Dan Carlin did an excellent hardcore history podcast on the mongol conquests- it’s called “wrath of the khans” and, well, to modern sensibilities it’s a pretty

Dan Carlin did an excellent hardcore history podcast on the mongol conquests- it’s called “wrath of the khans” and, well, to modern sensibilities it’s a pretty shocking tale. There were details like, when a city was taken, each soldier was required to bring back something like 20 left ears from people they killed. They had big bags of them. They would round people up in pens, and kill the adults first so they wouldn’t see their children die and fight back. Sometimes they would send a single soldier into a town to demand their surrender and he would walk around killing people at random. If nobody lifted a finger to stop him, then the city was spared. If anyone intervened, the mongol army would come and sack the city. Word got around, and most cities just surrendered. I can’t really think of any positive outcome of murdering every one of a city’s 2 million inhabitants- with knives, no less, which is a lot less impersonal than bombs. They genuinely considered non-mongols to be a form of cattle. You could make the case that the whole central Asian region never really recovered.