Women Who Ran Genghis Khan’s Empire
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
I didn't see any wholistic judgment of the Mongol empire in the article.
The Mongols did tons of amazing, fascinating, and great things. They also did terrible and atrocious things.
The later should not preclude curiosity and appreciation of the former.
People tend to ignore their ancestor's warcrimes. Even if they admit they were evil they can't bring themselves to hate them.
This applies to most old empires, many people can't bring themselves to hate the entire empire despite their barbarity.
20 years ago-ish, a book came out about Chingis Khan that extolled the virtues of his multicultural, pantheistic regime and totally glossed over the many genocides the Mongols perpetrated. Not to mention the guy probably raped more women than anyone else in history.
Edit: To add to this, a lot of what is written about Mongols in Chingis Khan's time is conjecture. They were not a literate people, so there are almost no records. They were nomadic and buried their leaders in secret locations, leaving scant archeological evidence. Many conclusions that have been drawn about the Mongols are speculative. Fast forward to the Yuan dynasty where there are records in Chinese. That era and locality have better documentation.
Most of those things you said can apply to the Assyrians, the Romans, the British, or any other similar empire, and people still idealize those places today. If your empire holds together long enough to get a period of Pax named after you, it means you've made it in the eyes of history.
The Mongols were a mix of modern and violent and ruthless before he (Chinggis Khan) died that you don't really see elsewhere.
If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union.
If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.
Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior.
imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun.
literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings.
they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses.
Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.
the commies killed far more than anyone by numbers and in barbaric ways, but their brutality was beaten by those who killed less in more gruesome ways.
the mongols excelled at both but I argued by brutality imperial japan was a bit worse.
Imagine a hit man showing up to work one day, only to find his targets already dead along with their entire town... and only much later finds out that it's because he'd been an asymptomatic carrier for weird space germs when he was casing the joint the previous month.
The intent in this case existed alongside unintended causes, but it was still there.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_E...
Maybe an oversimplification to assert "the Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas"?
Which didn’t remain so neutral when applied to fresh populations.
Native Americans simply weren’t playing host to as many diseases, and persisting virulent ones
It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations. What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
Google tells me the Timurids were Mongol descendents of Genghis Khan, so not really. 100% of that relevant data set is one extended family.
>What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
The Mongols were little more "psychopathic" than many societies at the time, only distinctive in terms of their relative success, not their cruelty. Alexander the Great tortured and slaughtered people by the thousands, and Westerners don't consider him a barbarian or psychopath so much as a tactical genius and founder of the civilized world.
When it comes to the number of genocides, it is probably difficult to beat out the British, but they were always quite jolly about it, so I guess it wasn't that bad.
it also erases our allies killing and starving the yemenis and the starvation in afghanistan post-war we caused by freezing all their funds.
clearly loosely defined ideals erase human suffering.
On the other hand, the United States committed genocide against an entire continent, was the only nation to drop atomic bombs in warfare (and did so against civilians) continued Nazi and Japanese human experimentation and bioweapons research going under MKULTRA and other secret programs (as well as recruited Nazi scientists for their space program,) raped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam and Korea (and used Agent Orange), and went on a 20 year temper tantrum of violence and war crimes across Iraq for no discernable reason other than Afghanistan not being enough to satisfy their post 9/11 bloodlust.
Not to excuse Imperial Japan or the Nazis or anyone else but ranking evil against evil is always a matter of perspective, and it's often less about which evil is greater than which evils you're willing to excuse and which not. A similar list of sins could be made about the Soviet Union, China, Britain, or just about any nation or empire in history. Humans are bastards everywhere.
There is a lot of fascinating literature about differences in gender roles between western and eastern Germany behind the iron curtain.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/05/suffra...
Intersectionality cuts both ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germa...
The world is a bizarre place and humans are unfathomably complex.
This should be cause for curiosity and investigation into history and The Human Condition
“Total war” wasn’t a thing in premodern history because every war was a total war.
Total war in particular usually involves civilians as targets, and most civilians were far from the battlefield. WWII changed that, when bombers could reach deep beyond the front lines. Without bombers (and missiles), London would have been untouched by the war, for example.
What I described is tied to the resources and power of the person in charge. I don't see how that's only European?
