Episode 296 - The Mongol Storm with Nicholas Morton

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 296, The Mongol Storm, with Nicholas Morton.

Last time we watched on at the surprising spectacle of a joint Roman-Bulgarian siege of Constantinople.

Ultimately Latin sea power won the day, and the Allies broke off their siege in acrimony.

As the Tsar Ivan Arsen made his way home, he was informed of worrying developments along the Danube.

Cuman tribes were trying to cross the river in large numbers.

Why?

Because they were scared of a new steppe confederation bearing down on them from the east.

When your most ferocious warriors begin running for their lives, it's time to be concerned.

Today the Mongols arrive in the Byzantine world, and they will make a dramatic impact.

They will invade both Europe and the Middle East, dealing devastating blows to all the states they encounter.

Most pertinent to our story is their encounter with the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum.

To tell us about this climactic showdown and its consequences, I am joined by Dr.

Nicholas Morton.

Dr.

Morton is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern and Global History at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

His research focuses on the history of the Crusades and the medieval Middle East between the 10th and the 14th centuries.

He has written four other books on crusading and the crusader states, and we'll have him back soon on the podcast to tell us about the fifth crusade.

His new book, The Mongol Storm, Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, is available now.

In it, he offers a panoramic account of the Mongol invasions of the Middle East during the 13th century, examining these wars from the perspectives of the many different societies impacted by their conquests, including, of course, Byzantium.

Dr.

Nicholas Morton, welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Hi, it's great to be on the show.

Hey, it's great to have you.

So just tell the listeners a little bit about your book, The Mongol Storm, and why you wrote it.

Okay, so the book's about the 13th century Middle East, and there's so much going on in this era.

The main thing, as the title suggests, is the Mongols invade the Middle East and conquer most of it.

But there's so many other empires and sultanates and territories struggling for survival, struggling to expand.

You've got the decline and fall of the Crusader states.

You've got Byzantium's

ongoing decline.

You've got the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Mamluk Empire, the fall of the Ayyubid Empire, that's Saladin's Empire.

There's so much going on.

And even beyond the political sphere, you've got exchanges in technologies ideas religions trade goods even recipes and i wanted to bring this out in a book where multiple perspectives were all drawn together to show how together they advanced the history of this period.

And so it's about the Mongol invasions of the Middle East, but it's from 10 different perspectives or about 10.

And between those perspectives, we explore how that century progressed to bring about what is basically a period of seismic change for the entire area.

And for me, at least, I wanted to communicate my excitement about that in the book and not just draw up the warfare and political side of it, but everything else that's going on too.

Yeah, absolutely.

The book is brilliant.

I really enjoyed it.

And obviously, we're just going to focus on one of those sort of arenas today.

But just to remind the listeners, they'll all have an idea in their head of who the Mongols were.

But who were the Mongols and why did they become such a successful force on the world stage?

Okay, so to the north of China, you have a region which is today's Mongolia, and it's a varied region.

It has a thick forest belt to the north.

There's various mountainous areas.

It's on the margins of the Gobi Desert, but a large part of the land is grassland, steppe.

And this is a conducive environment for nomadic peoples who move their herds and flocks from one area to another from their winter to summer grazing grounds.

And so in that respect, it's quite similar to much of Central Asia, which again, it can be varied, but there is a great deal of grassland, which is suited for nomadic ways of life.

And for years, decades, centuries, nomadic peoples can conduct their way of life with very little break or very little change.

They may fight occasional wars with neighboring dynasties or neighboring peoples, but that's about it.

But every once in a while, a confederation is formed.

And that confederation then typically attacks not just other societies in the Central Asian region, but the agricultural or fundamentally agricultural societies around their margins.

China.

That's why there are the various walls of China and also the Muslim world further south, where there's a line of fortress cities intended specifically to keep out invaders from Central Asia.

