Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire

it is the Year 1200 and the world is about to change in dramatic fashion let's just give ourselves a little bit of context of what the world looks like the kings of Western Europe are caught up in the Crusades in the year 1200 the Third Crusade has just ended and is mildly successful but Jerusalem is still in control of the Muslims the Byzantine Empire what's left of the true Roman Empire is on the decline losing more and more territory to the Turks in the Middle East and Persia you have the Golden Age of Islam the Abbasid Caliphate is still around although it has now been fragmented into many different Muslim empires modern-day North India Pakistan and Afghanistan is under control of the grid Sultanate with the rest of India being divided amongst various Hindu kingdoms in the east in other videos we study the Song Dynasty which is one of the really high points of Chinese civilization although they're suspicious of their northern neighbors but in the midst of all of this it ends up being a nomadic people that we really haven't talked a lot about in our survey of world history that become the main catalyst for change over the next several hundred years and that is the Mongols so let's move forward to the year 1206 in the late 12th and early 13th centuries you have a leader by the name of Tim mujin arise in Mongolia and he's able to unite the various nomadic tribes and declares in 1206 a Mongol Empire you see here in this yellow color he is eventually called Gen geese or Genghis Khan the Great Khan the great ruler or the universal ruler now even though the Mongols were not a focus point of world history up until this point they did have several very significant things going for them this point in history as nomadic tribes of herders they were excellent horsemen and they were also excellent archers capable of shooting an arrow in any direction while riding a horse so as a military they were incredibly nimble they were incredibly fast they were incredibly brutal but they were also incredibly adaptable as they conquered more and more people they learned from them and by the time of Genghis Khan's death in 1227 they had conquered much of northern Asia and the Mongols will continue on within half a century of Genghis Khan's death they will have conquered not just northern Asia when they capture Baghdad many historians consider this the end of the Islamic Golden Age as much pressure the Western Europeans were putting on the Turks during the Crusades it was actually the Mongol threat that was much more significant before fragmenting it is the largest contiguous Empire in world history I use the word contiguous because the British Empire actually covers more land as you'll see a few hundred years later but the Mongolian Empire all of the land was connected it was contiguous as you can see from this drawing they began to fragment into what's referred to as multiple Connie's that become more and more independent in the second half of the thirteenth century as we get into the 14th century we can see that is now fragmented into multiple still very significant empires in the East you have Kublai Khan's Wan dynasty controlling modern-day Mongolia and China re-emphasizing the importance of Buddhism until they eventually get reconquered by the Ming Dynasty in Central Asia you have the chaga Tai Khanate in Northwest Asia and Eastern Europe getting as far as Poland you have the Golden Horde and in Persia and the Caucasus you have the ilkhanate which you can view as a subordinate Connie but is now independent deaconate in the west eventually convert to Islam super important to understand because many of the empires that we're about to study in Asia and the Middle East have roots in the Mongolian Empire and roots in what Genji's khan started in 1206