This is Danishchwartz, host of Noble Blood. Just a quick bit of housekeeping. My new book, The Arcane Arts is coming out this May. I co wrote it with a friend of mine. It's a dual POV dark academia story about a grad student and a professor studying illegal magic. It's a lot of fun. It's by sd Coverly, which is the pen name we chose for both of us writing together. But it's not a secret that we wrote it. And if you pre ordered it, it would just mean
the world to me. So if you're looking for a sexy, fun, dark academia murder mystery thriller about forbidden magic, look up The Arcane Arts. A pre order would be super helpful. Okay, and now time for the episode Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Listener discretion advised. On the morning of January eighteenth, in nineteen twenty one, the Mongolian capital city of Urga seemed quiet, typical for a snowy morning in negative forty degree weather, but out in the distance you could see a series of fires had been lit in the hills surrounding the city. One witness noticed cavalry moving down the mountain side quote
like little black doubts against the snow. It turned out that the invaders were a ramshackle army of Mongolians, Tibetans, and Russians led by Russian baron Roman von ungern Sternberg, a man now sometimes referred to as the mad or
Bloody Baron. A bit of historical context. When the Chinese Republican force had occupied Mongolia in nineteen nineteen, they had had Bogged Khan, the highest Tibetan Buddhist authority, placed under house arrest, but placed under house arrest in his lavish European style home surrounded by a sacred nature preserve, where animals like cheetahs, tigers, and even allegedly a pet elephant lived in cages. Roman von ungern Schernberg had a lofty
goal in coming to Mongolia. He would rescue the bogged Khan. Soon, Tibetan horsemen, fighting alongside the Russian infiltrated the gates of the temple, their clothing covered with butter and their faces
smudged with soot to frighten their enemies. The animals in the menagerie yelped and howled, and historian James Palmer even alleges that the Khan's elephant was so frightened it broke free from its cage and charged trumpeting through the lines of battle, only to be quote discovered a week later, nearly one hundred miles away. Other historians think that that detail strains credulity. How could an elephant survive the Mongolian cold? But the anecdote speaks to the chaos of the scene.
Two Tibetan soldiers carried Khan out of the house and brought him to safety. An American merchant who witnessed the scene reported quote the entire action consumed exactly one half hour and was the prettiest piece of cavalry work that one could desire to witness. Apparently, Roman von ungern Sternberg shouted, now Erga is ours. He had pulled off an unthinkable feat, using his tiny army to take control of the capital
of Mongolia. From his new base in Erga, Roman would install a brutal military dictatorleadership under the ostensible rule of the Khan. Roman had come a long way from his beginnings as a middling czarist officer with a long history of disciplinary problems in Russia. Historians have very little positive to say about him. Historian James Palmer called him a psychopath who was quote an appalling human being in almost every way. The baron believed, like many aristocrats, that commoners
were in inferior species. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Roman's odious views after the Russian Revolution, he believed he had been chosen by God to protect the ideals of the monarchy, and he was invading Asia to save it from the same fate that Russia had suffered. As improbable and feudal as his mission would seem, he would do anything to achieve it, even putting thousands of lives at risk. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. To call Roman von ungern
Sternberg a proud Russian would be an understatement. He constantly bragged to anyone who would listen about his connections to the Romanovs and other members of the Russian aristocracy. Historian James Palmer wrote that Roman's quote sense of attachment to
the Russian Empire was almost pathologically intense. Roman wrote in his journals that like his fancy Russian ancestors he had quote never taken orders from the working classes, and thought it was preposterous that quote dirty workers who've never had any servants of their own but still think they can command, should influence Russia's rule. But it actually turns out that Roman had almost no Russian ancestry. His parents were German, and he spent most of his early childhood in Estonia,
