Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Middle Ages. Mongol methods of conquest, pioneered and perfected by Genghis Khan, and imitated ably by Temür, prefigured the terror autocracies of the twentieth century, in which millions of civilians could be thoughtlessly murdered to service the demented personal ambitions of charismatic rulers, and the goal of spreading an ideology as far around the globe as it would go. Yet alongside their gross bloodlust and a cruelty that cannot be written off with mere historical relativism, the Mongols also changed the world profoundly—for better and for worse. In some cases the changes were to basic political geography. The Mongols’ tendency to burn cities to the ground and either replace or erase them effectively reoriented whole regions. In the Far East, their conquests created the enduring idea of a Greater China, with one imperial (or quasi-imperial) power dominant over a massive territorial area, ruled from what is now Beijing, extending out onto the steppe and including a huge number of different ethnic groups. In the Middle East, poor ruined Baghdad declined, to be overtaken in importance by Tabriz in Azerbaijan. In central Asia, Samarkand was catapulted to powerhouse status by Temür’s plunders. In Russia, a trading backwater called Moscow grew to become a regionally dominant trading hub—initially as somewhere that merchants could operate at a safe distance from the Mongols of the Golden Horde, but subsequently as an ally of the Golden Horde khans and, by the sixteenth cent...