Organization of Genghis Khan’s empire

During the early stages of Mongol supremacy, the empire established by Genghis absorbed civilizations in which a strong, unified, and well-organized state power had developed. The social organization of the Mongols was, however, characterized by pastoralism and a decentralized patrilineal system of clans. Antagonism existed between a society of this nature and the subjugated advanced civilizations, between a relatively small number of foreign conquerors and a numerically strong conquered population. In the early phases of conquest, the Mongols usually attempted to impose the social structure of the steppes upon their new subjects. It was customary for the Mongols to enslave a conquered tribe and to present whole communities to distinguished military leaders as a sort of personal appanage. These slaves became sooner or later an integral part of the conquering tribe. In the conquered areas a similar procedure was adopted. Groups of the settled population, usually those living in a certain territory, became the personal property of Mongol military leaders who exploited the local economic forces as they liked. No use was made of the existing state machinery or bureaucracy, and the former political divisions were entirely disregarded. Nor was there any attempt to organize the numerous local Mongol leaders who enjoyed a high degree of independence from the court of the khans. Ruthless exploitation under strong military pressure was therefore characteristic of the early phase of Mongol domination, which may be said to have lasted until about 1234, some seven years after Genghis Khan’s death.

The central power rested with the khan, who was assisted by military and political councilors. No departmental administration was, however, established during the early stages of Genghis Khan’s empire. The highly hierarchized military organization of the Mongols had no political or administrative counterpart. The influence of the councilors, who were appointed by the khan regardless of their nationality, was nevertheless great. It was a former Jin subject, the Khitan Yelü Chucai (1190–1244), a man of high talents with an excellent Chinese education, who dissuaded Genghis from converting the whole of north China into pastureland. Other councilors were Uyghurs, and for some time the Uyghur language was as much used in the court chancery as Mongol. The Uyghur script was also adopted for writing Mongol. The oldest known document in the Mongol language is a stone inscription carved in approximately 1224.

The economy of the conquered areas was not properly organized during the period of conquest. The abolition of highly organized governments gave an opportunity for the exploitation of local production by the Mongol appanage-holders who relied to a great extent on non-Mongol tax-farmers. There was no single financial system for the whole empire or even for large parts of it. The absence of civil organization at the top, the great independence of the various appanages, and the high priority accorded to military affairs had a strongly disintegrating effect and were, at least in the early phases of Mongol rule, detrimental to economic progress and prosperity. The Mongol empire was, under Genghis and his successors, not yet a state in the normal sense of the word but a vast agglomeration of widely different territories held together by military domination.

As the empire grew through new conquests after Genghis’s death, the same pattern repeated itself: a period of military, and at the same time decentralized, rule marked the first stage of Mongol domination. The result was a noticeable variation of practice within the empire. Newly conquered areas were still subject to direct exploitation bearing the imprint of a nomadic and military mentality, but, in those areas which had been subjugated earlier, attempts were made to build up a state machinery and bureaucracy in order to consolidate Mongol rule. This was done mostly in accordance with the traditional administrative system of the individual territory.

This general tendency, together with the absence of an original Mongol concept for ruling a settled population, accounts for the entirely different development that occurred in various countries. This resulted in an empire that may not have been “Mongol” but was a Chinese, Persian, or central Asian empire with a Mongol dynasty. This trend was expressed more in some locations than others because the absorptive power of the various civilizations differed in intensity. In China, for instance, the Mongols could maintain their rule better than elsewhere because the strong Chinese tradition of centralized state power supplied a stable framework of governmental organization.

The original absence of a state concept on the part of the Mongols is reflected in the ruling clan’s attitude to the empire. The empire was considered to be not the khan’s personal property but the heirloom of the imperial clan as a whole. Already in Genghis’s lifetime the empire was divided among his four favourite sons into ulus, a Mongol word which denotes the supremacy over a certain number of tribes rather than a clearly defined territory. Tolui, the youngest, received the eastern part—the original homeland of the Mongols together with the adjacent parts of north China. Ögödei became ruler of the western part of the steppes (modern northern Xinjiang and western Mongolia). Chagatai received the lands of Khara-Khitai (modern northern Iran and southern Xinjiang). The eldest son, Jöchi, followed by his son Batu, ruled over southwest Siberia and west Turkistan (an area later known as the territory of the Golden Horde). To these four Mongol empires a fifth was added when Hülegü, a son of Tolui, completed the conquest of Iran, Iraq, and Syria and became the founder of the Il-Khanid dynasty in Iran. The unity of the Mongol empire was therefore from the beginning undermined by disintegrating factors, and the history of the empire after Genghis’s death may consequently be subdivided into two periods, the first being characterized by relative unity in the empire ruled by a great khan who was recognized by all branches of the royal clan, the second showing a more or less complete independence of the separate empires, which thereafter had no common history.