The Moral and Practical Implications of the Mongol Conquests

[pannonian]

426mak, you are getting some facts mixed up. First of all, Tamerlane never claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, just his successor and relative, which was one of the reasons he never called himself 'Khan'. Secondly, by Kublai Khan's death in around 1300, the Mongolian empire fractured into the Changatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate, the Golden Horde, and Yuan China. Yuan China collapsed, but of the remaining parts of the Empire, all were unified under Tamerlane in that very same century. Comparing that very close relationship and very short timeframe (same century) to the link from the Macedonians from 334 BC to centuries (or millenia) later is not intellectually honest.

RE other atrocities in history, like pannonian, you are cherry picking examples (which, for the record, still don't match up to what the Mongols did). There have been massacres throughout history, it's true. But please give another example of another empire which did what the Mongols did to the Khwarezmians alone, ie wiping out multiple entire cities of noncombatants, including women and children, totalling millions of lives. The Roman Empire, as I noted, certainly had the opportunity to do so to all of the lands they conquered, not just Gaul. They did not. Same with the British. Same with Alexander. No one 'stopped' Alexander from massacring the Persians after beating them; he chose not to do so, and in fact honored Sisygambis, the mother-in-law of Darius (his ultimate enemy), as his own mother. No one 'stopped' the British from wiping out the entire population of India; they chose not to do so. Your parallel using serial killers who were stopped holds no water. Not all conquerors are the same. The Mongols were indisputably the worst of an often-bad lot.

If you want to look at cities being wiped out, the Roman were pretty apt at "sacking" cities that resisted. Polybius describes the process, which was to systematically kill everything that moved until the commander told them to stop. Typically the process would then proceed to stripping the city of anything valuable, and selling the inhabitants into slavery. In some cases, such as Carthage, the process would end with a symbolic sowing of salt over the site, that nothing living may stand there again. In one operation, a returning Roman general was told to go by way of Epirus (modern day Albania), and strip the region of its inhabitants to be sold into slavery. 250,000 were enslaved, which was pretty much the entire population of that area. If you go over to the Americas, you have the Aztecs, who went to war for the explicit purpose of carrying off captives to be sacrificed to their gods. Tens of thousands of human sacrifices, which at the population levels dealt with, is as proportionally bad as anything in the Old World. And then you have 20th century Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which surpasses everything else in the scale of what they did (with the exception of what Soviet Russia and Communist China did to their own people). There are quite a few supposedly advanced civilisations that have inflicted brutality in the manner of the Mongols.

[Ren Wo Xing]

If you want to look at cities being wiped out, the Roman were pretty apt at "sacking" cities that resisted. Polybius describes the process, which was to systematically kill everything that moved until the commander told them to stop. Typically the process would then proceed to stripping the city of anything valuable, and selling the inhabitants into slavery. In some cases, such as Carthage, the process would end with a symbolic sowing of salt over the site, that nothing living may stand there again. In one operation, a returning Roman general was told to go by way of Epirus (modern day Albania), and strip the region of its inhabitants to be sold into slavery. 250,000 were enslaved, which was pretty much the entire population of that area. If you go over to the Americas, you have the Aztecs, who went to war for the explicit purpose of carrying off captives to be sacrificed to their gods. Tens of thousands of human sacrifices, which at the population levels dealt with, is as proportionally bad as anything in the Old World. And then you have 20th century Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which surpasses everything else in the scale of what they did (with the exception of what Soviet Russia and Communist China did to their own people). There are quite a few supposedly advanced civilisations that have inflicted brutality in the manner of the Mongols.

@426mak, we aren't debating who did the most conquering, but who was the worst of the conquerors. Almost all Empires rise through conquest, but the Mongol Empire was unique in the amount of devastation and atrocities committed. Alexander's treatment of the Persian royal family (and of the lands he conquered in general) were the treatment of his enemies' family; to compare that to Genghis Khan's treatment of his own family is such a false equivalence.

@pannonian, again, you are cherrypicking and drawing false equivalencies; as I already said, of course there are massacres throughout history.

1) Rome - The only eyewitness account Polybius narrated was that of Rome's sacking of Carthage, which was the end result of three wars spanning a full century that included an invasion of Italy by Hannibal that nearly destroyed the Roman Republic. This can be described as a life-and-death struggle, and the desire to beat an opponent so badly that they would never threaten the Republic again. The sacking of Epirus, similarly, was directly linked to fifty years of on-and-off warfare that initiated with Macedonia's support of Hannibal. To compare this to, say, Genghis Khan's annihilation of the Khwarezmians, where they went from a peace to total annihilation in the space of two years, or to Genghis Khan's supposed order to 50,000 troops to each murder 24 civilians in the city of Urgench (for an admittedly likely inflated total of 1.2 million civilians) is a totally false equivalence. There is a reason that the Mongols are viewed as being far more vicious and bloodthirsty than the Romans.

