Class 11 History Chapter 3 Nomadic Empires Notes in English

1How Do We Know About the Mongols?

1.1 A People Written About by Others

Before meeting Genghis Khan, it helps to ask an unusual question first: how do historians even know about him? The Mongols lived on the steppe, the vast, flat, grassy plains of Central Asia, and moved constantly with their herds, so they themselves wrote almost nothing down. Nearly everything we know about nomadic Mongol society instead comes from chronicles, travelogues and documents written by literati, educated, literate writers who lived in cities, and who were not Mongols at all.

Many of these authors were hostile or simply ignorant about nomadic life. But the Mongols’ own imperial success drew in all kinds of literate people, Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Turkish and Muslim, some just passing through, others staying on to serve Mongol masters. Even without much familiarity with Mongol customs, many still wrote sympathetic accounts, some even full of praise, alongside the usual hostile “city dweller versus barbarian” narrative.

1.2 The Secret History, and Modern Scholarship

The single most important early narrative on Genghis Khan is a work whose original Mongolian title, transliterated into Roman letters, is roughly Mongqol-un niuca tobcian, best known in English simply as the Secret History.

The transcontinental reach of the Mongol empire means its sources survive in a huge range of languages, Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Arabic above all, but also Italian, Latin, French and Russian. Often the very same event was recorded quite differently in two languages at once: even the Italian and Latin versions of Marco Polo’s own account of his travels to the Mongol court do not match. Because of this, historians studying the Mongols often have to work as philologists too, closely comparing word choices across languages, scholars like Igor de Rachewiltz on the Secret History itself, and Gerhard Doerfer on Mongol and Turkic words that crept into Persian.

Much of the most valuable modern research came out of Russia. Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tsarist-era travellers, soldiers, merchants and history-collecting scholars produced detailed survey notes as the Russian empire pushed into Central Asia. In the early twentieth century, after the Russian Revolution, Soviet historians tried to fit Mongol history into their own theory of stages of economic development, arguing that Mongol society was moving from an old “tribal” way of organising people to a “feudal” one, where a lord controlled land and peasants worked it for him. Despite this rigid, theory-first approach, scholars such as Boris Yakovlevich Vladimirtsov still produced excellent research on Mongol language, society and culture.

2Genghis Khan’s World Empire

2.1 A Mandate from Heaven

The title “Nomadic Empires” can sound like a contradiction. Nomads are usually pictured as wanderers living a simple life, with no real differences of wealth or role between families, and hardly any political organisation, while an “empire” suggests exactly the opposite, a fixed place, complex social and economic structures, and an elaborate system for governing a huge territory. Once you actually study a real nomadic empire in detail, this apparent contradiction turns out to be false. Theme 4 of this book already looked at one such case, the Bedouin nomads of the Arabian peninsula, who built states of their own in the central Islamic lands; here we look instead at a very different group of nomads altogether, the Mongols of Central Asia.

By the early thirteenth century, the great empires of Europe and Asia had every reason to worry about a new power rising in the Central Asian steppe: Genghis Khan, who died in 1227, had united the Mongol people. But his ambition went far beyond simply leading a confederacy (an alliance of tribes acting together) of Mongol tribes, he genuinely believed he held a mandate from God to rule the entire world.

His grandson Mongke (1251-60) put this belief into words in a chillingly confident warning to the French king Louis IX (1226-70): “In Heaven there is only one Eternal Sky, on Earth there is only one Lord, Genghis Khan, the Son of Heaven… if… you bring an army against us, we know what we can do.” These were not empty words. Batu, another grandson, led campaigns from 1236 to 1241 that devastated Russian lands as far as Moscow, seized Poland and Hungary, and camped an army outside the gates of Vienna itself. To many people across China, the Middle East and Europe, it genuinely looked as if the “Eternal Sky” favoured the Mongols, and that Genghis Khan’s conquests were nothing less than the wrath of God.

2.2 The Capture of Bukhara

These two voices, the conqueror’s own self-justification and a survivor’s bare, exhausted summary, frame the biggest question here: how did the Mongols, starting from so humble and dispersed a society, build an empire that dwarfed even Alexander’s conquests, and how did a man so certain of his divinely-given right to rule actually govern the vastly different peoples and religions that came under him?

