Who were the Mongols?
In 1206 a steppe chieftain united the tribes and built the largest land empire in history — paved with terror, and held together by the best-run postal service on earth.
Last updated: October 2026
History’s largest land empire was not built by a civilization. It was built by nomads who had no cities, no written bureaucracy, and no intention of being civilized — and who then ran their conquests with a managerial genius that shames many modern states.
The Mongols were a people of the steppe, the vast grassland that stretches across Central Asia from Manchuria to the Caspian Sea. They lived as nomadic herders, moving with their horses, sheep, goats, camels and cattle between seasonal pastures, dwelling in felt tents called gers, and measuring wealth in livestock. They had no cities of their own, no written language of their own until the thirteenth century, and no standing bureaucracy. What they did have was the horse. Mongol children learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk, and Mongol warriors could ride for days, live off mare’s milk and dried meat, and shoot arrows with deadly accuracy from a galloping horse. In a world where most armies moved at the speed of a marching man, the Mongols moved at the speed of a horse, and that difference made them, for a time, the most formidable fighting force on earth.
In the twelfth century the steppe was divided. The Mongol tribes, along with their Tatar, Kereit, Naiman and Merkit neighbours, raided one another, feuded over pasture and women, and served as auxiliaries and mercenaries for the great settled empires on their borders: the Jin dynasty of northern China, the Khwarezmian Empire of Persia and Central Asia, and the caliphate of Baghdad. No one in the settled world regarded the steppe tribes as a serious threat. The great wall-building empires of China had spent centuries keeping nomads out. Within a single generation, the tribes would be united under one leader, and the settled world would be turned upside down.
That leader was born with the name Temüjin, probably in the early 1160s, the son of a minor Mongol chieftain. His early life, as told in The Secret History of the Mongols, the great Mongol epic composed in the thirteenth century, was a story of hardship: his father was poisoned by Tatars, his family was abandoned by their clan, and they survived by fishing and foraging. Temüjin rose by a combination of military talent, political cunning and a willingness to reward loyalty and talent over birth. He built alliances, absorbed defeated enemies into his own following, and broke with the steppe custom of distributing the spoils of war only to aristocrats, sharing them instead with his ordinary soldiers. In 1206, on the banks of the Onon River, a council of the steppe peoples proclaimed him Genghis Khan, a title usually translated as universal ruler. He was about forty years old, and he had just begun.
Genghis Khan’s first great conquest was northern China. From 1211 he campaigned against the Jin dynasty, whose armies were far larger than his own but whose infantry could not catch his horse archers and could not prevent them from cutting supply lines, isolating cities and destroying armies in the field. The Mongols learned siege warfare from Chinese and Muslim engineers, and they turned it against the walled cities that had once seemed impregnable. By 1215 they had taken Beijing, then called Zhongdu, and by the time of Genghis’s death they had broken Jin power in the north. The conquest of China would not be completed until his grandson Kublai took the south decades later, but the pattern was set: Mongol mobility, Mongol discipline and Mongol willingness to learn from the conquered.
In 1219 Genghis turned west against the Khwarezmian Empire, a rich Muslim state that ruled Persia and much of Central Asia. The war began when the Khwarezmian governor of Otrar seized a Mongol merchant caravan and the Shah executed a Mongol ambassador, acts that Genghis treated as intolerable insults. The Mongol response was devastating. City after city fell: Bukhara, Samarkand, Nishapur, Herat. The cities that surrendered were taxed and spared; the cities that resisted were destroyed, their populations massacred or enslaved, their artisans carried off to serve the Khan. The destruction was so thorough that some of the great cities of Central Asia took generations to recover, and the memory of the Mongol conquest shaped the region’s history for centuries. Genghis died in 1227, probably during a campaign against the Western Xia kingdom in north-west China, and he was buried in an unmarked grave on the steppe, in a place that remains unknown today.
Genghis Khan’s reputation in the West is that of a destroyer, and the destruction was real. But he was also a builder of a political system. He created a decimal army, organised in units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, commanded by men promoted on merit. He created a body of law, the Yassa, which punished theft, adultery and treason and protected envoys and merchants. He promoted trade, protected the great trade routes, and practised a policy of religious tolerance that was remarkable for the age: he exempted religious leaders from taxation, allowed Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Taoists to practise freely, and sought out wise men of every faith. His successors inherited both the terror and the tolerance, and both shaped the empire that followed.
