EDWARD VAJDA: This
is not a classroom. This is a tent. This is not a document camera. This is a fire, and in
the flickering flames today you're going to
hear about someone who's made more impact
on world history than anyone else in
the last 1,000 years. And I'm not an
overworked professor. I'm a clan elder, and
it is my privilege to relate these stories
from the past to you today. And when-- we need to talk
about the achievements of one individual here. We're going to
talk about someone who, from complete obscurity
and against all odds, rose up to make the largest
empire ever in history. We're also going to
talk about somebody who really
single-handedly changed the medieval world into what
became now the modern world. One person did all
of those things, and I'm going to tell
you about that today. But we have to go pretty far
back into history to start. We have to go about 800
years back, first of all. If we went back that far in
history, what we would find is that there wasn't
one international world. There were many
separate worlds in what we call the world today. There were the
European countries, the largest and most
prosperous of which was Russia at that time. They had very little
idea of anything on the other side of Eurasia. There is extremely
populous, wealthy China, who had very little connection,
if any, with Europe. So inventions in
China stayed in China. Innovations in Europe
stayed in Europe. There was also the Middle East,
and except for the Crusades, this kind of crazy connection
that had happened in the Middle Ages, there was really no
connection of significance with the countries
of the Middle East, with their innovations in
geometry and in other sciences, with the metallurgy of Europe
or with the chemistry of China. None of these things
were connected. That's what the Middle Ages is. It's a time when we had
several worlds, not one single, international world. How did the situation
get to be the way that it was 800 years ago? We have to go back an
even further 800 years. And if we do that, we'll
find that the world consisted of farming peoples like
the Romans, the Chinese, peoples of South Asia
who had been in-- their ancestors had been
there for many, many thousands of years, and it became
fairly thickly populated. But the food-producing
peoples of the world who moved on to this
interior area of Eurasia, they abandoned
growing and planting and simply relied on their
herds of animals, which they moved around
with all year around, and they became
the pastoralists. This happened
later than farming. And pastoralists and farmers
were basically enemies. Their lifestyles clashed. We see it in the
Genesis of the Bible. Cain and Abel. Pastoralist and the farmer. This was how history was
for thousands of years. And during this
time of history, it was almost always
the pastoralists who won against the farmers. They had the better weapons. They had horses. They had mobility. And they had a lifestyle, since
they moved around all year round anyway with animals
and could survive out in the open and out
in the wild, there was no difference between
peace and war for them. Their mobile lifestyle was the
same as a military campaign, even in peace. And so the farmers could
not compete with that. The main reason why the
pastoralists didn't always take over the farmers
is because there was one flaw in
pastoral lifestyle-- the patriarchal clans on the
steppes, the short grasslands, were always fighting
with each other. They wanted grassland. They wanted tribute, and
no one could unite them. Only in a few
instances in history did we have a strong man
enough on the steppes that was able to unite a large
enough portion of the steppes that they made a major impact
on the farming societies, because they were fighting with
the farmers and not each other. That happened 2 and 1/2 thousand
years ago in North China when a people called the
Xiongnu, who were immortalized in Walt Disney's movie-- what was that movie? AUDIENCE: Mulan. EDWARD VAJDA: Mulan. They were incorrectly
called the Huns. Were united under a
man named Muldoon, and he inspired the connecting
with the Great Wall of China. He was that powerful. Then later, we had
a Western group called the Huns who rose up. Maybe they're the same people of
the Xiongnu, but we don't know. And under their
charismatic leader, Atilla, several
hundred years later, they made such an impact
in European history that they precipitated the
collapse of the Roman Empire. They ended the ancient world
and began the medieval world. And in the vacuum that created
once the Huns were collapsed, there was another
group who rose up. Well, actually, there were
two groups who rose up, the Turks and the Mongols. The Mongols in the east and
the Turks in the center. The Turks won out over
the Mongols in the 500s, and they conquered almost
all of the steppes. And the steppes became populated
mostly with Turkic peoples. There over three different
Turkic languages today. Over 30 different Turkic
nationalities, 60, 70 million Turkic people. And that is the way that the
steppes progressed since 500s all through the Middle Ages. And the Mongols, the
ancestors of the people we're really going to
be talking about today, who I'm representing
here by this campfire and whose felt skins you are
all sitting on to listen to, and I'm grateful
for the attention, just like I'm grateful
for this mountain out here that's
giving us strength, which you think is great
Haggard Hall, but it is not. It is northern
Mongolia Mountain. The Mongols were
pushed into the forest. They were marginalized. It looked like their
history was mostly over. It was the Turks that were in
charge of all of this stuff. So 800 years pass
since these times. And things didn't look like
they would ever change. The Turks were still the
majority people on the steppe. Not only that, we had
strong civilizations of farmers rising up and
Christianization from Europe was spreading onto the
steppes from Russia. Muslim civilization was
spreading into Central Asia. Turks were becoming Christians,
were becoming Muslims. It looked even like the
steppe nomad lifestyle was starting to disappear and
get absorbed into the farming lifestyle. No one would have ever
suspected that all this was going to completely change. No one would have ever
