by Ed West
To Europeans these people were exotic in the extreme: “They did not eat vegetables, drank fermented mare’s milk and emptied their bowels without a single thought for those they were talking to—and in public, no further away from where one was standing than ‘one could toss a bean.’”16 Mongols also never washed and, since they were always around animals, to Westerners they smelled terrible.
THE DESERT OF DEATH
It was a three thousand-mile trek across the steppe and the arid desert of Mongolia, the real-life Dothraki sea, and unsurprisingly very few Europeans had made the journey. In the 1250s, Flemish missionary and explorer William of Rubruck had visited Mongolia where he described Tartar women as “astonishingly fat” with “hideously painted faces” and the men as having “monstrously oversized heads.”17 They were all very dirty and didn’t wash, he added. Another traveler, Johannes de Plano Carpini, had gone in 1245, the first Westerner since 900 AD to travel east of Baghdad and return safely.
Carpini travelled from Kiev, recently sacked by the Mongols, and while in the region he described hailstorms so bad that 160 men drowned when the ice melted; he witnessed extremes of heat and cold, winds and drought that were alien to a Westerner.
Carpini learned that the Mongols didn’t have cities but lived in tents; he observed that they were friendly to each although they had drunken binges after consuming fermented mare’s milk. Mongols didn’t like exchange but were very keen on receiving gifts (just like the Dothraki).
They worshipped the moon, which they called “the great emperor” and had religious ceremonies where men and animals were purified after passing between two fires while the women stood on the sides, pouring water on the men and chanting. Carpini went to Sira Orda, the court of the great khan by the Mongol capital Karakorum, now in Mongolia; there he learned that the emperor’s mother had power “to execute justice” in his absence, just like in Essos where the dosh khaleen, the old widows of khals, are the effective rulers.
Europeans had begun to learn more about the East through two travelers, the Englishman John de Mandeville and Marco Polo, a Venetian. Polo spent twenty years with his father and uncle travelling to the court of Kublai Khan, encountering many strange sites and cultures. Along the way he visited the oasis town of Khotan on the edge of Taklimakan Desert in western China. Taklimakan means “Desert of Death” or “Place of No Return,” hardly surprising when temperatures varied by 68 degrees Fahrenheit over a day.
He visited Malabar in India, where the king had five hundred wives. In India Polo also saw that faithful followers of a ruler “throw themselves into the fire together with the king of their free will, and are burnt with the king to bear him company in the other world.” This practise of sati—where women burned in the funeral pyre of their husband—continued until the British empire suppressed it six centuries later.
He found yogis who had to apply to a religious position by first being tempted by women, who touched their ‘members’, and who failed if they were ‘moved’. He also found Tebets, a Tibetan tribe who used to eat their parents when they died, a practice noted by Herodotus almost two thousand years earlier.
And the Mongol society he described on his return to Italy was strange in the extreme.
Mongols lived in portable villages, each family in a mobile home made of wood and felt called a ger, which they disassembled and carried on wagons when they moved. Their food was not to everyone’s tastes: “They feed on flesh and on milk and on game, and also they eat little animals like rabbits, which are called ‘Pharoah’s rats.’” They also ate horses, camels, cows and dogs, drinking the milk of horses and camels too; if they couldn’t bring milk with them on their travels they’d kill their horses as they went, or sometimes live off its blood by pricking its veins and drinking straight from it. They also kept dried mares’ milk, which was eaten like a paste, which is probably as enjoyable as it sounds.
The Mongols drank koumiss, fermented mare’s milk, which has a strong, sour taste, and when Marco Polo agreed to try the stuff his hosts pulled his ears back to ensure he swallowed it, which gives some indication of how flavorsome it was.
Mongol warriors, the Chinese observed, could survive for long periods without food or even water and were prepared to endure extreme hardships. Compared to Chinese soldiers they were also much stronger and healthier, living primarily on meat, milk, and other dairy products, rather than the grain which was a staple diet for settled peasants, low in protein and vitamins and leaving them weak boned and vulnerable to disease.
Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan became the fifth emperor in 1260, and under Kublai the Mongol rulers lived ever more lavishly in their northern or “upper capital,” as they called it—Xanadu. There “the rich men and nobles wear cloth of gold and cloth of silk and under the outer garments rich furs of sable and ermine.”18 The Khan’s special costume, bearing a total of 156,000 gems, went on display once a year at the court. Here two “great men like giants” guarded the doors of the feasting room, and people walking in could not touch the actual threshold and if they did they would be beaten (unless they were drunk, in which case it was excused).
In the Mongol-controlled Chinese city of Hangchow, Polo was dazzled: a “hundred miles around and guarded by twelve great gates, the city had blue-water canals, fire brigades, hospitals, and fine broad streets lined with house upon whose doors were listed the names of every occupant.”19 The city had twelve thousand bridges and “the most beautiful women in the world.” In his palace there the Khan was served his meals by five singing virgins. Kublai Khan, his soldiers displaying his banner of a sun and moon, had come to own such extravagances as an albino herd of white horses, ten thousand or more in number, plus albino cows, from which only the Great Khan and his family were allowed to drink the milk. Albino animals were often prestigious to own which is why a white elephant was often given as a very grand—but very expensive to maintain—gift, and so gave its name to any dear but essentially useless project.
Each of the khan’s four wives had an entourage of up to ten thousand people, Polo claimed: “Whenever he wishes to lie with any one of these four women, he makes her come to his room, and sometimes he goes to the room of his wife.” On top of this he had “many other concubines.” Every other year the Great Khan sent his messengers out to find the 500 most attractive females in his empire. Once assembled, the young women would appear before a group of judges and marked according to their “hair, the face, and the eyebrows, the mouth, the lips, and the other limbs—that they may be harmoniously and propionate to the body,” and only those valued at twenty carats gold reached the presence of the Khan. After that, one of the older women in the khan’s entourage would lie with the young woman in bed “to know if she has good breath and sweet, and is clean, and sleeps quietly without snoring, and has no unpleasant scent anywhere, and to know if she is a virgin’”—and implicitly rather more. Kublai Khan had twenty-two sons by his four wives and twenty-five sons by concubines; Polo did not mention how many daughters, but presumably this was not very important.
Even the Khan’s minister Ahmad had forty concubines on top of his four wives, although rising high meant falling hard—after Ahmad’s disgrace his four sons were executed. It was later learned that the minister owned a pair of tanned human skins and his eunuchs revealed that he made strange mutterings as if praying to something, presumably a demon.
Each Mongol man, Polo noted, “can take as many wives as he likes, up to a hundred if he has the power to maintain them,” and they also had no taboo about marrying relatives.
Polygamy was the norm among all horsemen, and contributed to their relentless violence, an idea explored by a Royal Society paper, The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage. Polygamy ensured that low-status men had little prospect of ever finding a mate and so “will heavily discount the future and more readily engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behaviors,” bringing increased levels of murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, and sexual slavery.20 This absence of available wo
men explains why nomads were driven to conquer settled people. In contrast the spread of monogamy in Europe, imposed by churchmen with the encouragement of rulers, was motivated by a desire to suppress internal violence.21
But the strong men who ruled these societies enjoyed huge Darwinian advantages. Ata-Malek Juvaini, a Persian historian who died in 1283, wrote that “of the issue of the race and lineage of Genghis Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth and affluence more than 20,000. More than this I will not say . . . lest the readers of this history should accuse the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time so great a progeny.” But he was not exaggerating—one of the few well-known facts about Genghis Khan is that today one in twelve Asian men carry a Y chromosome originating in Mongolia, most likely the fruit of his over-active loins.
