19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe (Part 1)

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0:30Transcription by ESO.

Ibn Battuta's Journey

0:59Tutor went on a journey around all of Asia that would take him to India and over the sea to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and eventually on to his final destination of China. But the first leg of this journey took him along the winding roads overland from Constantinople. He traveled past the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, over vast grasslands, and on southwards through the deserts of Central Asia,

1:32in what is now Kazakhstan, Ibn Batuta had heard marvelous stories about the opulent cities that lay along the vast trade route known as the Silk Road, which laced across the continent of Asia. These were the cities of Bulk, Bukhara, and Samarkand.

1:59First, he visited the city of Bukhara, once the jewel of Islamic learning, a city of enormous libraries and colleges. But to his disappointment, when he arrived, he found the city a much reduced place, as he wrote in his journal. We traveled for a whole day through contiguous orchards with streams, trees, and habitations, and arrived at the city of Bukhara.

2:34This city was formerly the capital of the lands beyond the river Ja'i, but was laid in ruins, so at the present time its mosques, colleges, and bazaars are in ruins. All but a few, and its inhabitants are looked down upon. There is not one person in it today who possesses any religious learning, or who shows any concern for acquiring it. Surprised at the sorry sight of the once great city of Bukhara, Ibn Battuta continued on to the opulent metropolis of Samarkand.

3:19I journeyed to the city of Samarkand, once one of the greatest and finest of cities, and most perfect of them in beauty. It is built on the bank of the river called the Wadil Wasarin, along which there are water wheels to supply water to the orchards.

3:38But when he arrived at the oasis of Samarkand, he found it too was in a much diminished state. The city was sparsely inhabited, its legendary walls torn down long ago, and its grand buildings standing in ruins. There were formerly great palaces on the riverbank, and constructions which bear witness to the lofty aspirations of the townsfolk.

4:10But most of this is obliterated, and most of the city itself has also fallen into ruin. It has no city wall, and no gates, and there is vegetation growing inside it. Ibn Battuta soon left that melancholy place, and continued on his journey. Finally, he passed through the city of Balkh, now in northern Afghanistan. This had once been another wealthy trade hub, and a center for the Zoroastrian religion.

4:45From a distance, he could see its tall buildings rising out of the river plains. But as he got closer, he saw no smoke of cooking fires, no animals in the fields, no traffic of people in its streets. An eerie feeling must have crept up on him. Next, we crossed the river Jayin, into the land of Khorasan, and marched for a day and a half, crossing the river through uninhabited desert and sands to the city of Balkh.

5:26It is completely dilapidated and uninhabited, but anyone seeing it would think it to still be inhabited, because of the solidity of its construction. For it was a vast and important city. Its mosques and colleges preserved their outward appearance, even now, with the inscriptions on their buildings incised with lapis-blue paints. As he passed through this devastated region, he heard stories about other ruined cities lying out in the desert, now so empty of life, that they could offer no shelter to travellers.

6:08The great cities of Khorasan are four. Two of them are inhabited, namely Herat and Nishapur, and two are in ruins, namely Balkh and Merv.

6:29Had he journeyed out to the city of Merv, he would have found an even more devastated ruin. Just a series of jagged earthen remains, rising out of the cracked salt flats of the desert, home only to owls and wild dogs, where once a city of half a million people had stood. Everywhere across this region, the cities bore the scars of one of the Middle Ages' most momentous and world-changing events.

7:00This was the uniting of a nomadic people who called themselves the Mongols.

7:08From their homeland far away in the steppe grasslands of East Asia, the Mongols had fused their anarchic pastoral culture into a war machine that has had few equals in history, and forged an empire that would stretch across much of the landmass of Asia, the largest continuous land empire in history. In almost every land they touched, they would bring destruction and death, fear and anguish.

7:39As Ibn Battuta stood in the abandoned streets of Balkh, Samarkand, and Bukhara, he must have wondered at the unlikely story of these strange nomadic conquerors. He must have wondered those ruined palaces and crumbled places of worship, those empty markets and dilapidated houses, and asked himself, where had these mysterious conquerors come from?

8:12What did they want? And why had no one been able to stop them?

Fall of Civilizations Podcast

8:26My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history.

9:05I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to tell one of the most remarkable and unlikely stories from medieval history, the story of the Mongol Empire. I want to show how this group of nomadic horse riders united the peoples of the Mongolian steppe and forged them into a truly unique kind of state.

9:38I want to describe how they conquered much of the lands of Eurasia and brought the distant cultures of China, Persia, the Middle East, and Europe into contact. And I want to tell the story of how the world's largest land empire finally came apart and left the world as we know it in its wake.

The Eurasian Steppe

10:00The Eurasian steppe is the largest grassland on Earth. It's a vast corridor of seasonal savannas that run virtually the entire length of Asia and covers around 7% of the planet's land surface.