And of course, Western Christendom or the Western or the Roman Empire as it was, where for many parts of,

for many periods, there is the threat of nomadic invasion going all the way back.

to the earlier period and indeed Byzantium as well, where people at the Kumans and Pechenegs moved around the coast of the Black Sea to assail Byzantium's borders.

And so really the history of Eurasia is characterized by this ongoing tension.

There aren't nomadic peoples.

For decades, it's easy to forget that they pose a threat because they don't.

They're just continuing their way of life until they do.

And then it can be decisive.

And one of the things that has become very clear to me as I've studied nomadic peoples is just how effective they are when they put their minds to conquest.

Because unlike agricultural societies like Byzantium,

pretty much every single adult male is a warrior.

And also women are also raised with military skills as well, although

it's more rare that they go on campaign and act as fighters, but they still have those skills.

By contrast, agricultural societies like Byzantium, like much of the Muslim world, like much of Western Christendom, you've probably got one fighter per 20 head of population.

And so

the fighters are normally the elites who depend on farmers to provide the revenue base, the resource base on which they can be supported.

And so nomadic peoples can raise large armies on slender populations.

And they're incredibly mobile.

They don't require the wagon trains and the logistics that agricultural societies need.

They bring their herds with them.

And so as a result, their logistics are right there next to them.

They're very hardy as well.

So they can survive for long periods without much

by way of support.

And so

their armies, all of whom are mounted, are fast moving.

They don't require logistics.

Pretty much everyone can fight.

fight and that makes them very very dangerous they're very very mobile and they'll cut the logistics of the people they're fighting almost immediately.

So combating a nomadic invader is exceptionally difficult.

And that's why Byzantium struggled enormously with peoples like the Pechnegs and the Kumans.

Western Christendom struggled with peoples like the Avars, or before that, you could go back to the Huns and all the other nomadic peoples of that era who attacked both Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire, or indeed the Muslim world people like the Seljuk Turks.

And so this is a major problem for agricultural societies.

How do you manage the process of stepping invasion when it happens?

Because when it happens, you can try and resist it, but the experience of agricultural societies is very mixed when they try.

Absolutely.

So

the Mongols end up being this unusually successful confederation.

And obviously, your book is about their collision with the Middle East.

So can you very briefly remind listeners what they've done in China and the East and bring them to the Middle East and kind of explain why?

Why are they heading so far west?

Sure.

So the key figure here is called Temujin.

And Temujin

rose in quite a sort of tough environment in Mongolia, fighting his way to the fore.

He's had several serious reverses, but by the early 13th century, he's beginning to build an empire for himself.

And in 1206, he will take on a title or be granted a title in his own perception, and that is Chinggiz Khan.

And he begins to weld a confederation of peoples together in the Mongolia region and then uses that to invade the northern parts of China.

and then subsequently to expand out into parts of Central Asia, where again, he conquers various societies along the margins of China or in more of the steppe region.

And so his confederation builds and it builds.

And over time, it's not clear if it's Chingiz Khan or his Ez who developed this view, but the view begins to form that what is happening here is not simply the creation of a new empire.

It's planetary conquest.

It's everything.

It's everywhere.

Every single human being has, in the Mongols' view, a responsibility to submit to the Mongol Empire.

And that seems to have been a view which is a long time in sort of in brewing.

It's not clear if Chinggis Khan himself developed that, but nonetheless, these are the kinds of thoughts that will drive the Mongol Empire onwards.

And the crucial moment for the Mongols' invasion into the Middle East, or the first one,

occurred in 1218 when a caravan of Mongol merchants arrived at a border town called batra

very much on the sort of the borders between the muslim world or the northern reaches of the muslim world and the central asian steppe region and for reasons that aren't quite clear the town governor called inal chuk

arrested the mongols merchants and then sent back to the sultan uh sultan of the area was ruled by the Khwarazmian dynasty.

So he's sent back to the Khwarazmian Sultan asking for guidance on what he should do with these captured Mongol merchants.

And the instructions he received were very clear.

They were all to be killed.

