Re:Women Who Ran Genghis Khan’s Empire
by Apocryphon on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @12:24AM
(#31649896)
People tend to have starry eyed views of successful empires that not only conquered a lot of territory, but were able to rule for some time. Because there is inherent difficulty in administering areas spanning many cultures, ethnicities, creeds.
Most of those things you said can apply to the Assyrians, the Romans, the British, or any other similar empire, and people still idealize those places today. If your empire holds together long enough to get a period of Pax named after you, it means you've made it in the eyes of history.
20 years ago-ish, a book came out about Chingis Khan that extolled the virtues of his multicultural, pantheistic regime and totally glossed over the many genocides the Mongols perpetrated. Not to mention the guy probably raped more women than anyone else in history.
Edit: To add to this, a lot of what is written about Mongols in Chingis Khan's time is conjecture. They were not a literate people, so there are almost no records. They were nomadic and buried their leaders in secret locations, leaving scant archeological evidence. Many conclusions that have been drawn about the Mongols are speculative. Fast forward to the Yuan dynasty where there are records in Chinese. That era and locality have better documentation.