which at that time was called Estland. The reason why he considered himself Russian has to do with the complicated relationships between Russia and its colonies in the nineteenth century. Roman's German ancestors invaded Estonia way back during the Crusades and had been there ever since. Eventually, the Russians began
to take over the area. German colonists in Estonia, like Roman's family, were more aligned with the Russian invaders than the native Estonians, who these aristocrats regarded for the most part as lowly peasants. On the other hand, the Russians were willing to ally with the German aristocracy in their quest to expand their tree's eastern frontier. Many of Roman's family members benefited from that partnership by pursuing military careers
in the Russian army. Throughout the eighteen sixties, Russia also implemented an intense program of Russification in the border territories like Estonia to embed them more deeply into the empire. Roman's birth certificate indicates how entwined these two cultures became. He has two different birth dates. According to the Western Gregorian calendar, he was born on January tenth, eighteen eighty six, and according to the Russian Julian calendar, he was born
on December twenty ninth, eighteen eighty five. Russia's attempt to exert greater cultural control over Estonia may have worked a little too well on Roman. As a child, he loved hearing stories about his warlike Crusader ancestors with names like the Axe and the Brother of Satan. He saw the powerful Russian Empire as an extension of that military lineage. He considered himself Russian because he wanted to be on the winning team. His excitement about war and violence made him,
by all accounts, a terrifying and terrible child. As one relative put it, quote, Roman was a terror to his fellow pupils and his masters. According to one source, at twelve years old, he tried to strangle his cousin's pet owl. In class, he had a habit of tossing his books out of the window of the classroom in the middle of the lesson, running outside to grab them, and never coming back. As you might expect, his grades were abysmo. In nineteen o two, he was ranked the worst student
in his class. When he transferred to military school as a teenager, he racked up forty two demerits in just a year and a half, including oversleeping, skipping class, fighting, smoking in bed, keeping his hair too long, and losing his homework. He was simply too entitled to care. Once, while on watch during military training, he just wandered away. He told his supervisor, I'm not some sort of manservant.
I don't have to stand in one place. In February nineteen o five, the head of the school wrote to his family asking them to withdraw him from the school or he would be expelled. They chose withdrawal, and the following year he was sent to war. The Russo Japanese War was winding down, and Roman spent a little under a year puttering around Manchuria before coming back to Russia. But while he was away the peasantry of Estonia rose up to demand better conditions through a series of riots.
In just over a week in December nineteen o five, one fifth of all German owned property was destroyed, including much belonging to the ungern Sternbergs. Even the manor house where Roman grew up was left nothing more than quote a blackened shell. The ideology of the Russian army helped Roman process the destruction of his family home and aristocratic lineage. Unfortunately, it imbued him with an even uglier, more vengeful sense
of elitism. Much of the Russian nobility believed that peasants were a biologically inferior race, with actual black blood that distinguished them from the elite. Because of that, imperial rule was divine and natural law, making a peasant revolt a world shattering crisis. This idea would have galvanized someone like Roman, who found almost all of his self worth in his
proximity to the Russian monarchy. He wrote later that he considered these revolutions an omen of quote famine, destruction, the death of culture, of glory, of honor, of spirit, the death of states, and the death of peoples. Having found new moral purpose in the Russian Army. He enrolled in a prestigious military academy in Saint Petersburg and began training as a cadet. There. Roman transformed from a failing student
into merely a mediocre one. As James Palmer put it, this gave him limited options when he graduated in nineteen o eight. Those at the top of the class had first paid over where they'd be stationed. Roman, over a hundred spots down on the list, decided to set off for the Transbical Region, an area of eastern Siberia outpast the Urals and bordering Mongolia and China. Why he decided to go so far away is still something of a mystery.
