Mongol Empire

The largest contiguous land empire in history, assembled in a lifetime by a people who numbered perhaps a million. Temujin united the Mongol and Turkic clans of the steppe by 1206 and took the title Genghis Khan, and his innovation was organisational rather than technological: he broke up the tribes into decimal military units, promoted by merit rather than birth, imposed a written law code and a script, and built a relay courier system that moved messages across Asia at speeds not matched until the telegraph. The armies were cavalry with composite bows, capable of covering ground no settled army could match, and they learned siege engineering from Chinese and Persian captives. Conquest ran from northern China to Hungary within two generations. The destruction was real and enormous - Merv, Nishapur and Baghdad were effectively annihilated, and Iran's irrigation systems took centuries to recover - and estimates of the dead run to tens of millions. The empire also made Eurasia safe for merchants for a century, moved technologies and ideas along the routes it controlled, practised religious tolerance as policy, and probably carried the plague west in the 1340s. It split into four khanates after 1259 over a disputed succession. Kublai conquered southern China and founded the Yuan dynasty. Two invasions of Japan were destroyed by storms. Mongolia today is a country of 3.5 million people. At its height the empire covered around 24 million square kilometres, roughly a sixth of the world's land. Karakorum was its first capital. The four successor khanates ruled China, Iran, Central Asia and Russia. Genghis Khan died in 1227 and his burial place has never been found.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history