Lands, Peoples and Languages of the Early Mongol Empire

Temüjin united rival steppe coalitions and in 1206 was acclaimed their khan, or ruler, under the title Genghis Khan. Ögedei (1229–41), Güyük (1246–48) and Möngke (1251–59) succeeded him as Great Khans, with contested intervals between their accessions. During the next half-century, Mongol armies and rulers brought the grasslands of Inner Asia into contact with northern China, Central Asian oasis cities, the Iranian plateau, the Caucasus and the western steppe. Möngke, the fourth Great Khan, or supreme ruler of the empire, died in 1259; rival accessions in 1260 began the struggle that ended the single imperial government.

The empire linked communities with different livelihoods and languages. Pastoral households, whose livelihood depended on herding livestock, moved their animals between seasonal pastures; farmers tended irrigated fields; city residents made goods, kept accounts and served courts. Conquest made people, land and specialist skills available to the new rulers, but the ways communities entered imperial power differed by region.

On this page6 sections

The steppe heartland and changing allegiance

The Mongolian steppe included open grasslands, river valleys, uplands and forest margins, each offering different grazing and shelter through the year. In the 1250s, the Flemish Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, a member of a Christian religious order, described Mongol groups shifting south toward warmer winter grazing and north toward cooler summer pasture. He said each captain knew where his people grazed in winter, spring, summer and autumn. Water, snow and the growth of grass shaped those movements. John of Pian de Carpine, another Franciscan friar, explained that visitors’ horses could starve in deep snow because they did not paw through it to reach grass as steppe horses did.

Mongol, Tatar, Kereit, Naiman and Merkit were names used for communities and political groupings around Temüjin’s rise. After his 1206 acclamation, Genghis Khan reorganized forces that had joined or resisted him. Peter Jackson’s historical account describes defeated groups being redistributed among new military units and compliant groups placed under commanders loyal to the khan. That process changed who commanded people and where they served. A person’s former group no longer determined which commander they followed.

Mongol rulers assigned their relatives grazing lands, troops and subject communities as an ulus, a political unit joining a prince’s territory, people and military forces. Genghis Khan allocated these resources among his sons. Jochi, his eldest, received a western domain that reached toward the Volga; Batu’s campaigns later brought the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas under Jochid rule in 1236–40. The original grant and Batu’s later conquests were distinct stages in the family’s expansion.

Karakorum: a court town on the Orkhon

Karakorum stood in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia. Ögedei, Genghis Khan’s son and second Great Khan, began a major building programme there in 1235. Karakorum gave the court workshops, markets, administrative buildings and storehouses in the steppe heartland. The khan’s household continued to move between camps, while officials and craftspeople worked from the fixed capital.

Rubruck visited in 1254. He describes a market quarter where Muslim merchants gathered and a separate quarter of Chinese artisans, as well as palaces for court secretaries. Archaeologists have uncovered an artisans’ quarter with workshops for blacksmiths, gold- and silversmiths, glassworkers and stoneworkers. Imported materials also reached the city from China and Central Asia; excavations have found Chinese porcelain and glazed ceramics among its goods.

In 1254, Rubruck met Guillaume Boucher, a Parisian goldsmith captured during the Mongol invasion of Hungary. Möngke supplied him with funds and fifty workmen for a court project. Boucher’s experience shows how conquest could move skilled workers far from home and put their labor at the service of the khan.

Northern China and the Tarim Basin

East of the Mongolian heartland, the Tangut-ruled Western Xia state occupied parts of what is now northwestern China. It submitted to Genghis Khan in 1209, though he destroyed its ruling state in 1227. Farther east, the Jurchen Jin dynasty ruled northern China. Mongol forces began a long war against Jin in 1211; the dynasty fell in 1234 under Ögedei. The Southern Song, based farther south, remained independent beyond the united empire’s end. On the Korean Peninsula, the kingdom of Goryeo faced Mongol campaigns beginning in 1231; after nearly three decades of intermittent war, its crown prince made peace with Qubilai, later known as Kublai Khan, in 1259.

