preliminary remarks 9
armed raids for plunder, however, also brought with them a conse-
quence that was seriously inconvenient for the invaders as well as for the
victims: the massacres and looting which the Mongols indulged in wher-
ever they went destroyed livelihoods and production, so that captains
were forced to lead their men onwards, in search of plunder, to ever new
horizons. Since there were objective limits, the Mongol khans found that
they could not satisfy the need for more and more loot, neither in day-to-
day conquest nor, evidently, in the (infinitely) long run. one of chinggis’
councillors had advised him that “the empire was created from horseback,
but it cannot be ruled from horseback”22—an undeniable truth.
the Mongol rulers’ leadership qualities were also much in evidence,
though in less spectacular fashion, in peacetime. their achievements as
peacetime rulers are all the more remarkable because the chronic prob-
lem of finding sources of income to support their military and civilian
retinues became acute once the wars of conquest had ceased. Until this
point, the stability of their power had been assured by the very dynamic
of its expansion—a process comparable to a man riding a bicycle, who
can only keep his balance while he is in motion—but now it had to be
guaranteed by other means.
the task of converting a war economy into a system for making the
best use of human potential and material resources began early; it was
a long process, with many twists and turns, and never succeeded in sup-
planting the empire’s fundamentally military structure, nor that of the
Mongol successor states. the administrative apparatus had already taken
shape during the period of expansion, and it was progressively built upon
and perfected. run by predominantly Muslim or chinese personnel, the
system was primarily aimed at collecting revenue for the khan’s treasury.
the great census of the population all across the empire, carried out at
the great khan Möngke’s orders in the mid-thirteenth century in order to
improve tax-gathering, is the most developed expression of this underly-
ing concern.
however efficiently the apparatus worked—and this was only rarely the
case24—the endemic poverty of the rural and urban tax base, exacerbated
22 Grousset, Empire, p. 321.
23 allsen, Imperialism, pp. 116–143 (chapter 5: ‘population registrationʼ), 144–188 (chap-
ter 6: ‘taxationʼ).
24 corruption and abuses by local authorities were an endemic problem, against which
centrist attempts at reform usually remained ineffectual (cf. ibid.).