Jack Weatherford: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So actually, if we rewind, Kublai Khan, who was he? And what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare? In 1215, Chinggis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of Northern China. And at that time, Southern China was ruled by the Song Dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Xi Xia Kingdom of the Tangut people. And so most of Northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered middle later, his descendants conquered middle, and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south. But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing. And he was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Chinggis Khan. Well, he’s got lots of cousins out there who’ve been riding around. They’re conquering Russia, and they’ve already burned down Kiev, and they’ve conquered different places in the world. They’re real Mongols. That’s their whole life. And he’s born, and he doesn’t meet Chinggis Khan until he’s about seven years old, because Chinggis Khan was away on a conquest in Central Asia. And Chinggis Khan came back and he met him and he said, “Oh, he doesn’t look like a Mongol. He looks like his mother’s people.” His mother was Sorghaghtani, who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people, whom he had conquered sometime earlier. And he said, ” He looks like his mother’s people,” who is a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white with very bright red cheeks, and have a certain very round face, and so on. And so he looked different. And for whatever reason, his mother, I think she recognized the difference, and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Mongke, later Mongke Khan, Mongke, and she wanted him to become, even though her husband was a drunk, who died out on campaign drunk, and she took over northern China and she began to put it together. And she wanted her son to become the Great Khan, the emperor of the Mongol Empire. And this wasn’t in line. This wasn’t going to happen. Because he’s the fourth son out of three, others are way in line, way ahead of her. But she calls the revolution. She made it happen. She put her son in, Mongke Khan in 1251. He became Great Khan. He only lived till 1259. He died of something. It could have been cholera, or there are different stories, and I don’t know the truth of it, but he died on campaign in China trying to conquer Southern China. Well, up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was, she was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him. And she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China. tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China. And so he was learning all this stuff for it. But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout. He needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people, Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn’t great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart. And at first a little bit lazy, he liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had many with him to do the shooting, and then to prepare the food and all. And his territory in Northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, “Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge.” And everybody was terrified of the mother. So he ran off to China and he started administering his land, and he started learning how to do it. Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River, on a campaign that he was sent by his brother. He was having no success at all. But he thought, “Okay, the brother’s dead. I should finish the campaign.” Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Boke, Ariq Boke was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded. And he was back in Mongolia. And his tolerance for religions, he had to oversee the debate one time between the Daoists and the Buddhists, because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists. So he had to oversee it. He got mad, and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he just wasn’t good for moderating debates. So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people. So his wife, Chabi sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, “Forget about Southern China. It’s going to always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new Emperor. You are the next son after Mongke Khan.” And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back. And even though he didn’t have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense.…

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