suspected that the people who were in Russia at
this time, looking over their vast, wealthy
farms, or in China in the cities over
a million people, that in a couple of
generations, all of these people would be conquered by the
same conquerors, people who had been marginalized
completely until very recently. And when I put this
picture up here, it is very interesting--
one thing on it must really strike your eye. There's one little detail
of this that must really really strike your eye. There's no portraits
of Chinggis Khan that were done during his lifetime,
so don't try to look and see if he looks like himself. There's something
that if I were you, I'd be really concerned about. I said that-- I alluded to the fact
that this is the most-- in the world history in
the last 1,000 years. I think in the New York Times a
number of the most significant 100 people in the year 2000-- I think he even
beat out Madonna. Slightly, but did. But there's something
really interesting here. There's not even-- for sure
known when he was born. This tells you that this
is not a person who's born into some great wealth,
into some great power. This is someone who's born
in utter obscurity, who almost certainly
would have, could have remained in that obscurity. And yet completely, he came out
of it and changed the world. So let's go 800 years
ago, back to the East Asia during this period of time. We think Chinggis
Khan was born in 1162. He may have been born in 1167. The situation that
existed at that time was that all the western
and central steppes and taken over by the Turks. They were the large people. They were the big movers
and shakers on the steppes, and they had been for several
hundred years prior to that. Islam was moving
onto the steppes. Russian Christianity was
also moving onto the steppes. In the east, we have the
remnant Mongol tribes who've been pushed into the
forest, or the forest steppes, by the Turks when they
built their great empire in the 500s A.D. One of
these tribes was the Mongols. They were the most
pushed-away tribe. There were also
tribe called Merkit. Khereid. Another tribe called Tatar. All of these spoke
dialects of the language that we today call
Mongol, which is quite different than
Turkic language, although some people think
they came from a common origin. When this young man was born
into Mongol tribe in the 1160s, his name was Temujin. Later did he acquire
the title Chinggis Khan. He was born into a
tribe that was fighting with all the other
tribes around them, and had been doing so
for hundreds of years. And China itself was divided
into three very wealthy, large countries during
this period of time. The most wealthy part of
China was the southern part, the Song Dynasty
with its capital, Hangzhou, which had
over a million people. The North had been overrun
by Manchurian peoples, and this was the very powerful
Jin Dynasty, who took tribute from some of the
Mongol-speaking tribes on the steppes, who
fought and encouraged them to fight with each other,
steal women from each other, to steal horses from each other. Then there was the
kingdom of Xi Xia. The Tangutsu may have been
related to the modern Tibetans. We don't know. There are a lot we
don't know about them, and I'll explain
a little bit later in the lecture
why we don't know. So this was the
situation that existed. When in this tribe,
a man named Yesugei, who is a clan chieftain in the
Mongol tribe, killed a Tatar and returned home and
took the Tatar's name that he killed and gave it
to his newborn son, Temujin. And the son grew up. But the interesting
thing with his son is that his mother had been
kidnapped from another tribe. So the Merkit tribe was also
at war with the Mongols, just like the Tatars were. And this was the situation
that existed during the time that Temujin was growing up. Moving around with
animals on the steppe, in constant danger of
being attacked or ambushed by enemies on all
sides, having to be ready to flee into the forest
at any time to save your life. The father didn't get along with
the son for whatever reason. Temujin and his father
didn't seem to get along, and his father tried
to marry him off early, and got him betrothed
to a girl when he was about nine years
old in another tribe. And things looked like they
were going to go pretty well, but then disaster struck, as
it always did on the steppe after a certain
small period of time. And some Tatars recognized
Temujin's father, Yesugei, as someone who had killed their
kinsman, and they poisoned him. He was poisoned. And that meant that Temujin
and his mother and his younger siblings were all
left on the steppe without anyone to fend
for them and defend them, and they had to go
back up into the forest and survive by hunting animals. And the mother of
Temujin, Hoelun, succeeded in getting
the family to survive at this period of time. But it was very
frustrating for this boy because he was surrounded by
peoples who were constantly preying on his group and
who were possibly going to enslave them at any point. And this indeed is what
happened to Temujin. A period of time he
survived as being enslaved by another group. And this ended when he
escaped from that enslavement. He went back to find
the girl that he'd been betrothed to a
number of years earlier, and he actually succeeded
in getting married to her. She was still there
waiting for him. Borte. And so Temujin and Borte
get ready to have family, and everything looked like
it's going to be wonderful. But what always
happens when things are going well on the steppes? The weather changes. And if you go to the
lecture this afternoon you'll find out how weather
can destroy all the animals in a very short period of time. Something called
the [NON-ENGLISH]. But people can be destructive
as [NON-ENGLISH] on the steppe. And what happened is
some of the Merkits who saw that Temujin
is married now, they remember that Temujin's
father stole Temujin's mother from them a generation earlier. It was like
Hatfields and McCoys. So they decide they're
going to steal his wife. So they steal Borte
and take her back. Temujin has to make a decision. Does he just give up
and find another wife, or does he get some
kinds of reinforcements and do something
