You're Dead to Me - Genghis Khan

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Peter Frankopan and comedian Phil Wang in the 12th century to meet one of the most feared conquerors in world history, Genghis Khan. We find out why silk shirts weren’t just a fashion choice and how kittens were apparently used as weapons as Genghis Khan established the largest land empire in history.A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And you might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

but that one's for the kids. This one is not for the kids. It's for you. And how does this one work? Well, every time I'm joined by a clever clogs and a joke machine for a hilarious history lesson. And today we are setting the historical record straight and one of the most famous, feared and famously fearless conquerors in world history, Genghis Khan. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner,

he's a globetrotting rock star of history. He's come back after doing Justinian and Theodora. He's Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, and he's the author of the multiple million-selling books The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads. It is the honourable Professor Peter Frankopan. Hi, Peter, how are you? Lovely to be joining you. Thank you for having me back. It's a pleasure to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, he's an award-winning comedian, a former president of the prestigious Cambridge Footlights. You'll have seen him on Live at the Apollo, Would I Lie to You?, Drunk History, and if you watched the hilarious Taskmaster series, you will certainly have an image burned into your retina

of this man doing hula-hooping in a very tight yellow jumpsuit. It's the brilliant Phil Wang. Hi. Phil, on your Radio 4 show Wangsplaining, you are described as an artist with an engineering degree. So where does history come into it? I mean, you know, did you like history at school? I mean, you've been in horrible histories, you know, the show I work on.

We've been in a sketch together. Yes, we were Romans. We were Romans. There was a farting sketch. It was very high class. But did you like history at school? Is it one of those subjects you're like, oh, do I have to? My early school years were in Malaysia. And in Malaysia, we kind of only learned Malaysian history, which is about 50 years old. So I came out of the Malaysian school system with a real historical ignorance. Did you do Genghis Khan at all? Did you do Mongolian or Chinese history? Nope. No, no, no.

So you are starting from zero here. Pretty much all I know about the Mongols is their involvement in Medieval 2 Total War for the PC. Yeah, that's a good game. The Mongols are when the game gets difficult, especially if you're a European power and you've gone and done the first, I think it's the first crusade. You're doing fine. You're defeating the various armies of the Middle East. And then

the Mongols turn up and you're absolutely screwed. So I get a bit scared of the Mongols, which I guess is their intention. Whenever the Mongols come up, I do get a pang of fear, which was always their specialty. That's very on brand. And we're going to get to that later on. So I'm glad to hear that, actually, Phil. Thank you very much. So what do you know? That leads us on to the first segment of the pod, the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a crack at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And I'm hoping you've heard of Genghis Khan or is it Chinggis Khan? I think that's probably how we're meant to pronounce it. You might know that he was the founder of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire ever known.

That's a nice word, contiguous, isn't it? Clocked in at 9 million square miles, which is arguably too many miles. You're probably thinking that Genghis, or Chinggis, was a ruthless killer and conqueror, which is certainly how he's portrayed in pop culture. He's been played on screen by John Wayne, bit weird. Omar Sharif, slightly less weird. In 2007, there's a film called Mongols starring the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano. He also pops

up as a skateboarding baseball bat wielding troublemaker in the time travel classic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's the best one for me, I think. If you're into historical fiction, you might have read about him in Con Iggleton's Conqueror books. And as Phil has mentioned, you can play him in various games. Age of Empires 2, Civilization, Total War. He certainly gets around in pop culture almost as much as he got around in 13th century Eurasia. But what do we need to know about the man himself? And is it all true? Let's find out. Right. Professor Peter, Genghis Khan was not called Genghis Khan when he was born, and he was born into the Mongol tribe, which at the time was not a great world power. So can we mingle with the Mongols? Who were they when he was born? What's the kind of vibe and what was his name? that stretches from roughly the northern lip of the Black Sea right the way across Central Asia, across the Mongolian plains and ultimately to the Pacific, has been inhabited by lots of different tribes. And those tribes typically look after their animals, things like sheep, of course, but above all horses. And they tend to be nomadic migrants. And there are lots and lots of different

tribes who are milling around. They sometimes conquer each other. Sometimes they collaborate with each other. But they mainly go about minding their own business, working out where they can find markets for their produce, and also avoiding the things that kill them, like disease, and adapting to climate change. So Herodotus, writing about steppe nomads 2,500 years ago, calls them the greatest survivors in history because they have to get on with things.

But by the time that Genghis Khan was born Temujin is born they are small bit part players because there are lots of small bit part players yeah and we think he's born about the year 1160 give or take a couple of years and as you say Peter he's called Temujin yeah which means Smith oh really or blacksmith or something like that sort of fairly inauspicious and in fact he's given that name because the day that he's born his father captures a Tatar the Tatars are the kind of the bigger dominant tribe in eastern Mongolia at that time and his father captures a guy who's called Temujin and in the world and typically with the Mongols when you beat someone you take everything from them you take their their goods you take their children you take their horses you take their goods, you take their children, you take their horses, you take their clothes, and you take their names.

