All six exercise questions from NCERT Themes in World History, Theme 3, “Nomadic Empires”, exactly as the English edition prints them, each with a full model answer. The book splits them into four questions to be answered in brief and two to be answered in a short essay. The four in-text activities printed in the margin are answered at the end. Write your own answer first, then read this one.
The Hindi edition of this chapter asks the same six questions in the same order, but its wording is not a straight translation of the English one. If you are writing the paper in Hindi, work from the Hindi edition’s own version of these questions, which is answered in the Hindi post of this page.
1 Answer in brief
Q. Why was trade so significant to the Mongols?
Answer:
The steppe could not supply everything. Mongol pastoralists herded horses and sheep, and to a lesser extent cattle, goats and camels, while the hunter-gatherers of the Siberian forests lived off furs and game. Neither economy produced grain in any quantity, nor iron tools, nor most manufactured goods.
China was the natural partner. Agricultural produce and iron utensils came from the settled societies to the south, and horses, furs and game went the other way. That exchange, whether by trade or barter, was what kept a Mongol household supplied.
It was mutually useful, and never quite peaceful. Whichever side held the advantage at a given moment pressed the other for better terms. When Mongol lineages united behind a strong leader, the pressure could become military, and plunder replaced trade altogether.
The alternative was costly for the settled side. In a frontier war the nomads could retreat into the steppe with marginal losses, while the settled societies suffered dislocated agriculture and plundered cities. China’s answer was defensive: fortifications built from as early as the eighth century BCE were joined from the third century BCE into the line we now call the Great Wall.
So trade was not a luxury. It was the mechanism by which a thin, mobile, resource-poor economy drew on the wealth of a far richer neighbour, and the balance between trading and raiding shifted with Mongol political unity.
Q. Why did Genghis Khan feel the need to fragment the Mongol tribes into new social and military groupings?
Answer:
The material he had to work with. Unification and conquest brought a very mixed body of men into his army: Mongol lineages that had fought one another for generations, Turkic Uighurs who joined willingly, and defeated peoples such as the Kereyits who were absorbed despite earlier hostility.
The danger in leaving them as they were. If clansmen continued to serve together under their own chiefs, their first loyalty would remain to the lineage, and the confederation would break apart the moment the leader died. That is exactly what had happened to earlier steppe confederacies, including Attila’s in the fifth century.
What he did instead. He kept the old steppe decimal system of units of 10, 100, 1,000 and, at least on paper, 10,000, the last called a tuman, but broke up the clan and tribal blocks and redistributed their members across new, mixed units. Moving out of an assigned unit without permission was punished harshly.
Who now commanded. The reorganised units served under his four sons and under specially chosen captains, the noyan.
The new basis of status. Long-serving followers were publicly honoured as blood-brothers, anda, and freemen of humbler birth were given the rank of bondsman, naukar. Status now came from closeness to the Great Khan rather than from ancestry.
The result. Old tribal identities were systematically erased, and a soldier surrounded by men of other clans had only one loyalty left to fall back on, which is why Genghis Khan’s political system outlasted him where Attila’s did not.
Q. How do later Mongol reflections on the yasa bring out the uneasy relationship they had with the memory of Genghis Khan.
Answer:
What the word first meant. In its earliest form, yasaq, it meant simply law, decree or order, and the details that survive concern administrative regulation of the hunt, the army and the postal system.
What it grew into. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Mongols were using the related term yasa far more broadly, for the whole legal code of Genghis Khan, said to have been promulgated at the quriltai of 1206.
Why they needed that claim. The Mongols were now a numerical minority ruling sophisticated urban societies that had their own laws and their own histories. A sacred law inherited from their own ancestor let them protect their ethnic identity, cast Genghis Khan as a lawgiver comparable to Moses or Solomon, and gave them the confidence to absorb settled customs without ceasing to be Mongols.
Where the unease shows. The code was in all likelihood a compilation of ordinary Mongol customary tradition, dressed in Genghis Khan’s authority, rather than anything he personally drafted. His descendants therefore had to keep reshaping the memory of him to fit circumstances he never faced. David Ayalon’s research traced how this was done.