really unusual, go out and attack against this
tribe who has raided him to get back his wife? And he decides that's
what he's going to do. He goes to the clan
of the Khereid people, who had been an
ally of his father, and he offers to become like
the son of the clan leader, of Khereids-- the
khan of Khereids. And so-- Ong Khan. And so together with him
and other of the Mongols, they make a surprise
attack on the Khereids and they get his wife back. OK? So this is the beginning of
Temujin having his family group and having an alliance
with Khereids. But Temujin very
much dislikes how things are going
among the Mongols, because always, the
steppe nomads are fighting with each other. They're killing each
other, and there's no way that someone on the
steppe can feel secure. And everyone's very poor
because people are constantly stealing from each other. So he wants to change that. And he also wants to get revenge
on the people who enslaved him. And so he gathers
together his followers, and he's a very talented
military leader, it turns out. And he attacks this clan
who had enslaved him. And usually, when a
steppe nomad group attacks another steppe nomad
group, they just steal things, and the other group mostly
runs away to fight another day. Temujin decides he wants
to make permanent changes on the steppes. So when he captures
another group, he organizes his followers
so that they do not take any loot until all
the group has been defeated and has been surrendered. And then he takes and he
kills all the adult males who's taller than the
wagon wheel spoke center. And then he incorporates
the rest of them, not as slaves, into his own
group, but as equal members, even adopting some
into his family. So he starts causing
different steppe nomad groups to disappear as
ethnicities and to become part of his Mongol ethnicity,
not as subservient, but as equal members. Just like the 50 states. Each state is inducted
in the same equality as the last state who was there. And this is why there's not
been so many civil wars as there could have been in the
United States, probably. So Temujin gradually builds
up his people like this. Another thing he
does is he makes sure that all of the booty that is
taken from raiding and success at work is distributed
equally to everybody, not just the ones who did the
fighting get it and go away. Because he remembers his family
was left destitute when they-- when the warrior was killed
at the head of the family. So he makes social welfare
system for everyone. And soon all the people,
they're very much loyal to him. And they're not loyal to
the old clan chiefs who are in the lineages that
are old aristocracies, because they don't-- their
people quite as well as that. They don't give everyone equal. And so by 1204,
Temujin has succeeded in defeating all the other
local Mongol tribes here. He even defeats
the Merkits again, and he defeats
even the Khereids. And he defeats the
Tatars as well, and incorporates all these
peoples into his group, so that by 1206, almost
exactly 800 years ago, he has succeeded
in doing something no one's done before with the
Mongols for several hundred years-- uniting them
all into one people. And this is a tribe, it
is a people, it's an army, all together, all of those
things at the same time. And they recognize him as
their universal leader, and in that year, 1206,
give him the title Chinggis Khan, which maybe means a world
leader or universal leader. He becomes the
leader of [INAUDIBLE] And he begins to expand. He even takes over some of the
Turkic peoples in the West. And so for the first
time ever on the steppes, there's peace, in hundreds
and hundreds of years. But there's no trade
goods coming in, because the trade goods
were brought by stealing, and no one's doing that anymore. So Chinggis Khan
leads his people and he hits up the
Xi Xia for tribute. And he defeats their king
and he makes the Xi Xia begin to pay tribute to them. And that is the beginning
of the steppe nomad empire of Chinggis Khan having
effect on non-Mongol peoples, on non-Turkic peoples
off of the Steppes. So the Xi Xia promise him
tribute and also promise to give him men if
he goes into war. The Uyghers hear about this--
this is an ancient Turkic group that's been there for a
very long period of time-- and they decide that they
think this person really is going somewhere. Chinggis Khan. And so even though Chinggis Khan
doesn't even know they exist, even though Chinggis
Khan doesn't even go against them in war,
they send a delegation to his tent in the
northern Mongol steppes, and they surrender to him. They introduce themselves
and tell where they live, and then they surrender to him. That's pretty good. And another thing the
Uyghers give is an alphabet. They give a writing
system to the Mongols. And the reason why
we know so much about the early
life of Temujin is that it is written down within
a generation of his life. It's written down, this
beautiful, vertical script, the Secret History
of the Mongols. And we know a lot
about his early life. And a lot of the things
in it are corroborated by other sources, and
so it seems like it's a very reliable document. So the Mongols are
extending their domination to this wealthy kingdom
that gives them trade goods, and the Uyghers give them
administrative ability and writing system. But the big power on the
block is the Jin Dynasty ruled by Manchurian
tribes called the Jurchen. And the Jin Dynasty
does not like what's going on the steppes. The Jin Dynasty does
not like that at all of these tribes that used
to sometimes pay tribute to their king is now united
under this new leader. And so they send a delegation
to demand that Chinggis Khan pay tribute and homage
to their golden khan back in what is
now northern China. He doesn't want to do it. He refuses. And a war ensues. And this is the first major
war between the steppe nomads in the east under Chinggis
Khan and the sedentary peoples that are ruled in northern China
by peoples from Manchuria, who originally were horsemen. But the Mongol horsemen
defeat the Jin horsemen on the steppes, and then
they wear down each city and conquer it. Slaughter its inhabitants. And all of North China
falls to the Mongols, eventually, with
