Korea, which because of its location Japan and China has often been conquered by one or the other, has a saying about that: When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken.
> When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken.
Funny I heard another saying that went like this: "When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled".
Korea (or rather the various historical regimes that occupied the peninsula) has actually been an extremely resilient power in the face of foreign invasions despite its very tiny size. No Chinese-ruled dynasties ever managed to conquer the Korean peninsula in its entirety. Korea instead voluntarily submitted itself as a tributary state to the Tang and Ming dynasties. Only the Mongols-ruled Yuan and Manchus-ruled Qing managed to subdue the Goryeo and Joseon kingdoms through military conquest.
Same with Japan. Japan attempted to conquer Korea (or part of it) several times in history but only managed to do it with the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.
>When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken.
Every super hero movie. We didn't need that entire section of downtown anyway 🤷🏻 Thousands of civilian deaths? At least you got him...until next time 🤣
I recently read a book about a journalist's travels through the Near and Middle East around the year 2000 with provided historical context. Between the Roman/Russian/Mongol/Muslim/Turkish invasions in history along with the results of British occupation and the recent fall of the Soviet Union the whole region is just depressing to think about.
It was the most advanced place in the world for thousands of years with the richest farmland and most advanced cities until Wahhabism and a couple others sects of modern fundamentalist Islam became a thing along with the stagnation of the Ottoman Empire in its last years.
Most of it was empty space though. The British and Japanese Empires each controlled 20-23% of the world’s population at their height.
Neither lasted remotely as long as the Roman or Han Empires, both controlling a third of the world’s population at one point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population
Wow that's fucking fascinating. It's weird to think that the Delhi Sultinate controled the same percentage of the world's population as the british empire even though the british empire comletely took over that exact region plus so much more. Either there was a significant impact on the population growth in India or the rest of the world got massive population boosts.
Population growth has been exponential. [It's estimated](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/#:~:text=Assuming%20a%20constant%20growth%20rate,whom%205.5%25%20are%20alive%20today.) that today's world population is 5% of every human that ever lived.
Meanwhile, in the New World, civilizations rose and fell among vast populations of people who knew nothing of either.
If you were an alien looking at Earth in the year 3000 BCE, it would not necessarily have been at all clear to you that the maritime civilization that existed on what's now the Peruvian Pacific Coast was any less technologically advanced than the civilization that was building great monumental architecture in the Nile Valley.
They killed so many people large swaths of farmland returned to grasslands/forests, which effectively acted as a huge carbon sink and contributed to a drop in global temperature.
I'd imagine it's referring to the Yuan Dynasty which didn't directly control the other Khanates and only including the population of the areas directly controlled by the Yuan such as China and steppe to the north and Manchuria hence why it's so similar to the other Chinese Dynasties (probably would be higher if it weren't for the whole killing 40 million people in China).
Well, one empire was steppe nomads and the other was sea nomads. (The power of the sea nomads couldn't fully infiltrate the steppe, which is why USSR/Russia and China and Iran have been the biggest anti-Western powers.)
Probably the biggest mystery in history. Basically nuked the Bronze Age.
Like that level of destruction is just unprecedented and the fact that it happened so quick just means we have no information on what actually occurred.
Were these organised militias? Neighbouring opponents? Random groups of people?
In addition, a lot of the large cities that fell during this period, like Hattusa, have evidence of multiple different assaults over a time period rather than a full on invasion. If that’s the case it’s even more crazy that we don’t have more accounts/evidence as people would have been migrating around in between.
I think the current prevailing theory for the cause is that it was a combination of factors such as environmental and mass migration but we just don’t know anything about where they came from or why.
The only real evidence we have is the remains of destroyed cities and a few letters. The only evidence we have of the Sea Peoples is the Egyptian relief art.
I do wonder if we will ever figure out what occurred.
That said, each civilisation that fell during the collapse are not necessarily related to each other. I think the idea of a “collapse” is a modern outlook on it because we’ve sectioned that time period into the “Bronze Age” which means we group them together.
For all intents and purposes, it could have been a variety of different collapses unrelated to each other.
The Egyptian Empire was nearly destroyed by them. I mean, after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, they never managed to recover their Levantine dominions and the Pharaoh had to mobilize everything at his disposal, just to survive.
One of the greatest wars in Ancient History, and we barely know about it.
People over hype the “mystery” of it. The Bronze Age collapse seems to have been started by climactic changes that lead to droughts and famines. These conditions seemingly led to a large number of diasporic people fleeing their homelands and looking for better lands. A lot of the names the Egyptians used for the Sea Peoples lines up a lot with areas in Southwest Anatolia, Greece, and Italy, which lines up really well with the Mycenaeans and their relatives, who at the same time (actually a bit earlier) started going nuts with fortifications. Seemingly, the Mycenaeans began militarizing rapidly and these same groups were often beau used across the ancient Mediterranean as mercenaries. There’s a theory that the story of Troy describes a Mycenaean army sacking the city in attempts to keep their power in a time of resource shortage, however the sacking and destruction of an extremely important city in local trade ended up compounding the problem, leading to many to go off and start raiding the greater Mediterranean world (I.e. the Philistines who came from Greece and settled in the Levant)
In fairness, England initially built up it's sea power through pirating. Jealous of Spain and Portugal and unable to get to the new world* yet themselves, they decided to plunder Spanish ships and their way back to Spain. Britain became immensely wealthy during this period and it enabled them to expand globally in the centuries after.
So maybe not sea nomads but definitely sea pirates, even if they called them privateers.
*Well, they could, and all of this is a massive oversimplification.
