1206 steppe
The launch pad.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Scale85
Intensity82
Duration70
Tech shift35
Political impact80
Cultural memory60
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Quick answers
Are the scores a ranking of nations or armies?
No. Scores are browsing aids inside an era-bounded atlas — not live league tables of countries.
How many died?
About 20-40 million is a commonly cited scholarly-range band across Eurasia, with very high uncertainty. Some local chronicle figures are impossible as censuses. Use ranges.
Did they "conquer the world"?
They built the largest contiguous land empire, then stopped or failed at Japan, the Mamluk Levant, and parts of Southeast Asia. Sea and desert edges mattered.
What was Baghdad 1258?
Hulagu's forces took the city and ended Abbasid caliphal rule there. Chronicle death figures are huge and disputed; the political shock is not.
How was Korea involved?
Mongol campaigns against Goryeo ran through the 1230s-50s. Later, Goryeo was forced to support Kublai's Japan expeditions of 1274 and 1281 -- a Korean tragedy inside a Japanese legend.
What is Pax Mongolica?
A later phrase for relative security on some overland routes in the mid-to-late thirteenth century. It does not cancel the conquest deaths.
A map of 1290 that still shows one colour is lying a little. Show khanates.
A Korea-Japan inset for 1274/1281 is mandatory in this atlas.
Maps
1241 western ride
Kiev to Mohi -- and the withdrawal.
1258 Baghdad
A city as a world-political end.
Goryeo campaigns
The Korean inset this atlas requires.
Khanates c. 1290
The honest split map.
Portrayals
Marco Polo editions
The English default tale.
Mongol school-map blob
The visual cliche to unlearn.
Japanese kamikaze legend
1281 as divine wind -- incomplete without Korean yards.
Mongolian national Chinggis
A modern state icon on an old conqueror.
Russian Horde memory
A long literary aftertaste (and later nationalist uses).
Korean Goryeo dramas / museums
The local thick portrayal.
Rituals
Naadam (modern Mongolia)
A later national festival that cites the horse-warrior past -- not a thirteenth-century rite unchanged.
Japanese 1281 commemorations
Typhoon-as-deliverance rites; pair them with Korean forced-labour history.
Goryeo temple and palace sites
Korean remembrance of invasion and overlordship.
Sayings
Hungarian and Polish battlefield markers are the European pilgrimage; Goryeo sites are the East Asian one.
School blobs made the empire famous and the victims generic. This page tries to un-generic the victims without inventing false precision.