Genghis Khan and The Making of The Modern World - Misrepresentations

Misrepresentations

• Weatherford consistently calls the thousands of women dragged off by the Mongols as sex slaves "wives", and the thousands of male slaves "servants", thereby glossing over a grim aspect of the Mongolian campaigns.

• The silver tree constructed in Karakorum by a French artisan who had the misfortune to be in Belgrade when the Mongols captured it is declared to be a great marvel. However, such toys were popular at courts all over Europe.

• It is stated that during William of Rubruck's visit to Mangu's court, William and the Nestorian Christians allied with the Muslims in an attempt to refute the claims by the Buddhist clerics. By William's own statement, he despised the local variant of Christianity, which was heavily infused with what he calls "the Manichean heresy"; he regarded the Muslims as the only true monotheists present beside himself. Weatherford's claim that the Christian clerics started to sing hymns because they had become drunk is not borne out by William's account.

• The book claims that the Nestorian Monk Rabban Bar Sawma, who made a pilgrimage from Kublai Khan's capital to Jerusalem in the Ilkhanate, was then, in 1287, "sent by his superiors" to the courts of Europe to offer a peaceful alliance between the Mongols and the Europeans. That is not supported by the only known narrative of his mission, the one Weatherford himself relies on. Rabban Bar Sawma was asked by the Ilkhan Arghun to offer the Christian monarchs a war alliance against the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, but the Christian monarchs were not interested. Their lack of enthusiasm became the more pronounced since the Mamluks had in 1262-63 secured an alliance with the Golden Horde in Russia. This was another Mongol principality ruled by the descendants of another of Genghis Khan's sons than the one the Ilkhans were descended from; by now, they were bitter enemies of the Ilkhanate. The Europeans vividly remembered the previous Mongolian invasion of Europe and did not desire a repeat. Furthermore, by the middle of the 13th century Europeans were well aware of the Mongolian strategy of making alliances against peoples nearby with peoples further away and then, after victory, turning on their former allies.