Heinz-Murray 2E.book

96 Part II: Outsiders

in every direction by superior civilizations—west, southwest, south, and east.

The Silk Road enticed them with the fabulous trade between these great centers

of production, but they had little more than pelts to contribute.

It all changed in the early thirteenth century. In 25 years Genghis Khan

conquered more than twice as much land as the Romans conquered in 400

years. He, along with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely

populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. From the Pacific Ocean to the

Mediterranean, Mongol horses thundered across Eurasia. No city could beat

them back, no nation could fight them off. At its zenith, the empire covered

between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles (Weatherford 2004). With

an army that consisted solely of cavalry, Genghis Khan defeated a dozen

Slavic states defended by knights in armor and walled cities; by the end, both

armor and city walls were made obsolete, and the Slavic states were united

into one large Russian state under Mongol control. Europe was terrified; the

earliest known mention of Mongols was in 1240 when an English Benedictine

monk named Matthew Paris called them “an immense horde of that detestable

race of Satan,” and a century later Chaucer wrote about them in The Canter-

bury Tales. On the other side of Eurasia, Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan,

conquered three Chinese states (including the Song dynasty) and established

the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Muslim lands of the southwest consisted of

Map 3.1 Division of the Mongol Empire, ca. 1300.

LEGEND

Gobi^

desert

Kashgar

India

Arabia

Baghdad

Shangdu

(Xanadu)

South

China

Sea

Arabian Sea Bay of Bengal

Aral

Sea

Black

Sea

kh

mer

an

na

m

Tib

et

Khanbalik

(Bejing)

Hangzhou

karakorum

Yuan

Dynasty

Ilkhanate

(Persia)

Moghulistan

Golden Horde

Divisions among

Genghis Khan’s sons

and grandsons

Mo

gu

ls

( (^15)
(^26) )
Korea
Yangzi River
Caspian
Sea