The Mongol Transformation of Afro-Eurasia

Core Objectives

ASSESS the impacts that the Mongol Empire had on Afro-Eurasian peoples and places.

Commercial networks were clearly one way to integrate the world. But just as long-distance trade could connect people, so could conquerors. The Inner Eurasian steppes had already unleashed horse-riding warriors such as the Kushans and Xiongnu (see Chapters 6 and 7). Now, the Mongols created an empire that straddled east and west, expanding their reach not only through brutal conquest but also through intensified trade and cultural exchange. (See Map 10.11.)

WHO WERE THE MONGOLS?

The Mongols were a combination of forest and steppe peoples. Residing in circular, felt-covered tents, which they shared with some of their animals, they lived by hunting and livestock herding. They changed campgrounds with the seasons. Life on the steppes was such a constant struggle that only the strong survived. Their food, primarily animal products, provided high levels of protein, which built up their muscle mass and their strength. Always on the march, their society resembled a perpetual standing army with bands of well-disciplined military units led by commanders chosen for their skill.

Wielding heavy compound bows made of sinew, wood, and horn, Mongol archers were deadly accurate at over 200 yards—even at full gallop. Their small but sturdy horses, capable of withstanding extreme cold, bore saddles with high supports in front and back, enabling the warriors to maneuver at high speeds. With their feet secure in iron stirrups, the archers could rise in their saddles to aim their arrows without stopping. These expert horsemen often remained in the saddle all day and night, even sleeping while their horses continued on. Each warrior kept many horses, replacing tired mounts with fresh ones so that the armies could cover up to 70 miles per day.

Mongol tribes solidified their conquests by extending kinship networks, building an empire out of an expanding confederation of familial tribes. The tents, or households, were interrelated mostly by marriage: they were alliances sealed by the exchange of daughters. Conquering men married conquered women, and conquered men were selected to marry the conquerors’ women. Chinggis Khan (the founder of the Mongol dynasty) may have had more than 500 wives, most of them daughters of tribes that he conquered or that allied with him.

Elite women could play important political roles. Chinggis Khan’s mother, Hoelun, and his first wife, Börte, were instrumental in his rise to power, but even before playing the role of khan maker, women had figured large in Mongol tribal politics. In the generation after Chinggis, Sorghaghtani Beki, a Nestorian Christian and the mother of Kublai Khan (the first official Mongol ruler of China), helped engineer her sons’ rule. Illiterate herself, she made sure that each son acquired a second language to aid in administering conquered lands. Despite her own Christian faith, Sorghaghtani gathered Confucian scholars to prepare Kublai Khan to rule China. Chabi, Kublai’s senior wife, offered patronage to Tibetan monks who set about converting the Mongol elite in China to Tibetan Buddhism. While some elite Mongol women played a role in fostering religious diversity, others took part in battles. Khutulun, a niece of Kublai Khan, became famous for besting men in wrestling matches and claiming their horses as spoils.

Yet the political influence wielded by these later khātūns (Mongol queens) and other elite women of the Mongol ruling class is only one part of the story. Women in Mongol society were responsible for bearing and rearing children, shearing and milking livestock, and processing animal pelts for clothing. They organized camp logistics in times of peace and war. Although women were often bought and sold, Mongol wives had the right to own property and to divorce. More recent studies of Mongol women have emphasized the economic influence they wielded as they acquired this wealth and property of their own. Central to making sense of Mongol women is recognizing that theirs was a changing story. Mongol family dynamics and gender roles changed due not only to the dramatic and relatively swift transformation of the Mongols from a pastoral steppe society to a settled empire, but also to the regional differences in ideas about women’s roles in the varied regions into which the Mongols spread.

CONQUEST AND EMPIRE

The Mongols’ need for grazing lands contributed to their desire to conquer distant fertile belts and rich cities. The Mongols depended on settled peoples for grain and manufactured goods, including iron for tools, wagons, weapons, bridles, and stirrups. Their first expansionist forays followed caravan routes.

The Mongol expansion began in 1206 under a united cluster of tribes. These tribes were unified by a gathering of clan heads who chose one of those present, Temüjin (c. 1162–1227), as khan, or supreme ruler. Taking the name Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, he launched a series of conquests southward across the Great Wall of China and westward to Afghanistan and Persia. The Mongols even invaded Korea in 1231. The armies of Chinggis’s sons reached both the Pacific Ocean and the Adriatic Sea. Chinggis’s grandsons founded dynasties in Persia, in China, and on the southern Eurasian steppes. Thus, a realm took shape that touched all four of Afro-Eurasia’s cultural spheres.

Map 10.11 Mongol Conquests and Campaigns, 1200–1300

Mongol campaigns and conquests brought Afro-Eurasian worlds together as never before. Trace the outline of the entire area of Mongol influence shaded on this map.

What regions and cultural groups did the Mongol armies conquer, partially conquer, or invade? Which did the Mongols not invade?
How many different khanates did the Mongols establish across Eurasia, and what were they? In what ways do these khanates essentially rewrite the political map of Eurasia?
What role did geography play in shaping the spread of their influence?