So it's a way of showing who's in the ascendancy. Sure. Phil, is that the same in comedy? If you defeat someone in a joke battle, do you then get to have their entire set? Yeah. Officially, my name now is Ed Gamble because of our first rose battle. It doesn't suit me, but rules are rules. What are steps? The steps. You keep talking about ascendancy and steps,

and all I'm picturing is Genghis Khan walking up some huge steps. They're a pop band, Phil. Yeah. So the steppe lands are the flat rolling plains that are unpunctuated by mountains. There are important rivers like the Oxus or the Jakarta, the Sir Daria and Amidaria. The flat rolling lands that have very few even trees on them

are grazing areas stretched for thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. Sir Temujin is born in 1160, which is actually, Phil, you were saying before, you don't know your kings. We've done a couple of other episodes about Saladin and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their stories were happening at the kind of same time.

But in the 1160s, he's born, his dad dies or is murdered, we think, Peter? Something like that, yeah. When he's nine years old, these things, they happen. I mean, I think we forget in a world where life expectancy has risen very sharply. Even only 200 years ago, life expectancy in places like China was only 32 years old. So losing your parents at a young age was relatively unusual. It can also be the making of you because you have to become more mature. You need to look after yourself. And above all, you need to feed yourself because if you can't, you die. So no one seems to feel particularly sorry for Temujin,

least of all himself. Did Temujin become the property of the person who killed his father? No, but so the Mongols sort of drift off into, from being a not that important a star in these constellations to something that might be about to fade away. Because the one thing that is very dangerous on the steppes and in nomadic societies is to be all on your own, because you need to be assimilated. You need to have powerful kinship groups.

You need to have tribes who can offer you protection, also access to water and to markets and so on. And we know all this stuff because of a lovely document. It's called The Secret History of the Mongols. It tells us, Peter, that he was born with a lucky omen. Actually, Phil, do you want to guess what the lucky omen was? He came out of the womb, clutching something in his little baby hand. What do you think it was? Like a four-leaf clover or something, or a rabbit's foot. It was a blood clot, which, you know, I wouldn't say is particularly lucky. But

yeah, that apparently was propitious and was a good sign. And the secret history, Peter, is a really interesting text because it's perhaps the most important in terms of Mongolian history. And it also has some Mongolian myths as well, doesn't it? All cultures that are successful need to explain where they came from. The challenge is that nomad societies tend not always to be heavy on their literatures. The Mongols, as they start to build an empire, you need to have writing systems to be able to tax correctly and to be able to administer justice from long distance.

But the oral tradition is what makes the nomad world tick. But probably at around about quite soon after Genghis Khan's death, we know it from late 14th and early 15th century manuscripts. But it explains where the Mongols came from. And of course, the weirder you can make the story, the better. So the first Mongol supposed to be descended from a fallow deer and a blue-grey wolf. You know, why not? That sounds to us totally crazy. But then we think about Rome and Romulus and Remus being fed and brought up by a she-wolf and the wolf being the symbol of Rome.

So it's not that unusual. But then the secret history tells us about how Genghis Khan's ancestors or Temüjin's ancestors went through 11 generations, that one of his female ancestors or great grandmothers was abandoned by her family.

And then one night she was minding her own business in her felt tent and a glowing supernatural man came through the smoke hole in the top and lo and behold, a few months later, she had three children. This is a familiar story. I mean, this is very much like the Immaculate Conception as well, isn't it?

It just sounds like centuries of unfaithful people trying to come up with crazy stories as to how they got pregnant all of a sudden. It was a supernatural glowing man and then, bam, kids. He came in through the chimney. Phil, what animal would you say you were descended from if you were trying to impress people? Like a lynx? Oh, that's nice.

Yeah, lynxes are really cool. Or an octopus. I think octopus are really cool because they're really clever. But we all know I would not be descended. And I'd be, like, if I were descended from an animal, I'd be like, ugh. You know those very ugly deep sea fish that only come up after a tsunami and they all look surprised to be out

of the water they're like what they all look so annoyed to be pulled out the deep deep dark water and i reckon i mean i probably am descended from them maybe we all are apparently those blobfish what i gather is that they don't actually look like that. It's the pressure that's placed on them when they get brought up. But actually in their own environment, like most people in the dark side, they look alright. That's my excuse too. So Phil, when Temujin is growing up a little bit, his dad has obviously died, his mum's still with him. There is a bit of family discord with his brother.

Do you want to guess what happens? So he fell out with his brother after a game of Monopoly or something oh yeah they're not i mean fell out is is probably right i mean it gets a bit worse than fall out oh did he kill him and his like heart fell out of his body he killed him he certainly did it was an argument over a fish which um hey a blobfish i'm telling you it's the pressure no they already look like that no this was dinner wasn't it peter the story goes that they have a massive argument we know that he seems to be taken captive and is enslaved for at least some time yeah so he he is taken by a rival tribe the taishid clan but he gets out of it i mean he makes a name for himself and he he sort

of gets released somehow and then he gets himself a name for himself and he he sort of gets released somehow and then he gets himself a nice wife uh when he's about 16 years old and she was called borta that's too young given some of the some of the marriages we've done on this show phil a 16 is surprisingly like oh that's that's almost okay okay and then borta the wife gets kidnapped so he now has to go on a bit liam neeson taken type mission to get her back at this point was like maybe it's me maybe i'm the common factor here maybe i'm just a messy bitch who loves drama he doesn't betray the kind of classic psychological profile of someone who doubts himself later in life but this moment is a definitive one i mean how how one builds the profile of someone

who we have so few written records for. It is a kind of make or break moment. His wife is kidnapped. She's held in captivity for something like eight months. She comes back pregnant and likely that she's been either raped or harassed and that the child probably isn't Temujin's. But he then goes looking for, she's kidnapped by the Merkit people who are sort of forest grouping. And Temujin rides out to go and find her. And the story goes in the darkness, she recognizes the bridle and the tether of the reins of his horse. So she can tell that it's him without him speaking. But she's pretty cool, Berta. So later on in her life, she's crowned as the Grand Empress alongside him. She plays a pretty active role in decision making, so far as we can tell, and in keeping the show on the road.