It was an unconventional choice for a new graduate to one of the furthest and most unstable parts of the Russian Empire, but a photo from around this time gives us a clue. Roman was photographed in a uniform with what one historian called his quote bullet shaped head and stage villain mustache. One of his buddies, a Russian merchant, described Roman this way quote a scrawny, ragged, droopy man on his face had grown a wispy blonde beard. He had faded blank blue eyes, and he looked about thirty
years old. His military uniform was in abnormally poor condition, the trousers being considerably worn and torn at the knees. He carried a sword by his hip end quote. This wouldn't be just any sword, but a three foot curved Cossack saber, a design that originated in Mongolia, which would eventually become the site of his biggest military achievements. While Roman was a controversial and unsuccessful figure in Europe, out in the farthest reaches of the Russian Empire, his career
was just beginning. Roman stepped off the trans Siberian Railway to report for duty in the Siberian city of Cheetah on July twenty seventh, nineteen o eight. By the time he had arrived, the re Jin was in crisis. Nearby, Mongolia had been independent for two years after three centuries of Chinese rule. Russia tacitly encouraged Mongolian independence, thinking it
would help them expand further into Asia. As a Russian general put it at the time, quote, in the future, a major global war could flare up between Asia and Europe. For this purpose, Russia must occupy northern Manchuria and Mongolia. Only then will Mongolia be harmless end quote. Russia had
increased its presence in the newly independent Siberia. Administrators from the Resettlement Administration, the Russian State's new Colonization Agency were stationed throughout the country, administering land, handing out cheap guide books, and managing quote settler relay camps. Away from the rigid hierarchies and forced decorum of his life in Europe, Roman was finally in an environment that rewarded his let's say, toughness, independence,
and viciousness. But there wasn't much for him to do. Aside from trapesing around the mountains of eastern Siberia and Mongolia with few actual duties, he spent his time scribbling new Mongolian words into his notebook. One witness recalled that he would sit alone in silence before suddenly becoming animated enough to ride his horse across the plains in quote wild charges towards nowhere, in particular at the Mongolian border. Roman also had an opportunity to deepen a burgeoning interest
in Buddhism. Back in Europe, Roman had developed an extracurricular interest in Eastern religion and the occult. This wasn't entirely unpressed. Roman's cousin wrote that even as a tween, Roman had always had an interest in Tibetan and Hindu philosophy, and called Roman quote one of the most metaphysically and occultly gifted men I had ever met. His cousin apparently believed
that Roman could actually read minds. At the time, many Russian intellectuals were entertaining what they considered quote exotic ideas encapsulating both spiritualism and Eastern philosophy. Roman may have walked by bookstores with occult or spiritualist titles on display, or encountered fringe religious groups in Saint Petersburg. Palmer alleges that Roman would have resonated with the quote elitism baked into
occult religious ideas. He suggests that occultism rests on the principle that there is secret none that only a few worthy people can understand, appealing to Roman's belief in hierarchy and innate sense of superiority. The historian also hypothesizes that Roman's unwavering belief in the tsar's inherent right to rule had a mystical element that would have aligned with more fringe religious beliefs. However, all of that doesn't explain Roman's
interest in Buddhism specifically. Historian William Sunderland argues that Roman was quote spiritually restless and a self styled iconoclast, making an unfamiliar religion like Buddhism particularly appealing. However, Sunderland hedges that we don't have any proof of Roman's motivation's only possibilities. In any case, Roman was able to spend his idle hours talking to the blamas and monks who dominated Mongolian
society after the country's independence. Roman took a particular interest in the Bogged Khan or Holy Emperor, who ruled over the country. While the two had never met, the Bog Khan was an infamous political figure and celebrity. He was the head of Mongolian Buddhism, and much like the Dali Lama, he was considered a living Badhisattva. All that said, rumor had it that the Bog Khan wasn't the most pious man. He was apparently a binge drinker, and members of his
cabinet reported meetings turning into night long bacchanals. He was going blind either from drinking or from having contracted syphilis after sleeping with one of the monks at his court. He was also said to be cruel and violent. Apparently, he would toss an electrified rope over the wall of his palace, and when passers by would touch it, they'd get shocked and believe they had received a spiritual blessing.
When he got bored, he'd fire a pair of guns that had been given to him by a Russian visitor at random targets. He had a vast collection of taxid army, from pufferfish and penguins to elephant, seals, and a zoo with giraffes, tigers, chimpanzees and more who were left to weather the cold in outdoor cages. These sensational stories may be mostly apocryphal, especially given that so many of these reports come from Europeans, who justified their own colonial interests
by making Mongolia seem exotic and brutal. That said, even more measured accounts portray the bag Khan as a mercurial and violent figure, not entirely unlike Roman, who angered quickly and had no difficulty executing anyone who got in his way. After Roman spent a few years in eastern Siberia, he was reassigned in nineteen thirteen. It was a routine move, but Roman was disappointed. He hadn't accomplished much, and he returned to Estonia unemployed and aimless. In peacetime, he struggled.
