Nomadic Empires | Class 11 History Notes
This chapter from the Class 11 History textbook Themes in World History introduces the great empires that rose across the Euro-Asian steppe. It explains their political and social structures and focuses closely on the Mongol Empire, the largest land empire the world has ever seen, and on its founder, Genghis Khan. These notes walk through the sources, society, conquests and legacy of the nomads in plain language. You can find more study material like this in our Class 11 History notes collection.
The great empires of the Euro-Asian continent
In the early thirteenth century, the great empires of the Euro-Asian continent recognised the danger posed by Genghis Khan. His vision as a political leader went far beyond simply uniting the Mongol tribes.
Genghis Khan was said to have been given a divine mandate by god to rule the world. Besides consolidating the power of the Mongol tribes, he led campaigns into the neighbouring regions of northern China, Transoxiana, Afghanistan and the Russian steppes. His aim was to build the world's largest empire, and his descendants carried this vision even further afield.
The French king Louis IX (who ruled from 1226 to 1270) was warned about the Mongol threat linked to Mongke, one of Genghis Khan's grandsons. Between 1236 and 1241, another grandson, Batu, destroyed Russian regions all the way to Moscow, invaded Poland and Hungary, and camped outside Vienna. As Mongol emperor he came to dominate a huge stretch of China, the Middle East and Western Europe.
What are the sources for the history of nomadic empires?
The main sources for the history of nomadic empires include chronicles, travelogues and city-based literature. The steppe dwellers did not produce written works of their own. As a result, several outside authors distorted and misrepresented the nomadic way of life.
- The imperial success of the Mongols attracted many learned writers, or literati.
- Travelogues were written by travellers who stayed on to serve the Mongols. They came from many backgrounds, including Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity. They were unfamiliar with Mongol customs, and their accounts were often sympathetic.
Research on the Mongols
During the tsarist regime's control over Central Asia, Russian scholars carried out the most valuable research on the Mongols. Travellers, soldiers, merchants and antiquarian scholars all contributed to this work. After the Soviet republics expanded into the region, the new Marxist historiography argued that the dominant mode of production determined the nature of social relations.
Language, society and culture
- Boris Yakovlevich Vladimirtsov carried out outstanding research on Mongol language, society and culture.
- Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold broke with a few conventions. When the Stalinist regime grew suspicious of regional nationalism, Bartold came under fire for his sympathetic and positive assessment of the achievements of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors.
Scholars have access to a rich variety of sources written in many languages, including Chinese, Mongolian, Arabic, Persian, Italian, Latin, French and Russian. A single text was frequently translated into two different languages, each version carrying its own unique content. The earliest narrative about Genghis Khan, known as the Secret History of the Mongols, survives in both Mongolian and Chinese. As scholars such as Igor de Rachewiltz and Gerhard Doerfer have shown, studying the history and culture of the Central Asian nomads presents many difficulties.
Social and political background
Geographical extent
The Mongols lived alongside the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus to the east, and the Turkic tribes to the west. They included nomadic pastoralists as well as hunter-gatherers. The pastoralists tended large numbers of horses and sheep. These people lived in the territory that is now Mongolia, in Central Asia.
The Onon and Selenga rivers flowed through this vast landscape. It was bounded on the west by the snow-capped Altai mountains, on the south by the arid Gobi desert, and on the north by many springs fed by the melting snows of the mountains. The Siberian forests to the north were home to hunter-gatherers, who lived by trapping and trading animal furs during the summer months. Across the whole region, long, cold winters alternated with short, dry summers.
The division of Mongol society
Unlike some of their Turkish neighbours further west, the Mongols did not take to farming, even though it was possible for a brief part of the year. There were no cities, because pastoral and hunting-gathering economies could not support dense settlements. The Mongols lived in tents called gers and moved with their herds between their winter and summer pasture lands.
Despite their common ethnic origins, Mongol society was divided into patrilineal lineages because resources were scarce. Wealthier families were larger and owned more livestock, and they influenced local politics more than others. Natural disasters, such as unusually cold winters that killed off game and stored supplies, or droughts that dried up the pastures, drove people from their homes. This led to conflict over pasture land and to raids in search of livestock.
Alliances
Groups of families sometimes formed alliances, for both attack and defence, around more powerful and wealthy families. Most of these confederacies were small and short-lived. Only Attila's confederation of Turkic and Mongol tribes, in the fifth century, may have come close to matching the one built by Genghis Khan. His political system, by contrast, endured for centuries and held off larger, better-equipped armies in China, Iran and Eastern Europe.
Urban settlements
Later the Mongols came to manage agrarian economies and urban settlements, even though these sedentary ways of life were alien to their own experience and habitat. Although nomadic and settled societies had very different socio-political structures, they still shared many features.
Trade in the Mongol empire
Because resources were scarce in the steppe, the Mongols and other Central Asian nomads were forced to trade and barter with their settled neighbours in China. Farm produce and agricultural tools such as hoes and horseshoes were exchanged for horses, furs and game trapped in the steppe. This commerce was often tense, and either party might abandon diplomacy and use force to increase its profits.
