turkish . This is bad , you think ?

and yeah , ı happen to be the resident Turkish Nationalist idiot .

 

[Agent327]

Ah. the subtle nuance between ' unnecessary' and ' necessary' destruction. If you look closely you may detect that virtually all empires employed that raping and pillaging method (i.e. terror) to establish their 'necessary' empires - right up till the British handling of the Boers. So your nuance seems a bit arbitrary. In practice, perhaps, all empires employ such methods - simply because they can. Certainly not because it is ' right' or ' wrong' (necessary or unnecessary). Terror is terror.

 

[Liufeng]

You know what mongols did when they captured the city, after slaughtering 800.000 defenseless people and making towers using their severed heads?

I never called Timurlane a mongol, I never called him a persian, his empire, the truko-mongol one he created slowly adopted the culture and became persianate, meaning slowly, the mongols who celebrated their victories by creating pyramids and towers of severed heads (FACT) learnt there is another way of life as well, they became civilized.

Two and a half million to 250.000? Pyramids of severed heads? Just details.

Still unable to distinguish murder, mass murder and genocide + a significant lack of real historical knowledge.

Some dude killing another dude= reducing the population of a country from 2.500.000 to 250.000, creating a pyramid of severed heads.

Flawless, grade A, totally none PC biased logic you've got there.

I thought that night would bring advise to some minds, and so I rested. And now that I've woke up, I see nothing has changed. Looks at your own comments : you've been repeating the exact same over and over ! I already told many times that it weren't mongols that made skull towers but Tamerlane, but you insist on it.
You keep talking of murder, mass murder and genocide ? But do you even know what is a genocide ? Even if mongols killed millions, they're acts were not the ones of genocide. Genocide is when you kill people of a certain ethnicity for the sole purpose of exterminating the said ethnicity. The kill is the end, not the mean. Hitler tried to commit genocide because his goal was to kill all the jews, for the sake of killing them (and other political reasons that I'm sure that many civfanatics are more effective than me since WWII is not my field of speciality). Young turks tried to kill all armenians, for the sake of killing them, as an end. Hutus murdered Tutsis for the sake of killing them, as an end. However, spanish people, when they conquered the Americas, dropped the population of 95% of it. Was it a genocide ? No. Why ? Because they did not have the goal to terminate that population. On the contrary : spanish soldiers would get native women pregnant because they could sell them at a more expensive price. As cruel as it is, it is not genocide, because genocide is about terminating a specific group of people. And for the mongols, again, it wasn't a genocide. Call it murder, mass murder, war, ... but not genocide, because those killings were part of a plan which I already explained before and invite to read again (the mongol terror tactic). In fact, mongols spared citites that surrendered, and artists and engineers, which shows that ethnic cleansing was not on their agenda !

I may be blunt, but is this thread still useful ? Is this thread worth to continue ? Everytime someone tells you a new argument, a new explanation, you just keep on saying the exact same thing over and over. I may be a bit harsh, but almost feel like that you've been trolling us this entire time ! What's the point of trying to debate when nothing new comes out from one side ? It's like debating with a wall !

 

[r16]

withour Mongols

ah , a stupid speeling mistakes ... Meant to say "without" . Considering Turk/Turkic/Turkish speaking entities felt the full wrath of both Cengiz and Timur , my post was supposed to lead to a discussion how we are discussing this in English instead of a different one , a language people might have trouble learning .

 

[Flying Pig]

historians do not judge, but only state facts.

This one is worth bringing out. It's something we often say, but I don't think it's true. To use the obvious example, you won't find a historian of the Holocaust writing 'the Holocaust was a bad thing', but you also shouldn't walk away from a book about the Holocaust thinking that the author has any doubt about the matter. Lining up facts is absolutely a matter of judgement - after all, that's precisely how a legal case works. What matters is the facts that you choose to include, the links that you draw between them, and the facts that you choose to exclude. A lot of people seem to have an idea of a kind of 'statute of limitations' - that pretending to be neutral about the Holocaust is wrong, because the Holocaust was an evil act and deserves to be labelled as such, but that more distant atrocities - the Athenian mass murder on Melos during the Peloponnesian war, for instance - should not be presented in those tones. I don't find that very convincing, and it's telling that nobody can come up with a concrete, justified line where the 'statute' should kick in.

If we're on the subject of which empires did the most wanton destroying and murdering - look at the Belgians in the Congo, or the British in India, before you conclude that the Mongols were the only people to use terror and mass murder as weapons of war. Even if you can call the Mongol conquests 'systematic genocide' (and I don't think you can), you then need to look at the policies of the 19th-century US government towards Native Americans, or of the French in Algeria. Both of those were far more systematic, far more clearly genocidal, and far more successful.