And so he went ahead, he executed them, but he missed one.

And so one made it back to Chinggis Khan and reported what had happened.

And needless to say, Chingiz Khan was very,

was extremely angered by this.

And so within a matter of weeks,

a Mongol army arrived outside Otra, destroyed the city, and Inal Chuk was executed by having boiling metal poured down his throat.

After that, the Mongols then began to knock down the Khwarazmian Empire's main border cities, one after another.

And they did it by

gathering together the able-bodied people from the previous city they had just conquered, and then driving them against the ramparts of the next city, so that when the defenders fired their arrows and shot their catapults to try and repel the Mongols, what they were actually doing is just mowing down the very people the Mongols had forced in front of their own assault troops.

And then once their ammunition was expended, that's when the Mongols made their main assault and city after city fell.

And so this is the opening move, which will ultimately bring the Mongols into the Middle East.

The Khwarazmian Sultan, realizing that the border was collapsing, he fled to an island on the Caspian Sea.

and the Mongols sent a flying column to try and hunt him down.

They never never found him, but in the process of searching, they went south of the Caspian, then up through the Caucasus, so through Armenia, Georgia, and then into what today would be southern Russia.

And in that process, that brought them properly into the Middle East.

It didn't stay put, but it became clear from that point the Mongols are on their way.

given the Mongols' ambition to conquer the world, it really was only a matter of time before the next really big army would be dispatched into the region.

And this is modern Iran they've now reached.

Is that right?

So by this point, they've conquered parts of northern Iran, much of what today would be modern-day Afghanistan,

most of the Stan, so Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, that sort of area, that would be under their control now.

So yeah,

that advance is taking place, but it stalls in 1221.

because Chinggis Khan wants to go back to China to continue his wars there.

And so there is a sort of period of hiatus

where

people in the Middle East, they know the Mongols are coming, but they're not sure when.

And that's obviously a time of considerable anxiety.

It's also mixed with some interesting legends.

So in 1221, for example, or

between 1218 and 1221, there's a big crusade taking place in Egypt.

and the crusaders want to conquer Egypt, the idea being to conquer Egypt and then use that as a staging point to conquer Jerusalem.

And they hear rumors of something big going on far out to the east.

And they know who it is.

They know what's going on.

This is the advance of Presta John.

This is the advance of a Christian empire, emperor, according to their own legends, who rules over an empire of monsters.

as well as human subjects.

and his empire encompasses things like the crags where the dragon masters live and the fountain of eternal youth.

And these legends are taken very seriously.

And so when they start to hear reports of victories taking place or advances taking place far out to the east, they think Presta John is on the march.

And the Fifth Crusade actually pauses its military operations,

at least in part, it seems, because they were hoping that Presta John would arrive and they could then synchronize their activities with him.

So it's an astonishing sort of knock-on effect of the rumours of the Mongol invasions.

It also reflects, I think, perhaps the earliest major impacts in other parts of the Middle East, untouched by the Mongols, where rumor alone does its work in changing the way that things are happening, wars, diplomacy,

the norms of everyday life.

I'm sure we can't go into

the Presterjohn myth too deeply, but I suppose that reflects the Muslim understanding that the Mongols were not Muslims.

So the word was coming down that these people are not part of us.

And maybe that's the Christian assumption as well.

They must be part of us.

You know, there isn't another, surely there isn't another world religion that we haven't heard of kind of thing.

Yeah, and the Presto John myth goes back quite a long way.

It goes back to the 1120s.

It's based on apparently a visitor who reached the papal court and reported the existence of this empire.

It was taken very seriously from that point.

But yeah, certainly from the Muslim world's perspective, there's no suggestion that this is a friendly force.

The overthrow of the Khwarazmian Sultanate, which is a Sunni Muslim territory, that made it perfectly clear that the Mongols were not allies in any way, shape, or form.

