CBSE Class 11 History Notes — Nomadic Empires

CBSE Class 11 History Chapter 5 notes on Nomadic Empires: Genghis Khan, Mongol society, army organisation, Pax Mongolica, the yasa and sources on the Mongols.

Chapter Summary

This chapter studies how the Mongol nomads of Central Asia, led by Genghis Khan, built the largest empire of the thirteenth century. It covers the sources and historiography, steppe society and trade with China, his rise from Temujin, military and administrative organisation, the Pax Mongolica, the split into rival lineages, the yasa, and the contrasting ways Genghis Khan is remembered.

Key Concepts

What Is a Nomadic Empire? Understanding the Apparent Contradiction

At first the phrase nomadic empire sounds self-contradictory. Nomads move around with their herds, live in family groups and have simple political structures. An empire, on the other hand, suggests a fixed centre, complex social and economic arrangements and an elaborate administration over a large territory. The chapter argues that this contrast is too narrow and unhistorical, and that it breaks down when we look at empires created by nomadic groups.

In Theme 4 you studied states that grew out of the Bedouin traditions of Arabia. Here the focus is on the Mongols of Central Asia, who under Genghis Khan created a transcontinental empire across Europe and Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Compared with the farming empires of China, Mongolia may have had a simpler social and economic world, but the steppe societies were not isolated islands. They traded with, learnt from and influenced the wider world.

The central theme is adaptation. The Mongols turned their customs into a formidable military machine and an effective system of government. Because they ruled many peoples, economies and religions, they could not simply impose steppe habits; they innovated and compromised, and in the process their own society changed permanently. When writing an answer, show this two-way change: the Mongols changed Eurasia, and Eurasia changed the Mongols.

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Sources and Historiography: Who Wrote About the Mongols?

The steppe people produced almost no literature themselves, so our knowledge comes mostly from chronicles, travelogues and documents by city-based writers, who were often ignorant of nomadic life and biased against it. The word barbarian itself comes from the Greek barbaros, meaning a non-Greek whose speech sounded like noise; the Romans and Chinese also used such labels for steppe peoples. However, the Mongols' success attracted scholars from Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Turkish and Muslim backgrounds. Some wrote travelogues, others served the Mongol rulers, and many wrote sympathetic accounts that challenge the hostile picture.

Russian scholars from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced valuable survey work under Tsarist control of Central Asia. In the early twentieth century a Marxist approach saw Genghis Khan's rise as a shift from a tribal to a feudal mode of production. Despite this rigid scheme, scholars like Boris Vladimirtsov did excellent work on Mongol language and society. Vasily Bartold praised the Mongols' achievements, which angered Stalinist censors, and his nine volumes appeared only in the 1960s.

Sources survive in Chinese, Mongolian, Persian, Arabic, Italian, Latin, French and Russian, and versions often differ. The Mongolian and Chinese versions of The Secret History of the Mongols differ, and so do Italian and Latin versions of Marco Polo. Historians therefore also work as philologists, as in the studies of Igor de Rachewiltz and Gerhard Doerfer.

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The Steppe Homeland and Mongol Society

The Mongols were a varied group linked by language to the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus in the east and the Turkic tribes in the west. Some were pastoralists who tended horses and sheep, and to a lesser extent cattle, goats and camels, in the steppes of present-day Mongolia. This landscape had wide plains, the snow-capped Altai mountains to the west, the Gobi desert to the south and the Onon and Selenga rivers. Hunter-gatherers lived to the north in the Siberian forests and traded in furs. Winters were long and harsh and summers short and dry. Neither economy could support dense settlement, so there were no cities. The Mongols lived in tents called gers and moved between winter and summer pastures; unlike some Turks, they did not take up farming.

Scarce resources split society into patrilineal lineages. Richer families had more animals, pasture and followers and more political weight. Harsh winters or droughts forced families to search further, causing conflict over pastures and raids for livestock. Alliances around powerful lineages were usually small and short-lived. Genghis Khan's confederacy of Mongol and Turkish tribes was matched in size only by that of Attila in the fifth century, but unlike Attila's, it survived its founder and could face larger, better-equipped armies in China, Iran and eastern Europe.

