Home › Political & Historical › Historical Empires
The Mongol Empire
The largest contiguous land empire in history, forged on the steppe within a single lifetime
In 1206 an assembly of steppe clans proclaimed Temüjin as Genghis Khan, and within seven decades his family ruled the largest contiguous land empire the world has seen. At its height it stretched from Korea to the borders of Poland and Hungary and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf, linking China, Persia and Russia under one dynasty for the first and only time. The conquests killed very large numbers of people and destroyed cities from Central Asia to Baghdad. The order that followed, often called the Pax Mongolica, opened the overland Silk Road to merchants, missionaries and travelers such as Marco Polo. The empire's successor khanates shaped the later borders of China, Russia, Iran and Central Asia.
The empire was born on the grasslands of the Mongolian Plateau, and the Eurasian Steppe, a nearly continuous belt of grassland running from Manchuria to the plains north of the Black Sea, carried its horse armies across the continent. It also ruled very different country: the farmland and great river valleys of China, the oasis cities of Central Asia, the Iranian plateau, Mesopotamia, and the forests of Russia, whose principalities paid it tribute. At its peak around 1270 it covered about 24 million square kilometers. Its lands now lie in Mongolia, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and eastern Turkey, and Korea's Goryeo kingdom became a vassal state.
Genghis Khan unified the Mongol and Turkic tribes of the steppe and launched campaigns against the Jin dynasty in northern China and the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia. His sons and grandsons pushed into Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1230s and 1240s, took Baghdad in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate, and completed the conquest of Song China in 1279. The empire relied on a disciplined mounted army, a relay postal system called the yam, and a general tolerance of its subjects' religions. After 1260 it split into four khanates: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Golden Horde on the western steppe and in Russia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Ilkhanate in Persia. The Ming expelled the Yuan from China in 1368, the date often given for the empire's end, although successor khanates lasted for centuries.