The clearest example. (NCERT dates the fall of Bukhara to 1220 in its opening extract and this episode to 1221; both years are the book’s own.) In 1221 Genghis Khan stood on Bukhara’s festival ground and condemned the city’s wealthy Muslims as sinners. In the late sixteenth century a distant Jochid descendant, ‘Abdullah Khan, went to that same ground to perform Muslim holiday prayers, and his chronicler Hafiz-i Tanish described the act as done “according to the yasa of Genghis Khan”.
The point. Genghis Khan’s name had become indispensable to his descendants and, at the same time, awkward. They could neither give it up nor live by it literally, so they stretched it until it authorised the opposite of what he had actually done.
Q. “If history relies upon written records produced by city-based literati, nomadic societies will always receive a hostile representation.” Would you agree with this statement? Does it explain the reason why Persian chronicles produced such inflated figures of casualties resulting from Mongol campaigns?
Answer:
There is a great deal in the statement. The Mongols wrote almost nothing themselves, so nearly every source about them was produced by literate outsiders living in cities. Many of these writers knew little of nomadic life and were hostile to it by habit, working within a tradition that had labelled all nomads barbarians long before the Mongols existed. The Greek word barbaros meant a non-Greek whose speech sounded like meaningless noise; the Romans reused it for the Germanic tribes, the Gauls and the Huns, and Chinese writers had their own equally negative terms.
But it is too absolute as it stands. Mongol imperial success drew literate men of Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Turkish and Muslim background into Mongol service, and some of them wrote sympathetic accounts and outright eulogies. Russian scholarship offers another counter-example: Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold’s assessment of Genghis Khan was so positive that Stalinist censors suppressed it for decades. So the hostility is a strong tendency in city-written sources, not an iron law.
Does it explain the inflated figures? Partly, and only partly.
What it does explain. A chronicler writing for an urban readership had every reason to present the nomad as an unimaginable calamity, and no way of checking a number. Juwaini’s own account shows the method: the figure of 1,300,000 at Merv was reached, he says, because it took thirteen days to count the dead at a hundred thousand corpses a day. The reported tolls of 1,747,000 at Nishapur in 1220, 1,600,000 at Herat in 1222 and 800,000 at Baghdad in 1258 belong to the same tradition.
What it does not explain. Some of the worst exaggeration came from chroniclers writing under Mongol patronage, not against it. Late thirteenth-century Il-Khanid Persian chronicles turned an eyewitness count of 400 defenders at Bukhara’s citadel into 30,000 killed, precisely so that the present rulers could be praised for having ended the great killings of the past.
Conclusion. Hostility explains part of the distortion and patronage explains another part. The figures are evidence of how the Mongols were remembered, and cannot be read as a count of the dead.
2 Answer in a short essay
Q. Keeping the nomadic element of the Mongol and Bedouin societies in mind, how, in your opinion, did their respective historical experiences differ? What explanations would you suggest account for these differences?
Answer:
What the two had in common. Both were nomadic pastoral peoples of a harsh, resource-poor environment, organised into lineages and tribes, dependent on their herds, and both produced a leader who welded scattered tribes into a force that overturned the great settled empires of their day.
How the experiences differed.
1. The binding idea. Bedouin expansion in the central Islamic lands (the book’s introduction refers to it, though that theme is no longer part of the rationalised syllabus) was carried by a new religion. Islam gave the tribes a common faith, a common law and a community that cut across lineage. The Mongols had no such creed to export. Genghis Khan’s unifying idea was a personal claim to a mandate from Heaven to rule the world, expressed in Mongke’s warning to Louis IX that in Heaven there is one Eternal Sky and on earth one Lord.
2. What happened to the conquered. Arab conquest brought a religion that many of the conquered eventually adopted, and Arabic spread with it. Mongol conquest brought no religion at all. The Mongol Khans held varied personal faiths, shamanistic, Buddhist, Christian and eventually Islamic, and deliberately kept personal belief out of public policy, recruiting administrators and soldiers from every ethnic group and religion.
3. The direction of absorption. The Mongols were therefore absorbed by the societies they ruled rather than the reverse. Ghazan Khan converted to Islam in Iran, the Golden Horde turned towards Islam from Berke’s reign and converted definitively in the 1350s, and the Yuan dynasty in China took on Chinese forms of rule.
4. Durability. The Arab conquests produced a lasting religious and linguistic order. The Mongol dominion, at its greatest extent the largest land empire in history, fragmented into four khanates from the middle of the thirteenth century and had lost China by 1368.