2) Aztecs - This is grasping at straws. While the Aztecs did practice human sacrifice, as many cultures around the world have, the only numbers for these 'tens of thousands of human sacrifices' come from the Spanish conquistadores, who had a vested interest in making the people they were about to conquer look as bad as possible. Even assuming the dubious Spanish claims of '10,000 sacrifices a year' were accurate, the Aztec Empire alone held roughly 20,000,000 people, excluding all the periphery nations they made war on, making the total percentage of the population they killed/year to roughly be about 0.05%; not even the smallest fraction of what the Mongol Empire did. So no, this is not 'as proportionally bad as anything in the Old World'. Again, this is a false parallel.

3) An estimated 2.5% of the world's population died in WWII, on both sides of the war. Percentagewise, that's half of the kills that were attributed to Tamerlane alone. So no, even Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did not 'surpass' the scale of what the Mongol Empire and its immediate successor state did. And if we dig into the details and compare percentages of deaths in civilian population, especially intentional deaths directly attributed to kills by invading armies as compared to starvation, etc., the Mongol Empire comes out even worse. There is NO civilization, advanced or otherwise, that has inflicted brutality in the scale, the scope, and extent of the Mongol Empire.

[426mak]

[QUOTE=Ren Wo Xing;1072476]@426mak, we aren't debating who did the most conquering, but who was the worst of the conquerors. Almost all Empires rise through conquest, but the Mongol Empire was unique in the amount of devastation and atrocities committed. Alexander's treatment of the Persian royal family (and of the lands he conquered in general) were the treatment of his enemies' family; to compare that to Genghis Khan's treatment of his own family is such a false equivalence.

It was not my desire to do a personality comparison between the two conquers I was just using this as an example that the Mongol founding father was more than just a blood thirsty tyrant, like Alexander could be a benevolent master as well as a soldier.

However I see you have avoided answering my main point

'If they could would Alexander or the Romans had conquered as much territory as Genghis/the Mongols did if they could have at the price of the same horrors?

What we know of Alexander's personality and the Roman psyche suggest that they would. Neither the Romans nor Alexander shied away from committing atrocities if it would achieve their goals, which was only limited to circumstance.

Again your entire argument is based on scale, with the complete neglect of motive, circumstance and ability.

Such an argument can only be sustained if you subscribe to the serial killer A/B hypothesis I mentioned earlier.

If you do agree with said hypothesis there is nothing left to discuss.

[Ren Wo Xing]

It was not my desire to do a personality comparison between the two conquers I was just using this as an example that the Mongol founding father was more than just a blood thirsty tyrant, like Alexander could be a benevolent master as well as a soldier.

However I see you have avoided answering my main point

'If they could would Alexander or the Romans had conquered as much territory as Genghis/the Mongols did if they could have at the price of the same horrors?

What we know of Alexander's personality and the Roman psyche suggest that they would. Neither the Romans nor Alexander shied away from committing atrocities if it would achieve their goals, which was only limited to circumstance.

Again your entire argument is based on scale, with the complete neglect of motive, circumstance and ability.

Such an argument can only be sustained if you subscribe to the serial killer A/B hypothesis I mentioned earlier.

If you do agree with said hypothesis there is nothing left to discuss.

Although Alexander the Great's empire's total landmass was smaller than the Mongol Empire, the total population of his empire, as a percentage of the world population, was greater than the Mongol Empire's. So arguably, he DID control as much of the human world as the Mongols did! The same is true for the Roman Empire as while; both the Macedonian Empire and the Roman Empire controlled roughly 25% of the world's population, and they did so without causing devastation on the size and scale that the Mongolians did.

