49 Fun Facts About The Mongol Empire

What record does the Mongol Empire hold in world history?

Largest contiguous land realm ever: it ran unbroken from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe, while the larger British Empire was scattered across oceans.

What was Genghis Khan's birth name?

Temüjin was still a boy when Tatars poisoned his father Yesugei; the clan then abandoned the family, who survived by hunting and foraging on the steppe.

How did Genghis Khan come to rule the Mongols?

Uniting the tribes came first: he was proclaimed ruler of all the Mongols in 1206, and his great conquests abroad came only after that.

What is a kurultai?

A Mongol assembly that elected khans, it needed the princes of Genghis's line in attendance, so one prince who stayed away could stall the choice of a great khan for years.

Genghis Khan organised his army on what numerical system?

Decimal units of tens, hundreds and thousands were led on merit: command went to proven followers, some of them low-born, rather than to the seniors of each clan.

What was the Mongol law code credited to Genghis Khan called?

The Yassa outlived him: generations later, his descendants ruling Iran still applied it side by side with sharia law.

Which people's writing system did Genghis Khan adopt for Mongolian?

The Uyghurs' alphabet was pressed into service because Mongolian had only ever been spoken; the script that grew from it is written vertically, in columns running left to right.

Which group did Genghis Khan exempt from taxes across his empire?

Religious leaders of every faith paid no tax. He had decreed freedom of worship to avoid strife, and contented subjects were less likely to rebel.

Which state did Genghis Khan invade after its ruler killed a Mongol envoy?

The Khwarazmian shahdom's governor at Otrar had seized a Mongol trade caravan and killed its merchants; the envoy who died had come to demand that governor's punishment.

What happened to Genghis Khan's body after his death in 1227?

He was buried in a secret location, probably near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun; legend has it that the funeral escort killed everyone it met on the way.

From what did the Mongols make kumis, their mildly alcoholic everyday drink?

Mare's milk was poured into a big hide bag and churned with a stick until it soured, fizzed and turned mildly alcoholic.

Why was the paternity of Genghis Khan's eldest son Jochi in doubt?

His mother had been a Merkit captive, and the doubt never left him: Genghis raised Jochi as his own, but rivals within the family disputed his legitimacy all his life.

Which city did the Mongols establish as their capital in 1235?

Karakorum never matched the empire it ruled: a friar who visited in 1254 rated it below the village of Saint-Denis outside Paris.

What did the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher build at the Mongol great khan's palace?

A silver tree that dispensed drinks, it had a trumpeting angel on top. A visiting friar wrote that a man hidden in a vault beneath blew the trumpet, because bellows had proved too weak.

Which dynasty ruling northern China did the Mongols destroy in 1234?

The Jin were caught between the Mongols to the north and the Song to the south, who had allied with the invaders; the Song then became the next target and fell in 1279.

Which city, long the capital of the Rus', did the Mongols storm in December 1240?

Kyiv was stormed and most of its people killed, while Novgorod, far to the north, was never sacked, though it too had to accept Mongol overlordship.

Which grandson of Genghis Khan led the invasion of Rus' and Europe?

Batu was later offered the great khan's throne and turned it down, preferring to rule his own western lands and play kingmaker.

How did the Mongols kill the Rus' princes captured at the Kalka River in 1223?

Crushed under the victors' feast platform, the princes paid for killing the Mongol envoys sent before the battle; the victors dined on the boards above them.

Which kingdom did the Mongols lay waste in 1241 after routing King Béla IV at Mohi?

Hungary lay open after Mohi: King Béla fled all the way to the Adriatic coast with Mongol riders on his heels, and his kingdom was ravaged for a year before the invaders pulled out.

What news halted the Mongol advance into central Europe in 1242?

The death of Ögedei Khan is the traditional reason, calling the princes home to choose a successor; yet the army's own commander never made the journey.

What was Töregene, who ruled the Mongol Empire as regent for five years, to the late great khan?

His widow held the throne just long enough to win the election for her own son Güyük, setting aside the grandson her husband had named as heir.

Which Christian princess was the mother of the great khans Möngke and Kublai?

Sorghaghtani Beki, though a Christian herself, gave alms to Muslims as well, and all four of her sons became known for their religious tolerance.

Möngke's 1251 election shifted power from Ögedei's line to descendants of which son of Genghis?

Tolui was Genghis's youngest son, and the switch to his line was sealed in blood: once elected, Möngke purged the house of Ögedei.

Which great Muslim city did the Mongols sack in 1258, ending the Abbasid Caliphate?

Baghdad fell after a brief siege and a week of slaughter followed; the caliphate that had reigned since 750 ended with the execution of its last caliph.

How did the Mongols execute al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid caliph?

Most accounts have him rolled in a carpet and trampled, so that no royal blood touched the earth, a Mongol taboo; another tale has him locked away to starve among his treasure.

Which sect's Persian mountain stronghold of Alamut fell to the Mongols in 1256?

The Assassins had long picked off rulers and generals from their hilltop castles; their name, from an Arabic slur meaning 'hashish-eater', gave English the word assassin.

