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Review of Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2021. 377 pages. ISBN 9780674244214. Hardcover, $29.95.
Perhaps no group from the pages of history is as routinely stereotyped today as the Mongols. In novels, popular media, and even academic works, the Mongols are very often portrayed as bloodthirsty barbarians, sometimes reduced in cinematic rendering to eating raw meat off the bone while pillaging a city and communicating with one another in little more than guttural grunts. Even more sensitive academic works tend to downplay the Mongols' contributions to history, economics, and politics, instead turning them into passive recipients of "civilization"-for instance by seeing them as having been sinified by contact with Han bureaucracies or taught the genteel arts of sedentary living by refined Muslim courtiers. Very rarely are the Mongols given their due for having had the sophistication to build an empire much (much) bigger than Rome's, and to rule over a linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity arguably richer than in any other polity at any time in history.
In her new book The Horde, scholar of empire Marie Favereau- associate professor of history at Paris Nanterre University and seasoned veteran of Mongol research-sets out to change this stereotype. Working in a dazzling array of historical sources written in, among other languages, Russian, Arabic, German, English, and French, Favereau reconstructs the Mongol empires (the plural is accurate) beyond the ruthless conquests to show that Mongol leaders were often dynamic thinkers, adept politicians, and brilliant strategists, able not just to take territory but also to hold it. In eight chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, Favereau gives readers a multi-level, multi-faceted history of the Golden Horde (the "Ulus of Jochi" (1182-1227)), the western offshoot of Chinggis Khan's (1162-1227) vast steppe empire solidified by his grandson Batu Khan (ca. 1205-1255). She goes beyond this, too, situating the Golden Horde within the sweep of Mongol and world history. For those who read The Horde, it would surely be impossible to keep up even the most hidebound of stereotypes about the Mongols. Favereau shows them to be sophisticated, resilient, fallible (far from the invincible juggernaut of popular imagination), religious (even pious), savvy, and discerning. They won their...