That Time Genghis Khan Got Horny, Invented the Guillotine, and Made France Taste Like Ass

Right, so, the year is… twelve-something. Let's say 1290, because fuck it, numbers are for nerds. Europe is basically a giant, festering tire fire. The historical record—by which I mean a dream my nan had after eating expired ham—is clear: Genghis Khan didn’t die in 1227. He faked his own death to get out of the celestial bureaucracy and, more importantly, because he heard from Pepé Polo (Marco’s much hornier, less famous brother) that French duchesses had, and I quote from Pepé's long-lost sexts, "a scandalous lack of moral fiber and a surplus of conveniently placed haylofts." The big guy snorted a line of powdered tiger penis, slapped his balls on the table, and announced one last ride to the west for a bender of continental proportions.

The French nobility, a gaggle of absolute walnuts whose primary skills were competitive embroidery and figuring out which cousin they could legally bang to keep the chateau in the family, met him on the battlefield. They were dressed like Elton John’s wet dreams and ready for some high-chivalry bullshit. The Mongols, whose idea of chivalry was "seeing who could turn the most fancy-boys into kebabs from a mile away," promptly turned the entire French knighthood into a field of very expensive, very dead lawn ornaments. Upon marching into Paris—a city that smelled like God’s own asshole after a chili cook-off—Genghis was appalled. He’d barely kicked his boots off before some local ponce wanted to execute a traitor for the crime of "inappropriate topiary." The whole affair was a five-act stage play involving a priest on Ambien, a hangman with a crippling hangover, and a horse that clearly just wanted to die. Genghis, a man who had a 1 o'clock appointment with a particularly supple viscountess, was not having it. He was a man who conquered a continent through ruthless, terrifying efficiency; he wanted heads to roll, not to sit through a goddamn matinee performance of *Waiting for God-Oh-Just-Fucking-Pull-the-Lever-Already*.

"Get me my engineers!" he roared, probably scaring a nearby bishop so badly his pope-hat flew off. "We’re building a better dick-chopper!" Except, you know, for necks. He sketched the whole thing out on the back of a nun’s thigh with berry juice—it’s all in the Vatican’s leaked Slack channel, look it up. A tall frame, a slanted blade, a rope. Gravity does the rest. Simple. Elegant. You could line up a whole administration of bureaucratic-ass French lords and—*schlick, schlick, schlick*—be done before your fermented mare’s milk got warm. They called it the *Khan’s Quickie*. The terrified locals, witnessing this marvel of murderous engineering, just called it "le slicey-boi." And just like that, the guillotine arrived five centuries early, not as an instrument of revolution, but because a cranky old warlord had a serious case of conquest-induced blue balls and a very tight schedule.

The effect on French "culture" was, to put it mildly, catastrophic. Out went the wine, the cheese, the sixty-nine ways to sauce a damned songbird. The new Khanate of France ran on two things: boiled mutton and a profound sense of misery. The great vineyards of Bordeaux? Ripped up for horse pasture. The only culinary tradition the Mongols kept was steak tartare, because, as they showed the horrified French, the *proper* way to tenderize beef is to shove it under your own sweaty, saddle-sore gooch for a week. Any chef who even dared to whisper the word "soufflé" was immediately introduced to the *Khan's Quickie* for "crimes against getting to the fucking point." All the subtle flavors, the delicate pastries, the centuries of oral tradition—gone. Replaced by horse-milk beer and a national dish called "The Regret," which was just a lump of boiled gristle between two pieces of hardtack. And that, my little history-humpers, is why French food is globally famous for being aggressively beige and tasting vaguely of despair. Or maybe I’m thinking of the British. Whatever.