Bob Genghiskhan

Nate and I calculated the chance of the first response to this thread being "Bob Genghiskhan" to be 98.7654%
That said, you should definitely see the film "Mongol".

I haven't seen the movie, but do you know that it is Kazakh propaganda?

There is a great history series on youtube called crashcourse world history.

It has an excellent lesson on the mongol empire. I liked their secular trading empire which unified a huge amount of the world... Not more good/evil than any nation which came to exist through bloodshe and violence.

I wouldn't go that far, orathiac. Not every empire stacks up piles of human heads that are higher than the city walls.

I'm creating a benevolent empire as we speak

gameID=100000

(PS I have mod permission to discuss this particular game)

Projecting much, Invictus? orathaic didn't write what you pretend he wrote.

"Not more good/evil than any nation which came to exist through bloodshe and violence."

I don't recall Napoleon stacking heads outside of Vienna, ulytau. All I mean is that (on top of anachronistic comparisons being wastes of time) it's ridiculous to say that the Mongols were no more good/evil than anyone else. If you're even gonna start making those sorts of comparisons they would definitely be better than some and worse than some. That's all I mean.

Almost all of the conquerors and great generals we learn about in history class were terrible, terrible people. A good general rule: Anyone called "the Great" was probably some sort of mass-murdering sociopath or power-hungry despot. Alexander the Great is a good example. The only important exception I can think of off the top of my head is Cyrus the Great.

Anyway: Genghis Kahn excelled similar conquerors in both the evil (mass murder etc) and the beneficial (his general policy of tolerance for submissive peoples, the trading networks his conquests promoted, etc).

"There is a great history series on youtube called crashcourse world history.

It has an excellent lesson on the mongol empire. I liked their secular trading empire which unified a huge amount of the world... Not more good/evil than any nation which came to exist through bloodshe and violence."
I've seen most of it, the ending disappointed me (incredibly bias last vid) and they didn't touch upon my favourite time period in history(if they did, I missed the video):
The black death.

That being said, John Green is a huge fan of the Mongols and talks about them in every video as en example of an exception to almost every rule about history.

I haven't seen the end, his pro-mongol video is massively biased, well i suppose he does allow two sides to be presented.

Does he take a putin-esque stance on the modern capitalism? I think he mentions the black death, but barely, he says a lot more about the trans-atlantic trade and how it changed the world (or the new world and the old world, may have left the orient largely the same...)

"Please remain civil and attempt to entertain the viewpoints of as many sides as are presented."

+10 troll points when you pull this off even though you said that in OP.

@Yellowjacket
I do not need any troll points. Actually this is a reasonable tactic for preserving the integrity of a discussion. If someone posts things that are off topic, rather than tell them to shut up, you can offer them the courtesy of forming a new thread for them and others to post.

This *particular* thread has offered the benefit of allowing me to learn something. For example, apparently Khan was reasonable to people that surrendered, and worked to promote trade. Obviously I am out of my element talking about him as I don't have a strong history background, but it's nice to learn stuff.

It is interesting, the khanates didn't want to run cities, they were not administrators, so if you surrendered you'd mostly get to keep your own rulers. Your rules would change as you'd have to trade with the mongols (or they kill you) and trade with other mongol cities.

Of course getting people to surrender meant lots of fear, which meant wiping out whole cities on occassion (also the men liked to rape and pillage so it is good for morale) it is these occasional massacres which are remembered rather than the boring bits of living under mongol rule, the safety of travelling across the mongol empire (because the mongols wanted people to be able to trade) and the religious tolerance (because they had gods tied to the land, thus they didn't expect people in other lands to worship them)

All that stuff is far less exciting, so people at the time would have been less interested in writing about it... Meanwhile europeans at the time wrote about the impending fear of invasion...

"Does he take a putin-esque stance on the modern capitalism? I think he mentions the black death, but barely, he says a lot more about the trans-atlantic trade and how it changed the world (or the new world and the old world, may have left the orient largely the same...)"
No, John Green isn't that left wing (Hank is), but he just criticized trade and globalization way more then is justified. And my most central core belief is free trade #1.

He also claimed that it was a myth that Globalization has reduced wars, when in reality it has reduced wars and if you look at history, rarely have trade partners ever gone to war.

"Of course getting people to surrender meant lots of fear, which meant wiping out whole cities on occassion (also the men liked to rape and pillage so it is good for morale) it is these occasional massacres which are remembered rather than the boring bits of living under mongol rule, the safety of travelling across the mongol empire (because the mongols wanted people to be able to trade) and the religious tolerance (because they had gods tied to the land, thus they didn't expect people in other lands to worship them)

All that stuff is far less exciting, so people at the time would have been less interested in writing about it... Meanwhile europeans at the time wrote about the impending fear of invasion..."
Some Arab merchant described living under Mongol rule as the ability to walk from Arabia to Korea with clothes made of gold and not have to worry about being robbed.

The Mongols did garner the reputation of if you surrender we will spare your city, if you don't we will kill all the men and rape all the women.

