Long ago, when I visited the Austrian Military History Museum, Vienna, I was taken aback to find a Navy Department in it. My surprise shows my ignorance of history. Up to the First World War, Austria(or after 1867 Austria-Hungary) had a powerful navy based at Trieste on the Adriatic. I decided then and there that I would go to Trieste one day.
It was a third of a century afterwards that I fulfilled my wish. We travelled by land from Zagreb, Croatia, to Ljubljana, Slovenia, and entered Italy at Trieste in 2010. Trieste looked very peaceful, apparently forgetting its own naval history.
In a similar way if one talks about Mongolian warships he would not be taken seriously. But it is a fact. There was a time when Mongolians had a powerful navy which tried to conquer Japan twice.
It was not Mongol in the narrow sense. Chingis Khan(1162-1227) built a great empire over the continents. His grandson, Khubilai(1215-94), now with his capital at Beijing, wanted to conquer Japan.
To digress a little bit, Yoshitsune(1159-89) was a brilliant Samurai commander and a most popular person in our history. There is a legend, persistently believed, that after being chased by his elder brother he went over to the continent and became Chingis Khan.
Anyway Khubilai sent mighty fleets on two occasions to Japan with an interval of seven years. Some of their troops landed in Kyushu, and surprised the Japanese counterparts with their novel gunpowder. But on both occasions they were blown away by typhoons. Khubilai planned a third invasion, but he was busy with a war of invasion against Vietnam, and the attempt was dropped.
These typhoons gradually came to be known as divine typhoons, and during the Pacific War we were led to believe that those winds were bound to come and blow away all the US fleet from near the Japanese waters.
Earlier in this month, the NHK broadcasting showed in its TV programme how the research is going on about those sunken Mongolian ships. The research teams found keels and other parts of those ships. They have also ascertained that the specific types of granite filling the anchors are available only in a certain region of South China and were making use of by the Muslim merchants at the time. It is known that a large part of the ships on the second invasion came from the port of Nin-po, Central China.
These are very painstaking research, but will be of great use in shedding light on the history of East Asia. Fortunately or unfortunately, Mongol is mainly known in Japan today not as a great invader in the past but a country which has sent a number of Sumo wrestlers. At present both of the Grand Champions of Sumo are from Mongol.
It was a third of a century afterwards that I fulfilled my wish. We travelled by land from Zagreb, Croatia, to Ljubljana, Slovenia, and entered Italy at Trieste in 2010. Trieste looked very peaceful, apparently forgetting its own naval history.
In a similar way if one talks about Mongolian warships he would not be taken seriously. But it is a fact. There was a time when Mongolians had a powerful navy which tried to conquer Japan twice.
It was not Mongol in the narrow sense. Chingis Khan(1162-1227) built a great empire over the continents. His grandson, Khubilai(1215-94), now with his capital at Beijing, wanted to conquer Japan.
To digress a little bit, Yoshitsune(1159-89) was a brilliant Samurai commander and a most popular person in our history. There is a legend, persistently believed, that after being chased by his elder brother he went over to the continent and became Chingis Khan.
Anyway Khubilai sent mighty fleets on two occasions to Japan with an interval of seven years. Some of their troops landed in Kyushu, and surprised the Japanese counterparts with their novel gunpowder. But on both occasions they were blown away by typhoons. Khubilai planned a third invasion, but he was busy with a war of invasion against Vietnam, and the attempt was dropped.
These typhoons gradually came to be known as divine typhoons, and during the Pacific War we were led to believe that those winds were bound to come and blow away all the US fleet from near the Japanese waters.
Earlier in this month, the NHK broadcasting showed in its TV programme how the research is going on about those sunken Mongolian ships. The research teams found keels and other parts of those ships. They have also ascertained that the specific types of granite filling the anchors are available only in a certain region of South China and were making use of by the Muslim merchants at the time. It is known that a large part of the ships on the second invasion came from the port of Nin-po, Central China.
These are very painstaking research, but will be of great use in shedding light on the history of East Asia. Fortunately or unfortunately, Mongol is mainly known in Japan today not as a great invader in the past but a country which has sent a number of Sumo wrestlers. At present both of the Grand Champions of Sumo are from Mongol.
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