THE HORDE

Rather than being the murderous mob depicted in film and popular history, the Mongol horde, this book reveals, was a complex Euro-Asian culture whose history “remains as though behind a veil.”

From the 13th to 15th centuries, the nomadic people who composed the horde bestrode the vast treeless Eurasian grasslands, the steppe, that stretched thousands of miles across Siberia and west into central Europe. Deriving from the 12th-century conqueror Genghis Khan and existing, via his sons and others, into the 14th-century days of the great military commander Tamerlane, the horde divided and subdivided into many groups. Yet, as Favereau shows, its component parts maintained a remarkably rich and stable culture while absorbing and equitably governing the peoples it subdued. As much a community as a state, the horde created “a new kind of empire” suited to the ecosystem it occupied. The author dispels the myth that it was just a rampaging mass of warriors; it possessed great governing skills, was adept at social relationships, and remained a major force on the Eurasian landmass until it began to withdraw eastward after the Black Death. So why has its history been unknown and ignored? Because, Favereau contends, the Mongols, a herding, horse-riding agricultural people always on the move, left little by way of architecture, literature, and urban centers. This book helps rectify their absence from Western consciousness and fills a major gap in our knowledge of world history. Although the author writes her largely academic work with more fervor than grace, she fully succeeds in rescuing her misunderstood subject from the world of poetry and myth and anchoring it firmly in scholarly learning. Readers will have to adjust to little-known names, terms, and geographical realities, but Favereau does her best to help, and numerous maps, often missing in books of this sort, offer skilled assistance.

A fine contribution to our understanding of the culture that “knit together east and west.”