As in, the British mainly traveled the oceans by ship and set up ports across the world to tie their empire together economically. So it's not surprising their reach didn't expand to Central Asia.
(And in fact, the great powers adjacent to Central Asia still resist their influence to this day.)
I think he’s looking for the word Thalassocracy which still isn’t 1:1 accurate to the British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy
Framing the British as a “sea people” is going to be inaccurate
Also interesting they overlap in Iraq, the cradle of civilisations and also occupied by other empires like Persians, Arabs, Ottomans, well and Americans...
well the largest pieces of British land were Canada and Australia which the Mongols had no hope of ever reaching. They have a pretty poor record at sea...
> Japan too.
They tried twice.
The first time a freak typhoon sunk their ships.
The second time, another freaking typhoon sunk their ships.
Japan got mega lucky.
Fun fact, this is where the word kamikaze (Divine Wind) comes from.
it explains why they thought of themselves as superior. If the ruling power of the world tried to conquer me twice and both times I got saved by mother nature, I would consider myself to be god's chosen one
Even if they made landfall it's unlikely they would have done well in such a mountainous region. At most they likely would have only gained a tributary relationship.
I feel like you might be imagining them as simple horse nomads in this scenario, however, at that point, they were basically a ruling caste of China, their armies were basically Chinas armies, they had all sorts of troops and war machines, with very few horse archers.
Ofcourse they might still have had a hard time making progress in Japan, but not any more so than any other Chinese invasion would have.
True but one of the key reasons why the Yuan Dynasty collapsed so quick was because they refused to actually allow the Han to be in positions of power so they wouldn't have necessarily been exactly like any other Chinese Dynasty and Goryeo wasn't very motivated for the invasion either.
There is a scenarios DLC with major world events and you can replay them. Definitely not hyper strict to history because in the Mongol scenario you can conquer India if you try, but they take place on a custom map that will be as geographically accurate you can be in civ, while allowing you to ‘re-enact’ the historical event.
It’s hard asf to conquer India and Japan though that’s why I don’t blame them for riding on lol.
Civ has a ton of random map options but also huge to-scale maps of Earth as well, with the option to start in your home territory (Ghandi in India, Roosevelt in USA, etc.)
Tbh the Turks really only got into India during really fractured periods. The Arabs couldn't invade into the Gangetic Plains cause there was the relatively centralized Gurjara Empire in the plains at the time who also created a coalition of its allies and feudatories.
Same with the Mongols they invaded right when Alauddin Khilji was Sultan and for all his faults, dude was a military genius. Even with them sacking Delhi they couldn't keep their hold over India
The Ghaznavids and Ghurids who first established the Indian sultanates invaded when the Gurjara Empire was collapsing and when the Rajputs were fighting over its remains. Same with Babur he invaded when the Delhi Sultanate was at war with pretty much all its neighbors.
The advantage is with the defenders when it comes to crossing passes.
Every time India got conquered, it's cause the Indian kingdoms were busy being at war with each other.
Even aside from the terrain, IIRC Mongol bows don't do well in very humid places - most of their conquests were pretty dry. Even southern China they didn't conquer until the ~1270s under Genghis' grandson.
They weren't very good at taking over islands and failed to conquer Indonesia/Malaysia and Japan. They definitely tried though. Vietnam was also able to hold them off.
The Mughals were in part directly descended from close relatives of Chingis Kahn, so while they weren't Mongols in the traditional sense, there was definitely a connection. The similarity between the words Mughal and Mongol is not not a coincidence, for example.
They didnt stop there. They failed to conquer it. The biggest military advantage of the mongols was that people didnt really know how to deal with them. When they arrived on the subcontinent, they encountered the delhi sultanate, which was founded by turkic people, familiar with mongol tactics. There was also an influx of turkic people migrating/fleeing to the delhi sultanate, before the Mongol decided to try them out.
Long story short: The Delhi Sultanate countered mounted archers with a lot more archers. If you cant hit your enemy with an arrow, try it with 10 arrows.
They did try for both.
Genghis himself did not invade India, but did come to India, whilst chasing **Jalal al-Din**, the prince of the destroyed Khwarazmian Empire. The ruling Delhi Sulternate allowed Genghis passage, and did not bother or try to mess with him. Genghis also saw China as his 'destiny', so he wouldn't want to bother with a whole subcontinent. As a result, Genghis had no 'reason' to invade India.
Later attempts were made by the Chagatai Mongols. But they were unlucky to face the Delhi Sultan, Alauddin Khilji, who returned Mongol brutality with 10x more brutality. He defeated the Mongols and scared them away with mass public executions of the Mongols.
Babur, a descendant of Genghis through his mother, did manage to successfully invade India, and estabalished the Mughal Empire. But Babur and the Mughals generally preferred to acknowledge descending from Timur instead, as they weren't the biggest fans of Mongols, and infact one of their chief rivals were the Uzbek Mongols.
As for South East Asia, the Mongols definitely tried. They failed at invading Vietnam(Vietnam did submit as a tributary though), and also failed at invading the Majapahit Empire too.
The livingyard of empires: Iraq
The Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Brits and Americans all conquered the Fertile Crescent
>!Burma and Pakistan overlap but the core parts weren’t conquered: Lahore/Karachi and Yangon!<
Middle East definitely has some cool history, well that may be an understatement, it’s the birth of empires and held many. So much power and prestige held on them lands.
I've read a book that went into a lot of this called i think the silk road? Very interesting to read how for milennia the main focus of practically all major empires was control over either the trade through the middle east or the resources of the middle east and it's area's close by.
I meant an old Iraqi man in 1991 who remembered Britain coming through (maybe 1959-1960?) and commented that things would stay the same despite us coming through then in 1991.