enormous amount of wealth coming into the Mongol tribes. All of this happens. And the Mongols
also wind up taking control of an empire here,
the Qara Khitai empire, which is ruled by descendants of
some other Mongols who used to be ruling in northern China. They are taken over. The man who's in
charge of that empire is actually an historian
Christian, the Qara Khitai, who's persecuting the
Muslims that are there. And when Chinggis Khan
takes this area over, he decrees that there will
be freedom of religion. This was unheard of in the
medieval world, freedom of religion. He says that everyone
just pay their taxes and they can worship
as they please. And so this is a very
innovative, modern idea that people in mosques
and different kinds of Christian churches can
all coexist without fighting with each other. This is the way the
Mongols are going to rule as they expand their empire. Now already by this
time, Chinggis Khan, he's getting to be up there. He's in his late 50s, you know. There's no TIAA-CREF for
retiring nomadic conquerors. So he's probably
thinking of his future. And so maybe we don't know
what he had in his mind, but it looks like
he was thinking that he would become in charge
of the trade routes that go from China to Central Asia. Central Asia's a fabulously
wealthy place filled with Persian speakers and
Turkic soldiers, and at that time was ruled by a Turk
Muslim whose name was-- whose title was Khwarezm Shah. Mohammed II. OK. And so the Mongols sent a
delegation to the Khwarezm Shah and proposed that
trade be enacted, that the Mongols of
course would control, and this would be
like their retirement. It would be like their 401(k)
this controlling the trade route between these
two wealthiest countries in the world. But the foolish
governor of the province that's in the northernmost
part of Khwarezm empire, he actually decides to rob
the Mongol ambassadors, and even he killed
a few of them. And this precipitates a war. Chinggis Khan one
takes one whole year to get himself ready
for a war of revenge. This is the worst thing that
you can do is show disloyalty and treachery. Even when Chinggis Khan has
defeated one of his enemies, if somebody betrayed the enemy's
king, he didn't like that. He didn't like treachery. So this is the worst
thing that could happen. And he gathers all
the Mongol groups and all the felt tent
warriors he can find, and he puts them
together in a year to go against the
Khwarezm empire in a war of annihilation
and revenge. And he goes to the Xi Xia, who
many years before had promised men if they would come to if
they had-- to produce men, just like in war of the rings-- Lord of the Rings, the
ones that were supposed to give the men and
they didn't do it, and they became those skeletons. Well, same thing's
going to happen here, because the king of
Xi Xia very arrogantly says to Chinggis Khan,
before the campaign against the Khwarezm in Central
Asia, well if you're the-- if you're so powerful,
you don't need my men. And if you're not that powerful,
you're not going to get them. So he's very rude. Chinggis Khan didn't want to
fight against him right away. He's always careful. And so he says like
Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'll be back up to Central Asia. So he goes with five big
armies into Khwarezm empire and he began to fight
against Khwarezm empire. The armies go along
the whole border, and they keep going
back and forth and attacking at different spots
so the Khwarezm shah doesn't know where to
concentrate his forces. And he gets all disorganized. Nomads can move around a
lot easier than farmers, so if they do this
hit-and-miss type of fighting, it really is very effective
against the farming frontier. Meanwhile, Chinggis Khan
takes his largest army and he goes deep into the
desert, to the Kyzylkum desert. Red sands desert. And he disappears
for a few months. No one knows where he is. And all of a sudden, he goes-- because he has befriended some
of the nomads in this area, he comes 1,000 miles
around and gets behind enemy lines entirely, and
shows up one bright day right at the foot of one of the
greatest cities in the Khwarezm shah empire, 1,000 miles
away from the frontier where the war was
supposed to be going on. This place is called Bukhara. It's one of the jewels,
ancient farming city. Oasis city. Beautiful center
of Muslim learning. And he besieges Bukhara,
and he reduces it. He conquers it, and he
has almost all the people of Bukhara slaughtered
underneath this huge minaret which is still to be
seen today, the minaret. And he-- one out of 100, he
sends off to the other cities to tell what happened and what's
going to happen to them if they don't immediately surrender. The Mongols have a custom that
if you surrender right away without fighting, you're fine. If you surrender after fighting,
you're in deep trouble, because even if you surrender,
you're going to be punished. So one by one, the cities
of the Khwarezm empire fall, the armies begin to desert,
and the Khwarezm shah ruler runs away and hides on an
island in the Caspian Sea, and he drops dead of exhaustion. Meanwhile, the Mongols,
destroying one city after another, they go
out hunting for him. Don't know that he's died. They go all the way
around the Caspian Sea, go through the countries
of Armenia, Georgia. Conquer these countries,
and then they come out in the steppes of Europe. No known steppe nomads
have come out of Asia into these steppes for a
very long period of time. And he meets the Turks
there and defeats them, and then he meets a
combined army of the Turks and the Russians-- the Russians
are there at this time-- and defeats them as well. And this is just a taste
of what's going to happen. This wasn't Chinggis Khan
that was leading this. It was his great
general, Subutai. Subutai defeats everyone
in this entire area and then goes back
to the main war. But by that time, the
time he gets back, everything's already finished. There's been a
tremendous destruction of most of the cities
of Central Asia, and cities that have
been there sometimes for 10,000 years laid waste. The population is slaughtered. No one even knows how
many millions of people have been killed, but the
whole place is just decimated. And Chinggis Khan, he gets
tired of this campaign. And so he organizes his men in
the largest hunt that has ever been in world history
in the surrounding area about the size
of Great Britain just to kind of loosen up
from all that war, and then they hunt all
the animals in this area. And then they go back home. And then they have a score to
settle with the Xi Xia king. And they begin to attack,
to punish the Xi Xia king. This is in 1226, 1227. Unfortunately, Chinggis
Khan, who is out hunting, runs into some wild horses. And the wild horses
spook his horse, and the greatest nomad conqueror
in history falls off his horse and gets internal injuries,
which in a few weeks, kill him. So then August 1227, he dies. And the Mongol soldiers
are so angry that when they defeat the
Xi Xia, they kill everyone in the whole country. They destroy everything. We don't even know what
language they spoke. Everything is destroyed. And this normally would be
the end of the Mongol Empire. When Muldoon died,
everything fell apart. When Atilla died,
everything fell apart. Even when the great
Turk kakhans died, things fell apart, because
one person who has charisma needs to be the one
to organize all this. Chinggis Khan has done
something on the steppe that no one had done before him. He not only got all the
organization of everyone on the steppe that he defeated,
but he also completely changed the ethnicity and
the nationality by mixing the tribes
together into one huge army. So there weren't any
more Merkids or Khereids or Naimans or Tatars. There were just Mongols. Mongols are later going to
get called Tatars in the West, but there's just
this one huge nation. Nobody had made a huge
nation on the steppe. So even when Chinggis Khan dies,
that nation is still there. And his sons and his grandsons
succeed in taking it over. And so Chinggis
Khan has four sons. And one of them, the second
one-- third one, sorry-- winds up being the-- elected the great Khan. And here he is. Ogedei. Ogedei. Ogedei was his name. And he has inherited this
vast area, four times the size of the Roman Empire
and even larger than what Alexander conquered. All of this area,
the Mongol tribes have succeeded
under Chinggis Khan in conquering this
enormous area, and now it has to be governed. Ogedei decides that he's
going to have to build a city. He's going to do something
no Mongol has done. And he builds the city
right in the center called Black Walls, Karakorum. Kharkhorin in modern Mongolia. And here is the actual walls-- well, actually, this
is a Buddhist monastery that's on the site of it today. So the Mongols have this vast
city and Ogedei is in charge. And he asserts his authority. He puts down rebellions
in northern China, and then the Mongols have
another big get-together, like a caucus. You know how we have caucuses? The Mongols have a big caucus
which is called Kurultai. And the last time they had
this, they elected Temujin as the great khan. Now they elected
Ogedei as great khan, but they have to
decide something else. What are they going to
do with themselves now? They want to go to war
against somebody else. And so there are two
parties of Mongols, and they don't know what
they are going to do. One party of
Mongols decides they want to fight against
Russia and Europe. The ones that went around
on that big journey, they liked all the grass there. They want to go-- plus, Chinggis Khan bequeathed
to his eldest son's family all of Russia and Europe
without knowing how far it was. Seems like it'd be a
good idea to conquer it. So half of the Mongols wanted
to go in that direction. The other half says no. China is the big prize. Great cities, huge amount
of wealth, and so half of the Mongols want to
go conquer China in 1235. They have this big powwow and
they can't decide what to do. So they make a compromise. They'll conquer
both simultaneously. So they send two vast armies,
one going into Russia-- and this army is the largest
army that has probably ever been fielded in history before,
something upwards to 200,000 of the best troops and also
engineers from Central Asia and from northern
China, siege engineers-- and this army comes
in 1236, 1237. It comes across the Volga
River in the wintertime when it's frozen. They put bags of dirt
on the ice so the horses could walk across. That's their bridge. Russia had never been
conquered before. Russia was a country longer
than the United States is today a country, over 250 years, and
never been conquered by anyone. There was just skirmishes
by the Turkic steppe nomads against the Russians. They had no idea
that they would ever be conquered by anyone
in their history, any more than we would have the
idea that the United States be conquered. The Mongols come
in with this army. The Russians have no clue what
is emerging out of the east onto their steppe lands. And one by one, the Mongols
destroy each Russian city. They surround it, they
starve it, they bombard it, and then they slaughter
the inhabitants. And in the next
four years, almost every single Russian city
is destroyed by the Mongols. It's the same, almost
like nuclear war. The last city to fall is one of
the greatest Christian cities in Europe, Kiev, that is
rumored to have 40 churches-- 40 times 40 churches in
some of the manuscripts. This was a great
center of Christianity. It refuses to submit
to the Mongols, and it is also hammered-- open
the city and it is destroyed. And even five years after
the Mongols conquered, people who have-- are emissaries on
the Mongol trade routes on the steppes
report that no one lives there anymore, and
the whole plain is covered with human remains,
as far as the eye can see, from the aftermath of
the Mongol conquest. So all of Russia's laid
waste, but that's not really what the Mongols came for. What instead they came
for is to go farther on. There's grasslands farther on. So after destroying Russia,
they move into Europe, and part of them go up
to Poland and Germany and defeat the Poles. And then gathered-- huge
forces gathered in the north, who are all of-- the Knights Templars,
the Hospitallers, the Teutonic
Knights who've never been defeated in the north, they
all took twice as many of them to fight with the Mongols. But the Mongols have
their heavy cavalry. They have arrows that
can shoot farther than the European arrows. They are much faster
