Part III - Meaning and Truth in Histories

Summary

No history of the Mongol Empire, no matter how erudite, which dwells only on Mongol destruction can be satisfactory.

(Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, p. 25)

The most well-known accounts of the Mongols in central and western Asia, Russia and Europe are laments and descriptions of terror on one side, slaughter on the other; the Javanese accounts differ from this pattern, but they are not the only ones to do so. Wassaf tells of a Shi'i group in a southern Iraqi town (Hillah) who greeted the Mongols as those who would destroy injustice, sending an embassy to Hülegü with a letter telling of an old prophecy which they believed referred to the Mongols:

When comes the group of horsemen which has no share, by God, you will surely be laid in ruins, oh mother of tyrants and abode of oppressors, oh source of tribulations — woe unto you, oh Baghdad, and unto your splendid palaces with their wings resembling the wings of peacocks, disintegrating like salt dissolves in water! There will come the Banu Qantura, preceded by a loud, neighing noise; they have faces like shields covered with leather, and trunks like the trunks of elephants, and there is no country they reach which they will not conquer, and no creature which they will not unsettle!

(Wassaf, quoted in Pfeiffer, 2003)

Hülegü thought that this is how people ought to respond, and like the Tibetans and others who submitted, the community of Hillah suffered no harm under Mongol rule.

The Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 and the perceived threat of such an invasion both before and after the actual invasions gave rise to a unique response in Japan: a long-term concerted effort to withstand a future attack.