Okay let it never be said I don't deliver. This set of questions is too beautiful to pass up even if its likely only one person will see it. I've got Born to Run on in the background so hopefully it will get me pumped as I write this.

1. It's somewhat difficult to discern, but the short answer is probably yes. Let me expand on this. So how are people going to lose their lives? There is of course the initial slaughter that follows invasion. How many people die in this? Not exactly my speciality but the numbers are probably not as high as contemporaries claim. For example you're not going to uncritically accept the numbers cited by one Islamic historian who also dedicates part of his book to describing Genghis Khan's descent into hell. That said Mongols were perfectly willing to engage in mass slaughter when they deemed it practical so we can guess there were substnatial casualties. These numbers would of course be increased by people dying as refugees and due to the subsequent social issues associated with the brutal conquest of an area (disease, famine, banditry, etc).

But surely the population can breed itself back? Nope the true time bomb isn't really set off. Due to mass abandonment of agricultural lands as a result of invasion the food supply is dislocated. This problem would have been further exacerbated by the Mongol policy of turning large areas of agricultural land into pasture in order to feed their horses. Add to this the extortionate taxation of the Mongols driving farmers and suchlike into penury causing further abandonment of agricultural lands. This extortionate taxation doesn't really get better until Hulagu arrives and begins reforming about 35 years after the initial invasion, some even think reforms didn't happen until a further 40 years later under Ghazan (although I don't subscribe to this view).

A further issue is that once these lands were abandoned they probably stopped being useful for farming after a while. Large areas of the Iranian plateau are very dry and farming was made possible there by a highly sophisticated irrigation system. In short water was piped via pipes known as qanats from rivers to arid areas. The problem is that they require regular maintenance so Mongols had driven off loads of farmers they would begin to cease to function turning farms into dustbowls. We can see that agriculture remained an issue by the fact that under Ghazan Khan (some 70 years after the invasion) the minister Rashid al-Din made huge efforts to revive agriculture. He does things like grant tax incentives to farmers and even publishes an almanac on agriculture/land management. That said some areas, may have not suffered as much as other areas if they submitted relatively peacefully. This was especially the case in southern Iran where the Mongol presence was less intrusive.

2. Ok Islam did fine under the Mongols. They were generally religiously tolerant possibly because they didn't care or maybe they were hedging their bets over which god was real. On taxes the clergy of every faith were exempt from taxation.

On how quickly the Mongols converted to Islam? Unclear the first Ilkhans were mainly influenced by ideas of shamanism and Buddhism. Indeed the Ilkhan Arghun (ruled 184-91) was a pretty devout Buddhist. However in 1295 the Ilkhan Hulagu converted to Islam and appears to have been followed by most of his court. That said we do know of Muslim Mongols before this but I'm not sure how common they were as the average Mongol doesn't leave many records of himself.

3)How did the aristocracy fair? It sort of depends of how the area came into the empire. In areas that submitted the local elite had a decent chance of surviving and even retaining a bit of power. For example in Shiraz the Salghurids retained a degree of power and autnomy for some time. However this was curtailed under the centralising reforms Rashid al-Din who served Ghazan Khan (reigned 1295-1304).

4. The bureaucrats did pretty well under the Mongols. They usually left the local administration intact but would simply tack on an overseer known as a darughachi (or shahna or basqaq Mongol government terminology is hell) who made sure that taxes were directed towards the Mongols. Now who were these people (this partly answers the second part of the question)? They were drawn from a variety of backgrounds though Central Asian groups with bureaucratic experience e.g. the Khitan and the Uighurs were the most common group.

But does this mean the Mongols relied on other groups to do the government work for them? Well you've just opened a huge debate in the subject here. For a while the accepted view was yes. But that view has been challenged recently. We do see some prominent ministers from a Mongol background such as Buqa, a Mongol, served not as an overseer but as a minister in Ilkhanid Iran in the 1280s. Bolad Aqa, another Mongol, served as minister in the Ilkhanate and Yuan China from around 1260 until his death in 1313. Also we can see some evidence the the Ilkhan himself was involved in governing his domains to a certain extent.

Ok I'm afraid I'm going to wait until tomorrow to answer the rest of this as its now 22:40 and I have to get up at 5:00 tomorrow. As the following subjects cover such a rich and interesting area I want to look at them when I'm not worrying about how late its getting.

Okay here comes part two. I'm shattered from rowing training but we beat the other eight so I've got enough enthusiasm to carry me through this. The music to get me going today is Alice Cooper's Poison. Lets go.

5. They had a pretty major impact on art, and it was a positive impact. Islamic art reached one of high points during the Mongol era, particularly work coming from the Ilkhanate. This was in great part due to the new styles came in from other areas conquered by the Mongols. In Tabriz there were Chinese, Greek and Italian artisans and their styles would have interacted with local traditions. For example we see miniatures from Iran which are clearly inspired/influenced by Buddhist and Chinese painting styles. If we look at some works produced at the time the background scenery has a distinctly Chinese look. This was received official patronage on the part of the Ilkhans as many of these paintings come from imperial workshops. Similarly when Rashid al-Din sought people to illustrate his Universal History (a fascinating work) we can see Persian, Chinese, Central Asian Buddhist, Byzantine and even Italian Siennese influences.

6. With science we also see quite a rich period thanks to cultural exchange. There are three areas I'm going to focus on cartography, medicine and astronomy.

