The Horde
How the Mongols Changed the World
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Cundill Prize Finalist
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year
A Five Books Book of the Year
The Mongols are known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful engines of economic integration in world history to show that their accomplishments extended far beyond the battlefield. Central to the extraordinary commercial boom that brought distant civilizations in contact for the first time, the Horde had a unique political regime—a complex power-sharing arrangement between the khan and nobility—that rewarded skillful administrators and fostered a mobile, innovative economic order. From their capital on the lower Volga River, the Mongols influenced state structures in Russia and across the Islamic world, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced new ideas of religious tolerance.
An eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire that has long been too little understood, The Horde challenges our assumptions that nomads are peripheral to history and makes it clear that we live in a world shaped by Mongols.
“The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity…The Horde flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating…The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world…An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book.”
—The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Mongols were sophisticated state builders who left a lasting mark on Eurasia, according to this eye-opening revisionist study. Favereau (The Golden Horde and the Mamluk Sultanate), a Paris Nanterre University historian, sketches the rise of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan in the 13th century, but focuses on the subordinate territory of the "Golden Horde" under the Batuid dynasty of khans, who ruled over the steppe stretching from Central Asia into Russia and as far as Hungary. She pegs Horde society as a novel form of "nomadic empire" that migrated with its herds but promoted trade, commerce, and economic production among the sedentary peoples it controlled and taxed, using diplomacy as often as violence. Among the world-historical upheavals the Golden Horde facilitated, according to Favereau, were the Black Death and the rise of the modern Russian state dominated by Moscow. The author's accessible, wide-ranging narrative entwines political and military history with deep dives into everything from the Mongols' monetary reforms to their national beverage of fermented mare's milk, which, she contends, "strengthens the immune system and treats and prevents typhoid." Favereau downplays the bloodier aspects of Mongol power, but her detailed exploration of its more constructive side makes this a meaningful corrective to popular misconceptions about Mongols' role in world history.