and more maneuverable. So they set up a
smoke screen and they get the Europeans to string
out, and they surround them, and they destroy them
like it's a fox hunt. And at the end of
the battle, they destroy the entire
northern European army that was originally
twice as large as them, and at the end of the
day, they have someone to count all the bodies. They cut off the left
ear of each corpse, and nine huge sacks are
filled by the end of the day. Meanwhile, the southern
army has gone into Hungary. Hungary is not a little
country back then. Hungary is this huge country
that has a warlike tradition, because the
Hungarians themselves came from steppe nomads. They have the best
cavalry in Europe, and they have a really
good king, Bela IV, and this king is ready to
fight with the Mongols. He has the best
army, over 60,000. Mongols again are
outnumbered, the group that has come to the south. And so the Mongols
are hesitant to get into the fight with Bela. But Bela has problems
himself, because his nobles won't support him. And the nobles get
in a fight with some of the Turkic steppe nomads who
had gone to Hungary to run away from the Mongols,
and who Bela wanted to use as auxiliaries
against the Mongols. They wind up to fighting
with the Hungarians instead and leaving. So the fight starts. Bela's 60,000 fighting
with the Mongols. The Mongols tried
to surround them, but there's not enough Mongols. Then, at that crucial
time, the army of the north that
has just destroyed the Germans and the Poles comes
down and joins the other Mongol force. The Hungarians are
completely destroyed. The whole army is destroyed. The king's brother is killed. King Bela himself is wounded
and he has to flee on a horse, and he hides out in an
island in the ocean. And so already in 1341, we have
Mongols on the edge of Italy. Conquer everything. We have other Mongols fighting
in Korea and in central China. This has never happened
in world history before. The Mongols settle
down for the winter, and they're preparing
an attack on Vienna. They're preparing an
attack into Italy. All of Europe looks
like it's going to fall. There's no great army left after
these ones that were defeated by the initial Mongol invasion. And all of a sudden,
the Europeans look out, and one
day in December 1241, and there are no Mongols there. They're all gone. And the Europeans
talk themselves into thinking that
they'd beat the Mongols. But what really had happened
is that word had reached the Mongols by this
wonderful Pony Express that Ogedei had died,
way back in Karakorum. He was a real big drinker. Drank himself to death. His elder brother,
Chagatai, tried to get him to stop drinking,
convinced him to only drink two cups of alcohol per
day, whereupon Ogedei had made two huge cups out of iron. And so he died. And so all the Mongols have
to go back to Karakorum to decide what to do
about the next great khan. And some of the Mongol
grandsons of Chinggis Khan are fighting against each other. They are not getting along. They all have to go back. So the campaign ends in Europe. The Mongols didn't like
Europe much anyways. Too many trees. And they decided to
just stick with Russia. And during the great arguments
that ensue in the next four or five years,
there are a number of queens who are
ruling the Mongols. And there are no more
major Mongol offensives during this period of time. OK? So what we have now in
1242 is the Mongols still have their capital Karakorum. They've not only conquered
all of the steppes in northern China,
they've also conquered all of Eastern Europe and Russia. Russia remains under the
Mongols for 250 or more years. Finally, in 1246, 1247,
there is a new khan, but he is not getting along
with some of the others. So the Mongols that
take over Russia sort of set themselves up as a kind
of semi-independent group which called the Golden
Tent or the Golden Horde. And this is the one
that is ruling Russia. That group connives with a
group that is in northern China against the great khan, and
when the great khan dies, they get together and decide
that the next great khan is the son of the youngest
son of Chinggis Khan. Not the third son. And Mongke Khan becomes the
great khan in 1250, 1251. And so that is, again, the
next phase of Mongol world war is going to start happening. Mongols weren't able
to conquer all of China during that other war when
they were conquering Russia so successfully. China is a lot
harder nut to crack. And so the next
phase of conquest is going to again be
the rest of China, but this time, the Middle East. The Middle East is
going to be conquered. So one of the grandsons
of Chinggis Khan is sent to the Middle
East with a huge army. And the other grandson,
Kublai, is sent to China to fight against the
southern Chinese. And Hulagu is very successful
in 1256, 1258, in Central Asia. He destroys the remnant
of the caliphate. He besieges Baghdad and
kills the last caliph of Baghdad, which had
been ruling for hundreds and hundreds of years. Baghdad is utterly destroyed. No non-Muslim had ever done
this in history before. And the Mongols conquer all
of the rest of the Middle East here, too. They also conquer
what is today Syria. And things look like
nothing can stop them. They're getting ready
to invade Egypt. They're getting ready to
go down into Saudi Arabia, the heart of the Muslim world. No one has ever devastated
the Muslims like the Mongols. The Crusades, who happened a
couple of centuries earlier, they never got but
a few miles inland. They didn't do even a
fraction of the damage that the Mongols
did to the Muslims. The Mongols almost destroyed
the Muslim world in the 1200s. Crusaders were like a little
mosquito and that was all. So it looks like the Muslim
world is going to end. But then what happens
is the great khan again dies in Mongolia. And he dies on
campaign against China, and when he dies, what happens
is there is no possibility to put them-- to get a new great khan
that everyone agrees with. In 1260, all these things
start coming unraveled. The khan of the
Golden Horde refuses to accept the khan in China,
Kublai, as great khan. And so there's a fight
in China as to who gets to be great khan. Also, the ruler of Golden
Horde gets very angry that they knew
Hulagu in Middle East has taken some of his lands