Total war is a separate concept from genocide. Though both can be practiced in the same war, targeting economic and political support for war does not necessarily mean systemically eliminating a population.
Lol, this seems a bit naive. It's hard to rape and pillage people you like.
Do you think we've lost the plot a little bit when you have to do these mental gymnastics to distinguish between murdering an entire nation out of some "approved" reason, vs say out of ethnic reasons.
Surely the real crime is murdering a nation.
Never forget that history is written by the victors. The Mongol Empire was replaced by the Russian Empire.
> Chinggis Khan’s senior wife, Börte, is responsible for a camp. She’s responsible for their home, the yurt or ger that they live in. She’s responsible for the kids. If merchants come through, she’s going to talk to them about economic activity. She is going to oversee or perform the typical daily herding activities. There’s food preparation. There’s clothing preparation. There are religious rituals. There’s entertainment. It’s often a woman’s job to be the hospitable partner, to bring in food and welcome guests.
The annoying thing is that it makes no sense to do this because there are plenty of non-male or non-white leaders to pick from anyway.
My favorite empire is the Ajuuran sultanate that was a very powerful african sultanate in modern day somalia. It traded as far as china and it had many victories over great powers like portugal.
A great female leader that actually existed was queen boudica, one of the greatest celtic anti-roman rebels. She led her people and dealt a lot of damage to the roman invaders before she inevitably lost to the chads that are the roman legions.
Rather than blackwash or add in random women we can just look to the parts of history that already contain that.
Despite this her actions were greatly inflated by the title and main claim.
This contrasts with, say, the ancient Sarmatians, where we see female burials with actual weapons of war, and have contemporary accounts that women did fight extensively in battles. There, a figure of 20% would be roughly accurate.
The wives of many leaders tend to be important politically and have a hand in the nation's affairs, but its a large leap to claim that means they ran it.
She was important absolutely, but the article was just using too much hyperbole.
also the army stat was complete bs, we know they were not in need of resorting to female soldiers due to their large enough population.
In older societies it was common to view women as playing a central role in bringing great ruin or great fortune to men, and by extension "their" empires, for this very reason.
Honestly, even if we don't talk about it, it still is this way. If you want to achieve success, the single most important decision you make is who you marry.
I don't think it is, not just women in particular but also bureaucrats and diplomats in general is what actually ran and does still run empires and nations. Today you'd call it the administrative state. Both historically as well as today people vastly overstate the importance of visible leaders and vastly underestimate the role that administrators, managers, and so on play.
That's a strawman.
> If you read the article you find she later ran the whole shop.
May I suggest that before looking down on others like this, it is wise to make sure you've been careful when reading the thing?
The article contains no such claim. Most likely, you are mixing up Töregene and Börte.
The reasons are obviously: precious, precious clicks.
A title like "The Women Who Kept Genghis Khan's Empire Running" would have been better.
And Genghis Khan was just a powerful savage who wiped out entire chinese cities who dared to defend themselves. His take on chinese civilization was that it was occupying land that could be used to grow grass for his horses.
As hard as it maybe to wrap one's head around this, historically, war was a way to obtain resources, or rather resolve conflicts over resources. Genghis wanted a resource for his horses, he resolved it. If your city was wiped out by him, it was your fault for being weak. You should not expect peace between nations or compassion. Nations are built on stolen land, their borders drawn by blood. We live in a world where nuclear powers maintain balance and modern technology has resolved many of the world 's resource scarcity issues. Our countries are ruled by law, not people. People allowed themslves to be ruled by the most cruel and ruthless in the past because that meant obtaining the most resources for them, even if done on a wh im to satisfy their rulers. People sit back and judge empires from the romans to the british and criticize their morals. It is utterly absurd. I mean, even these days the US invades the middle east and Russia its neighbors for resources. And the terrible thing about democracy is that people think the whole world runs on some system of rules where people's wills and lives matter at a global scale. It sounds nice but that isn't reality. It can be that way in a country but between countries, when you have food shortage your government will not hesitate to wipe out cities and commit genocide on your behalf. My point is that such criticism should be based on reality not on how things should be in an ideal world. The primary directive of any government is not just to secure its borders but the nation itself, whatever that stands for. Be it the elected ruler's will or the monarch's whim.