 

[Liufeng]

This one is worth bringing out. It's something we often say, but I don't think it's true. To use the obvious example, you won't find a historian of the Holocaust writing 'the Holocaust was a bad thing', but you also shouldn't walk away from a book about the Holocaust thinking that the author has any doubt about the matter. Lining up facts is absolutely a matter of judgement - after all, that's precisely how a legal case works. What matters is the facts that you choose to include, the links that you draw between them, and the facts that you choose to exclude. A lot of people seem to have an idea of a kind of 'statute of limitations' - that pretending to be neutral about the Holocaust is wrong, because the Holocaust was an evil act and deserves to be labelled as such, but that more distant atrocities - the Athenian mass murder on Melos during the Peloponnesian war, for instance - should not be presented in those tones. I don't find that very convincing, and it's telling that nobody can come up with a concrete, justified line where the 'statute' should kick in.

I realize it, do not worry. Just like science is not about having "Eurekas" but rather formulating a hypothesis and trying to prove it right, history is not very different, since when an historian picks a problematic to work on, he often knows the end he is trying achieve and prove, with sources that often go in his way of thinking, or interpretating them as such (however, there are some exceptions, like in the historical demographics where historians did not expected some results when working on it).

If we're on the subject of which empires did the most wanton destroying and murdering - look at the Belgians in the Congo, or the British in India, before you conclude that the Mongols were the only people to use terror and mass murder as weapons of war. Even if you can call the Mongol conquests 'systematic genocide' (and I don't think you can), you then need to look at the policies of the 19th-century US government towards Native Americans, or of the French in Algeria. Both of those were far more systematic, far more clearly genocidal, and far more successful.

I invite you to read my different interventions in this thread : you'll realize I'm not advocating at all to call the mongols genocidaries, nor trying to make a race on the cruelest of them all. I'm actually doing the opposite ...

 

[Kyriakos]

ah , a stupid speeling mistakes ... Meant to say "without" . Considering Turk/Turkic/Turkish speaking entities felt the full wrath of both Cengiz and Timur , my post was supposed to lead to a discussion how we are discussing this in English instead of a different one , a language people might have trouble learning .

"Withour Mongols" did seem a bit like a slip of the tongue Don't some political parties in Turkey (eg grey wolves) regard the mongols as turkic?

 

[Kyriakos]

I realize it, do not worry. Just like science is not about having "Eurekas" but rather formulating a hypothesis and trying to prove it right,

Archimedes shouted "Eureka" cause he identified his law of displacement in fluids, which he was able to prove anyway (scales were there already, you know). The law still stands. Later on he also used the same logic to present how to examine if a metal was pure or mixed with lesser metals. Just sayin ^^

 

[Lexicus]

So yeah, please give the credit to the greatness that was Chengiz and his Mongols, it's not like your Pollitically Correct agenda hasn't rewritten history before.

My Politically Correct agenda?

That's interesting, when your entire argument seems to be something close to "I"m Persian and still butthurt that the Mongols conquered and depopulated Persia centuries ago."

I submit you are the one being Politically Correct here.

 

[Arakhor]

Interesting use of necessary and unnecessary. It's almost as history has objective facts and they align with the OP.

 

[Ajidica]

The Mongols are as worthy of being a civilization as the Goths.

Make of that what you will.

 

[Lohrenswald]

If it's in the civ games it's gotta be a civ

 

[GoodSarmatian]

If it's in the civ games it's gotta be a civ

Your're just saying that because they included Norway.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Your're just saying that because they included Norway.

I had honestly kinda forgotten lol

I should get the new game one of these days

 

[Hygro]

If you had read a bit of history, you'd have known that the unnecessary destruction caused by Mongolian hordes doesn't even touch the necessary destruction other empires caused to reach their purpose.

This sentence entertains.

 

[Kyriakos]

Pain is mandatory ^^

Though, yes, some people had been a bit more brutal than others.

 

[r16]

"Withour Mongols" did seem a bit like a slip of the tongue Don't some political parties in Turkey (eg grey wolves) regard the mongols as turkic?

it was , but one has to be extra careful .

everybody is Turkic if it suits the mood . And why not , just a place for a Civ story . The first time ı saw the game , in its original Civ1 version , was a magazine review , where the writer complained there were still no Turks . We have been in the top 20 economies of the world since like ı was able to read newspapers . Got it , after my brother had this 486 to write his thesis and saw Mongols was in . Though always played as Germans , liking the epithet of Scientific / Militarist . See , Civ knows best and Mongols are Turks or whatever .