Nomadic Empires

This is Theme 3, the second chapter of Section II, Empires (whose introduction and Timeline II open the previous chapter, An Empire Across Three Continents). The section introduction ends with the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors, ‘the last of these peoples’ to attack and try to control West Asia, and notes that an empire need not be city-centric — the Mongols are its example.

• Links within this book: Section II’s introduction (previous chapter) frames empires as attempts to control trade networks and stresses relations with pastoral peoples; Theme 1 showed pastoralists (Amorites) founding dynasties in Mesopotamia; the Mongols’ capture of Baghdad (1258) ends the Abbasid caliphate mentioned in Timeline II.
• Links to Indian history: Genghis Khan reached the Indus in Iltutmish’s reign; Mongol pressure shaped the Delhi Sultanate’s north-west frontier; Timur claimed descent through Chaghatai and sacked Delhi (1398, Beyond NCERT); Babur, descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, founded the Mughal empire (1526) — and NCERT notes that historians are studying how the Mongols provided ideological models for the Mughals.
• UPSC — be realistic: GS1 world history is officially from the 18th century, so the Mongols appear mainly in Prelims medieval India questions (Genghis Khan and Iltutmish, Timur, the origins of the mansabdari) and in geography (the steppe). For Mains and essays the chapter is a model of source criticism: who writes history, and whose perspective is erased.

• Sources: the Mongols wrote little; we read them through city-based literati — often hostile — and through sympathetic writers in their service; modern study runs from Tsarist and Soviet scholars to philologists.
• Steppe society: pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, no cities, patrilineal lineages; trade and raids with China, which built walls integrated into the Great Wall from the 3rd century BCE.
• Temujin (c. 1162) → Genghis Khan at the quriltai of 1206; China (Peking 1215), Khwarazm 1219–21 (resisting towns devastated), the Indus; died 1227.
• Organisation: decimal units (10s to the 10,000-strong tuman) that broke up tribes; noyan, anda, naukar; four sons’ ulus; decisions at quriltais.
• After 1227: Batu in Russia, Poland, Hungary (1236–42); Baghdad (1258); all China (1279); lineages split into Golden Horde, Chaghataids, Yuan, Il-Khans.
• Yam, paiza, baj → Pax Mongolica; from predation to protecting peasants (Qubilai, Ghazan Khan); the yasa as identity; a multi-religious regime that inspired Timur and the Mughals.

In the early 13th century the great empires of Eurasia saw the danger of a new power on the steppe: Genghis Khan (d. 1227) had united the Mongols. His vision went beyond a tribal confederacy: he claimed a mandate from God to rule the world. His own life was spent consolidating the Mongol tribes and campaigning in north China, Transoxiana, Afghanistan, eastern Iran and the Russian steppes; his descendants went further and built ‘the largest empire the world had ever seen’.

These were not empty threats: Batu’s campaigns of 1236–41 (1236–42 in the timeline) devastated Russian lands up to Moscow, seized Poland and Hungary and camped outside Vienna. Many in China, the Middle East and Europe saw the conquests as the ‘wrath of God’ and the beginning of the Day of Judgement.

The Mongols were a diverse people, linked by language to the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus to the east and the Turkic tribes to the west. Some were pastoralists (horses, sheep and, less, cattle, goats and camels), nomadising in what is now Mongolia — rolling plains ringed by the Altai mountains to the west and the Gobi desert to the south, drained by the Onon and Selenga. Others were hunter-gatherers in the Siberian forests to the north, a humbler people living by the fur trade. Winters were long and harsh, summers brief and dry. Unlike some Turks further west, the Mongols did not take to farming; neither economy could support dense settlement, so the region had no cities. People lived in tents (gers) and moved between winter and summer pastures.

Society. Ethnicity and language united the Mongols, but scarce resources divided them into patrilineal lineages; richer families were larger, owned more animals and pasture, had more followers and more say. Periodic calamities — very cold winters, or drought — forced families to forage further, causing conflict over pasture and raids for livestock. Families sometimes allied round powerful lineages, but such confederacies were usually small and short-lived. Genghis Khan’s confederation of Mongol and Turkish tribes was perhaps matched in size only by Attila’s (d. 453) — but, unlike Attila’s, it survived its founder and administered complex agrarian and urban societies far removed from its own experience.

