Thread · 7 entries
Steel and steppe
How a confederation of nomad clans on the Mongolian plateau remade Eurasia in eighty years.
The Mongols are best remembered for what they destroyed, but the more interesting question is how they did it — and what kind of world they made afterward. The empire was assembled by a coalition that combined steppe cavalry with siege engineering and a postal network that ran from the Pacific to the Carpathians. It outlived its founder by less than a century, but the trade routes and the diseases that travelled them defined the next four hundred years.
- 01
Temüjin unifies the Mongol clans by 1206 and dies twenty years later master of an empire larger than Rome.
Genghis Khan
person · 1162 CEAn eight-year-old boy abandoned by his tribe on the Mongolian steppe, reduced to near-poverty, would seem an unlikely candidate to alter the course of global history.
- 02
Subutai's columns reach the Carpathians and the Adriatic by 1241. Then the great khan dies; the army turns back, and Europe never quite finds out what it was spared.
Mongol invasion of Europe
event · 1223 CEIn the early thirteenth century, the fragmented kingdoms of Europe woke to a threat that bypassed their traditional rivalries and forced a temporary, panicked peace.
- 03
Founds the Yuan dynasty in China, builds Khanbaliq (modern Beijing), and presides over a sinified Mongol court that is also still nomadic.
Kublai Khan
person · 1215 CEWhen Genghis Khan smeared the fat of a rabbit and an antelope onto the middle finger of his nine-year-old grandson, he reportedly warned his followers to heed the boy’s wisdom.
- 04
At its peak under Kublai, a single trade system from Korea to Hungary — administered, in China at least, as a continuation of the imperial Chinese tradition.
Yuan dynasty
concept · 1271 CEWhen Kublai Khan laid claim to the Mandate of Heaven in 1271 CE, he did something no non-Han ruler had ever accomplished: he established a dynasty, the Great Yuan, that would eventually bring the entirety of China proper under foreign rule.
- 05
Lives in Kublai's court for seventeen years and brings back the report Europe will spend the next century arguing about.
Marco Polo
person · 1254 CEThe world that the young Venetian merchant entered in 1271 was one of vast, unmapped distances, but by the time Marco Polo returned to his native lagoon twenty-four years later, he had shrunk those distances forever.
- 06
Under the Pax Mongolica, the longest single corridor of overland trade the world has yet seen. Caravans, ideas, Bubonic plague.
Silk Road
placeTo trace the path of ancient trade across Eurasia is to abandon the idea of a single, well-paved highway.
- 07
Yersinia pestis travels the same routes. Between 1346 and 1353 it kills perhaps a third of Europe and reshapes the labour and the politics that follow.
Black Death
event · 1346 CESometime in 1347, during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Caffa in Crimea, the army of the Golden Horde under Jani Beg reportedly introduced a lethal pathogen to their European adversaries.