As Palmer put it, quote, he was a loser, albeit an upperclass one who would always be sheltered from the consequences of his own actions. But a loser. Nonetheless. Luckily for Roman, if not for anyone else, peace would not last long. World War One had broken out, giving him
a new opportunity to prove himself in battle. He was mobilized on July nineteenth, nineteen fourteen, and for the next two years he bounced around from us Ukraine to southern Lithuania and eventually back to Siberia for the first time. In Roman's life. He was apparently a quote exemplar to the other officers and soldiers, according to one of his supervisors. One officer described his wartime service as quote a feat
of uninterrupted heroism performed for the glory of Russia. Apparently, he would go first in every charge, even in dangerous missions, and hyped up his fellow soldiers. He wrote later that quote, life is the result of war and society is the instrument of war. To refuse war means to refuse an epic life. However, on October twenty second, nineteen sixteen, Roman
would get in trouble yet again. He got drunk with another officer in Ukraine while they were both on regimental leave, and when they went back to a hotel at the u s end of the night, the receptionist wouldn't let Roman book a room without a certificate from his commander, which he didn't have. Roman tried to swing at the receptionist and broke a glass window. Instead. Roman called his commander and tried to convince him to approve the hotel
s day, but the commander refused. Furious, Roman yelled, whose face do I have to mess up? He turned toward the officer he got drunk with, who was still with him in the lobby, called him a swine and scratched his face with his sword. With that, Roman was discharged and put in military prison until January nineteen seventeen. After his release, Roman returned to the Eastern Front in Siberia, but by then there was little left to return to.
No more than a month After he was out of prison, the monarchy that Roman had been so devoted to in Russia collapsed. Russia suffered thousands of casualties on the battlefield and rampant food shortages on the home front. Workers protested rising prices for scanty provisions. Even soldiers joined the riots they had been ordered to suppress. In February nineteen seventeen, Zar Nicholas the Second abdicated the throne, ending three hundred years of Romanov rule. Later that year, Lenin seized the
Winter Palace and took over the government. The Bolsheviks attacked everything that Roman had stood for, religion, elitism, and the monarchy. The revolution threatened to strip him of his regiment and his authority. To Roman, it seemed like the Estonian riot in nineteen oh five had spread to the rest of the country, upending life as he knew it. Over in Siberia, morale was low. Soldiers had defected en mass exhausted by years of war, trudging through the snow far away from home.
As civil war took hold across the country, Russia split into shifting zones of control. The Bolsheviks the Reds held the central heartland, while anti Bolshevik forces. The White occupied the peripheries, including Siberia. Roman aligned himself with the anti Bolshevik White forces and viewed the Civil War as an extension of World War One, where he had to quote
defend the motherland. But this was a guerrilla war consisting of quote identity chechs, detentions, beatings, executions, and occasional raids and skirmishes on suspected dissidents as opposed to formal battles between two opposing forces. These tactics befitted chaotic, anti authoritarian
figures like Roman. From nineteen seven to nineteen twenty, Roman enacted his sadistic reign of terror, overseeing beatings and interrogations of suspected Bolsheviks in a Siberian detention center to the hills. He would shout as he sent prisoners away to be executed. When he wasn't terrorizing prisoners, he traveled through Siberia to Manchuria and Mongolia, buying horses or checking in on gold mines. Even those more banal routine missions required brutality from Roman.
To fund these excursions, he stole money and jewelry from travelers, and grain, livestock, and other goods from warehouses and cargo trains. But by nineteen twenty Roman's coalition among the Whites was falling apart. The Bolsheviks pressed the Whites even further and further east, and they lost control of the Trans Siberian Railway. In October of that year, the Reds marched into Cheetah, the White Siberian stronghold and Roman's home base, taking over
the city. But by the time the Reds arrived, Roman was already gone. He was off to Mongolia, about to embark on the most ambitious military campaign of his life. This time he wasn't fighting under Russia. He was on his own. This is the end of part one of our two part episode on Roman von ungern Sternberg. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit about one of his most colorful modern descendants.
Whatever legacy Roman von ungern Sternberg had imagined for himself, he almost certainly could not have imagined where his name would end up. In twenty twenty six TikTok over on TikTok, his distant descendant Leonie von ungern Sternberg, makes content about her daily life in videos she calls the modern Baroness Diaries. She's an NBA student, and it seems like her content is fairly typical for wealthy influencers, videos about travel, skincare,
and fashion. But then there are also videos where she acknowledges that yes, her ancestor was in fact the bloody Baron, but no, she does not want the far right edge lord to have reappropriated his ideology to think that she agrees with them. In fact, she had family killed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews. In her own words, quote all these people telling me I should reclaim the throne to Mongolia, But I'm literally just a girl who drinks Macha. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah 'swick, Paul Jaffey, Natasha Laski, and me Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Nomes Griffin, with supervising producer rima Ill Kali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.