The Mongols defeated the Bagan army at the Battle of Vochang Valley by using archery to panic the Burmese war elephants, which then turned and trampled their own forces.
Marco Polo's account describes how Mongol archers shot the Bagan war elephants, causing them to flee in panic and trample their own soldiers, which turned the battle decisively in favor of the Mongols. ✦ AI generated
Paul Cooper (narrator, quoting Marco Polo) · Fall of Civilizations · 2022-11-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 87:19
When the elephants felt the smart of those arrows that pelted them like rain, they turned tail and fled, and nothing on Earth would have induced them to turn and face the Tartars. Then, too, they plunged into the wood and rushed this way and that, dashing their castles against the trees, bursting their harness, and smashing and destroying everything that was on them.
verbatim transcript · starts at 87:19
87:26the majority of its gold and silver, was in the hands of the tax-exempt church. For successive kings of Bagan, this resulted in something of a bind. Their entire legitimacy rested on the system of belief that began and ended with the Buddhist church, and so the thought of using any kind of force to seize land from the unarmed Buddhist monks was unthinkable. The church wasn't just a beloved religious institution. It was also the
87:58land's biggest employer, and countless people depended on it for their livelihood. So, if the Burmese kings had any hope of getting their land back, they would have to use the doctrines of the church against it. Buddhist doctrines in Burma did allow for a sort of release valve on the power and influence of the church. Monks were supposed to live by the Vinaya, or the Buddhist code of conduct, which emphasizes relinquishing yourself
88:32of Earthly possessions, and it was considered the duty of kings to periodically purge the church when it wandered too far from this ideal. If the church had become too wealthy, then by definition it must have strayed from the Vinaya, and so a process called Sasana could begin. This was a kind of inquisition in which individual temples were inspected and excess wealth or land could be confiscated, according to a strict
89:02religious code. It was a way for the crown to claw back some of the wealth it had lost to the church, but the process of Sasana was slow and often insufficient. Once a stage of Sasana purifying of the church was finished, often the population felt newly inspired to donate to their now pure and righteous church, and money would start flowing back to the monks in even greater amounts.