So Temujin has got to get her back, because if he doesn't, then his status, his profile, his humiliation is complete. So he does start to become a slightly different person. And he adopts the baby as well. You know, you said that she was pregnant, perhaps probably by someone else. But he says, no, this is my child, and he names the child Yoki, or Joki. Very modern family. Yeah. He's been helped in his little mission

by a couple of buddies, Sogriel and Jamukha. These are his blood brothers. These are his best friends. And then, they end up killing each other. I mean, it sort of goes a bit wrong. Well, these things, you know, our entire common knowledge in Europe

just in the 20th century is about one family, more or less, with nephews, nieces, cousins in Germany, Russia, England, starting the First World War. You know, I mean, it's not that unusual. What's strange is that you normally pay other people or force other people to go and fight your wars for you. But in the rough and ready world where, you know, you are not just judged on how you control a bureaucratic administration, but on your own individual skills, then it's also about how you

control, how you take power and how you manifest that you deserve to be taken seriously. Also sounds like just because he's adopted someone doesn't mean he won't kill them at some point later on. Yeah, you're not committing to anything in Mongolian times, are you really? It's a short term contract. One of the great skills that the Mongols have is you tend not to be able to dominate and hold an empire together if you're always ruthless and always killing. So you might want to do it selectively, but it's much more important to be bringing people inside your felt tent than leaving bodies strewn outside yeah i was just about to say peter the next thing in my script here is that he then wiped out the tatas he kind of he turned up and went um

no you don't get to live anymore i mean he lets the women and children live modern guy any man taller than the linchpin of an ox cart he killed do you reckon a lot of like the older men were sort of hunching and trying to get below the linchpin of a it's like going on a roller coaster you have to be this short to ride the rest of your life Genghis Khan is a title so it means universal leader leader of everything so he's now reached the stage where he's leading men he's leading armies he's taken on the tatars and he's waved Tatar to them. They're gone. They're defeated. They're now part of his wider empire. He's getting bigger. He's got more troops. He's got more land. And so he now has to become an administrator. Is it also that he likes meritocracy? He likes to promote talented people rather than

who your dad was? The most important prerequisite is loyalty. In a second instance, it's your efficiency to be able to deliver what it is that the great Khan tells you and what he needs. Step empires are all built on the need to acquire more goods so you can distribute and reward more. So he needs to have around him a substantial retinue that he can rely on at all costs. And so becoming a member of that retinue is, in the first instance, are you related to him? In the second, are you one of his original tribes, the Mongols? But then there's a much more complicated calibration there of making sure that all these other tribes you're bringing in aren't going to either regroup and challenge you,

but that they will respect and make sure that you are unchallenged and he has that bodyguard which we call that the keshi the you know k-e-s-h-i-g keshi's castle not to keshi's castle that'll be amazing wouldn't it yeah yeah that's how the mongols remained undefeated all their enemies just kept hitting big rubber balls and falling in bodies of water yeah i mean that'd be amazing that's how you get recruited onto the... Can you be a Mongol? Can you get across this assault course without someone hitting you in the face with a rubber mallet? The Keshie is the name of the elite bodyguards.

And as I understand it, Peter, some of those men in the bodyguards were sort of hostages. They were kind of the brothers of important men. There's a process of loyalty, but also, I could kill your family members if they stab me, if they betray me. Yeah, it's a bit like the Trump White House. You need to have your family in the first row, Ivanka and Jared, and then you have disposable and dispensable people you can fire. And in fact, the process of getting rid of them is symbolically very

important. And it's a manifestation of your power. What Genghis Khan does is he makes sure that there are, I mean, it's not, the bodyguard sounds a little bit too formal it sounds a bit like they're all muscled up and they're kind of shadowing and looking after him but the Kesheg includes people who are cooks it includes people who have night watch duty and things like that amongst those are what we might call hostages or diplomatic allies where it's not just about keeping your enemies close it's about showing that you matter to them. Okay, so he defeats the Tatars. He defeats the Keret tribe. He defeats Jamaka, his old best friend. By 1206, he's like that bloke in the gym who never skips leg day. He is now the step master. And this is when he receives his new name of Genghis Khan. I'm glad

you enjoyed that joke, Phil. He is the leader of everything, which means that realistically, he now needs to be conquering the big powers. And the big power in the area is China, presumably. But China at the time is not just a single nation of China. It's a few kingdoms. So the first one is the Xia, the Western Xia, which is in the northern part of China. Is that right, Peter?

Yeah. To get there, he has to march across the Gobi Desert, which is no mean feat. So it's a bit of a commute. But he turns up and he spends two years doing research. Phil, this is someone who's putting together a booklet. He's sort of having a look. He did the books.

