Saturday, Jun 19, 2021 • 29min
Genghis Khan (Radio Edit)
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Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Peter Frankopan and comedian Phil Wang in the 12th century to meet one of the most feared conquerors in world history, Genghis Khan. We find out why silk shirts weren’t just a fashion choice and how kittens were apparently used as weapons as Genghis Khan established the largest land empire in history.
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Greg Jenner
Peter Frankopan
Phil Wang
Transcript
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00:00
This is the
BBC
.Share
00:03
This podcast is supported by advertising outside the
UK
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Greg Jenner
00:08
Hello
Greg
here, just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed. So it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much enjoy the show.Share
00:27
BBC Sounds
, music, radio, podcasts.Share
Greg Jenner
00:32
Hello and welcome to You're Dead To Me, a history podcast for everyone.
Share
00:35
My name is
Greg Jenner
. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC
comedy show, Horrible Histories
and you might have heard my other podcast, Home School History but that one's for the kids.Share
00:46
How does this one work? Well, every time I'm joined by a clever clogs and a joke machine for a hilarious history lesson and today we are setting the historical record straight on one of the most famous feared and famously fearless conquerors in world history
Genghis Khan
.Share
01:02
And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests in history corner, he's a globetrotting rock star of history. He's Professor of Global History at
the University of Oxford
, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and he's the author of the multiple million selling books, The Silk Roads
and the new Silk Roads.Share
01:21
It's the wonderful Professor
Peter Frankopan
. Hi Peter, how are you?Share
Peter Frankopan
01:24
Lovely to be joining you
Share
Greg Jenner
01:26
And in comedy corner he's an award winning comedian, a former President of the prestigious Cambridge Footlights. You have seen him on
Live at the Apollo
, Would I Lie to You
, Drunk History
and the hilarious Taskmaster
series.Share
01:37
It's the brilliant
Phil Wang
Share
Phil Wang
01:38
Hi!
Share
Greg Jenner
01:39
Did you like history at school? Is it one of those subjects where you are like, do I have to?
Share
Phil Wang
01:42
My early school years are in
Malaysia
and in Malaysia
you we kind of only learn Malaysian history which is about 50 years old. So I came out of Malaysia
, the Malaysian school system with a real historical ignorance.Share
Greg Jenner
01:55
Did you do
Genghis Khan
?Share
01:57
Did you do Mongolian and Chinese history?
Share
Phil Wang
01:59
Nope, no no no no.
Share
02:01
So you are starting from zero here.
Share
02:03
Pretty much all I know about the Mongols is their involvement in
Medieval Two: Total war
for the PC
.Share
Greg Jenner
02:09
Yeah, that's a good game. Yeah.
Share
Phil Wang
02:10
Great game. The Mongols are when the game gets difficult. So I get a bit scared of the Mongols, which I guess is there their intention. Whenever the Mongols come up I do get a pang of fear which was always their specialty.
Share
Greg Jenner
02:23
That's very on brand and we're gonna get to that later on. So I'm glad to hear that actually Phil thank you very much.
Share
02:27
So what do you know?
Share
02:34
This is where I have a crack at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject and I'm hoping you've heard of
Genghis Khan
or is it Genghis Khan
I think that's probably how we meant to pronounce it?Share
02:44
You might know that he was the founder of the
Mongol Empire
, the largest contiguous land empire ever known, clocks in at nine million square miles, which is arguably too many miles.Share
02:53
You're probably thinking that
Genghis
was a ruthless killer and conqueror, which is certainly how he's portrayed in pop culture. He's been played on screen by John Wayne
, bit weird. Omar Sharif
slightly less weird in 2007, as a film called Mongol starring the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano
.Share
03:10
He also pops up as a skateboarding baseball bat wielding troublemaker in the time travel classic
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
. That's the best one for me. I think if you're into historical fiction, you might have read about him in Con Eagleton's conqueror books and as Phil has mentioned, you can play him in various games, Age of Empires
to Civilization
, Total War
. He certainly gets around in pop culture almost as much as he got around in 13th century Eurasia
.Share
03:33
But what do we need to know about the man himself? And is it all true? Let's find out.
