Villains and Virgins History Podcast
Jun 1, 2026 · 1 hr · 11 segments
Rumi was a 13th century poet and mystic often quoted today. He was born into a world shattered by the Mongol invasions that sent his family fleeing the only home they had known. Along the road we…
So the Mongols are laying siege to this city, and one of the defenders shoots an arrow which happens to kill a Mongol warrior.
You'd think that would be a good thing, but it wasn't, because this particular Mongol warrior was the son-in-law of none other than Genghis Khan himself, the leader of the entire army.
And Genghis allowed his daughter, who was now a widow because her husband had just been shot, to choose the revenge that would be visited upon the city of Nishapur.
And when the Mongols breached the walls and rushed into the city of Nishapur, they did exactly as she had commanded.
A pile of men's heads, a pile of women's heads, and yes, a pile of children's heads.
The horror of such a scene and the terror and the screaming that would have been involved in creating these pyramids of skulls is difficult to imagine.
In fact, there are some reports that say many Mongol warriors were given quotas of people to kill.
So if you were going to take a city and you were a Mongol warrior, you had to kill, say, 24 people yourself.
Now, when you begin to multiply those numbers, they become absolutely horrendous.
Even if you subtract a few Mongols on the reasonable assumption that some of them are going to die in the battle, you still have a whole lot of dead people on the other side.
And so word of their coming would travel for miles ahead because very soon everybody knew what happened to cities that the Mongols took.
The idea was that those people would flee the city where everyone else they knew had been butchered and would spread the word of what the Mongols were capable of doing if they reached your city.
So the Mongols are laying siege to this city, and one of the defenders shoots an arrow which happens to kill a Mongol warrior.
You'd think that would be a good thing, but it wasn't, because this particular Mongol warrior was the son-in-law of none other than Genghis Khan himself, the leader of the entire army.
And Genghis allowed his daughter, who was now a widow because her husband had just been shot, to choose the revenge that would be visited upon the city of Nishapur.
And when the Mongols breached the walls and rushed into the city of Nishapur, they did exactly as she had commanded.
A pile of men's heads, a pile of women's heads, and yes, a pile of children's heads.
The horror of such a scene and the terror and the screaming that would have been involved in creating these pyramids of skulls is difficult to imagine.
In fact, there are some reports that say many Mongol warriors were given quotas of people to kill.
So if you were going to take a city and you were a Mongol warrior, you had to kill, say, 24 people yourself.
Now, when you begin to multiply those numbers, they become absolutely horrendous.
Even if you subtract a few Mongols on the reasonable assumption that some of them are going to die in the battle, you still have a whole lot of dead people on the other side.
And so word of their coming would travel for miles ahead because very soon everybody knew what happened to cities that the Mongols took.
The idea was that those people would flee the city where everyone else they knew had been butchered and would spread the word of what the Mongols were capable of doing if they reached your city.
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