Now, if you insist on using territory as opposed to population, and insist that I prove "if Alexander was X, he would've been Y", then you are essentially insisting that I prove a counterfactual, which is impossible (and usually a sign that one doesn't have an argument rooted in fact). But I'll play ball. We can extrapolate from what did happen and draw parallels. You are essentially arguing that in order to conquer territory on the scale that the Mongolians did, that atrocities are essentially required. But that is not true, because even in the early stages, when the Mongol Empire was half the size of the Roman Empire or the Macedonian Empire, they had already committed atrocities and slaughters against civilian populations, the likes of which have never been seen in history. The deaths caused by the Mongol campaign against Jin China (the first campaign) have been discussed already. The campaign against the Khwarezmians was the second campaign, and they resulted in essentially the annihilation of an entire civilization's worth of civilians, with entire cities of civilians executed totalling 2-3 million civilian deaths. The campaign against Western Xia was the third major campaign, and it resulted in the genocide of that entire kingdom, another 2-3 million or so civilian deaths.

These were "unnecessary" deaths, at the time of the masascres, the Mongols had already won and conquered those countries! But Genghis Khan was angry at the Khwarezmians for insulting them, and angry at the Western Xia for betraying him, and therefore he annihilated their entire civilizations. At this early stage of conquest, where the Mongol Empire was still much smaller than the Roman Empire and the Macedonian Empire which you want me to compare them to, in the course of the Mongol expansion, they had already caused civilian death on an unprecedented scale that was far larger and far worse than the Romans or the Macedonians carried out while expanding to an Empire larger than that which the Mongols had at the same time.

So if you want to draw a comparison, there it is. By any measure, the Mongol Empire comes out far worse. Alexander was a conqueror, and all conquerors kill people, yes. But Genghis Khan was a conqueror and a butcher.

[426mak]

Again you argue scale, while I argue motive, circumstance and ability.

How is Alexander killing people to satisfy his own lust for glory, different from Genghis killing people a avenge insults and betrayal.

Previously you used Roman/Carthaginian war to argue Roman fighting in self defence. But can you make the same argument for the conquest of Dacia, England, Spain, Gaul etc.

Waging war for greed and lust is an atrosity I fail to see how Mongols doing it is any worse than other people doing it.

[Ren Wo Xing]

Again you argue scale, while I argue motive, circumstance and ability.

How is Alexander killing people to satisfy his own lust for glory, different from Genghis killing people a avenge insults and betrayal.

Previously you used Roman/Carthaginian war to argue Roman fighting in self defence. But can you make the same argument for the conquest of Dacia, England, Spain, Gaul etc.

Waging war for greed and lust is an atrosity I fail to see how Mongols doing it is any worse than other people doing it.

Alexander had the ability to genocide the Persians every bit as effectively as Genghis did the Khwarezmians. One committed genocide. The others did not. Alexander had the ability to genocide the Egyptians every bit as much as Genghis did the Western Xia. One did it. The other did not. One conquered. The other slaughtered. War is a constant, and people die in wars. But the conquests of Dacia, England, etc. did not see the sort of widespread genocide which Genghis Khan perpetuated. Both Genghis and Alexander perpetuated war, yes. But only one of them perpetuated genocide and widespread slaughter upon the civilians of the defeated nations.

Alexander's crimes can be described as stealing and breaking eggs to make himself an omelette, whereas Genghis Khan didn't just break eggs; he killed the chickens and burned down the entire chicken coop, even though he also just made omelettes. If you genuinely believe that the difference between the two is just a matter of "scale", then as you said earlier, I don't think there's anything left for us to discuss.

[426mak]

Alexander had the ability to genocide the Persians every bit as effectively as Genghis did the Khwarezmians. One committed genocide. The others did not. Alexander had the ability to genocide the Egyptians every bit as much as Genghis did the Western Xia. One did it. The other did not. One conquered. The other slaughtered. War is a constant, and people die in wars. But the conquests of Dacia, England, etc. did not see the sort of widespread genocide which Genghis Khan perpetuated. Both Genghis and Alexander perpetuated war, yes. But only one of them perpetuated genocide and widespread slaughter upon the civilians of the defeated nations.

Alexander's crimes can be described as stealing and breaking eggs to make himself an omelette, whereas Genghis Khan didn't just break eggs; he killed the chickens and burned down the entire chicken coop, even though he also just made omelettes. If you genuinely believe that the difference between the two is just a matter of "scale", then as you said earlier, I don't think there's anything left for us to discuss.

Fair enough. We shall agree to disagree.

[pannonian]

@pannonian, again, you are cherrypicking and drawing false equivalencies; as I already said, of course there are massacres throughout history.