Steppe and sown. Different as they were, nomadic and agrarian societies were not strangers: scarcity drove the nomads to trade with China — farm produce and iron utensils for horses, furs and game, a ‘mutually beneficial’ exchange. Both sides used military pressure for profit: allied Mongol lineages could force better terms or turn to plunder; when the Mongols were divided, the Chinese asserted themselves in the steppe. Frontier wars hurt settled societies more — farming dislocated, cities plundered — while nomads could retreat. Chinese regimes built fortifications from as early as the 8th century BCE; from the 3rd century BCE these were integrated into what is now called the Great Wall of China, ‘a dramatic visual testament’ to the fear of nomadic raids.

Temujin was born around 1162 (c. 1167 in NCERT’s timeline) near the Onon, son of Yesugei, chief of the Kiyat, related to the Borjigid clan. After his father’s murder his mother Oelun-eke raised him and his brothers in hardship; he was captured and enslaved, and after his marriage his wife Borte was kidnapped and had to be fought for. He made friends: Boghurchu, his first ally; Jamuqa, his blood-brother (anda), later a foe; and Tughril/Ong Khan of the Kereyits, his father’s old anda. Through the 1180s–90s he used the Ong Khan alliance to defeat rivals, then turned on the Tatars (his father’s killers), the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself (1203). The final defeat of the Naiman and Jamuqa in 1206 left him supreme; a quriltai proclaimed him Great Khan (Qa’an) with the title Genghis Khan.

China. Just before 1206 he reorganised the Mongols into a disciplined force (section 5). China was then three realms: the Hsi Hsia (of Tibetan origin) in the north-west, the Jurchen Chin dynasty ruling north China from Peking, and the Sung in the south. The Hsi Hsia were defeated by 1209, the Great Wall breached in 1213 and Peking sacked in 1215; war with the Chin dragged on to 1234, but Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia in 1216.

Military innovation. Genghis Khan died in 1227. His success came from turning steppe skills into strategy: the horsemanship of Mongols and Turks gave speed and mobility; mounted archery was honed in hunting expeditions that doubled as field manoeuvres; the cavalry travelled light and used its knowledge of terrain and weather — campaigning in winter and using frozen rivers as highways. Nomads were usually helpless against fortifications, but he quickly learnt the value of siege engines and naphtha bombardment, and his engineers built light, portable equipment.

Two phases of expansion. 1236–42: the Russian steppes, Bulghar, Kiev, Poland and Hungary. 1255–1300: all of China (1279), Iran, Iraq and Syria; then the frontier stabilised. After the 1260s, though Vienna, western Europe and Egypt seemed within reach, the Mongols withdrew from the Hungarian steppe and were defeated by Egyptian forces.

Among the Mongols, as among many nomads, all able-bodied adult men bore arms. Unification and conquest made the army an ‘incredibly heterogeneous mass’: groups like the Turkic Uighurs, who joined willingly, and defeated peoples like the Kereyits, accommodated despite past hostility. Genghis Khan set out to erase old tribal identities. The army kept the old steppe decimal system — units of 10, 100, 1,000 and notionally 10,000 — but where clan and tribe had once sat inside these units, he broke the tribes up and spread their members across new units; leaving one’s unit without permission was harshly punished. The largest unit, the tuman (about 10,000), now mixed fragments of many tribes, giving them a new identity derived from Genghis Khan.

A new elite. The new units served under his four sons and chosen captains (noyan). Loyal followers of the hard years were honoured as ‘blood-brothers’ (anda) or, if humbler freemen, as bondsmen (naukar) — titles marking closeness to him. Old clan chiefs kept no rights: status now came from closeness to the Great Khan.

The four ulus. His sons governed conquered peoples through their ulus, which at first did not mean fixed territories: Jochi (eldest) received the Russian steppes, extending ‘as far west as his horses could roam’; Chaghatai the Transoxanian steppe and lands north of the Pamirs; Ogodei (third) was named successor as Great Khan and set up his capital at Karakorum; Toluy (youngest) received the ancestral lands of Mongolia. Genghis Khan meant his sons to rule collectively: princes’ contingents (tama) were placed in each ulus, and all family and state decisions — campaigns, plunder, pastures, succession — were taken together at quriltais.

The yam. Genghis Khan created a rapid courier system: fresh mounts and despatch riders at outposts at regular distances. Nomads supported it by giving a tenth of their herd — the qubcur tax, paid willingly for its benefits. The system (yam) was refined after his death; its speed and reliability surprised travellers and let the Great Khans watch the far ends of the empire.

