Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests 1190-1400
Stephen Turnbull's Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests 1190–1400 is part of Osprey's "Essential Histories" series. Each book in the series is meant to study the origins, politics, fighting and repercussions of one major war or theatre of war, from both military and civilian perspectives. This book actually addresses a series of wars spanning the rise and fall of the Mongol empire and its successor states, but it overindulges in picturesque details at the expense of the big picture, and the end result is somewhat confusing.
As an introduction to the history of the Mongol conquests, the book gives less background information than one might hope. There is little discussion of the lifestyle of the Eurasian pastoral nomads, which is essential for understanding Mongol logistics. There is no attempt to explain what distinguished the Mongols from the various nomadic confederations that preceded them—no sense, for example, that the Mongols benefited from a long and evolving tradition of political organization on the steppe. Nor, despite the appearance of his name in the title, is there any real discussion of why Genghis Khan's career turned out to be so unique.
Summarizing the history of the Mongol conquests in 96 heavily illustrated pages is no easy task, and Turnbull's compromise between the chronological approach and the regional approach is apt. The balance of coverage between the regions is questionable, though. Considerable space (a scarce resource in a book like this) is devoted to Korea and, with even less justification, to Japan and Southeast Asia, in a way that does not reflect Mongol priorities or historical significance. By contrast, very little is said about Genghis Khan's initial struggles to unify the tribes of the steppe, which set the Mongol conquests in motion.
The imbalance between the treatment of different theaters
is particularly regrettable because there is no meaningful presentation
of the centralized
strategic planning behind the Mongol conquests. The Mongol leadership
held meetings to plan campaigns and allocate resources, and the book
might have
presented snapshots of the empire at these points in time to
tie the different theaters of war together. Sacrificing a few of the
illustrations for a few
maps showing the strategic situation facing the Mongols at different
stages in their expansion would have gone a long way towards addressing
this problem.
As it is, many readers will be confused by the sequence of seemingly
unconnected campaigns.
Turnbull strongly emphasizes the adaptability of the Mongols
to different styles of warfare, which is an important point and very much
worth stressing.
This may explain in part the greater attention given to some
of the less important theaters of war—Southeast Asia, for example, where the Mongols faced
an unfamiliar combination of naval and jungle warfare. Of course, it is doubtful
whether the forces that invaded Southeast Asia were "Mongol" at
all in any sense other than the fact that they served the Mongol emperor of
China. Still, the Mongol high command was adept at mobilizing new resources
to tackle new challenges, and this helps explain Mongol success.
Other elements in Mongol success go unexamined, however. For all the discussion of the counterweight trebuchet in siege warfare, there is barely any mention of the composite bow, which was fundamental to Mongol tactics in the field. Similarly, the aspects of Mongol logistics that set them apart from their sedentary enemies in the early stages of the conquests are not explained adequately—Turnbull almost denies that any difference existed. In general, the book could also have devoted more discussion to the elements of steppe warfare.
The book misses an opportunity to contrast the tactics of the Mongols with those of the Mamluks of Egypt, who had their roots in the same kind of steppe society but were sold into slavery as children and trained to fight a different style of warfare. Since this is one area of Mongol-era military history that has been relatively well covered in English-language research—with Ayalon, Smith, Amitai-Preiss, and Martinez, for example, offering different perspectives—and since the Mamluk military system was arguably the most effective response to the Mongol threat, it is unfortunate not to find a better account here.
It is not the aim of this book to advance the state of the field or even to give a comprehensive summary of it, so it would be unfair to judge the book by that standard. Turnbull's writing is lively enough, the anecdotes are interesting and the illustrations are generally well chosen (the cover is perhaps my least favorite of them). If the book succeeds in stimulating an interest in history, and in Mongol history in particular, then it will have made a positive contribution. Unfortunately, the failure to put the Mongols in historical context, and the author's decision to emphasize those regions most familiar to him over the ones most important to the Mongols, compromise its usefulness as a general introduction to the Mongol conquests.
The best general introduction to the Mongol empire is still David Morgan's The Mongols (Blackwell, 1986), one of the few works in Turnbull's rather perfunctory Further Reading list. At just over 200 pages, Morgan's book is not a difficult read, and Morgan is an expert in this field. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the military history of the Mongol empire, I would recommend following that with Timothy May's recent PhD dissertation, "The Mechanics of Conquest and Governance: the Rise and Expansion of the Mongol Empire, 1185–1265" (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004), both for its own merits and as a great resource for citations to both primary and secondary sources.