The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us

IIn September, Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church ever to visit Mongolia. It must have been a humbling stopover. The country has fewer than fifteen hundred Catholics. The welcoming ceremony, in Ulaanbaatar’s main square, attracted a few hundred spectators—a crowd less than a thousandth the size of one that had gathered to see him in Lisbon a month earlier. One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event.

Not everyone understood why the Pontiff was there. A caterer at a banquet for the Vatican entourage asked a Times reporter, “What are Catholics again?” But the Pope came prepared. Speaking to diplomats, cultural leaders, and the Mongolian President, he celebrated the religious freedom protected under the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—“the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.” He also celebrated “the Pax Mongolica,” the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia, citing its “absence of conflicts” and respect “of international laws.”

Many earlier Christians would have been staggered by Francis’s words. The first recorded mention of the Mongols in Western Europe is from a Benedictine monk who, in 1240, recorded testimony that the Mongols were “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan . . . thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings.” Five years later, Pope Innocent IV sent Güyük Khan, the third leader of the Mongol Empire, a letter expressing “our amazement” that the Mongols “have invaded many countries belonging to both Christians and to others and are laying them waste in a horrible desolation.”

Muslims, too, saw the Mongols as bloodthirsty savages. When Hulagu Khan stormed Baghdad, in 1258, bodies were heaped on the streets; drains reportedly ran red in the heart of Muslim civilization, while Baghdad’s great library, the House of Wisdom, burned. For many historians, the sacking marked the end of five centuries of cultural and scientific flourishing—the Islamic Golden Age. In November, 2002, Osama bin Laden claimed that George H. W. Bush’s Administration had been more destructive than “Hulagu of the Mongols.” Months later, in the run-up to the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein referred to the United States and its allies as “the Mongols of this age.”

The image of Mongols as brutes outlasted their conquests. In a Voltaire play, they appear as “wild sons of rapine” who set out to “make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.” Today, the name of the empire’s founder remains so tied to tyranny and fanaticism that it’s become a cliché to describe politicians as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.” In Russia and Eastern Europe, the “Mongol-Tatar yoke” denotes not just the period of Mongol rule but also other forms of despotism; days after Francis’s comments, the Ukrainian political consultant Aleksandr Kharebin used the phrase to describe Putin’s Russia.

But Pope Francis was far from alone in challenging the old tropes. “We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueller.

The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.

The Eurasian steppe is a vast curtain of grassland that stretches from Hungary to Manchuria. Its size is almost impossible to fathom: a vista of green and tan whose termini are farther from each other than Anchorage is from Miami or Cairo is from Johannesburg. Its historical significance derives from a curious quadruped that has lived there for roughly a hundred thousand years: the horse. Long-legged, with powerful lungs, elastic tendons, and a gut capable of digesting tough grass, the creature thrives on the open steppe. Horses were well equipped to weather the Ice Age, their hard hoofs able to break through snow and ice to expose grasses underneath.

“The horse has been the most efficient and enduring means of transport humans have ever used,” Sattin, a British journalist, writes in “Nomads,” “and the ability to ride a horse transformed life on earth, perhaps nowhere more so than on the steppe.” Horses were bred in captivity on the western steppe at least five thousand years ago. The wheel was invented around the same time, and the two innovations, combined, allowed nomadic pastoralism to flourish.

The people of the Yamnaya culture were the first to take advantage of the new technologies and dominate much of the steppe. Starting north of the Black Sea about 3000 B.C., they used horses and wheeled carts to traverse astounding distances; geneticists have found second cousins buried almost nine hundred miles away from each other. They and their descendants also spilled into Europe, India, the Near East, and western China, as Harl, a professor emeritus of history at Tulane, recounts at the beginning of “Empires of the Steppes.” The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali. (Today, more than three billion people speak an Indo-European language.) Roughly seventy per cent of us have some Yamnaya ancestry in our DNA. More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies.