Here are some interesting thoughts via Prof. Stephen Hicks about the death of one of the Mongols and what it meant for Europe back in the time of the invasions.
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How the death of one man possibly changed historyOctober 5th, 2012 |
 12 comments to How the death of one man possibly changed history |
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Ah yes, What If?
I reviewed the book of that name here over a decade ago. And I picked out that particular episode. It has stuck in my mind ever since.
Neal Stephenson and friends have turned it into a novel. It’s a bit like the Baroque Cycle but with Mongols.
Interesting, but worth considering the Islamic conquest of the Mediterranean lands & Iberia. This is widely regarded as the flowering of Islamic culture & civilisation. But was it? A bunch of camel jockies out of the deserts of Saudi had all this scientific, architectural, artistic knowledge stowed in their saddle bags along with the dates?
What actually happened was the imposition of Muslim rule on what was broad swathes of the Roman Empire & all of its inheritance. Same people, different bosses. After a short period of assimilation, effectively same people same bosses.
So the Mongols conquer all Europe & unite it as a single empire. But they move into the same castles as the nobility they’ve defeated, have to administer the same agricultural system to provide food. The population may have been thinned a bit by the odd massacre but it’s still the same people. How long before they’ve completely assimilated & Caucasians with oriental names & one slant eyed grandmother are calling themselves the Khan of Cologne or Cardiff? Without the devastation of the infighting between the various European royals & religious factions the continent could even have got the Renaissance a century or two quicker & the book been run up on an early 19th century word processor.
Problem being that Batu wasn’t TRYING to conquer Europe. He’d have brought more men with him had that been the intention.
Sad to say for the medieval european pride (and I say this as a guy who specializes in Central European, and mostly Hungarian, medieval milhist), but all Europe faced from the Mongols was a RAID designed to create an open buffer of devastated and therefore harmless territory surrounding Batu’s new domain.
If one takes a look at the kind of things the Mongols did when fighting the various Chinese, it’s a REAL eye-opener. They were operating on a level that nobody in Europe even dreamed of playing on.
Dude has no clue about what happened at Mohi or leading up to it, either. Grrrrrrr. If you’re gonna speculate about history, how about digging deeper than wikipedia!!
We alternate-history buffs have been on this for years.
The death of one man can always have great effects. Human history is extremely “chaotic” (in the mathematical sense).
European history is especially rife with such effects, because of the hereditary monarchical-succession principle that was followed so strongly for centuries.
For instance, the death of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, almost certainly contributed massively to the American Revolution.
Likewise, the demise of Kaiser Friedrich II has been blamed for World War I.
Going back much earlier, there was a death which averted the dynastic unification of Portugal and Castile just at the start of the Age of Discovery. Iberian mariners arguably affected the world as much in their great day as Mongol cavalry had in theirs, and that death rearranged how they went about it.
However, it’s arguable that the timing of Ogedei’s death may have had the largest immediate impact of any one death.
A political system that could not handle a succession without sending armies 4,500 miles back home shows a serious instability. Had the Mongols made it to the English channel, isn’t it as likely they would have split into warring internal factions eventually?
I just read that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_R._Broccoli
of Bond movies: “In 1966, Albert was in Japan with other producers scouting locations to film the next James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Albert had a ticket booked on BOAC Flight 911. He canceled his ticket on that day so he could see a ninja demonstration. Flight 911 crashed after clear air turbulence.”
Would we still have them if he took that plane?
@lucklucky: Probably – the first few had already been successful enough to warrant more being made – but Ranulph Fiennes might have been the next man to play Bond.
There were a lot of empire ruling in europe and none survived
Plus we could ask ourself the effect for empire to spread around enormeous land and continent. in my opinion it reduced the hypothesis of a Mongol take over.
Last point, nowadays European Union is 500M citizen and Russia is less than 150M. I suppose the population had a similar ratio between those countries at the Mongol era, so the conquest would have been a lot more difficult.
The Marmeluke managed to defeat the Mongols without much trouble but there was one enemy that the Marmeluke themselves could not defeat – some effete English guy called Richard the Lionheart.
Funny that.
Bloke in Spain….
It is the disunity of the West that helped produce the technological and other advance.
Why do you think that 500 years of unity under the Roman Empire produced a civilisation that was LESS (yes LESS) advanced at the end of the period than it was at the start? Give me the backstabbing city states of Italy any day – if the other choice is the unity of the Roman Empire (and yes – I am against German and Italian unification in the 19th century also).
The Middle Ages were not like the stagnation (indeed the decline) of the Roman Empire – each century (indeed often each decade) produced real improvements. New things that had not been seen before – and this continued in European history.
And political disunity (the fact that if you did not like one ruler you could go for a walk and find yourself in the land of another, different, ruler) was one fo the two great things that produced that progress.
The other was the PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF LAND. In theory this was “only” free hold – but Feudal free hold was a lot more like private ownership than Roman Empire law (where an Emperor could take anything, on a whim, and his court intellectuals would justify it – and the population was unarmed, no Great Charter barons and other such, and so did not matter).
It is no accident that the Progressives (the people who love polticial unity) also hate “feudal” ideas of real ownership (i.e. great estates, and great merchant houses in the towns, people with the resources to actually achieve things).
Academics (at least the sort who get on BBC shows) love the idea of the Mongols taking over Europe – or the Ottomans taking over Europe.
“They were such tolerant, progressive civilisations”.
They were oriental despotism – incompatible with the genius of Western Civilisation.
All those nasty armed landowning families, and the vile (i.e. independent) church, and the greedy (i.e. productive) merchants and manufacturers of Milan and so on.
Rule of thumb.
If academics the BBC like are in favour of a counter factual historical development – then it is a bad thing.