- [Instructor] 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 is now have been fragmented into many different Muslim empires. Modern-day north India,
Pakistan, and Afghanistan is under control of the Ghurid 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 twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, you have a leader by the name
of Temujin 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
Genghis, 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 at 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 as 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 we'll see, a few hundred years later. But the Mongolian Empire, all
of the land was connected, it was contiguous. But as you can see from this
drawing, they begin to fragment into what's referred to
as multiple Khanates, that become more and more independent in the second half of
the thirteenth century. As we get into the fourteenth century, we can see that it is now fragmented into multiple, still
very significant empires. In the east, you have
Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty, controlling modern-day Mongolia and China, reemphasizing the importance of Buddhism until they eventually get
reconquered by the Ming Dynasty. In central Asia, you have
the Chagatai 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 Khanate, but is now independent. The Khanates in the west
eventually convert to Islam. Super important to understand because many of the empires
that we are about to study in Asia and the Middle East
have roots in the Mongolian Empire and roots in what
Genghis Khan started in 1206.