Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Джек Уезерфорд

Yong, fressh, and strong, in armes desirous

As any bacheler of al his hous.

A fair persone he was and fortunat,

And kepte alwey so wel roial estat

That ther was nowher swich another man.

This noble kyng this Tartre Cambyuskan.

10. The Empire of Illusion

“When Christopher Columbus”: David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1986), p. 198.

– For information on the plague in Mongol territories, see Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

– For more information on the plague in general, see Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death (New York: Free Press, 1983), and David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

bodies of plague victims catapulted over the walls: Belief that the Mongols deliberately spread the plague remained strong enough to inspire imitation of it through the years, but without success. Russian troops reportedly used the tactic against Sweden in 1710, and in World War II, Japan tried it by dropping infected fleas from airplanes onto Chinese villages. The fleas had been exposed to a particularly virulent form of plague and did infect some villagers, but they did not create an epidemic.

the population of Africa declined: For population estimates, see Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 2nd ed., trans. Carl Ipsen (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), p. 31, and Jean-Noel Biraben, “An Essay Concerning Mankind’s Evolution,” Population (December 1980).

the epidemic permanently changed life: For a fuller discussion of the impact of the plague and similar diseases, see William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 132–175.

“venerable authority of laws”: Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. M. Rigg (London: David Campbell, 1921), vol. 1, pp. 5–11.

Christians once again turned on the Jews: For information on the Jews being blamed for the plague, see Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 209–226.

the Mongol authorities increased repression: Regarding anti-Chinese policies on the Mongols, see John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yüan China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism: Regarding Tibetan Buddhism under the Mongols, see Hok-lam Chan and William Theodore de Bary, eds., Yüan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mongols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.484.

         the collapse came quickly: For an account of the end of Mongol rule in China, see Udo Barkmann, “Some Comments on the Consequences of the Decline of the Mongol Empire on the Social Development of the Mongols,” in The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, ed. Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1999).

expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders: For more on the impact of trade, see Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 112.

Columbus embarked on his voyage: For more on Christopher Columbus and the Mongol influence, see John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

“the most singular people on earth”: The quotes in this paragraph are from the Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), pp. 268–280.

“I have confined my plan”: The quotes in this paragraph are from Voltaire, The Orphan of China, in The Works of Voltaire, vol. 15, trans. William F. Fleming (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), p. 180.

“The more I see”: Ibid., p. 216.

“what have I gained”: Ibid., p. 216.

“The lips are large”: The quotes in this paragraph are from George Louis Leclerc Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History of the Globe and Man (London: T. Tegg, 1831), p. 122, quoted in Kevin Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness (Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), pp. 61–79.

“The leading characters:” Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 307.

“the northern Chinese”: Carleton Coon, The Living Races of Man (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 148.

“Mongoloid race”: John Langdon Haydon Down, “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” Journal of Mental Science 13 (1867), pp. 120–121, Quoted in Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness.

“Parents too nearly related”: Chambers, Vestiges, p. 309.

“pre-human, rather than human”: quoted in Francis G. Crookshank. The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces (New York: Dutton, 1924), p. 21.

“Mongolian stigmata”: Ibid., pp. 72–73.

“Mongol expatriates”: Ibid., p. 13.

“Atavistic Mongolism”: Ibid., p. 92.

“from the East”: Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev, Pan Mongolism, in From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, available at http://max.mmic.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.htm.

“dream of the past”: Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (New York: John Day, 1942), p. 5.

calendar based on the year 1206: For Information on the Genghis Khan calendar, see Sechen Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society. Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 115.

translation of the Secret History: During World War I, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions prevented much study of the Secret History. In the 1920s, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot prepared a French translation, but it failed to be published until after World War II. The German publisher Bruno Schindler of Verlag Asia Maior prepared the German text for publication in Leipzig, but because of growing Nazi persecutions, Schindler had to flee to England. He left the manuscript behind, where it was eventually taken over by another publishing house, Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, which managed to set it in type in 1940. In France, Pelliot’s translation was finally published in 1949. A complete Russian translation was made public about the same time, and the German edition appeared in 1981. Except for the few eccentric international scholars who worked on the manuscript, the world took little notice. Over the subsequent decades, these dedicated scholars from several countries labored to reconstruct and translate the history first into proper