Genghis Khan and the Warriors of the Mongol Empire | Dan Carlin and Lex Fridman

Is it Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan? It's not Genghis Khan. It's either Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan. So let's go with Genghis Khan. That's the only thing I'll be able to say with any certain, last certain thing I'll say about it. It's like, I don't know, GIF versus GIF. I don't know how it ever got started the wrong way, but yeah. So first of all, your episodes on Genghis Khan, for many people, are the favorite. It's fascinating to think about events that had so much, like in their ripples, had so much impact on so much of human civilization. In your view, was he an evil man? Let's go start a discussion of evil. Another way to put it is, I've read he's much loved in many parts of the world, like Mongolia, and I've also read arguments that say that he was quite a progressive for the time. So where do you put him? Is he a progressive, or is he an evil destroyer of humans? As I often say, I'm not a historian, which is why what I try to bring to the Hardcore History podcasts are these sub-themes. So each show has, and they're not, I try to kind of soft-pedal them, so they're not always like really right in front of your face. In that episode, the soft-pedaling sub-theme had to do with what we refer to as a historical arsonist. And it's because some historians have taken the position that sometimes, and most of this is earlier stuff, historians don't do this very much anymore, but these were the wonderful questions I grew up with that blend, it's almost the intersection between history and philosophy. And the idea was that sometimes the world has become so overwhelmed with bureaucracy or corruption or just stagnation that somebody has to come in, or some group of people or some force has to come in and do the equivalent of a forest fire to clear out all the dead wood so that the forest itself can be rejuvenated and society can then move forward. And there's a lot of these periods where the right? Creating the foundations for a new world that will be better than the old one, and it's a recurring theme. And so this was the sub-theme of the Khan's podcast, because otherwise you don't need me to tell you the story of the Mongols, but I'm going to bring up the historical arsonist element. But this gets to how the Khan has been portrayed, right? If you want to say, oh yes, he cleared out the dead wood and made for, well, then it's a positive thing. If you say, my family was in the forest fire that he set, you're not going to see it that way. Much of what Genghis Khan is credited with on the upside, right? So things like religious toleration, and you'll say, well, he was religiously, the Mongols were religiously tolerant. And so this makes them almost like a liberal reformer kind of thing. But this needs to be seen within the context of their empire, which was very much like the Roman viewpoint, which is the Romans didn't care at a lot of times what your local people worshipped. They wanted stability. And if that kept stability and kept you paying taxes and didn't require the legionaries to come in, then they didn't care, right? And the Khans were the same way. Like, they don't care what you're practicing as long as it doesn't disrupt their empire and cause them trouble. But what I always like to point out is, yes, but the Khan could still come in with his representatives to your town, decide your daughter was a beautiful woman that they wanted in the Khan's concubine, and they would take them. So how liberal an empire is this, right? So many of the things that they get credit for as though they're some kind of nice guys may, in another way of looking at it, just be a simple mechanism of control, right? A way to keep the empire stable. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They have decided that this is the best. And I love, because the Mongols were what we would call a pagan people now, I love the fact that they, and I think we call it, I forgot the term we used, it had to do with, like they were hedging their bets religiously, right? They didn't know which god was the right one. So as long as you're all praying for the health of the Khan, we're maximizing the chances that whoever the gods are, they get the message, right? So I think it's been portrayed as something like a liberal empire. And the idea of Mongol universality is more about conquering the world. And it's like saying, you know, we're going to bring stability to the world by conquering it. Well, what if that's Hitler, right? He could make the same case. Or Hitler wasn't really the world conqueror like that, because he wouldn't have been trying to make it equal for all peoples. But my point being that it kind of takes the positive moral slant out of it if their motivation wasn't a positive moral slant to the motivation. And the Mongols didn't see it that way. And I think the way that it's portrayed is like, and I always like to use this analogy, but it's like shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it afterwards, right? How do we justify and make them look good in a way that they themselves probably—and listen, we don't have the Mongol point of view per se. I mean, there's something called the secret history of the Mongols, and there's things written down by Mongolian overlords through people like Persian and Chinese scribes later. We don't have their point of view, but it sure doesn't look like this was an attempt to create some wonderful place where everybody was living a better life than they were before. I think that's later people putting a nice rosy spin on it. But there's an aspect to it, maybe you can correct me, because I'm projecting sort of my idea of what it would take to conquer so much land, is the ideology is emergent. So if I were to guess, the Mongols started out as warriors who valued excellence in skill of killing. Not even killing, but like the actual practice of war. And you can start out small, you can grow and grow and grow. And then in order to maintain the stability of the things over which of the conquered lands, you develop a set of ideas with which you can, like you said, establish control. But it was emergent. And it seems like the core first principle idea of the Mongols is just to be excellent warriors. That felt to me the starting point. It wasn't some ideology. Like with Hitler and Stalin, with Hitler, there was an ideology that didn't have anything to do with war underneath it. It was more about conquering. It feels like the Mongols started out more organically, I would say. This phenomenon started emergently and they were just similar