The cost of conquest. Conquered peoples ‘hardly felt a sense of affinity’ with their new masters. In the campaigns of the first half of the 13th century cities were destroyed, farmland laid waste, trade and crafts disrupted; tens of thousands were killed — ‘the exact figures are lost in the exaggerated reports of the time’ — and even more enslaved; all classes suffered. The underground canals (qanats) of the Iranian plateau went unmaintained and the desert crept in: parts of Khurasan never recovered from this ecological devastation.

Pax Mongolica. Once the campaigns ended, Europe and China were territorially linked. Trade and travel along the Silk Route peaked — and the routes no longer ended in China but continued north to Mongolia and Karakorum. Travellers carried a pass (paiza in Persian, gerege in Mongolian) for safe conduct; traders paid the baj tax — all acknowledging the Khan’s authority.

From predation to protection. The tension between nomadic and sedentary interests eased during the 13th century. In the 1230s, during the war against the Chin, a strong group in the Mongol leadership urged massacring the peasantry and turning their fields into pasture. By the 1270s, when south China was annexed after the Sung’s defeat, Qubilai Khan (d. 1294) appeared as the protector of peasants and cities. In the 1290s Ghazan Khan (d. 1304), Toluyid ruler of Iran, warned his family and generals against pillaging the peasantry — a speech ‘whose sedentary overtones would have made Genghis Khan shudder’.

Administrators. From Genghis Khan’s time the Mongols recruited civil administrators from conquered societies and moved them around — Chinese secretaries to Iran, Persians to China — to integrate the dominions and ‘blunt the harsher edges of nomadic predation’. Trusted while they raised revenue, some were influential: Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai muted some of Ogodei’s ‘more rapacious instincts’ in the 1230s; the Juwaini family played a similar role in Iran; Rashiduddin drafted Ghazan’s speech. Beyond NCERT: Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai (Yelü Chucai), whom NCERT calls a Chinese minister, was a Khitan by birth, trained in Chinese statecraft.

By the mid-13th century the shared family patrimony gave way to separate dynasties, each ruling its ulus — a word that now meant territory. Succession struggles drove this. Toluy’s descendants ruled China (Yuan) and Iran (Il-Khans); Jochi’s formed the Golden Horde in the Russian steppes; Chaghatai’s ruled Transoxiana and ‘Turkistan’. Nomadic traditions lasted longest among the Chaghataids and the Golden Horde.

Rewriting the founder. Persian chronicles of late-13th-century Il-Khanid Iran detailed Genghis Khan’s ‘gory killings’ and greatly exaggerated the numbers — an eyewitness put the defenders of Bukhara’s citadel at 400; an Il-Khanid chronicle reported 30,000 killed there. These chronicles still eulogised Genghis Khan but expressed relief that the great killings were over: to appear as heroes to a sedentary audience, his descendants could no longer look quite like him.

The yasa. Following David Ayalon’s research, recent work shows how memory of the Great Khan was fashioned. The earliest term, yasaq, meant ‘law’, ‘decree’ or ‘order’, and its known contents are administrative rules on the hunt, the army and the post. By the mid-13th century yasa meant ‘the legal code of Genghis Khan’. Why? The Mongols, now a unified people ruling sophisticated urban societies with their own laws, were a numerical minority; a sacred law from their ancestor protected their identity. The yasa was probably a compilation of Mongol customs, but calling it Genghis Khan’s code gave them a ‘lawgiver’ like Moses and Solomon, bound them to his line, and let them keep their identity while adopting settled ways — ‘an extremely empowering ideology’.

Today, NCERT observes, the images of Genghis Khan in our imagination are those of the conqueror and destroyer of cities, responsible for the deaths of thousands; many 13th-century townspeople of China, Iran and eastern Europe looked on the steppe ‘hordes’ with fear and distaste. Yet for the Mongols he was ‘the greatest leader of all time’: he united them, freed them from tribal wars and Chinese exploitation, brought prosperity, built a transcontinental empire and restored trade routes and markets that drew travellers like Marco Polo. NCERT’s lesson: these contrasting images should make us reflect on how one dominant perspective can erase all others.

A plural empire. The Mongol khans followed many faiths — Shaman, Buddhist, Christian and eventually Islam — but ‘never let their personal beliefs dictate public policy’. They recruited administrators and soldiers from all ethnic groups and religions: a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious regime unthreatened by its pluralism, ‘utterly unusual for the time’. Historians are now studying how it provided ideological models for later regimes like the Mughals. Genghis Khan’s inspiration endured: Timur, at the end of the 14th century, hesitated to call himself monarch because he was not of Genghis Khan’s line, and declared sovereignty as guregen, ‘son-in-law’ of the family. Today, after decades of Soviet control, Mongolia venerates Genghis Khan as a national hero in forging its identity.

