The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest, but the nomads who have rebelled against their marginalization in history have given the world so much more than conquest and destruction. A new book says we live in a modern world inherited from the moment of the Mughals.

The book "The Khanate: How the Mongols Changed the World" - published in 2021 by French historian Marie Faveiro - reveals that the achievements of the Mongols extended far beyond the war.

For 300 years, the Mongols were no less powerful in global development than Rome was. They left a deep legacy in Europe, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East that is still tangible to this day.

Faveiro, who holds a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne University, takes us to explore one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history.

The Mongol Khanate was the central node in the Eurasian (Europe and Asia) trade boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and was a channel of intellectual and commercial exchanges across thousands of miles.

With their unique political system - a complex power-sharing arrangement between the khan and the nobles - skilled administrators and diplomats were rewarded, and a vibrant, orderly and innovative economic system was fostered.

From Sarai - the capital of the Golden Horde and the Mongol kingdom - which Ibn Khaldun described as one of the most beautiful cities "full of people, beautiful bazaars and wide streets", which lies on the lower Volga in present-day southern Russia, the Mongol Khanate provided a model of rule for Russia, and influenced social practices and structure A state across Muslim cultures, providing theories and ideas about the natural world, and a model of religious tolerance, it ruled most of Russia as well as parts of Siberia, the Balkans, northern Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

The book provides a summary of the foundation of the Mughal Empire, its unique quasi-constitutional form of government, and the expansion that carried the khanate and its nomadic subjects away from their homeland, considering it the only empire to expand so enormously so rapidly, despite the small population base of the Mughals and their nomadic allies compared to the population they conquered. .

The book also reviews the division of the empire into independent sub-khans at the beginning and then into completely independent and often hostile states.

Golden Horde Khanate

The "Golden Horde Khanate" is one of the khanates of the Mongol Empire, and it ruled the northwestern part of its lands. It was founded by Batu bin Juji bin Genghis Khan and ruled large areas of the Caucasus, Balkar (Saqlab) and the Gulga, and even the borders of Iran and Asia Minor. The Mongols of the Golden Horde embraced Islam since the time of Baraka Khan (brother of Batu) and the Khanate took its position as an Islamic state with friendly relations with the Mamluks of Egypt and the Levant, in contrast to the Ilkhanids of Persia.

The book comes as part of increasing Western attempts to write a more comprehensive history of the Mongols, especially the "golden tribe" that ruled large areas of Russia and Central Asia between the mid-thirteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, contrary to the prevailing stereotype about the Mongols that attribute "eastern despotism" to the brutal Mongol precedent. , an image that many researchers did not avoid, who neglected the flexibility and high adaptability that characterized the rule of the Golden Horde within a mixture of societal pluralism and pure Mughal institutions.

The book emphasizes the nomadic nature of the nomadic Mongols who traveled vast distances and built advanced societies, in the western Eurasian steppes, which became one of the medieval civilizations in the region.

The book discusses the advantages of nomadic collective power in geopolitics and commerce, and how empires can be generated from mobile peoples and states, not just from the stable powers and colonial empires usually associated with the European era.

The book conclusively shows that "pastoralism is not a primitive stage on the road to modernization", but an entirely different way of life in which the Mughal Empire aptly succeeded through the dynamics of adaptation, trade and diplomacy.

He also concluded that the Mughal imperial success did not occur despite their being nomadic tribes but precisely because of that, according to the author who worked on the Oxford University research project "Nomadic Empires: A Global Historical Perspective".

The book avoids referring to the influences of Turkish culture on the Golden Horde;

Some of these transformations were associated with linguistic and cultural transformation, and some Turkic-speaking khanates appeared in important urban metropolises, such as Astrakhan, Kazan and Crimea, and posed a challenge to the Moscow Duchy in the fifteenth century.

The conflict between the Khanate of the Golden Horde and other Mongol tribes put enormous pressure on the Khanate, which was in constant competition and conflict with the Russian armies. The Golden Horde Khanate and the confrontation with the Russians until the dissolution and division of the Khanate and the fall of its last remnants (the Crimean and Kazakh Khanates) in 1783 and 1847, respectively.

The Volga, Crimean and Lipka Tatars (in Lithuania and Poland) still bear witness to the continuous movement of these Asian peoples, in addition to the cultural traces they left in the countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Mughal exchange

The author analyzes the idea of ​​"Mongol exchange", that is, the meeting of people, goods and ideas in the Asian and European spheres on the borders of the Mongol Khanate, and considers that the Golden Horde established a dynamic system in economic terms, and formed advanced political institutions in which elite members gathered and women participated, and redistributed wealth and societal sharing of resources With minimal interference with local customs, people of all faiths and backgrounds are welcome to settle in their country as long as one pays taxes, respects laws, and honors obligations.

Golden Horde officials were successful administrators and economists, who pursued policies to boost trade revenues and created cities, markets, and trade routes with low tax rates and guarantees of security along the routes of the Volga and Don rivers, turning their lands into a global trading zone in which merchants exchanged goods and merchandise from Genoese and Venice, and from Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs Russia, Central Asia, China and even Western Europe.

The book says that the Mongol Khanate - with the system it brought to Eastern Europe and Western Asia - fostered an integrated market that included coastal cities such as the Italian city-states, Constantinople, and the metropolises of the Islamic world, enabling merchants to travel from the Volga River to the Nile, where their Mamluk allies were.

This "Mongol exchange" was an appropriate time for the development of the infrastructure and monetary system in that region of the world, which allowed the expansion of economic horizons and the development of the "Northern Road" (one of the main land routes of the Silk Road) that stretched from the European Danube to the hinterland near present-day Beijing .

But, unfortunately, the Mongol exchange and the expansion of trade led to the spread of the plague in the middle of the fourteenth century, which weakened the powerful empire and dismantled the trade networks, and the major setback came as a result of the internal wars between the Mongol tribes vying for legitimacy, before the Russians overran the Mughal lands.

But - according to the author specialized in the history of the Golden Horde - "It is impossible to imagine modern Russia without the Mongol influence."

The book concludes that grazing is not a primitive stage in the path of urbanization, but rather a different option that "enabled the Golden Horde to form a unique imperial entity that does not emulate any stable model", which constituted an indispensable introduction to modern globalization and the contemporary economic and political system.