The end of Europe loomed in the small Polish town of Legnica, three hours southeast of Berlin. It was April 9th, 1241 and a harried, hodgepodge army – Poles, Moravians and even some Knights Templar – lined up outside the town to await the feared invaders.
They had heard whispered tales of the Mongols: their fearless horsemanship and ruthless archery skills. Rumours had reached them that these godless barbarians even ate human flesh. How many of the nervous Poles wondered if they might well be the invaders’ next meal?
When at last the Mongols appeared, all 20,000 of them, they lived up to their fearsome reputation. Hails of arrows rained down on the Europeans, other whistling arrows flew to communicate along the battle-lines, while gunpowder smokescreens confused the European enemy.
The Mongols pretended to retreat before launching a final, lethal push to trounce the European army led by Henry II, Duke of Silesia. He soon became Henry the Headless, as the Mongols paraded around the region for weeks with his skull on a spear.
By now the Mongols were used to victory: in the previous two decades, the so-called “Mongol storm” had raged ever-westward, swallowing up the Khwarazmian empire in modern-day Afghanistan, as well as Persia, Korea, and even defeating the Jin dynasty to take Manchuria in northern China in 1234.
Vast swathes of today’s Russia and Ukraine fell to the Mongols too as they made their way westwards. Now 7,000km from home, they had pushed across the known world at the then dizzying pace of 100km per day. Watching and waiting, many fearful peasants in 13-century Europe saw the Mongols as a biblical force of evil: Gog and Magog and the end of days.
After beheading Henry in Poland, rather than continuing west, the invaders executed part two of their European plan and charged south to rejoin other hordes to defeat a Hungarian army in another battle at Mohi, 180km northeast of Budapest.
Though the Hungarians had more men in the field, the Mongols sliced through the front lines at Sajo and Hernad − and sliced off an ear of each Hungarian soldier to keep track of their death toll (reportedly filling nine sacks).
They burnt cities to the ground, including the then Hungarian capital Strigonium, today’s Esztergom, confiscated all cattle and crops they could and slaughtered one in four Hungarians. King Béla IV fled to Croatia while Fredrick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, hearing news of the defeat, mourned later how “the entire precious kingdom” of Hungary was now “depopulated, devastated and turned into a barren wasteland”.
With two big European armies trounced in two days, the Mongols were poised to take Vienna or even Paris. First they set up a new base, striking their first coins and eyeing up Hungarian plains for agriculture. Then something strange happened.
Rather than continue their campaign and conquer further European lands, integrating them into the largest empire in human history, the Mongolian armies turned around. And in December 1241 they began the 7,000km journey back home.
For Mongolian historian David Morgan, it was one of the great “lucky escapes” of all time, preventing Europe from “becoming another province of a great Eurasian empire”.
This lucky escape was not because the Europeans set aside their differences to mount a united pushback, but because of the death of the Mongolian supreme leader, the Great Khan Ögedei. He was the third son of Genghis Khan, whose death 800 years ago is the hook for a landmark new exhibition in Berlin.
The show, with exhibits being shown outside Mongolia for the first time, tells the story of one of history’s most colourful and dramatic clans − and flirts with that great what-if historical question. What if the Mongolian invasion of Europe hadn’t come to an abrupt end but continued?
“The consequences, obviously, would have been incalculable,” writes Morgan in his landmark study, The Mongols.
Like many in this field, however, the late Morgan had a humorous take on the what-if question. Had the Mongols invaded western Europe after all, “it may be said with a degree of certainty [that] the study of Mongol history would not now be the concern only of a few specialists in historical exotica”.
Perhaps he was thinking of Dschinghis Khan, a Boney-M knock-off song that became West Germany’s fourth-placed Eurovision entry in 1979. Or was he thinking of the Washington Post’s tongue-in-cheek “person of the millennium” competition, announced five years early, in 1995? The newspaper handed its made-up award not to not to explorer Christopher Columbus, printing press inventor Johann Gutenberg, firebrand friar Martin Luther or multi-talent Leonardo da Vinci. No, the Post went out on a limb and declared its person of the millennium to be Genghis Khan.
Like no one before or since, the Post argued, Khan “embodied the half-civilised, half-savage duality of the human race”, whose “thuggery and genius” helped build “the largest world empire stretching from the Pacific to eastern Europe, dwarfing Roman and Soviet territories”.
“Genghis Khan reached out and touched countless lives,” it wrote, adding drily: “Ended them, in fact.”
Though the most bloody waves of expansion came after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, a nervous humour hung over the exhibition opening in Berlin. German president Frank Walter Steinmeier, in his opening address, welcomed dignitaries from Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, with a one-liner: “This time the Mongols actually made it as far as Berlin.”
A wag in the audience whispered: “Of course Berlin back then didn’t have the importance Berlin doesn’t have today.”
Anyone who wants to understand Genghis Khan should ready themselves for a dive down a historic rabbit hole with more myth and special effects than an Amazon Middle Earth reheat.
