Posted on 10/26/2003 1:22:46 PM PST by nwrep
UNTIL THE TYRANTS of the 20th century came along, they were the most efficient, cold-blooded, feared, and destructive conquerors the world had ever known. They were the Mongol horsemen from the steppes of Central Asia, whose hordes under the leadership of Genghis Khan built a 13th-century empire by mass slaughter -- burning cities and terrifying half a dozen civilizations from Russia to the East China Sea. Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulagu, leveled Baghdad, and Iraqis have invoked his name ever since to brand their enemies, including the Americans.
It is said that you could smell their stench downwind before you could see their dust or hear the thunder of their horses signaling onrushing death. It is said that they could stay in the saddle for days, living on mare's milk or the blood of their own horses if necessary. According to a contemporary Persian account they were covered with lice "which looked like sesame growing on bad soil." It is also said that they could ride 70 miles a day and fire their steel-tipped arrows 200 yards with deadly accuracy at full gallop.
They swept all before them -- the armies of the emperor of China, Russians on the banks of the Dnieper, and the storied Khanates of Central Asia. And if surrender was not immediate, all were slaughtered.
Great centers of learning, Bukhara, Urgench, and Samarkand, were sacked and destroyed. Indeed there is hardly a building standing in Central Asia that predates the Mongols. They rode on into India, laying waste to the provinces of the Indus River. At Herat, which fell only after a six-month siege, the victorious Mongols spent a whole week killing and burning. According to some accounts as many as a million and a half people were slaughtered. Genghis Khan's sons and grandsons would rule over his empire after his death in 1227. When Hulagu sacked fabled Baghdad of the "Thousand and One Nights," it was the greatest city of the Islamic world. Its fall ended the Abbasid Caliphate, and Baghdad never recovered its former glory, even though Saddam Hussein dreamed of it.
A century later, Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane as he was known in the west, rose to better Genghis Khan. For 15 years he ravaged Persia, sacked Baghdad again, mounted expeditions into Anatolia and over the Caucasus, and attacked India. He plundered Delhi, put 100,000 to the sword, and is said to have skinned alive any surviving Hindus he could put his hands on. His signature was the towers of skulls he would leave behind.
In the west the names of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane have a mystic and deeply seated association with death and destruction. Their reputations as mass murderers still ring down through the centuries as symbols of unparalleled awfulness.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
One word:Tyre
Alexander the Great: The fall of Tyre
"The extent of the bloodshed can be judged from the fact that 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city's fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king {Alexander} then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.
Alexander was a constitutional monarch who had to be proclaimed in office according to the Macedonian constitution. Thus he was not a tyrant-see my post#11.
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