Professor Peter
, Genghis Khan
was not called Genghis Khan
when he was born and he was born into the Mongol tribe, which at the time was not a great world power. So can we mingle with the Mongols, who were they when he was born? And what was his name?Share
Peter Frankopan
03:52
Well, so go back 2000, 3000 years? The step belt that stretches from roughly the northern lip of
the Black Sea
, right the way across Central Asia
, across the Mongolian plains and ultimately to the pacific has been inhabited by lots of different tribes.Share
04:07
And those tribes typically look after their animals, things like sheep of course, but above all horses and they tend to be nomadic migrants and there are lots and lots of different tribes who are milling around. They sometimes conquer each other.
Share
04:21
Sometimes they collaborate with each other, but they mainly go back minding their own business, working out where they can find markets for their produce and also avoiding the things that kill them like disease and adapting to
climate change
.Share
04:32
So
Herodotus
, writing about steppe nomads 2500 years ago calls them the greatest survivors in history because they have to get on with things. But by the time that Genghis Khan
was born, Temujin is born, they are small bit part players because there are lots of small bit part players.Share
Greg Jenner
04:46
We think he's born about the year 1160, give or take a couple of years.
Share
04:51
And as you say, Peter, he's called Temujin,
Share
Peter Frankopan
04:53
Which means smith
Share
Greg Jenner
04:54
Oh really?
Share
Peter Frankopan
04:55
Or blacksmith or something like that, fairly inauspicious. And in fact he's given that name because the day that he was born, his father captures a
Tatar
. The Tatars are the kind of the bigger dominant tribe in Eastern Mongolia at that time, and his father captures a guy who's called Temujin and in the steppe world, and typically with the Mongols, when you beat someone, you take everything from them, you take their goods, you take their children, you take their horses, you take their clothes and you take their namesShare
Greg Jenner
05:22
Phil
is that the same in comedy if you defeat someone in a in a joke battle, do you then get to have their entire set?Share
Phil Wang
05:28
Yeah, Yeah. Officially my name now is a gamble because of our first roast battle, it doesn't suit me. But rules are rules. What are steps of the steps we can keep talking about ascendancy and steps and all I'm picturing is
Genghis Khan
walking up some huge stepsShare
Greg Jenner
05:45
They're are there a pop band Phil?
Share
Phil Wang
05:48
Yeah.
Share
Peter Frankopan
05:48
So the steppe lands are the flat, rolling plains that are unpunctuated by mountains. There are important rivers like the
Oxus
or the Jakarta
, the sudar and Ahmad
area. The flat rolling lands that have very few even trees on them are grazing areas, stretch for thousands and thousands of thousands of milesShare
Greg Jenner
06:07
And we know all this stuff because of a lovely document.
Share
06:10
It's called
The Secret History Of The Mongols
, really interesting text because it's so it's perhaps the most important in terms of Mongolian history. It tells us Peter that he was born with a lucky omen, actually Phil
do you want to guess what the lucky omen was? He came out of the womb clutching something in his little baby hand. What do you think it wasShare
Phil Wang
06:28
Like a four leaf clover or something or rabbits.
Share
Greg Jenner
06:30
But it was a blood clot. Which you know, I wouldn't say it's particularly lucky. But yeah that's apparently was propitious and it was a good sign. And it also has some Mongolian myths as well, doesn't it?
Share
Peter Frankopan
06:42
So the first Mongol supposed to be descended from a fallow deer and a blue grey wolf. That sounds to us totally crazy. But then we think about
Rome
and roman disagreements being fed by and brought up by a she wolf
and wolf being the symbol of Rome
. So it's not that unusual.Share
06:59
But then
The Secret History
tells us about how Genghis Khan's
ancestors went through 11 generations, that one of his female ancestors of great grandmothers was abandoned by her family. And then one night she was minding her own business in her felt tent and a glowing supernatural man came through the smoke hole on the top.Share
07:18
And lo and behold a few months later said three children
Share
Phil Wang
07:20
This is familiar connecting, this is very much like the immaculate conception people sounds like centuries of unfaithful people trying to come up with crazy stories as to how they got pregnant all of a sudden
Share
Greg Jenner
07:32
There's a supernatural glowing man and then bam kids
Share
Phil Wang
07:35
Came in through the chimney
Share
Greg Jenner
07:37
Phil what animal would you say you were descended from?
Share
Phil Wang
07:39
You know those very ugly, deep sea fish, that only come up after a tsunami. They all look surprised to be out of the water. I mean a group, I probably am descended from them.