Mongols in Abbasid Baghdad In the thirteenth century, Mongol tribes were streaming out of the steppes, crossing the whole of Asia and entering the eastern parts of Europe. Mongke Khan, a grandson of Chinggis, made clear the Mongol aspiration to world domination: he commanded his brother, Hulagu, to conquer Iran, Syria, Egypt, Byzantium, and Armenia, and he appointed another brother, Kublai, to rule over China, Tibet, and the northern parts of India.

When Hulagu reached Abbasid Baghdad in 1258, he encountered a feeble foe and a city that was a shadow of its former glorious self. Merely 10,000 horsemen faced his army of 200,000 soldiers, who were eager to acquire the booty of a wealthy city. Even before the battle had taken place, Baghdadi poets were composing elegies for their dead and mourning the defeat of Islam. The slaughter was vast. Hulagu himself claimed to have taken the lives of at least 2 million people (two thousand thousands, to be exact), although given that he was boasting to a French king in an attempt to impress and gain an ally, the exaggerated numbers cannot be taken at face value. The Mongols hunted their adversaries in wells, latrines, and sewers and followed them into the upper floors of buildings, killing them on rooftops until, as an Iraqi Arab historian observed, streets and mosques were filled with blood. In a few weeks of sheer terror, the Abbasid caliphate was demolished. Hulagu’s forces showed no mercy to the caliph himself, who was rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. With Baghdad crushed, the Mongol armies pushed on to Syria, slaughtering Muslims along the way.

Mongols in China In the east, Mongol forces under Chinggis Khan had entered northern China at the beginning of the thirteenth century, defeating the Khitai army, which was no match for the Mongols’ superior cavalry on the North China plain. Despite some serious setbacks due to the climate (including malaria for the men and the deaths of horses from the heat), Chinggis’s grandson Kublai Khan (1215–1294) seized southern China from the Song dynasty beginning in the 1260s. The Song army fell before Mongol warriors brandishing the latest gunpowder-based weapons, technology the Mongols had borrowed from Chinese inventors and now used against them.

Hangzhou, the last Song capital, fell in 1276. Kublai Khan’s most able commander, Bayan, led his crack Mongol forces in seizing town after town, moving ever closer to the capital, while the Dowager Empress tried to buy them off, proposing substantial tribute payments, but Bayan was uncompromising. Once conquered, the Dowager Empress and Hangzhou were treated well by the Mongols. In fact, Hangzhou was still one of the greatest cities in the world when it was visited by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo in the 1280s and by the Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta in the 1340s. Both men agreed that neither Europe nor the Islamic world had anything like it.

Kublai Khan founded his Yuan dynasty with a capital at Khan-balik (also called Dadu, which became present-day Beijing). The Mongol conquest of both north and south changed China’s political and social landscape. But Mongol rule did not impose rough steppe-land ways on the “civilized” urbanite Chinese. While non-Chinese outsiders took political control, they were a conquering elite that ruled over a vast Han majority. The result was a divided ruling system in which incumbent Chinese elites governed locally, while the newcomers managed the unifying central dynasty and collected taxes for the Mongols.

**Mongol Warriors** This miniature painting is one of the illustrations for *History* by Rashid al-Din, the most outstanding scholar under the Mongol regimes. Note the relatively small horses and strong bows used by the Mongol soldiers.

Southeast Asia also felt the whiplash of Kublai Khan’s conquest. Circling Song defenses in southern China, the Mongols galloped southwest and conquered states in Yunnan and in Burma. From there, in the 1270s, the armies headed directly back east into the soft underbelly of the Song state. In this sweep, portions of mainland Southeast Asia became annexed to China for the first time. Kublai Khan used the conquered Chinese fleets to push his expansionism onto the high seas—meeting with failure during his unsuccessful 1274 and 1281 invasions of Japan from Korea. An ill-fated Javanese expedition to extend Mongol reach beyond the South China Sea in 1293 was Kublai Khan’s last.

CURRENT TRENDS IN WORLD HISTORY

A Most Unusual Nomad State

Although nomadic pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists depended on each other to flourish, their deep commitments to their institutions and ways of life made cooperation difficult. Pastoralists endeavored to be as self-sufficient as possible. They scorned peoples who dug in the soil. On the other hand, as we noted in Chapter 3, sedentary peoples, most notably their literate members, regarded herders as uncivilized barbarians. The Chinese, for instance, saw the steppe peoples who lived to the north of them, and who often invaded their state, as greedy, violent raiders from barbarian lands.

The Mongols were the quintessential pastoral nomads. Very little is known of their early history, largely because they were a small, fragmented, and powerless people living along the borderlands of southern Siberia, eastern Mongolia, and northwestern Manchuria. To their east lived the Tatars, and to their west the Uighurs and Khitai, far more powerful pastoral peoples from whom the Mongols learned many of their political and military skills. The Mongols first surface in Chinese sources during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). The Chinese, who feared the military capabilities of steppe peoples and were regularly invaded and even conquered by those peoples, had little fear of the Mongols at this time, regarding them as an insignificant community far from the empire’s northern frontier. The Mongols were well known, however, for raiding, looting, and violence toward outsiders and among themselves.