Cartography: The Mongols were very keen on maps, they had a clear practical use. In the Ilkhanate the works of Rashid al-Din demonstrate an unprecedentedly detailed knowledge of East Asian geography including details like rivers, major cities, etc... An indication of its quality is the fact that it appears to have remained a standard work in the Islamic world for several centuries. It's worth noting that at the time scholars were aware the world was a globe, though this knowledge predated the Mongols. However while knowledge increased we don't see a change in the style of Muslim cartography, as they still kept their systems of longitude and latitude.

Medicine: Again the Mongols were keen on this as it had clear uses. With medicine while while we don't see the Islamic world adopting Chinese medical theory but certain practices were transmitted. Rashid al-Din published the first book on Chinese medicine in the Middle East and the Chinese practice of diagnosing by pulse spread quickly throughout the Islamic world. They also gained access to China’s knowledge of physiology, which was very advanced at the time. All this new knowledge was put to work, for example in the Houses of Healing in Tabriz, both eastern and western schools of medical thought were examined and practised.

Astronomy: So why did the practical Mongols go for this rather impractical science? Well they were very interested in prophecy of all sorts, including astrology so they had a healthy interest in the heavens. In the Ilkhanate the study of the stars received a lot of official patronage. Hulagu, the first Ilkhan, built an entirely new observatory at Margarah, an undertaking which he took a personal interest in. The final building was well built with a library and a well equipped observatory. In this observatory Islamic and Chinese scholars worked side by side and shared knowledge. They came up with a giant compendium describing the positions and movement of the stars, the five known planets, the sun and the moon.

As a final note you often see claims that the Mongols transferred knowledge of gunpowder and the printing press west. On gunpowder its likely, but we can't be completely sure, and we also don't know how it was transferred. It is unclear if the Mongols made widespread use of it during their invasion of the Middle East. On the printing press the Islamic world likely had knowledge of printing press before the Mongol arrival, although it failed to take off. Furthermore it still didn't take off after the Mongols arrived; there's an interesting debate on why the Islamic world was so incredibly slow to make use of print technology.

7. Ok I'm afraid I'm a lot less knowledgeable on this point. I can't find any specific references to it in my books. That said I can offer a few comments on the impact of the Mongol invasion on the Islamic worlds psyche. Firstly it was incredibly shocking, the invasion was very fast and very brutal. But most shocking was that these invaders were non-Muslim. In Islamic though the world could be divided into two, the dar al-islam (the House of Islam) where Islam ruled and the dar al-harb (the House of Strife/War) where non-Muslims ruled. A popular idea was that the dar al-islam would slowly and inevitably encompass the world. Even if by then the idea of constant jihadi conquest had been pretty much abandoned the idea that the dar al-islam might retreat was incredibly shocking. So when a bunch of pagans rocked up and conquered huge swathes of Islamic lands, specifically the very important Persian areas, they reeled mentally as well as militarily. Of course this issue went away the Mongols began to convert but still it was pretty shocking. So how did they rationalise it? They tried to make the Mongols part of the divine plan. As a result we see a lot of histories written at the time by Muslims inside and outside the Mongol empire. Some of these are apparently pretty apocalyptic but I don't really know about them.

But what I do know about are Juvaini's History of the World Conqueror and Rashid al-Din's Universal Chronicle. The first one rather tellingly ends after Hulagu destroys the hated Hasshashin (a bunch of possibly drug fuelled assassin's from an odd Shia sect) a big triumph for Sunnism. But this also means he doesn't have to go into the Mongols then killing the Caliph, Muhammad's and theoretical leader of the Islamic world, when they besieged Baghdad. Rashid al-Din had it easier the Ilkhan had converted to Islam by the time he was writing the book so he could justify the conquest as Islam had been spread to new areas. Just one final comment, his Universal History is incredible it contains not just Islamic historical knowledge but also Chinese and Indian, there's even some basic history of Europe in it.

8. For trade we see a trade boom under the auspices of the Pax Mongolica. The Mongol conquest and domination of an unprecedentedly large amount of Eurasia proved a great boon to merchants. There were two immediate benefits. Firstly, the unification of various disparate states into a single bloc greatly reduced the number of tariffs that had to be paid by merchants. Secondly, the complete military dominance of the Mongols meant previously dangerous trade routes were unprecedentedly safe, eliminating the possibility of war disrupting trade. The Mongols proved so effective in preventing banditry along the Silk Road (perhaps because the old bandits were the new guards) that it was said “a woman with a golden vessel on her head might walk alone without fear or dread.” Every attempt was made to encourage trade. Ogodei (second Great Khan) standardised weights and measures, planted trees and erected stone pillars to mark the road and paid extraordinary amounts to merchants who brought him goods . For a while the use of the yam system was free for merchants to use. Mongke (fourth Great Khan) created a standardised system for determining the value of local, currencies further facilitating trade.

Even after the Mongol Empire disintegrated into separate occasionally warring states, undermining some of the original benefits, trade continued to boom and the yam remained. Two other Mongol systems maintained the trade boom. The first was the ortagh system, where rich Mongols would form partnerships with merchants providing investment and official patronage. This level of involvement in trade was not common in other regimes, the Chinese in particular seeing trade as dishonourable. The second was the appanage system, where the various Mongol princes owned pieces of land scattered across the entire empire. Hulagu, owned 25,000 households of silk-workers in China, valleys in Tibet, and lands in Mongolia. This ensured a constant flow of goods between the various areas aiding private trade too. The trade was mainly luxury goods and a lot of porcelain flowed into Persia.

9. I'm afraid I'm not really sure. I can't find anything in my books so I don't feel qualified to comment and wouldn't be able to offer anything Google couldn't.

I've exceeded the character limit so continued below.