10:35It stretches from Hungary and Poland in Eastern Europe more than 8,000 kilometers, passing over mountain ranges and rolling hills, past salty inland seas and sandy deserts, and over countless rivers until it reaches northern China and the forests of Manchuria on the Pacific coast. The word steppe entered English from the Russian language, with its origin possibly rooted in the old Slavic word,

11:06sutepe, which means a place that is flat and bare. The Russian author Anton Chekhov describes the landscape of the steppe. A plain, broad, boundless, girdled by a chain of hills, lies stretched before the traveller's eyes. The hills merge into rising ground, extending to the very horizon and disappearing into the lilac-hued far distance.

11:41On and on you travel, but where it all begins and where it ends, you just cannot make out.

11:52Coarse, steppe grass, milkwort, wild hemp, all are drenched in dew and caressed by the sun.

12:05The green, forested lands of China and Europe receive moisture from the winds blowing in from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, meaning that they can support large trees, forests, and all manner of crops. But the lands of the steppe receive most of their airflow from the north, from the frozen polar ocean of the Arctic. Cold air cannot hold much moisture, and what little it contains falls as rain in the northern mountains,

12:36where the great frozen pine forests of Siberia stretch.

12:42The low rainfall on the steppe means that trees cannot survive, and even species of long grasses find it difficult to take root. As a result, all that remains here are the hardiest species of short grasses. For this reason, the steppe has always supported massive herds of grazing animals.

13:07The first humans to set foot on the steppe arrived about 40,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who lived off what the land provided. In its rolling grassland, they hunted mammoths. Then, once those had died out, boar, antelope, goats, and aurochs, and one animal that lived in the steppe in abundance, the wild horse.

13:38Horses evolved in North America around four million years ago, but had crossed over to Asia during one of the last ice ages, when a land bridge existed between Alaska and eastern Russia. Humans and horses would one day form one of the most successful partnerships in history, but our fascination with them goes back even further. Horses are the animal most frequently depicted in the oldest prehistoric cave paintings,

14:10even in those of Chauvet Cave in France, which are more than 30,000 years old and predate the domestication of the horse by 25 millennia. For all these thousands of years, humankind had looked on the horse as a symbol of power, grace, and perhaps also freedom.

14:36When people arrived on the Eurasian steppe, they initially hunted horses for food like any other animal, with horse bones showing up in slaughter sites from at least 10,000 years ago. But sometime around 6,000 years ago, they began to be kept as livestock. Humans first used horses for milk and meat alongside their cattle, sheep, and goats. But over the following thousand years or so, humans learned that if a horse

15:06was sufficiently tamed, it would allow a human to ride on its back. We will never know which daring young man or woman first leapt up onto the back of a horse and braved the inevitable bucking and kicking that every horsebreaker must learn to endure. But when they did, they changed the course of human history.

15:32Around 5,000 years ago, we begin to see evidence of horse riding on the Eurasian steppe. One burial site in Botai, in northern Kazakhstan, contains the bones of horses, with the earliest signs of wear on the teeth and jawbones that suggest they had worn a metal bit in their mouths for much of their life, which could be attached to reins for a rider. This development occurred at a momentous time in human history.

16:05Around the world, the earliest cities were just then coalescing in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and elsewhere, and a new way of human life was taking shape. This new lifestyle was based on the planting of grain, the making of pottery, and the building of fixed dwellings. Soon came hierarchies and religions, priests and kings, armies and city walls. From this settled way of life,

16:36the first written words would be set down, cut into clay tablets in the Sumerian cities of Ur and Uruk, carved into the stone temples of Egypt, and into shoulder bones and tortoise shells in China. But it's clear that in the vast expanse of the Eurasian steppe, an equally dramatic revolution was taking place.

17:02It's around this time that the first mention of horses begins to appear in the written texts of the Sumerians. They would call them by the name Anshe Kura, meaning donkey of the mountains, since they first arrived from the mountainous north. One Sumerian text written more than 4,000 years ago is one of the first to mention this new animal, describing the hero god Lugalbanda as being as swift as a mountain horse.

17:33Holy Lugalbanda came out from the mountain cave, and from that spot he sped away like a horse of the mountains. Like a lone wild ass, he darted over the mountains. Like a large, powerful donkey he raced. A slim donkey, eager to run, he bounded along. Human life had just sped up

18:03considerably, and the domestication of the horse would change life on the steppe forever.

18:12A herder traveling by foot can cover a maximum of only about 30 kilometers a day, which limits how large his flock can be and how far he could range in search of new grazing lands. But riding on the back of a horse meant you could cover more than 100 kilometers at a push, and you could travel at five times the speed over a short distance. With greater ability to cover large areas, you could also

18:42effectively manage much larger herds, and with more food available, you could establish ever bigger families and social groups. While all around the world, other peoples were settling down into ever-larger cities built of mud brick and stone, the people of the steppe were developing a parallel way of life, a life constantly on the move.