to the Native Americans with the Comanches, like the different warrior tribes that Joe Rogan's currently obsessed with, that led me to look into it more. They seem to just start out just valuing the skill of fighting, whatever the tools of war they had, which were pretty primitive, but just to be the best warriors they could possibly be, make a science out of it. Is that crazy to think that there was no ideology behind it in the beginning? I'm going to back up a second. I'm reminded of the line said about the Romans, that they create a wasteland and call it peace. But there's a lot of conquerors like that, right? Where you will sit there and listen, historians forever have, it's the famous trade-offs of empire. And they'll say, well, look at the trade that they facilitated and look at the religion, all those kinds of things, but they come at the cost of all those peoples that they conquered forcibly and by force integrated into their empire. The one thing we need to remember about the Mongols that makes them different than, say, the Romans, and this is complex stuff and way above my pay grade, but I'm fascinated with it, and it's more like the Comanches that you just brought up, is that the Mongols are not a settled society, okay? They come from a nomadic tradition. Now, several generations later, when you have Kublai Khan as the emperor of China, it's beginning to be a different thing, right? And the Mongols, when their empire broke up, the ones that were in settled, the so-called settled societies, right, Iran, places like that, they will become more like over time the rulers of those places were traditionally. And the Mongols in, say, like the cognate of the Golden Horde, which is still in their traditional nomadic territories, will remain traditionally more Mongol. But when you start talking about who the Mongols were, I try to make a distinction. They're not some really super special people. They're just the latest confederacy in an area that saw nomadic confederacies going back to the beginning of recorded history. The Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Avars, the Huns, the Magyars, I mean, these are all the nomadic... You know, the nomads of the Eurasian steppe were huge, huge players in the history of the world until gunpowder nullified their traditional weapon system, which I've been fascinated with because their traditional weapon system is not one you could copy. Because you were talking about being the greatest warriors you could be. Every warrior society I've ever seen values that. What the nomads had of the Eurasian steppe was this relationship between human beings and animals that changed the equation. It was how they rode horses. And societies like the Byzantines, which would form one flank of steppe, and then all the way on the other side you had China, and below that you had Persia, these societies would all attempt to create mounted horsemen who used archery. And they did a good job, but they were never the equals of the nomads because those people were literally raised in the saddle. They compared them to centaurs. The Comanches, great example, considered to be the best horse riding warriors in North America. The Comanches, I always loved watching, there's paintings, George Catlin, the famous painter who painted the Comanches, illustrated it. But the Mongols and the Scythians and the Avars and all these people did it too, where they would shoot from underneath the horse's neck, hiding behind the horse the whole way. You look at a picture of somebody doing that and it's insane. This is what the Byzantines couldn't do and the Chinese couldn't do. And it was a different level of harnessing a human-animal relationship that gave them a military advantage that could not be copied. It could be emulated, but they were never as good. That's why they always hired these people. They hired mercenaries from these areas because they were incomparable. It's the combination of people who were shooting bows and arrows from the time they were toddlers, who were riding from the time they were toddlers, who rode all the time. The Huns were bow-legged, the Romans said, because they ate, slept, everything in the saddle. That creates something that is difficult to copy. And it gave them a military advantage. I enjoy reading actually about when that military advantage ended, so 17th and 18th century, when the Chinese on one flank and the Russians on the other are beginning to use firearms and stuff to break this military power of these various Khans. The Mongols were simply the most dominating and most successful of the confederacies, but if you break it down, they really formed the nucleus at the top of the pyramid of the apex of food chain, and a lot of the people that were known as Mongols were really lots of other tribes, non-Mongolian tribes, that when the Mongols conquer you after they killed a lot of you, they incorporated you into their confederacy and often made you go first. You know, if you're going to fight somebody, we're going to make these people go out in front and suck up all the arrows before we go in and finish the job. So to me, and I guess a fan of the Mongols would say that the difference and what made the Mongols different wasn't the weapon system or the fighting or the warriors or the armor or anything, it was Genghis Khan. And if you go look at the other really dangerous, from the outside world's perspective, dangerous step, nomadic confederacies from past history was always when some great leader emerged that could unite the tribes. And you see the same thing in Native American history to a degree too. You had people like Attila, right? Or there was one called Tuman. You go back in history and these people make the history books because they caused an enormous amount of trouble for their settled neighbors that normally, I mean, Chinese, Byzantine, and Persian approaches to the step people were always the same. They would pick out tribes to be friendly with. They would give them money, gifts, hire them, and they would use them against the other tribes. And generally, Byzantine, especially in Chinese diplomatic history, was all about keeping these tribes separated. Don't let them form confederations of large numbers of them because then they're unstoppable. Attila was a perfect example. The Huns were another large, the Turks, another large confederacy of these people, and they were devastating when they could unite. So the diplomatic policy was don't let them. That's what made the Mongols different is Genghis Khan united them. And then unlike most of the tribal confederacies, he was able, they were able to hold it together for a few generations.