Yeah. He did his revision. He's a nerd. Yeah, a murderous nerd. He's a nerderer. He's scouting the city of Volohai and he finally makes his move in 1209. He conquers the city of Volohei with cute birdies and fluffy kittens. Phil, I'm going to ask you to guess how he does this and I'll give you a clue.

Don't think sort of Disney princess singing nice songs to kittens and birds. Think slightly more violent. Does he build like just a mountain of dead birds and cats and he climbs over them over the wall and then someone's like you could have just used a ladder but he's like yeah there's nothing scary about a ladder look at how many cats i killed it's not a bad guess oh yeah were they diseased cats and birds that he flung over the wall and got everyone sick i mean that is something that is said to have been done later on. But in this case, he gets the cats and the birds from the city and then sets them on fire.

And then, of course, they run back to their homes and set that on fire, apparently, allegedly. That's the story anyway. I mean, that's extra horrible. If you've been missing your cat for a week and you look out the window and, oh, Mr. Snuffles is back. Oh, my God. In fact, that doesn't sound to me entirely plausible, your cat for a week and you look out the window oh mr snuffles is back oh my god in fact that doesn't sound to me entirely plausible partly because unless i've misunderstood something

birds even if they have cotton in flames tied to their tails tend not to explode particularly effectively haven't you played angry birds i think you'll find they very much do explode angry birds is actually a historical video game it's a documentary yeah about the conquest of valakai he does manage to win against larger forces i mean this is one of the things that's really impressive about him he defeats larger more established armies and some of his tactics are really quite inventive so one of the things the mongols do is they feign retreat so they pretend to run away so people chase them and then they turn around and go, ha-ha! I know this from Medieval to Total War. Yeah.

It's so annoying. I'd just taken, what is it, Damascus, and there I am, because I keep running away, but also you keep dying because I'm shooting at you the whole time. That's it. And it's true, isn't it, Peter? They used composite bows, they were brilliant horsemen, they were tactically ingenious,

they practised all these manoeuvically ingenious you know they practiced all these maneuvers so you can't get close to them the big weakness is they're not very good against fortified locations and cities because first you need the technology to make the walls well explode maybe like the exploding cats and birds but most importantly is that the mongols are on horses and so as phil's experience in Damascus shows, they're very annoying because there's very little reward in going after them. And if you do go after them, you're in trouble. But equally, if they come and sit outside your front gates, it's an irritant.

What the challenge is for the Mongols is that to be able to take big cities, it's very technically complicated. So you need to find ways of putting pressure on the inhabitants, either psychologically or by diverting water into cities and messing things up, or by constantly issuing threats. Because otherwise, the longer it goes on, the more the odds are in favour of the people inside the city. Cities can withstand sieges lasting one, two, three years. So when he goes to look at other cities to investigate them, the reason he's doing his research is that he knows he can't make it work unless he comes up with some magic. You've mentioned the psychological warfare of it. He does issue threats.

He does terrify. He deliberately sets out to scare people so that the next city will surrender, which obviously makes his job easier. And that sort of works for him, because in the Western Xia, having annihilatedilated volohai he then turns up to the next guy and says come on just hand it over and the king says you know what yeah fair cop i will pay you lots of money and i'll be a client king i'll do whatever you say i'll be a puppet leave me alone please don't hurt my face and he accepts that he's fine with that isn't he yeah well it's it's not necessarily the worst equation typically the question is am i going to end up paying more tax than i was paying before and as long as the the Mongols are fiscally liberal, then you're fine. You're right, Greg. The real thing to do is to be able to convince people that you are willing to follow

through. And it's quite helpful in the Mongol locker to have a couple of examples where you do stack up people's heads in pyramids or towers that can be seen from 25 miles away. That does concentrate the mind. Yeah, I mean, Phil, you mentioned a stack of dead cats. Actually, he did it with human skulls later on in Nishapur. The story goes he stacked up 1.75 million skulls in a human pyramid. And also the reputation thing works in his favour too. And we think that perhaps the Mongols deliberately spread misinformation, spread rumours about their own violence.

Fake news. Which I guess is a bit like stepping out on stage as a comedian. If you've got a reputation and the audience are already like, oh, this guy's funny, they're going to laugh quicker than if they don't know who you are. Absolutely. I haven't actually told a joke for five years now, but I have been fortunate enough to build some kind of reputation

where people presume I'm funny. And it's amazing how many minutes you can get out of that. So in 1211, Genghis Khan, or is it Chinggis Khan? Peter, let's settle this. Chinggis or Genghis? Chinggis. I think he'd be comfortable with sir, but I think Chinggis. All right. OK, we'll call him Chinggis Khan. Right. So he wants to conquer Jin China now. He's conquered Jia and in 1211, he's like, right, I'm going to go for the big daddy.

Now, this is this is proper China, proper, big, huge, massive army China. And he turns up at the city of Zhongdu, which is now Beijing. And it is a massive city. And they've got an army of one hundred and seventy thousand men. The city is guarded by huge walls, 900 guard towers. They are no pushover he's not getting in is he how is he going to conquer this city given that his army is all based on horses and they've got massive walls what's the plan yeah so there's no real prospect of storming the city but on the other hand the weak point of large settlements is that they need a lot of food and if you can cut

off or pressure on that food supply, it doesn't take very long to really ramp up the temperature inside the city. So Zhongdu, I think it's already the Jin Dynasty having troubles anyway. But then what Genghis does is he tries to win over key supporters from nearby and even from inside by promising them status and so on, which is quite a good way of doing it. And Bob's your uncle and the big cat doesn't arrive. Zhongdu falls.