So let's move.

to Anatolia, where the Seljuk Sultanate based at Konya, formerly Byzantine Iconium,

has been dominating most of

that peninsula, apart from the western coast and the northern coast.

So they will be anxious to hear about this because

it's a non-Muslim power moving west.

Can you

take the listeners sort of

into Anatolia a little and just talk about sort of

the state the Seljuks were in and their sense of the Mongols as they get closer.

Absolutely.

So, Anatolia, roughly speaking, modern-day Turkey,

that was for centuries one of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire.

And that continued until the 11th century, which is when you have the beginnings of the Seljuk invasions and the Turkmen invasions into Anatolia.

And so, for a time, Anatolia was sort of a conquest space where various Turkmen and Seljuk dynasties tried to sort of struggle with one another for supremacy.

But by the sort of 1170s, it's becoming clear that the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate is going to be the

strongest

and most stable of those territories in Anatolia.

It doesn't control all the...

all the land under its own control.

As you mentioned, the western part of Anatolia is still part of the Byzantine Empire.

And then between the Byzantine frontier and the Seljuk Sultanate, there's a sort of an area called the Ujj,

which is where various Turkmen nomadic groups

conduct their pastoral way of life.

And it seems as though the Seljuk Sultanate only had limited control over those Turkmen groups.

So Turkmen meaning Turks who still maintain a nomadic way of life.

But the Seljuk Sultanate goes from strength to strength in the late 12th and early 13th century.

It sits on various major trade routes running through Anatolia, whether that's west-east, linking Byzantium to the Caucasus and places like Tabriz in the Caucasus or north-south.

So there's trade routes running from the north coast, bringing in goods from across the Black Sea, then cross Anatolia and into the Middle East.

And so another major event that shapes the Seljuk Sultanate prior to the Mongol invasions is the Fourth Crusade,

which brings about the catastrophic overthrow of Constantinople.

The Seljuks don't try and profit from the Byzantine collapse in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, but the Crusaders trying to conquer the Byzantine Empire.

They don't profit from it too much.

They take various cities,

most importantly, I think, Antalya on the south coast.

But nonetheless, they're getting stronger.

It's becoming clear that the Anatolian Seljuks are the dominant or becoming the dominant faction in Anatolia at this time.

And then the Mongols arrive.

And it seems initially that the Anatolian Seljuks

wanted to try and conduct diplomacy with the Mongols.

And it seems in the early years of that relationship, they gave the Mongols the impression that they were prepared to accept a sort of

client status to the Mongols.

And this is taking place in the 1230s, because in 1230, after that period of hiatus I mentioned before, the Mongols stage another major invasion into the Middle East, and this time they're coming to stay.

And so under a leader called Chormakun, the Mongols conquer what's left of the Khwarazmian Empire, and then in the 1230s, they conquer Georgia and Greater Armenia in the Caucasus, which then gives them a frontier on the eastern boundaries of the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate.

So the Anatolian Seljuks seem to have hoped to keep the Mongols off by diplomacy initially, but something goes wrong.

And it seems to have something to do with the change in leadership and with the accession of a new Seljuk sultan called K.

Khuzro II.

And

by

early 1240s, it's clear that war is beginning to form on the eastern borders of Anatolia.

And in 1242,

By this stage, the Mongol commander Chulmakun has been replaced by his subordinate called Baiju.

He stages an invasion into Anatolia, and this is the beginning of the war with the Anatolian Seljuks.

He conquers Erzurum,

and then the following year, 1243,

the Mongols invade again with a large invasion army.

The Seljuks are ready for them.

They've amassed...

the largest army they can manage.

So the ground is being shaped for a substantial confrontation.

The Mongols themselves, their army wasn't that large, actually.

It's probably no more than about maybe 10, 15,000 troops with then a substantial contingent of Georgian auxiliaries.

The Georgians may not have been very keen to fight for the Mongols, but having been conquered by them, they are now under Mongol authority, and so they're going to fight for the Mongols whether they like it or not.

