19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe (Part 1)

In the year 1333, the North African traveler Ibn Battuta journeyed through Central Asia expecting to find the legendary Silk Road cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Balk. Instead, he found ruins. Bukhara's mosques and colleges lay in rubble, its inhabitants "looked down upon." Samarkand had no walls or gates, with vegetation growing inside it. Balk was completely uninhabited, its buildings still standing but empty of life. Everywhere across this region, the cities bore the scars of one of the Middle Ages' most world-changing events: the rise of the Mongol Empire.

The Mongols began as one of the weakest peoples on the Eurasian steppe, a vast grassland stretching 8,000 kilometers from Hungary to Manchuria. For thousands of years, nomadic peoples had lived on this landscape, moving with their herds and developing a way of life built around the horse. The domestication of the horse around 5,000 years ago transformed life on the steppe, allowing herders to cover over 100 kilometers a day and manage much larger herds. The combination of the horse and the composite bow—a compact weapon made from maplewood, bone, horn, sinew, and fish glue that could shoot over 300 meters—made the steppe horse archer the deadliest single entity on the planet.