3Social and Political Background of the Mongols

3.1 Pastoralists and Hunter-Gatherers of the Steppe

The Mongols were not one single, uniform people, they were a diverse group linked by language ties to the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus to their east, and to Turkic tribes to their west. Some Mongols were pastoralists, herding horses, sheep, and to a lesser extent cattle, goats and camels, across the wide grasslands of what is now Mongolia, a majestic landscape of rolling plains, ringed by the snow-capped Altai mountains in the west, the arid Gobi desert in the south, and fed by the Onon and Selenga rivers and countless mountain springs.

A separate, humbler group of hunter-gatherers lived further north, in the Siberian forests, making a living by trapping and trading furs. Winters across the whole region were long and harsh, summers brief and dry; some farming was possible in the pastoral areas, but, unlike some of the Turkic peoples further west, the Mongols never really took to it.

3.2 Lineages, Confederacies and a Wary Neighbour

Mongol society was organised into patrilineal lineages, family lines traced through the father’s side back to a common male ancestor. Richer families, with more animals and better pasture, attracted more followers and carried more weight in local politics. But resources were always scarce: a harsh winter or a bad drought could force whole families to forage further afield, sparking conflict over grazing land and predatory raids for livestock. Groups of families sometimes banded together around a powerful lineage for offence or defence, but, with rare exceptions, these confederacies stayed small and did not last.

These confederacies did not all rule the same territory, and were not all equally large or complex, but they had a real impact on the nomadic world and, unevenly, on China and its neighbours as well. Scarce steppe resources drove the Mongols to trade constantly with settled China, farm produce and iron tools for Mongol horses, furs and game, and this trade was mutually useful but never fully peaceful. Whichever side had the upper hand pressed the other for better terms, and when Mongol lineages allied, plunder often replaced trade outright.

China’s long-term answer to this threat was defensive. Fortifications against steppe raiders were being built as early as the eighth century BCE, and from the third century BCE these scattered walls were gradually joined into a single, continuous line of defence, the structure we know today as the Great Wall of China, itself a dramatic, visible record of just how much fear and disruption nomadic raids caused in north China.

4The Career of Genghis Khan

4.1 From Temujin to Universal Ruler

The man the world would come to know as Genghis Khan was born near the Onon river in what is now northern Mongolia. NCERT’s own text gives two slightly different years for this, around 1162 in the running account and around 1167 in its own timeline table, so do not be surprised to see either one in a question.

He was named Temujin, son of Yesugei, chieftain of the Kiyat, a group of families within the larger Borjigid clan. His father was murdered while Temujin was still young, and his mother Oelun-eke raised him and his brothers in real hardship. The years that followed brought more reversals still, Temujin was captured and enslaved at one point, and soon after his marriage his wife Borte was kidnapped, forcing him to fight to win her back.

It was during these hard years that Temujin made the alliances that shaped his rise: Boghurchu became his first, lifelong trusted ally; Jamuqa, his blood-brother (anda), was another, though the friendship later turned to bitter rivalry; and he restored an old alliance with Tughril, also called Ong Khan, ruler of the Kereyits and his own father’s former blood-brother. Through the 1180s and 1190s, Temujin used the alliance with Ong Khan to defeat Jamuqa, and, once confident enough, turned on his other rivals in turn: the Tatars (his father’s killers), the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself by 1203, and finally the Naiman people and Jamuqa again in 1206.

Just before this quriltai, Genghis Khan had already reorganised the Mongols into a far more disciplined military force (see Section 5), the foundation for every campaign that followed.

4.2 Conquering China and Central Asia

Genghis Khan’s first major target was China, at the time split into three separate realms: the Tibetan-origin Hsi Hsia in the north-west, the Jurchen Chin dynasty ruling the north from Peking, and the Sung dynasty controlling the south. The Hsi Hsia were defeated by 1209; the Great Wall itself was breached in 1213 and Peking sacked in 1215. Fighting against the Chin dragged on until 1234, but Genghis Khan himself was satisfied enough with its progress to return home to Mongolia in 1216, leaving the campaign to his subordinates.