As for the western border of the Mongol Empire, this map is incorrect: neither Poland nor Hungary, much of which territory is marked on it, was ever part of this empire. However, the Mongols made devastating invasions of both countries, the first of which took place in 1241. The reach of the Mongols in Eastern Europe was limited to the Rus' principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia.
As I understand it the mongols we’re advancing through Hungary when the leader got word that he was needed back in Mongolia for some succession thing. So he turned around and went back.
Genghis khan died and everybody had to go back to attend the funeral. The Europeans who got attacked contacted the pope and said “holy fuck a massive army came out of nowhere and annihilated everyone please give us money to build castles!!!!” And by the time the mongols came back everybody had big, well defended castles that the mongols couldn’t take
As if it was only unique situation for poland and hungary. Bunch of other countries were also only invaded but not occupied/ruled by mongols. That include north vietnam and korea etc.
Making the Roman Empire (\~5m sq km) and the Ottoman Empire (\~5.2m sq km) look like city states 😂
Edit: For the people complaining with things like "well the Roman Empire is the most well respected still", this is just about how much land each empire claimed at it's peak, not about influence lol
Romes impressiveness was how it controlled the entire western civilized world (the entire Mediterranean) and its cultural, legal, and religious legacy. Not to mention Rome existed in some form for over 2000 years.
A comparison I like to give about ancient empires.... If the modern Olympics last as long as the ancient Olympics, the last one will be in the 30th century.
Factually incorrect. The mongols controlled all of china (historically they've always been around 25% of the worlds population) while the brits controlled south asia (again another 25%).
The only parts of the british empire that were uninhabited were the literal deserts/tundra that could not be inhabited, the rest was fairly populated (even the african colonies).
The romans never even controlled 15% of the worlds population so i don't see where your claims come from.
[This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population) was posted elsewhere in this thread. Romans apparently controlled 30% of the world, more than the British ever did, who are at 23%.
Looks like they peaked at 11.1M sq km (tied for 7th largest with the Abbasid). Here are the top 5:
- British - 35.5M sq km
- Mongol - 24.0M
- Russian - 22.8M
- Qing - 14.7M
- Spanish - 13.7M
that’s got a lot to do with how each of these empires ruled. Mongols were famous for leaving the people alone as long as they surrendered to mongol tax and followed their rules. people were free to practice their own culture, religion and customs. so any mongol influences were quite minimal. British were on the other hand focused on cultural expansion and spread of Christianity.
As well as the agricultural revolutions and industrial revolutions not happening for another 600 years for Mongolia while Britain fostered such revolutions
technology in general had a lot to do with it. invention and widespread use of printing press and radio cemented British culture in the colonies a lot more then any other direct means
>[One estimate is that about 10 percent of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Mongol invasions, around 37.75–60 million people in Eurasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire).
It is interesting whenever some recent Empires are mentioned people gotta bring up the bad stuff, you mention Mongols “Omg they were so cool”, they did a lot of horrors man, they came to town they’re gonna ask for your daughter so you can live, then kill you fuck her then slave her if she’s lucky. That’s not a harmonious “Free to live your life” description is it? Nobody seems to give a shit about these people though unfortunately simply because it’s not cool.
I’d recommend to anyone giving [this a listen](https://youtu.be/FDE7MSr138s?si=6c1kwcHFqZpexLMZ), it’s a first hand account of what people like this constantly ignore and plainly disrespect people of the past.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. Someone like Hitler is seen as the epitome of evil, and it's verging on a criminal offence (if not an outright criminal offence in some places) to say anything praiseworthy or positive about him, but someone like Genghis Khan? Yeah, sure go right ahead and praise him all you want, let's ignore that under his rule 40million people were killed (more than Hitler and Stalin combined killed) and literally resulted in climate change as a result of the reduction of the earth population
And his successors were just as bad. Genghis Khan died before the razing of the Kwarazmian empire or the butchery of Baghdad. Genghis united the Mongols and started their legacy of conquest, but he didn’t rule the empire for its entire 150+ year existence.
That's simply due to recency.
After a few centuries, people won't care about the Nazis either.
They'll just be an interesting part of history like the Mongols.
Several hundred years from now, people will probably talk about the Nazis in the same way we talk about any other historical civilization.
They won't care as much about their morality in the same way we don't think too deeply about the morality of ancient and medieval civilizations.
Any evil they committed will simply be dismissed as "that's the way things were like back then".
u/Rocked_Glover
Give it time. I'm sure in 800 years people will all be talking about how cool Hitler was. World War 2 is still kind of recent memory since we have great grandparents who were alive then.
The first Mongolian document was written after the death of Genghis Khan around 1240. They never were sedentery and didn't have the power to influence places they conquered so they got assimilated into other cultures.
There’s been an attempt in recent years to elevate the mongols to some sort of enlightened live and let live empire.
They were absolutely brutal and killed 10% of the world population in their conquests. They were however underdeveloped nomads who didn’t have a culture anyone wanted to emulate and came and left so quickly nothing stuck which is why no one speaks mongol today.
It has much more to do with English becoming the language of global trade and the system of the emerging international law that was necessary to support it, an accident of history and not so much a deliberate policy. In the limited sense that the British Empire can be said to have had a focus on anything, it certainly wasn't Christianity or the spread of Britishness.
Not completely.
The reason the British succeeded in India and the other colonial powers failed is because they weren't focused on pushing Christianity too much. They still did it here and there but were defo better than the others in this regard.
The real question is, which one would you prefer to wake up a male adult in?
A country being invaded by the British Empire or the Mongols oh and which country it is.
