Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [66]
Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God's nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil…after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match.
…[A]s the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone too drunk to continue.34
Comic as they might seem in the twenty-first century, these debates were all the more remarkable given the contrasting treatment of religious dissent elsewhere in the thirteenth-century “civilized” world. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued his fateful bull ad exstir-panda, sanctioning the use of torture to root out heretics. Eager to comply, Dominican friars—“hounds of the Lord”—roamed from city to city, extracting confessions from suspects with ghoulish techniques. Across Europe, cross-bearing monarchs from Edward I to Frederick II took up the anti-Muslim sword; tongues were torn out and heads rolled in the name of Christ. In France, Rubruck's sponsor, Louis IX, was canonized for various acts of saintliness, including the burning of 12,000 handwritten Talmudic texts. “Soldiers of the Cross” unleashed their fury not only on Muslims but also on Orthodox Christians. In Constantinople, “Crusaders butchered everyone they met regardless of sex or age…Nuns, maidens, and matrons were abused and violated…Exquisite cruelties were inflicted on Orthodox priests.”35
The “barbarian” Mongols, meanwhile, were deeply cosmopolitan in their openness to different cultures. At Mongke's court, Rubruck met not only religious thinkers, merchants, and diplomatic envoys from many lands but superb craftsmen from Syria, Russia, Hungary, Germany, and France, including the master Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher. Though technically war captives, these artisans were treated with the greatest esteem. Assigned a team of fifty assistants, Boucher redecorated the Mongol capital in tony European style. To be sure, the Mongols were arrogant in their own way: Mongke, like Genghis Khan, believed that the Mongols were chosen by God and by nature—interchangeable in their view—to conquer the entire earth. But having little art, science, erudition, or administrative capability of their own, the Mongols, with seemingly no prejudice, simply took whatever was useful from the more civilized peoples they had conquered.
In the end, the Mongols did not take Jerusalem. On the contrary, the Mongol drive westward ended in 1260 in Palestine, at Ayn al-Jalut (Goliath's Well), where Hulegu's forces were defeated by the Egypt-based Mamluks. Not long before, Hulegu had received word of his brother Mongke's death. Hulegu, who himself had no ambition to be Great Khan, was apparently stricken with grief. Perhaps he sensed that Mongke's death also marked the end of the Mongol Empire's unity.36
THE MONGOL RULE OF CHINA
A few years before his death, Mongke, tired of his brother Khubi-lai's lack of progress and constant excuses, took the conquest of the Song dynasty China into his own hands, leaving the administration of the empire to his youngest brother, Arik Boke, in Karakorum. In May of 1258, employing the same tactics used by his grandfather, Genghis Khan, Mongke led his army across the Yellow River toward the heart of southern China. But the great Song—even in its twilight, the most formidable adversary the Mongols ever faced—battled back stubbornly. Mongke died almost two decades before