🎙️Interview with Marie Favereau on The Horde
Last week I interviewed, French historian, Marie Favereau on the Mongol Empire, and its successor states, the Hordes (White, Blue and Golden). I am delighted to share this interview with you on both my audio podcast and YouTube channel.
Her book from 2021, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World is a readable, scholarly revision of many conventional histories of empire and the West. In these accounts, the Mongols are the barbarian invaders from the East, hungry to plunder the more civilised Europe and Islamic states of West Asia. Marie’s account shows that this old story, which still dominates YouTube history channels and some political rhetoric, is far from the truth.
Her insights begin with the title of the book, The Horde. You may think this uses a pejorative term, unless, like me, you have played one side of World of Warcraft. But, in fact, the negative associations derive from European history’s resentment towards Mongol power and nationalist versions of history, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. Marie derived the term from the political language of the Mongols. In the interview, Marie told me:
Yeah, that was very important for me to find my own language. Also like which terms I wanted to explain to the public, to the students. … Sometimes it’s good to translate, sometimes good to use empire. But when you know that Mongols never used this term for themselves…? Of course, it’s also interesting to see what are the terms they want to use in their official documents and that’s where I come up with “Horde”, which is term Orda or Ordu… this is the actual term the Mongols used.
(Burning Archive podcast #126, 0:03:28)
It turns out that the image of the Horde and the Mongols dominated by Genghis Khan and marauding archers on horseback is a distortion. The Mongols and the Golden Horde were skilful governors. They embraced diversity. Their states thrived collective decision-making, and societies gave a strong role for women. Their trade, culture, political institutions, communications networks and mastery of the steppe created a phase of globalisation that Marie terms, the Mongol Exchange. It changed the world.
Marie was kind and generous with her time. Do check out the podcast (on Spotify, Apple and other platforms) or YouTube video.
💭Nomads, empires, exchange and globalisation
“The Mongol Exchange.. knit together East and West. Nomads drove global history too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”
Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World
So many of the standard stories of history, empire and civilisation are dominated by images of stone-built cities, sedentary societies, and cycles of rise and fall. But these tropes do not fit the story of the nomadic empire of the Horde. Nor do they fit other nomadic empires discussed by Marie in the podcast and in her book, such as the Comanche and Apache in North America.
The impact of the Mongols and other peoples of the Horde was different. It is a story of exchange and adaptability. It is a story of the use of both war and peace to service power. And it is a story of globalisation, if before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and long before America invented the internet.
The central term Marie Favereau used to capture this older story of globalisation, led by a nomadic state, is the Mongol Exchange. From the 1260s, after the first wave of conquests, the descendants of Genghis Khan in the Hordes
balanced power among rivals within the empire, imposed Mongol-style law and order on sedentary subjects with unfamiliar political cultures and ethnic traditions, and fostered a trade network that knit together Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Siberia and the Black Sea. This was truly the Mongol exchange; the various participants knew it was the Horde that made the network run, and they courted the khan in hopes of improving their own fortunes. (Favereau, The Horde, pp. 164-165)
The ingenuity of political and cultural institutions was the foundation of this exchange. Its reach across Eurasia and Africa is stunning. As Marie Favereau wrote:
Through its singular adaptiveness and assimilative capacities, the Horde changed the world. The Horde shaped the politics of Russia and Central Asia, and firmly anchored Islam in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The Horde brought the steppe peoples to Mamluk Egypt and Franciscans to Crimea and the lower Volga. (The Horde, p. 308)
Towards the end of the podcast, we discussed globalisation, and how it did not start in the 1990s, or after 1945, or 1815 or 1492. There have been many phases and styles of globalisation in the course of history. The nomad led Mongol exchange was one, and thinking about these different stories can help us imagine today’s world more clearly.
You can read more of my thoughts on nomad empires, The Horde and globalisation at my free weekly newsletter on Substack – jeffrich.substack.com.
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