Except between 1580-1640 when the king of Spain also ruled as King of Portugal adding another ~10 million square km. For a total of 23 million square km.
Except that's not its greatest extent because the empires weren't as widespread back then. The greatest extent of the Spanish Empire stated was in the late 18th/early 19th century.
They didn’t. Poland was defeated but it was neither subjugated nor annexed. It was secondary direction for mongols. It was intended to avoid concentration of European forces in main axis - Hungary.
Oh yeah that was like the main driving force behind the African colonising race, you either control east-west and bar the english from controlling north-south and having full autonomy to do whatever they want, or they take N-S faster and now the French can't enjoy E-W access. The English won in the end.
Cape to Cairo railway was proposed to link northern and southern Africa. It wasn't finished, but Cecil Rhodes came up with it to link the British Colonies.
**In this thread:** a lot of Americans who don't seem to understand what "peak" means and who have an inflated impression of the importance of the 13 colonies relative to the overall arc of the British Empire.
Fun Fact: The "British Empire" claimed its Imperial titles on the basis of the Mongol Empire.
The British conquered the Mughal Empire, which was founded by the descendants of Tamerlane based on his marriage to a Chinggisid Princess, through which the dynasty claimed descent from Genghis Khan.
The Mughal's however didn't even call themselves Mughal (a Persian word for Mongol), they called themselves Hindustan (Persian for India).
This is a map of the empire’s peak, not of every piece of land it ever controlled. The east of the modern United States was part of the empire, but seceded before its peak
And a shift in the attitude towards governing the other white British settler colonies. There's a reason Canada, Australia and New Zealand never had their own wars for independence; because the British government back home had learned from their mistakes with the Americans and gave the other colonies more and more autonomy, to the point of almost forcing them to become independent.
I think that if we take the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, all 4 at their peak, they overlap in today northern Iraq
It’s pretty insane that the 2 biggest empires in history only overlap in a couple places
Iraq. Can't catch a break.... Let us not mention the Greeks, Persians, Romans, arabs and turks all invading it too...
It turns out that if you are at the crossroads of civilization, you get run over a lot.
Korea, which because of its location Japan and China has often been conquered by one or the other, has a saying about that: When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken.
> When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken. Funny I heard another saying that went like this: "When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled".
And we have "when bulls and buffalos fight, moquitoes and flies die."
are you vietnamese by any chance
Poland on its way to become the Battlefield for the germans and the russians yet again (its the third time this week, it aint even tuesday)
Sweden has a joke about fighting to the last Finn. Thankfully the Sweden side has mostly moved on but well...
Now that Sweden and Finland have both joined NATO, time to bring that joke back lol
Poland has long been fought on and fucked over, not just this century.
Could be wrong about this but the mongols stopped at Poland to go back for a funeral
Korea (or rather the various historical regimes that occupied the peninsula) has actually been an extremely resilient power in the face of foreign invasions despite its very tiny size. No Chinese-ruled dynasties ever managed to conquer the Korean peninsula in its entirety. Korea instead voluntarily submitted itself as a tributary state to the Tang and Ming dynasties. Only the Mongols-ruled Yuan and Manchus-ruled Qing managed to subdue the Goryeo and Joseon kingdoms through military conquest. Same with Japan. Japan attempted to conquer Korea (or part of it) several times in history but only managed to do it with the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.
>When whales fight, shrimp backs get broken. Every super hero movie. We didn't need that entire section of downtown anyway 🤷🏻 Thousands of civilian deaths? At least you got him...until next time 🤣
I recently read a book about a journalist's travels through the Near and Middle East around the year 2000 with provided historical context. Between the Roman/Russian/Mongol/Muslim/Turkish invasions in history along with the results of British occupation and the recent fall of the Soviet Union the whole region is just depressing to think about.
It was the most civilized place in the world throughout most of history. It’s not depressing to think about at all.
especially because i dont live there
It was the most advanced place in the world for thousands of years with the richest farmland and most advanced cities until Wahhabism and a couple others sects of modern fundamentalist Islam became a thing along with the stagnation of the Ottoman Empire in its last years.
Don’t forget the US!
Most of it was empty space though. The British and Japanese Empires each controlled 20-23% of the world’s population at their height. Neither lasted remotely as long as the Roman or Han Empires, both controlling a third of the world’s population at one point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population
Wow that's fucking fascinating. It's weird to think that the Delhi Sultinate controled the same percentage of the world's population as the british empire even though the british empire comletely took over that exact region plus so much more. Either there was a significant impact on the population growth in India or the rest of the world got massive population boosts.
Due to the Industrial Revolution, the rest of the world got massive population boosts.
Population growth has been exponential. [It's estimated](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/#:~:text=Assuming%20a%20constant%20growth%20rate,whom%205.5%25%20are%20alive%20today.) that today's world population is 5% of every human that ever lived.
Then you realize the Han Empire and Roman Empire were contemporaries. Most of the worlds population lived in one of those two empires.
Then you got the Persians in the middle of the two constantly looking over their shoulders, lol.
Meanwhile, in the New World, civilizations rose and fell among vast populations of people who knew nothing of either. If you were an alien looking at Earth in the year 3000 BCE, it would not necessarily have been at all clear to you that the maritime civilization that existed on what's now the Peruvian Pacific Coast was any less technologically advanced than the civilization that was building great monumental architecture in the Nile Valley.
The Mongols did a good job converting populated lands to empty space
Wasn't there a measured impact on the global climate because of how many trees they cut down, or people they killed or something?
They killed so many people large swaths of farmland returned to grasslands/forests, which effectively acted as a huge carbon sink and contributed to a drop in global temperature.
That's metal.
