Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. She has been a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a research associate for the Nomadic Empires project at the University of Oxford. Her books include La Horde d’Or et le sultanat mamelouk and the graphic novel Gengis Khan.
Outstanding, original, and revolutionary. Favereau subjects the
Mongols to a much-needed re-evaluation, showing how they were able
not only to conquer but to control a vast empire. A remarkable
book.
*Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads*
The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an
unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity…The Horde
flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely
because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.
*Wall Street Journal*
In medieval European times, the Mongols ruled a vast area of the
Eurasian landmass stretching as far to the west as modern Ukraine.
Favereau, a French specialist on nomadic empires, achieves the
exceptional feat of writing about this era in a way that is
accessible to general readers as well as scholarly.
*Financial Times*
Fascinating…The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an
impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with
the natural world…An impressively researched and intelligently
reasoned book that will be welcomed by historians of the Mongol
Empire.
*The Times*
A major achievement: it is thorough, accurate and complex, yet also
accessible to a broad readership. Her blow-by-blow account of
Mongol life and politics as one ruler falls and another rises is
the most complete we have. Even better, the book is not solely
focused on the Mongols. Favereau is an integrative historian
committed to showing how the Horde influenced other peoples and
shaped world history…Readers will enjoy the richness and clarity of
The Horde.
*Literary Review*
The first book to be devoted exclusively to the Golden Horde. It is
at once a microhistory, dense with regional politics and war, and a
survey of the Horde’s wider influence.
*New York Review of Books*
A wonderful book…Suffice to say that in their politics,
administration, family lives and, yes, their warfare, the Mongols
were far more complicated than we think.
*Bloomberg Opinion*
Favereau’s narrative is extremely rich in ethnographic detail and
descriptions of succession battles, military campaigns, and
internecine warfare. Favereau seeks to exonerate the Horde, which
in her view is too often portrayed as merely a plundering
force.
*Foreign Affairs*
Eye-opening…A meaningful corrective to popular misconceptions about
Mongols’ role in world history.
*Publishers Weekly*
Rather than being the murderous mob depicted in film and popular
history, the Mongol horde, this book reveals, was a complex
Euro-Asian culture…[Favereau] dispels the myth that it was just a
rampaging mass of warriors; it possessed great governing skills,
was adept at social relationships, and remained a major force on
the Eurasian landmass until it began to withdraw eastward after the
Black Death.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Although it had no permanent settlements and farmlands, the Horde
was an advanced civilization as well as a formidable military
power. Its leaders, all literate, ran a well-organized
communications network that kept its far-flung population in
constant touch…Reading The Horde is like immersing oneself in a
sprawling epic.
*Literary Review of Canada*
In The Horde, an ambitiously revisionist account of the Mongol
Empire, Favereau presents the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
conquerors of the steppe as sophisticated stewards of globalism,
rulers who practiced remarkable tolerance, and stimulated
far-reaching economic growth.
*Scroll*
It is far too often forgotten that Asia’s nomadic empires, from the
Sogdians and Huns through the Parthians and Seljuks, were key
drivers of greater Asia’s rich cultural diversity. This
extraordinary book vividly details how the nomadic Mongols operated
the largest empire of the premodern world, through practices that
continue to shape today’s world.
*Parag Khanna, author of The Future Is Asian*
Terrific—a really important reassessment of the origins of one of
the great empires in history.
*The Spectator*
[An] ambitious book with a huge range. It presents this world in
its full complexity. It’s an incredibly compelling read and it
changes the way you see the world.
*Five Books*
A deeply compelling, sympathetic, and highly engaging account of
how the Horde was created and of its lasting impact on the
evolution of what we now call ‘globalization.’ Favereau’s book will
transform our understanding of world history.
*Anthony Pagden, author of Worlds at War*
Favereau’s detailed and objective account of the Mongol conquest
and rule of Russia rescues the era from dark neglect and prejudice
to reveal its powerful positive and negative influences in shaping
modern Eurasia. This highly readable and deeply informed work fills
in one of history’s important missing chapters.
*Jack Weatherford, author of Genghis Khan and the Quest for
God*
Combining material and textual sources, Favereau has written the
best book on the Jochid Khanate: the first to see events resolutely
from a Jochid perspective, without foreclosing on the vast contexts
that bind the history of the Horde to that of Eurasia and the
world.
*Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Pathfinders*
In this riveting book, Favereau shows how the most enduring
descendants of Chinggis Khan’s Mongol imperium—the Western or
‘Golden’ Horde—fashioned an exceptionally resilient imperial system
with far-reaching influence in western Eurasia. She has challenged
us to think afresh about how mobility and empire can be fused into
dynamic political and cultural forms.
*John Darwin, author of After Tamerlane*
The Horde is not the first history to challenge the depiction of
the Mongol Empire as governed solely by ruthless conquerors and
plunderers, but it is the most nuanced and comprehensive
history.
*New York Journal of Books*
An exciting new addition to a rich pool of contemporary scholarship
in the field.
*The Telegraph (India)*
A book that has profound ramifications for our understanding of
European and Eurasian history…Irrefutably enthrones the Mongol
Empire as one of the great drivers of global history.
*Moscow Times*
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