1979, Atheneum, NY, 190 pages with illustrations

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world with no U.S. government. The president has been replaced by a televangelist, and your Ohio town is harried by tattooed biker freaks out of the back lands. You are Ohio Fred, the only literate king of America, with the only halfway trained army, and are currently arguing with the Born Again TV Pope in Washington D.C. The TV Senators support the TV Pope’s claims and the mercenaries paid by you piss from the senate house balcony until the senators below begin passing out from the ammonia fumes…

…Oh yes, the badass tattooed freakazoid bikers from the Red State Wastes [the liberals nuked Kansas back in 2020], who have been kicking your asses since ‘The Flash’, show up in Saint Louis to beg your cousin Detroit Bell for protection, because some baaaaaaad dudes are coming...

What do you do Ohio Fred?

You order your mercs to drink more beer and drown those cardinals.

…Weeks later the Mexican drug cartel ambassadors show up in Toledo with roses in their assault rifle muzzles begging you for an alliance because some baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad dudes are coming…

What do you do Ohio Fred?

You hire a new guitarist from Delaware…

A week later, some really baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad dude shows up in Chicago on a custom dirt bike. It looks like an XT 500 but runs on air. He informs you that The Yamaha Khan demands your submission, and will allow you to keep your Harley’s and your Delaware guitarist, if you swear loyalty to the Yamaha One World Kicking Your Ass Lazy White Man because it is Our Genetic Imperative Empire. If you do not submit, the Yamaha Khan will crush your men, drive you before him, and hold your women close.

What do you do Ohio Fred?

Unfortunately, you are enjoying the 100% blue agave tequila that your pen pal from the Matamoros Cartel sent you while trying to figure out how your butler is going to get that weird-ass armadillo that came with the booze into your terrarium. This means Chicago Shane, your hot-headed half-brother, receives the ambassador and cuts his head off. Dude, Detroit Bell told you that boy was smoking too much crack, and now a horde of motocross yakuza with Fifty Cals mounted between the handlebars of their rice burners are riding your way!

Yes, that sounds a bit like a sci-fi channel movie of the week. But, it really happened. Just replace the bikes with horses.

Of the 11 books I have read on the Mongol military machine The Devil’s Horseman is the best. It only tells the story of the European and Near Eastern conquest. But Chambers has such gritty insight, I have read this book five times in 25 years. It is that good. The advent of the Mongols in the Western World was certain death for Europe, which was spared only by the alcohol-induced strokes of two khans a half a world away.

The Devils Horseman reads like a military adventure written by a guy who forget to get fat in college. You get spicy tidbits like the fate of the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ who was the basis for the Thulsa Doom character in the movie Conan the Barbarian made a year or two later. You get to read about the Sultan of Syria who the Armenian Christian allies of the Mongols forced to eat himself a bite at a time! Then, after all of this barbarity, you get a conclusion that rates as one of the best macrohistorical deductions and does much to explain the genesis of our own World War III.

Throughout The Devil’s Horsemen Chambers keeps the missionary thread alive. For a full generation more than half of the military power in the world was in the hands of a murderous clan who essentially had no religious orientation. For decades the terrible conquerors of the medieval world were equally receptive to Buddhist, Islamic and Christian missionaries. Christian Europe sent an aging fat man with a pompous letter demanding submission. The other faiths sent their best and brightest. Had a moral and competent Christian monarch reigned in A. D. 1250 today’s religious pie chart might be decidedly different. See the web address below.

“For want of an army and through lack of trust, Christianity had relinquished western Asia to Islam and through the paucity of its missionaries the east was to be lost to Buddhism… The Mongol threat had woken Europe from its ignorant isolation, but under their new masters from the steppes the Persian and Arabic civilizations began to decline. The vulgar materialism of the Mongols and the bigoted Puritanism of the Mamluks inhibited their artists. Even in Cairo, which after the fall of Baghdad became the academic capital of Islam, the Mamluks’ dogmatic acceptance of all unexplained phenomena as ‘the will of Allah’ suppressed the curiosity of their scientists.”

James chambers writes with such bare intensity that, cracking this book open to check facts for the conclusion of my novel Forty Hands of Night, which I have fallen a week behind on, I found myself sitting on the porch in the sweltering heat rereading passages and dog-earing pages. If you care about history and can find The Devil’s Horseman, read it.