Skip to content Skip to a section
M Mongol conquests

Cost

About 20-40 million dead, scholarly range -- highly uncertain, stated as a band.

Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.

At a glance
Score intensity

Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.

Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology

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.

Start with this section - Cost

The 20-40 million band is a confession of uncertainty. Some cities in Persian sources have numbers that cannot all be literal. The honest move is a range plus local studies.

Korea's cost was demographic, political, and naval -- years of campaign and levy.

Bands

Eurasian dead

About 20-40 million, highly uncertain.

Some city chronicles

Figures that cannot all be literal -- reported as claims.

Goryeo

Repeated campaigns and later levy -- a national demographic and political cost.

Deportations

Artisans moved as a form of loss for sending cities.

Later plague debate

Fourteenth-century mortality is a different file, sometimes wrongly dumped into 1240.

Regions

Mongolia / steppe

Political origin.

China

Jin, Song, Yuan -- the longest conquest.

Central Asia / Iran

Khwarezm to Ilkhanate.

Rus' / Eastern Europe

1240s shock and Horde tax.

Korea

War, submission, ship levy.

Japan / Levant edges

Failure and limit as geography.

Key numbers

Unification1206
Deaths (band)about 20-40 million
Baghdad1258
Japan fleets1274 and 1281

Makers

Steppe horse economy

The biological base of mobility.

Conquered workshops

Weapons and later ships as extracted industry.

Yuan bureaucracy

A Chinese-style machine on a conquest throne.

Goryeo shipyards

Forced makers of the Japan war.

Persian and Chinese chroniclers

The makers of the numbers we now distrust and use.

Later map publishers

The blob-makers of English memory.

Artisan deportations moved skills as well as suffering -- a cold economic fact in the sources.

Later plague arguments (fourteenth century) are a sequel hypothesis, not a thirteenth-century body count.

HistoryForcesCampaignsCostIconsLegacyAtlas