The Mongol Conquests

The Mongol conquests were a series of military campaigns beginning with Genghis Khan's unification of the Mongol tribes in 1206 that created, within about seventy years, the largest contiguous land empire in world history, stretching from Korea to Eastern Europe and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. Genghis Khan and his generals destroyed the Western Xia and Jin states in China and the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia, while his grandson Batu led the invasion of the Rus principalities and Eastern Europe in the 1230s and 1240s, and another grandson, Hulagu, destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in 1258. The conquests were extraordinarily destructive to the cities and populations that resisted, yet the resulting Pax Mongolica also connected trade routes across Eurasia under unified rule, facilitating an exchange of goods, technology and ideas between China, the Islamic world and Europe that included the transmission that helped spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The unified empire fragmented after the mid thirteenth century into several khanates, including the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia and the Golden Horde in Russia, which continued to shape Eurasian politics for centuries afterward.