Share
Greg Jenner
07:49
Maybe we all are
Share
Peter Frankopan
07:50
Apparently those
blob fish
, what I gather is that they don't actually look like that pressure that's placed on them when they get brought up.Share
07:57
But actually in their own environment, like most people,
Share
Greg Jenner
07:59
That's my excuse to, I look like this because of the pressure. Yeah so
Phil
, when Temujin is growing up a little bit, there is a bit of family discord with his brother. Do you want to guess what happens?Share
Phil Wang
08:12
They say he fell out with his brother after a game of like monopoly or something
Share
Greg Jenner
08:15
Fell out is probably right. I mean it gets a bit worse and fallout.
Share
Phil Wang
08:18
Oh did he kill him? And his like heart fell out of his body?
Share
Greg Jenner
08:23
He killed him. He certainly did. It was an argument over a fish which
Share
Phil Wang
08:28
Hey, a
blob fish
, I'm telling you it's the pressure. No, they already looked like that.Share
Greg Jenner
08:35
This was dinner, wasn't it
Peter
.Share
Peter Frankopan
08:36
The story goes that they have a massive argument and possibly he kills his brother because of the argument but anyway, we know that he seems to be taken captive and is enslaved for at least some time.
Share
Greg Jenner
08:50
Yeah. So he's taken by a rival tribe.
The Taichiud Clan
, but he gets released somehow and then he gets himself a nice wife when he's about 16 years old and she was called Botha and then brought to the wife gets kidnapped. So he now has to go on a bit Liam Neeson
taken type mission to get her backShare
Phil Wang
09:07
At this point was to mention like maybe it's me, maybe I'm the common factor.
Share
Peter Frankopan
09:12
This moment is a definitive one. I mean, how one builds the profile of someone who have so few written records for it is a kind of make or break moment. His wife is kidnapped. She's held in captivity for something like eight months. She comes back pregnant.
Share
09:26
Temujin rides out to go and find her. And the story goes in the darkness, she recognizes the bridle and the tether of the reins of his horse. So she can tell that it's him without him speaking, but she's pretty cool Botha. So later on in her life, she was crowned as the grand empress alongside him.
Share
09:44
She plays a pretty active role in decision making so far as we can tell and in keeping the show on the road. So Temujin has got to get her back because if he doesn't, then his status, his profile, his humiliation is complete.
Share
Greg Jenner
09:55
So he does, he does not become a slightly different person and he adopts the baby as well and he names the child Jackie or Jackie, he's been helped in his little mission by a couple of buddies talk real and Jamukha.
Share
10:08
These are his blood brothers, these are his best friends and then they end up killing each other.
Share
10:13
I mean it goes a bit wrong, doesn't
Share
Phil Wang
10:15
It also sounds like just because he's adopted someone doesn't mean he won't kill them at some point. Later on. You're not committing to anything in Mongolian times, are you really?
Share
Greg Jenner
10:24
It's a short term contract.
Share
Peter Frankopan
10:25
One of the great skills that the Mongols have is you tend not to be able to dominate and hold an empire together. If you're always ruthless and always killing, you might want to do it selectively, but it's much more important to be bringing people inside your felt tent than leaving bodies strewn outside
Share
Greg Jenner
10:42
Just about to say Peter the next thing in my script here is that they then wiped out the
Tatars
. It kind of turned up and went, no you you don't get to live anymore.Share
10:52
I mean he lets the women and children live.
Share
Phil Wang
10:54
Modern guy
Share
Greg Jenner
10:55
Any man taller than the linchpin of an ox cart he killed a lot of like
Share
Phil Wang
10:60
The older men was hunching and trying to get below the linchpin of a it's like a rolling this short. You have to be this short to ride the rest of your life.
Share
Greg Jenner
11:08
Genghis Khan
is a title. So it means universal leader, Leader of everything.Share
11:13
So he's now reached the stage where he's leading men, he's leading armies. He's taken on the
Tatars
and his wife to talk to them. They are now part of his wider empire. He's getting bigger. He's got more troops. He's got more land and so he now has to become an administrator. Is it also that he likes meritocracy? He likes to promote talented people rather than your dad was.Share
Peter Frankopan
11:32
The most important prerequisites is loyalty. In the second instance, it's your efficiency to be able to deliver what it is that the great khan tells you and what he needs.
