Estimated Extent of Mongol Destruction

Estimated Extent of Mongol Destruction All reports of Genghis Khan’s campaigns agree at the vast number of people killed following the capture of cities that defied his authority. The numbers are staggering: at the capture of Nishapur in , , , people were massacred while the toll at Herat in was , , people and at Baghdad in , , . Smaller towns suffered proportionately: Nasa, , dead; Baihaq district, , ; and at Tun in the Kuhistan province, , individuals were executed. How did medieval chroniclers arrive at such figures? Juwaini, the Persian chronicler of the Ilkhans stated that , , people were killed in Merv. He reached the figure because it took thirteen days to count the dead and each day they counted , corpses. N OMADIC E MPIRES T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY Mongol forces in pursuit of Sultan Muhammad pushed into Azerbaijan, defeated Russian forces at the Crimea and encircled the Caspian Sea. Another wing followed the Sultan’s son, Jalaluddin, into Afghanistan and the Sindh province. At the banks of the Indus, Genghis Khan considered returning to Mongolia through North India and Assam, but the heat, the natural habitat and the ill portents reported by his Shaman soothsayer made him change his mind. Genghis Khan died in , having spent most of his life in military combat. His military achievements were astounding and they were largely a result of his ability to innovate and transform different aspects of steppe combat into extremely effective military strategies. The horse-riding skills of the Mongols and the Turks provided speed and mobility to the army; their abilities as rapid-shooting archers from horseback were further perfected during regular hunting expeditions which doubled as field manoeuvres. The steppe cavalry had always travelled light and moved quickly, but now it brought all its knowledge of the terrain and the weather to do the unimaginable: they carried out campaigns in the depths of winter, treating frozen rivers as highways to enemy cities and camps. Nomads were conventionally at a loss against fortified encampments but Genghis Khan learnt the importance of siege engines and naphtha bombardment