Why the difference. First, ideology: a portable universal religion travels and reproduces itself, while a claim to personal divine mandate dies with the family that makes it. Second, numbers: the Mongols were a small minority spread over enormous, densely populated territories, which forced them to rule through the administrators and customs they found. Third, distance and geography: the further a lineage lived from the steppe, the stronger the pull to settle, so the empire pulled apart along the lines of the four ulus. Fourth, succession: the Mongol quriltai gave no fixed rule of succession, so every generation of Genghis Khanid descendants fought over the office of Great Khan, and that quarrel, not any European army, is what halted the westward advance.
Conclusion. Nomadic origins gave both peoples the same military advantages of mobility, endurance and speed. What they did with those advantages afterwards depended on what they carried besides horses, and the Mongols carried an empire without a creed.
Q. How does the following account enlarge upon the character of the Pax Mongolica created by the Mongols by the middle of the thirteenth century?
The Franciscan monk, William of Rubruck, was sent by Louis IX of France on an embassy to the great Khan Mongke’s court. He reached Karakorum, the capital of Mongke, in 1254 and came upon a woman from Lorraine (in France) called Paquette, who had been brought from Hungary and was in the service of one of the prince’s wives who was a Nestorian Christian. At the court he came across a Parisian goldsmith named Guillaume Boucher, “whose brother dwelt on the Grand Pont in Paris”. This man was first employed by the Queen Sorghaqtani and then by Mongke’s younger brother. Rubruck found that at the great court festivals the Nestorian priests were admitted first, with their regalia, to bless the Grand Khan’s cup, and were followed by the Muslim clergy and Buddhist and Taoist monks.
Answer:
What the Pax Mongolica was. Once the conquests stabilised, Europe and China lay within a single connected system of Mongol control, and the peace that followed allowed Silk Route trade and long-distance travel to flourish as never before. The route no longer terminated in China but ran north into Mongolia, to Karakorum itself. Travellers carried a pass, paiza in Persian and gerege in Mongolian, and traders paid the baj tax for the same protection.
Distance had become ordinary. A French monk on a royal embassy reaches the Mongol capital and finds two Europeans already living there. A woman from Lorraine has arrived by way of Hungary. A goldsmith from Paris is in court employment. None of this could have happened a century earlier, and none of it is presented as remarkable by Rubruck.
The movement was not only of goods. Skilled craftsmen, servants, envoys and clergy travelled the same roads as merchandise, some voluntarily and some, like Paquette, as captives of an earlier campaign. The account is therefore a reminder that the Mongol Peace rested on conquest.
Talent was recruited without regard to origin. Guillaume Boucher served first Queen Sorghaqtani and then Mongke’s own brother. From Genghis Khan’s reign onwards the Mongols recruited administrators from the societies they conquered and moved them across the empire, Chinese secretaries to Iran and Persians to China. A Parisian goldsmith at Karakorum is the same policy in a different craft.
Religion was managed, not imposed. At a single court festival, Nestorian priests blessed the Khan’s cup first, then came the Muslim clergy, then Buddhist and Taoist monks. The Khans held varied personal faiths but never let private belief dictate public policy, and this ordered plurality was unusual anywhere in the thirteenth century.
Conclusion. The passage turns the Pax Mongolica from a phrase about trade routes into something a traveller could see: one court, in the middle of the steppe, holding a French captive, a Parisian craftsman, and the clergy of four religions, all under the authority of a single Khan.
Questions 1 to 4 are the “answer in brief” set and are usually worth three or four marks, so four to six firm points are enough. Questions 5 and 6 are short essays, so give them headings and a conclusion, and name people, places and years wherever you can: Karakorum, 1254, Rubruck, Sorghaqtani, Rashiduddin, Juwaini. Marks in this chapter come from the names.
7 In-text activities
The chapter also prints four activity boxes in the margin. They are answered below in the order they appear in the book.
Q. Assume that Juwaini’s account of the capture of Bukhara is accurate. Imagine yourself as a resident of Bukhara and Khurasan who heard the speeches. What impact would they have had on you?
Answer: As a resident of Bukhara I would have been terrified and humiliated. Genghis Khan told the rich residents gathered at the festival ground that they had committed great sins, that the great ones among them had committed these sins, and that he himself was the punishment of God, sent because of those sins. Coming from a conqueror who had just taken the city, this meant that resistance was useless and that the destruction was presented as divine judgement; it would have made people fear for their lives and their property, and some might even have blamed themselves or their leaders. As a resident of Khurasan hearing the survivor’s report, “They came, they [mined the walls], they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed”, I would have expected the same fate for my own city, and the fear would have encouraged surrender rather than resistance. The speeches also show how the conquest was remembered: as sudden, total and unstoppable.