19:17After the horse, people in the western steppe also likely invented the wheel, allowing them to transport bigger loads, as well as their families, the elderly, and children too young to ride. Whole communities could now become completely mobile, living their lives from birth to death without ever settling in one place. This alternative way of life

19:47would meet with remarkable success. One legacy of that success is the language that many of us speak today.

19:59Beginning perhaps around 4000 BC, an enigmatic population known only as the Proto-Indo-Europeans rode out of the western portion of the steppe in all directions. They brought their horses, their wagons, and chariots with them. Wherever they went from India to Persia, Greece, and northern Europe, they conquered or settled and left

20:29their language behind. Their lost dialect is the ancestor of 445 languages that survive to this day from Hindi, Sinhala, Punjabi, and Farsi to Russian, Spanish, French, German, and English. In all of these languages, they left traces of their way of life. Many languages in the Indo-European family use

21:00similar words derived from Proto-Indo-European for objects like wheel, axle, wagon, chariot, and, of course, horse. It's believed the Proto-Indo-Europeans had two words for horses which have been reconstructed to something like equos and marcos, possibly to differentiate between a wild horse and a tamed horse. Equos entered Latin

21:31as equus, from which we get equestrian, and it entered ancient Greek as hippos, from which we get hippodrome and hippopotamus. The word marcos has survived in English as the word for a female horse, a mare. This English word can be found echoing on the other side of the world in Mongolia, where a single horse is called mor, and even in the non-Indo-European

22:02language of Mandarin Chinese, where a horse is called ma.

22:08Today, these words connect people on every side of the globe, and nearly half of the world's population speaks a language descended from the Indo-European family. The proto-Indo-Europeans were the first nomads to ride out of the steppe and leave their mark on history, but they were far from the last. Still, there were drawbacks to the nomadic

22:38lifestyle. While the settled peoples of the world developed alphabets and writing systems that allowed them to keep records and recount their histories, the peoples of the steppe did not develop their own system of writing. For this reason, for much of their history,

Nomadic Lifestyle

22:56we can only detect their presence through the writings of others, who often feared and hated them. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus would write one account of the horse-riding nomads who lived in the steppe around the Black Sea and increasingly made armed raids into Central Europe, a people the Greeks called the Scythians.

23:28Rather than build cities or walls, they all carry their homes around with them on wagons, practice their archery from horseback, and depend for their living on cattle rather than the fruits of the plough. How, then, could they fail to defy every effort made to conquer them or to pin them down?

23:50Already, the settled peoples of the world were encountering a paradox that despite all the technological advancement that agricultural society had brought, these steppe peoples were still exceptionally difficult to fight.

24:10More than 800 years later, the struggling Roman Empire was limping through the remains of the 4th century, rocked by crisis and civil war. It was at this point that they were menaced by a new threat, a nomadic people who rode out of the steppe and sent waves of refugees fleeing in their wake. They would be known as the Huns. The Roman writer Ammianus

24:42Marcellinus wrote with distaste about these frighteningly rootless nomads.

24:49The Huns are a race savage beyond all parallel. They grow up without beards, with closely knit and strong limbs. They are all without fixed abode or settled mode of life. None of their offspring, when asked, can tell you where he comes from, since he was conceived in one place, born far from there and brought up still farther away.

25:17The arrival of the Huns was a major factor that contributed to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. In the decades that followed, under the rule of their leader Attila, the Huns would remake the balance of power in Europe. They fleetingly captured large areas up to the banks of the Rhine and left fire and destruction in their wake.

25:45Part of the reason for the Huns' success was their innovative use of the technological development of the composite bow. Bows made of a single piece of wood had a natural limit to their power, but on the step a good bow could mean the difference between life and death, and so people had poured immense energy into developing them. By the time of the Huns, these were already intricate constructions,

26:15combining multiple materials. A core of maple wood, bone, and antelope horn, knotted with sinew, deer gut, and leather, all held together with a fish-based glue. The combination of these materials created a bow with immense elasticity, capable of hurtling an arrow at tremendous speeds and over great distances, reportedly as far as 300 meters. If these accounts are

26:46accurate, then these bows could shoot further than an English longbow, which stood taller than a man, but crucially was compact enough to be drawn from horseback. The combination of horse and composite bow would make the steppe horse archer the deadliest single entity on the planet, and in Europe these weapons would come to be known with fear and reverence as Hun bows.

27:19The people of China struggled no less with their nomadic neighbors.

27:27During the period of the Han dynasty, a people they knew as the Xiongno constantly menaced their borders for much of the first millennium and may even have been the same people as the European Huns.

