State a range when the census is gone
Honesty over a fake integer.
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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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.
Yuan rule recast Chinese politics; the Golden Horde recast Rus' politics; Ilkhanids recast Iran. Those are three legacies, not one.
The yam and some trade security became the "Pax" story -- true enough to teach, false if it hides the conquests.
Lessons
Edges matter
Japan, Ain Jalut, Goryeo resistance -- the blob was not fate.
Successor states are the long story
Tax and post outlasted the first khans.
Small polities get drafted
Korea's ship levy is the exhibit for this atlas.
Pop history flattens victims
Polo is not a death register.
Unresolved
Global death total
Still a band.
Plague linkage
A fourteenth-century argument, not settled.
Local Korean archaeology
Ships and camps still being studied.
Chronicle number method
How to read Persian and Chinese figures remains a craft fight.
Shifts
Eurasian political integration
A violent, temporary one.
Yuan as a conquest dynasty in China
A template later compared (carefully) to other foreign dynasties.
Rus' princely politics under the Horde
A centuries-long aftertaste.
Korean-Japanese 1274/81 memory split
Two national myths, one levy.
Outlook
Genetics and archaeology
New tools, same need for cautious totals.
Korean scholarship in English
Slowly thickening the Goryeo chapter for outsiders.
A closed conquest, an open argument about numbers
The riders are history; the census is not finished.
Risk
closed conquest
The thirteenth-century conquests are historically closed. The live risk is bad history: fake precision on deaths, or treating a school blob as a manual of power.
Modern borders do not descend neatly from 1241. Modern national myths often pretend they do.
For Korea, Mongol overlordship is a chapter in a longer history of great-power pressure -- read beside 1910 and 1950, not equated with them.