Please Read by October 27th

This week we are going to step away from our focus on Western Europe in order to look at the Mongols, Marco Polo, and the Far East.

It would be helpful if you familiarized yourself with the following names and facts before you come to class:

THE MONGOLS

1. The term Mongol refers to anyone who spoke a Mongolic language. In the modern world we tend to identify people by the nation sate that they live in, but it was common to use language in the ancient world as the primary marker of group identity (so Greeks were the people who spoke Greek). This is not universally the case. For example, many first century Romans and Jews spoke Greek rather than Latin or Aramaic/Hebrew.
2. Geographically, the Mongols seem to have come from China and Mongolia. Most of the Mongolians alive today live in China, Mongolia, and Russia.
3. The two Mongols that we will be talking about in class are Genghis Khan 1162-1227 and his grandson Kublai Khan 1215-1294.
4. The khans, especially Genghis Khan, are often portrayed as brutal and ruthless barbarians. This one dimensional portrait is terribly misleading. Why would such a misleading portrait be repeated so frequently? Try to find something positive to say about Genghis or Kublai Khan.
5. The term khan is a title for a ruler of the Mongols. It is difficult to translate it accurately as terms like king, prince, general, or dictator all carry connotations of what those terms mean in the context of European history.

MARCO POLO 1254-1324

1. Marco Polo was a Christian trader from Venice, Italy. He traveled widely and wrote (actually dictated) about his travels.
2. After 24 years of traveling in the Far East, Marco Polo returned to Venice to find that it was at war with Genoa. Marco was imprisoned and dictated his stories to his cell mate.
3. People were fascinated with the accounts of exotic lands that Marco provided. The assessment of the historical accuracy of his writings has ranged from deeming them highly reliable to suggesting that he basically made it all up. Would knowing that Marco Polo dictated his stories to his cell mate lead you to question some of their historical integrity?
4. What Marco Polo did accomplish was to broaden the horizon of Europeans to realize that there were vast civilization that they knew virtually nothing about.