Share
11:43
Steppe empires are all built on the need to acquire more goods so you can distribute and reward more. So he needs to have around him a substantial retinue that he can rely on all costs and so becoming a member of that revenue is in the first instance. Are you related to him in the second?
Share
12:03
Are you one of his original tribes, Mongols? But then there's a much more complicated calibration, they're making sure that all these other tribes you're bringing in aren't going to either regroup and challenge you, but that they will respect and make sure that you are unchallenged.
Share
Greg Jenner
12:18
And he has that bodyguard, which we call that the Keshi K E S H I G
Share
Phil Wang
12:23
Takeshi's Castle
?Share
Greg Jenner
12:24
Not
Takeshi's Castle
Share
Phil Wang
12:25
That's how the Mongols remained undefeated. All their enemies just hitting big rubber balls and falling into bodies of water.
Share
Greg Jenner
12:33
Keshi is the name of the elite bodyguards and as I understand it
Peter
some of those men in the bodyguards were sort of hostages. They were kind of the brothers of important men, there's a process of loyalty but also I could kill your family members if they stabbed me if they betray me.Share
Peter Frankopan
12:49
The bodyguard sounds a little bit to formal, it sounds a bit like they're all muscled up and they're kind of shadowing and looking after him. But the cash, it includes people who are cooks. It includes people who have nightwatch duty and things like that. Amongst those are what we might call hostages or diplomatic allies. Where it's not just about keeping your enemies close, it's about showing that you matter to them.
Share
Greg Jenner
13:09
Okay, so he defeats the Tatars, he defeats the Carrot tribe, he defeats Jamukha, his old best friend by 1206. He's like that bloke in the gym who never skips leg day. He is now the step master.
Share
13:20
And this is when he receives his new name of
Genghis Khan
, He is the leader of everything. Which means that realistically he now needs to be conquering the big powers. And the big power in the area is China
presumably, but China
at the time is not just a single nation of china. It's a few kingdoms.Share
13:38
So the first one is the genre, the western jar, which is in the northern part of
China
to get there. He has to march across the Gobi desert
, which is no mean feat. So it's a bit of a commute, but he turns up and he spends two years doing research Phil
this is someone who is putting together a booklet.Share
Phil Wang
13:57
He's a nerd a murderous nerd, He's a murderer.
Share
Greg Jenner
14:01
He's scouting the city of Vallo High and he finally makes his move in 12 oh nine.
Share
14:06
He conquers the city of Allah High with cute birdies and fluffy kittens
Phil
I'm going to ask you to guess how he does thisShare
Phil Wang
14:13
Does he build like a just a mountain of dead birds and cats and he climbs over them over the wall and it sounds like you could just use a ladder.
Share
14:23
I was like yeah there's nothing scary about ladder.
Share
Greg Jenner
14:26
Not a bad guess he gets the cats and the birds from the city and then sets them on fire and then of course they run back to their homes and and set that on fire allegedly. That's the story.
Share
Phil Wang
14:37
Anyway, I mean that's extra horrible if if you've been missing your cat for a week and you look out the window, Mrs Scuffles is back. Oh my God!
Share
Peter Frankopan
14:47
In fact it doesn't sound to me entirely plausible partly because unless I have misunderstood something birds, even if they have cotton in flames tied to their tails tend not to explode particularly effectively.
Share
Phil Wang
14:58
Haven't played angry birds. I think you'll find it very much to explore.
Share
Greg Jenner
15:02
He does manage to win against larger forces. I mean this is one of the things that's really impressive about him and some of his tactics are really quite inventive. So one of things that Mongols do is they feign retreat, so they pretend to run away. So people chase them and then they turn around and go ha ha
Share
Phil Wang
15:15
I know this one from
Medieval Two: Total War
, So annoying. I've just taken Damascus
and there I am, because they keep running away, but also you can keep dying because of shooting at you the whole time.Share
Greg Jenner
15:28
That's it. And it's it's true, isn't it
Peter
? They used composite bows, they were brilliant horseman, they were tactically ingenious. You know, they practiced all these maneuvers so you can't get close to them.Share
Peter Frankopan
15:39
The big weakness is they're not very good against fortified locations and cities because first you need the technology to make the walls well explode, maybe like the exploding cats and birds. Most importantly, is that the Mongols are on horses. And so as Phil's experience in
Damascus
shows they're very annoying because there's very little reward in going after them. And if you do go after them, you're in trouble.Share
16:02
But equally they come and sit outside your front gates. It's an irritant what the challenges for the Mongols is that to be able to take big cities, it's very technically complicated.
