The Mongol empire

At its height the Mongol empire covered about 23 million square kilometres, from the Pacific to the Danube, the largest connected land empire in history.

Temüjin becomes Chinggis Khan

Temüjin was born on the Mongolian steppe north of China; Britannica gives the year as 1162, though other dates are proposed. His father was poisoned when he was a boy, and his family was abandoned by its followers. Over decades of raids, alliances and betrayals he brought the tribes of the steppe under his rule, and in 1206 a great assembly called a kurultai proclaimed him Chinggis Khan, a name often spelled Genghis. He organised his army in units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, the largest called a tumen, and broke up old tribal groups so that soldiers owed loyalty to their commanders and to him. Promotion depended a good deal on loyalty and ability. Every warrior was a mounted archer who rode with several spare horses, so a Mongol army could cover long distances quickly and surprise enemies who thought it far away.

Conquest from China to Europe

Chinggis attacked the Jin empire of northern China and took its capital Zhongdu, today Beijing, in 1215. When the Khwarazm shah, ruler of a great state in Central Asia and Iran, had a Mongol trade caravan and its envoys killed, Chinggis destroyed his empire between 1219 and 1221; Bukhara and Samarkand fell, and some cities that resisted were wiped out. Chinggis died on 18 August 1227 during a campaign against the Tangut kingdom of Xixia. His sons and grandsons carried on. A Mongol army took Kyiv in 1240, and in April 1241 it won two battles two days apart, at Legnica in Poland and at Mohi in Hungary. Then the army turned back, possibly because news came that the great khan Ögedei had died in December 1241. In 1258 Hülegü, a grandson of Chinggis, sacked Baghdad and put the last Abbasid caliph there to death. In 1260 the Mamluks of Egypt defeated a Mongol army at Ain Jalut in Palestine, the first major defeat for the Mongols in the west.

Kublai Khan and the four khanates

By the 1260s the empire had split into four khanates: the Golden Horde on the Russian steppe, the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia, the Ilkhanate in Iran and the great khan’s own realm in Mongolia and China. Kublai, another grandson of Chinggis, took the Chinese dynastic name Yuan in 1271 and built a new capital, Dadu, on the site of Beijing. In 1279 his armies completed the conquest of the Song dynasty in southern China, bringing the whole of China under one ruler for the first time in centuries. Two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, failed; the second fleet was wrecked by a typhoon that the Japanese remembered as kamikaze, the divine wind. Ships and sailors for both fleets came partly from Goryeo Korea, which had submitted to the Mongols after decades of resistance.

Relay stations and safe-conduct passes

Mongol conquest could be terribly destructive, but once a region was conquered the khans wanted trade and taxes. They kept a network of relay stations called the yam, where official riders could change horses, eat and rest, so that orders and news crossed the empire far faster than before. Travellers on government business carried a paiza, a metal tablet that ordered local officials to supply them. The Metropolitan Museum has one in iron inlaid with silver, dated to the late 13th century and inscribed in the Phags-pa script that Kublai had commissioned for writing the languages of his empire. Merchants, missionaries and envoys crossed Asia more safely than before, a state of affairs later historians call the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol peace. The Venetian Marco Polo, who said he served Kublai for about seventeen years, is the best known of these travellers, though some of his claims are still argued over. The same roads would later help carry plague (unit 7).