on the edge of the domain, and he attacks fellow Mongols. This has not happened since
the rise of Chinggis Khan. Mongols have to
send reinforcements against their own brethren
at this period of time. And the force that
they leave to invade Egypt is not strong
enough, is not big enough. And the rulers of
Egypt, in fact, are horsemen from
the steppes who've gone down into Mediterranean,
ancient Turks who are there. They're called the Mamelukes. And for the first
time ever in history, the Mongols are defeated. The Mongols are defeated at a
battle called Ain Jalut, which is exactly at the
spot in the Bible where David is said
to have slain Goliath. The Mongols are defeated
by the Mamelukes, and this is the end of
the united Mongol empire, because Golden
Horde is going to be fighting with
Hulagu, who becomes the other khan, the ilkhan. And in the east,
[? Kublai ?] fights first with one of his
brothers, and then he fights with one of his cousins,
because he wants to make-- he wants to make China into a
new dynasty ruled by Mongols, and not just
conquered by Mongolia. He went to make the
capital in China. And he succeeds in doing that. So instead of one
Mongol Empire, we have several Mongol Empires in
the second half of the 1300s. And yet at the same
time, all of these areas, once some of the
initial wars were over, unite with each other,
at least in trade. And there are trade routes
that go all the way from China and Korea to Hungary, and
you could cross the steppes in two weeks. This is almost incredible. Only in the modern
age did we have so much good transportation. The Mongols invent the
first kind of credit card. First corporate credit card. These kinds of things that
the messengers wear that was made out of gold
or silver or wood. And they allow
someone to go and get free, on the khan's
tab, room and board in each of these little
stops along the way. And so the Pony
Express is invented. The world's largest free
trade center is invented. The world's largest zone
of freedom of religion is invented during
this period of time. And that causes all sorts
of technologies from China to make their way to
Europe in the next century. This is the legacy
of the Mongols. The Mongols bring Chinese
chemistry, Chinese gunpowder, Chinese paper into
Europe, and that mixes with European metallurgy
and eventually leads to printing press,
leads to guns. These are things that
are made possible when the Mongols unite all these
pieces of the medieval world. The Mongols bring chemistry of
Middle East and China together. The beautiful blue that is
made on this top of the mosques is brought to China. It becomes blue willow china. And so Mongols connect and
unite all of these people in the 1300s, in the next
century when they're ruling. And after the Mongols'
era is over, what we have is not the medieval
world anymore. We have a much more united-- getting to be a single world. Getting to be global village
where Mongolian ambassadors are going to be in London. Mongol ambassador was
attending a Christmas service in 1294 in London cathedral. This was almost unheard of. And we have Muslims
coming into Europe. We have Muslims coming
into northern China. We have Marco Polo, who
you've all heard about. That was just the tip of the
iceberg of what happened. And so this one individual
and his sons and grandsons, because of their ability
to unite the steppe nomads and to use them as this one
huge force, a family, an army, was able to make the
largest empire in history. And this empire not only was
the steppe lands, which maybe it was once or twice when
we had charismatic steppe leaders in the past, but
it was also all of Russia, eventually all of China,
eventually much of India and much of the Middle East. All of this was united for the
first and last time ever in one single, huge country. And this is why the modern world
came out of the Middle Ages. This is what jump
started the modern world. And this all is due to one
man who was posthumously granted the title of the emperor
of China by his grandson. And this portrait was
made of Chinggis Khan as the emperor of China, even
though the Mongols didn't succeed in conquering
China until about 50 years after Chinggis Khan
himself had already died. So this is just a little bit
of the history of the Mongols. And I-- usually,
the Mongols are told about in history as
these terrible conquerors and all sorts of bad
things about them, and all those things
are true as well. But the other part of the
history of Mongols that is not usually told, I told today. The spreading of all of this
innovation and technology that wound up being
the modern world. But you can't ignore
the other part that I sloughed over, because
Mongols' conquests were tremendously destructive in
certain parts of the world, and has had a permanent--
much of Central Asia reverted to desert. Afghanistan used to be a
very good farming place. All of the irrigation
was destroyed. Those areas never recovered. Medieval Burma, very
strong central government, was destroyed by the Mongols,
and it never recovered. Russia in some ways-- either
you could say never recovered or it recovered in
a very different way than its history would
have been otherwise, because the new
Moscow khan, or tsar, was very much absolute ruler. Very different than the
rulers before the Mongols. And the history of
Russia was very much changed by the Mongols. So when you want to look at the
legacy of the Mongol conquests, the only thing that
is definitely true, that you can say
from either side, is that you cannot understand
world history without understanding what the
Mongols did, good and bad. And you can't understand
how that happened unless you understand the
details of the life of one single individual,
Chinggis Khan, Temujin, who really should be
looked at as the most influential person in
the last thousand years of human history. Because he did so many things
that were not on the drawing board to be done
in history, that had never been done before
and have not been done since. And really, you have to look
on the beginning of the Mongols as the beginning of
international studies. And that is what I'm
giving this lecture for, the Center for
International Studies. This is the lecture series
