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Review
| Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule, by George Lane. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. 272 pp., with maps and photos. $45.00, cloth.
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| The Mongol phenomenon in world history, offered here as one of the "Greenwood Guides to Historical Events of the Medieval Period," is addressed in sober, but not arid, historical perspective. Sober, because the Mongol century has been often seen in lurid terms, with its duration seen as a flash in the pan and its main figures as lustful, cruel, and debauched marauders. The medieval chroniclers called them 'Tartars,' from the Latin tartarus, meaning "from hell." George Lane redresses this image. While retaining the legendary quality of Genghis Khan (he uses Chinggis), he relates the feats of this Mongol leader who not only united his tribes but built the only "one-world" government Eurasia, the "world island," has ever known. He emphasizes rule rather than wanton destruction. This study, from the start, has implications for such current themes as globalization, global villages, and global conditions for peace. The book tells a grand story in the brief compass of seven chapters, with a well-written historical introduction, a helpful chronology, sixteen biographies portraying the international cast of personages who traversed empires, and a glossary indispensable to a work of this nature. Twenty-one primary documents give historical credence to the Mongol story itself, a story which is told only in the oral tradition of The Secret History of the Mongols. Maps and illustrations round out the material in support of the text. |
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The historical introduction invokes the global theme in anticipation of telling the Mongol story in a positive light, correcting past images of Mongol excesses. Chapter one introduces the steppes, with their improbable span of longitudes, languages, ethnicities, religions, customs, and feuds. These feuds, ironically, constituted the only common experience of the many peoples. Genghis's achievements cannot be fully grasped without appreciation of what he had to overcome. Chapters two through four trace the rise to power of Temujin, the conquest of China, and the founding of the Mongol Empire as well as the Yuan Dynasty in China. Chapter five covers the Mongols in Iran. Chapter seven offers a consideration of the legacies of Yuan China (1272–1370) and the Il-khanate of Iran (1258–1335), two of Mongol power's rule of civilizations. Here the theme is the transcontinental nurture, appreciation, and transmission of culture and trade throughout Eurasia. The Mongol era, in this sense, most deserves to be called the Pax Mongolica or the Pax Tartarica. Chapter six, which should probably have come last or as a postscript, offers a historical parallel of the Mongol policy toward Iran and George W. Bush's policy after September 11 toward Iraq. The author finds a parallel between two of the world's mightiest military powers warring with Islam's center of Sunni power. Seeing George Bush as "a poor man's reincarnation of the Mongol hero, Hülegü Khan," (p. 81) the author does offer some differences in this historical parallel which he labels "History Repeated." The differences are three: Mongols kept their capital outside of Baghdad, gave the defeated ruler an honorable death, and converted to the religion of the land they conquered. He concludes that the Bush legacy is too short to evaluate at present. |
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The Mongol story invites historical parallels, especially as the Mongol achievements prompt the suggestion of a Pax Mongolica. For comparison, one can think, for instance, of some other well-known eras of peace: the Pax Romana, the Pax Sinica (Han China), the Pax Britannia, and finally (possibly, but it is to early to say) the Pax Americana. It is the mention of global themes in the introduction that occasioned this mention of other eras of peace. One of the goals of the Greenwood Series is to invite more discussion in the classroom as well as among scholars. The conditions for global peace, security and stability, all of which facilitate trade and cultural exchange (items emphasized in the text), invite discussions on the meaning we give to peace, whether it has ever existed altruistically, and how it was maintained and sustained in various historical epochs. Teachers of world history will welcome this Mongol addition to the dialogue. However, the work would have benefited from the inclusion of another personage in the biographies: Yelü Chucai, the Khitan who advised Genghis that in China much more could be gained than returning it to pasture land. For world history, this figure remains a perennial favorite as a great medieval adviser on behalf of civilization. Otherwise, the Mongol story has been successfully retold. |
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| University of Hawaii, Emeritus |
D. W. Y. Kwok |
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