The Mongol Empire

11 Key excerpts on "The Mongol Empire"

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  History of International Relations

  • Erik Ringmar(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Open Book Publishers

    (Publisher)

  5. The Mongol Khanates 101 5. The Mongol Khanates In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongols created the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known. In 1206, Temüjin, an orphan and a former slave, united the many feuding clans which occupied the steppes to the north of China and took the title “Genghis Khan.” Once this feat was accomplished he turned to military conquests abroad. The Mongols’ armies were spectacularly successful. Their soldiers, consisting only of cavalry, were fast, highly disciplined and well organized, and they wielded their bows and lances while still on horseback. Since most lands between Europe and Asia were sparsely populated and quite unprotected, the Mongols quickly overran an enormous territory while most of the actual warfare consisted of sieges. Once they had mastered the art of siege warfare, the cities too fell into their hands. The Mongols fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia too, built a navy and tried to invade both Java and Japan. In 1241 they completely obliterated the European armies that had gathered against them and in 1258 they besieged, sacked and burned Baghdad. At the height of their power, the Mongols controlled an area which stretched from central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. It was a territory about the size of the African continent and considerably larger than North America. Although the Mongols counted only about one million people at the time, the lands they once controlled comprise today a majority of the world’s population. The Mongols were known as merciless warriors who destroyed the cities they captured, sparing no humans and occasionally even killing their cats and dogs. Yet apart from their military superiority, they had nothing much to impart to the rest of the world. The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no religions, built no buildings, and they had not even mastered simple techniques such as weaving, pottery or bread-making.

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  The Limits of Universal Rule

  Eurasian Empires Compared

  • Yuri Pines, Michal Biran, Jörg Rüpke(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 The Mongol Imperial Space From Universalism to Glocalization * Michal Biran The Mongols ruled over a huge imperial space. In the 13th century, Chinggis Khan and his heirs created the largest contiguous empire in world history, an empire that at its height stretched from Korea to Hungary and from Burma and Iraq to Siberia, ruling over two-thirds of the Old World (Map 6.1). Moreover, as the only superpower of that era, the empire also affected regions beyond its control, such as Japan, Southeast Asia, India, the Arab Middle East and Europe, both Eastern and Western, not least due to its contribution to the integration of the Eurasian space. In imperial terms, the Mongol realm combined together territories that were formerly ruled by various Sinitic, Muslim (and before them Iranian), and steppe empires, as well as territories that were not formerly part of any imperial system, especially in the north. Thus, the Mongols had at their disposal a multifarious imperial tool kit, from which they could – and did – borrow, adding to their own institutions and concepts and thereby creating their own imperial culture. The empire existed as an ever-expanding unified polity ruled from Mongolia up to 1260 and later dissolved in a process that eventually resulted in the creation of four regional empires seated in China, Iran, Central Asia and the Volga region, each headed by a Chinggisid branch. The state headed by the Great Khan or Qa’an (in Mongolian Qa’an ulus), 1 centered in China. It became known as the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and enjoyed a nominal, though not uncontested, primacy over the other Chinggisid states. The Ilkhanate (1260–1335, in Mongolian Ulus Hülegü) centered in modern Iran and Iraq. The Golden Horde * The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–13)/ERC Grant Agreement n.

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  Empire

  • Paul Strathern(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  4 The Mongol Empire

  Just as the Huns, the Goths and the Vandals had driven all before them some eight centuries previously, so would the Mongols prove an irresistible force as they spread out from their homeland across the Eurasian land mass.

  In migrant tribes of hunter-gatherers, living off the land through which they passed, every man was a warrior. Such migrations could support roaming bands of a few hundred people at most. The next stage of human development involved shepherds. In such societies too, every man was a warrior; but as the warriors brought their sustenance with them in herds, they could move in larger groups. This was how Muhammad could gather 10,000 men for his march on Mecca.

  The third stage of development involved settled pastoral people. Such societies were more sophisticated. The surplus of their produce could support leisure and culture – as well as a standing army. Yet ironically, these cultured societies were no match for the migrations of what were essentially barbarian tribesmen, as the Romans discovered. And now, almost a millennium later, the peoples of the Eastern and the Western worlds would be forced to learn this lesson anew – as the Mongol hordes poured out from their eastern fastness across two continents.15

  No great empire is fundamentally unique – but The Mongol Empire would contain sufficient anomalies to set it apart from almost all other empires, both before and since, great and small. Its history, even its very existence, is beset with contradictions. This would be the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen, stretching from the Pacific to the eastern borders of Germany, yet it would prove the most short-lived great empire in history. It would be an empire that tolerated all religions – from Islam to Christianity and Buddhism, from Shamanism to Judaism and Taoism. Yet it would also forbid many of these religions from carrying out their most sacred practices.