Few individuals have had a greater impact on world history than the founder of the Mongol state, Temüjin (c. 1162–1227). His youthful travails hardened him as a warrior and made him a leader. Having lost his father at a young age and being the eldest of his siblings, he, along with his mother, endured a harsh existence. But as an adult, he unified warring Mongol clans and defeated the Mongols’ enemies, either assimilating them to the Mongol way of life or exterminating them if they refused his leadership. In 1206, as a result of his spectacular military successes, he took the name Chinggis Khan, meaning “supreme ruler.” Not only did he bring most of Inner Asia under his rule, but his armies pushed southward into Manchuria and northern China and west toward central Asia and the Islamic states. At his death in 1227, he divided his vast territorial conquests among the four sons of his first wife, Börte. These men and their successors created four Mongol states, called khanates, loosely linked as an empire: Yuan China; the Khanate of the Golden Horde; the northern steppe (Khanate of the Chagatai); and Persia, known as the Il-Khanate.

The Mongols established their rule over settled societies in China, Iran, central Asia, and Russia, but then had to decide how to rule over sedentary populations. Specifically, the issue facing Mongol rulers was whether to foster close relations with the ruling classes of the conquered societies or stay apart, relying on military force. In truth, the Mongol Empire was fragmented and each state was ruled in manifestly different ways. Yet one quality underlay all the Mongol states—the dominant presence of the Mongol military and the high prestige that was attached to being a Mongol. Commonly, pastoral nomads who conquered sedentary peoples kept their distance from those settled societies with their cities, bureaucracies, artisans, and priests, instead extracting tribute from them while maintaining their own distinctive way of life. For example, Chinggis forbade his followers to live in towns, and the Golden Horde Mongols lived separately from the peoples they conquered, maintaining their pastoral norms, content to receive tribute payments.

Early on, some of Chinggis’s followers wanted to annihilate the northern Chinese population and turn the region into pure pastureland. Ogodei, Chinggis’s third son and successor as the Great Khan, was opposed to Chinggis’s merciless and destructive practices and ordered his followers not to kill or loot indiscriminately. One of Ogodei’s successors, Kublai, became the founder of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China, claiming for himself the Chinese mandate of heaven. Even so, Kublai cherished his Mongol identity, never learned Chinese, and never consulted a book in Chinese. Moreover, the Yuan rulers divided the populations under their rule into four ranked tiers: the first was the Mongols themselves; the second, the non-Han Chinese of the western parts of Inner Asia, mainly nomads like themselves; the third, the northern Chinese, conquered early in the Mongol expansion; and the fourth, the southern Chinese, once ruled by the Song dynasty and the center of Confucian culture. In such a fashion, the Yuan dynasty, although centered in China proper—the heartland of urbanization and high culture—did not allow itself to be swallowed up by the Han population or its culture.

Thus, the Mongol Empire, which lasted for more than two centuries, made an uneasy accommodation with sedentary populations, with its rulers partially embracing the institutions of the sedentary peoples, but never fully renouncing their pastoral, nomadic ways.

Questions for Analysis

How did nomads and sedentary peoples view one another?
Why might one consider the Mongols in general, and Temüjin in particular, to be unlikely conquerors?
In what ways did different Mongol leaders negotiate the difference between pastoral and sedentary ways?

Explore Further

Di Cosmo, Nicola, Allen J. Frank, and Peter Golden (eds.), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009).
Khazanov, Anatoly M., Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd ed., trans. Julia Crookurden, with a foreword by Ernest Gellner (1994).
Mote, Frederick W., Imperial China, 900–1800 (1999).
Rossabi, Morris, A History of China (2014).
Tanner, Harold M., China: A History (2009).

In the end, the Mongol Empire reached its outer limits. In the west, the Egyptian Mamluks stemmed the advancing Mongol armies and prevented Egypt from falling into their hands. In the east, the waters of the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan foiled Mongol expansion into Java and Japan. Better at conquering than governing, the Mongols struggled to rule their vast possessions in makeshift states. Bit by bit, they yielded control to local administrators and rulers who governed as their surrogates. There was also frequent feuding among the Mongol rulers themselves. In China and in Persia, Mongol rule collapsed in the fourteenth century. Ultimately, the Mongols would meet a deadly adversary even more brutal than they were: the plague of the fourteenth century (see Chapter 11).

Mongol conquest reshaped Afro-Eurasia’s social landscape. Islam would never again have a unifying authority like the caliphate or a powerful center like Baghdad. China, too, was divided and changed by the Mongols’ introduction of Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine influences into China’s architecture, art, science, and medicine. The Yuan policy of benign tolerance brought elements from Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam into the Chinese mix. The Mongol thrust also facilitated the flow of fine goods, traders, and technology from China to the rest of the world. Finally, the Mongol conquests encouraged an unprecedented Afro-Eurasian interconnectedness, surpassing even the Hellenistic connections that Alexander’s conquests had brought in the late fourth century BCE (see Chapter 6). Out of Mongol conquest and warfare would come centuries of trade, migration, and increasing contacts among Africa, Europe, and Asia.