1) Rome - The only eyewitness account Polybius narrated was that of Rome's sacking of Carthage, which was the end result of three wars spanning a full century that included an invasion of Italy by Hannibal that nearly destroyed the Roman Republic. This can be described as a life-and-death struggle, and the desire to beat an opponent so badly that they would never threaten the Republic again. The sacking of Epirus, similarly, was directly linked to fifty years of on-and-off warfare that initiated with Macedonia's support of Hannibal. To compare this to, say, Genghis Khan's annihilation of the Khwarezmians, where they went from a peace to total annihilation in the space of two years, or to Genghis Khan's supposed order to 50,000 troops to each murder 24 civilians in the city of Urgench (for an admittedly likely inflated total of 1.2 million civilians) is a totally false equivalence. There is a reason that the Mongols are viewed as being far more vicious and bloodthirsty than the Romans.

To be honest, I'm slightly sceptical about some of the numbers quoted in pre-modern histories, given the logistical issues involved. Since I can read English but not Asian languages, I'm not au fait with the current state of Asian historiography, but quotes of hundreds of thousands in armies make me that much more sceptical about the rigour in chasing these numbers up. Compare with quotes that I've seen of the opposing sides at the Battle of Philippi between the Caesarians and the Republicans, where both sides had drawn all the resources they could from the half of the Roman Empire that they controlled, and each mustered between 100,000 and 150,000, and the battle itself being a drawn out affair across a wide arena. That's the combined resources of the entire Roman empire producing a full operational mobilisation of 200,000-250,000 troops. Or a study of the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes that concluded that he could not have brought much more than 250,000 with him, across all arms and including logistical trains. Personally, I'm sceptical about the numbers quoted by Julius Caesar, but then he had 10 years to do his work in.

Without detailed knowledge of the studies involved, I tend to be sceptical about any numbers pre-industrial revolution that go above a million. That's an awful lot of slaughtering, and even if you can convince them to stay in one place while you cut them down by hand, you still need to get them into one place first, wchih would require quite a logistical feat for no useful end. As an comparative example, at Cannae, where the Romans were surrounded on all sides, the Carthaginians had to take breaks between killing the packed and near-helpless Romans, simply because they lacked the physical strength to continue killing. Modern estimates of Roman dead at Cannae are around 25,000-40,000. There's a limit to what human muscle can do.

[426mak]

Alexander had the ability to genocide the Persians every bit as effectively as Genghis did the Khwarezmians. One committed genocide. The others did not. Alexander had the ability to genocide the Egyptians every bit as much as Genghis did the Western Xia. One did it. The other did not. One conquered. The other slaughtered. War is a constant, and people die in wars. But the conquests of Dacia, England, etc. did not see the sort of widespread genocide which Genghis Khan perpetuated. Both Genghis and Alexander perpetuated war, yes. But only one of them perpetuated genocide and widespread slaughter upon the civilians of the defeated nations.

Alexander's crimes can be described as stealing and breaking eggs to make himself an omelette, whereas Genghis Khan didn't just break eggs; he killed the chickens and burned down the entire chicken coop, even though he also just made omelettes. If you genuinely believe that the difference between the two is just a matter of "scale", then as you said earlier, I don't think there's anything left for us to discuss.

Having reviewed my earlier comments, I may have argued my point to aggressively.
If I offended you I apologise.
With the new year I would like to resume our discussion with a cool head.

First you debunked my argument of using Genghis's treatment of his family as comparison to Alexander's treatment of the Persian royal family as they were different situations.

By the same token your example of Alexander's treatment of Egypt as opposed to Genghis's actions towards Western Xia and Khwarezian must also be discounted.

Alexander was dealing with a subject state that had surrendered without a fight while Genghis was dealing with a traitor Allie and hostile enemy that provoked him.

To give a fair judgement we must look at how Alexander reacted to betrayal and insult.
The two most famous example would be Thebes and Tyre.

Thebes rebelled against Alexander and he sacked the city killing or enslaving everyone, committing genocide.

Tyre resisted him and met the same fate.

Previously you gave example of Genghis's lack of mercy towards his defeated foes and his causing unnecessary deaths as evidence of his evil.

However in the same situation Alexander behaved in exactly the same way. He did not have to utter destroy Thebes and Tyre but he choice to.

This behaviour is not just limited to them. The Roman treatment of the defeated English Celts and Druids also showed this.

There the Romans responded to revolt and deviance the same way as the Mongols and Macedonians.

Why because this is how empires deal with betrayal and deviance.

[Ren Wo Xing]

Pannonian, I agree that historical numbers are not perfect.

I'd like to avoid continuing an old debate into a New Year. Happy New Year to both of you as well!