After Genghis’s death, his son Ögedei became the second Great Khan, and the conquests continued. In the 1230s and 1240s Mongol armies under Batu, Genghis’s grandson, and the general Subutai swept westward across the Russian principalities, destroying Kiev and other cities, and then into Poland and Hungary, defeating a Polish and German army at Legnica in 1241 and a Hungarian army at Mohi the same year. Europe was saved from further invasion, in the traditional telling, by the death of Ögedei in December 1241, which forced the Mongol princes to return to Mongolia to elect a new Khan. Modern historians debate how much of the withdrawal was due to the succession crisis and how much to the limits of steppe logistics in forested, densely settled Europe, but the Mongol advance into Central Europe stopped, and it never resumed.
In the east, the Mongols completed the conquest of China. Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis, defeated the Song dynasty in the south, and in 1271 he proclaimed the Yuan dynasty, becoming the first foreign conqueror to rule all of China. He made his capital at Khanbaliq, the city that is now Beijing, and he governed China with a mixture of Mongol military rule and Chinese bureaucratic administration. It was at Kublai’s court that the Venetian traveller Marco Polo claimed to have served, and his account, whether first-hand or compiled from other travellers’ tales, introduced Europe to the wealth and scale of Mongol-ruled Asia. Kublai also attempted invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, both of which were scattered by typhoons that the Japanese called kamikaze, the divine wind, and of Java and Vietnam, with less success than he hoped.
At its height, the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching from Korea to Hungary and from Siberia to the South China Sea. After the death of Möngke Khan in 1259, it ceased to be a single political unit and divided into four great khanates: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Middle East, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde in the western steppe and Russia. The khanates fought one another, converted to the religions of their subjects, and gradually dissolved into the peoples they had conquered. The Yuan dynasty fell to the Ming in 1368. The Golden Horde’s hold over Russia loosened over the fifteenth century. The last Mongol khanates faded in the centuries that followed, but the empire’s effects endured.
The most important legacy of the Mongol Empire was not destruction but connection. For roughly a century, the Mongol peace, the Pax Mongolica, made the Silk Road safer than it had ever been, and goods, technologies, ideas, religions and diseases travelled across Eurasia at a scale never seen before. Chinese gunpowder technology travelled westward, and would eventually transform warfare in Europe. Persian astronomy and medicine travelled eastward. Textiles, ceramics, crops and craft techniques crossed the continent. Merchants could travel from Venice to China under Mongol protection, and the great trading cities of Central Asia flourished as the continent’s crossroads. The Mongols built and maintained the Yam, a system of relay stations with horses, supplies and messengers, that was the largest postal system in the world at the time and a model of imperial communication.
The Mongols also changed the peoples they conquered. In Russia, two centuries of Mongol overlordship shaped the rise of Moscow, whose princes learned statecraft as the Mongols’ tax collectors and emerged, when Mongol power faded, as the rulers of a centralised state. In the Middle East, the Ilkhanate’s conversion to Islam and its patronage of Persian culture helped produce a flourishing of art and scholarship. In China, the Yuan dynasty’s rule left a legacy of debate about foreign conquest and national identity that still resonates. And the movement of peoples and microbes across the Mongol world had a dark side: historians debate the role of Mongol-era trade routes in spreading the plague that became the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed a vast share of the population of Europe and the Middle East. The Mongol Empire connected the world, and connection carried both prosperity and catastrophe.
Today the Mongols are a nation of about three million people in the independent state of Mongolia, with millions more Mongols living in China, chiefly in the Inner Mongolia region, and in Russia. Genghis Khan is Mongolia’s national hero, his face on its currency and his name on its airport, its university and its most popular vodka. The steppe world he created is gone, but the empire he built remains the defining case of a paradox: the most destructive conquerors in history were also, in their own way, the first builders of a connected world.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Mongol Empire” and “Genghis Khan.”
- World History Encyclopedia, “Mongol Empire.”
- Weatherford, Jack, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Crown, 2004).
- May, Timothy, The Mongol Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).