Mongol invasions and conquests: A Visual History

The Mongol conquests are the wars by which Genghis Khan and his descendants built the largest contiguous land empire in history between 1206 and the 1360s. They struck China, Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Java and Japan. Estimates of the dead range from 20 to 40 million or more, from massacres, famine and disease. Beyond the destruction the conquests connected Eurasia as never before, opening trade routes and moving people, technologies and plagues from one end of the continent to the other.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Mongol invasions and conquests. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Estimated deaths in the main theatres

Medieval population figures are guesswork; these are widely quoted rough estimates for the campaigns in each region.

Timeline of the Mongol invasions and conquests

1. 1206
   Genghis Khan proclaimedThe Mongol tribes united.
2. 1211
   Invasion of Jin ChinaZhongdu falls in 1215.
3. 1219-1221
   Khwarazmian campaignCentral Asia devastated.
4. 1223
   Battle of the Kalka RiverFirst Mongol victory over the Rus.
5. 1227
   Western Xia destroyedGenghis Khan dies during the campaign.
6. 1234
   Jin dynasty fallsNorthern China conquered.
7. 1240
   Kiev sackedThe Rus principalities subjugated.
8. 1241
   Legnica and MohiPoland and Hungary crushed.
9. 1258
   Sack of BaghdadThe Abbasid Caliphate ends.
10. 1260
    Ain JalutMamluks stop the Mongols in Palestine.
11. 1274
    First invasion of JapanRepulsed; a storm scatters the fleet.
12. 1279
    Song China conqueredKublai completes the conquest of China.
13. 1281
    Second invasion of JapanThe kamikaze typhoon.
14. 1288
    Bach DangVietnamese victory ends Mongol invasions of Vietnam.
15. 1368
    Yuan expelled from ChinaThe conquests are over.

China first, 1205-1234

Genghis Khan's first foreign campaigns were against the Tangut state of Western Xia and the Jurchen Jin dynasty in northern China. The Mongols had no experience of siege warfare and learned it fast from captured Chinese engineers; the Jin capital Zhongdu (Beijing) fell in 1215 amid a massacre. Western Xia was annihilated in 1227, the year Genghis died, and the Jin were finished off in 1234 with help from the Song.

The Song, who ruled southern China, would prove the toughest opponent of all. Their conquest took the Mongols 45 years (1235-1279), including a five year siege of the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng, and it was Kublai Khan who finished the job.

Central Asia and Persia, 1218-1260

In 1218 the governor of Otrar in the Khwarazmian Empire murdered a Mongol caravan and the shah killed the envoys sent to complain. Genghis Khan's response was total: Otrar, Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur and Herat were sacked in 1219-1221, and contemporary sources speak of pyramids of skulls. Persian chroniclers put the dead in the millions.

Hulagu's campaign of the 1250s completed the job. He destroyed the Assassins' fortress of Alamut in 1256 and in February 1258 stormed Baghdad, executing the last Abbasid caliph (rolled in a carpet and trampled, so as not to spill royal blood) and killing much of the city's population. The Mongol advance was finally halted by the Mamluks of Egypt at Ain Jalut in 1260.

Russia and Europe, 1223-1242

A reconnaissance in force under Subutai and Jebe defeated a Rus-Cuman army at the Kalka river in 1223 and vanished back into the steppe. In 1237-1240 Batu returned with the main army, destroying Ryazan, Vladimir and Kiev; the Rus principalities became tributaries of the Golden Horde for over two centuries.

In 1241 the Mongols split into two prongs. One destroyed a Polish and German army at Legnica; the other, under Batu and Subutai, annihilated the Hungarian army at Mohi two days later. Mongol scouts reached the Adriatic and the outskirts of Vienna. Then Ogedei Khan died in Mongolia, and the princes rode home to elect his successor. Western Europe was never invaded again.

The limits: Japan, Vietnam, Java

Kublai Khan's later campaigns were more mixed. Two invasions of Japan (1274 and 1281) were wrecked by storms remembered as the kamikaze; the 1281 fleet may have carried 100,000 men. Invasions of Vietnam were repelled three times, most famously at Bach Dang in 1288, when the Vietnamese sank the Mongol fleet on hidden stakes. An expedition to Java in 1293 was outmanoeuvred and withdrew.

The conquests ended as the khanates fragmented, fought each other and adopted the cultures of their subjects. Their legacy was mixed: depopulated regions in Persia and Central Asia that took centuries to recover, but also the Pax Mongolica, under which Marco Polo travelled, gunpowder reached the West and, most probably, the Black Death reached Europe.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Mongol Empire (1206 to 1368)
• Yuan dynasty (1271 to 1368)
• Ilkhanate (1256 to 1335)
• Golden Horde (Jochi Khanate) (1242 to 1502)
• Chagatai Khanate (1226 to 1347)
• Khwarazmian Empire (1077 to 1231)
• Abbasid Caliphate (750 to 1258)
• Southern Song dynasty (1127 to 1279)
• Jin dynasty (1115-1234) (1115 to 1234)
• Western Xia (1038 to 1227)
• Mamluk Sultanate (1250 to 1517)
• Kievan Rus (882 to 1240)

Wars of the same era and region

• Conquests of Timur (1370 to 1405)
• Crusades (1096 to 1291)

10 surprising things about the Mongol invasions and conquests

1. The Mongols reportedly diverted a river through the ruins of the Khwarazmian shah's birthplace so that no trace of it would remain.
2. Subutai, the general who beat the Rus, Poles and Hungarians, was a blacksmith's son who won some 65 battles and conquered 32 nations without, so far as we know, ever losing a major engagement.
3. Ogedei's death in 1241 probably saved Western Europe. Historians still argue about whether the Mongols could have held it, but nobody argues they could not have reached Paris.
4. The Mongols catapulted plague-infected corpses into the Genoese trading post of Caffa in 1346, an early act of biological warfare that may have helped carry the Black Death to Europe.
5. The Hungarian king Bela IV fled so fast after Mohi that he ended up on an island in the Adriatic.
6. A Mongol army in 1258 was accompanied by a thousand Chinese siege engineers to reduce Baghdad's walls.
7. Some scholars think the Mongol conquests killed so many people that regrowing forests absorbed enough carbon to slightly cool the planet.
8. Marco Polo claimed to have served Kublai Khan for 17 years, and Chaucer wrote about the 'Tartar king Cambyuskan' in the Canterbury Tales.
9. The 1281 Japanese defence was helped by a stone wall built along Hakata Bay after the first invasion; parts of it can still be visited.
10. The Vietnamese general Tran Hung Dao, who beat the Mongols three times, is still worshipped as a national hero and has temples dedicated to him.

Sources

• Mongol invasions and conquests Wikipedia
• Mongol empire Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Mongol invasions of Japan Wikipedia
• Siege of Baghdad (1258) Wikipedia
• David Morgan, The Mongols (1986, 2nd ed. 2007) Blackwell
• Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West (2005) Pearson

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