For some reason, the website is down for me. I have always been fascinated by the Mongols after reading “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford.
Recently, I stumbled upon the 6:40+ hour YouTube video, “The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe.” You might like it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFwMDuAnS4
Baudolino from Umberto Eco (an excellent book) is partially about that, I recommend the read !
I honestly had no idea about the French fascination with the Mongols. People tend to admire people who have traits they aspire to. I wonder if this stems from France, being a major imperial power at the time, admiring the Mongols as an imperial power.
This timeline coincides with the Crusades with, which the article talks about at length. I find the Crusades fascinating because they've shaped the modern world in so many ways.
Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame) once said that why he cares about military history is it shapes the world. If you look at the lightbulb, it doesn't really matter who invented it. Somebody would've. But take the Battle of Marathon, which shaped the entire history of Western Europe as the Greeks repelled the Persians. History would've been completely different. Or how Cyrus II (IIRC) essentially saved Judaism by rebuilding the Temple. Without that, Judaism may well have died out and, with it, all the Abrahamic religions may never have existed.
So the Crusades are fascinating because they've often portrayed as a religious war but they were anything but. Religion was simply the excuse. Instead medieval powers wanted to control the Levant to enrich themselves.
The Crusades essentially created international banking, making the Knights Templar incredibly wealthy [1]. One wonders if this was a necessary condition to the rise of the mercantile class that eventually displaced feudalism and brought on capitalism.
But back to the French. It's interesting that they were fascinated with the Mongols with everything else that was going on. During this same period, the Eastern Roman Empire still existed and the Moors occupied the Iberian peninsula. In many ways, the Mongols were more distant whereas the Arab "threat" was closer and more real. So why the Mongols?
[1]: https://bigthink.com/the-past/knights-templar-crusades-finan...
The arabs were broken into smaller kingdoms for a long time when it came to the XIII century. The Eastern Roman Empire had been in decline since the fall of Constantinople in 1204 and even before that it was only a regional power. Compared to those, the mongols managed to build an empire spreading on millions of square kilometers. There is no base for comparison. It is like comparing the UK and the US 20 years after WWII.