Very clever. And he also promises that he'll leave them alone and takes a big payment. And then he comes back the next year and storms the city. So he'll backstab as well. I think we can agree that Genghis Khan was a ruthless bastard, but he was also ingenious and shrewd and tactical and thought things through,

levered all types of different technologies and weapons and strategies against different enemies, you know, depending on what's in front of him. The Jose Mourinho, he looks at what the opponents are doing and then he tries to neutralise it. His next major conquest after Jin China, I'm going to get this wrong pronunciation here, Peter, the Khwarazm Empire? Khwarazm. Oh, do that again, yeah. Khwarazm empire kwarazm oh that's do that do that again yeah kwarazm kwarazm yeah so we're spelling this k-h-w-a-r-a-z-m it is quite game of thrones it's lovely isn't it it's beautiful

um that's a sort of a relatively new empire in central asia persia and afghanistan and he initially approaches the ruler muhammad shah in18 for a bit of a chat, a bit of a trade deal. Friendly advice. And it very quickly goes wrong because the Mongol emissary is killed. And then the next emissary is their beard to shave to humiliate them. This is basically poking the bear. Chinggis Khan will now demand vengeance, presumably. Yeah, he's not a fan of the metrosexual look with the wax and the shave.

Yeah, he wants men with hair. It's intended to humiliate. OK, in retrospect, stupid thing to do. But basically, when you get emissaries, the equation is take it or leave it. Muhammad Shah says he'll leave it. And the way to do that is not send it back politely with a nice message. It's to say, I'm not scared of you. This is how I'm going to treat your envoys.

Muhammad had built this empire of his own, basically doing the same thing that Chinggis Khan had been doing himself by picking off smaller groups. That gives opportunities for the Mongols. So from Chinggis Khan's point of view, that expanding westwards along these trade routes, looking at some of these big cities, that it was a nice right route that was ready to go and ready to be exploited. It's put very simply by one historian. He says that when the Mongols arrived, they burnt, they killed, they plundered, and then they left. And then another one says, I wish I'd just never been born, so I'd never had to live through such traumas. Genghis Khan smashes that empire to pieces, takes it for himself. He marauds through the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which are these

amazing hubs of trade on the Silk Roads, which you've written about in your books, Peter. One of them is particularly devastated, isn't it? Yeah, so Pokhara's okay. Samarkand looks more complex. But in fact, the two big signature sacks come much later, well, come slightly after. Nishapur, which you mentioned already, with its 1.75 million skulls.

And then Murf, which is the big oasis city in what's now Turkmenistan and Murf is broadly speaking is dismantled one of the biggest cities in the world at the time possibly the biggest maybe a population of three-quarters of a million maybe even more to take down walls of that size on that scale without gunpowder and without cannon and so on it's really quite something so do they even get through the walls through the gates yeah and there again it's the same story of pyramids of skulls and again the defiance of the of the local city who refused to submit what the mongols really want is to encourage trade to keep going again because

then you you get the bling going you get the trade you get the tax and you get back to life so he now controls the silk roads. This enormous trade network that connects East Asia through to Europe. I mean, he's got huge amounts of money now. Is he buying a big fancy palace? Nice big hat? So Mongols, they were very keen on bling. You know, you showed off ostentatiously what you had. You wore silks and furs and jewels and, you know, the best horses.

They're very keen on their bling, but they're very keen to distribute that across all the warrior groups. Otherwise, if the leader takes all the cash, if you have a sort of Jeff Bezos type who just becomes insanely rich and then no one else, then it's not sustainable. And so you need to be generating wealth all the time. And you've got one shot with conquest, but then after that, you need to be galvanizing.

You need to be encouraging trade. You need to be stimulating. And normally, if you murder people who come in step one foot inside your lands, they don't want to come back or you kill them. They work quite hard at making sure that these oasis towns, the local villages, longer range trade, that there is infrastructure put into place to make sure that this empire functions properly and smoothly. Phil, have you got any silk shirts? Silk? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Every single one a mistake. I don't know why I bought them. I don't know who I thought I was. I bought one in Italy and I look ridiculous. I just look flat out divorced when I put it on. I don't know who I thought I was. I'm sure you look lovely. It feels nice. It does feel nice. But also there's a hidden advantage that silk is a sort of armour, certainly on the battlefield. The remarkable thing about it is it's incredibly strong.

And if you are hit by an arrow on the battlefield and you're wearing a silk shirt, the arrow might puncture your body, but the silk shirt doesn't break. So you can pull the arrow out by pulling the silk shirt away from your body and it pulls the arrow out from within you without snapping or leaving bigger puncture. It's rather clever. It's rather good. So if you were going through a midlife crisis in the mongol days you actually stood a better chance of surviving an arrow but i want to just pivot here and just have a bit of fun because in 1979 eurovision saw one of the greatest ever songs this is the german entry do you know it phil do you know the classic jingis khan song from 1979 no it's's Genghis Khan by the band Genghis Khan from the album Genghis Khan.

