The Mongol Khans of Medieval France

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/mongol-khans-medieval-france

by Thevet • 5 months ago

107 54 5 months ago

jmyeet4• 5 months ago

I honestly had no idea about the French fascination with the Mongols. People tend to admire people who have traits they aspire to. I wonder if this stems from France, being a major imperial power at the time, admiring the Mongols as an imperial power.

This timeline coincides with the Crusades with, which the article talks about at length. I find the Crusades fascinating because they've shaped the modern world in so many ways.

Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame) once said that why he cares about military history is it shapes the world. If you look at the lightbulb, it doesn't really matter who invented it. Somebody would've. But take the Battle of Marathon, which shaped the entire history of Western Europe as the Greeks repelled the Persians. History would've been completely different. Or how Cyrus II (IIRC) essentially saved Judaism by rebuilding the Temple. Without that, Judaism may well have died out and, with it, all the Abrahamic religions may never have existed.

So the Crusades are fascinating because they've often portrayed as a religious war but they were anything but. Religion was simply the excuse. Instead medieval powers wanted to control the Levant to enrich themselves.

The Crusades essentially created international banking, making the Knights Templar incredibly wealthy [1]. One wonders if this was a necessary condition to the rise of the mercantile class that eventually displaced feudalism and brought on capitalism.

But back to the French. It's interesting that they were fascinated with the Mongols with everything else that was going on. During this same period, the Eastern Roman Empire still existed and the Moors occupied the Iberian peninsula. In many ways, the Mongols were more distant whereas the Arab "threat" was closer and more real. So why the Mongols?

[1] https://bigthink.com/the-past/knights-templar-crusades-finan...

gostsamo3• 5 months ago

The arabs were broken into smaller kingdoms for a long time when it came to the XIII century. The Eastern Roman Empire had been in decline since the fall of Constantinople in 1204 and even before that it was only a regional power. Compared to those, the mongols managed to build an empire spreading on millions of square kilometers. There is no base for comparison. It is like comparing the UK and the US 20 years after WWII.

cm2012• 5 months ago

Mongolian empire was so large because it is cheap to run an extractive regime

jmyeet4• 5 months ago

So this is a fallacy of seeing historical events through a modern lens.

We know how far the Mongols spread and we have accurate maps but in no way am I convinced that France could possibly conceive of the size and scope of Central Asia in the 11th century.

clarionbell• 5 months ago

France was not a major imperial power at the time. It was much smaller than today, lacking Savoy and much of Burgundy for start, with Normandy and many other areas only nominally part of it and technically under control of English king (who was just a duke in France, but that changed only a very little on the battlefield).

Crusades in middle east started as an attempt of Eastern Roman empire (although they just called it Roman empire / Basileia Romaion) to recover from recent advances of Muslim invaders in Anatolia (modern Turkey). But turned into an overwhelmingly religious effort in the west. The first crusade especially was largely ill organized and chaotic affair. Where on one end of the spectrum you had nobles arriving with somewhat well equipped forces and idea of what to do, and on the other you had pilgrims, with whatever they just picked up in their hands and not answering commands of anyone, but their priest.

The economic side of things came into play after the process started and gradually became dominant. But it didn't start like it.

Finally. Interest of France in Mongols can be easily explained precisely by the influence crusades had on French and other Christian elites in Europe. The initial victory of 1st Crusade was followed by a series of setbacks. Muslims gradually begun to push crusaders out, the fact that crusaders started to fight amongst themselves helped a lot.

And then mongols arrived, almost from nowhere, crushed one of most powerful Muslim states at the time, and didn't stop there. It did seem like an immense opportunity, and in a way it was. If French, or someone else in Christendom, could convince khans that some form of cooperation is possible, or even better, if Mongols converted to Christianity, there would be a decent chance to not only save Jerusalem, but to move on to Egypt (still majority Christian).

bossyTeacher• 5 months ago

under control of English king (who was just a duke in France,

I thought the folks in Normandy were just Nordic people who moved there and later to England

AnimalMuppet• 5 months ago

Why the Mongols? Because they were distant. You can't afford to admire the people next door; you're either fighting them or preparing for when fighting breaks out again.

forshaper2• 5 months ago

The idea that you can't admire people you're fighting is ridiculous. You're forced to admire them. If you don't admire where they win, you lose.

Brajeshwar• 5 months ago

For some reason, the website is down for me. I have always been fascinated by the Mongols after reading “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford.

Recently, I stumbled upon the 6:40+ hour YouTube video, “The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe.” You might like it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFwMDuAnS4

Hikikomori4• 5 months ago

I guess you already found the hardcore history podcast episodes.

EDIT: Didn't pay attention to what channel you linked, didn't know they made videos for their podcasts.

vm• 5 months ago

I still get weird looks when I rave about 8 hours of podcasts on the Mongols. Hard to appreciate without having heard it. Dan Carlin is exceptional.

Here’s the first episode on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wuQ7JPneMRJTU9UJrJRNs?si=6...

And link to buy for those who prefer that over streaming https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...

wiseowise• 5 months ago

Goodreads reviews don't instill confidence in the book.

soiltype2• 5 months ago

As a rule, "pop history" is full of shit and is probably better considered misinformation than anything else. I probably don't I know of a single general-audience history/anthropology book that doesn't horrify scholars of the field.

