Test: Nomadic Empires- 2

Genghis Khan died in 1227, having spent most of his life in military combat. 

However, Genghis Khan’s political vision went far beyond the creation of a confederacy of Mongol tribes in the steppes of Central Asia: he had a mandate from God to rule the world.

One man had escaped from Bukhara after its capture and had come to Khurasan.

Some of the Mongols were called pastoralists.

The size of Genghis Khan’s confederation of Mongol and Turkish tribes was perhaps matched in size only by that which had been stitched together in the fifth century by attila.

Genghis khan was born sometime around 1162 near the Onon River in the north of present-day Mongolia.

Temujin restored old alliances with the ruler of the kereyits, Ong Khan, his father’s old blood-brother.

At Nishapur, a Mongol prince was killed during the siege operation.

Vienna, western Europe, and Egypt were within the grasp of Mongol forces; their retreat from the Hungarian steppes and defeat at the hands of the Egyptian forces signaled the emergence of new political trends.

The new military contingents were required to serve under his four sons and specially chosen captains of his army units called Noyan.

This was called the Qubcur tax, a levy that the nomads paid willingly for the multiple benefits that it brought.

The courier system was further refined after Genghis Khan’s death, and its speed and reliability surprised travelers.

The underground canals are called qanats in the arid Iranian plateau.

In the 1290s, the Mongol ruler of Iran Ghazan Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan’s youngest son Toluy, warned family members and other generals to avoid pillaging the peasantry.

In the 1230s, the Chinese minister Yeh-Lu ch’u-Ts’ai muted some of the Ogedei’s more rapacious instincts. 

By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Mongols had started using the related term Yasa in a more general sense to mean the legal code of Genghis Khan.

Mongols ruled over sophisticated urban societies with their respective histories, cultures, and laws.

In the late sixteenth century, Abdullah Khan, a distant descendant of Jochi, Genghis Khan’s eldest son, went to the same festival ground in Bukhara.

At the end of the fourteenth century, Timur, another monarch who aspired to universal dominion, hesitated to declare himself a monarch because he was not of Genghis khan descent.

For the Mongols, Genghis Khan was the greatest leader of all time: he united the Mongol people, freed them from interminable tribal wars and Chinese exploitation, brought them prosperity, fashioned a grand transcontinental empire, and restored trade routes and markets that attracted distant travelers like the Venetian Marco Polo.