Catiline's Reviews > The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World

This is an interesting but extremely biased and poorly argued book. Favereau has written a book-length thesis in the guise of a history, and her unconvincing arguments mar what could have been an otherwise excellent account of the subject and period.

Her argument is that the Mongols, and especially the Horde, were not some savage barbarians ravaging the world, but instead a cohesive society and legitimate empire in their own right, who effected many positive benefits on the parts of the world they governed through social, cultural, and economic means of their own making. The argument’s weakness, and the book’s biggest flaw, is that Favereau completely ignores the scale of destruction of the initial Mongol conquests and the subsequent wars. This is a baffling and almost propagandistic omission. To ignore the obvious evidence countering her argument, even if that evidence is gone over ad nauseam in other books, is too shockingly disingenuous to forgive. How can an honest analysis of the economic effects of Mongol rule be conducted without factoring in the millions of people they killed and the cities they destroyed? One can imagine that burning cities to the ground and killing all the inhabitants has a powerful effect on the local economy.

Yet when destruction is mentioned, it barely garners a sentence or two (i.e., “They sacked Kiev”) and a comprehensive picture of the sheer scale of it is never painted, compared to the pages and pages extolling the benefits to global commerce and development of having the main thoroughfare of the Silk Road located in the Horde’s territory. This is not to say her argument is necessarily wrong; the two things could have existed together, the Mongols and the Horde could have created a sophisticated economic system while also having laid waste to much of Eurasia, but the failure to address such a massive hole in her argument irreparably ruins it. It would have been a far more interesting and convincing thesis had the scale of destruction and its social, cultural, and economic effects been discussed.

Time and time again, the reader is told that this one city was constructed and had a population boom because of the Horde, this other city grew and churches and schools were built because of the Horde, this part of Europe experienced a rapid rise in development and wealth because of the Horde, etc. There is no end to the benefits that the Horde’s subjects experienced, Favereau writes over and over again. What about the drawbacks? None are mentioned or examined to the same depth as the never ending litany of benefits, and while this does not negate the possibility that all the benefits Favereau lists actually occurred, this is another spot where omitting the other side of the story weakens her argument and takes the book out of the realm of history and into borderline propaganda. There is also a very obvious anti-Russian slant to Favereau’s retellings of the early Russian principalities’ interactions with the Horde over the centuries. There is a level of vitriol present in these descriptions that is absent when describing other civilizations and cultures; the bias is unexplained and distracting, making those parts read more like pro-Mongol revisionism than trustworthy history.

Near the end of the book, Favereau makes another strange and completely unsupported argument: the Horde did not truly “collapse.” They reorganized, she explains, they strategically retreated and then recombined, they absorbed other nomadic peoples and morphed, they changed, they evolved, etc. etc. This secondary argument is even weaker and more fallacious than the main thesis. Rule from the Jochid line ended, their sphere of power ended, their currency issuance changed, their territory fractured, their population dispersed, their cities crumbled—the Horde collapsed. Favereau says that these things are normal for nomad societies and are a part of evolution and therefore not collapse, but she can’t have it both ways. Either the Horde was an empire—and empires collapse—or it was a loose confederation of nomads for whom the lack of centralization makes collapse impossible. Moreover, it is an odd argument to make. It is not controversial to say that they collapsed, and her insistence to the contrary just further steers this book towards revisionism and propaganda.

Nevertheless, Favereau does a decent job of recounting the chronology and history of the Horde. When she is writing plain history, Favereau is an excellent historian. She takes a tricky and convoluted history and condenses it into an enjoyable and simple-to-follow story that includes the key players, the major events, their causes and their consequences, all while following the “main thrust” of the subject and the period. While the book could’ve done with more maps and especially with a few dynastic trees, the sections of straight history are well worth reading and the highlight of this book. It makes the rest of the work that much more painful to read, knowing that she could have written a truly excellent, comprehensive history if she wasn’t condensing the events to fit the arguments that she is forcing onto it.

This was a strange and disappointing book. The group responsible for one of the highest death tolls in any period of human history is certainly interesting to study, but they are a strange subject to attempt to “rehabilitate,” as Favereau has tried and failed to do here. While the plain history is absolutely worth reading, the book as a whole cannot be called a history as much as a thesis.