After defeating the Qara Khita (who controlled the Tien Shan mountains, north-west of China) in 1218, Mongol power reached the Amu Darya river and the borders of Transoxiana (the fertile region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, in today’s Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and Khwarazm. When Sultan Muhammad, the ruler of Khwarazm, had Mongol envoys executed, Genghis Khan’s response between 1219 and 1221 was devastating: the great cities of Otrar, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Gurganj, Merv, Nishapur and Herat all surrendered, while towns that resisted were destroyed outright. At Nishapur, after a Mongol prince was killed during the siege, Genghis Khan ordered the town “laid waste… that the site could be ploughed upon”, sparing, in his own chroniclers’ words, “not even cats and dogs.”

Smaller towns suffered too, at least according to the same inflated chronicle tradition: Nasa 70,000 dead, the Baihaq district another 70,000, and 12,000 people executed at Tun in the Kuhistan province.

Mongol forces went on to pursue Sultan Muhammad into Azerbaijan, defeated Russian forces in the Crimea, and encircled the Caspian Sea, while a second wing followed his son Jalaluddin into Afghanistan and Sindh. At the banks of the Indus, Genghis Khan even considered returning to Mongolia by way of North India and Assam, but the heat, the unfamiliar terrain, and ill omens reported by his shaman (a priest believed to read signs from the spirit world) changed his mind.

4.3 Death, Military Method, and the Limits of Expansion

Genghis Khan died in 1227, having spent most of his adult life in military campaigns. His extraordinary success rested on turning familiar steppe skills into devastating new tactics: expert horsemanship gave the Mongol army speed and mobility, rapid mounted archery, sharpened by regular hunting expeditions that doubled as field manoeuvres, gave it striking power, and a willingness to campaign even through the depths of winter, using frozen rivers as highways, gave it surprise. Genghis Khan also learned quickly to use siege engines and naphtha (an early, flammable, oil-based weapon) as a bombardment, arming his engineers with light, portable equipment that broke fortified towns nomads had traditionally struggled against.

Mongol expansion after his death fell into two distinct phases: the first, 1236-42, brought major gains in the Russian steppes, Bulghar, Kiev, Poland and Hungary; the second, 1255-1300, completed the conquest of all of China (1279), and added Iran, Iraq and Syria, after which the frontier finally stabilised.

5Social, Political and Military Organisation

5.1 The Decimal Army and a New Aristocracy

Among the Mongols, as in many nomadic societies, every able-bodied adult male bore arms and formed the army whenever it was needed. As Genghis Khan united the different Mongol tribes and absorbed newly conquered peoples, this once-small, fairly uniform body grew into an extraordinarily mixed force, including groups like the Turkic Uighurs, who joined willingly, and defeated peoples like the Kereyits, who were absorbed despite their earlier hostility.

This new army served under Genghis Khan’s four sons and under specially chosen captains called noyan. Alongside them stood a new kind of nobility, built not on old clan status but on personal loyalty to Genghis Khan himself: some long-serving followers were publicly honoured as his “blood-brothers” (anda), while others, free men of humbler birth, were given the special rank of bondsman (naukar), a personal servant tied closely to his master. Either way, status now flowed from closeness to the Great Khan, not from ancestry.

5.2 The Four Ulus and the Machinery of Empire

Genghis Khan divided responsibility for governing his conquests among his four sons, in shares called the ulus. Crucially, in his own lifetime an ulus was not yet a fixed piece of territory, the frontiers were still fluid as conquest continued.

To keep this shared dominion coherent, each prince’s own military contingent, a tama, was stationed inside every ulus, and the quriltai kept deciding matters that concerned the whole family together, campaigns, plunder, pasture, and succession.

6The Mongols and Settled Societies

6.1 The Cost of Conquest, and the Pax Mongolica

Conquered peoples had every reason to hate their new nomadic rulers. Across the first half of the thirteenth century, cities were destroyed, farmland ruined, and trade and handicraft production disrupted; tens of thousands were killed and even more enslaved, though we cannot trust the exact numbers, since chroniclers of the time exaggerated them.

Yet once the dust of conquest settled, a traveller could, for the first time, cross overland all the way from Europe to China under one connected system of Mongol control. In the peace that followed, trade along the Silk Route reached its height, and, unlike before, it no longer stopped at China but continued north into Mongolia itself, all the way to Karakorum, the heart of the new empire.