So, I mean, I'm surprised you haven't heard it. I might have to just play you the YouTube video because it's fun. I mean, they've really committed to the costumes. Would you wear shiny gold trousers and a shiny gold cape? I already have, really. Whoa! One of the ladies has flat out refused

to go along with the theme she's just in like a white jumpsuit there are the others have really committed to the mongolian look and she's like guys this is not going to age well i mean that's the most culturally insensitive thing the germans have ever done and that's saying a It's a catchy tune. It's not a bad tune, you know. And technically speaking, they say we're all descended from Genghis Khan. So maybe we're all allowed to do Mongolian impressions. This is taking us down a dangerous. Probably not. Peter, there is that thing that Genghis Khan had so many children that there are hundreds of millions of descendants of Chinggis. I mean,

that's sort of, that's a slight technicality, but it is an interesting thing, isn't it, that the scale of the Mongol Empire? Yes, but I mean, I'm not a statistician. The law of multiplication and statistics is that anybody alive then has hundreds of millions of descendants. So they're wearing a huge amount of silk. They control the Silk Roads. They're incredibly wealthy. They've conquered China. They've conquered Persia, Afghanistan. Nishapur is in persia isn't it and that city which the 1.75 million skulls stacked up that was a vengeance thing his son-in-law was was killed by an assassin and so he took vengeance on the entire city the mongol army is extraordinarily adaptable it's brilliant it's huge it's as phil has already pointed out swirling

sort of you know archers that you can't catch bastards yeah bastards they're like a kind of murderous jazz band in that they can improvise but they're also incredibly well trained they know what they're doing and they also peter in terms of their army organization a bit like the romans they have decimal style 10 men 100 men men, 1,000 men, 10,000 men. Peter, you mentioned earlier that the Mongols were very good at learning. They studied their enemies, they picked up the good stuff, they abandoned the bad stuff. And so, Phil,

if you could guess which of these six weapons they didn't pick up from the Chinese, because the Mongols were not siege engine experts, but when they went and besieged Chinese cities, they worked out what the Chinese were doing. I'm going to give you six weapons. One of them Chinggis Khan did not have in his arsenal.

Five of them he did. So which one is the odd one out? Which one didn't he have? Okay, here we go. First one, fire rockets. Yeah, he would have done because there was fireworks in it. And they had gunpowder in China. Okay, retractable climbing ladders.

What do you think? I reckon so. Or a steppladder, I guess you'd call it. Handheld cannon. In Mulan, they have them. So I'm going to say yes.

OK. It's how he dies in Mulan, the bad guy. Spoilers. Giant crossbows that shot flaming bolts. Oh, like a ballista. That was in Rome Total War.

I didn't see it. No. OK. Mobile siege towers On wheels That they can roll up to the walls of the city And then climb out I want to say they did have those Okay

And then huge trebuchets Which are massive catapults I'm going to say Actually they did have the huge crossbows But they didn't have the trebuchets You are wrong It's the handheld cannon they didn't have disney lied to you again the kind of cannon came in probably a few decades later on everything else

they did have they had fire rockets they had retractable climbing ladders mobile siege towers huge trebuchets flaming bolt crossbows they recruited chinese engineers you know they said look come join our army or we'll kill you and then they used this stuff to go in and attack the Persian Empire. So they were incredibly adaptable, weren't they, Peter? They weren't just people who rode about on horses. Yeah, I think anybody who is successful, you want to buy, borrow, copy the best. And technology, again, it's not something that's new and exciting in the 21st century. I think what you are always trying to work out is what have other people got to offer that we might learn from and incorporate?

Everything is turning up rosy here. But at the end of Ginkgas' life, have they built stuff? Are they leaving behind Mongol culture or are they absorbing Persian culture and Chinese culture and changing? Well, it presupposes that, you know, why do you need to leave stuff behind? Why does that become a marker of your legacy? Why should you worry about that? You know, are the Romans somehow better because they built a bunch of buildings and then died out?

Surely the measurement is how successful and what's the impact. And in that sense, the efficiency, the revenue gathering, the structures, I think are much more impressive. And in fact, it's almost the other way around. Why build and waste money on vanity projects like building giant parliament buildings

in Delhi or whatever the Brits did? Why not invest your money on, A, having a good time and blinging yourself up with furs, jewels and the rest of it? Why should you want to immortalise yourself in these sort of ways that are ultimately rather vainglorious? So I think that's the first thing. But in terms of the impact, I mean, you find Mongols popping up in Shakespearean plays. You know, you find them in Chaucer. You know, the Order of the Garter is founded with Mongol cloth, the oldest chivalric order in Britain. You have in the Renaissance, the sort of the hen in the conical shaped hat that women wear is Mongol fashion. So, I mean, the Mongols left an enormous imprint. And, you know, and today, people talk about the Pax Mongolica, you know, this moment where Asia is all completely at peace, because there's one empire that sits across the whole lot for the best part of a couple of hundred years. When we think about the Mongols, we think