Q1–4 are brief answers (about 100 words); Q5–6 are short essays (250–300 words). Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• The Mongols wrote little; we read them through others — often hostile, sometimes admiring.
• Steppe and sown traded and fought; walls were the farmers’ answer.
• 1206: Temujin becomes Genghis Khan at a quriltai.
• Towns that surrendered were taken; towns that resisted were destroyed.
• Genghis Khan turned back at the Indus.
• Decimal units kept; tribes broken up — loyalty to the Khan replaced loyalty to the clan.
• Four sons, four ulus: Jochi, Chaghatai, Ogodei, Toluy.
• Family politics and a defeat by Egypt stopped the Mongols in the West.
• Yam, qubcur, paiza, baj: the nuts and bolts of the Pax Mongolica.
• From ‘turn fields into pasture’ (1230s) to ‘protect the peasants’ (Ghazan, 1290s).
• The yasa grew from administrative orders into Genghis Khan’s sacred code.
• One dominant perspective can erase all others (NCERT).

Traps to avoid

• Genghis Khan died in 1227; Europe (Poland, Hungary) was invaded by Batu in 1236–42.
• Ogodei (third son) succeeded as Great Khan; Toluy (youngest) received Mongolia; Jochi (eldest) the Russian steppes.
• Berke was Batu’s brother (son of Jochi) — NCERT’s timeline calls him Batu’s son.
• Toluy’s line ruled both China (Yuan) and Iran (Il-Khans); Jochi’s the Golden Horde; Chaghatai’s Transoxiana.
• The Mongols did not farm and had no cities in their homeland.
• Decimal units were an old steppe system; Genghis Khan’s change was mixing the tribes.
• Qubcur = levy of a tenth of the herd for the yam; baj = traders’ tax; paiza/gerege = pass.
• Ghazan Khan converted from Buddhism to Islam; his speech was probably drafted by Rashiduddin.
• Yasaq first meant law/decree; ‘yasa’ as Genghis Khan’s legal code came by the mid-13th century.
• Timur was a Barlas Turk who ruled as guregen (son-in-law), not a Genghisid.
• Casualty figures are chroniclers’ estimates, which NCERT itself calls exaggerated.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate: UPSC 2001 asked in whose reign the Mongols under Genghis Khan ‘invaded India’ (key: Iltutmish); UPSC 2021 asked whether Chengiz Khan reached the Indus in Iltutmish’s reign pursuing the Khwarazm prince (correct) and whether Timur crossed the Indus under Muhammad bin Tughluq (incorrect — Timur came in 1398). Note: the 2001 wording ‘invaded India’ is loose — Genghis Khan reached the Indus and turned back — but the key is standard.
• Mongol institutions in India: UPSC 1994 asked where Akbar’s mansabdari was borrowed from (key: Mongolia) — linked to the Mongol decimal ranking of the army (section 5). The key is standard, though historians also see Persian and Central Asian (Timurid) influences, so treat it as debatable.
• Geography of the steppe: UPSC 2013 described a region with extreme climate, scanty rain and nomadic herders (key: Central Asian Steppe) — exactly NCERT’s description of the Mongol homeland (section 2).
• Likely areas: quriltai, yasa, yam, tuman; Batu and the Golden Horde; Hulegu and Baghdad (1258); Qubilai and the Yuan; Ghazan Khan; Timur and Babur’s descent.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• No Mains question has been asked directly on the Mongols. Use the chapter for source criticism in history answers (whose records survive; Il-Khanid exaggeration; ‘one dominant perspective can erase all others’) and for essays on pluralism and governance (a multi-religious regime that did not impose the ruler’s faith; administrators recruited across ethnicities), connectivity (Pax Mongolica, Silk Route) and environment (qanat collapse in Khurasan).
• Medieval India answers: the Mongol threat explains the Delhi Sultanate’s frontier policy and army reforms; the Mughals’ Timurid–Genghisid ancestry explains their claims to legitimacy (Babur, 1526).
• Answer frame: steppe background → Genghis Khan’s reorganisation → conquest (stated factually, figures attributed) → administration and Pax Mongolica → fragmentation and memory → competing perspectives.

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