Where I Learn How Horribly Awesome the Mongols were 800 Years Ago

The March of the Barbarians by Harold Lamb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another old book I got as a castoff and finally got around to reading. My opinion--it's really good.

You know, with caveats.

It's from 1940, which makes it a bit dated. That shouldn't matter much, obviously, with the topic being a pretty distant past, but some stuff comes through from the time of the writing that isn't current. There's a lot of talk--could be metaphor but doesn't feel like it--about what this people or that people is best at or most fit for, in the sense of racial proclivities. Russians are like this, Mongols are like that, Persians do this... It's not to the same extent as, say, 19th Century British historians, but it's noticeable. Also, 1940s misogyny shows up here and there. When the Oyrat tribe goes against Ogadai, he takes many of their women as his wives, gives others to his officials, gives others to "keepers of prostitutes," and lets his guards take still more. And here is the conclusion of that incident: "The Oyrat men had attmpted to disobey the Khakhan, and they had learned their lesson..." Yes, clearly the men suffered. [Rolling my eyes.]

However, having said that, this book is less culturally chauvinistic than I expected in an 80-year-old history book. He often describes Europe of the 13th and 14th Centuries as a backwater, an unimportant peninsula at the end of the continent, a land of barbarians on the fringes of enlightened civilization. These descriptions have merit, and seem more modern in tone than I expected from a book written in 1940. (Makes me wonder if the author signed off on the title of his book. Or maybe it's ironic.)

As to the rest of the work, I found it a very thorough, readable, clear history of the Mongols and their allies, the Turks and Tatars and others. He went to a lot of primary sources for his information, much of which was difficult to come by at the time. The author, IMO, treated the individuals and the cultures in an objective way, describing Mongol brutality without sugarcoating it and their enlightenment, such as their religious tolerance, without stinting. In the afterward, he states: "I have only tried to draw the men themselves, as they existed against the background of their time, as it was then." This had to be quite progressive for 1940; bearing in mind the caveats mentioned above, the history is reasonably modern even in 2019.

There are many histories of the Mongols. I have several, actually, all of them newer than this one. And no doubt, they have information missing here. But this book doesn't deserve to be overlooked. I enjoyed it, finding it very readable, and am not reluctant to recommend it if you find it on the shelves somewhere. Well worth picking up.

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