The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World

by Marie Favereau

Overview

2021 Cundill History Prize Finalist
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A Spectator Best Book of the Year
A Five Books Best Book of the Year

“Outstanding, original, and revolutionary. Favereau subjects the Mongols to a much-needed re-evaluation, showing how they were able not only to conquer but to control a vast empire. A remarkable book.”
—Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. In the first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau shows that the accomplishments of the Mongols extended far beyond war. For three hundred years, the Horde was no less a force in global development than Rome had been. It left behind a profound legacy in Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, palpable to this day.

Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. The Horde was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was a conduit for exchanges across thousands of miles. Its unique political regime—a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility—rewarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative. From its capital at Sarai on the lower Volga River, the Horde provided a governance model for Russia, influenced social practice and state structure across Islamic cultures, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced novel ideas of religious tolerance.

The Horde is the eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire little understood and too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674244214
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,091,899
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. She has been a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a research associate for the Nomadic Empires project at the University of Oxford. Her books include La Horde d’Or et le sultanat mamelouk and the graphic novel Gengis Khan.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Power of a New Kind 1

1 The Resilience of the Felt-Walled Tents 26

2 Into the West 63

3 New Hordes 95

4 The Great Mutation 138

5 The Mongol Exchange 164

6 The Northern Road 206

7 Withdrawal 247

8 Younger Brothers 274

Epilogue: The Horde's Mirror 299

Glossary 311

Notes 314

Acknowledgments 364

Index 367

Editorial Reviews

01/25/2021

The Mongols were sophisticated state builders who left a lasting mark on Eurasia, according to this eye-opening revisionist study. Favereau (The Golden Horde and the Mamluk Sultanate), a Paris Nanterre University historian, sketches the rise of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan in the 13th century, but focuses on the subordinate territory of the “Golden Horde” under the Batuid dynasty of khans, who ruled over the steppe stretching from Central Asia into Russia and as far as Hungary. She pegs Horde society as a novel form of “nomadic empire” that migrated with its herds but promoted trade, commerce, and economic production among the sedentary peoples it controlled and taxed, using diplomacy as often as violence. Among the world-historical upheavals the Golden Horde facilitated, according to Favereau, were the Black Death and the rise of the modern Russian state dominated by Moscow. The author’s accessible, wide-ranging narrative entwines political and military history with deep dives into everything from the Mongols' monetary reforms to their national beverage of fermented mare’s milk, which, she contends, “strengthens the immune system and treats and prevents typhoid.” Favereau downplays the bloodier aspects of Mongol power, but her detailed exploration of its more constructive side makes this a meaningful corrective to popular misconceptions about Mongols’ role in world history. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A major achievement: it is thorough, accurate and complex, yet also accessible to a broad readership. Her blow-by-blow account of Mongol life and politics as one ruler falls and another rises is the most complete we have. Even better, the book is not solely focused on the Mongols. Favereau is an integrative historian committed to showing how the Horde influenced other peoples and shaped world history…Readers will enjoy the richness and clarity of The Horde.

Literary Review - Timothy Brook

In this riveting book, Favereau shows how the most enduring descendants of Chinggis Khan’s Mongol imperium—the Western or ‘Golden’ Horde—fashioned an exceptionally resilient imperial system with far-reaching influence in western Eurasia. She has challenged us to think afresh about how mobility and empire can be fused into dynamic political and cultural forms.

John Darwin

The Horde is not the first history to challenge the depiction of the Mongol Empire as governed solely by ruthless conquerors and plunderers, but it is the most nuanced and comprehensive history.

New York Journal of Books - Francis P. Sempa

Favereau’s narrative is extremely rich in ethnographic detail and descriptions of succession battles, military campaigns, and internecine warfare. Favereau seeks to exonerate the Horde, which in her view is too often portrayed as merely a plundering force.

Foreign Affairs - Maria Lipman

A deeply compelling, sympathetic, and highly engaging account of how the Horde was created and of its lasting impact on the evolution of what we now call ‘globalization.’ Favereau’s book will transform our understanding of world history.

Anthony Pagden

In The Horde, an ambitiously revisionist account of the Mongol Empire, Favereau presents the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century conquerors of the steppe as sophisticated stewards of globalism, rulers who practiced remarkable tolerance, and stimulated far-reaching economic growth.

