competent and useful, if conventional

Review of The Mongols by David Morgan

Genghis Khan arose from the nomadic steppe peoples North of China.  He raised a great army with a core of ur-loyalists he kept as his bodyguard. Otherwise, he mixed the people of various tribes to actively serve his empire. The Mongol warriors' principal strength was their cavalry, which was capable of great coordination and flexibility on the field.  Each knight had approximately 5 horses in tow, in keeping with their nomadic lifestyles on the plains.  This was also a limitation, of course, in that they had to find food for them.  The difference, it seems, is that Genghis was not only after plunder, but was interested in tax revenues from conquered peoples (in particular the Chinese in the North) and even allowed local elites to retain most of the power to administer in the Mongols’ stead, paying tribute while keeping their positions and prestige, etc.  This kind of cooptation is similar to the Romans (without the cultural assimilation component).  Upon his death in 1227, he left a vast empire to be divided by his sons, who ruled more or less separately for 100 years, when his descendants were either ejected by collapse or absorbed into local elites.

The legacy of the Mongols remains controversial.  Like conquerors of that time, they were extremely brutal, killing entire cities if they refused to capitulate without fighting.  While they were impressed with both Persia and China, where they copied their civilizations, they destroyed irreplacable libraries such as those in Bagdad or melted down many artifacts.  They tolerated local religions, eventually adopting the Muslim religion to replace the native shamanism, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism.  Their organizational genius may also have been copied by the Ottoman Turks, also a steppe people.  Like all empires, their collapse was quick when it occurred - disunited, warring between khanates, and far from supply lines and their cultural sources.

This is a very academic introduction to the Mongol people and more particularly, the empire founded by Genghis Khan.  Written at the undergraduate level, it provides the basics as well as a sense of the state of the field, i.e. what is known, what is not, and what needs to be done.  It is workmanlike in tone, but to put it mildly, very dry.

The beginning seemed designed to turn off all but the most determined reader.  It is a scholarly overview of the original sources on the Mongols.  While this can be very interesting - to read documents in the original it would require knowledge of Chinese, Persian, Turkish and Arabic at a minimum - the place for it is an afterward, or even footnotes, not 30 pages of turgid prose, that is, if you want to spark interest in a lay reader rather than count on academic obligation to get through it.

The same is true of the conclusion, which is an overview of scholarship since 1985, i.e. when the first edition was published.  There you get served the dullest array of academic controversies, many of which are choices of emphasizing one interpretation over the others, e.g. were the Mongols really as brutal as their reputation or did they bring good to those they governed?  An essential question, but the way that it is presented in unspeakably boring and reeks of intellectuals taking a stand in order to develop interpretations (however silly or unrealistic) in order to advance their careers.  Indeed, that this is tacked on as a final chapter rather than integrated into the text is a sign of laziness if you ask me.  There is no wrapup, but instead this stilted and rambling discussion of who is saying what at the moment.

That leaves a scant 150 pages for all of the historical information on the Mongols.  As such, it is rather thin gruel, stripped of any storytelling or feeling for how things were in the 13^th and 14^th  centuries.  It is threadbare and flavorless, if essential, reading.

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