    55

    War and the dreams of conquest are fueled, it seems, less by

    poverty than by the heady whiff of new riches.  In the 12th century, the

    Mongols were a nomadic people, living on the plains of Eastern Asia.

    Their economy was based on their horses.  They drank mare's milk and

    made war on horseback.163  The Mongols supplemented their diet on

    long trips by pricking their horses' necks, drawing blood, mixing it

    with a bit of the millet meal they carried in a pouch at their side, and

    eating the ruddy paste while galloping across the countryside.

    In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, the Mongols were

    gifted with an economic boom--good weather increased their supply of

    fodder, 164 allowing a spectacular growth in the number of new colts.

    Did the burst of surplus bring smiles of placid contentment to Mongol

    faces?  Not exactly.  The Mongols, interpreting the boost in pasturage

    as a sign that God had granted them the entire world, took off on a

    rampage.  Within less than seventy years they had conquered a

    territory nearly twice the size of the Roman Empire.  It included China,

    Russia, Persia, Syria, Iraq and chunks of Eastern Europe.165  That

    empire was not won with gentle persuasion.  One Mongol descendent,

    Tamerlane, was remembered for building 120 towers of severed heads

    in the opulent city of Baghdad 166.  Needless to say, the skulls had all

    been parted from their supporting vertebrae by Mongol swords.167

    But why does carnage so frequently follow a boost in well-being?

    One clue may come from the following puzzle.  Murder rates rise after

    a war.   You'd think they'd go up the most in the losing nations, whose

    citizens are frustrated and gnashing their teeth over their misfortune.

    But they don't.   Murders increase the most in the country that won!168

    The same phenomenon has been observed in animals.  When two

    groups of rhesus monkeys were squeezed into a territory smaller than

    what they were accustomed to, one pack aggressively asserted its right

    to lord it over the other, and hogged up the available real estate.  As the

    winning gang beat its rivals into submission, a strange thing occurred.

    The members of the losing troop "fought less among one another.  But

    within the dominant group, which was in the process of acquiring new

    space, aggressive interactions increased."169  Why?

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