Frontier wars
When the Mongol lineages united, they could force their Chinese neighbours to accept better terms, and they could drop trading alliances in favour of outright plunder. When the Mongols were in disarray, the balance shifted the other way, and the Chinese would claim greater influence over the steppe. These frontier wars badly disrupted settled societies, dislocating farming and cities. The nomads, by comparison, risked losing very little when they fled a conflict zone. The Great Wall of China was built to protect the farming societies of northern China from nomadic invasions and raids.
Genghis Khan: the universal ruler
Genghis Khan is regarded as the founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which after his death grew into the largest continuous land empire in history. He rose to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia.
Early life and background
- Genghis Khan, whose birth name was Temujin, was born around 1162 near the Onon river in Mongolia.
- Temujin was the son of Yesugei, head of a group of Borjigid clans. His father was murdered when Temujin was young, and his mother, Oelun-eke, had to raise him and his brothers on her own, so his early years were very hard.
Radical shifts
Temujin was captured and enslaved, and later his wife, Borte, was kidnapped. After a fierce struggle he won her back. During these years of hardship he also formed strong friendships. Jamuqa was his blood brother, or anda, and Temujin had long looked up to him. To revive his father's ties with Tughril, also called Ong Khan, the leader of the Kereyits, Temujin formed a new alliance with him. In the 1180s and 1190s the two fought many enemies together, including Jamuqa, who had turned against them both. After defeating him, Temujin felt confident enough to campaign against the remaining tribes. An assembly of Mongol chieftains, called a quriltai, then recognised him as the Great Khan of the Mongols and gave him the title Genghis Khan.
Reorganisation of forces
Genghis Khan reorganised the Mongol people into a more effective and disciplined military force, which made his later campaigns so successful. His first aim was to conquer China, which at this time was divided into three realms:
- The Hsi Hsia people, of Tibetan origin, in the north-western provinces.
- The Jurchen, whose Chin dynasty ruled northern China from Peking.
- The Sung dynasty, which controlled southern China.
By 1209 the Hsi Hsia had been defeated. The Great Wall was breached in 1213, and Peking was sacked in 1215. Long battles against the Chin lasted until 1234, but Genghis Khan was pleased enough with his gains that he returned to Mongolia in 1216 and left command of the region to his subordinates.
The conquest of Central Asia and beyond
After defeating the Qara Khita, who controlled the Tien Shan mountains north of China, in 1218, Mongol power reached the Amu Darya and the states of Transoxiana and Khwarazm. Sultan Muhammad, the ruler of Khwarazm, felt Genghis Khan's anger when he executed Mongol envoys. Between 1219 and 1221 the great cities of Otrar, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Gurganj, Merv, Nishapur and Herat were conquered.
Towns that resisted were devastated. When a Mongol prince, Nayan, was killed during the siege of Nishapur, Genghis Khan ordered the town laid waste and the ground ploughed over. Mongol forces pushed into Azerbaijan, defeated Russian forces in Crimea and encircled the Caspian Sea. Another wing chased Jalaluddin, the sultan's son, into Afghanistan and Sindh. Genghis Khan considered returning to Mongolia through North India and Assam, along the banks of the Indus, but the heat, the difficult environment and the warnings of his shaman soothsayer convinced him otherwise.
Military innovations
Genghis Khan died in 1227, after a life spent largely at war. His military achievements were remarkable, in large part because he turned various features of steppe warfare into highly effective strategies.
- The horse-riding skills of the Mongols and Turks gave the army great speed and mobility, and their skill at rapid archery from horseback was sharpened during regular hunting expeditions that doubled as field manoeuvres.
- The steppe cavalry had always been light and swift, but now the Mongols used their knowledge of terrain and weather to campaign in the depth of winter, using frozen rivers as highways to reach enemy cities and camps.
- Genghis Khan also came to value siege engines and naphtha bombardment. His engineers built light, portable equipment that was used to devastating effect.
The Mongols after Genghis Khan
Mongol expansion after the death of Genghis Khan fell into two clear phases:
- The first, from 1236 to 1242, made its main gains in the Russian steppes, Bulghar, Kyiv, Poland and Hungary.
- The second, from about 1255 to 1300, brought the conquest of all of China by 1279, along with Iran, Iraq and Syria.
The frontier of the empire stabilised after these campaigns.
Why the westward advance halted
The Mongol armies met few setbacks in the decades after 1203, but after the 1260s the drive for new campaigns in the west could no longer be sustained. Their retreat from the Hungarian steppes and their defeat by Egyptian forces marked the start of a new political trend. Two factors lay behind this:
- First, succession politics within the Mongol family. For the first two generations, the descendants of Jochi and Ogodei allied to control the office of the Great Khan, and this concern took priority over campaigns in Europe.
- Second, the Jochi and Ogodei lineages were later pushed aside by the Toluyid branch of Genghis Khan's descendants. After Mongke, a descendant of Toluy, came to power, campaigns were pressed hard in Iran in the 1250s instead.
