The Mongol Empire

From the steppes of Mongolia to the plains of Hungary and the heart of Beijing. The story of a herding boy who became the most feared man in history and the empire he built that briefly ruled most of the known world.

In the year 1206, a tribal leader named Temüjin, a man who had survived captivity, hunger, and the murder of his father, stood before an assembly of chiefs on the Mongolian steppe and was named Genghis Khan, universal ruler. Within twenty-five years, his armies had crushed the empires of Central Asia. Within eighty years, his grandsons ruled from the Pacific to the eastern edge of Europe.

It was the largest contiguous land empire the world had ever seen, and a generation of historians is still arguing about whether its existence was a catastrophe, a renaissance, or both.

This book takes you inside that story. Inside the felt tents of the steppe. Inside the burning libraries of Baghdad. Inside the silk markets of the Yuan. Inside the saddle of a Mongol bowman who could shoot accurately at full gallop from either side of his horse.

Inside, you'll discover:

• The Rise of Genghis Khan: Temüjin's early years of captivity, hunger, and exile, the kidnapping of his wife Borte, the Baljuna Covenant, and the path that ended with a tribal boy becoming universal ruler in 1206

• The Mongol Way of War: Composite bows, decimal army units, feigned retreats, siege engineers absorbed from China, and the terror tactics that brought down walls before the first arrow flew

• The Destruction of Khwarazm and the Conquest of China: How Mongol armies erased empires that had stood for centuries, including Khwarazm, Western Xia, and the Jin dynasty, in a single generation, and the rivers of refugees that fled west ahead of them

• The Invasion of Europe: The campaigns of Batu and Subutai across the Volga, the sack of Kiev, Legnica in Poland, the Battle of Mohi in Hungary, and the death of Ogedei Khan in 1241 that may have saved the rest of Europe

• The Conquest of the Middle East: Hulagu's army of 120,000 men, the fall of the Assassins, and the siege and sack of Baghdad in 1258 that ended five hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate

• The Pax Mongolica: Why the bloodiest century in medieval history was also the century that made the Silk Road safe, and how plague, paper money, gunpowder, and ideas all rode the same roads east and west

• Kublai Khan and the Yuan Dynasty: How Genghis's grandson conquered Song China, moved the capital to Dadu (modern Beijing), and built a court that drew the Italian traveler Marco Polo and inspired his famous account of the East

• The Decline and Fall: The Golden Horde, the Ilkhanate, the Chagatai Khanate, and the Yuan, four successor states, four religions, four civilizations the Mongols left behind, and the slow unraveling that followed

• And much, much more.

Whether you're drawn to military history, the lives of conquerors, the long arc of Eurasian civilization, or the question of how a single family from the steppe rewrote the map of the medieval world, this book gives you the full story: clear, vivid, and unflinching.