The Torgut Exodus

At the beginning of the modern age the Torguts were still nomads, and were able to move across the continent on short notice. Living in the days before railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, during their time on the Volga they fought against the Swedes and Turks, sent a delegation to the Dalai Lama in Lhasa 2500 miles away, and exchanged delegations with the Manchu Emperor in Beijing 3600 miles away. They also served the civilized world as a conduit for  information about the continent as a whole: around 1715, Chinese emissaries returning from the Torguts brought the Manchu emperor news of Russia's 1709 defeat of the Swedes at Poltava in the Ukraine (about 600 miles west of the Torgut's Volga homeland). The Russian victory at Poltava also indirectly contributed toward enlarging the Western universe: captured Swedish officers were transported far to the east, and two of them ultimately brought back a German translation of the first Mongol work ever seen in Europe (a history written in 1659 by the ruler of Khiva in present-day Uzbekistan, Abu al Ghazi Bahadur).

Does the Bush Protect the Little Bird?

For little birds hoping for refuge, by and large, the odds are not really good. Cao Zhi and Prince Rakoczi  escaped with their lives, but the Chinese poet had to sit helplessly and watch while his friends, one by one, were murdered by the his brother the Emperor. (The almost mawkish pathos of the poem here is very rare in the Chinese poetry). Temujin escaped too,  but he devoted his life to tracking his enemies down and killing them. He was not a sparrow, but the fiercest of sparrowhawks, and from him there was no refuge.

700 year old jokes from a Syrian bishop

Bar Hebraeus’ Chronography, one of the major sources on Mongol Persia, is also multi-cultural, relating the histories of the Hebrews, the Chaldeans, the Medes, the Persians, the pagan Greeks,  the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the Mongols -- called Huns. (Another historian of Mongol Persia, Rashid ad-din, also wrote histories of China and Western Europe).  A peculiarity of the Chronography is that it uses two dating systems, the Muslim system and a second system which dated events from the foundation of Alexander’s Greek  Empire in Persia --  which had been defunct for 1400 years. (Presumably because of their Monophysite Christology, the Jacobites did not start their calendar with the birth of Christ).

Why Marco Polo Didn't See the Great Wall

One of the Wood's arguments is that Polo doesn't mention the Great Wall of China. However, the wall we know  was built by the succeeding Ming Dynasty, after the Mongol Yuan dynasty had collapsed, and Waldron has argued that the "Great Wall" as such did not exist before the Ming. .  There were, in fact, military walls in existence at the time of the Mongol conquest, but they were differently located than the Ming wall and much less impressive. Furthermore, since these walls were built to protect China from the Mongols, the Mongols tore many of them down.

Gabriel Ronay: The Lost King of England

The usurping minister Harold Godwinson became the leader of the Anglo-Saxon party in court, and ultimately became King -- though he almost immediately lost his throne to one of the other claimant, William the Conqueror of Normandy. (The fourth claimant was Harald Hadrada of Norway -- and Constantinople -- who was defeated at Stamford Bridge a few days before the Battle of Hastings). Before I read this book I already knew a fair amount about 1066 and all that, but I never had heard of Edward and Edgar. Ronay’s book fleshes out their story, and in the process gives us a vivid picture of the eleventh-century northern-European world.

The Politics of Genghis Khan: Conclusions

Genghis’s Mongols had  a unique and paradoxical position in the world described by Tilly: the lowest accumulation and concentration of capital of any nation, combined with the highest concentration of coercive power of any nation. They were coercion specialists who produced barely enough to keep themselves alive. But because of their military skills and organizations, they were able to reconfigure the Eurasian political world.

The Coming of the Age of Iron

This book, together with Robert Drews’ The End of the Bronze Age (Princeton, 1993) makes it pretty clear that iron and steel didn’t make anything happen. The rise of iron roughly coincided with a series of invasions which brought down many of the empires of the Eastern Mediterranean (notably Troy), but the evidence tells us that the invasions came first, and that the heavily militarized conquering nations afterwards developed steel technology for military uses. During the nineteenth century it was often thought that technological changes (or access to resources) caused social changes,  but nowadays it is more often thought, as in this case, that the social changes led to the increased exploitation of already-existing technology and resources.