Who defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut?

The Mamluks of Egypt had answered a Mongol demand to submit by executing the embassy, then won at a spring whose name is taken to mean Goliath's Spring.

Which two brothers fought a civil war from 1260 to 1264 after each was proclaimed great khan?

Kublai and Ariq Böke fought for four years; Kublai won because he could draw on the wealth and grain of China, but the empire never truly reunited.

Which supreme deity did the Mongols believe had granted them the right to rule the whole world?

The Eternal Blue Sky, called Tengri, stood above all other powers, and the khans opened their edicts and their letters to foreign kings by invoking it.

Kublai Khan built his new capital, known as Khanbaliq or Dadu, on the site of which modern city?

Beijing had been a frontier stronghold and a regional capital before him; under Kublai the whole of China was ruled from it for the first time.

What was Kublai's summer capital, immortalised in Coleridge's poem?

Xanadu, Shangdu or 'Upper Capital' in Chinese, had a marble palace and a walled hunting park; thanks to the poem its name became a byword for far-off luxury.

What kind of money did Marco Polo marvel at in Kublai Khan's China?

Paper notes, each authenticated with official seals, were unknown in Europe; the accuracy of his account is one reason historians believe he really reached China.

What scattered and sank the fleets Kublai Khan sent to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281?

Typhoons struck both times, and the Japanese called them kamikaze, 'divine wind', the name later given to the suicide pilots of the Second World War.

Which Southeast Asian kingdom beat back three Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century?

Đại Việt, in northern Vietnam, ended the last invasion with a trap: iron-tipped stakes hidden in a river bed wrecked Kublai Khan's fleet.

What was the Yam, which kept fresh horses waiting at stations?

The mounted postal relay carried the khan's orders well over 100 miles in a day, and it doubled as his eyes and ears, speeding intelligence back to him.

What did a paiza, a tablet issued by the Mongol khans, serve as?

A passport in effect: its bearer could demand fresh horses, food and lodging along the imperial roads, and the Polo family carried one from Kublai Khan.

What is the oldest surviving literary work in the Mongolian language?

The Secret History of the Mongols tells the life of Genghis Khan, yet it survives complete only in a Chinese transcription, its Mongolian sounds spelled out in Chinese characters.

The Jami' al-tawarikh, written at the Mongol court of Persia, tells the history of what?

The history of the world, from China to Europe: its author, a Persian vizier, even drew on a chronicle of the popes and emperors for the Latin West.

Which of the four Mongol khanates, the one ruling Persia, was the first to fall apart, from 1335?

The Ilkhanate broke up after its ruler died in 1335 without a clear successor; rival claimants fought over the throne and Persia split into smaller states.

Which city's grand prince, Ivan III, faced down the khan's army in 1480, the traditional end of Mongol rule over Russia?

Moscow had risen as the khans' own tribute collector: an earlier prince, known as Ivan 'Moneybag', gathered the Mongols' taxes across his lands.

Which Chinese dynasty drove the Yuan out of Dadu in 1368?

The Ming were founded by Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant's son turned rebel leader; the last Yuan emperor fled north, where his line ruled on in Mongolia as the Northern Yuan.

Which battlefield trick did Mongol armies use again and again?

A feigned retreat could last for days: at the Kalka River the Mongols fell back before the Rus' princes, then turned on their strung-out pursuers.

At the siege of Caffa in the 1340s, what did the Mongol army reportedly hurl over the walls?

Plague-infected corpses, wrote an Italian notary of the day: the besiegers' own army was dying of the disease, and the tale is often called one of the first acts of biological warfare.

What did Möngke Khan stage in 1254, with friar William of Rubruck taking part?

An interfaith debate: Christians, Muslims and Buddhists argued before three judges, one from each religion, because the khan wanted to know whose belief was best.

A 2003 genetic study suggested what share of all living men descend in the male line from Genghis Khan?

About 1 in 200, or some 16 million men: the study put it down to power, not chance, since his sons and grandsons ruled much of Asia for generations and fathered many children.

What did Jamukha, Genghis Khan's boyhood friend, become to him?

His rival: hostile chiefs elected Jamukha supreme khan against his old friend, who went on to defeat their coalition.

Which conqueror, ruling from Samarkand, cast himself as restorer of the Mongol Empire from about 1370?

Tamerlane, or Timur, tied himself to Genghis Khan's line by marriage, taking a princess descended from the great khan as a wife to bolster his claim to rule.

Which religion had Berke, khan of the Golden Horde, adopted before he went to war with his cousin Hulagu in 1262?

Islam: Berke's conversion set him against Hulagu, who had destroyed the caliphate, and he sided with a Muslim sultan against his own cousin, Mongol fighting Mongol.

The monk Rabban Bar Sauma, a Christian from Mongol-ruled China, set out on a pilgrimage to which city?

Jerusalem was never reached: war closed the roads, and he ended up touring Europe as a Mongol ambassador instead, meeting the pope and the kings of France and England.