Chapter 12: Pastoral Peoples on the Global Stage

Chapter 12: Pastoral Peoples on the Global Stage

            In this chapter I learned about the Mongolian Empire, a group that was commonly described as barbaric but in some sense I consider them to be ingenious and ruthless. The Mongolian society was nomadic based so a majority of their history is written by either enemies or account witnesses who ran into them. Being a nomadic culture gave them a huge advantage in war fare.  As an audience we hear mostly about the greatness of the Mongol’s and their fierceness but every now and then they had their casualties or setbacks for example “their withdrawal from Eastern Europe (1242), their defeat in Egypt (1260), the failure of their own invasion of Japan owing to violent typhoons (1274, 1281), and the difficulty of penetrating the tropical jungles of South East Asia, even when they tried conquering Russia” Page 345.  Mongolian society was egalitarian and this lead to the fall of Cheggis Khan’s empire based on the “10, 100, 1000, 10,000”structure, when the Cheggis Khan had passed away everyone who was a general had to return back to pick a new Khan. Everyone in the hierarchy of this pyramid structure had to turn around when they were already scattered.  History doesn’t credit on how impressive the Mongolian civilization truly was because they were consistently doubted they were the first ones to have horses and domesticated them into being used for battle. They had a complex economy because again their usefulness of being nomadic their economy was based from what they raided in small cultures and what they had gathered mainly only what they needed. When they did take over areas they never forced a religion because amazingly they were open towards what people believed as what Mongke had said “Just as God gave different fingers to the hand , so has He given different ways to men” Page 347.