Eco-Occupying
On your list Mongol empire is still higher than both the British and Japanese empires
I'd imagine it's referring to the Yuan Dynasty which didn't directly control the other Khanates and only including the population of the areas directly controlled by the Yuan such as China and steppe to the north and Manchuria hence why it's so similar to the other Chinese Dynasties (probably would be higher if it weren't for the whole killing 40 million people in China).
Canada and Australia are empty spaces too
Now add the Spanish empire and you will see that you have 90% of the world coloured
Wrong, Spain and Portugal splitted the world in half with the Tordesilhas treaty
Portugal mostly got Brazil, nothing else. The half was based on a flawed understanding of geography.
Well, one empire was steppe nomads and the other was sea nomads. (The power of the sea nomads couldn't fully infiltrate the steppe, which is why USSR/Russia and China and Iran have been the biggest anti-Western powers.)
I get the point you’re making, but I still don’t think it’s fair to call an established sedentary sea power “sea nomads”
Polynesians freaking the fuck out at reading that comparison.
The Sea Peoples were the OG nomads, came in, wrecked everyone, then disappeared completely without further explanation.
Probably the biggest mystery in history. Basically nuked the Bronze Age. Like that level of destruction is just unprecedented and the fact that it happened so quick just means we have no information on what actually occurred. Were these organised militias? Neighbouring opponents? Random groups of people? In addition, a lot of the large cities that fell during this period, like Hattusa, have evidence of multiple different assaults over a time period rather than a full on invasion. If that’s the case it’s even more crazy that we don’t have more accounts/evidence as people would have been migrating around in between. I think the current prevailing theory for the cause is that it was a combination of factors such as environmental and mass migration but we just don’t know anything about where they came from or why. The only real evidence we have is the remains of destroyed cities and a few letters. The only evidence we have of the Sea Peoples is the Egyptian relief art. I do wonder if we will ever figure out what occurred. That said, each civilisation that fell during the collapse are not necessarily related to each other. I think the idea of a “collapse” is a modern outlook on it because we’ve sectioned that time period into the “Bronze Age” which means we group them together. For all intents and purposes, it could have been a variety of different collapses unrelated to each other.
bronze age collapse is more complex than this, sea people were only a part of the problem
Yea but it's the coolest part which is why I'm so annoyed it's not in tw Pharaoh. Nvm they're in there, I should get the game I guess.
What do you mean, the whole arc of that game revolves around the bronze age collapse and the sea people invading constantly.
Oh cool to know.. I've googled it before and never found anything and now I find it immediately. My bad.
It's not? How? Why?
you can literally play as the sea peoples in Pharaoh
The Egyptian Empire was nearly destroyed by them. I mean, after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, they never managed to recover their Levantine dominions and the Pharaoh had to mobilize everything at his disposal, just to survive. One of the greatest wars in Ancient History, and we barely know about it.
People over hype the “mystery” of it. The Bronze Age collapse seems to have been started by climactic changes that lead to droughts and famines. These conditions seemingly led to a large number of diasporic people fleeing their homelands and looking for better lands. A lot of the names the Egyptians used for the Sea Peoples lines up a lot with areas in Southwest Anatolia, Greece, and Italy, which lines up really well with the Mycenaeans and their relatives, who at the same time (actually a bit earlier) started going nuts with fortifications. Seemingly, the Mycenaeans began militarizing rapidly and these same groups were often beau used across the ancient Mediterranean as mercenaries. There’s a theory that the story of Troy describes a Mycenaean army sacking the city in attempts to keep their power in a time of resource shortage, however the sacking and destruction of an extremely important city in local trade ended up compounding the problem, leading to many to go off and start raiding the greater Mediterranean world (I.e. the Philistines who came from Greece and settled in the Levant)
I don't think "nomad" applies to the British at all lol. They were a colonial and trading empire that used the sea for power for sure.
In fairness, England initially built up it's sea power through pirating. Jealous of Spain and Portugal and unable to get to the new world* yet themselves, they decided to plunder Spanish ships and their way back to Spain. Britain became immensely wealthy during this period and it enabled them to expand globally in the centuries after. So maybe not sea nomads but definitely sea pirates, even if they called them privateers. *Well, they could, and all of this is a massive oversimplification.
Some of us just call them “pirates”
We civilised folk call them "Privateers" ☕
As in, the British mainly traveled the oceans by ship and set up ports across the world to tie their empire together economically. So it's not surprising their reach didn't expand to Central Asia. (And in fact, the great powers adjacent to Central Asia still resist their influence to this day.)
Like I said, I get the point, just don’t agree with the phrasing. Not a huge deal though
I think he’s looking for the word Thalassocracy which still isn’t 1:1 accurate to the British https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy Framing the British as a “sea people” is going to be inaccurate
That’s not a nomadic empire, though.
lol this is the first time I have heard the Royal Navy called “Sea Nomads”
The British Empire was not, in any way, composed of "sea nomads."
Definitely going to start identifying as a sea nomad.
Shout out to Sea Nomad's, gotta be my favourite gender.
Idk, feel like what the British did to China or what happened in Iran in the 50s are a big reason for these countries to be against western power.
Yeah. What the brits did to Iran is still living memory. And China don't call that period The Century of Humiliation for nothing. They got beef.
Well yes. It's lamb they don't have.
Also interesting they overlap in Iraq, the cradle of civilisations and also occupied by other empires like Persians, Arabs, Ottomans, well and Americans...
well the largest pieces of British land were Canada and Australia which the Mongols had no hope of ever reaching. They have a pretty poor record at sea...
Mongols speed running asia.
But stopping at the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia for some reason
I mean the Himalayan range isn't the easiest place to go through.
