For the great Franciscan thinker Roger Bacon, the Mongols represented the triumph of science and philosophy over ignorance. For the English chronicler Matthew Paris, the Mongols were Gog and Magog aroused from their slumber they were the demons of Tartarus, the myrmidons of Satan himself. These divergent modern views are a projection across the centuries of diametrically opposed views of the Mongols entertained in the 13th century. In contrast to the ‘Genghis as monster’ take on events, the anthropologist Jack Weatherford, in his 2004 hagiography of Genghis, soft-pedalled the casualties caused by the Mongols and stressed instead their enlightened attitude to women, their avoidance (mostly) of torture, their transmission of culture and the arts, and even their (alleged) role as fount and origin of the Renaissance. The Mongols are supposed to have imported ruthless ferocity to Islam, which in turn transmitted it to the crusaders, thence back to Spain and, after Columbus’s voyages of discovery, the New World: “The awful fate of the Incas and Aztecs… ultimately washed back to Genghis Khan himself.” The Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski replied, correctly, that “ruthless ferocity” was actually introduced to Islam by the crusaders. Military historian Sir John Keegan made Genghis responsible for the savagery of the Spanish Reconquista against the Moors in the late 15th century and their massacre of the Aztecs and Incas. One school of thought would make the Mongols culpable for every military atrocity that has ever occurred the opposing one would make them harbingers of world peace and security, beset by a few regrettable excesses. It is the task of the honest historian to attempt a balanced, judicious estimate of this conventional appraisal, all the more so since modern revisionism has seen something of an ‘overswing’ of the critical pendulum. Most historians claim that this astonishing achievement was the result of massacre and bloodshed not seen again until the 20th century. Genghis and his sons waged major wars on two fronts simultaneously and conquered Russia in winter – both feats that eluded Napoleon and Hitler

Medieval 2 total war mongols