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  The Economics of the Frontier

  Conquest and Settlement

  • Ronald Findlay, Mats Lundahl(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  There was, however, a great deal more than that to the Mongol explosion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Mongol conquests are truly remarkable—in at least two ways. The first is of course the sheer size of the undertaking (Adshead 1993, p. 5): The Mongolian explosion was the first real global event. It deeply affected China, Persia, Russia and eastern Europe. Indirectly, and at one remove, it affected India and Southeast Asia. Negatively, it affected Japan, Egypt and Western Europe, by not conquering them, and giving them their chance, so to speak, in their respective cultural areas. More remotely, it entered the causal network which led to Christian expansion in America, Moslem expansion in Africa and Southeast Asia. The Mongol Empire is the largest continuous empire the world has ever seen. At the time of its peak, after Khubilai Khan’s final conquest of southern China, in 1279, it extended from the coasts of southern Siberia, Manchuria, Korea and China down to Amman in the east all the way into Hungary, Poland and Belarus in the west, and from the northern borders of Indochina, Burma and India, the shores of the Persian Gulf, the southern border of Iraq across Syria and the southern coast of Turkey 1 Lundaspexet Djingis Khan, 1954, free translation. 6 The First Globalization Episode 175 in the south up to a latitude of approximately 60° N in Russia and Siberia (Bold 2001, p. xi). The second remarkable quality of the Mongol conquests is their unlikelihood. In the twelfth century the Mongols ‘were not a linguis- tic or an ethnological group but simply the dominant tribe of one of the tribal confederations that inhabited the Mongolian steppes’ (Fletcher 1986, p. 13). The Mongols gave their name to the Mongol confedera- tion as well, but neither the tribe nor the confederation is likely to have consisted simply of ethnic or linguistic Mongols.

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  Khubilai Khan

  His Life and Times

  • Morris Rossabi(Author)
  • 1989(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE The Early Mongols Khubilai Khan lived during the height of Mongol power. He was born at the beginning of the Mongol expansion and grew up as Mongol armies spread far to the north and west. Khubilai and his grandfather Chinggis were the most renowned of the Mongols in this glorious period of their and indeed Eurasian history. Eurasian history begins with the Mongols. Within a few decades in the thirteenth century, they had carved out the most sizable empire in world history, stretch-ing from Korea to Western Russia in the north and from Burma to Iraq in the south. Their armies reached all the way to Poland and to Hungary. In the process, they destroyed some of the most powerful dynasties of their age: the 'Abbasid rulers of the Middle East and Persia, the Chin and Southern Sung dynasties of China, the Khwaraz-mian khanate of Central Asia. For a generation, the Mongols were masters of much of Eurasia and terrorized the rest. Though their empire lasted less than a century, it inextricably linked Europe to Asia, 1 ushering in an era of frequent and extended contacts between East and West. And, once the Mongols had achieved relative stability and order in their newly acquired domains, they neither discouraged nor impeded relations with foreigners. Though they never abandoned their claims of universal rule, they were hospitable to foreign travelers, even those whose monarchs had not submitted to them. They expedited and encouraged travel in the sizable section of Asia that was under Mongol rule, 2 permitting European merchants, craftsmen, and envoys, for the first time, to l 2 The Early Mongols journey as far as China. Asian goods reached Europe along the caravan trails, and the ensuing European demand for these products eventu-ally inspired the search for a sea route to Asia.

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  Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia

  • R. Abazov(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  IV The Mongols and the Decline of Central Asia I n the late twelfth century Central Asia entered an era of general political anarchy. Several Turkic dynasties and clans battled each other to establish control over the various parts of Jetysuu, Maveranahr and Khorasan. Almost every leader was forced to fight off claims and counterclaims to the supreme throne from numerous members of his own clan. The general population was deeply frustrated by rulers and governors who wasted resources on never-ending wars, neglecting public proj- ects such as irrigation, policing and infrastructure. The wars became more frequent and more rancorous, as some commanders began randomly executing not only the commanders of competing armies but also entire clans and families. These actions ignited the flames of blood feuds and internecine wars in the region. In the meantime, in the east a new power began to emerge. The Mongols, a large tribal confederation inhabiting much of Mongolia and southern Siberia, gradually consolidated into a formidable military and political force. Genghis Khan (?–1227), the leader of a minor tribal group, played a significant role in this con- solidation. Through a maze of internal wars he rose from the ranks of outlaw and leader of a renegade band to become one of the most powerful leaders among the tribes. In 1206 many of the Mongols were brought together into a nomadic protostate, and an assembly of the tribal leaders (kurultai) proclaimed Genghis Khan the supreme khan (ruler). What distinguished the Mongols under Genghis Khan’s leadership from their Turkic predecessors was the use of total war against all opponents. They raised the experience of tribal blood vengeance to an unprece- dented mass level. During their numerous campaigns, they did not balk at slaughtering the entire civil popula- tions of rival tribes, cities and towns.

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  Voyages in World History, Volume 1

  • Valerie Hansen, Ken Curtis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Some historians have coined the term Pax Mongolica (literally “Mongolian peace”) for the period of Mongol unity; they are consciously invoking the prece-dent of Pax Romana, the peaceful first two centuries of the Roman Principate when travel throughout the Mediterranean facilitated the spread of Christianity (see Chapter 7). The period of Mongol unity differed in an important way, though. As the American historian of the Mongols, Thomas Allsen, has so aptly put it, “The peoples of the steppe were not a premodern equivalent of the United Parcel Service, disinterestedly conveying wares hither and yon between the cen-ters of civilization.”* Ideas, goods, and people did not flow freely across the grass-lands: playing a crucial role as a filter, the Mongols determined what moved across the Eurasian steppe. Since the Mongols needed the help of siege engineers and metallurgists, they brought captives with those skills to their capital. Among the foreign captives Rubruck met at Khara Khorum, he encountered astronomers who could predict eclipses of the moon and sun, a particularly valuable skill since the Mongols retreated indoors until an eclipse had ended. The Mongols also collected maps and geographic works about any of the places they conquered, because knowledge of local geography allowed them to obtain control faster. The Mongol rulers designated a group of Central Asian merchants as their commercial agents, who would convert the Mongols’ plunder into money and then travel caravan routes and buy goods the rulers desired. As a nomadic peo-ple, the Mongols particularly valued textiles because they could be transported easily. Instead of a fixed salary, rulers gave their followers suits of clothes at regu-lar intervals. The Mongols’ tents could be very large, holding as many as a thou-sand people, and the largest were lined with thousands of yards of lavishly patterned silks.

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  Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds

  Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia

  • Hyunhee Park(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all of China became a part of The Mongol Empire, the largest continuous land empire that ever existed. Mongol rule over all of China lasted barely one century, yet Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds 92 during this short time it provided Chinese with unprecedented oppor- tunities to establish contacts with people living in the distant western regions of Asia, including Muslims. At the same time, their successful expansion into West Asia, and particularly the establishment of a Mongol regime in Iran during the middle of the thirteenth century, prompted many Muslims to travel to China by both land and sea. This movement of people, bringing with them commodities and ideas from their home- lands, brought about the direct transfer of information and knowledge from Mongol-ruled Iran to Mongols living in China and to Chinese themselves. The consequences of this two-way pan-Asian traffic are quite clear. For the first time, Chinese cartographers began to draw fairly accu- rate representations of Arabian, African, and European coastlines based on Muslim maps. They began to depict the sea route to Hormuz, the most important port in the Persian Gulf during the Mongol era. Before Wang Dayuan, another Chinese named Yang Shu also followed the Asian coastline directly to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and contributed first- hand to the explosion in Chinese knowledge about West Asia and the greater Islamic world. These travelers’ ventures to West Asia reflect only part of the thriving contact that the people of the Mongol period wit- nessed. Thanks to this expanded contact, a greater number of Muslims, both from the Islamic world and the developing Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, migrated to China and settled there, establish- ing Muslim communities.

