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The Mongol empire is one of the most expansive and well known empires today. In its initial conquests and subsequent predecessors the Mongols have conquered from Korea all the way to turkey. This all happened in the matter of a century, and it has got me thinking. In order to achieve conquering such large swaths of land that other large empires take several centuries to do must mean that the Mongols were particularly brutal. They had used a number of tactics that were revolutionary for the time to conquer effectively such as biological warfare were Mongol armies would dump plague infected corpses into cities that wouldn’t surrender . The Mongols were also known to massacre the population of cities and use the subsequent death toll and destruction as propaganda for yet to be conquered territories to surrender or face the same fate. It was terrorism tactic that was heavily used by the Mongols. These tactics although effective for the Mongols also left many millions of people dead as their victims, cities where these tactics were used sometimes never recovered to their pre-Mongol prosperity such as Baghdad the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, many may have even disappeared off the map. It is estimated that the Mongol invasions were responsible for up to 40 million deaths, a number unfathomable even today 700 years later. That is equal to the population of Spain being killed off. This death toll is estimated to be about 10% of the world population at the time; it would be the equivalent of killing 770 million people today. A death toll of this amount would take several generations to recover. To give context into how long Russia’s population growth is still suffering from the dramatic losses in life that happened during the eastern front of World War 2 80 years later. The Mongol invasions were responsible for one of the largest estimated losses of life in human history.
Source 1: Wheelis, Mark. “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa – Volume 8, Number 9-September 2002 – Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal – CDC.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 July 2010, wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article.
Source 2: McGlynn, Sean. “Was Genghis Khan the Cruellest Man Who Ever Lived?” The Spectator, 24 June 2015, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/was-genghis-khan-the-cruellest-man-who-ever-lived/.
History at Normandale 