But you do bring a good point, its actually a shame that the Mongol Empire fell so quickly after their rise. At the time, both the European and Chinese kingdoms were heavily against international trade and preferred isolationist policies. The Mongol Empire force mass trading on Asia, and when they fell so did their trade routes. So contrary to popular belief, if the 'barbaric' Mongols did last long then their brief dominance, I think technology would have developed faster then it did.

However I am also assuming that the colonization of the New World would still happen. which may or may not be true.

""Does he take a putin-esque stance on the modern capitalism? I think he mentions the black death, but barely, he says a lot more about the trans-atlantic trade and how it changed the world (or the new world and the old world, may have left the orient largely the same...)"
No, John Green isn't that left wing (Hank is), but he just criticized trade and globalization way more then is justified. And my most central core belief is free trade #1.

He also claimed that it was a myth that Globalization has reduced wars, when in reality it has reduced wars and if you look at history, rarely have trade partners ever gone to war."
Some of my critiscism got cut out:
He claimed income inequality is going up, that is also a myth, in reality income inequality is going down.
He claimed that many in poor countries haven't benefited. That is somewhat false, it is true that you can point to billions of poor people, but for the most part, countries that have allowed sweatshops from multinational corporations have seen their poor marginally better off as a result and way better off in the long run.

He claimed that trade increases the likely hood of pandemics, evidence of that being wrong is that we haven't had any major outbreak since the Spanish Flu. On top of that trade wasn't that big of an idea until after the first major plague in Europe. Granted there was the occasional merchant trading accross borders prior to the plague, and that they contributed to the spread. But, for the most part, trade didn't become big in Europe until the decades after.

He claimed that capitalism is unsustainable and that the growth we are experiencing will end when we run out of our unsustaniable resources. I present to him the price system:
When supply starts decreasing (its increasing for most resources right now) prices will slowly start increasing decreasing quantity demanded.

He also claimed Hugo Chavez was a dictator, and it may be a surprise to here a right-wing nut like me claim otherwise, given how communist he is, but the reality was he was democratically elected and was democratically reelected.

He just got so much about globalization wrong and presented so many fallacies and misconceptions.

*squints at OP suspiciously, nods, walks away*

Lets just put it this way... if you're GOING to be a horde of awe inspiring bastards who brutalize anybody who dares to stand before them but is actually pretty OK once you're assimiliated, you gotta go with the Mongols.

Fasces, what's the need here for an obi-esque essay about how you think some historian is bad? It really has barely anything to do with the topic at hand.

Anyway, I think that anyone who thinks that the Mongols were any worse than any other big conquerors in history is doing nothing more than deluding himself. I think that the only reason they are remembered more negatively is that they didn't have time or the desire to write histories about how great they were, like most people do when they conquer others.

The Mongols are a perfect case of a time absolving sins. They were inhuman barbarians who set back huge swaths of Eurasia centuries, depopulating large countries substantially in the most cruel fashion imaginable. But because it was a long time ago they're remembered fondly or at the very least, amorally by those who give any pretext to worship conquerors, especially Asiatic ones.

How many times did the Khans engage in punitive tax raids on their supposedly well treated vassals?

Putin, pick another great conqueror from history, and I guarantee that I can find evidence of similar barbaric actions.

Really, what cities did Trajan utterly depopulate? What great civilizations did he reduce in population from 2.5 million to 250,000?

I got no leg to stand on at all if you're talking to me, Putin. I know not much about it at all.

Not really referring to you.

First of all, just because he expanded the empire to its greatest size, Trajan does not qualify as a great conqueror. Second, Roman historians did not often go into great detail, and even when they did they were heavily censored by the emperors. Regardless, here's what I can find, by military campaign (of which he had only three):

1. Dacia: From Eutropius's "Brevium ab Urbe Condita":
"Trajan, after he had subdued Dacia, had transplanted thither an infinite number of men from the whole Roman world, to people the country and the cities; as the land had been exhausted of inhabitants in the long war maintained by Decebalus."
Key words here are "exhausted of inhabitants."

2. Nabataea: We still don't know what happened here.

3. Parthia: Trajan screwed up here and barely managed to accomplish anything before dying. He succeeded only in establishing a puppet ruler with little effort, violently suppressing rebellions, and establishing a few new provinces that Hadrian released from Roman control when he came to power.

To conclude, Trajan didn't do all that much, all of the histories talk about how he's a godly person, which is always a bit suspect, and of his three military campaigns, one left an area "exhausted of inhabitants," another is completely lacking in historical detail, and the last ended with those who accepted him living fine and those who didn't dead. All in all, not that much different than our friend Genghis, except that Genghis did a whole lot more.

So we're going to play this game where nobody except the overrated Mongols are 'great conquerors' and the crimes of the Mongols are diminished while that of everybody else are exaggerated. Got it.

Please tell me, if the greatest Roman Emperor is not a great conqueror, who the hell qualifies that isn't one of your beloved skull stacking Mongols?

And if the Dacians were so brutally treated why were they able to rise up on three different occasions to fight the Romans, pray tell? Could the exhaustion not have been from the fact that the Dacians were a small province that fought three wars?