27:42One Han period Chinese writer, Sumar Jian, describes their way of life.

27:51The Xiongno are mountain barbarians. They move in search of water and pasture and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings. Nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture. They wear clothes of hide or wraps made of fur or felt. They have no writing and even their promises and agreements are only verbal. The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow.

28:22Thus, all the young men are able to act as armed cavalry in time of war.

28:31Around the fourth century, these peoples also introduced the stirrup, straps for the riders' feet that help them stay in the saddle and allow them even greater control of their horses. One medieval Chinese writer describes the sight of a step horse warrior in action.

28:56When they ride at a gallop, they always stand in the stirrups rather than sit in the saddle. They are swift as the onrush of a gale and strong as the weight of a mountain. Wheeling left and cutting right like wings in flight, they shoot with power enough to pierce armor. For the civilizations that lived on the borders of the steppe in China, India, Persia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, these nomadic peoples could

29:27be alien, frightening, and primitive.

29:31While they were divided, they could be contained, controlled, and violently put down. But every few hundred years, they would unite, into a force large enough to flood out of the steppe. They would come to conquer and settle, to wreak havoc and sow destruction, but every time to change the course of history. The most dramatic of these stories would take place as

30:02the 12th century came to a close, and the memory of Attila's Huns had faded to just another ghost story from classical history. It would come in the form of a people who were perhaps the most unlikely of conquerors. When our story starts, they had many names, but soon they would become known as the

The Mongols

30:27Mongols. To find the location of the beginning of this story, we must travel to the east, along the wide expanse of the Eurasian Steppe. For thousands of kilometers, we would see only grassland and seasonal deserts. Then we pass over the Altai Mountains, home to wolves,

30:59curly-horned ibex, and eagles. Finally, we would reach the far eastern steppe on a high plateau of what is today Mongolia.

Life on the Mongolian Steppe

31:10At the end of the 12th century, the Mongols were just one of countless groups that existed in this land, speaking Turkic languages like Uyghur and dialects of Mongolian and worshipping any number of gods. But despite this variation, many of them followed a similar way of life.

31:34Life on the steppe meant following the natural cycles of the world. In the warm summers, the rains come and the grassland flushes green. During these months, the nomads' herds of cattle, goats, sheep, camels, and horses have plenty to eat, and they graze in their summer pastures on the open grassland. But as the cold, dry winters descend, herders would move to their winter pastures in

32:05the north, where the green valleys at the foot of the mountains remain shaded, and there are still grasses growing. This natural cycle dictated every aspect of steppe life, as one medieval Chinese writer Zhao Gong describes. In their custom, each time the grass grows green is one year. So if someone asks one of them his age, he says how many times the grass has

32:36greened. Also, once when I asked one of them what month and day he was born, he laughed and replied, I can't remember, nor did I ever know it in the first place. winter on the steppe is harsh. During these months, the wind blows straight from Siberia, and a layer of ice can often cover the grasslands completely. When the grass is frozen,

33:06steppe peoples would allow their horses to graze ahead of the other animals. They would use their hooves to crack the ice, and then other livestock like sheep could follow.

33:27In the flat, featureless landscape, people navigated primarily using rivers, which interlaced the steppe in countless waterways. Among them, the Orkon, the Selenga, and the Onon. By riding up and down these rivers, the steppe peoples could find their way and would never be far from water for their horses. The knowledge of these river paths were passed on from person to person by word

33:58of mouth through poems and songs. The primary mode of shelter in the steppe was the tent. One Chinese writer of the time, named Li Xinxuan, describes these habitations. They have neither walls nor moats, nor houses, nor mansions, but instead make felt tents, for which they choose dwelling places

34:28that have the most beneficial water and grass.

34:34In English, these tents are often called yurts, derived from a Turkic word, but in Mongolian, they are known as gyr. Their structures are made of lattice of light but strong willow ones, and their walls are made of felt, a material created by pressing together layer upon layer of sheep's wool. These tents are warm during winter, and cool during summer, and they are also fully mobile,

35:05designed to be dismantled and rebuilt every day if necessary, and carried from place to place on the back of carts. The Chinese observer Peng Daya wrote the following description of seeing steppe people moving across the landscape. The yurts, that is felt tents in which they live have neither walls nor roof beams. They move them to follow the grass and water, never staying for long.

35:36Cattle, horses, or camels are used to pull their carts, on which it is roomy enough to sit or recline. These carts are dispatched in groups of five, looking like columns of ants as they wind along, extending out for five miles. Some of these carts could be huge, designed to carry the tents of nobles on their back. One European visitor to Mongolia in the Middle Ages, William of Rubrook, described seeing carts as

36:07large as ten metres wide, about the length of a London bus. These dwellings are constructed of such a size as to be on