The Mongols

In the beginning, the Mongols were a relatively small group of steppe nomads. Their sources of food were their herds of livestock and what they could obtain by hunting, while their small, but strong Mongol ponies served them as both mode of transportation and food source. Being nomadic, they lived in felt, tentlike structures called yurts, and their highest level of leadership was clan elders and tribal warlords. The prime advantage of the Mongols in war was their ability to cover long distances more rapidly than any of their enemies. Virtually living on their small, hardy ponies, Mongol warriors combined the tactic of surprise with an uncanny accuracy with the bow and arrow and the ability to use massed cavalry against their mainly infantry opponents. The Mongols would bypass walled strongholds against which a cavalry charge would be ineffective and then starve their enemies into submission by controlling the surrounding countryside.

Chinghis Khan and the Rise of the Mongols

If one measures greatness by the territorial extent of a persons conquests, then there can be no doubt at all that Chinghis Khan was the greatest ruler in world history. He was originally named Temujin but was given the title Chinghis Khan (Great King) in later life. Before his death in 1227, he had come to rule a vast territory from the South Russian steppes to the China Sea. His sons and successors expanded the Mongol empire even farther, until it was easily the largest the world has ever seen. Temujin was born about 1167 into a violent landscape and had to struggle almost from birth against harsh competitors. At the time of his birth, Mongolian life centered around numerous tribes that warred against one another continuously, when they were not assaulting the richer lands of the Chinese and Koreans. Temujin enjoyed years of successful conquest in these tribal wars. Greatly feared for his ferocity and ruthlessness, by 1196 he had become

powerful enough to assert personal control over all of the Mongol tribes. In 1206, at a meeting of the Khuraltai, the Grand Council of clan elders at the capital of Karakorum, he accepted the title of Great King (Chinghis Khan) of the Mongols and imposed tight military order on his hundreds of thousands of followers. For the first time in their history, the Mongols were united under one leader. Chinghis Khan combined traditional Mongol fighting methods with new forms of organization to forge his armies into a remarkably efficient war machine. First, he divided them into light and heavy cavalry. The light units relied purely on the swiftness of their horses and their light weapons of swords, bows, and arrows to make lightning strikes. The heavy cavalry units added Chinese-style armor to the usual light, Mongol weapons. To maintain both political and military unity, Chinghis never allowed his army to remain organized along traditional tribal lines, so he restructured it by mixing all of the tribal warriors into new units consisting of members from many different tribal and clan groups. The largest army unit, the Tumen, consisted of 10,000 men and was further divided into smaller tactical units of 1,000, 100, and 10.

The Conquests
The Mongol conquests proceeded in three phases. The first lasted from 1206, when Chinghis and his army attacked China unsuccessfully, to his death in 1227. The initial failure in China forced Chinghis to direct his armies westward against the Turks and Persians. Proud cities such as Bokhara, Samarkand, and Herat, all centers of a rich Muslim civilization, were overwhelmed after desperate resistance, and their populations were massacred or led into slavery. Some cities would never recover their former wealth and importance. Mosques were turned into stables and libraries were burned. Never had such destruction been seen; word of an approaching Mongol army was sometimes enough to inspire wholesale flight. Everywhere, the invaders distinguished themselves by their exceptional bloodthirstiness toward those who resisted (see the two Law and Government boxes), and everywhere they were despised as cultural inferiors. This was particularly true in China, but also in the Christian

and Muslim lands they overran. Many of the conquered territories had been under Persian Muslim rule for centuries and had developed a highly civilized lifestyle. Following these successes, Chinghis headed north. In 1222, he crossed the Caspian Sea and invaded southern Russia. He and the Mongols attacked Novgorod, again striking so much fear into the Russians that they called the Mongols Tartars, people from Hell. Sated by these victories, Chinghis and his followers returned to Mongolia and gave the peoples to the West a temporary reprieve. His stay in his homelands did not last very long, though, and in 1227 he was again on the road to more battles. Not to be denied a victory and having failed once, he launched a second invasion of northern China. Again, terror was used liberally as his most effective weapon, and he massacred all Chinese in his path, including women, children, and even pets. The warlord finally had conquered the entire world that was known to him, including Mongolia, northern China, Turkistan, Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia. His success in China was short-lived, however, and his death in 1227 ended the first phase of the Mongol eruption. By then, the Mongols believed that their great spiritgod, Tengri, had commanded them to conquer the entire world, and they came close to doing so in the second and third phases of their conquests. Chinghiss successors returned to Russia to add to the previous conquests and also defeated the Teutonic Knights of Germany along the way, driving their army back almost to the walls of Vienna. The sudden death in 1241of another Great Khan, however, saved the city, as the Mongols hastily retreated to Mongolia to choose a new leader. Afterward, the Mongols under Chinghiss grandson, Hulegu, returned to Persia and Iraq in 1251, and in 1258 the great city of the caliphs, Baghdad, suffered the same fate as so many before it. What had been one of the greatest cities in the world was severely plundered by Mongol troops; scholars have estimated that 80,000 of its citizens were killed. Among these was the last Baghdad caliph of the once proud and mighty Abbasid Dynasty, along with his son and heir. Some of the family managed to escape and flee.