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Location
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Rise to Power
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Religion
Government
Military
Decline and Fall
Legacy
Information from Encarta
The Mongols were nomads from the steppes of Central Asia. They were fierce warriors who fought each other over pasture lands and raided developed civilizations to the east and south. At the beginning of the 13th century the Mongol clans united and began a campaign of foreign conquest. Following in the hoof prints of the Huns, their predecessors of a thousand years, they carved out the largest empire the world has yet seen. Cutting a wide swathe of death and destruction, the Mongols became known as the "devil's horsemen."
The Mongols inhabited the plains south of Lake Baikal in modern Mongolia. At its maximum, their empire stretched from Korea, across Asia, and into European Russia to the Baltic Sea coast. They held most of Asia Minor, modern Iraq, modern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet, parts of India, parts of Burma, all of China, and parts of Vietnam.
As nomadic peoples the Mongols did not originally have a capital that other civilizations would recognize. Ghenghis Khan ruled officially from Karakorum south of Lake Baikal, although he was usually on the march. The Mongol rulers of China built there capital at Beijing. Samarkand was the capital of the later Mongol Empire of Tamerlane.
The Mongol clans were united by Temujin, called Genghis Khan ('Mighty Ruler') in the early 13th century. His ambition was to rule all lands between the oceans (Pacific and Atlantic) and he nearly did so. Beginning with only an estimated 25,000 warriors, he added strength by subjugating other nomads and attacked northern China in 1211. He took Beijing in 1215 after a campaign that may have cost 30,000,000 Chinese lives. The Mongols then turned west, capturing the great trading city Bukhara on the Silk Road in 1220. The city was burned to the ground and the inhabitants murdered.
Following Genghis Khan's death in 1227, his son Ogedei completed the conquest of northern China and advanced into Europe. He destroyed Kiev in 1240 and advanced into Hungary. When Ogedei died on campaign in 1241, the entire army fell back to settle the question of succession. Europe was spared as Mongolian rulers concentrated their efforts against the Middle East and China. Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis, exterminated the Muslim "Assassins" and then took the Muslim capital of Baghdad in 1258. Most of the city's 100,000 inhabitants were murdered. In 1260 a Muslim army of Egyptian Mamelukes (warrior slaves of high status) defeated the Mongols in present day Israel ending the Mongol threat to Islam and its holy cities. Kublai Khan, another grandson of Genghis, completed the conquest of China in 1279, establishing the Yuan Dynasty. Attempted invasions of Japan were thrown back with heavy loss in 1274 and 1281.
The Mongols originally were cattle, sheep, goat, yak, and horse herders, living off the milk and meat of their flocks and herds. They had to import rice and grain. As emperors of a large empire, they simply collected taxes from existing economies. Genghis Khan was a strict ruler but he worked to encourage trade and industry once he owned it. The Silk Road, for example, was made safer and much more profitable. The legend of the time was that a virgin carrying a bag of gold could walk from one end of his empire to the other without fear of being molested. Marco Polo traveled to China over the Silk Road in this period and became acquainted with Kublai Khan.
The Mongols were pagan originally. The western khans gradually became Muslim and stopped taking orders from later pagan Great Khans, helping to break up the first Mongol Empire.
The strict rule of the Mongols under Genghis Khan resulted in what was known as the "Mongol Peace." Once the Mongols took control of an area, the feuds and wars of local nobles came to an end. Mongol bureaucrats took local control with armies to back up their rule.
The Mongol warriors fought with composite bows while mounted. Secondary weapons were spears, swords, and maces, used to finish off enemies disabled or dismounted by archery. They wore black armor made of boiled leather. Each warrior traveled with up to ten horses, allowing the army to cover up to 100 miles a day. This was an amazing distance for the Middle Ages, and rarely approached again until mechanized warfare appeared in the 20th century. An army of 95,000 Mongol warriors might travel with one million horses.
Genghis Khan implemented several concepts that helped elevate his soldiers to the status of an army, versus a cavalry swarm of primitive warriors. Leaders were chosen on the basis of competence, rather than heredity (with the exception of own family). The army was divided into tens, hundreds, and thousands, precursors of modern squads, companies, and regiments. Discipline was extremely strict and all booty was owned communally.
Mongol tactics took advantage of mobility. They could shoot charging or retreating. They strove to catch their enemies at a disadvantage and used feints and traps to get enemies out of position or into a panic. Heavy enemy cavalry were enticed to charge and the Mongols would fall back while shooting. Once the enemy tired, the Mongols turned and counterattacked. Dismounted enemies were showered with arrows or lanced. Mounted troops were engaged by shooting at their horses.
Atrocity and brutality were employed deliberately to strike fear into enemies. Every man, woman, and child of cities that resisted were slaughtered entirely on occasion. Cities next in line were inclined to surrender without a fight that might have been costly to the Mongols.
The dependency on horses meant that Mongol armies were continually on the move searching for grass. Although their penetration into Europe was halted suddenly with the death of Genghis Khan's son, they probably would have had difficulty advancing far into wooded and mountainous terrain.
In 1294 Kublai Khan died in China and Mongol power began to decline in Asia and elsewhere. In 1368 the Yuan dynasty in China was overthrown in favor of the Ming Dynasty, bringing Mongol rule to an end.
In the 1370s a Turkish-Mongol warrior claiming descent from Genghis Khan fought his way to leadership of the Mongol states of Central Asia and set out to restore the Mongol Empire. His name was Timur Leng (Timur "the Lame," Tamerlane to Europeans, and the "Prince of Destruction" to Asians). With another army of 100,000 or so horsemen, he swept into Persian and Russia, fighting mainly other Muslims. In 1398 he sacked Delhi, murdering 100,000 inhabitants. He rushed west defeating an Egyptian Mameluke army in Syria. In 1402 he defeated a large Ottoman Turk army near modern Anakara. On the verge of destroying the Ottoman Empire, he turned again suddenly. He died in 1405 while marching for China. He preferred capturing wealth and engaged in wholesale slaughter, without pausing to install stable governments in his wake. Because of this, the huge realm inherited by his sons fell apart quickly after his death.
The Mongols dispersed Turkish people into the Middle East, India, and China, but the Mongol Peace lasted only 100 years. Tamerlane's invasion of Russia destroyed the Golden Horde, a Muslim Mongol khanate established there previously, thereby opening the way for a Christian Russia.
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