Oh my goodness, it is time to talk about the Mongols, y'all. When you think of the largest land-based empires in history, maybe you think of the Greeks or maybe you think of the Romans. But write that thought on a piece of paper, burn it, and then dance upon its ashes, because it was in fact the Mongols who hold the title for the largest honking contiguous land-based empire ever. So we need to talk about how they did it and the effects that it had.
So if you're ready to get them brain cows milked Let's get to it. Now let's begin in the beginning with the birth of a guy named Temujin, who, according to legend, was born holding a giant blood clot in his fist, which in his culture was a sign that this kid was gonna grow up to be a mighty leader and run everybody's crap like a boss. Now, speaking of his culture, Temujin was a Mongol, and the Mongols were pastoral nomads living right about here around the Gobi Desert.
And nomads, in case you don't know, are traveling people. They move from place to place depending on the season, and that's their whole way of life. Anyway, Mr. Bloodclot in the Fist grew up and proved to be a powerful leader, and through skillful diplomacy allied himself with powerful people. Then after leading several important military raids and finding himself victorious, Temujin united the various Mongol groups under himself in 1206, put on his power pants, and assumed the title Chinggis Khan. Now maybe you've heard of of him under a different name, namely Genghis Khan, but we say Chinggis now for two reasons.
First, it's funner to say. Chinggis. Chinggis. I'm just having a great time. Second, Genghis is the westernized version of his name, and Chinggis is closer to how it would be pronounced in Mongolian, so we're sticking with Chinggis.
From there, old Chinggis got busy taking over the world. He attacked and conquered northern China, then territory in Central Asia, and then up to southern Russia. And then Chinggis Khan went ahead and died in 1227, and then his sons who succeeded him one after another just kept re- right on expanding until the empire reached its peak in 1279, including all of this land right here. Now hold on a minute, if you've been with me since Unit 1, this should sound a little weird.
Like, the military forces of the Seljuk Empire and the Delhi Sultanate and Song China were nothing to sneeze at. So how did the Mongols, who were often very much outnumbered by other military forces in these empires, win so many victories? Well, partly it was their military organization. I Chinggis Khan organized his forces into groups of 10,000 and 1,000 and 110, which made controlling and commanding them devastatingly efficient. Rather than partly it was superior weaponry and skills.
The Mongols'weapon of choice was a bow that was larger than traditional bows and can sink arrows into their enemies from much farther away. Also, they were exceedingly skillful horse riders and they could often outride those they encountered. And another part is that their timing was pretty lucky. The Song Dynasty had recently lost control of its northern territory, and large states like the Abbasid Empire had been declining in power for a long time, and it was the Mongols who brought it to an end with the destruction of Baghdad in 1258. But the juiciest explanation of their success was their reputation for brutality.
In some cases, Mongol armies would slaughter nearly everyone in a settlement. then leave just a few alive so they could run to the next town and warn them of the poop-your-pants ferocity of Mongol invasion. And in that way, the Mongols didn't even have to fight in some places, they just showed up and then everyone unceremoniously pooped their pants and they were like, oh hey y'all, just come on in, Randy's over there grilling some camel meat if y'all are hungry.
But what's interesting is that even though the Mongol body count was staggering during their wars of expansion, once they kind of ruled everything… they were pretty peaceful. In fact, there's a whole phrase for the peace experienced under about a century of Mongol rule, namely the Pax Mongolica. So the point is, as the Mongol Empire expanded, it replaced the empires we talked so much about in the last unit, and after Chinggis Khan's death, his grandsons organized the empire into several khanates, or military regions.
And in many cases, Mongol rulers kind of adopted a lot of the cultural norms of the people over which they ruled. For example, Kublai Khan ruled in China and went ahead and set up a new Chinese dynasty, namely the Wan Dynasty. And because he had united warring factions from across China, many of the Confucian elite believed that he possessed the mandate of heaven to rule China, which was a way of saying that because he united everyone, well, he must be our rightful ruler. Additionally, Kublai Khan styled himself as a benevolent Confucian-style ruler.
Now to be clear, the Mongols in China did not become Chinese, but I'm just trying to show you that in China and elsewhere, Mongols adapted their style of rule to the conditions of that place. Okay, now let's talk about the economic situation under Mongol rule. And if you remember in the last video we talked about the Silk Roads, you'll remember that those trade routes were expanding like mad. But arguably, the Silk Roads were never more organized and prosperous than they were under Mongol rule, and here's why.
Now these trade routes passed through a lot of different states and empires over time, and depending on where you were, these routes could be less safe or more safe. But when the whole stinking length of the Silk Roads fell under the control of the Mongols, then that meant that one state was responsible for keeping everyone safe and goods flowing from one side of the world to the other. Additionally, Mongol rulers improved the infrastructure of many of the places they ruled by building metric buttloads of bridges and repairing roads, all of which facilitated more trade.
And so thanks to the Pax Mongolica, trade flourished across the Silk Roads during this period. And a side benefit of the increased flow over the Silk Roads was an unprecedented increase in communication and cooperation across Eurasia. For example, Persian and Chinese corps often worked together across distances, sending skilled artisans back and forth and exchanging ambassadors.
They also shared military intelligence, and all of this was done with the help of the Yam system, which was a series of communication and relay stations spread across the empire. And because of this inter-regional diplomatization, diplomatic hug fest far-flung parts of the The empire were more friendly and that further increased trade, which further increased the wealth of all involved. And certainly no discussion of the Mongols would be complete without talking about the technological and cultural transfers that occurred during their rule. Now the Mongols had a high opinion of intellectuals and skilled artisans, and when they were on their tours of pants-pooping conquest, they were often careful not to kill those kinds of people.
Oh hey, I can see you're about to kill everyone, and look, you're doing a great job, but I just want to let you know I'm a pretty smart guy, I even know how to write. Hey y'all, don't kill this guy. You guys are the best.
But because it was the Mongol policy to send skilled people to all different parts of the empire, that movement encouraged the transfer of technology and ideas and culture. One significant consequence of that was the transfer of medical knowledge developed by ancient Greeks and Islamic scholars over to Western Europe. Another significant transfer was the Mongol adaptation of the Uyghur script to write their language. It was Chinggis Khan who first decided that conquering a bunch of literate societies probably meant that his own Mongolian language needed to have some kind of written form too.
So he adopted the Uyghur script from a conquered people in Central Asia and that written form of the language became a kind of lingua franca, or widely adopted imperial language, of the empire. Anyway, the point is, despite their brutal rise, the Mongol Empire facilitated loads of cultural transfers across many parts of Eurasia. But the Mongols fell out of power about as quickly as they rose to power.
And as the Mongol Empire exited the world stage, many of the people who were under Mongol rule redoubled their efforts to install powerful centralized leaders and create a unified culture, thus paving the way for the rise of the modern world. Okay click here to watch my other Unit 2 videos and click here to get my AP World Highlights Heimler Review Guide, which will help you get an A in your class and a 5 on your exam in May. And I'll catch you on the flip-flop.
Heimler out.