6.2 Pastoralists or Protectors? Ruling the Peasantry

The Mongol leadership itself was divided over what to do with conquered farmland. In the 1230s, while fighting the Chin dynasty in north China, a strong faction actually pushed to massacre the entire peasantry and turn their fields into pasture for Mongol herds. But by the 1270s, once south China had also been conquered and brought under Mongol rule, Genghis Khan’s own grandson Qubilai Khan (who died in 1294) instead presented himself as the protector of peasants and cities.

This same shift shows up in the empire’s administration. From Genghis Khan’s own reign onward, the Mongols recruited civil administrators from the very societies they had conquered, and moved them around the empire, Chinese secretaries served in Iran, Persians served in China. As long as they kept raising revenue for their Mongol masters, these administrators were trusted and could wield real influence: the Chinese minister Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai reined in some of Ogodei’s harsher instincts, the Juwaini family played a similar role in Iran through the late thirteenth century, and it was the wazir Rashiduddin who drafted Ghazan Khan’s own appeal to protect the peasantry.

7From One Dominion to Four Khanates

7.1 Four Lineages, Four Realms

The pressure to settle down and adapt to local ways was strongest furthest from the original steppe homeland. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the sense of one shared family inheritance (a “patrimony”, property passed down within one family) was gradually replaced by separate dynasties, each ruling its own share, and the word ulus, which once meant a fluid, ever-shifting frontier, now came to mean a fixed territorial kingdom. This was partly a result of succession struggles, as Genghis Khanid descendants competed against each other both for the office of Great Khan and for the most prized pastoral lands.

7.2 Whose Version of the Family Story?

This split reshaped how the past itself was remembered. The Toluyid branch, controlling both China and Iran and able to pay far more literati (educated writers) than their rival cousins, was best placed to tell its own version of the family’s disputes in the histories written under their patronage, that is, histories they paid writers to produce. Even Genghis Khan himself was not spared this rewriting: late-thirteenth-century Persian chronicles from Il-Khanid Iran exaggerated his killings for dramatic effect, an eyewitness count of 400 defenders at Bukhara’s citadel became, in one such chronicle, 30,000 killed. Yet the same chronicles still praised Genghis Khan highly, even as they expressed relief that “the great killings of the past were over.”

8The Yasa, and Genghis Khan in World History

8.1 The Yasa: Law and Legacy

Why did the meaning grow so much? By then the Mongols, though politically dominant, were a small minority ruling over sophisticated, literate urban societies with legal traditions of their own. Claiming a sacred law handed down by their own ancestor let the Mongols protect their identity, cast Genghis Khan as a lawgiver in the mould of Moses or Solomon, and hold on to their sense of themselves even while absorbing more and more of a settled way of life.

The yasa, in other words, was most likely a compilation of ordinary Mongol customary tradition, given the weight of Genghis Khan’s name. Whether or not he ever planned such a formal code himself, it became a genuinely powerful, unifying idea, one his descendants kept reshaping to fit their own very different circumstances, as the research of the scholar David Ayalon has traced in detail.

8.2 Conclusion : Two Images of Genghis Khan

Ask what Genghis Khan means today, and you get two sharply opposite answers. The real point is not to pick the “true” one, but to notice how easily one dominant view can erase the other entirely.

Beyond either view, the sheer scale of the Mongol dominion is itself remarkable: though the Mongol Khans held a range of personal faiths, shamanistic, Buddhist, Christian, and eventually Islam, they never let personal belief dictate public policy, and recruited administrators and soldiers from every ethnic group and religion under their rule. For its time, this multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious tolerance was genuinely unusual, and historians are still studying how it may have offered a model for later regimes, including the Mughals of India, to follow.

Even Genghis Khan’s imitators needed his name. At the end of the fourteenth century, Timur (1370-1405), another conqueror who dreamed of universal rule, hesitated to declare himself monarch at all because he was not descended from Genghis Khan, when he finally did, it was only as “son-in-law” (guregen) of the Genghis Khanid family. And today, after decades of Soviet control, Mongolia has reclaimed Genghis Khan as its great national hero, a figure whose memory is once again helping to shape the country’s own sense of identity.

9Timeline: Genghis Khan and the Mongols at a Glance