Scroll - Dinyar Patel

Favereau’s detailed and objective account of the Mongol conquest and rule of Russia rescues the era from dark neglect and prejudice to reveal its powerful positive and negative influences in shaping modern Eurasia. This highly readable and deeply informed work fills in one of history’s important missing chapters.

Jack Weatherford

A book that has profound ramifications for our understanding of European and Eurasian history…Irrefutably enthrones the Mongol Empire as one of the great drivers of global history.

Moscow Times - Emily Couch

Combining material and textual sources, Favereau has written the best book on the Jochid Khanate: the first to see events resolutely from a Jochid perspective, without foreclosing on the vast contexts that bind the history of the Horde to that of Eurasia and the world.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Combining material and textual sources, Favereau has written the best book on the Jochid Khanate: the first to see events resolutely from a Jochid perspective, without foreclosing on the vast contexts that bind the history of the Horde to that of Eurasia and the world.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Fascinating…The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world…An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book that will be welcomed by historians of the Mongol Empire.

The Times - Gerard DeGroot

[An] ambitious book with a huge range. It presents this world in its full complexity. It’s an incredibly compelling read and it changes the way you see the world.

Five Books - Paul Lay

Outstanding, original, and revolutionary. Favereau subjects the Mongols to a much-needed re-evaluation, showing how they were able not only to conquer but to control a vast empire. A remarkable book.

Peter Frankopan

The first book to be devoted exclusively to the Golden Horde. It is at once a microhistory, dense with regional politics and war, and a survey of the Horde’s wider influence.

New York Review of Books - Colin Thubron

In medieval European times, the Mongols ruled a vast area of the Eurasian landmass stretching as far to the west as modern Ukraine. Favereau, a French specialist on nomadic empires, achieves the exceptional feat of writing about this era in a way that is accessible to general readers as well as scholarly.

Financial Times - Tony Barber

2021-01-16
Rather than being the murderous mob depicted in film and popular history, the Mongol horde, this book reveals, was a complex Euro-Asian culture whose history “remains as though behind a veil.”

From the 13th to 15th centuries, the nomadic people who composed the horde bestrode the vast treeless Eurasian grasslands, the steppe, that stretched thousands of miles across Siberia and west into central Europe. Deriving from the 12th-century conqueror Genghis Khan and existing, via his sons and others, into the 14th-century days of the great military commander Tamerlane, the horde divided and subdivided into many groups. Yet, as Favereau shows, its component parts maintained a remarkably rich and stable culture while absorbing and equitably governing the peoples it subdued. As much a community as a state, the horde created “a new kind of empire” suited to the ecosystem it occupied. The author dispels the myth that it was just a rampaging mass of warriors; it possessed great governing skills, was adept at social relationships, and remained a major force on the Eurasian landmass until it began to withdraw eastward after the Black Death. So why has its history been unknown and ignored? Because, Favereau contends, the Mongols, a herding, horse-riding agricultural people always on the move, left little by way of architecture, literature, and urban centers. This book helps rectify their absence from Western consciousness and fills a major gap in our knowledge of world history. Although the author writes her largely academic work with more fervor than grace, she fully succeeds in rescuing her misunderstood subject from the world of poetry and myth and anchoring it firmly in scholarly learning. Readers will have to adjust to little-known names, terms, and geographical realities, but Favereau does her best to help, and numerous maps, often missing in books of this sort, offer skilled assistance.

A fine contribution to our understanding of the culture that “knit together east and west.

Kirkus Reviews

Although it had no permanent settlements and farmlands, the Horde was an advanced civilization as well as a formidable military power. Its leaders, all literate, ran a well-organized communications network that kept its far-flung population in constant touch…Reading The Horde is like immersing oneself in a sprawling epic.

Literary Review of Canada - Christopher Moore

It is far too often forgotten that Asia’s nomadic empires, from the Sogdians and Huns through the Parthians and Seljuks, were key drivers of greater Asia’s rich cultural diversity. This extraordinary book vividly details how the nomadic Mongols operated the largest empire of the premodern world, through practices that continue to shape today’s world.

Parag Khanna

The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity…The Horde flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.

Wall Street Journal

An exciting new addition to a rich pool of contemporary scholarship in the field.

The Telegraph (India) - Madhumita Mazumdar

A wonderful book…Suffice to say that in their politics, administration, family lives and, yes, their warfare, the Mongols were far more complicated than we think.

Bloomberg Opinion - Stephen L. Carter