The Mongols had some customs that seem very odd to us. Marrying children is strange to modern mores, but it was the norm in medieval Europe; however, the Mongols went further by marrying dead children. After the “wedding” between two recently-deceased children a necromancer or shaman would burn all the documents relating to the marriage, with smoke announcing the union of the spirits of the dead. Then there was a feast, and later they made images of the newlyweds, placed on a horse-drawn cart with flowers and paraded them around before they were burned with prayers for a happy marriage in the other world. The two families exchanged gifts and kept in touch, just like with any in-laws.
No one can shed blood in Vaes Dothrak, but as Viserys discovers that does not mean you’re necessarily safe. Likewise, the Mongols disliked shedding blood when they executed people, although this was nothing to do with any compassion—it was just a sort of tradition.
Indeed Mongol justice was strict. In 1252 Mongke, the fourth khan, punished seventy officers he believed to be plotting against him, forcing stones into their mouths, a common Mongol punishment. Kublai Khan had one minister, Sanga, a member of the Uighur ethnic group in central Asia, put to death by having his mouth filled with excrement. Ogul Gaimish, a princess who refused to declare her loyalty to Mongke, had her hands and legs sewn into a leather bag; he accused her and her mother of trying to kill him by magic spells, and so had them rolled up in rugs and drowned and her two chief counsellors also put to death. Under Mongol tradition, captives were killed if they failed the “measure of the lynch-pin,” that is if they were taller than the pin at the end of the axle of the cartwheels. Men usually failed this test, while those who passed, mostly women and children, instead went off to slavery.
The Mongols were the unconquerable land force of their age but were inexperienced at sea. And yet Kublai Khan could not be “universal emperor,” in his mind, while across the sea the island of Japan remained unconquered; he tried twice to remedy this, in 1274 and 1281, and failed twice. On this second occasion, a Mongol army tens of thousands strong carried in as many as four thousand ships could not defeat the Japanese, who like their island counterparts at the other end of the supercontinent were aided by the weather, in this case a typhoon they called the “divine wind,” or kamikaze.
Polo spent many years at Kublai Khan’s court but eventually found an excuse to leave, and it was only after he was captured by the Genoese that his stories were widely circulated.
Polo’s account sold only one-fifth as many copies as John Mandeville’s tales of the east, but then he had the narrative advantage of having totally made it up—or at least some of his account was certainly invented and Mandeville was not his real name. In contrast, Polo was widely disbelieved at the time and mocked as a fantasist; local children shouted Il Milione at him, his nickname being Mr Million, as in a million lies. It was only in the nineteenth century, when academics painstakingly went through old court records from China and matched them with Polo’s accounts, that it was accepted he was telling the truth.*
“EIGHTEEN TIMES THE HORSELORDS CHARGED”
The Mongols were brutally effective at warfare, employing giant slingshots and catapults to hurl stones, flaming naphtha (a sort of napalm) or dead corpses. Carpini wrote: “Sometimes they even take the fat of the people they kill and, melting it, throw it onto the houses, and wherever the fire falls on this fat is almost inextinguishable”—unless doused with wine.22
One of their tricks was to feign retreat and lure the opposition to a cliff where they were surrounded, and then overwhelm them with arrow fire, their ammunition sometimes tipped with poison. Even their civil wars were dramatic and cinematic, such as in 1266 when Kublai went to war with one of his own men, Kaidu, a fight that involved two hundred thousand horsemen. Kublai Khan said he would have put Kaidu “to an evil death,” wrapped in carpet and trampled by horses, had it not been for relatives intervening.
Mongols almost always won in hand-to-hand combat, and while they were famously brave and adept at horsemanship they also developed sophisticated weaponry too. The nomads had a different version of chain mail to the European type, and also carried hooks that could grab chain mail, while their boots had upturned toes to create air pockets to protect from frostbite. Mongol armor also had a mirror over the heart because they believed these could deflect evil forces, even spears.
