Death to the Rescue
Cheat Sheet to History
In 1218, the Fifth Crusade enlisted the help of St. Francis of Assisi to, yet again, try to conquer the Holy Lands in the name of God and plunder. This time, the effort began with the seizing of the port city of Damietta in 1219. Damietta lies at the mouth of the Nile and is the gateway to Cairo and the long sought after riches of Egypt. While gathering the riches of this ancient and decrepit land, the Crusaders hoped that St. Francis might assist in the conversion of the Islamic Sultan a-Kamil. The result was a thrashing at the hands of the resolutely Muslim sultan and a stalled Crusade. While the Sultan was negotiating the fate of the Crusaders, rumors swept through the Christian camp about a large army marching from deep inside Asia that was coming to their rescue in order to help them reclaim the Holy Lands. These were rumors not only embraced by fairly desperate men trapped at the mouth of the Nile; they were same rumors circulating throughout Europe.
The rumor took shape over time. It involved the arrival of a mythical figure in early medieval history – Preston John. Preston was the fabled ruler of a vast, heavenly nation in an unchartered part of the world inhabited by Amazons and the Lost Tribes of Israel – among others. His mythical kingdom was a paradise on earth – a Christian paradise – whose time had come to bring military relief and missionary fulfillment to the Fifth (and last) Crusade. Something very different, however, arrived out of the depths of Asia.
By 1241, the Mongols, under three different leaders, had conquered a substantial portion of the known world ranging from China through Russia, the entire Middle east, Persia and much of South Asia. Eastern Europe had been ravaged, Japan invaded twice, and India threatened with the occupation of most of what is today Pakistan. As we all know, none of this was pleasant. Millions died. Historians argue whether the Mongol occupations were one long, incoherent but wide-ranging version of genocide. Europe avoided this fate by the skin of its teeth. First of all, Europe was not an attractive candidate for conquest, a comparatively poor part of the world then compared to the likes of China, India and the Muslim Empire. Once on the periphery, Europe drew the luckiest of historical cards as the Mongols retreated from Hungary in 1241 after their leader, Ogodei Khan, died unexpectedly and the army had to return to their homeland to go through the complex process of selecting a new Khan. The untimely death of the Mongol leader occurred just as the Horde was about to dismember Europe and certainly qualifies as one of the most significant deaths in human history. By the time the Mongols had fully regrouped, Europe had enough breathing room to organize effective resistance to future incursions. Meanwhile, the vast Mongol empire had begun to fragment into different Khanates with internal issues and gradual assimilation slowly dissolving what had been, for a relatively brief moment, the largest empire in history. (Revisionist historians (see below) have tried to rewrite the traditional story of death & destruction and make it more about establishing a binding set of trading networks utilizing the iron hand of the Khan rulers. In other words, treating the Mongols as architects of a new round of globalization. In doing so, they soft pedal massive extermination and relocation of ethnic groups that would have made Stalin blush. The truth, of course, is somewhere in-between).
As important as the 1241 death of Ogodei Khan was, however, the most striking part of this dramatic story was the illusion that it was Preston Johns riding over the hill not the Mongols. It is a striking allegory for our capacity to deny what is happening right in front of us. I could not help but think of the rise of the Rapture movement and other such fundamentalist offshoots of evangelical Christianity. The Rapture captures one’s imagination with a Preston John sleight of hand. Rather than accept the responsibility for an increasingly hostile and toxic planet, you can believe that you have been chosen to be rescued by Christ before this troubled world meets its Days of Judgment. It is a “get out of jail free” card so irresistible to the Preston John within us all that the Rapture and similar such fanatical religious offshoots only increase in popularity as the Horde of climate change gets closer and closer.
The Preston John turned Mongol Horde story came from my current reading of The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The book, currently “On the Stack”, is a compelling retelling of history that recasts the familiar 3000-year narratives of empire, religion and commerce from its Eurocentric and Asian points of view and tells it through the many Silk Roads that connected West with East and North with South. It is as much a story about Baghdad, the steppes and the Hindu Kush as it is about European monarchs and Chinese dynasties. The book is structured around 24 “road” chapters, each describing chronologically another historical variant of The Silk Road. The Crusades was “The Road to Heaven” while the Mongols were “The Road to Hell”. Soviet and American incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq from 1979 to the present are in a chapter titled, “The Road to Catastrophe”. The “road” conceit is a bit forced and compromises the whole enterprise to some extent; however, the idea that the powers of the world have all had to traffic this vast geographic epicenter is intriguing and instructive if not entirely convincing. It is very readable and, of course, too long. I am about to leave the Ottoman Empire and wish the book had stopped here. I may change my mind as I continue to read it. While it is a book that reshapes how you think about the world, it too often feels like it is trying too hard to do so. So many “new histories” of the world, Europe, modernity – take your pick – are so obsessed with being “new” that the “history” begins to feel forced and fragile.
The Silk Roads
A New History of the World
by Peter Frankopan
505 pages (2015)