Share
16:10
So you need to find ways of putting pressure on the inhabitants, either psychologically or by diverting water into cities and messing things up or by constantly issuing threats because otherwise the longer it goes on, the more the odds are in favor of people inside the city cities can withstand sieges lasting 1 2 3 years.
Share
16:30
So when he goes to look at other cities to investigate and the reason he's doing his research is that he knows he can't make it work unless he comes up with some magic.
Share
Greg Jenner
16:38
You've mentioned the psychological warfare of it. He does issue threats. He does terrify. He deliberately sets out to scare people so that the next city will surrender, which obviously makes his job easier. And that sort of works for him because in the western jar having annihilated value high.
Share
16:54
He then turns up to the next guy and says, come on just handed over and the king says, you know what? Yeah, fair cop. I will pay you lots of money and I'll be a client king. I'll do whatever you say, I'll be a puppet. Leave me alone. Please don't hurt my face.
Share
17:06
And he accepts that he's fine with that, isn't he?
Share
Peter Frankopan
17:08
Well, it's not necessarily the worst equation. Typically the question is, am I going to end up paying more tax than I was paying before?
Share
17:15
And as long as the Mongols are fiscally liberal, then you'll find the real thing to do is to be able to convince people that you are willing to follow through. And it's quite helpful in the Mongol locker To have a couple of examples where you do stack up people's heads in pyramids or towers that can be seen from 25 miles away that does concentrate them.
Share
Greg Jenner
17:33
Yeah, I mean also the reputation thing works in his favour to and we think that perhaps the Mongols deliberately spread misinformation, spread rumours about their own violence.
Share
Phil Wang
17:42
Fake news
Share
Greg Jenner
17:43
Which I guess is a bit like stepping on stage. Fell as a comedian if you've got a reputation and the audience are already like this guy is funny, they're going to laugh quicker. Yeah, exactly. Don't know who you are.
Share
Phil Wang
17:53
Absolutely. I haven't actually told a joke for five years now, but I have been fortunate enough to build some kind of reputation with people presume I'm funny and you're it's amazing how many minutes you can get out of that.
Share
Greg Jenner
18:08
So in 1211
Genghis Khan
or is it Genghis Khan
Peter? Let's settle this Genghis or GenghisShare
Peter Frankopan
18:14
Genghis.
Share
18:15
I think he'd be comfortable with sir, but I think it's okay.
Share
Greg Jenner
18:18
All right, okay, we'll call him
Genghis Khan
. Right. So he wants to conquer Jin China. Now he's conquered Asia
. And he in 1211, he's like, right, I'm gonna go for the big daddy. Now this is proper china, proper big huge, massive army china and he turns up at the city of jean do, which is now Beijing
and it is a massive city And they've got an army of 170,000 men.Share
18:39
The city is guarded by huge walls? 900 guard towers?
Share
18:43
They are no pushover. He's not getting in, is he? How is he going to conquer this city?
Share
18:48
Given that his army is all based on horses and they've got massive walls. What's the plan?
Share
Peter Frankopan
18:52
So there's no real prospect of storming the city.
Share
18:56
But on the other hand, the weak point of large settlements is that they need a lot of food and if you can cut off pressure on that food supply, it doesn't take very long to really ramp up the temperature inside the city.
Share
19:08
So jean, do I think it's already the
Jin Dynasty
are having troubles anyway. But then what Genghis does is he tries to win over key supporters from nearby and even from inside by promising them status and so on, which is quite a good way of doing it.Share
19:23
And bob's your uncle and the big cat doesn't arrive, John dew falls very clever
Share
Greg Jenner
19:27
And he also promises that he will leave them alone and takes a big payment and then he comes back the next year and storms the city. So he'll back stab as well.
Share
19:35
His next major conquest after Jin china. I'm going to get this wrong pronunciation here, Peter the quarrelsome empire.
Share
19:42
That's a sort of relatively new empire in Central Asia Persia and
Afghanistan
.Share
19:47
And he initially approaches the ruler
Mohammad Shahr
in 1218 for a bit of a chat, bit of a trade deal and it very quickly goes wrong because the Mongol emissary is killed and then the next emissaries their beer to shave to humiliate them? This is basically poking the bear.Share
20:03
Genghis Khan
will now demand vengeance presumablyShare
Peter Frankopan
20:06
He's not a fan of the Metro sexual look with the wax and shave, he wants the men with hair. It's intended to humiliate Okay, In retrospect, stupid thing to do.
