Jack Weatherford: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. They also carried dried dairy products, aaruul it’s called, dry curd and they can keep it for a couple of years even. But you dry it and then, when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water, you ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom and turns into thick protein. It’s said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire, they had enough food. They would … So, all these little things at the lowest level were important as well at the highest level of his loyalty of his men to him and it went all the way down. Loyalty was extremely important and he organized the army into left wing, right wing or east and west. Mongols, the word for left is east, the word for right is west so those two wings and then in the middle was the [foreign language 01:32:30], the center, this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle. Then usually they would have a vanguard and a rearguard and sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through. And they never marched the way other armies do it in a line of one following the other, they would always go in long lines spread out in wings so that each horse is on its own path, you can say, but all parallel together. So, they had very precise ways of doing things and this, I think, was the secret with him and he used the best people but he was willing to train them as much as possible, he never punished them for what happened. So, Shigi Qutuqu, for example, the supreme judge, he was command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan and he lost the battle which is very, very unusual for Mongols. So, Genghis Khan went out with him, said, “Okay, let’s go to the battlefield together and look it over and you explain to me what you did and then we will talk about it.” So, he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him and they knew they weren’t going to be punished, it’s not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No, Genghis Khan knows every general is going to try 100% and, if they retreat fine, they’re saving Mongol lives, they know what to do, he respects that. So, all these things like that fit together but I think a part of it that was important for him … So, he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery and how that all fit together but he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw. as important for him … So, he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery and how that all fit together but he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw. I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we’re going to make it a little faster, we’re going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first. So, he went into Tangut territory of what’s now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. So, he went there and, of course, the cities have walls around him, this is a man who’s never encountered a wall in his life. Well, he did but they were made out of felt, the walls around his tent or felt walls. Yeah. Just imagine what it’s like for the first time in your life seeing a wall.…

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