And in fact, there is some doubt expressed as to how loyal the Georgians will actually prove, but they still line up for battle with the Mongols.

On the other side of the battlefield, the Seljuks have put together the biggest confederation they can possibly manage.

The Seljuk Sultanate is actually a large-scale recruiter of Frankish or Western European troops.

And so there are several thousand Frankish mercenaries within the Seljuk army.

This is an era where mercenaries, like many other professionals like shipwrights and architects, move very freely across cultural boundaries.

There may also have been Byzantine troops troops and as well as troops from other Muslim territories further south.

So the Seljuks have put together the largest possible force and they meet at a place called Khuzidagh

and at that battle is a two-day battle.

The first day is rather indecisive.

There's a great deal of fighting back and forth.

No one clearly seems to get the upper hand, although come that evening, the Seljuks seem to have been persuaded that their position is no longer tenable.

And so the Seljuk Sultan pulls back, abandoning his camp and abandoning, incidentally, he brought along with him many of his animals.

He seems to have been very interested in collecting.

He had his

personal mobile zoo that he brought with him with many sort of hunting cats and things like that.

I think there's a giraffe in there too.

They got left as well.

So he pulled back abruptly.

And the following day, the Mongols advance expecting to re-engage in battle.

and there's no one there.

So they cautiously advance into the Seljuk camp and see the Seljuk camp laid out below them.

Evidently, and not surprisingly, they're wary.

Perhaps this is some kind of elaborate trick or ambush.

But no, the Seljuks have indeed withdrawn.

And so, as a result, the Mongols take over the Seljuk camp and then begin their conquest of Anatolia.

And it's during that conquest that ultimately the Seljuk vizier manages to arrange

a treaty with the Mongols, whereby the Seljuks formally accept a client status to the Mongols.

And that begins the long-term tributary status of the Seljuk Sultanate to the Mongols, which will carry on until the Seljuk Sultanate is no more.

Wow.

So this is big change coming.

And we may not have the sources for this, but I think some listeners, when they think of the seljuks fighting the mongols will think that the seljuk side

could command all the nomads of anatolia but actually they probably would have been quite a mixed force they might have had some steppe riders themselves but not enough to threaten the mongols military superiority Yeah, I mean, it seems like the Seljuk army was actually bigger than the Mongols.

And as you say, the Seljuks themselves were in their roots from the Central Asian steppe.

They still fought in much the same way as nomadic light cavalry.

Although, of course, they have acquired additional formations of Frankish heavy cavalry, crossbowmen, and possibly Byzantine troops as well, who would fight in different ways.

But that could be an advantage because you can blend the different strengths and weaknesses of those various contingents.

I think the problem is by this stage, it's the 1240s.

The Mongols have been fighting wars of expansion now for getting on for half a century.

They're very, very accustomed to winning.

Their commanders are supremely experienced.

And you hear stories of the Mongols' opponents backing away from the battlefield even before the Mongols have crossed the horizon.

Now, the Seljuks did put up resistance.

But this is a time when there's so many stories going around of just how fearsome the Mongols are.

And there's stories about, for example, one story told by Ibn al-Athiya, who's a Muslim author from Mazul at this time, or just before it.

He talks about one instance where someone mentioned to him that a single Mongol rider approached a group of 60 men who were walking along a particular road.

And the Mongol rider said, okay, everyone, tie yourselves up.

You're now,

you've now been conquered by the Mongols.

And they do.

And the only way you can explain people behaving like that is that they're absolutely terrified.

I mean, in fact, it doesn't go so well for the Mongol soldier because the person who told Ibn al-Athir this story apparently knifed the Mongol warrior when he came close, and so they were able to get away.

But the story reflects the terror in which they're held, and you can see why.

They're in the process of conquering the entire planet.

And actually, at this point, given the sheer scale of their conquests, that ambition doesn't seem so very implausible at this time.

because no one's successfully resisting them.

