In the thirteenth century, people in China had only the vaguest idea that people in Europe even existed, and vice versa. Yet all would come to be terrified of one man. He and his "Hordes" seemed to come out of nowhere, instilling fear in people from one end of the Earth to the other. Genghis Khan (1167-1227), a Mongol warlord who had little use for the finer things of Chinese or European civilization, slept in a yurt and rode a fast, sturdy Mongolian stallion, evolved as perhaps the most successful military leader in the history of the world. Late in the twelfth century, he became the leader of a Mongol band which saw no limit to the potential size of a Mongol Empire.
The Mongols were a nomadic people who lived on the vast plains of Central Asia. For many years they eked out a living on the steppes, fighting among themselves and raiding villages on the fringes of the Chinese Empire. Few people beyond the periphery of their homeland had even heard of them. The Great Wall of China, legun around 200 BC, generally kept them at bay, and most of Europe was several thousand miles from the cold, high deserts the Mongols inhabited. Eventually, neither wall nor distance would matter.
Genghis first turned his attention to the Tartars. Having defeated them, he plunged south into China, where the Kin Dynasty was on brink of ruin and hence an easy target for the marauding Mongols. Genghis captured Beijing in 1214 and soon occupied most of China. In 1219, he looked west toward lands that had not yet heard of his conquests.
The "Mongol Hordes," as the vast oceans of heavily-armed horsemen came to be known, swept across Russia, digested the Persian Empire, swallowed Poland and Hungary and threatened all of Europe. Over the next eight years, Genghis Genghis Khan, Mongol conqueror.
amassed the largest contiguous empire the world had yet seen. Only the British Empire, when it included both Canada and Australia, would be larger. Unlike Alexander the Great, the Caesars or the Persian emperors, Genghis Khan's idea of conquest was not to occupy and rule another people, but rather to rape, pillage and destroy everything in his path. His total disregard for human life led to his being utterly dreaded throughout virtually the entire Eurasian land mass.
However, the success of the Hordes was completely dependent upon Genghis Khan's leadership abilities and his unification of the Mongols. When Ogadai Khan (ogo-dl' kan) (1185-1241) succeeded him after his death and continued on a path of conquest, the Mongol juggernaut eventually ran out of steam and the Hordes returned to Central Asia. In the long run, the most important impact that the Mongol Empire had on history was that it made people at opposite ends of the globe—China and Europe— aware of one another. The Crusades had reopened the ancient dialogue between Europe and the Middle East, but before the Mongols, Europeans were largely unaware that the Far East existed.