Jurchens were a people from northeastern Asia whose rulers had displaced the Khitan Liao dynasty in northern China. Mongol rulers recruited Khitan, Uyghur, Chinese and Muslim administrators who had served regional rulers before Mongol arrival. They brought experience with established armies, cities and record-keeping. Mongol forces also used Chinese infantry and siege specialists to attack fortified cities.

In 1204, before the formal empire, the Mongol chancery, or imperial writing office, adopted the Uyghur script and adapted it for writing Mongolian in official documents. West of Mongolia, Uyghur rulers in the Tarim Basin, an oasis region in today’s Xinjiang, submitted in 1209. The Turkic-speaking Uyghurs had towns and written administrative traditions. Their ruler had been subordinate to the Qara-Khitai, a Central Asian state founded by Khitan migrants; Mongol power reduced that state around 1218. Uyghur scribes and officials then helped connect commands from the court with the work of a growing administration.

Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus

The campaign against the Khwarazmian Empire, a Central Asian realm centered on the lower Amu Darya, began in 1219 after a governor at Otrar in today’s southern Kazakhstan killed members of a Mongol-backed merchant mission. The Khwarazmian lands included oasis cities in Transoxiana, the region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, and districts extending into present-day Iran. Bukhara and Samarkand, both in present-day Uzbekistan, were among the conquered cities. The wider campaigns reached Khorasan, the northeast of the Iranian plateau, and Sistan, around today’s Iran-Afghanistan border.

These cities depended on farming as well as trade. Irrigation channels fed fields around settlements, while craft districts and markets relied on the food those farms produced. Peter Jackson’s survey records abandoned cultivation and neglected irrigation channels after the campaigns in parts of Iran. Jackson notes that some agricultural regions shifted to pasture as Turkic and Mongolian herders moved into Azerbaijan, west of the Caspian Sea, and Khorasan. The consequences thus varied with local conditions: warfare could damage settled agriculture, while new pastoral communities used the same region for grazing.

Mongol commanders pushed into the Caucasus, a mountain region between the Black and Caspian seas, during the 1220s and 1230s. Georgia and Armenia came under Mongol power. In Khorasan, military governors shared authority with civil officials who registered people and organized fiscal and military resources. In 1255 Möngke sent his brother Hülegü west to extend control over Iran and Iraq. His forces captured Baghdad in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate.

The western steppe and Rus lands

Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, led campaigns westward in the 1230s and 1240s. The Volga and Don river basins included the cities of Volga Bulgaria on the middle Volga, the pasturelands of Kipchak-speaking communities and the medieval East Slavic Rus principalities around Kyiv and other cities. These communities had their own rulers and religious institutions before Mongol conquest. Mongol power in the region combined direct command over some territories with demands that local rulers submit and pay tribute, a required payment of goods or money, to the khan.

During his 1245–47 journey across Rus lands, Carpine described a region where war had killed many men or carried them into captivity. His party needed local escorts and pack animals for the journey toward the khan’s court. Rubruck also met Paquette, a woman from Metz whom he says had been captured in Hungary. She had formed a household with a Ruthenian, or East Slavic, carpenter and raised three sons in the Mongol court camp.

Languages, documents and interpreters

The empire’s administrative work drew on people who spoke and wrote different languages. Uyghur script served Mongolian documents; Persian became a common language for communication across distant regions, aided by Muslim merchants who traveled east. At the court of Sartaq, Batu’s son, Rubruck met Armenian priests who spoke Turkish and Arabic. Another traveler knew Syriac as well as those two languages. Court scribes translated the diplomatic letter into Mongolian for Sartaq.

Court business often depended on interpreters. When Rubruck learned that Batu’s letter to Möngke described King Louis as asking for troops against Muslims, he suspected Armenian interpreters had sharpened the French king’s message. The episode shows how translation could alter the political meaning of a diplomatic exchange.

Güyük, a grandson of Genghis Khan, sent a letter to Pope Innocent IV in 1246. The surviving letter is in Persian and bears the khan’s seal, stamped twice.