Now, occasionally

there is a Mongol defeat, but that's that's almost always reversed immediately afterwards by a tidal wave of additional invasions that make sure that that defeat is covered off pretty quickly.

So I suspect that the experience of endless campaigning and the veteran status of Mongol warriors, their willingness to learn from their defeats, and they pick up various techniques and weapons among others, sort of Chinese siege engineers, among other specialists as well.

So they're picking up experience and knowledge too.

And then just confidence.

They know they're going to win.

And that can breed arrogance, but it can also mean that they're very, very hard to defeat.

And I suspect,

again, probably difficult to reconstruct, but

in the Seljuk case, when you're facing a likely defeat, even if you've put up good resistance for a day, your internal politics then comes into play.

You're thinking, who's going to knife me in the back if we lose this and make a deal with the Mongols?

So maybe I should make a deal with the Mongols.

And so, yeah, can you tell the listeners what happens next?

Yeah, so there's all sorts of

the Seljuk court is

coming out of a period of substantial infighting.

There's been a number of rebellions in recent years by particular Turkmen groups.

It's a little bit unsettled.

And so, as you say, when the pressure comes on, the cracks are exacerbated to some degree.

And indeed, in later decades, the Seljuk Sultanate is placed in the extremely difficult position as a client to the Mongols, where it has to confront the Mongols' endless demands for payment, whether in resources or money, or incidentally, also in hats.

This is a vogue in the medieval period.

Everyone loves Turkish hats.

And a little bit of an aside here, but if you'll forgive me,

part of the Seljuk's tribute is payable in hats.

And hats are getting exported everywhere.

And hats have been a firm favourite by this time.

The Knights Templar wear felt hats, which I'm pretty sure are from

Seljuk Anatolia.

In

1119, so 100 years plus before this, in a provincial council in France, the hats are so popular, there are attempts to ban them.

And even in the 13th century, it's well known that Turkish hats get exported as far as the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of France.

So yeah, Turkish hats, extremely popular, and the Mongols want them too.

But I do digress.

Yeah, the Seljuk Sultanate has to pay enormous tributary payments to the Mongols.

And of course, they're weakened.

They've lost their independence and therefore their rulers have lost a great deal of their prestige and their traditional sort of basis of their leadership.

And so the Seljuk Sultanate weakens and weakens.

And then in the 1250s, the Mongols want to take over much of the best grazing ground in Anatolia as well, which weakens them further.

And so the Seljuks go into long-term decline.

Often their chief ministers who act as liaisons to the Mongols, they actually have more power than the Seljuk Sultans themselves until by the early 14th century,

it's the end, basically, and they just disappear.

What's interesting

is that

whilst the Seljuks are declining, The opposite is true for the Turkmen nomads who also exist in Anatolia.

As I mentioned, they've always been quite difficult for the Seljuk Sultanate to control.

Sometimes they're aligned, sometimes they're not, but as the Seljuk Sultanate

retreats and as it goes into decline, largely due to the Mongols' demands, the Turkmen also fill that vacuum and they become a lot more powerful.

And so as we move into sort of the mid to late 13th century, those Turkmen groups stage rebellion after rebellion against the Mongols, often put down with stunning force and enormous casualties.

But they continue rebelling until eventually those Turkmen groups start to form their own micro-states, which become known as Beyliks.

And these are the origins of an enormous empire, which will last to the 20th century, because it's in these years that the Ottoman Beylik begins to form, which in time, of course, will become the Ottoman Empire.

So these events,

they have significant implications that will change not just the region, but the world

in the fullness of time.

And so just to clarify, the Mongols are using the steppe land of eastern Anatolia to graze their own herds while they're trying to conquer other parts of the Middle East.

Yeah, so the big move takes place in 1256.

So the Mongols, being a nomadic people, they want grazing.

And the best grazing in the Middle East is,

well, there's a large area of grazing in sort of

Central Asia Minor or Central Anatolia that's suited for that.