Share
20:14
But basically when you get emissaries, the equation is take it or leave it
Mohammad Shahr
says he'll leave it and the way to do that is not send it back politely with a nice messages to say, I'm not scared of you.Share
20:25
This is, I'm going to treat your envoys Mohammed built this empire of his own, basically doing the same thing that changes can have been doing himself by picking off smaller groups that gives opportunities for the Mongol.
Share
20:36
So from the point of view that expanding westwards along these trade routes, looking at some of these big cities that it was a nice ripe fruit that was ready to go and ready to be exploited.
Share
20:46
Its put very simply by one historian, he says that when the Mongols arrived, they burned, they killed, they plundered and then they left and then another one says, I wish I'd just never been born. So I never had to live through such traumas.
Share
Greg Jenner
20:58
So he now controls the silk roads essentially this enormous trade network that connects
East Asia
through to europe. I mean he's got huge amount of money that is, he buying a big fancy palace, nice big hatShare
Peter Frankopan
21:08
So the Mongols they were very keen on bling.
Share
21:10
You showed off ostentatiously what you had, you wore silks and furs and jewels and the best horses, they're very keen on their bling, but they're very keen to distribute that across all the warrior groups. Otherwise if the leader takes all the cash, it's not sustainable. So you need to be generating wealth all the time and you've got one shot with conquest.
Share
21:30
But then after that you need to be galvanizing. You need to be encouraging trading to be stimulating.
Share
21:35
And normally if you murder people who come in step one ft inside your lands, they don't want to come back or you kill them
Share
21:41
Phil
have you got any silk shirts?Share
Phil Wang
21:43
Yeah, every single one of mistake.
Share
21:45
I don't know why I bought them. I don't know who I thought I was, I just looked flat out divorced when I put it on. I don't know who I thought I was.
Share
21:54
It feels nice. It does feel nice.
Share
Greg Jenner
21:56
But also there's a hidden advantage that silk is a sort of armor certainly on the battlefield. The remarkable thing about it is incredibly strong and if you are hit by an arrow on the battlefield, you're wearing a silk shirt, the arrow might puncture your body, but the silk shirt doesn't break.
Share
22:11
So you can pull the arrow out by pulling the silk shirt away from your body and it pulls the arrow out from within you without snapping or leaving bigger puncture into this. Rather clever. It's rather good.
Share
Phil Wang
22:21
So, if you're going through a midlife crisis in the Mongol days, you actually stood a better chance of surviving an arrow.
Share
Greg Jenner
22:27
We've talked about
Genghis Khan
as the brilliant strategist, He did have a pretty brutal, ruthless streak in him. So the final part of the story for Genghis Khan
Peter is that he feels betrayed by the jar and the Jin, he feels like the people back in china that he sort of left behind, you know, they're not toeing the line.Share
22:44
So he returns to
china
to be much more brutal this time. And he wipes out entire towns, entire villages, entire cities in total.Share
22:53
Genghis Khan
is said to have wiped out 40 million people during his career. Which is so extraordinary that scientists have posited a theory that global warming slowed down by 700 million tons of carbon during his reign. So he was an eco friendly mass murderer,Share
Phil Wang
23:14
Basically, he is
Greta Thunberg
.Share
Greg Jenner
23:17
I think his tactics were slightly different to
Greta
Share
Phil Wang
23:19
For Now,
Share
Greg Jenner
23:21
I doubt she's going to wipe out 40 million. She seems very nice.
Share
Peter Frankopan
23:24
So, these numbers are 40 million. Okay, I think we, as historians need to be slightly boring about that because high approximations, they're all to do with how people typically on the losing side of writing much later would say, or 1.75 million skulls were built up in pyramids and that's a sort of cipher to say just a lot.
Share
23:41
And so I think we can, we need to be, I think cautious about putting numbers on it. And even with the climate element, the depopulation of
Asia
is much more dramatic because of disease rather than because of mass murder. Even with the climate, the change to ecosystems, it's not absolutely clear that that's all to do with the fact that fewer people are around to till the fields.Share
24:04
They're all sorts of reasons why carbon dioxide levels change and adjust so we can correlate some of these things, but doesn't mean there's causation,
Share
Greg Jenner
24:11
You sound like his lawyer.
