Mongols

Bad-ass barbarians most notable for producing Genghis motherfucking Khan and probably being one of your ancestors. They're the exception.

Nomad Tech-Tree

To understand the Mongols you first need to understand steppe nomadism. Steppe nomads were, essentially, munchkins in a very poorly designed campaign. Most societies of the time had a lot of options and thus spread their proverbial character points around. Metallurgy, agriculture, architecture, and philosophy were all valuable links in a massive skill tree that allowed great classical civilizations like China and the Roman Empire to thrive. Steppe nomads on the other hand, living in an environment that resembled the moon as much as anything, had a access to a slightly more restricted skill tree. And by restricted we mean it basically consisted of "raising sheep", "riding horses", "shooting things with bows". It's no accident that every society along the steppe belt from East Asia to Central Europe had the same basic patterns of life, adapted the same tactics, and made their neighbors lives the same living hell with a cyclical "trade and raid" policy for thousands of years. Essentially they were all one trick ponies, but that pony had a man on it, and the trick was putting an arrow with sixty pounds of draw tension behind it through your eye at a hundred paces. To this day the steppe nomads still live like that, although now they use snowmobiles and AK-47's.

While it's true that their environment is unsuitable for sedentary agriculture and their population-area ratio is nowhere near those of settled socities (but again, their territories are massive) the idea that nomadic economies are inefficient is just agriculture bias. When your environment is dry, cold, and full of inedible grass, the only thing you can really raise is livestock, which converts grass to pretty much all of your basic necessities. If you remember basic bio, herbivores are pretty efficient converters of energy, and meat/milk is very calorie dense. Moving around also avoids overgrazing and depleting natural resources, giving the land time to regenerate, and is considered efficient (work put in vs calories gained) and sustainable; while the virgin farmers were busy being exploited by "landowners" to do the backbreaking work that makes farming possible (irrigation, land clearing) and giving up their surplus value, the chad nomads were living free across wide territorial expanses.

Whatever nomads couldn't make themselves, they traded for, and they made a killing on their control over trade routes (and that's if they weren't doing the trading themselves). Besides trading what they had looted, they also traded their trademark horses with others. The horse was probably domesticated by the ancestors of the Mongols, and while the horse caught on in the West, Chinese horse breeding could never compete with their steppe neighbors, and there are instances of Emperors buying or arranging trade deals just so they had a reliable source of military-grade horses.

Even the warfare aspect between nomadic societies isn't like the total warfare of annihilation that Genghis Khan became famous for, but subjugations of other nomads for their territory and manpower, which is how all those nomadic empires (and the Mongolians specifically) got so powerful: the Huns, Khazars, and Mongolian empires were named after the nations at the top, but conquered nomads would either be vassalized or assimilated (or even LARP as Mongols, see Timurkhan below), inflating their numbers and giving them lots of access to hardened veterans. Total annihilation was done on settled cities that didn't pay the Horselords proper respect, because they were, well, settled, and thus conveniently easy to wipe out.

What made the Mongols unique was that they actually had a plan for all the territories and people they conquered. Genghis delegated authority to his generals and his family, and made sure that there was a clear chain of command that should be followed. Other nomadic empires, like the Huns or Khazars, would break up at the loss of the Khagan, or would continously change sides/religions to facilitate better relations with their neighbors. They also tended to simply raze and occupy conquered territory, but the Mongols gave them a choice: surrender and be assimilated, or fight and die. Those who surrendered were incorporated, which gave the Mongols sedentary vassals who knew how to actually run a sedentary society.

The Mongolian Empire

The Mongolian Empire at its height, teaching both Napoleon and Hitler on how to actually conquer Russia.

Now enter Genghis motherfucking Khan. We won't go into great detail about him here because he has his own page (which he deserves and which you will read, sheep) but the short version was that he decided that uniting the stepped was too easy, so he decided to look for a right proppa scrap by invading all of his neighbors. Just like a certain other GOAT Warlord, he invaded any Empire that seemed like a challenge, utterly destroyed their leadership, and moved on the next one when he got bored. We're not even joking, because Genghis Khan died in 1227, which was well before Rus and China were entirely conquered, but well after their empires were razed: It was the Khan's way to oversee campaigns until the leadership was destroyed, then leave the mop-up to his Generals/Family, which is badass when you realize that this meant the Mongolian Empire was fighting multiple wars on all sides, all the time.