The Caucasus, particularly areas around Azerbaijan, have large areas of good grazing, and so do some areas of the upper Jazeera, the northern part of the Jazeera.

And so the Mongols are after these areas very much so.

But of course, the Seljuks also have a substantial

nomadic footprint.

They need those lands for themselves, take away those lands, and they get weakened.

And so, as the Seljuks

become weaker and poorer and less able to control their own territories,

coupled with the Mongols' demands for tribute payments, the Mongols are actually weakening their own position because they lose control of Anatolia because they've weakened their clients so much that the Turkmen groups who feel much less um

obliged to show submission to the Mongols, they become a lot more rebellious against Mongol rule.

And ultimately, they push so far west that they push the Byzantines out of Anatolia altogether.

Yeah, so by the late 13th, 14th century, early 14th century, the Mongol Empire in the Middle East is starting to break apart, it's going into decline.

Mongols' ability to ask for anything is weakening.

The Seljuk Sultanate's virtually gone.

And so, again, this is a vacuum which these various now Beyochs Beyliks

can

exploit.

At the start, it's not the Ottomans are only one among many.

They're not necessarily the most powerful.

The Beylik of Karaman is incredibly powerful in the early years.

But yes, in the fullness of time in the first decades of the 14th century, this is when Byzantine Anatolia really goes into decline until there's really very little left.

Thank you so much for taking us through that.

I'd obviously, I'm going to ask people to check out the book to find out more, but

you've been studying this whole period for a long time.

Was there anything in the writing of the book that kind of stood out to you, a change of perspective?

Or,

I don't know, information that kind of dawned on you in a new way?

Yeah.

Two things, actually.

I think that one of the biggest...

biggest and least acknowledged problems we have when dealing with the medieval period is that we live in the modern period.

In the modern period, agricultural societies predominate.

The nomadic way of life is marginal and the thought of nomadic invasion simply no longer exists.

And so it's very easy to assume.

that

that's always been the case, that agricultural societies have always had some kind of upper hand in that relationship, but they haven't.

It's only really that in the the 17th century that gunpowder weapons get effective enough to defeat nomadic armies.

It's only really with the advent of railways and roads and the internal combustion engine that the nomadic way of life

is really forced back

in a way it hadn't been previously.

But we're talking about hundreds of years before that.

In this era, the nomadic way of life in many ways is incredibly effective on the battlefield, but it's not not just its military abilities.

Nomadic cultures are very sophisticated.

If you can hold together an empire that stretches from the Pacific seacoast, taking in China, Central Asia, Russia,

parts of Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East, and you can hold it together and make it work using some quite sophisticated communication structures and organizational structures.

This is complex.

And I think that something we've lost is an appreciation of just how complex these societies were, how sophisticated they were.

I'm not playing down the loss of life involved in those conquests, which could be considerable.

But nonetheless, I think we need to sort of

understand these cultures on their own terms.

And actually, in many ways, it's not agricultural armies with their

heavily armored

knights or mamluks or Varangian gods or whatever it is they've got.

These people, they're not what stopped these nomadic societies from expanding.

Often it's the environment.

It's simply the fact that nomadic invasions stop where they can no longer graze their animals.

It's not because the agricultural societies are some way superior to them or better able to defend their borders or that they consistently win in battle.

No, they consistently lose in many cases.

And so

I think for me at least One big conclusion from this is the need to take nomadic societies seriously, not just as powerful players in Eurasian politics, but in many ways as being the dominant actors.

They are more important

than other societies, not all of them necessarily.

And I'm not saying that their

overall sophistication is somehow greater or not.

I'm not making a judgment there, but their ability to project power is considerable.

We talk about the Crusades.

Now, whatever you think of them, from a military perspective,

they are normally considered to have been very effective.

And yet their territorial footprint is tiny compared to that of the Mongols or indeed other nomadic invaders, like the Seljuk Turks.

And I think it's worth keeping that in mind when we sort of try and approach what's going on in the Middle Ages as a whole.