of marauding bands of people just wanting to murder and rape and kill. But things that are successful always work for a reason. There's a chain of command, there's structure. And the structure of the nomadic world just doesn't work the same way that it does in Britain, in the empire or in Rome. But it does work like other step empires. And it's extremely successful. The main point of difference I always think about is in terms of legacy, of the legacy of empires, contrasted British and roman and greek is the legacy of institution not just leaving behind buildings and infrastructure but particular rules of law institutions educational systems or modes of government and i guess my question is whether or not the mongols left

anything like that behind i suppose most significantly would be what they left behind in their dynasty in china yeah yeah i think that's right i mean not just china then we have the successors of the chingisids of the mongols timur tamburlain as we call him here timur traces his connections to the mongols very closely and then ultimately seeds what we call the moguls who've got much better pr in india mongol architecture you look at the taj mahal you look at the tomb of Humayun in Delhi, that's all classic Central Asian architecture patronized by the Mongols or their successors. And those great cities like Samarkand that Greg mentioned, the monuments are all in classic Central Asian style, has influences, of course, from Persia and elsewhere, from China too, but it's classically Central Asian. I mean, when you mention those institutions, Phil,

you know, those are also highly divisive, you know, education, law and so on don't deliver equalities in our Western societies. You know, those institutions that we get are sometimes part of the problem. What's specifically interesting about the Mongols is how ahead of their time they are from looking back with modern eyes to things like religious tolerance. So if you were Jewish or Buddhist or Christian or Muslim, you were given special protected status in the Mongol world. You know, you were respected for your religious beliefs in a way that is, you know, seems to be unbelievably, impossibly progressive in today's day and age. The incorporation of minorities and their redistribution to try to create a sense of

common identity so that people didn't feel left behind or weren't persecuted because they were from a small, weak tribe. And there was a chance to rise up, maybe not right up to the top of the golden circle, but, you know, if you were loyal, if you were efficient, if you were good at what you did. We've talked about Chinggis Khan as a brilliant strategist. He did have a pretty brutal, ruthless streak in him. There is one particular governor in the city of Otra

who defies him and he kills him in a pretty grues gruesome way phil do you want to have a guess on how he might have done that i reckon he pulled off all his skin in one go that would be horrible i mean it was still pretty nasty he basically ordered that molten silver be poured into his eyes and ears oh brain and eyes melted and frazzled and his brain exploded, basically, with the heat. Oh, God. Yeah, they do that in Game of Thrones when the... Yeah, they do. It's very Khal Drogo, isn't it?

Yes. But that's a nomad thing, too. OK, so one Russian prince in the 970s is killed on the battlefield and his skull is lined with silver and then used as a drinking goblet. Only for Sunday best. You're drinking your finest wines out of it,

not your Ribena. So the final part of the story for Chinggis Khan, Peter, is that he feels betrayed by the Xia and the Jin. He feels like the people back in China that he's sort of left behind, you know, they're not towing the line. So he returns to China to be much more brutal this time. And he wipes out entire towns, entire villages, entire cities. In total, Chinggis Khan is said to have wiped out 40 million people. brutal this time and he wipes out entire towns entire villages entire cities in total chingis

khan is said to have wiped out 40 million people during his career which is so extraordinary that scientists have posited a theory that global warming slowed down by 700 million tons of carbon during his reign so he was an eco-friendly mass murderer. Basically, he's Greta Thunberg. Genghis Thunberg. I think his tactics were slightly different to Greta. For now. I doubt she's going to wipe out 40 million.

She seems very nice. So these numbers of 40 million, OK, I think we as historians need to be slightly boring about that because these numbers, you know, no-one is keeping a running score on the clicker because that's really a very, very large number indeed. You know, they're high approximations. They're all to do with how people typically who are on the losing side or writing much later would say, oh, 1.75 million skulls were built up in pyramids.

And that's a sort of cipher to say just a lot. And so I think we can, we need to be, I think, cautious about putting numbers on it. And even with the climate element, the depopulation of Asia is much more dramatic because of disease rather than because of mass murder. Even with the climate, the change to ecosystems, it's not absolutely clear that that's all to do with the fact that fewer people are around to till the fields. There are all sorts of reasons why carbon dioxide levels change and adjust. So we can correlate some of these things, but it doesn't mean there's causation. You sound like his lawyer. What was the carbon footprint of a person back then? It's just their farts, isn't it? It's literally just your farts.

All the horses fart, don't they? All that meat thing. How many flights are the Mongols taking? But you're right, Peter. This is a much larger kind of ecosystem and there's a much larger story but his legacy as a conqueror as a wiper outer of peoples of cities of towns there is something in that empires are built on persecution on violence we look at the british empire and transatlantic slavery extermination of indigenous populations in north america you look at the spanish or portuguese you know this in North America. You look at the Spanish and Portuguese.