At one point, Jorah talks to a young Dothraki man about the relative merits of curly and straight swords, and whether to wear “steel dresses” as he calls chainmail. Dothrakis have swords called arakhs, and as Jorah says: “for a man on horseback a curved blade is a good thing, easier to handle.”23 The Mongols indeed fought with curved scimitars, which were easier to use on horseback than straight European weapons, which were only later used by the Arabs, with whom Westerners now associate them.
In 1258, the Khan Mingke attacked Baghdad, then the jewel of the Muslim world and a city with twenty-seven thousand public baths. The Caliph Musta’sim had warned the Mongols that if he died “the whole universe will fall into chaos, the sun will hide its face, rain will no longer fall, and plants will cease to grow.”24 The Mongols weren’t convinced, and launched a small attack, followed by a fake retreat, trapping the caliph’s men. The city was soon captured and thousands of people massacred, its inhabitants dragged through the streets and slain. The caliph was wrapped in a carpet and trodden to death by horses, and his family was murdered, except a daughter who went into the harem. Baghdad lost 90 percent of its population to death or exile, its canals were destroyed, and the city never recovered; indeed, it marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age.
The Assassins now sent envoys to Europe, proposing a joint war against the Mongols, but too late; the horsemen destroyed the Assassins in 1256, and four years later they took took Aleppo, and a crusader leader sent a ship to Europe with the warning: “A horrible annihilation will swiftly be visited upon the world.”25
In the Battle of Qohor, three thousand Unsullied face fifty thousand Dothraki, and while only six hundred of the eunuchs survive afterwards the triumphant Dothraki cut off their braids and throw them in front of the Unsullied in tribute to their bravery. The two real life models for these groups, the Malmuks and Mongols, did now face each other in battle, at Ayn Jalut in Galilee in September 1260. Setting aside their differences, the Malmuks had been given permission by the Christians to move north from Egypt where they faced the common enemy; they were victorious and afterward expelled the Mongols from Syria.
And in 1268, the Malmuk Sultan Baybars, nicknamed the Father of Conquest and famous for his brutality, had finally cornered the Christians in Antioch. He promised the Templars they could go but “when the gates were opened, Baybars grabbed all the women and children and sold them into slavery and decapitated all the knights and other men.”26 That same year Baybars took Safed, in what is now Israel, where, after defeating the Christians, he had the heads of decapitated Templars placed in a circle around the castle. Crusaders now controlled just a fortress on the edge of Acre; there the sworn brothers under marshal Peter of Sevrey held out while galleys evacuated Frankish civilians to Cyprus; a peaceful exit was ag
reed upon until the Mameluks began manhandling Christian women and children and so fighting broke out. On May 28, the fortress fell, and all the remaining Templars were killed.
When the Crusaders were forced out of the Levant, the Knights Hospitallers went to the island of Rhodes, and then the peninsula of Halicarnassus, the port of Tripoli, and eventually the island of Malta; as the Knights of Malta, they became famous as a defensive force against the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary Pirates.
The Templars, in contrast, were destroyed, but they had a lively afterlife. In Westeros, there is a Book of Brothers that records the doings of the Kingsguard, and in real life the Templars kept records in Cyprus. However, when the Turks captured the island they were largely destroyed, and as a result junk history has filled the void. In 1843, a book called Historical Notice of the Order first linked the order with the freemasons, who in reality only date back to the eighteenth century, and a genre of conspiracy theory was born.
*Robert Baratheon foresaw the Dothraki in Westeros, in Season 1, Episode 5: “They go from town to town, looting and burning, killing every man who can’t hide behind a stone wall, stealing all our crops and livestock, enslaving all our women and children.”
*Likewise A World of Ice and Fire described how in Westeros there is also The True Account of Addam of Duskendale’s Journeys, a merchant’s description of going through Essos, although ‘spends most of its time finding ways to remind readers that the warrior women walk about bare-breasted and decorate their cheeks and nipples with ruby studs and iron rings’.
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THE SMELL OF BLOOD AND ROSES
I’ll match him son for son, and I’ll still have nineteen and a half left when all of his are dead!
—WALDER FREY