for international studies, and it's very fitting that
we are talking about Chinggis Khan in international studies. So thank you for your
attention, and maybe we have a little bit of
time for some questions. I put some more wood
on the fire here. Get it going. [APPLAUSE] There's lots more ways we could
go with all these stories, and I didn't tell
you lots of things. So I have to teach at one,
but I have about eight minutes that I could answer questions
before my next class. Yes, please. AUDIENCE: Are you taking
another group to Mongolia? EDWARD VAJDA: Well, this last
time we didn't take a group, but what-- the idea is if we can get the
Mongol language going here at Western this year and next
year, the following summer we'll be able to take a group
of students over to Mongolia. This is an idea. We're going to start
teaching the Mongol language this wintertime
in the afternoons. Yeah, question, please. AUDIENCE: When they were
starting to the west, were there examples of countries
that surrendered, and-- EDWARD VAJDA: Yeah. The [INAUDIBLE] surrendered,
and some of the Turkic tribes surrendered. And the Turkic
tribes in the west who surrendered and
survived and became part of Chinggis Khan's
army, because they had gotten absorbed into the
Mongols, they get called by this ancient
Mongol tribal term, Tatar, which had nothing to
do with the Turks. And that's why we
call them Tatars. The Turks in the west and
in Russia are called Tatars. When the Europeans
heard this name, it sounded like Greek
word for Hell, [GREEK]. So the Greeks put the R in it,
because these devils horsemen coming to destroy
all of Christianity. And so that's why Europeans
incorrectly say Tartars. And then because these
people were steppe nomads, they had all kinds
of milky sauces, and we get tartar sauce. [LAUGHS] And if you don't
brush the teeth, you're going to get a tartar on your teeth. So see how far the
steppes have penetrated? Yeah. So there were other
groups that surrendered. In fact, if you look at
the map of modern Eurasia, the ones that still are there
are the ones that surrendered. [LAUGHS] The ones
that aren't there are the ones that kept fighting. Yeah, please. AUDIENCE: Are there any
different biographies we have of Chinggis Khan? EDWARD VAJDA: Yeah, they're
different biographies of Chinggis Khan. Some of them focus on
what I was talking about in most of this lecture,
like the biography called Chinggis Khan and the
Making of the Modern World. By the way, the word
Chinggis is in Mongolian. In Persian, it was
called Genghis, and that's what your
English usually got. It's the same name, though. Jack Weatherford, Genghis
Khan and the Making of the Modern World is
a very much presentation like I give here. There's also other stories about
Chinggis Khan that make him out to be this bloodthirsty
monster destroying everything, and they don't tell
about anything else. There are a lot of those. So if you look in
Western's library, which has such a fantastic
collection, and here's our fantastic
librarian here, we have lots of biographies
of Chinggis Khan. Of all sorts. Yeah, please. AUDIENCE: Why was
his father poisoned? EDWARD VAJDA: His father
was poisoned-- why or how? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] EDWARD VAJDA: Oh, the Mongols
poisoned people all the time. Because they didn't want to
get blood of other people on their hands. And it was a lot easier
to sneak and poison than to have to do the
fighting, which they were real good at if they had to. But see, Temujin's
father, Yesugei, he had killed one of the
Tatars, and he took the name of the Tatar for his son. And then the relatives of that
person happened to notice him. And he didn't realize who they
were, and so they poisoned him, and then he got sick and
died on the way home. This was very common
thing that happened. Even one or two of the great
khans may have been poisoned. It is possible. Yeah. AUDIENCE: You were saying that
his mother was [INAUDIBLE] EDWARD VAJDA: She
was the strong one. AUDIENCE: Do we know
any more about her? EDWARD VAJDA: We don't
know as much about her except that she was stolen. She was already
married to somebody, and Yesugei stole her
as his second wife. And Temujin was the
son of the second wife. He's in a subservient position. Father Yesugei already had
a first wife, Sochigel, who already had a son older
than Temujin, who was lording it over him all the time. Temujin got fed up
with it when he was 10, and he killed his older brother. And so we-- the mother, we don't
know as much about as we could, because we don't know
about her childhood, and we just know that she's
very angry at her younger son for killing her stepson,
I guess it would have been. And that also made
Chinggis Khan being able to be hunted and
enslaved by other Mongols, that he killed his own kin. That was the reason-- one of
the reasons he got enslaved. But Mongol women, and not
talking about men all the time, they were the ones that had
really an impact in history. Because during the time
when the khans were who were fighting
with each other, it was the women who
were ruling everything. In the middle of the
1200s, it was the women-- the wives, the daughters--
they're the ones that were calling all the shots. They were the ones that decide
who gets to be the great khan and making the
organization of the empire. So they are really very
important in Mongol history. And they don't fare
very well if they get on the wrong side
of losing civil war. If you read the biography
by Jack Weatherford that talks about these warring
queens, it's got this chapter. Very interesting to read. Hoelun, she's very
important for us. Yeah. Some more questions, maybe? Very good. So I'll open the smoke
hole a little wider here, and then we'll all go out. But I encourage you to read
more about Chinggis Khan. I only scratched a tiny
bit of the surface of what could be told about the
Mongols, and there's lots more to know and learn. So thank you very much. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [APPLAUSE]
Better yet...
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History did a five part series on the Mongols called Wrath of the Khans. Scroll down, you'll see it. I recommend subscribing to the podcast. He doesn't produce often, but it's always epic.