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Steppe and China: Trade, Raids and the Great Wall

Nomads and settled societies were not strangers. Because the steppe offered little, Mongols and other Central Asian nomads traded with China, exchanging horses, furs and trapped game for agricultural produce and iron utensils. This was useful to both sides, but it was not free of tension: when Mongol lineages united, they used military pressure to demand better terms, and sometimes trade gave way to plunder. When the Mongols were disunited, the Chinese felt confident enough to assert their influence in the steppe.

Frontier wars hurt settled societies more. They disrupted farming and plundered cities, whereas nomads could withdraw from the conflict zone with limited loss. For this reason China suffered repeatedly from nomad intrusions, and regimes built fortifications as early as the eighth century BCE. From the third century BCE these were linked into the common defensive outwork known as the Great Wall of China, a striking symbol of the fear created by raids on the agrarian north.

The chapter lists earlier steppe confederacies to show that Genghis Khan was part of a long tradition: the Hsiung-nu (200 BCE, Turks), Juan-juan (400 CE, Mongols), Hephthalite Huns (400 CE), T'u-chueh (550 CE, Turks), Uighurs (740 CE, Turks) and Khitan (940 CE, Mongols). Their impact varied. This section answers why trade was important to the Mongols: scarce steppe resources made exchange with farming neighbours necessary.

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The Career of Genghis Khan: Key Dates

Genghis Khan was born as Temujin around 1162 near the Onon river in northern Mongolia; the chapter's timeline gives c. 1167. His father Yesugei, chief of the Kiyat group of the Borjigid clan, was murdered early, and his mother Oelun-eke raised her children in hardship. Temujin was captured and enslaved, and his wife Borte was kidnapped soon after marriage and had to be recovered. Even in these years he made allies: Boghurchu, his first friend, Jamuqa, his blood-brother (anda), and Tughril or Ong Khan of the Kereyits, his father's old blood-brother.

In the 1180s and 1190s he stayed an ally of Ong Khan and defeated adversaries like Jamuqa, who had turned into an enemy. He then moved against the Tatars (his father's killers), the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself in 1203. After the final defeat of the Naiman and Jamuqa in 1206, a quriltai of chiefs proclaimed him Genghis Khan, the Oceanic or Universal Ruler.

He then turned to China, divided into the Hsi Hsia in the north-west, the Jurchen Chin dynasty in the north and the Sung in the south. The Hsi Hsia were beaten by 1209, the Great Wall was breached in 1213, Peking was sacked in 1215, and fighting against the Chin continued until 1234. In 1218 he defeated the Qara Khita. Between 1219 and 1221 cities of Transoxiana and Khurasan surrendered. He died in 1227.

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Conquest, Military Skill and the Scale of Destruction

Genghis Khan's success came from transforming steppe habits into an effective war machine. Mongol and Turkish riders gave the army speed and mobility. They were rapid-shooting archers whose hunting expeditions doubled as military exercises. The cavalry travelled light and used its knowledge of terrain and weather to campaign in mid-winter, treating frozen rivers as roads to enemy camps. Nomads were usually helpless against fortified cities, but Genghis Khan quickly adopted siege engines and naphtha bombardment, and his engineers built light, portable equipment.

In 1220 Bukhara was captured, and he addressed the wealthy citizens, calling himself the punishment of God for their sins. A survivor summed up the event in a few words: they came, they mined the walls, burnt, killed, plundered and left. After Muhammad of Khwarazm executed Mongol envoys, the Mongols pursued him into Azerbaijan, defeated Russian forces in the Crimea and encircled the Caspian. Another army chased his son Jalaluddin to the Indus, where heat, the terrain and ill omens from his shaman led Genghis Khan not to return via India.

