Description

Though history is usually written by the victors the lack of a particularly strong writing tradition from the Mongols ensured that history was largely written by those who they vanquished Because of this their portrayal in the West and the Middle East has been extraordinarily and in many ways unfairly negative for centuries at least until recent revisions to the historical record The Mongols have long been depicted as wild horsearchers galloping out of the dawn to rape pillage murder and enslave but the Mongol army was a highly sophisticated minutely organized and incredibly adaptive and innovative institution as witnessed by the fact that it was successful in conquering enemies who employed completely different weaponry and different styles of fighting from Chinese armored infantry to Middle Eastern camel cavalry and Western knights and menatarms Likewise the infrastructure and administrative corps which governed the empire though largely borrowed from the Chinese was inventive practical and extraordinarily modern and efficient This was no flybynight enterprise but a sophisticated complex and extremely welloiled machine