Section: War and Culinary Cannibalism under Mongol Rule

In 1211, the Mongol Empire, founded a few years earlier by Genghis Khan (ca. 1162–1227), invaded China, attacking first the Jin dynasty in the north and later the Song dynasty in the south. The conquest of the whole country took decades, but in 1271, Kublai Khan (1215–1294), a successor of Genghis, declared himself emperor of China. The Yuan dynasty founded by him ruled China for a century (until 1368), but the last decades of its existence were plagued by unrest and rebellions, until finally the Mongols were forced to retire.

After the collapse of the Mongol regime, Tao Zongyi, “an eminent scholar of the late Yuan period,”32 wrote down his recollections of the period. He criticizes that, while in earlier times human flesh was sometimes eaten out of necessity, the soldiers deployed in the northern regions “enjoyed eating human flesh” and frequently sacrificed civilians for their culinary pleasure: “Young children were the most appreciated; women came next and men last.” Some victims, he claims, were roasted whole in “large jars whose outside touched the fire,” others were “placed on an iron grate to be roasted alive. . . . Sometimes, the victim was put inside a double bag . . . which was put into a large pot, in order to boil them alive.” Corpses not needed for immediate consumption were “cut into pieces that were salted and dried. Sometimes, if it was a man, only his two thighs were chopped off, or if it was a woman, only her two breasts were chopped off.”33

While the dynastic histories written during the Yuan period do not admit that human flesh was eaten for culinary reasons or that its preparation was accompanied by sadistic tortures, one of them seems to approve of the consumption of civilians as long as it serves the war effort. “Among the soldiers there were those who boiled and ate children, and, during the day, still fought bitter battles,” notes the Songshi (written in the 1340s) about a war campaign against the collapsing Song dynasty in the 1270s.34 A later chronicle, written a few years after the demise of the Yuan dynasty, dryly describes the strategy of the old regime in its attempt to fight the rebellions that had broken out during the last years of its rule: “the strong were ordered to enlist as soldiers and the weak were killed and eaten.”35 Those who opposed them, however, sometimes did no better: “Wherever they went they burnt and looted, and even ate the old and weak as food.”36

Independently of the Chinese sources, European writers in the thirteenth century also noticed that Mongol fighters practiced cannibalism. During that century, the Mongol Empire grew at an enormous speed not only in the east, but also in the west. In 1241–1242, Mongol troops raided eastern and central Europe, coming as far as Austria before they chose to withdraw because of the death of their ruler, Ögedei Khan (ca. 1186–1241). Ivo of Narbonne was a Frenchman who at that time lived in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna which was attacked by the Mongols. While they withdrew without being able to conquer the fortified town, he later described in a letter that any “Christians in the adjoining province who . . . had been taken captive” were “without consideration of class, fortune, sex, or age . . . indiscriminately destroyed . . . by various forms of torture. The leaders, along with their dinner guests . . . fed on their corpses as though they were bread, leaving nothing for the vultures except bones.”37

Any “old and deformed women they gave to the cannibals [a remark that implies that not all of the fighters ate human flesh] as food, as if it were a daily ration.” “Beautiful women” and “virgins,” on the other hand, were not eaten outright, but “raped until they died.” Afterwards, “their breasts were cut off, which they kept for their leaders as delicacies, and they feasted on their virginal bodies in a more splendid manner.”38

The observation that women’s breasts were cut off as particular “delicacies” corresponds to Tao Zongyi’s remark that they were sometimes the only part of a woman’s body that was eaten. Both accounts indicate that the fighters showed a considerable degree of sadism, in particular in their treatment of female captives.

Simon of St. Quentin was a Dominican friar who visited the Mongol court in 1245 as a member of an embassy sent by the Pope in the hope of establishing better relationships between Europe and the expanding empire. While the mission was a diplomatic failure, St. Quentin was among the first Europeans to visit the central regions of the Mongol Empire and report what he had learned. He observes that the Mongols preferred to eat human flesh “roasted by fire rather than boiled.” Regarding their motives he adds that it was eaten “sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of pleasure, and sometimes in order to strike fear and terror in the people who will hear of it.”39

The Italian merchant Marco Polo (1254–1324), who became famous for his travel report, spent more than fifteen years in China during the early years of the Yuan dynasty (from 1274 to about 1290). Referring to the inhabitants of the region around Hangzhou, he writes that “they eat . . . any kind of meat, including human flesh, which they devour with great relish. They will not touch someone who has died of natural causes, but if he has been stabbed to death or otherwise killed they eat him all up and consider it a great delicacy.” He adds that soldiers, in particular, enjoyed to “drink [the] blood and eat [the] flesh” of those they had killed.40 This is the same region from which cannibal customs, seemingly with a distinctly culinary side, had already been reported about 150 years earlier by the scholar Zhuang Chuo.41 It is unclear whether this custom had persisted in the region or whether it had later been reintroduced by Mongol soldiers—but it is notable that cannibalism, practiced openly and with “relish,” seems to have found a wider acceptance here than in other regions.

In 1368, the Mongols had to withdraw from most of China, but they managed to establish a successor dynasty, known as Northern Yuan, which ruled in Mongolia and northeastern China until the seventeenth century. In 1633, one year before this dynasty collapsed under internal rebellions and external attacks, the soldiers of its last ruler, Ligdan Khan (1588–1634), “killed and ate people” because “food supplies were exhausted.” Soon, morale collapsed completely and “after continuous killings and lootings the troops dispersed in all directions.”42