As unfortunate as it is, studying cause-and-effect is extremely complex. If it's even theoretically possible to distill it down to easily digestible ideas, that's well outside our current technical capabilities.

There's usually going to be some true and interesting information in these books, but it will be too deeply embedded in a narrative that is misleading.

astrolx• 5 months ago

Baudolino from Umberto Eco (an excellent book) is partially about that, I recommend the read !

orwin• 5 months ago

What's also interesting about the mongols and their inheritors (India's mughals especially) was how weird but effective their administration was. India knew around no global famines and very few local ones (none around the Bengal) in ~300 years of Mughal rule. In ~100 years of British rule, you had regular famines all around India, and some very harsh ones where millions of people died from hunger (which used to be more than extremely rare), including one in Bengal which never in its written history had ever suffered even a local one.

ozgrakkurt• 5 months ago

Western colonialism is a very high bar in terms of damage imo.

This subject really interesting to read, thank you for mentioning it!

Found this in case anyone is interested in reading about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

PlatoIsADisease• 5 months ago

I worry Colonialism will come back again. Or at least in a different form.

Most International Relations practitioners are followers of (Systems) Realism. You might find some minor power with Idealists/Instituitonalists, but they only get that privilege by being under the umbrella of a great power.

Colonialism was not some greedy merchant/state thing, it was an Arms Race. It follows the inevitable forces produced by anarchy, there are no police to call so power is the greatest form of security. It causes a Tragedy of the Commons situation in the form of an Arms Race.

After Colonialism, we had essentially client states, which seems similarly brutal.

mdani• 5 months ago

There were several great famines during the Mughal reign in India, for example, Peter Mundy, the English merchant and traveller, describes the great famine of Deccan and Gujrat. The Mughal rule was brutal. The European travellers have written about the plight of the farmers who rebelled due to excessive taxation despite the fear of punishment. The Mughals built towers of severed heads outside each village and even they were not able to quell the rebellion, such was the state of affairs. So I'd say the assumption you're making isn't true.

dyauspitr• 5 months ago

Mughal rule in India was very inconsistent depending on the ruler in power at the time. There was a huge variety in quality of governance from Akbar to Aurangzeb.

999900000999• 5 months ago

What's the saying, the Irish famine was caused by a parasite, known as the British.

Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

skissane• 5 months ago

Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

They sent Protestant missionaries with free food for kids (souperism). Private charities, but the government used them as an excuse to not provide more government aid.

And a lot of Catholic parents decided they’d rather their children be dead than risk them becoming Protestant.

OkayPhysicist• 5 months ago

Famines are, with very few exceptions, politico-economic actions, often with intentional malice, rather than a complete inability to obtain enough food.

jmyeet4• 5 months ago

You’re so close to the point but not quite there.

Famines are political. They happen because one population is happy to starve another. The Mughals ruled themselves. The British stole harvests for themselves and let the local population starve.

The potato famine in Ireland is treated as some kind of unavoidable, natural event. No, the British just stole the harvest. And this continued right up until Churchill in India.

So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.

phainopepla2• 5 months ago

The Mughals ruled themselves
So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.

The Mughals were the imperium, ruling over their subjects. They came in to the subcontinent as outsiders, just like the British.

rramadass2• 5 months ago

[flagged]

suddenlybananas• 5 months ago

Interesting to not mention Rabban Bar Sauma ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabban_Bar_Sauma ) who was a Mongol ambassador to France. He was born a Christian in Beijing and walked all the way to Paris in a sort of reverse Marco Polo situation.

AStrangeMorrow• 5 months ago

Yeah it is easy to imagine the past as a set of very disconnected cultures when they were not. I remember hearing about people like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_da_Pian_del_Carpine

He was a medieval Italian diplomat. And seems like when he was at the court of the Khan, we was trying to make a push of Catholicism and was getting into debates with other theologians, including one from a Islamic country and one from the Byzantine empire.

A bit later in the medieval times, you have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Rubruck who was an envoy from the court of France (Louis XIV) to the Khan. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_de_Longjumeau (from France too)

Marco Polo is the most well know but far from the first one

piokoch• 5 months ago

"The kings of medieval France were fascinated by the Mongols, who they saw as great empire builders."

Well, surprising, as they were supporting military actions against Mongols, plus medieval France was nothing like Mongols empire in terms of social live organization, way of fighting wars (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God).

Later, in XV century, France started to turn into Mongols-like regime, but those weren't medieval times.

mikkupikku• 5 months ago

Real recognizes Real.

metalman• 5 months ago

contemporary mongol throut singing with heavy metal done on electrified tradition instruments. the HU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ7XW0_teB4

rramadass2• 5 months ago

Even better;

The Story Of The Mongols Whom We Call The Tartars by Friar Giovanni DiPlano Carpini (an Account of his embassy to the court of the Mongol Khan in 1245-1247) - https://archive.org/details/the-story-of-the-mongols-whom-we...

The cover; a picture of a Mongol Warrior in full Panopoly, is itself worth the price of the book!

The Mongol Khans of Medieval France

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