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=**The Mongols: More than Brutal Barbarians**=

Chinggiss (Genghis) Khan Temujin Mongols Eurasia Silk Route paper money foreign exchange system banks Oda Nobunaga Toyotomi Hideyoshi Tokugawa Ieyasu

In 1169, the year many historians believe that **Chinggiss (Genghis) Khan** was born as **Temujin**, young son of a Mongol tribal chief, the **Mongols** were not a unified kingdom, nation, or any such organization. They lived as nomads, seasonally moving from pasture to pasture, herding horses and goats, in small tribal groups that frequently fought one another over territorial rights and tribal membership. Their economy was based on herding, and the extra food they needed often came from trading and raiding in northern China.

Temujin was born into this relatively chaotic milieu, and by the time he was ten, his father had been poisoned by a rival tribe. Temujin, his mother and siblings were forced to leave the tribe and fend for themselves. The members of Temujin's old tribe at that time became members of the tribe that had destroyed his father. Legend has it that Temujin swore revenge.

Under the tutelage of his mother, Temujin became a charismatic leader with a keen understanding of warfare and of people, and decided that the Mongols would do best if unified under his command. During a series of breathtaking forays against other tribes, Genghis eventually won the chieftainship of a tribe, then conquered the group that had killed his father, and eventually brought almost all Mongol tribes under his own personal control. In 1206, a meeting of the Mongol tribes proclaimed Temujin to be the Great Khan, leader of the Mongols. This is how he gained the title Genghis Kahn.

His legacy is stupendous. Using military tactics that were often brilliant, and nearly as often resorted to terror as they did to the mobility and skill of his warriors, Genghis and his successors were able to turn **Eurasia** into a playground for the Mongols, and eventually to rule nearly all of it. The land empire created by the Mongols has never been rivaled in size.

This much of Mongol history is well known. they are famous for their brutality, for the lack of compassion or mercy shown by Genghis (frequently, when cities refused to surrender, he carried out his promise of exterminating every human life inside the walls, among other things). However, there is much more to the Mongols than just the terror and brutality. This group conquered huge swaths of Eurasia in a very short time - mostly within Genghis Khan's lifetime. After that, they had to rule it. At this, they excelled.

The conquests of the Mongols are impressive, judging by sheer scale and the small number of soldiers with which they accomplished them. Still, as David Morgan has pointed out, the number of soldiers they used, and the number of casualties they caused in various wars are still, and probably always will be a matter of debate unless more inside sources from the Mongols themselves come to light. What the effects of the Mongol empire were is a more interesting, and ultimately more important story in human history. In so many ways the Mongols changed cultures and history for so many culture that it is impossible to shed light on them all. Still, there are some critically important changes that the Mongols brought that are in effect harbingers of the modern world.

Mongols unified Eurasia, bringing all the different sections of the **Silk Route** under a single set of laws and enforcers for the first time in the 13th century. Traders could move across the continent by the land route, protected by Mongol enforcers, with limited taxes that reduced the costs and increased profits of long-distance trade in luxury goods. One effect of this was to open European markets, on the western end of the Mongol empire, to Chinese goods at an unprecedented level. Europeans began to buy Chinese and Asian goods at a greater degree, and the need to manufacture, purchase, and transport these goods led to the creation of systems of international trade, including the use of **paper money**, **foreign exchange system**s, the precursor of the letter of credit now used in international trade worldwide, and **banks** that could communicate with each other, do exchanges, and provide credit. These financial and trade instruments spread throughout Eurasia and set the foundation for international trade to grow in the post-Mongol era.

In Japan, the changes wrought by the Mongols were equally important, even though the Japanese were never conquered. Two Mongol attacks in 1272 and 1289, were both successfully repulsed. Still, the Japanese system of military houses (the samurai system) went through revolutionary change as a result of the Mongol invasions, and those changes meant radical political and economic changes in Japanese society as well. The fact that military houses in Japan rewarded warriors with grants of land, weapons, and wealth taken from their conquered enemies made rewards for successful repulse of the Mongols very difficult. The Mongols came without wealth, nor did they possess land that could be redistributed at their defeat. Those houses who had supported the Shogun in defending Japan often found themselves without rewards, and somewhat bitter about that fact.

Perhaps more important, many of those who fought the Mongols on the shores of the Japanese archipelago learned new ideas about warfare. Instead of the aristocratic, name-recognition style fighting that the Samurai had conducted up until the 13th century, the Mongols fought in mass attacks, and to win, expected that their goal would be to kill or incapacitate as many of their enemies as possible. The Japanese, unused to this, found themselves confronting an implacable enemy where they met the Mongols. They learned a kind of brutality and massed-army warfare that stayed with them later.

The lack of rewards, a generally chaotic political situation in Kyoto, and the new style of warfare all came together in the 14th century as the powerful military houses began to attempt to claim more and more wealth, property, and power - mostly at the expense of the Ashikaga Shoguns, who, to make allies, had had to give up almost all of the property won in their own battle to be Shoguns against the Hojo clan of Kamakura. With little wealth or power, the Ashikaga had to rely on their family lineage connections with the original shoguns of Japan's 12th century, the prestige of the Shogunal title bestowed by the emperor, and a willingness to play competitors off against one-another. Eventually, this led to conflict, and by 1357, Japanese samurai houses found themselves in a period of civil wars, each trying to dominate the others and find a way to control the Shogun and the Emperor in Kyoto. This period of civil wars is the environment in which the three great warlords **Oda Nobunaga**, **Toyotomi Hideyoshi**, and most importantly **Tokugawa Ieyasu** grew up and made their names and policies. Tokugawa Ieyasu, after defeating the forces of Hideyoshi, would go on to found the Tokugawa Shogunate, which lasted from 1600 to 1868, and is the source of most of what we call Japanese "tradition" today - the historical precursor to modern Japan. Thus, in Japan, even without conquest, Mongol influence was powerful.

In Russia, the creation of a set of noble clients who acted as tax collectors for the Golden Horde (Alexander Nevskii, et al) also set the stage for local assertions of independence and the creation of the Russian state after the fall of the Mongols in the 14th century. The leaders of the Golden Horde eventually accepted Islam as their religion of choice, and so the fact that they were foreign to Russia, their non-Christian religion, and the fact that the local nobility, while they cooperated with the Mongols, could claim to be different and gain some cachet as they led a resistance allowed them to later claim legitimacy as rulers of the burgeoning Russian state.

In all, the Mongols made such an impact wherever they conquered that government institutions, religious beliefs, trade activities, military systems, and landholding and and social class patterns were forever changed by their appearance, to the degree that in many societies of Eurasia, one must literally speak of the pre-Mongol and post-Mongol periods to capture the changes that occurred.