Jack Weatherford: belief

Transcript context

…Well, then, getting back to the horses, the value they had for the horses and the horse riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history. So, if we just talk about the mounted archery that they’ve employed in war. The Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. So, there’s a lot to say. You have to time, and just watching some of the videos, it’s just incredible how stable you could be on top of a horse and I guess you’re supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all four of the feet of the horse are off the ground. And so, you have to time all of that, you have to position your body to maintain balance and then there’s the skill of the actual holding and shooting the bow accurately and there’s, obviously, the technology of the bow, the composite bow, the recurve bow. They’ve also, I read, used crossbows later, they’ve adapted the technology and there’s a particular kind of a thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse. The thing is bouncing up and down, so you have to not drop the arrow. It’s just incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway. Can you speak to this exceptional excellence that Genghis Khan and the Mongols had for riding horses and engaging in war off of the horse? The Mongol, the horse and the bow were a perfect combination and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible the synchronization and the timing of the movements and also the years of skill. The fact that, from absolute birth, the Mongols would be on a horse and, by three years old, they would probably be riding alone on the horse. Now, when I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time, all jockeys on horses for races had to be under six years old. That was the age limit, the cut-off was six years old at that time and so you had some as three years old racing out there. It’s absolutely incredible. And of course, at that age, they can’t even have a saddle because it can’t even be used so all they’re doing is staying on the horse, the horse has been trained to do what it has to do and they just stay on it. But by staying on it, they learn the horse, they become one and, not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses. Usually, five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle and this ability to shoot. You have to defend your animals, there are wolves around, foxes, other things, in some areas, there were even tigers and other animals that would come in and you had to be able to shoot to defend it against other people who might be raiding you. So, they became excellent archers that had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. Now, I say all that because it’s very important but those are all nomadic traits of the great steppe anyway. In an earlier version, you had the huns who came out of Mongolia and hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun, to this day, that’s what they say for a human being. So, they came out of Mongolia and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia and they had similar skills. So, you have this perfect weapon but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it and this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all but the genius of Genghis Khan came in. Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times, a number of Turkic leaders or even Attila the Hun who, of course, was actually born in the West but they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders and it wasn’t that they were so excellent in their strategy, they were very good in warfare and that’s what carried them through. n the West but they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders and it wasn’t that they were so excellent in their strategy, they were very good in warfare and that’s what carried them through. Genghis Khan’s army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small. When you’re going against China that has millions just in the army, not to count in the country, and you’re going against Russia and you’re going against the Middle East and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas, your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow and each horse. That’s the weapon but the army becomes the super weapon of Genghis Han, how he organized it, on how he used it and the strategies that he put together.…

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