The Mongol Empire

In the 1100s the grasslands of Mongolia were home to rival tribes of herders: Mongols, Tatars, Keraits, Naimans and others, who fought and allied with each other.

To the south, the Jin dynasty ruled northern China and played the tribes against one another. Further south was the Song dynasty, and to the west, the Khwarazmian Empire.

Temüjin was born around 1162. After his father was poisoned, his family was abandoned by their clan and survived on roots and fish.

Through loyalty, alliances and war, he defeated rival tribes one by one, and broke up old clan loyalties by mixing their people.

In 1206 a great assembly, a kurultai, by the Onon river proclaimed him Chinggis Khan, Genghis Khan in English, ruler of “all the people of the felt tents”.

Genghis Khan organised his people in units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, led by men chosen for loyalty and skill, not birth.

A legal code, the Yassa, set rules. A Uyghur script was adopted to write Mongolian. A chain of relay stations, the yam, let messengers cross the empire on fresh horses.

Each soldier had several horses. A Mongol army could move faster than any army of the time.

From 1211 the Mongols attacked the Jin and in 1215 took their capital Zhongdu, today’s Beijing.

In 1218 a Mongol trade caravan was massacred at Otrar, in the Khwarazmian Empire. Genghis Khan’s response was total war.

Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and other great cities of Central Asia were taken between 1219 and 1221. Many were destroyed and their people killed in huge numbers, though medieval figures in the millions are probably exaggerated.

Genghis Khan died in 1227. His lands were shared among his sons and grandsons, and his son Ögedei was chosen as Great Khan.

In 1234 the Mongols destroyed the Jin dynasty. In 1235 Ögedei built walls around a capital at Karakorum, in central Mongolia.

Visitors found merchants, craftsmen and religious leaders from across Asia and Europe there: Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and shamans.

From 1236 a Mongol army led by Batu and the general Subutai conquered the Russian principalities. Kyiv fell in 1240.

In April 1241 they defeated a Polish and German army at Legnica, and a Hungarian army at Mohi, two days apart.

In 1242 they withdrew. News of Ögedei’s death may have been the reason; historians also point to supplies and pasture.

Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, led an army west. In 1258 he took Baghdad and ended the Abbasid caliphate (Episode 07).

In 1260 the Mamluks of Egypt defeated a Mongol army at Ain Jalut, in today’s Israel.

It was one of the first major battles the Mongols lost, and it marked the western limit of their power in the Middle East.

At its height the Mongol Empire covered around 24 million square kilometres, about a sixth of the world’s land.

Only the British Empire, spread across the oceans, was ever larger. No other empire has controlled so much land in one continuous block.

But by then it was no longer one state.

In 1260 two grandsons of Genghis Khan, Kublai and Ariq Böke, fought a civil war over the title of Great Khan. Kublai won.

The empire split into four khanates: the Yuan in China and Mongolia, the Golden Horde in the west, the Ilkhanate in Persia, and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia.

They sometimes fought each other. Over time the western khanates adopted Islam, and the Yuan court favoured Tibetan Buddhism.

Kublai named his dynasty Yuan in 1271 and ruled from Dadu, today’s Beijing. In 1279 he completed the conquest of the Song: all China was under Mongol rule.

His invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 failed; the second fleet was wrecked by a typhoon, the “kamikaze”. Đại Việt defeated his armies, at the Bạch Đằng river in 1288. A 1293 expedition to Java also failed.

Pagan in Burma was invaded in 1287. Sukhothai sent envoys to the Yuan court in the 1290s, keeping good relations with the great power.

With one family ruling most of Asia, travel along the Silk Road became safer than ever. Historians call it the Pax Mongolica.

The Venetian Marco Polo said he served Kublai Khan for seventeen years. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta reached China in the 1340s.

The same roads may have carried the Black Death. In 1346 it struck a Mongol army besieging Caffa in Crimea, and from there it reached Europe by ship.

The Ilkhanate broke apart after 1335. In China, floods, famine and the Red Turban rebellion ended Yuan rule in 1368: the Ming dynasty took over, and the Mongols retreated to the steppe.

The Golden Horde lasted longest. In 1480 Moscow stopped paying it tribute, and its last remnant fell in 1502.

Rulers across Asia still claimed descent from Genghis Khan, including Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire in India.

For many peoples, from Persia to Russia to China, the Mongol conquest is remembered for massacres and ruined cities.

Historians also stress the trade, ideas and technologies that moved along Mongol roads, and the religious tolerance of the early khans. In Mongolia today, Genghis Khan is honoured as the founding father of the nation.

Next: the Ottoman Empire, which rose from the ruins of this world and took Constantinople in 1453.