The first noteworthy mention of the Mongols comes in the fourth century AD, although not under their own name, but as the Huns, made famous by Attila, who terrified Europe and almost took Rome, but with whose death the name of the Huns evaporated as quickly as it had come to be known. Still, although historians are in general agreement that the Huns must have come from the whereabouts of modern Mongolia, they are not so generous as to make a positive identification of the Huns as the Mongols. This must be all right with the hero of the present entry, about whose Mongolian origin no one has doubt, leaving him without any historical competition whatsoever.
The man who gave the Mongols a foremost world-historical status was born in 1162, and his name was later to become known as Genghis Khan. There is no other nation in history whose birth and whose glory were so closely identified with a single man. Unlike Attila, he was not only a ruthless conqueror, but even more so a wise empire-builder, who was never too busy conquering the world to groom his sons and grandsons to succeed him with great distinction, and whose empire, consequently, was to last for more than his lifetime, as his own glory was magnified by being shared with his sons, grandsons, and various other kin, all striving to make their nation great by making it literate; and unabashedly, unapologetically, and unequivocally benefiting from the existing established cultures of the conquered peoples.
There is an almost contemporary Mongolian account of his life and times, coming to us as “The Secret History Of The Mongols.” Written in an adopted literary language and alphabet, it is unmistakably hagiographic. Although it surely supplies historians with many invaluable details, it is otherwise untrustworthy, having been manufactured by those same Mongols and their obedient literate servants who had a vested interest in glorifying their own at the expense of everybody else. As if Genghis Khan’s amazing genius ever required any embellishment. In fact, raw truth would have been infinitely more flattering to the Great Khan than any man-made retouch of it, and our astounded fascination with the genius of this great man is hardly based on the biased opinions of either his friends or his enemies, but on the sheer objective magnitude of his historical accomplishment.
To make it “fair and balanced,” there is the other, “unembellished” side, too. The thirteenth-century English monk-chronicler Matthew Paris calls the Mongols a “detestable nation of Satan, that poured out like devils from Tartarus, so that they are rightly called Tartars.” Genghis Khan was a Mongol, and the name Tatars applied only to a portion of the nomads he had brought under the general Mongol rule in his empire. This is not to say that there had not been a lot of mingling between them, to the point of making the Tatar-Mongols on Russian soil indistinguishable, and habitually called Tatars for sheer linguistic convenience. But starting with Matthew Paris’s Tartarus pun (I don’t mind the …Rus in Tatar-Rus, though), and with Europe eager to embrace his neat “etymology,” Genghis Khan and his heirs had been thus associated with Hell, and the Tatars are even today commonly misspelled as the Tartars.
(Except in Russia, where they still have their primary home and where they have been properly known as Tatars. I must add that following the invasion, there was massive Tatar assimilation in Russia, to the extent that in every Russian Tsar from Ivan Grozny on, flowed Tatar blood, while his temporary non-Rurikid successor as regent and Tsar, Boris Godunov, was a 100% Tatar.
Most Russians ever since have had Tatar blood in them, and, as an example of this, the great Russian writer and historian of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century Nikolai Karamzin traced his lineage directly to the prominent Tatar Kara Murza, from whom he inherited his Russified name. It goes without saying that every Russified Tatar accepted the Russian Orthodox Faith, and being properly baptized, became 100% Russian in the eyes of the Russian Church and consequently of the Russian nation. This is by no means to say of course that all Tatars in Russia are Russified. There are at least seven million of them unassimilated and predominantly Moslem, living in Tatarstan, Bashkorstan and elsewhere around Russia, maintaining their distinctive, albeit not entirely pure, ethnic and cultural identity.)
…To be continued tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment