what made the mongols so powerful under gengis khan ?

by limpingorange

lately i ve been fascinated with the mongols and how they managed to extend their influence in 11th and 12 th centuries from korea to hungary. what made their armies nearly invincible and how did they manage adminstrate their large diverse lands ?

panick21

We don't have a great deal of history about specially the early Mongols, they themselves published a book during the 2nd and 3rd generation after Gengis. That book however is somewhere between history and legend.

Anyway, lets get to the good stuff. Basically Gengis Khan managed to unify the Eastern steppe nomads, and he seems to have been a clever 'politician' and he seemed to have had a good nose for putting capable people in charge. That gave him enough manpower to take on the civilizations around him, and eventually the rest of the steppe too.

One policy that many important was breaking up the tribal army into a unified army, around a decimal system, meaning groups of 10, 100 , 1000 , 10000. While there likely was still some fair amount of the same clan providing units, at least in principle many of these units could be mixed, and specially as time went on, this created a proto-nation.

He was willing to give command based on skill rather then tribal identity. He elected people like Jebe, who was an enemy general initially. Subatai was from a clan that lived in the woods and was not much more then a slave but rose to a high position.

He was also very willing to use the skills of conquered subjects, increasingly bringing along engineers and other specialist forces with his main host. They would also use civilians, and quite literally herd them as a sort of infantry.

Now of course the backbone of all steppe-armies was the horse-archer that could shoot on the move. However in addition to that, the Mongols also had a lot of 'heavy' cavalry that could charge the enemy more in the style of medieval knights. An properly lead army with those components is almost impossible to beat in open battle. In and around the steppe, there did not exist an army that had really much of a chance.

The 10000 units were called tuman and contained everything need to be an independent operating army. It was something like the 'core' that Napoleon later used. Gengis army were capable of dividing into multiple parts and execute coordinated movements over very long distances.

For administration he also established a common script and administrative language they took from one of the steppe people that had a script. He established a capital called Karakorum. He also seemed to have made sure his kids, and specially grand kids, were well educated.

However during his own lifetime, there was not much administration. Outside of leaving some behind to keep an eye on the locals. They expected their subject people to send 'gifts' to the great ruler and where possible they continued to use what people had used before. Again, our information is very limited, as most accounts from the opponents of the mongols were exactly government reports.

When he died, he did divide his lands up between his children but they would still remain under one ruler and arguable because of the polices above, the second generation largely managed to keep the empire together. However by the 3rd generation the empire was already fracturing and not long after that it fractured completely.

Ögedei, 2nd ruler of the empire, basically inherited the army and they managed to conquer in all direction virtually at the same time. When a new Khan was elected, virtually all parts of the empire sent massive amounts of gifts to the new Khan.

The next couple rulers were trying to improve administration, but it was soon clear that the different 'clans' that spurning from the different lines of his sons, could not keep the empire together.

By adopting to their local situation, the different parts of the empire became very different. The part that inherited the middle-east often became Muslim. The one in China adopted the culture and language of china, and so on. All of these improved the administration a lot, but by that time we no longer talking about the mongol empire per se.

  • The Secret History of the Mongols

  • Ystoria Mongalorum

There are many good secondary sources that give a good overview.