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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