Q. Note the areas traversed by the Silk Route and the goods that were available to traders along the way. This map does not reflect one of the eastern terminal points of the silk route during the height of Mongol power. Can you place the missing city? Could it have been on the Silk Route in the twelfth century? Why not?
Answer: Areas traversed: on Map 2 the grey Silk Route line starts in northern China, at the unmarked eastern terminal point (the missing city), and runs west through Turfan and across the Chagatai lands of Central Asia to the Bukhara and Samarkand region of Transoxiana, then past Nishapur across Iran (the Il-Khan empire) to Baghdad, and ends just beyond that city, linking China with western Asia. (On this map Damascus, on the Mediterranean, is reached only by the blue arrow of the Mongol campaigns after 1259, not by the Silk Route line.) It does not touch Hangzhou, Guangzhou or Karakorum.
Goods along the way: silk, porcelain, tea and paper from China; horses, furs and hides from the steppe; spices, precious stones, textiles, metal goods and glassware from the lands further west. The chapter itself notes the basic exchange of the steppe with China: agricultural produce and iron utensils from China for horses, furs and game.
The missing city: Peking (Khanbaliq), where Qubilai Khan ruled as Grand Khan from 1260 and which became the capital of the Yuan dynasty, is not marked on the map.
Could it have been on the Silk Route in the twelfth century? No. In the twelfth century the Mongols were not yet united, north China was ruled by the Jurchen Chin dynasty from Peking, and the trade routes from the west ended in China itself. The chapter explains that only under the Mongols, once Europe and China were territorially linked in the Pax Mongolica, did the routes no longer terminate in China but continue north into Mongolia, to Karakorum, and the Mongol capitals became terminal points of the Silk Route.
Q. Why was there a conflict of interests between pastoralists and peasants? Would Genghis Khan have expressed sentiments of this nature in a speech to his nomad commanders?
Answer: Pastoralists and peasants used the land in opposite ways. Pastoralists needed open grassland for their herds, and conquered fields could be turned into pasture; plunder of peasant villages also gave quick wealth. Peasants needed their fields, oxen and seed protected, and a ruler who wanted regular grain and revenue had to protect them. That is why, in the 1230s, a strong group among the Mongols in north China advocated massacring the peasantry and converting their fields into pasture, while later rulers like Qubilai Khan and Ghazan Khan protected the peasants.
Genghis Khan would probably not have made such a speech. He spent most of his life in military combat, his campaigns devastated cities and farmland, and at Nishapur he ordered the town laid waste so that the site could be ploughed upon. The book itself says that Ghazan Khan’s speech had “sedentary overtones” that “would have made Genghis Khan shudder”. Ghazan Khan spoke as the ruler of a settled, revenue-paying Iran; the speech was probably drafted by his Persian wazir Rashiduddin.
Q. Did the meaning of yasa alter over the four centuries separating Genghis Khan from ‘Abdullah Khan? Why did Hafiz-i Tanish make a reference to Genghis Khan’s yasa in connection with ‘Abdullah Khan’s prayer at the Muslim festival ground?
Answer: Yes, the meaning altered greatly. In its earliest form, yasaq meant “law”, “decree” or “order”, and the few details known about it concern administrative regulations: the organisation of the hunt, the army and the postal system. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Mongols used yasa to mean the “legal code of Genghis Khan”, a sacred law from their ancestor that protected their identity and that they could impose on their subjects. By the late sixteenth century it had become a general source of legitimacy that could be attached to almost any act of a Genghis Khanid ruler.
In 1221 Genghis Khan had used the festival ground at Bukhara to call the rich Muslim residents sinners. ‘Abdullah Khan, a distant descendant of Jochi, went to the same ground to perform his holiday prayers. His chronicler Hafiz-i Tanish described this act of Muslim piety as being “according to the yasa of Genghis Khan” so that his master would appear both as a pious Muslim and as a faithful heir of Genghis Khan. The reference shows how important the Genghis Khanid legacy remained, and how freely its meaning had been stretched, since Genghis Khan himself had done something very different on that ground.