An unfortunate result of Favereau’s painstaking attention to these relations is that the book’s key messages can get lost within the forest of detail.Īmong the book’s timeliest and most powerful elements is the depiction of the relationship between the Mongols and their Russian vassals. The book is liberal in its use of maps (there are 11) but one is left with the distinct sense that at least one of these pages could have been dedicated to a family tree. Jochid Berke and Toluid Hülegü take sides in Qubilai and Arigh’s battle for the Great Khanate, all the while conducting their own battles for territory in the Middle East. In Chapter Four, we find ourselves in the midst of an internecine conflict between the Great Khan Qubilai and his brother Arigh (sons of Tolui) Berke (the son of Jochi) and Hülegü (another son of Tolui). Favereau covers in great - and perhaps too minute - detail the blood and political ties between these two hordes and others. Upon his death, the Horde breaks into two wings: the White Horde, led by Jochi’s older son Batu, and the Blue Horde, led by the younger son Orda. While referred to throughout the book as “ulus Jochi,” Jochi himself dies long before it reaches its zenith. The Mongol Empire was not a unitary state, but rather a constellation of multiple hordes which merged, broke apart, fought and shifted over time. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of “The Horde” is keeping track of its ever-expanding cast of characters. Each of Chinggis’s sons presided over their own horde, but Jochi’s was the Horde, and it is this group’s trajectory that Favereau follows. As Favereau clarifies, for the Mongols themselves, orda meant “a site of power, people under a ruler, a huge camp”- in other words a mobile system of governance. But, as the author notes, these resonances are the legacy of the fear and incomprehension with which medieval chroniclers wrote of the conquering force from the steppe. For Europeans, the word “horde” connotes a mass of unruly people. But in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World,” French historian Marie Favereau takes readers on a journey spanning over three centuries, showing that Chinggis’s distribution of his territories led not to unmitigated strife and destruction but to the emergence of an unprecedented era of cultural and economic adaptation and exchange.įavereau’s focus is on Chinggis’s eldest son, Jochi, whose ulus (“people”) became the eponymous Horde. Anyone who has seen or read “King Lear” might think this an inauspicious start to the story of a ruling house. That king’s name was Temüjin, but he went down in history is Chinggis (“Mighty”) Khan. Sometime in the early thirteenth century, a great king divided his vast kingdom among his four sons.
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