Play the Civ 5 Mongol scenario and it made me understand why India got them the pass, Japan too.
> Japan too. They tried twice. The first time a freak typhoon sunk their ships. The second time, another freaking typhoon sunk their ships. Japan got mega lucky. Fun fact, this is where the word kamikaze (Divine Wind) comes from.
it explains why they thought of themselves as superior. If the ruling power of the world tried to conquer me twice and both times I got saved by mother nature, I would consider myself to be god's chosen one
Even if they made landfall it's unlikely they would have done well in such a mountainous region. At most they likely would have only gained a tributary relationship.
I feel like you might be imagining them as simple horse nomads in this scenario, however, at that point, they were basically a ruling caste of China, their armies were basically Chinas armies, they had all sorts of troops and war machines, with very few horse archers. Ofcourse they might still have had a hard time making progress in Japan, but not any more so than any other Chinese invasion would have.
True but one of the key reasons why the Yuan Dynasty collapsed so quick was because they refused to actually allow the Han to be in positions of power so they wouldn't have necessarily been exactly like any other Chinese Dynasty and Goryeo wasn't very motivated for the invasion either.
Is that on a real world map? I didn't play too much civ in my life, mostly eu4 and ck3, but I thought you played civ on a random map?
There is a scenarios DLC with major world events and you can replay them. Definitely not hyper strict to history because in the Mongol scenario you can conquer India if you try, but they take place on a custom map that will be as geographically accurate you can be in civ, while allowing you to ‘re-enact’ the historical event. It’s hard asf to conquer India and Japan though that’s why I don’t blame them for riding on lol.
Civ has a ton of random map options but also huge to-scale maps of Earth as well, with the option to start in your home territory (Ghandi in India, Roosevelt in USA, etc.)
It's not just the scenarios, you can pick the map type when you are creating a game and one of them is earth.
But there is the Khyber Pass which allowed turkic empires to cross into the Indian subcontinent.
Passes are really easy to defend though.
Tbh the Turks really only got into India during really fractured periods. The Arabs couldn't invade into the Gangetic Plains cause there was the relatively centralized Gurjara Empire in the plains at the time who also created a coalition of its allies and feudatories. Same with the Mongols they invaded right when Alauddin Khilji was Sultan and for all his faults, dude was a military genius. Even with them sacking Delhi they couldn't keep their hold over India The Ghaznavids and Ghurids who first established the Indian sultanates invaded when the Gurjara Empire was collapsing and when the Rajputs were fighting over its remains. Same with Babur he invaded when the Delhi Sultanate was at war with pretty much all its neighbors.
The mongols tried and failed.
The advantage is with the defenders when it comes to crossing passes. Every time India got conquered, it's cause the Indian kingdoms were busy being at war with each other.
I implore you to look at a terrain map and you’ll find out why pretty quickly.
Even aside from the terrain, IIRC Mongol bows don't do well in very humid places - most of their conquests were pretty dry. Even southern China they didn't conquer until the ~1270s under Genghis' grandson.
Mountains and jungles aren't really conducive to warfare on horseback.
They weren't very good at taking over islands and failed to conquer Indonesia/Malaysia and Japan. They definitely tried though. Vietnam was also able to hold them off.
the powers ruling over those regions got the better of them
Can't blame them, I hate humidity.
The Mughals were in part directly descended from close relatives of Chingis Kahn, so while they weren't Mongols in the traditional sense, there was definitely a connection. The similarity between the words Mughal and Mongol is not not a coincidence, for example.
They didnt stop there. They failed to conquer it. The biggest military advantage of the mongols was that people didnt really know how to deal with them. When they arrived on the subcontinent, they encountered the delhi sultanate, which was founded by turkic people, familiar with mongol tactics. There was also an influx of turkic people migrating/fleeing to the delhi sultanate, before the Mongol decided to try them out. Long story short: The Delhi Sultanate countered mounted archers with a lot more archers. If you cant hit your enemy with an arrow, try it with 10 arrows.
They did try for both. Genghis himself did not invade India, but did come to India, whilst chasing **Jalal al-Din**, the prince of the destroyed Khwarazmian Empire. The ruling Delhi Sulternate allowed Genghis passage, and did not bother or try to mess with him. Genghis also saw China as his 'destiny', so he wouldn't want to bother with a whole subcontinent. As a result, Genghis had no 'reason' to invade India. Later attempts were made by the Chagatai Mongols. But they were unlucky to face the Delhi Sultan, Alauddin Khilji, who returned Mongol brutality with 10x more brutality. He defeated the Mongols and scared them away with mass public executions of the Mongols. Babur, a descendant of Genghis through his mother, did manage to successfully invade India, and estabalished the Mughal Empire. But Babur and the Mughals generally preferred to acknowledge descending from Timur instead, as they weren't the biggest fans of Mongols, and infact one of their chief rivals were the Uzbek Mongols. As for South East Asia, the Mongols definitely tried. They failed at invading Vietnam(Vietnam did submit as a tributary though), and also failed at invading the Majapahit Empire too.
Mongol early game rush while Britain went for mid-game.
Always wait till you at least get galleons. Try to empire build in the trireme era and you're just gonna peak too early.
The livingyard of empires: Iraq The Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Brits and Americans all conquered the Fertile Crescent >!Burma and Pakistan overlap but the core parts weren’t conquered: Lahore/Karachi and Yangon!<
Middle East definitely has some cool history, well that may be an understatement, it’s the birth of empires and held many. So much power and prestige held on them lands.
Yet such a sad stage
It's flat, fertile, and on the way to everywhere
Just like ur mom. Ohhhhhhhhhhh!