As a result, the Mongols faced an undermanned Egyptian army, and their defeat there, together with the Toluyid focus on China, brought the western expansion to an end. At the same time, conflict between the descendants of Jochi and the Toluyids along the Russian and Iranian border drew attention away from any future European campaigns. While expansion in the west halted, the campaigns in China, which the Mongols reunited, continued. Internal strife within the ruling family appeared, ironically, at the very moment of the family's greatest success.
Social, political and military organisation
Genghis Khan's army grew in size and diversity as his campaigns brought in many different peoples. Groups such as the Turkic Uighurs were included because they willingly submitted, while others, such as the Kereyits, were absorbed after being defeated.
He successfully wiped out the old tribal identities of those who joined his confederacy. Using the old steppe system of decimal units, his army was divided into tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of soldiers. In the past, clans and tribes had stayed together within these units. Now the old tribal groups were broken up and their members spread across new military units. Anyone who tried to leave his assigned group without permission was severely punished.
The largest unit of soldiers mixed together fragments of many tribes and clans, and the old steppe social order shifted as different lineages merged and adopted a new identity descended from Genghis Khan. All new military contingents reported to him, to his four sons and to specially chosen captains known as noyan. Lower-ranking freemen were raised to the position of bondsmen, or naukar, which marked their close bond with their master, and Genghis Khan publicly called several of these men his blood brothers, or anda. The old clan chiefs lost their protected rights, and a new aristocracy drew its status from closeness to the Great Khan.
The administrative divisions: the four ulus
Genghis Khan gave the task of governing the newly conquered peoples to his four sons. These divisions were called ulus, a word that did not originally mean fixed territory.
- The eldest son, Jochi, received the Russian steppes, but the outer limit of his ulus was left open: it stretched as far west as his horses could roam.
- The second son, Chaghatai, was given the Transoxanian steppe and the lands north of the Pamir mountains, next to his brother's. These lands would shift as Jochi marched westward.
- The third son, Ogodei, was named by Genghis Khan to succeed him as the Great Khan.
Way forward
The military campaigns of the early thirteenth century devastated cities, farmland, trade and craft production. Over that century, nomadic and settled worlds began to merge. As family traditions and memories changed, the descendants of Genghis Khan split into distinct lineage groups, and his ancestry allowed each of them to appear as a credible ruler for settled populations. Recent research on the yasa, the code of law that Genghis Khan proclaimed at the quriltai of 1206, explores the many ways in which later Khans shaped and reshaped his memory.
Conclusion
Genghis Khan is widely remembered as a conqueror, a destroyer of cities and a mass killer, and many townspeople in thirteenth-century China, Iran and Europe feared and hated the steppe hordes. Yet with his vast empire he also restored trade routes and markets, drawing distant travellers such as the Venetian Marco Polo. Although the Mongol Khans were at different times Shamanists, Buddhists, Christians and finally Muslims, they never let personal beliefs dictate public policy. They gathered administrators and armies of every ethnicity and religion under their banner, and the constitution posed no threat to them in a society that was multi-ethnic, multilingual and of many faiths.
Because so little was written by the Mongols themselves, it is hard to know exactly what drove such different peoples to unite behind a single empire. As the empire evolved, the inspiration of its founder stayed strong. Timur, for example, could not declare himself emperor because he lacked descent from Genghis Khan, so as the son-in-law of the family he claimed independence under the title guregen instead. After decades of Soviet rule, Mongolia reclaimed its independence and raised Genghis Khan to the status of a great national hero, celebrating his achievements with pride. For a broader view of these empires, see our Learnacy Hub and the wider study notes library.
Why it still matters today
The chapter makes one point that is still very much alive: the memory of Genghis Khan is shaped by whoever gets to tell the story. That is not just old history. It became a live diplomatic row only a few years ago.
In 2020 a history museum in Nantes, France, the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne, was preparing a large exhibition on Genghis Khan. According to the museum, Chinese authorities asked it to remove three words from the show: Genghis Khan, empire and Mongol. Beijing also wanted to control the exhibition, and even offered a new script written by China's National Administration of Cultural Heritage. The museum refused and postponed the show, with its director saying they stopped it in the name of the human, scientific and ethical values they defend. The exhibition finally opened on 31 October 2023, this time built with Mongolian partners and titled Genghis Khan: How Mongols Changed the World, and it ran until 5 May 2024.
Mongolia, meanwhile, treats Genghis Khan as the father of the nation. In October 2022 it opened the Chinggis Khaan National Museum in Ulaanbaatar, timed to the 860th anniversary of his birth, with eight exhibition halls and more than 11,000 objects. Many of the items lent to the Nantes show came from this museum and from the National Museum of Mongolia.
So the same figure is a national hero in one country and a politically sensitive name in another. That is exactly the lesson buried in the yasa and in the ways later Khans reshaped his image: history is not only about what happened, but about who is allowed to remember it, and how. Keep that idea in mind and this chapter connects straight to the news you read today.