The Chinese Campaigns: The Khan's first campaigns were invasions of China, which was divided into multiple competing dynasties and had been already been paying tribute to multiple nomadic nations for decades. Those in the Northwest rolled over with little resistance and pinky-promised to be good vassals, while the Empire in China proper stood their ground resulting in a longer war that only ended when Genghis sacked Beijing; the Jin Dynasty saw they were absolutely fucked and retreated south, and the Khan left it to his descendants to finish the job while he moved onto Central Asia; Ogedei's unification would only be completed in 1234.

While the Chinese would eventually play their own trump card strategy of just assimilating all the Mongols who came to China the first khans managed to keep their edge by continous warfare: Mongol units were routinely rotated back to the steppe to keep them hungry (both figuratively and literally) and distinct cultural and legal institutions were promoted to make sure they didn't get too friendly with the sheeple they were being sent to butcher.

This was actually super important, because the Western Xia (which the Khan graciously let live early in his career because he wanted to start invading actual China) backstabbed the Mongolians by not sending him military aid during his Central Asian Campaigns and even got the remnants of the Jin to join them; while he died a little bit after this re-subjugation campaign ended, he stuck around long enough to personally raze their capitals and execute every single member of the Imperial family.

Central Asian Campaign: The horde shifted west and began subjugating all the remaining Turkic and Central Asian nomads. This continued until the Mongols hit the powerful Khwarezmian empire in modern day Iran. The Khwarezmian shah, having just finished declaring exterminatus on the nomads on his side of the fence, wasn't in the mood for diplomacy and sent the Mongol emissaries back in boxes. Unfortunately for the shah and his people this just gave the Mongols a massive erection, and made Genghis Motherfucking Khan RAGE(hurting emissaries being a big no-no in nomad culture). The ruling khans immediately stopped bickering and exploded west in an Angron-worthy campaign of pillage and depopulation so bloody, Genghis Khan would ascend to daemonhood and become Doombreed (seriously).

Genghis was satisfied with the destruction of the offending Khwarezmian Empire, but his descendants would continue their expansion in the years after his death, a campaign that culminated in the destruction of the Arabian Empire. The destruction of their great cities was so traumatic that the Muslims were fairly certain they were living through the apocalypse. Even to this day, some Islamic historians are still butthurt by the destruction wrought by the Mongols, and they consider Genghis to be just as bad as Hitler in Europe; if you ever ask yourself why the Middle East is the way it is, the Islamic perspective was that the Caliphate became decadent and immoral, and Mongols were sent as divine punishment, necessitating religious conservatism to get back on the path. Considering they were foreign subjects from the time of Genghis to the modern era, Islamic fundamentalism became intrinsically tied with nationalism and xenophobia. Grimdark.

Back on topic, though: after the horde ravaged Persia, Genghis was tired and in need of a vacation. Subutai, the Khan's right-hand man and known for his TACTICAL GENIUS, convinced the Khan to embrace his inner white woman by Live, Laugh, Loving his way through Afghanistan and India, while he and another General fought their way through the Caucasian mountains, planning to meet up back in the steppes later.

Rus Campaign: After the powerful and united Khwarezmian empire, crushing Rus, which by the time was split into dozen of feudal states waging petty wars on each other with little to no central government (much like the rest of the Europe of that times) posed about as much challenge as a nurgling would to Marneus Calgar. After a few curb stomp battles the Russian princes attempted to play their own ethnic special ability of running away and letting winter conditions kill everybody. The Mongols, having come from one of the few earthly places shittier than Russia, were quite pleased that they could now march over frozen rivers and promptly sped up. The usual results ensued (several Russian nobles were lashed together and used as a picnic table) and the states of Rus were united for the first time in centuries under Mongol rule (except for Novgorod and Galich who bribed their way out of serious fighting); some historians attribute the entire Russian national identity as a result of them resisting, being subjugated, then eventually breaking free, from the Mongolians, which is a delicious irony when you consider that historical Mongolia is now split between an autonomous Russian state, a semiautonomous Chinese state, and the modern "independent" Mongolia.

