Reflections on Ch. 11: Pastoral Peoples or How to have the Pope Shaking in His Boots

Patterns develop when people start forming alliances.  The mind’s wheels spin in directions that create power and wealth, and from reading about the Mongols, they wrote the book on survival of the fittest with kinship, horsemanship, and military might.

Strayer amazes me how empires are created and dissolved in one to three paragraphs.  That has been his running theme throughout this book: the rise and demise in less than 300 words.

Wolf packs led by a kaghan.  Los Lobos, the wolves, now has a whole new meaning tied to their name, and raids are the name of the game.

Sultan is such a sexy word.  Who would not want to be dubbed a sultan?

Those Mongols sure are a conundrum – they left only a modest imprint after being the “largest land-based empire in all of human history.”

Outnumbered?  No problem.  No technological superiority?  Handled.  Just create armies that will kick everyone’s arses, and you have got yourself a Mongol empire.  Desertion means death, so don’t even think about it.

Were Mongols bullies?  I would say, yes, since they used “psychological warfare.”

Great idea:  Let’s “exterminate everyone in northern China and turn in into pasture land.”

Bloodshed and massacres everywhere, and torture for taxes.  I guess that is one way of getting blood from a stone.  God’s punishment for all of these evil doings was to turn the land into desert.

These Mongols make the Mafia look tame.

Can someone please do something different with peasants besides tax and torture them?

Thank God someone came along and finally poked a hole in the Mongols’ hold over creation!  Leave it to the Russians.

Cool that guidebooks were published about how to navigate the Silk Roads.

Wow – the pope and European leaders were shaking in their boots about the Mongols’ intentions all the while with their own intentions of converting Mongols to Christianity.  Let’s see, Mongols versus the pope.  That pope had better run for cover.

Thus far, the Black Death portion is the most intriguing of all.  The rats and fleas were in and of themselves vehicles for disseminating the plague.  In a way, the plague could be viewed as a way of simmering down all of the Mongols’ frivolity over the planet.  It sort of evens thing out.