The Mongol Empire

The Mongol Empire was the contiguous land empire founded by Genghis Khan in 1206, when a kurultai, a tribal assembly, proclaimed him supreme ruler of the newly unified Mongol nation. Within seventy years his armies and those of his sons and grandsons had conquered territory stretching from Korea and northern China to Eastern Europe and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf, making it the largest contiguous land empire in world history. The empire's rapid expansion rested on a disciplined, decimally organized cavalry army, siege technology adopted from conquered peoples, and a relay communications network called the Yam. After the reign of Genghis Khan's third son and successor Ogedei, the empire's unity weakened, and it fragmented after the 1260s into four major khanates, the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde in Russia, each ruled by a different branch of Genghis Khan's family and following its own separate trajectory afterward. The empire's conquests were devastating to the populations and cities that resisted, and remain among the most extensively debated events in medieval demographic history, but its unification of Eurasian trade routes under Mongol rule, a period historians call the Pax Mongolica, also connected China, the Islamic world and Europe more directly than ever before.