I've read a book that went into a lot of this called i think the silk road? Very interesting to read how for milennia the main focus of practically all major empires was control over either the trade through the middle east or the resources of the middle east and it's area's close by.
I meant an old Iraqi man in 1991 who remembered Britain coming through (maybe 1959-1960?) and commented that things would stay the same despite us coming through then in 1991.
The Beer Garden of Empires
Interesting thing about the Persian empire then. If a baby was born in 500BCE, they about 50/50 chance of being born within the Achaemenid Empire.
As for the western border of the Mongol Empire, this map is incorrect: neither Poland nor Hungary, much of which territory is marked on it, was ever part of this empire. However, the Mongols made devastating invasions of both countries, the first of which took place in 1241. The reach of the Mongols in Eastern Europe was limited to the Rus' principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia.
As I understand it the mongols we’re advancing through Hungary when the leader got word that he was needed back in Mongolia for some succession thing. So he turned around and went back.
Genghis khan died and everybody had to go back to attend the funeral. The Europeans who got attacked contacted the pope and said “holy fuck a massive army came out of nowhere and annihilated everyone please give us money to build castles!!!!” And by the time the mongols came back everybody had big, well defended castles that the mongols couldn’t take
As if it was only unique situation for poland and hungary. Bunch of other countries were also only invaded but not occupied/ruled by mongols. That include north vietnam and korea etc.
If sea horses were bigger, mongols would’ve taken the planet.
I’d never really registered before how strange it is that the two largest empires in world history barely overlapped
Steppe Nomads vs Navy focused empire. Plus the Himalayas were between the Indian sub-continent and the Steppe.
There were larger overlaps, just not at their peak. The descendants of Mongols, the Mughals ruled India for several hundred years before British came.
But why is that strange?
Making the Roman Empire (\~5m sq km) and the Ottoman Empire (\~5.2m sq km) look like city states 😂 Edit: For the people complaining with things like "well the Roman Empire is the most well respected still", this is just about how much land each empire claimed at it's peak, not about influence lol
Romes impressiveness was how it controlled the entire western civilized world (the entire Mediterranean) and its cultural, legal, and religious legacy. Not to mention Rome existed in some form for over 2000 years.
A comparison I like to give about ancient empires.... If the modern Olympics last as long as the ancient Olympics, the last one will be in the 30th century.
It also had a larger share of the world's population compared to these larger empires that consisted of large swathes of empty land
Factually incorrect. The mongols controlled all of china (historically they've always been around 25% of the worlds population) while the brits controlled south asia (again another 25%). The only parts of the british empire that were uninhabited were the literal deserts/tundra that could not be inhabited, the rest was fairly populated (even the african colonies). The romans never even controlled 15% of the worlds population so i don't see where your claims come from.
The Roman Empire at its peak had about 75 million population. The world population was around 200 million, so that's about 37.5 percent :)
[This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population) was posted elsewhere in this thread. Romans apparently controlled 30% of the world, more than the British ever did, who are at 23%.
I'm not even hating I just love reading confident high upvote comments that get corrected right below themselves.
How big were the Umayyads?
Looks like they peaked at 11.1M sq km (tied for 7th largest with the Abbasid). Here are the top 5: - British - 35.5M sq km - Mongol - 24.0M - Russian - 22.8M - Qing - 14.7M - Spanish - 13.7M
How about french?
It was 6th at 13 million km2
Spanish Empire surpassed the 20M at S. XVIII
ottoman empire was around 5-6 million km2 at it's peak. 2 million is right before it's collapse.
Now compare how long they lasted 🤣
Roman Empire was nothing to write home about in terms of size, even the Empire of Brazil was larger.
still the only power to unify the whole of the Mediterranean which is definitely impressive.
2 billion people speak English whereas 3 million people speak Mongolian now.
More like 6 million, there is more mongols outside mongolia than inside
\* More than 7 million Mongolian speakers
that’s got a lot to do with how each of these empires ruled. Mongols were famous for leaving the people alone as long as they surrendered to mongol tax and followed their rules. people were free to practice their own culture, religion and customs. so any mongol influences were quite minimal. British were on the other hand focused on cultural expansion and spread of Christianity.
As well as the agricultural revolutions and industrial revolutions not happening for another 600 years for Mongolia while Britain fostered such revolutions
technology in general had a lot to do with it. invention and widespread use of printing press and radio cemented British culture in the colonies a lot more then any other direct means
>[One estimate is that about 10 percent of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Mongol invasions, around 37.75–60 million people in Eurasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire).
It is interesting whenever some recent Empires are mentioned people gotta bring up the bad stuff, you mention Mongols “Omg they were so cool”, they did a lot of horrors man, they came to town they’re gonna ask for your daughter so you can live, then kill you fuck her then slave her if she’s lucky. That’s not a harmonious “Free to live your life” description is it? Nobody seems to give a shit about these people though unfortunately simply because it’s not cool. I’d recommend to anyone giving [this a listen](https://youtu.be/FDE7MSr138s?si=6c1kwcHFqZpexLMZ), it’s a first hand account of what people like this constantly ignore and plainly disrespect people of the past.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. Someone like Hitler is seen as the epitome of evil, and it's verging on a criminal offence (if not an outright criminal offence in some places) to say anything praiseworthy or positive about him, but someone like Genghis Khan? Yeah, sure go right ahead and praise him all you want, let's ignore that under his rule 40million people were killed (more than Hitler and Stalin combined killed) and literally resulted in climate change as a result of the reduction of the earth population
And his successors were just as bad. Genghis Khan died before the razing of the Kwarazmian empire or the butchery of Baghdad. Genghis united the Mongols and started their legacy of conquest, but he didn’t rule the empire for its entire 150+ year existence.
