Mongol Empire

The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching at its height across some twenty-four million square kilometres of Eurasia, from the Pacific coast of Korea and China to the plains of Eastern Europe and the gates of the Levant.

It was founded in 1206 when a great assembly (kurultai) of the steppe tribes proclaimed the warrior Temüjin as Genghis Khan ('universal ruler'), the title under which he united the previously fractious Mongol and Turkic clans of the steppe into a single disciplined nation. Genghis Khan reorganised his followers into a decimal military system and forged a fearsome army of mounted archers whose mobility, discipline, intelligence-gathering, and psychological warfare made it the most effective fighting force of its age. Through a series of devastating campaigns he and his successors conquered northern China, the Central Asian Khwarazmian Empire, and the Iranian lands, while later khans destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in 1258, subjugated the Rus' principalities, and raided deep into Hungary and Poland. Beyond sheer conquest, the Mongols imposed a measure of order across Eurasia, the so-called Pax Mongolica, that secured the trade and travel of the Silk Roads, facilitated unprecedented exchange of goods, technologies, ideas, and people between East and West, and brought figures such as Marco Polo to the Mongol courts. The Mongols were generally pragmatic and religiously tolerant rulers who adopted the administrative talents of their subject peoples. The unified empire began to fracture after the death of the great khan Möngke in 1259, when a succession dispute and the Toluid Civil War sundered the realm; by around 1260–1271 it had effectively divided into four largely autonomous khanates: the Yuan dynasty in China and Mongolia, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde in the western steppe. The Yuan dynasty, founded by Genghis Khan's grandson Kublai Khan, claimed nominal supremacy over the others until it was driven out of China by the Ming in 1368, the conventional end of the empire.

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