The Khan family chronicle, for instance, contains tall tales of glowing men who appear through yurt smoke holes and a baby born clutching a blood clot the size of a knuckle bone. That was baby Temüjin, the later Genghis Khan, born some time between 1155 and 1167 as the eldest child of a Mongolian chieftain Yesugei and his wife Hö’elün.
The blood clot singled out Temüjin for greatness, according to the later chronicle, though his father’s death when his son was eight suggested otherwise.
Showing early ambition and a strong personality, Temüjin executed his half-brother to become clan leader, then moved quickly to subdue and unite other Mongolian steppe clans under his patronage.
No images of him survive, though contemporaneous accounts speak of the leader’s tall, powerful stature, a broad brow over cat-like eyes and, perhaps appropriately, given that, a dislike of dogs.
The Berlin exhibition throws visitors in at the deep end, funnelling them through clay-walled recreations of heraldic paintings, a kind of Mongolian clan Facebook. Then come huge screens of AI-generated horse-backed hordes riding at speed towards visitors. While that was the last impression of previous generations of Europeans, today’s visitors can inspect a collection of innovative Mongolian weapons used against their predecessors.
A third room offers a vast landscape of white-yellow-green plywood shelves and seeks to evoke the vast Mongolian steppes and the origins of the Genghis Khan’s empire. Instead, its sparing choice of objects recalls a jeweller’s empty window before a riot.
Only in the second, cluttered half of the exhibition space do things get interesting: statues, jewellery and other finds from recent excavations. Visitors learn how the charismatic Temüjin took on the title Genghis Khan after a 1206 assembly and then went to work building – by war and diplomacy – an empire with remarkably modern innovations, from a meritocratic leadership system and unified legal standards to religious freedom and a mastery of psychological warfare.
Visitors in Berlin learn that, while Europe was spared full colonisation, the Mongolian retreat of 1241 was possibly also triggered by the region’s poor weather and lack of ample grazing pastures.
Not that later leaders abandoned Europe entirely: a Mongol state known as the Golden Horde stretched from the Carpathian Mountains to Siberia. The later Golden Horde’s strategy of expansion and consolidation peaked in the early 14th century, adopting Islam as its official religion, but eventually fell victim, around 1347, to an invisible foe: the Black Death. Side effects of the catastrophic plague – widespread unrest, border disputes and civil wars, tipped the once vast empire into decline and retreat.
“The Mongols were true system disrupters,” argues Berlin curator Matthias Wemhoff. “Everywhere the Mongols ruled, the world there afterwards was different.”
A shift from Mongolian expansion to consolidation, for instance, led to a period historians sometimes refer to as the Pax Mongolica, allowing a resurgence of international trade that forms the roots of globalisation today. For the first time since ancient Rome, traders were able to travel in relative safely from east Asia to Europe to trade everything from glassware to silk.
That helped generate the staggering trader wealth in Italian city-states such as Genoa, Florence and Venice that, in turn, bankrolled the Renaissance.
Modern reinterpretation of Mongolian expansion – and local pushback – remains most palpable today in relations with its huge neighbour, China. Vast swathes of its territory were conquered with the backing of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis. But in 1368, China’s Ming dynasty rose up against the Mongol-supported Yuan dynasty, their victorious pushback supercharged by ethno-nationalism, economic collapse and famine.
Six centuries later, Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong mocked Genghis Khan in a 1936 poem as a spent force who knew only “how to shoot condors”.
Not so today: modern China has appropriated the Yuan period as a legitimate Chinese dynasty, raising some hackles in Mongolia. At the Berlin exhibition opening, a leading European Mongolia expert dismissed China’s narrative as a “grotesque kind of historical Stockholm syndrome”. The expert, who asked not to be named, said: “It allows the Chinese talk of 5,000 years of continuous imperial history by nudging under the table the centuries of external Mongolian and later Manchu rule over vast swathes of its territory.”
It is not only the Chinese who see room for creativity with Genghis Khan’s legacy. In Berlin, Mongolian president Ukhnaa Khürelsükh praised the imperial leader as “renewer of the world, uniter of east and west” who united splintered clans, created a new form of government and, echoing an old British imperial claim, “brought peace to a realm from sunrise to sunset”. And forget what you may have read here about bags of severed Hungarian ears: for Khürelsükh, Genghis Khan “ensured that humanity could live in peace and prosperity”. Good to know.
Given all that history, today’s geopolicy nerds marvel at how modern Mongolia manages to keep the peace with two confident neighbours, Russia and China. And does it with a wink. During a series of high-level meetings this year, for instance, Khürelsükh praised $20 billion bilateral trade links as proof that “a close neighbour is better than a distant relative”.
Eight centuries on, it’s debatable how much closer the Berlin exhibition will bring Mongolia to western Europe, the continent that got away. After embracing shallow, modern presentation methods early on, curators offer visitors no guiding red thread through this complex and unfamiliar history. Few are likely to battle their way through a 500-page publication that is less exhibition catalogue than off-putting academic journal. Thankfully the elegance of rare exhibits – a silver deer statue here, a golden tea-set there – saves the day.
Genghis Khan and the World of the Mongols runs at the James Simon Gallery on Berlin’s Museum Island until April 18th, 2027
Source: The Irish Times · Derek Scally
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