Viswanathan K's Thoughts

After Genghis Khan died, the men decided that it was time for time for them to enjoy the spoils of war and empire, writes Jack Weatherford in The Secret History of the Mongol Queens : “As the role of women in public life in the Mongol Empire continued to recede over the next century, the elite Mongol men fell into a life of debauched pleasure in their Chinese parks, Persian gardens, and Russian palaces.” Thus began the decline of everything Genghis had built, albeit it took over a few centuries for the empire to fade out altogether.   Even as the Mongols declined, war tech had moved along: “Advancements in firearms had negated the Mongols’ most important asset, their ability to use bows and arrows very effectively from horseback. No matter how well trained and extensively practiced, a warrior with a bow and arrow cannot compete with cannons and firearms.”   So it came to back that the now-driven-out-of-China generation of Mongols found themselves with only two op...

If you come from a nomadic background, by definition, you don’t have much experience of building stuff. Or ruling anything bigger than a tribe. So when the Mongols stormed the world, how did Genghis Khan solve this problem?   Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens gets into that part. Genghis divided up all the conquered lands and assigned rulers to them. Nothing special about that, except when you realize all the assigned rulers were women (his wives), not his sons or generals! His sons, he could see, were hardly promising material, while his generals were needed to expand the empire even further. But before that, Genghis needed to ensure peace in the already conquered areas. How did he do that? “Through a thick network of marriage alliances.” But he didn’t take on more wives. Instead, he made alliances for his children. The conquered tribe thus gained prestige and material benefits. Even more cleverly: “The husband (of his daughter) would go to war...

In both his books on the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and its follow-up, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens , Jack Weatherford refers to something called The Secret History as a source. I always wondered why it is called “secret”. Sure, history is disputed, written by the winners, revised to suit whatever ideology is in vogue – we know all that. But “secret” history? That’s new…   Strangely, the Mongols didn’t seem to covet jewels and treasures as much as they did their documents and records! The Persian historian Rashid al-Din points out the Mongols went even further in how they maintained their records: “From age to age, they have kept their true history in Mongolian expression and script, unorganized and disarranged , chapter by chapter, scattered in treasures, hidden from the gaze of strangers and specialists, and no one was allowed access to learn of it.” Not only was it secret, it was deliberately chaotic in its organizatio...