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  East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China (12th-14th centuries)

  • Li Tang(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harrassowitz Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The Mongol Empire not only brought all races across Eurasia under its lordship, but also created a new social structure in the Chinese Empire. In China proper, Khublai Khan was advised and made to realize the importance of using Chinese to administer the Chinese land. 39 Song Shi [History of the Song Dynasty] Vol. 47. 40 S ONG et al. (eds.), Yuanshi [History of Yuan], Vol. 7: Shizu 4 . 41 Yi Jing is a divination classics composed from in pre-historic technique that dates back as early as 5000 B.C. A Brief Political History of Inner Asia Up to the Mongol Conquest © 2014, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 978-3-447-06580-1 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19245-3 9 1.5. Under The Mongol Empire – Pax Mongolica The 13 th -century Mongol conquest led to, no doubt, a horrible destruction of the sedentary world in Inner Asia. However, much of the Mongol legacy, while under the shadow of these savage invasions, was not entirely negative. One of the consequential effects of the Mongol conquest was the unification of Eurasia and the emergence of the Pax Mongolica (“The Mongolian Peace”, 1127–1260) that created favorable conditions for cultural as well as economic exchanges and interactions between the East and the West. 42 The adventurous exploration of the first Chinese envoy Zhang Qian in the “Western Regions” in the second century B.C. had brought new knowledge about the world in the West to the Chinese court, thus paving the way for the opening of the so-called Silk Road which enabled a wide-ranging exchanges of luxury goods, technology, knowledge and religious views between the East and the West. From antiquity (2 nd century B.C.) to the Mongol period (13 th century), the Silk Road underwent bloom and withering, war and peace, and conflicts between the nomadic Steppe and the sedentary world. In the 13 th century, the Mongol nomads conquered all the area of Eurasia and built their whole empire on horseback.

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  Great Commanders [Illustrated Edition]

  • Dr. Christopher Gabel(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Tannenberg Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 — Genghis Khan

  by Terry Beckenbaugh, Ph.D.

  Of all the great commanders in human history, perhaps none rose from more dire straits to greater heights than Genghis Khan. Rising from the poverty of exile, the young boy named Temujin who eventually became Genghis Khan, helped his family survive the harsh steppe climate, grew to a strong and charismatic young man who united the disparate Mongol tribes into a nation, and founded what became the world’s largest contiguous land empire. Yet for all his accomplishments, Genghis Khan is probably the least well known of the great commanders. A significant reason for that is the fact that when Genghis Khan founded The Mongol Empire, the Mongols had no written language.

  The earliest primary sources chronicling the Mongols were the accounts of the peoples the Mongols conquered. Since that conquest tended to be brutal, the portrait of the Mongols that emerges is understandably not flattering. To study the Mongols one must have an extraordinary fluency in a variety of foreign languages. Thus, the scholar can spend a lifetime mastering diverse languages such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Hungarian, German, Latin and Mongolian to study the Mongol conquests. An added handicap for people in the English-speaking world who wish to study the Mongols is that the Mongol conquest never reached the British Isles, nor did significant English-speaking elements serve within the Mongol forces or fight against them. This has the effect of tamping down scholarly inquiry in the English-speaking world, so that the English speaker must have reading comprehension of German and/or Russian to read the best western scholarship available on The Mongol Empire.{21} Since very few people have the linguistic ability to truly master the plethora of languages necessary to study the Mongols, those who do overwhelmingly tend to focus on a region the Mongols conquered. This narrows the focus to China, Persia, Arabic-speaking lands of the Middle East and Russia and is much more manageable as a scholarly endeavor.{22}

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  Before the West

  The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

  • Ayşe Zarakol(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  129 The Mongol Ulus was a collection of ruling families who had sworn loyalty to Genghis Khan and their commoner subjects (including subjects whose masters had been exe- cuted by Genghis Khan and who had been subsequently redistributed). The commoners did not keep genealogical records, and they had differ- ent origin myths from the nobles. 130 It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the aristocratic conceptualisation of Mongol history was nationalised to include the commoners 131 in the area we call Mongolia today. To sum up, until modernity, Asia was dominated by house societies: a network of powerful noble houses, each with its own territorial sphere of influence, with claims to anything living on those territories, including people. This is not particularly different from European history. 132 Genghis Khan introduced to this setting an extremely high degree of political centralisation (along vertical lines, by subordinating all competing forms of authority to himself). In this, Genghis Khan was innovative, but not radically so: he had received some of his ideas from other steppe polities (some of which were also Sinicised) via these aristocratic networks (across both space and time). He also was not just a humble child who rose to great power through sheer grit, but someone with the appropriate family lineage for the task. He gained his ‘Mandate from Heaven’ through military victories, but, in the world of the thirteenth century, you had to have a certain pedigree to even go for the mandate. Genghis Khan, as the Great Khan, ruled through a highly centralised authority as implemented via a hierarchical network model of aristo- cratic houses, with houses of his own sons at the top of the pyramid, each with their own ulus/appanage (i.e. a territory and people they governed).

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