Drakon and Solon

From a contemporary ideological point of view, the Athenian venture is interesting. In Athens the republican state and the individual (and to a degree, the market society) emerged simultaneously -- at the expense of myth, tradition, and the extended family. Individualism was made possible by the new state form, but this state form also forbade citizens to act on their desires for revenge and required them to restrain their impulses toward self-assertion. And finally, in Athens equality consisted of extending to commoners the old rights or privileges of the nobility (e.g. jury service, and the right to bring cases to trial), rather than simply stripping the nobles of their privileges and thus attaining a servile equality.

Silk and memes

Relic-worship and related practices are not part of the scriptures of Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, and insofar as they relate to these three doctrines, they seem more to be contrary to it than otherwise. And in fact these practices, which were heavily intertwined with magic and superstition, were often condemned by the orthodox when they first appeared

Starting from Greenland (or, the Turkish Kayak)

"Kayak" is probably a Turkish word, and the word "caique" has entered the European languages from Turkish as the name of an entirely different boat. The two words met in Scandinavia ca. 1700, having circumnavigated the globe between them. The Ivory Road from Greenland to China ca. 1000 AD. The Varangian (Norse) circumnavigation of Europe at the time of the Fourth Crusade.

Rome and Turkey

The migrations of Rome, and where did the turkey get its names, and why do some peoples call Turkey "Rome", and what's the difference between "Romanian" and "Rumanian" in Romanian, and where is Guinea, anyway?

Murder Most Foul: Chinggis Qan's Mother Speaks

The first recorded act of Temujin (the future Chinggis Qan) was the murder of his half-brother Bekter.  In the Secret History we can read  the eloquent speech his mother Ho'elün made when she heard the news. It seems like a bitter denunciation, but in the context of the book as a whole it functions as a prophecy that Temujin would prove overwhelming and  irresistible, and become the  greatest of  Qans. (Includes Mongol text of Ho'elün's oration.)

2000 years of Barbarians

My 4000-word attempt to summarize the role of the Steppe Barbarians in the military and political history of Eurasia from 700 BC to 1300 AD. For 2000 years, the steppe brought order and disorder to the civilized world.

The Barbarian Reservoir:  The barbarian invaders from the steppe have been compared to reservoirs (geothermal, electrostatic, or thermodynamic), volcanoes, lightning, storms, black holes, and wombs. Their real nature and their actual relationship to civilized society have been  properly understood by very few. For two thousand years they shaped civilized society from the uncontrolled steppe as a threat, and between about 200 A.D. and about 1300 A.D. almost all of the civilized world came under barbarian control.

"History of the Caucasian Albanians"

"Bestial, gold-loving tribes of hairy men.... demented in their satanically deluded  tree-worshipping errors in accordance with their northern dull-witted stupidity, addicted to their fictitious and deceptive religion....They also had drinking horns and gourd-shaped utensils from which they lapped their broth and similar greasy, congealed, unwashed abominations. Two or three of them to one cup, they greedily and bestially poured neat wine into their insatiable bellies which had the appearance of bloated goatskins..... Possessing completely anarchical minds, they stumble into every sort of error, beating drums and whistling over corpses, inflicting bloody sabre and dagger cuts on their cheeks and limbs, and engaging naked in sword fights – oh hellish sight! – at the graves, man against man and troop against troop, all stripped for battle.



Pre-Idiocentrism Writings:

The Nomads of Eurasia:
(To be revised; partly superseded by "The Barbarian Reservoir" and "2000 Years of Barbarians" above.)

Who were the Mongols?
How should the term "Mongol" be understood when speaking of the Mongol Empire?

Master Bibliography on The Mongol Empire, Central Asia, Eurasian Travellers, the History of War, and the Barbarian World

Sheng-wu Qin-zheng Lu:
An annotated translation of the Sheng-wu Qin-zheng Lu beginning where Pelliot and Hambis left off, and continuing as far as Temujin's proclamation as Chinggis Qan.

The Steppe Barbarians in Eurasia: a sketch:
(mostly superseded by "The Nomads in Eurasia" and "Who were the Mongols?" above)

The Rise of Chinggis Qan
A very tentative sketch.

The Secret History of the Mongols as a Historical Source:
Delivered at the 2002 ASPAC Conference, and heavily revised.

 The Secret History of the Mongols and Western Literature  (published as Sino-Platonic Papers #135, May, 2004.): some stories in the Secret History which relate to stories in the Western tradition -- with a closing comparison between the Western European feudal aristocracy and the nomads.

All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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