Editing Mongols (section)

==Decline==
Since this article had been spent mostly aggrandizing the Mongols as warriors and conquerors one might be left asking the question of what happened to them. Why are not steppe horsemen ruling over us now? There are three main reasons for this...
*Fragmentation: As previously mentioned, the Mongol Empire began breaking up into smaller domains, usually due to succession conflicts. These would continue to break down into yet smaller bits and because there were fighting Mongols with Mongols as a rule neither side had a decisive advantage to just roll over the opposition and so forth until non-mongols could take em on. The first major division split the empire into four parts...
** '''Yuan Dynasty''': Kublai Khan managed to finish off China by turning once powerful Song dynasty of South into a minor resistance force.  But then he tried to invade Japan and that went really badly (both of their invasion fleets got hit by a typhoon). After his death, like in most monarchies, capability of Kublai's successors decreased, while the number of problems in the country increased proportionally. Eventually, Yuan managed to finish off Song loyalists, but were weakened so much in the process that Ming managed to effortlesly seize power. Remnants of the former dynasty retreated to Mongolia, where they mostly fight among themselves until falling to Qing.
** '''The Golden Horde''': Batu, son of Jochi took control of the steppe lands, encompassing Volga-Dnieper and West Siberian territories of modern Russia. Once the direct Batu line died out the country has entered a half-century long succession crisis, which eventually turned into the good old habit of nomadic tribes fighting among themselves. Most of these statelets were annihilated by Russian Tsardom, but Crimean Khanate survived by becoming a vassal of Ottomans up until the 18th century.
** '''Ilkhanate''': first ruled by Tolui, the Ilkhanate stretched from Asia Minor (Turkey) to the Persian Gulf. While most of the mongol khanates were Buddhist, the Ilkhanate (alongside Golden Horde and Chagatai) were exposed to Islam, thought it was great and converted. Ilkhanate was badly ravaged by Black Death, and after the death of their Khan collapsed completely.
** '''Chagatai''': Initially spanning Afghanistan and surrounding areas, the Chagatai khanate has changed its borders a lot, thanks to Timurkhan/Tamarlane (who, alongside his descendants, the Mughals, are technically not recognized to be true successors of Genghis due to being partially Turkic instead of full-blooded Mongols in spite of sharing indirect blood ties) and internal conflicts,  before falling to neighboring Dzungars in 1705. 
*Administration: The Mongols were great warriors and were often led by great generals, but long story short a bunch of nomadic horse peoples off the steppes did not understand the fine details of managing complex agricultural and urban societies, especially when they often kept themselves said societies at arms length. Improper administration inevitably led to economic downturns, resentment and eventually rebellions. The biggest example would be in the death of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, in which their bad policies led to them getting kicked out from power after less than a century of ruling china, proving that outsourcing bureaucracy to other civil servants who were themselves from another land (Arabia) was not sustainable.
*[[Firearm|Gunpowder]]: If there was a good hard counter to Mongol horse archers it would be firearms, sort of. It took the Mongols some seventy years to conquer China and they only succeeded in doing so when it was divided, after overrunning the northern Jin Dynasty and adopting gunpowder weapons of their own. At the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, an army of the Mamluk Sultanate defeated a Mongol army partially by using gunpowder weapons. The Red Turban rebellion which toppled the Yuan Dynasty managed to drive them out in part through being good with blackpowder weapons. In both cases, these were very primitive firearms they went up against and firearms technology continued to advance. The Mongols' goose was cooked when the age of the Arquebus came around. The issue of course is not that Arquebuses are better than Mongol horsemen, but that it takes a Mongol a lifetime to be trained how to shoot accurately from horseback while at a full gallop, whereas you can train almost anybody to use a Arquebus in a matter of mere weeks, which the vastly more populated city cultures could use to create armies much larger and faster then the Nomadic Mongols.