Marco Polo's Journey to the Mongolian Empire

First Paragraph: (Marco Polo)

I, Marco Polo, am going to the Mongolian Empire in a couple of weeks. I have been doing some research about why people call them “bloodthirsty”. What my research as come up with is that they have wonderful military tactics, and are great about tricking the enemy. The Mongols can ride on horses and shoot arrows off their back. Their best weapon the Mongols use is the bow and arrow. In the Russian history, the Mongols were very destructive by slaughtering populations and took over rich cities with bloodshed. Genghis Khan was the leader of all the Mongols when they were expanding. Khan had phases called campaigns to go conquer surrounding lands. His final campaign was against Xia, a leader of a city. On his first couple of campaigns, Xia failed to supply troops. This made Khan very angry, so he ordered some soliders to slaughter Xia and the entire population of his city. After this, when other cities and countries heard what the Mongols can do, they just surrendered, not even wanting to fight. The people did not want to risk their lives.

Second Paragraph:

Now leaving the Mongolian Empire, I see now that the Mongolians are not all “bloodthirsty”.  My first couple of days in the Mongolian Empire, people told me even though Genghis Khan was a good military personnel, he was very faithful to his growing empire. The leaders of the Mongolian Empire let all their citizens practice their own culture. Even some of the leaders adopted different cultures. Since, the Mongolian empire is a huge empire, in size, they can cover a lot of land. The Mongols were very open for other countries to come through their empire to trade. Through all the land that the Mongolian Empire has they have good trade roots that most citizen and other traders use.Some items that are traded are mechanical printing, gunpowder, and the blast furnace. These items came all the way from China and made it all the way to Europe thanks to the Mongolian Empire. Not just physical items were traded through the Mongolian Empire. Other items such as, artistic ideas, knowledge of history, geography, and sciences such as astronomy, agricultural knowledge and medicinal ideas were traded from east to west. Also the Chinese culture received new ideas for theater, art and advances in science and medicine. The Mongolian empire was also a good thing with helping the world be connected, and improving the east culture and the west culture.

Third Paragraph: (Historian Point of View)

The reason why many people believe that the Mongols were “bloodthirsty” is because when they wanted to conquer land they would kill everybody in the village or city. They did not take any prisoners. They killed everybody, if not willing to surrender.The Mongols military tactics were advanced, they were good at tricking the enemy. Other people think the Mongols were nice people because they were nice about letting their citizens practice whatever culture they wanted. Also, the Mongols were very helpful about trading items that would never reach the western side. They were very helpful about trading new ways for science and new medical technology at that time. The Mongols were similar to the Romans by conquering land, but very different about how they accomplished their goal. The Romans would take prisoners and make them work as slaves, but the Mongols took no prisoners and just killed the whole population if the city did not surrender. Even though people think of the Mongols as “ bloodthirsty” they were actual a complex’s about their arts and sciences.

Work Cited:

Atwood, Christopher Pratt. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York, NY: Facts On File, 2004. Print

Halperin, Charles J. "Russia in The Mongol Empire in Comparative Perspective." JSTOR. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.

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 "World History Connected | Vol. 5 No. 2 | Timothy May: The Mongol Empire in World History." World History Connected | Vol. 5 No. 2 | Timothy May: The Mongol Empire in World History. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.

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