Historical Revisionism
Oct. 26th, 2003 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFrom The Boston Globe, "History rehabilitates the tyrants of old", by H.D.S. Greenway.
October 24, 2003
UNTIL THE TYRANTS of the 20th century came along, they were the most efficient, cold-blooded, feared, and destructive conquerors the world had ever known. They were the Mongol horsemen from the steppes of Central Asia, whose hordes under the leadership of Genghis Khan built a 13th-century empire by mass slaughter -- burning cities and terrifying half a dozen civilizations from Russia to the East China Sea. Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulagu, leveled Baghdad, and Iraqis have invoked his name ever since to brand their enemies, including the Americans.
It is said that you could smell their stench downwind before you could see their dust or hear the thunder of their horses signaling onrushing death. It is said that they could stay in the saddle for days, living on mare's milk or the blood of their own horses if necessary. According to a contemporary Persian account they were covered with lice "which looked like sesame growing on bad soil." It is also said that they could ride 70 miles a day and fire their steel-tipped arrows 200 yards with deadly accuracy at full gallop.
They swept all before them -- the armies of the emperor of China, Russians on the banks of the Dnieper, and the storied Khanates of Central Asia. And if surrender was not immediate, all were slaughtered.
Great centers of learning, Bukhara, Urgench, and Samarkand, were sacked and destroyed. Indeed there is hardly a building standing in Central Asia that predates the Mongols. They rode on into India, laying waste to the provinces of the Indus River. At Herat, which fell only after a six-month siege, the victorious Mongols spent a whole week killing and burning. According to some accounts as many as a million and a half people were slaughtered. Genghis Khan's sons and grandsons would rule over his empire after his death in 1227. When Hulagu sacked fabled Baghdad of the "Thousand and One Nights," it was the greatest city of the Islamic world. Its fall ended the Abbasid Caliphate, and Baghdad never recovered its former glory, even though Saddam Hussein dreamed of it.
A century later, Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane as he was known in the west, rose to better Genghis Khan. For 15 years he ravaged Persia, sacked Baghdad again, mounted expeditions into Anatolia and over the Caucasus, and attacked India. He plundered Delhi, put 100,000 to the sword, and is said to have skinned alive any surviving Hindus he could put his hands on. His signature was the towers of skulls he would leave behind.
In the west the names of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane have a mystic and deeply seated association with death and destruction. Their reputations as mass murderers still ring down through the centuries as symbols of unparalleled awfulness.
Yet in Mongolia and Uzbekistan, in which Tamerlane was born and made his capital, Genghis Khan and Timur have been historically rehabilitated. After the end of the Soviet Union, the newborn state of Uzbekistan began rummaging in its pre-Soviet past for proper symbols of past glories and came up with Tamerlane. In 1994 a gold coin was struck, by the Pobjoy Mint in London, showing the great seal of Uzbekistan on one side and the image of a mounted Amir Timur on the other. He has become a national hero.
No less a hero is Genghis Khan in his native Mongolia, a country looking for its own roots before it was divided between Chinese and Russian influences. The likeness of Genghis Khan appears on the national currency, and his portrait hangs in government offices.
I once attended a dinner for a Mongolian prime minister, Nambar Enkhbayar, at which a number of his aids told me about the greatness of Genghis Khan. They said that once the conquests were made his empire ushered in a long period of peace and stability unknown in the region. It was said that a nubile girl carrying a crock of gold could pass unmolested from one end of the empire to the other. The Mongol version of the pony express was unsurpassed in speed until the Russians brought the telegraph and the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
The aides said former Secretary of State James Baker had once joked to them that at least the Mongols of yore had known how to handle Baghdad. Today there are Mongols back in Baghdad as peacekeepers.
One cannot help but wonder if the modern tyrants -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, perhaps even Saddam Hussein -- will have their reputations rehabilitated one day as the mists of nostalgia take hold. They all have their supporters still.
Just a week before he invaded Poland, triggering World War II, Hitler said: "It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state . . . The aim of war is not to reach definite lines, but to annihilate the enemy physically . . ."
Genghis Khan would have argreed on that point, but the Mongols I talked to would not hear of such comparisons and said that the only reason Genghis Khan had received such bad press for the past 1,500 years was because the losers got to write the histories.