Chronicles give enormous death tolls: 1,747,000 at Nishapur in 1220, 1,600,000 at Herat in 1222, 1,300,000 at Merv, and 800,000 at Baghdad in 1258. Juwaini reached his figure by counting 100,000 bodies a day for thirteen days. Such figures are probably exaggerated; the Il-Khanid chronicle claimed 30,000 soldiers were killed at Bukhara against an eyewitness count of 400 defenders. Ecological damage was real: neglected qanats in Iran led to desert advance in Khurasan.

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How the Empire Was Organised: Army, Ulus, Quriltai and Yam

Mongol men were all armed fighters, but conquest turned a small, uniform force into a mixed one, including willing allies like the Turkic Uighurs and defeated peoples like the Kereyits. Genghis Khan deliberately erased the old tribal identities. The army followed the steppe decimal system of units of 10, 100, 1,000 and notionally 10,000 (tuman), but he broke up clans and tribes and mixed their members into new units. Moving out of one's unit without permission was severely punished. Soldiers now owed loyalty to him instead of their clan.

The units served under his four sons and chosen captains called noyan. Loyal companions were honoured as blood-brothers (anda) or bondsmen (naukar); the new aristocracy drew status from closeness to the Khan, not from old clan rank. The four sons received ulus, meaning domains that were not yet fixed territories. Jochi had the Russian steppes, Chaghatai Transoxiana and lands north of the Pamirs, Ogodei, the chosen successor, set up his capital at Karakorum, and Toluy, the youngest, got Mongolia. Princely military contingents (tama) were stationed in each ulus. The quriltai, an assembly of chiefs, decided campaigns, plunder, pastures and succession together.

The yam, a courier network with fresh horses and riders at regular outposts, linked the far-flung empire. Nomads supported it with the qubcur tax, a tenth of their herd. Travellers carried a paiza (gerege in Mongolian) and traders paid the baj tax.

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The Mongols after Genghis Khan: Expansion, Division and Pax Mongolica

After 1227 Mongol expansion took place in two phases. In 1236-42 gains were made in the Russian steppes, Bulghar, Kiev, Poland and Hungary, with Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, pushing as far as Vienna. In 1255-1300 the Mongols conquered all of China (1279), Iran, Iraq and Syria. Baghdad fell in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate, and Hulegu set up the Il-Khanid state in Iran. Ogodei (1227-41), Guyuk and Mongke (1251-60) were the successive Great Khans.

Western expansion slowed after the 1260s. Succession quarrels between the Jochid and Ogodei lines, then the rise of the Toluyids, diverted energy; as the Toluyids concentrated on China, a small, short-staffed force was defeated by Egypt, ending expansion in the west. In 1260 Qubilai became Grand Khan in Peking and the realm split into the Toluyid (Yuan in China, Il-Khans in Iran), Chaghataid and Jochid (Golden Horde) lines. The Yuan fell in 1368.

Peace under Mongol rule, the Pax Mongolica, linked Europe and China. The Silk Route reached its peak and, unlike before, extended north to Karakorum. The Venetian Marco Polo was among those who travelled. William of Rubruck, who reached Karakorum in 1254, found a Lorraine woman, a Parisian goldsmith and Nestorian, Muslim and Buddhist clergy at the court, a sign of the empire's cosmopolitan character.

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Sedentarisation, the Yasa and the Many Memories of Genghis Khan

The tension between nomadic and settled interests eased through the thirteenth century. In the 1230s some Mongol leaders even wanted to massacre peasants and turn fields into pasture, but by the 1270s Qubilai Khan appeared as protector of peasants and cities. In the 1290s Ghazan Khan, the Il-Khanid ruler who converted to Islam, told nomad commanders to stop plundering peasants, arguing that it would not bring lasting prosperity. His Persian wazir Rashiduddin probably drafted the speech. The Mongols recruited administrators from conquered lands, such as Yeh-lu Ch'u-ts'ai, who restrained Ogodei in the 1230s. As lineages settled in China and Iran, ulus came to mean fixed territories, though nomadic habits lasted longest in Central Asia and Russia.

