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Marco MillionsTheir words
However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison in Genoa. In the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions.
Jack Weatherford
Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
Jack Weatherford did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
What they believe
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The real source of the feuding that tore the Mongol steppe apart was women, which is why Genghis Khan's first law outlawed kidnapping and selling them.
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
youtube.comSaid 31 Jul 2025This on korrents
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1 August 2025
31 July 2025
From one piece Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 15 beliefs · youtube.com
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Their words
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars.
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Their words
So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, “This is going to return to pasture land.”
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Their words
I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason. Just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life.
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Their words
It allowed that, but he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
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Their words
And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
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Their words
If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
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Their words
We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children.
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Their words
But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot. It could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.
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Their words
And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them. It's going to weaken their food supply, and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it.
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Their words
The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that, they fought for victory. That was the one thing. So, to retreat, to save lives and all, there's no shame in that.
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Their words
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
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Their words
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
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korrents.com
Genghis Khan conquered the largest empire in history with an army that never exceeded about 110,000 men.Their words
Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small.
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Their words
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
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Their words
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
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The real source of the feuding that tore the Mongol steppe apart was women, which is why Genghis Khan's first law outlawed kidnapping and selling them.
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Mongols manufactured almost nothing themselves, so raiding was not aggression but their way of getting the trade goods of China.
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan conquered the largest empire in history with an army that never exceeded about 110,000 men.
Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Show 19 more
Settled civilizations only improve inside a fixed way of doing things; Genghis Khan had no fixed way of thinking, and that is why he could absorb any technology he met.
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan's kinsmen deserted him and the common herders he promoted never did — that asymmetry is the first explanation of the Mongol army.
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Mongols fought for victory rather than honour, which is why retreat cost them nothing and became their deadliest tactic.
The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that, they fought for victory. That was the one thing. So, to retreat, to save lives and all, there's no shame in that.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan manufactured the atrocity stories told about him, deliberately releasing refugees to carry terror to the next city before his army got there.
And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them. It's going to weaken their food supply, and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Anyone with a craft survived a Mongol conquest, whatever the craft was — skill was the one thing the Mongols never destroyed.
But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot. It could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets — they were acts of terror against women and children, and Americans should say so before condemning the Mongols.
We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
A nation of a million people cannot rule hundreds of millions by warfare; the Mongol Empire lasted because it offered its subjects things they actually wanted.
If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Mongol Empire was the first modern empire, because Genghis Khan invented the idea of one supreme law under which every people keeps its own.
And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan made religion the choice of the individual rather than a right granted to institutions, and nobody in history had thought of that before.
It allowed that, but he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan reached his laws through the practical experience of being hurt, never through ideology or the study of moral right.
I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason. Just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems as deliberate policy to return farmland to pasture, not out of the stupidity historians attribute to them.
So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, “This is going to return to pasture land.”
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan raised merchants above scholars, reversing the Chinese order of rank, and that is what made a continent-wide trade network possible.
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
There is no documented case of anyone crossing between China and Europe before the Mongols, and since Genghis Khan there has not been a single year without contact between East and West.
We really don't have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols. But since Chinggis Khan, there's never been a year without contact between east and west. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan failed on its own terms but achieved its real purpose, which was cutting the Southern Song off from Japanese sulphur for gunpowder.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Japanese defeated the Mongol invasions; the typhoon only sank the ships afterwards, and it deserves far less credit than it gets.
But I think Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say. Japanese deserve credit for that victory. And then the sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The Mongol Empire was destroyed by the plague, which its own courier system carried out of southern China to the rest of the world.
But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
Genghis Khan's army was the greatest military force in history, and no power will ever repeat what it did.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
America keeps losing wars because it attacks the capital first; the Mongol method was to take the countryside and let the city starve.
The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They're country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that's how they did it every time.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
The section of the Secret History in which Genghis Khan rewards his daughters was cut out of the surviving text.
He says, “Now, let us reward our daughters.” It's actually only a phrase. I said it as a complete sentence, but it's not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It's missing.
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 Said 31 Jul 2025
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Loved Marco Millions
However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison in Genoa. In the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions.
lexfridman.com 1 Aug 2025
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