My daughter generously sends me a couple books every month from an online subscription site called Cratejoy. They have a great variety of products from clothing, food baskets, and kitchen gadgets, to tools and craft hobby kits. I gather that you can subscribe for variable time periods and have the products sent to anyone. I have no idea who decides what books I get or what criteria are used in selecting them so it is always a surprise when they arrive. But they are never recent publications by famous authors so I suspect that they are chosen from a list of discounted books that publishers want to clear from their overstocked warehouses. In recent years publishing houses have moved to an on-demand business model, reducing the need for warehousing space, but older books still take up shelf space. I think she just sends them a list of book genres that she knows I like. This interesting arrangement exposes me to cultures and books that I would otherwise never look twice at and I appreciate that. This scholarly erudite history from an American anthropologist arrived along with a similar vintage fictional international spy espionage thriller.
More than a little laudatory about the early thirteenth century Mongolian warrior and his conquest of vast areas of the world, there is far more detail about the man and the primitive tribal culture of the time than most readers would ever want or need to know. At one point his descendants ruled an area larger than North America and western Europe combined, stretching from Moscow to near Vienna to the Arab peninsula and most of East Asia and China. It is perhaps appropriate to praise his brilliant and innovative military tactics, his treatment of vassals, levelling of hierarchies, and his tolerance of divergent often primitive religious practices including Buddism, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, Muslimism, and Christianity. One such strange practice was the peculiar divination practice was scapulancy in which divine guidance was provided by “reading” the shoulder bones of sheep. It is harder from this distance in time to appreciate the culture of endless tribal plundering and slaughter. Women were treated as little more than slaves, sex toys used for bargaining, and the source of offspring, although in later generations, women became placeholder regents of the homeland while the men fought and plundered on distant frontiers.
I got totally confused in the middle chapters in which his sons and grandsons with unfamiliar names cruelly raided ever greater areas with equally unfamiliar names, killing thousands of the natives in cruel ways. Despite feuding with each other over the title of Great Khan, they did maintain some of the old man’s positive innovations such as instituting widespread use of paper money to facilitate commerce, and universal primary education for all children. And the most famous grandson Khubilai Khan, immortalized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem as Khubla Khan, conquered most of China, Tibet, Vietnam and Korea, but was inept at sea and failed to take Japan. He is also described as fat, gouty, and self-indulgent, with long episodes of drunken debauchery. All of the Khans were prone to this vice usually drinking fermented mare’s milk to celebrate their conquests and some added hashish and opium from their loot in Afghanistan. Although the Mongolian Empire survived for another century after Khubilai Khan’s death, it ceased to expand and depended increasingly on peaceful coexistence and international trade with its neighbours. It gradually shrank when the epidemic of the plague disrupted their trade routes and travel to loot, and the families split into murderous warring factions vying for the title of Great Khan.
In the last section, much of the basics for later western cultural development from astronomy, law, mathematics, architecture, finance, communications, agriculture, and even music is attributed to the Khans, perhaps with some dubious connections. Marco Polo, following in the footsteps of the Mongolian Empire, did much to capitalize on the groundwork in international commerce that the Khans had established, but is barely mentioned.
The details provided in this book can be overwhelming. I don’t really care that 1219 was the Year of The Dragon, 1221 the Year of The Horse or a dozen other “Year Of The…” designations. Although I admire the dedication and scholarship of the author, his attempts to make Genghis Khan into a hero are not entirely convincing, even if some rebalancing of the historical perspective is needed. There are bits of interesting history here, but I have trouble believing that anyone except perhaps occasional history professors or Mongolians keen on researching their past would enjoy this deep, dark, detailed and incredibly dry book.
⭐️
Thanks,
Andra via Cratejoy.
The Passionate Reader 