Mongol Empire quiz: 7 questions

Life on the steppe prepared herders for mounted warfare: riding, archery and endurance were part of earning a living. Remount herds accompanied the army and grazed as it moved, making logistics unnecessary. Skills developed for subsistence thus supplied a foundation for war.

The Mongols organized the skills of the people they conquered. Specialists from every fallen town were hired rather than killed, giving the army the means to conduct sieges. Within a decade the “barbarians” were besieging cities better than the dynasties that had invented the tools.

The raiders went east, then returned in 1236 with knowledge of the fords, the winters and the feuds among the princes. Their victims had learned nothing. This difference decided the campaigns of 1237–41.

Historians consider both the succession council called after Ögedei’s death and the strain on Mongol herds from Hungary’s trampled pastures. Politics chose the moment of withdrawal; ecology set the limit. Succession also drew an army away from Syria in 1260: the empire’s inheritance law was its deadliest enemy.

The four states shared a dynasty, but they could fight one another. The Golden Horde even joined Mamluk Egypt against the Ilkhanate. The dashed borders mark divisions between cousins and help explain why the tide stopped rising.

Mongol power depended on horses, pasture and mobility. Those advantages were harder to use across typhoon seas, jungles and rice paddies. Fleets had to be coerced from conquered peoples, horses died, and local defenders avoided open battle while heat and disease wore down the invaders.

Plague from steppe reservoirs reached Genoese ships at Caffa in 1347. The connections that carried goods and knowledge across Eurasia also gave disease routes along which to travel.