This is how things work. Look at the Roman Empire built on slavery from not just within Europe, but from Africa and Asia too. Any empire in the past is all built on the same two principles of being able to expand your violence and to be able to persecute. So in the end, Chinggis Khan becomes a cropper in 1227. That's when he dies. And it's a pretty boring death he's

old he falls off his horse we don't know where he was buried really did we Peter they've looked for it the tomb of Chinggis Khan but they haven't found it yeah supposedly he said he didn't want to be buried with any flair pomp and circumstance but presumably taken back to his homelands and that is the end of him but it's not the end of the Mongol empire his son his descendants carry it on and grow it which is a surprise because actually on other episodes we've talked about Mansa Musa and Saladin Napoleon these great charismatic leaders who when they died everything went to shit and yet with Chinggis Khan it just carried on being pretty effective for another century or so is that because he'd put in place all of these

protocols all this system everything sort of was able to carry on with without him yeah I think it's partly to do with the sort of the great man theory that we focus on, on an individual rather than the underlying. The way in which this success takes place, it's not just about one particularly charismatic figure. You know, Chinggis Khan was obviously hugely determined, impervious to criticism and had a bad temper. But on the other hand, the structures that were put in place were very enduring and you know they lasted for many many centuries one of the facts i find fascinating is chingis khan in his 25 year career added more land to his empire than the romans did in four centuries

the nuance window this leads us on to the bit of the show that i love the most which is the nuance window this is where our expert historian can geek out for two jingis minutes. Phil and I basically go quiet and we have a little listen. And Peter, we've already heard so much interesting stuff, but what is it that you'd like to nuance for us? Well, first, I think that it's important in the 21st century that we think about the whole of the world rather than our little corner of Europe. Historians are making great strides right now in thinking about interconnected histories. But I think that Mongol imprint has been highly negative all around the world. So in China right now, which is founded by the

Mongols, is one that's seen as a race of outsiders that come in. In Iran, likewise, the Mongols are seen as being disastrous. In Russia, too, what I suppose is striking is that the Mongols don't get judged with the same yardstick you know so they are seen by us all to be significantly worse and by far the most brutal bloody and whatever and it's somehow because the the Brits we ended up playing cricket and you know having good sense of humor and recording you know podcasts like this that that somehow different but you know those legacies that we talked about I think are really important with the Mongols about how to give some kind of rehabilitation without playing down or denying the scale of violence.

But, you know, that is no different to how empires always get built. And I think it's time to be more open minded about how we think about how the Mongols work as an empire compared to how other empires work. empire's work and to not just be looking at the gory and the dramatic and the awful things that happened the stability the efficiency the ways in which uh taxation and trade and movement of people's function looks surprisingly modern even 800 years later so like all good historians all good history it's about i think trying to be more inclusive in how we think about things and above all to be not surprised our ancestors even the ones we paint in very bad light we're actually doing things sometimes better than we are today thank you so much peter what i'm learning from this is that the mongols should have picked up cricket and uh

maybe we judge them more kindly phil has that changed your mind on the mongols i mean you didn't know much about them before other than they were like really annoying in a computer game so where do you stand on them now the damage damage that was done in that Damascus campaign, that's going to take a while to get undone, but I feel I'm much further along that path today than I was before joining you all here today, so I really appreciate that. So what do you know now?

Well, it's time to see how much you've learned, Phil. Oh, yeah, I forgot about this. Oh, no. So this is the So What Do You Know Now? It's the quickfire quiz where we test our comedian to see what they've learned. We've got 10 questions for you. Let's see if you can remember some stuff. I'm going to start the clock.

And here we go. Question one. Much of what we know about Genghis Khan comes from which historical source? Oh, the grand history of Mongolia. The great... The secret history of Mongolia. Yes. Question two.

Genghis Khan was born Temujin and he was apparently born clutching what in his hand? A blood clot. It was a blood clot. Question three. Temujin killed his half-brother in an argument about food.

But what type of food? A fish. A blobfish. Yes, but not a blobfish a fish a blobfish yes but not a blobfish no not a blobfish question four what happened to chingis khan's first wife burta shortly after they were married she was captured she was captured and then he got her back question five roughly what does chingis khan translate to universal boss yeah it does. Question six. How did Chinggis Khan use fluffy kittens and cute birdies when attacking the city of Valahai, apparently?

He lit them on fire and recorded them on his phone and it went viral. Absolutely. They returned to their sender and they apparently burned down the city, although we don't necessarily know that's true. Question seven. During their campaign against China, which fancy fabrics did Mongols start to wear under their armour? My awful shirts. Silk.

Your lovely silk shirts. You're doing really well so far. Seven out of seven. Question eight. Name two of the Chinese war gadgets that Genghis Khan used in his campaigns. Trebuchet and a giant flaming crossbow. Yes, you could have had fire rockets as well. Question nine.

What was the name of Chinggis Khan's elite bodyguard slash entourage? Oh, it sounded like... Oh, Takeshi, the Keshi, the Keshi. Keshi, yes, Keshi's right. Question ten. This is for a perfect score. In what year did Chinggis Khan die? Oh, no.

I never pay attention to years. 12? Yes. 27. Oh, he's done it. 10 out of 10. Amazing. Amazing.

That's extraordinary knowledge. Proof that Peter has filled you with knowledge that can bolster you now when you return to Total War 2. And you can take on the Mongols now, knowing how they work. I can set it to hard mode now, yeah. Well, it's been a fantastic episode. If you want to hear more of Peter, you can listen to the Justinian and Theodora episode, which is on the back catalogue on BBC Sounds.

But for now, I have to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, the magnificent Professor Peter Frankopan. Thank you. gold cape. Cue the Eurovision music. Here we go. Bye. Ha! Your Dead to Me was a Muddy Knees media production for BBC Radio 4. The researchers were Olivia Croyle and Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow. The script was by Emma Neguse and me. The project manager was Ida Matthews

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