Tuesday, September 25, 2018
LIULEVICIUS DEBUNKS ECONOMIC WHIG HISTORIANS' PAX MONGOLICUS
It was good to see a 'real' historian taking the piss out of these idiots.
He points out that the thing the Mongols loved to do best was to destroy all cities, which they hated on principle, and slaughter all the inhabitants and pile them in front of the ruins.
Rufus Rears said, in one of his lectures, that medieval accounts noted that the ground for several hundred yards in front of these ruins was greasy for years with rotting remains.
Great for peaceful Mongol global economics.
Destruction under the Mongol Empire, Wikipedia
Two more fun accounts:
7. Moscow, 1382. By 1382, Mongol power in Russia had waned considerably. So much so, in fact, that Moscow’s rulers felt confident enough to challenge the authority of the Golden Horde on the field of battle. After a string of light victories against Mongol cavalry earlier in the year, the Mongols showed up with a large force on the doorstep of Moscow, promising to spare its inhabitants if it surrendered. The poor fools in Moscow believed the Mongols, and 24,000 people were slaughtered as the Mongols sacked the city once again. The siege of Moscow (one of many) reasserted Mongol control over Russia for nearly 100 more years before the Russians were finally able throw off the infamous yoke of the Golden Horde.
6. Kiev, 1240. There is a convincing argument to be made that during the medieval era in Europe, the Slavic world’s cultural, political, and economic epicenter was Kiev rather than Moscow or Warsaw. When the Mongols invaded Europe and plundered Kiev in 1240, the collapse of Kiev indeed proved crucial to the invading army’s success in pillaging Europe’s surprisingly defenseless countryside. Unlike China, which had a densely populated countryside and a few well-fortified cities, or the Middle East, which had virtually no countryside and many well-fortified urban areas, Europe was comparatively rural, or semi-rural . This meant that small urban areas like Kiev fell easily to the Mongol hordes, but it also made it harder for Mongol administrators to govern and tougher for the Mongol military to plunder, siege, and demoralize the populace. None of this stopped the Mongols from wreaking havoc on eastern Europe, of course, but it does help to explain, in part, why khanates in Europe did not share the successes of their contemporaries in the Middle East, western India, and China. Oh, by the way, the Mongols slaughtered 48,000 of the 50,000 people living in Kiev when the city’s defenses collapsed.
No comments:
Post a Comment