Another factor in this

is the question is this is a question, this is something that occurred to me after writing the book in many ways.

And that's just the very simple question of who gets to survive in this environment which societies are still standing at the end of it all or which have emerged and the answer is virtually none i mean the list of the casualty list of big societies in the middle east is considerable the anatomian seljuks the ayyubid empire

Crusader states, although they weren't overthrown by the Mongols, but they were still overthrown within the

wars of this era.

The Abbasid Caliphate and the congol conquest of baghdad and then although the abbasid caliphate was then um re-established in cairo but there's others too there's the zangid empire in mizul

the georgians in greater arm so the georgians and the greater armenians they were both overthrown in this era the khwarazmian empire these are big territories they don't survive so who does survive

And for me, at least, there's an interesting observation to be made here.

Two of the societies that survive, one for a bit and one for considerably longer after the Mongol invasions.

The first is great is Silesian Armenia, a different area of Armenian rule, this one in southern, what's been southern Turkey.

And they survive because they submit to the Mongols early, even before they've been really threatened.

They've clearly worked out they can't possibly stand up to Mongol invasion, and so they submit early.

And the Mongols appreciate that because they say they want other people to follow that example.

The Armenians, they are spared the need to have a Mongol garrison and their tribute payments are light.

So actually, they do very well in that scenario because they submitted early.

By contrast, another society that does very well is the Mamluk Empire in Egypt.

The Mamluks in 1250, they were originally enslaved people, raised and trained as soldiers by the Ayyubid Sultanate.

In 1250, they rose up, rebelled against the Ayyubids, and took power for themselves, creating the Mamluk Sultanate.

And they also reacted in a very extreme way.

The Mongols sent emissaries demanding the Mamluks' surrender.

The Mamluks refused and killed one of the envoys and shaved the beards from the others.

But then, unlike so many other societies, they didn't wait to be attacked.

They marched out and attacked the Mongols themselves.

No one does that.

A front-footed, aggressive strategy towards the planet's biggest empire.

It sounded like an act of extreme, well, bravery would be one way of putting it.

Several commanders in the Mamluk army think this is an act of suicide.

But what's interesting is that even though events did play out in the Mamluks' favour,

the Mamluks survive and the Armenians survive at least for a while.

And for me, at least, the take-home from this is that the societies that fall are often those who behave in what we might call a proportionate manner.

They realize they're threatened.

They send out envoys trying to work out and establish the extent of that threat.

They negotiate, try to

work out a way of managing that threat.

When that fails, they prepare their defenses and then when attacked, they try and protect themselves.

Now that sounds like an incredibly sort of sensible escalation.

It sounds very modern in many ways.

It's the kind of thing we would do.

It's It's a step-by-step response, responding in proportion to the level of aggression that we've faced.

They all get killed.

What's interesting is that those who survive react in extreme ways,

either by submitting entirely, even before threatened, which is actually a very pragmatic solution that does work for a time for the Armenians, or with

extreme aggression, attacking the Mongols head-on, immediately, very, very quickly.

And it's interesting that those reactions work.

And it makes me wonder, this has been a source of reflection for me that for me at least, and for many people, we've been raised in an environment where

we've been living at peace all our lives, really.

Wars have taken place, but not on our own soil.

And we've been used to stability

for as long as we can remember.

We're not used to, in many cases, I know some listeners may live in parts of the world where that's not true, but we live in, but we are used to extreme stability.

And so acting in a proportionate, in a way that feels sort of incremental, that makes sense to us.

That is the logic of peace, if you like.

But actually, in an unstable, in an unsettled environment where things are very much more dangerous, actually, in this context at least, more extreme reactions seem to have paid dividends in a way that proportionate reactions didn't.

fantastic that is uh just the sort of insight i i would recommend the rich listeners go seek out the book to hear more of uh the mongol storm making and breaking empires in the medieval near east is now out wherever good books are sold dr morton thank you so much for coming on the podcast thank you

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