Share
24:12
So in the end,
Genghis Khan
becomes a cropper in 1227. That's when he dies. And it's a pretty boring death. He's old, he falls off his horse and that is the end of him. But it's not the end of the Mongol Empire
, his son, his descendants carry it on and grow it. Is that because he'd put in place all of these protocols or this system, everything was able to carry on with him.Share
Peter Frankopan
24:33
I think it's partly to do with the great man theory that we focus on an individual rather than the underlying the way in which this success takes place. It's not just about one particularly charismatic figure changes.
Genghis Khan
was obviously hugely determined, impervious to criticism and had a bad temper.Share
24:50
But on the other hand, the structures that were put in place, We're very enduring and they lasted for many, many centuries.
Share
Greg Jenner
24:56
The Mongol army is extraordinarily adaptable. It's brilliant. They're like a kind of murderous jazz band in that they can improvise, but they're also incredibly well trained, they know what they're doing and they also Peter in terms of their army organization, bit like the romans, they have decimal style, 10 men, 100 men, 1000 men, 10,000 men.
Share
25:14
But his legacy as a conqueror as a a wiper outer of peoples of cities, of towns. There is something in that isn't there
Share
Peter Frankopan
25:21
Empires are built on persecution or violence. We look at the
British Empire
and transatlantic slavery, extermination of indigenous populations in north America. You look at the Spanish and Portuguese, this is how things work.Share
Greg Jenner
25:34
One of the facts I find fascinating is
Genghis Khan
in his 25 year career added more land to his empire than the Romans did in four centuries.Share
25:42
The nuanced window
Share
Greg Jenner
25:48
This leads us onto the bit of the show that I love the most which is the nuance window.
Share
25:51
This is where our expert historian can geek out for two genius minutes
Phil
and I basically go quiet and we have a little lesson and Peter
, we've already heard so much interesting stuff. But what is it that you'd like to nuance for us.Share
Peter Frankopan
26:03
Well first I think that it's important in this in the 21st century that we think about the whole of the world rather than our little corner of europe. Historians are making great strides right now in thinking about interconnected histories. But I think that Mongol imprint has been highly negative all around the world.
Share
26:18
So in
China
right now, which is founded by the Mongols is one that's seen as a race of outsiders that come in and Iran
, likewise, the Mongols are seen as being disastrous in Russia
to what I suppose it's striking is that the Mongols don't get judged with the same yardstick. So they are seen by us all to be significantly worse and by far the most brutal, bloody and whatever.Share
26:38
And it somehow because the Brits we ended up playing cricket and having good sense of humour and recording podcast like this, that that's somehow different. But you know, those legacies that we talked about I think are really important with the Mongols, about how to give some kind of rehabilitation without playing down or denying the scale of violence.
Share
26:56
But that is no different to how empires always get built. And I think it's time to be more open minded about how we think about how the Mongols work as an empire compared to how other empires work and to not just be looking at the gory and the dramatic and the awful things that happened.
Share
27:12
It's about I think trying to be more inclusive in how we think about things and above all to be not surprised our ancestors, even the ones we painted very bad. Like we're actually doing things sometimes better than we are today?
Share
Greg Jenner
27:23
Thank you so much Peter? I mean what I'm learning from this is that we probably judge the Mongols more kindly have they picked up cricket?
Share
27:30
Well, I'm afraid that's it for today. A huge thank you again to our guests in history corner, the magnificent
Professor Peter Frankopan
, from the University of Oxford
and in comedy corner, the sensational Phil Wang
and to you, lovely listener will be back soon to conquer a new historical era with two different warriors by our sides. But for now I'm off to place a fire extinguisher by the cat flap. Bye.Share
27:56
Just before you go. If you want to hear more history about fearsome warriors, why not check out, You're Dead To Me, feed for episodes on
Saladin
Boudicca
or granular O'malley, the irish pirate queen. Or if you Fancy a deeper dive into the Mongol Empire
.Share
28:10
Check out the, in our time episode on
Genghis Khan
or Genghis Khan
, whatever we're gonna call him all of that can be found on the BBC Sounds
app.Share
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Greg Jenner
Peter Frankopan
Phil Wang