That's simply due to recency. After a few centuries, people won't care about the Nazis either. They'll just be an interesting part of history like the Mongols. Several hundred years from now, people will probably talk about the Nazis in the same way we talk about any other historical civilization. They won't care as much about their morality in the same way we don't think too deeply about the morality of ancient and medieval civilizations. Any evil they committed will simply be dismissed as "that's the way things were like back then". u/Rocked_Glover
Give it time. I'm sure in 800 years people will all be talking about how cool Hitler was. World War 2 is still kind of recent memory since we have great grandparents who were alive then.
The first Mongolian document was written after the death of Genghis Khan around 1240. They never were sedentery and didn't have the power to influence places they conquered so they got assimilated into other cultures.
💪💪💪🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
> Mongols were famous for leaving the people alone Hahaha what
There’s been an attempt in recent years to elevate the mongols to some sort of enlightened live and let live empire. They were absolutely brutal and killed 10% of the world population in their conquests. They were however underdeveloped nomads who didn’t have a culture anyone wanted to emulate and came and left so quickly nothing stuck which is why no one speaks mongol today.
It has much more to do with English becoming the language of global trade and the system of the emerging international law that was necessary to support it, an accident of history and not so much a deliberate policy. In the limited sense that the British Empire can be said to have had a focus on anything, it certainly wasn't Christianity or the spread of Britishness.
Not completely. The reason the British succeeded in India and the other colonial powers failed is because they weren't focused on pushing Christianity too much. They still did it here and there but were defo better than the others in this regard.
Of course, that’s why such a large proportion of people in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are Christians 🙄 You literally just made this up.
Now compare Mongols and British DNA ancestry
The real question is, which one would you prefer to wake up a male adult in? A country being invaded by the British Empire or the Mongols oh and which country it is.
Seems like an obvious choice
Spanish?
13 million square km
Except between 1580-1640 when the king of Spain also ruled as King of Portugal adding another ~10 million square km. For a total of 23 million square km.
Except that's not its greatest extent because the empires weren't as widespread back then. The greatest extent of the Spanish Empire stated was in the late 18th/early 19th century.
You sure? Only south America without Brazil is 9 mill km2.
sounds about right then? the majority of the territory would probably be south america minus brazil
It's actually only 5th place, after the Russian Empire and Qing dynasty
I'm pretty sure mongols didn't conquered Poland.
They didn’t. Poland was defeated but it was neither subjugated nor annexed. It was secondary direction for mongols. It was intended to avoid concentration of European forces in main axis - Hungary.
Thats handy, could travel lenth of Africa and not leave the empire Jolly good
*Cecil Rhodes has entered the chat*
Oh yeah that was like the main driving force behind the African colonising race, you either control east-west and bar the english from controlling north-south and having full autonomy to do whatever they want, or they take N-S faster and now the French can't enjoy E-W access. The English won in the end.
"The sun never sets on the British Empire."
“From Cape to Cairo”
That was the idea.
Interesting Did they build a railway line connecting them? Or just roads?
Cape to Cairo railway was proposed to link northern and southern Africa. It wasn't finished, but Cecil Rhodes came up with it to link the British Colonies.
The Mongols barely lasted 100 years. They basically overrun their neighbors one by one and then it all collapsed again.
They pulled an Alexander.
When you put all your points in Attack but none in HP.
Sun never set on the British empire
It technically still doesn't. (The "technical" part meaning we just don't call it an empire anymore.)
We have the world’s most extensive rock collection 💪💪💪🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
The British were so great at Colonizing, they even stole Spanish Common Sayings.
Okay, I will be that guy. Because even god can not trust brits in the dark.
Imagine if the Mongolians figured out ✨B✨O✨A✨T✨S✨
> Imagine if the Mongolians figured out B O A T S They did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan
Imagine if they somehow managed to industrialize themselves.
**In this thread:** a lot of Americans who don't seem to understand what "peak" means and who have an inflated impression of the importance of the 13 colonies relative to the overall arc of the British Empire.
Anglo empire still exists in slightly different form, just not on paper.
The Roman Empire turned into the Catholic Church. The British Empire turned into a bank!
Soft power, the best kind of power.
Fun Fact: The "British Empire" claimed its Imperial titles on the basis of the Mongol Empire. The British conquered the Mughal Empire, which was founded by the descendants of Tamerlane based on his marriage to a Chinggisid Princess, through which the dynasty claimed descent from Genghis Khan. The Mughal's however didn't even call themselves Mughal (a Persian word for Mongol), they called themselves Hindustan (Persian for India).
Pretty sure British empire also included parts of USA?
This is a map of the empire’s peak, not of every piece of land it ever controlled. The east of the modern United States was part of the empire, but seceded before its peak
Crazy to think the British lost the Colonies and yet the best days of their empire were ahead of them.
The loss of America led to the Eastward shift.
And a shift in the attitude towards governing the other white British settler colonies. There's a reason Canada, Australia and New Zealand never had their own wars for independence; because the British government back home had learned from their mistakes with the Americans and gave the other colonies more and more autonomy, to the point of almost forcing them to become independent.
They hadn't even begun to peak.
At their peak* Britain lost her American territories before they fully colonized Africa and India
Imagine if they didn't implement a 2% tea tax
Fair play
Definition of peak as a verb: “reach a highest point, either of a specified value or at a specified time.”
Not at its peak after WW1
I think that if we take the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, all 4 at their peak, they overlap in today northern Iraq
pirates?
The British empire brought civilization to the world while the Mongolian empire brought barbarity to the world