October 24, 2003
UNTIL THE TYRANTS of the 20th century came along, they were the most efficient, cold-blooded, feared, and destructive conquerors the world had ever known. They were the Mongol horsemen from the steppes of Central Asia, whose hordes under the leadership of Genghis Khan built a 13th-century empire by mass slaughter -- burning cities and terrifying half a dozen civilizations from Russia to the East China Sea. Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulagu, leveled Baghdad, and Iraqis have invoked his name ever since to brand their enemies, including the Americans.
It is said that you could smell their stench downwind before you could see their dust or hear the thunder of their horses signaling onrushing death. It is said that they could stay in the saddle for days, living on mare's milk or the blood of their own horses if necessary. According to a contemporary Persian account they were covered with lice "which looked like sesame growing on bad soil." It is also said that they could ride 70 miles a day and fire their steel-tipped arrows 200 yards with deadly accuracy at full gallop.
They swept all before them -- the armies of the emperor of China, Russians on the banks of the Dnieper, and the storied Khanates of Central Asia. And if surrender was not immediate, all were slaughtered.
Great centers of learning, Bukhara, Urgench, and Samarkand, were sacked and destroyed. Indeed there is hardly a building standing in Central Asia that predates the Mongols. They rode on into India, laying waste to the provinces of the Indus River. At Herat, which fell only after a six-month siege, the victorious Mongols spent a whole week killing and burning. According to some accounts as many as a million and a half people were slaughtered. Genghis Khan's sons and grandsons would rule over his empire after his death in 1227. When Hulagu sacked fabled Baghdad of the "Thousand and One Nights," it was the greatest city of the Islamic world. Its fall ended the Abbasid Caliphate, and Baghdad never recovered its former glory, even though Saddam Hussein dreamed of it.
A century later, Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane as he was known in the west, rose to better Genghis Khan. For 15 years he ravaged Persia, sacked Baghdad again, mounted expeditions into Anatolia and over the Caucasus, and attacked India. He plundered Delhi, put 100,000 to the sword, and is said to have skinned alive any surviving Hindus he could put his hands on. His signature was the towers of skulls he would leave behind.
In the west the names of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane have a mystic and deeply seated association with death and destruction. Their reputations as mass murderers still ring down through the centuries as symbols of unparalleled awfulness.
Yet in Mongolia and Uzbekistan, in which Tamerlane was born and made his capital, Genghis Khan and Timur have been historically rehabilitated. After the end of the Soviet Union, the newborn state of Uzbekistan began rummaging in its pre-Soviet past for proper symbols of past glories and came up with Tamerlane. In 1994 a gold coin was struck, by the Pobjoy Mint in London, showing the great seal of Uzbekistan on one side and the image of a mounted Amir Timur on the other. He has become a national hero.
No less a hero is Genghis Khan in his native Mongolia, a country looking for its own roots before it was divided between Chinese and Russian influences. The likeness of Genghis Khan appears on the national currency, and his portrait hangs in government offices.
I once attended a dinner for a Mongolian prime minister, Nambar Enkhbayar, at which a number of his aids told me about the greatness of Genghis Khan. They said that once the conquests were made his empire ushered in a long period of peace and stability unknown in the region. It was said that a nubile girl carrying a crock of gold could pass unmolested from one end of the empire to the other. The Mongol version of the pony express was unsurpassed in speed until the Russians brought the telegraph and the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
The aides said former Secretary of State James Baker had once joked to them that at least the Mongols of yore had known how to handle Baghdad. Today there are Mongols back in Baghdad as peacekeepers.
One cannot help but wonder if the modern tyrants -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, perhaps even Saddam Hussein -- will have their reputations rehabilitated one day as the mists of nostalgia take hold. They all have their supporters still.
Just a week before he invaded Poland, triggering World War II, Hitler said: "It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state . . . The aim of war is not to reach definite lines, but to annihilate the enemy physically . . ."
Genghis Khan would have argreed on that point, but the Mongols I talked to would not hear of such comparisons and said that the only reason Genghis Khan had received such bad press for the past 1,500 years was because the losers got to write the histories.
