Liu Guandao, Kublai Khan Hunting (detail), 1280

Taipei, National Palace Museum

Here from: https://theme.npm.edu.tw/khan/Article.aspx?sNo=03009149&lang=2#p3

In the medieval west, they told monstrous legends of the Mongols. The Tatars, as they called them, roasted humans alive and feasted on their flesh. That particular legend may not be true, but in the thirteenth century the populations of cities from Poland to China could have told their own stories of ruthless barbarism and indiscriminate murder.

Then again - although it would have been small consolation to the doomed citizens - the murder was not entirely indiscriminate. Artisans, architects, and specialists in various fields, tended to be spared. For everyone else it was just too bad! What on earth was going on?

In 1207, an alliance of tribes, led by Genghis Khan, thrust out of their ancestral plains, north of the Gobi Desert. They thundered across the plains of Hungary, took all the great cities of the Silk Road, and after three generations had also made themselves the rulers of China, as the Yuan dynasty.

That these decades of relentless conquest also involved wanton, even mindless destruction is undeniable. And yet the Mongols were not mindless. Far from it! Like all nomads, they understood the value of trade - of the things that other people made and which they desired. By the end of the thirteenth century they had captured and appropriated the greatest trade network in the world. They spent the rest of their brief hegemony making trade happen - truly trans-continental trade. One might even call them the first globalists. At the same time, the sons and grandsons of those bloody conquerors became utterly seduced by the cultures over which they now ruled. The destroyers became the builders in a story of cultural cross-pollination of the greatest historical significance.

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