The yasa (originally yasaq, meaning law, decree or order) was supposedly Genghis Khan's code announced in 1206. The few known details concern the hunt, army and postal system. By the mid-thirteenth century it was treated as a sacred law, probably a collection of Mongol customs. It helped a small ruling group keep its identity. In 1221 Genghis Khan scolded the Muslims of Bukhara at its festival ground; in the late sixteenth century 'Abdullah Khan prayed at the same ground, and his chronicler Hafiz-i Tanish called this according to the yasa, showing how its meaning had changed.

The conclusion contrasts views: for conquered townspeople he was a destroyer; for Mongols a unifier who brought prosperity and trade. The Mongol regime was multi-ethnic and multi-religious, later influencing the Mughals. Timur claimed descent as guregen (son-in-law), and today Mongolia honours Genghis Khan as a national hero.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the term nomadic empire not a contradiction?

Nomads are usually thought of as wanderers with simple politics, and empires as settled and administratively complex. History shows this definition is too narrow. The Mongols under Genghis Khan adapted steppe customs to create a disciplined army and a system of governance for many peoples, building a transcontinental empire without giving up all their nomadic traditions at once.

Why was trade important to the Mongols?

The steppe had few resources, so the Mongols depended on trade with sedentary neighbours in China. They exchanged horses, furs and game for agricultural produce and iron utensils. Trade was profitable for both, though the Mongols also used military pressure to obtain better terms. Later, under the Mongols, Silk Route trade peaked.

Why did Genghis Khan break up the old tribal groupings?

Old clan and tribal ties could challenge his authority. He distributed members of different tribes into new decimal units, and restricted movement between them. This reduced loyalty to chiefs, united diverse peoples such as Turks and Kereyits, and gave soldiers a new identity based on service to Genghis Khan.

What were the main features of Mongol military strength?

The Mongols were highly mobile horse riders and rapid-shooting archers who practised in hunting expeditions. They travelled light, campaigned in winter using frozen rivers, and learnt siege warfare quickly, using portable engines and naphtha. The decimal organisation, strict discipline and the yam communication system added to their strength.

Explain the role of the quriltai and the ulus system.

The quriltai was an assembly of chiefs where campaigns, plunder, pastures and succession were decided collectively. Genghis Khan divided the empire into ulus under his four sons, with princely contingents in each, so that the family would rule together. Later, ulus became separate territorial dynasties as quarrels over succession grew.

What was the Pax Mongolica and why was it important?

Pax Mongolica was the peace established by Mongol rule across Asia and eastern Europe by the mid-thirteenth century. It linked Europe and China, and the Silk Route reached its height and extended north to Karakorum. Travellers like Marco Polo and William of Rubruck visited, with safe-conduct passes (paiza) and trade taxes recognising Mongol authority.

Why are casualty figures in Persian chronicles considered unreliable?

City-based writers often disliked nomads, and later Il-Khanid chroniclers exaggerated earlier killings to present themselves as gentler. For example, one chronicle claimed 30,000 soldiers died at Bukhara's citadel, though an eyewitness said only 400 defended it. Juwaini's Merv figure came from a rough daily count of corpses.

What was the yasa and how did its meaning change?

Yasaq originally meant a law or order, and the few known rules dealt with hunting, the army and the postal system. By the mid-thirteenth century yasa meant the legal code of Genghis Khan, probably a collection of customs. It strengthened Mongol identity, and even in the sixteenth century 'Abdullah Khan's Muslim prayer was described as following it.

How did the Mongols change from plundering to protecting settled societies?

In the 1230s some leaders wanted to destroy peasants and use fields as pasture. But as the Mongols ruled agrarian lands, they needed revenue, so by the 1270s Qubilai protected peasants and cities, and in the 1290s Ghazan Khan warned commanders against plunder. Administrators such as Rashiduddin and Yeh-lu Ch'u-ts'ai influenced this shift.

Why is Genghis Khan remembered in two different ways?

Residents of conquered towns in China, Iran and eastern Europe saw him as a destroyer who killed thousands. For the Mongols he was the greatest leader, who united them, ended tribal wars and Chinese exploitation, brought prosperity and revived trade. The chapter says that a dominant perspective can erase others, and we must consider both.

CBSE Class 11 History Notes — Nomadic Empires