How useful it is for leaders who have a view to posterity to patronise historians who write sympathetically of their age of empire

Blanket images of the mongols as barbaric destroyers are wide of the mark, and represent the misleading legacies of the histories written later which emphasised ruin and devastation above all else. This slanted view of the past provides a notable lesson in how useful it is for leaders who have a view to posterity to patronise historians who write sympathetically of their age of empire - something the Mongols conspicuously failed to do.

P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015), 161