Preserve Us From the Wrath of the Marmot King

In my world civilization classes I've consistently tried to stay on the cutting edge of instruction. Most history courses, for instance, focus solely on human interaction as an explanation for turning points in history. But avant-garde historians like myself recognize that animals can also be important actors on the stage of history.

For example:

You may not know that it was marmots who are partially responsible for the Black Death, which decimated the populations of China, Europe, and the Near East. Fleas spread the bacterium throughout the Central Asian marmot population, and some unfortunate Mongol hunter probably skinned and ate an infected marmot, thereby unleashing the whirlwind of pandemic. This much is widely accepted.

But here's what you won't read in your 'traditional' textbook:

At the end of the twelfth century an army of marmots, under the leadership of the legendary Marmot King, devastated Central Asia. They swept the peoples of the Golden Horde before them like a tidal wave. As they moved westward, the marmots cleverly formed alliances among other rodent populations, signing treaties with the porcupines and making vassals out of the Richardon's ground squirrels.

Once the rodents of Asia were united under the sovereignty of the Marmot King, they launched their attack of the great civilizations of Europe and the Islamic world.


In 1347, an army of marmots surrounded the Genoese port city of Kaffa, on the Black Sea. During the resulting siege, thousands of marmots died from the plague. The Marmot King then ordered their corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hopes of infecting and terrorizing its inhabitants.

Marmot military tactics devastated their opponents. When the armies of the Marmot king faced the forces of Kwarizm near the Sea of Azov, marmot sappers went out to the battlefied the night before and dug thousands of holes in the field. During the next day's battle, when the Sultan's cavalary charged the field, the horses caught their feet in the burrows and came crashing down. The marmot infantry quickly fell upon the Persian cavalrymen and ate their livers.

The attrocities of the Marmot King were unspeakable. In Baghdad, marmot soldiers gnawed the eyeballs from the sockets of eight-hundred Muslim clerics after they refused to bow before the invaders. After their conquest of Kiev, the marmots forced the Russian princes to run continuously inside specially-constructed stationary wheels until they dropped dead of exhaustion. In Krakow, the Marmot king tried to blackmail a local newspaper into firing an editor, threatened to pull funding for a children's hospital, and requested bribes for appointing potential candidates to a vacant Senate seat.

In their search for a scapegoat, Europeans blamed their own rodent populations for conspiring to help the marmots conquer all of Christendom. They organized massive rodent pogroms, massacring the mice populations and burning thousands of rats at the stake. It was a dark time for Europe.

Just when all seemed lost, the great marmot hordes disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Historians are at a loss to explain why. My own research speculates that the Marmot King was poisoned by one of his captured concubines. Without his leadership, the alliances disintegrated and the rodent world was plunged into civil war. Europe was saved.

Perhaps I'll make this the subject of my next book project.