The conquest of Rus would eventually mark the highwater point of the Empire; Temujin died in 1227, just before they could stage an invasion of Bulgaria/Hungary, which would put him right on the doorstep of the Romans Byzantines; though, like the absolute chad that he is, their goal wasn't gold or pussy, but to gain access to the motherfucking pastures of the Pannonian Basin for their horses.

Temujin's offspring had always been a bunch of clusterfucking alcoholic maniacs but their egos and power had finally grown so large that even the laws and systems he had devised could no longer contain them, and they split themselves up. The final years of the united empire weren't without merits. The war machine kept grinding on even in the absence of competent leadership. The horde penetrated central Europe and began fucking up places like Poland and Hungary, but these were probing missions, warm-ups for the real main event. Still, the handful of battles between Europe's chivalric armies and the Mongols usually played out like a match between the New York Yankees and your local tee-ball team (if Derek Jeter killed and mutilated the entire group of children after the game). Nobody is quite sure how far the Mongol forces might have swept if the Xia didn't revolt, or if their Mongolian leadership hadn't imploded, but take a moment to be happy you aren't speaking Mongolian.

Impact

Leaving aside the toll in human lives, the Mongols did have some lasting impacts in the areas they conquered. In truth the Mongols did not contribute much new to science, technology or artwork directly, but they were good at spreading things around - starting with your mom's legs. For instance, the male Hungarian aristocracy used to be of the N Y-chromosome, coming from northeastern Europe as they did, like Finns and Estonians. After the Mongols got done, the N type became very rare in Hungary. (Although the peasants kept speaking that language.) This DNA was replaced by Mongol DNA, not just in Hungary, but in all the Russias and deep into Iran and India.

When the Mongols went to Iran, they brought with them rice from China. They also sent cobalt east to Chinese potters for use in their ceramics industry as blue paint. Mongolians built roads and established trade posts on the conquered territories (well, not by themselves - they ordered locals to do it), and were responsible for creating one of the first reliable mail networks, that spanned from Kyiv to Peking (several ancient civilisations beat them to it, not least the ancient Achaemenids, who were first, and the Romans). Additionally, they credited with the first cannons - combining European bell-casting techniques with Chinese gunpowder.

Mongols also liked to swear a lot, and to this day roughly 10 to 50% of swear words in the places they had conquered have Mongolian roots.

It should be noted that it was under the Mongol Empire that Europe started having more regular contact with the Far East; while this was partly due to them being right on Eastern Europe's doorstep, the Europeans had also sent many emissaries, including famed explorer Marco Polo, who spent years in Kublai Khan's court and introduced Europe to a world that they knew little of before; this culminated in a fascination with the far East, leading to repeated attempts by Europeans to find efficient trade routes during Age of Exploration.

Reasons You're Completely Fucked

• The Mongols invented blitzkrieg warfare. In an era where most armies had to give up and go home every time farming needed to happen, the Mongols had only one reason to ever stop, namely that since Mongols used composite bows, wet weather could break the glue of their bows apart which may have been why they did not take much of wetter Europe, but other than that problem of their bows breaking apart, they would not stop. Every Mongol trooper carried everything he needed to survive and fight including extra bow strings (the penalty for losing one was death) and herded sheep along as a mobile food source; the Mongolians were also expert hunters, meat and game being their primary food source in the Winter. In Europe, hunting was a ceremonial activity reserved for the nobility, and doubled as training. For the Mongolians, every single rider knew how to systematically encircle and catch game in the winter for survival; it didn't matter if they were in Russia or China, winter hunting was a routine activity for them. In the unlikely event that they ran out of sheep or game, they would simply steal from the locals; and in the unlikelier scenario that they were in a place with nothing to loot, they would drink their horses' blood. Historians credit this fact for the wildly exaggerated numbers most opposing armies credited the Mongols with having. Nobody could believe that the same people who had fucked their shit up last Tuesday at the border were now camped outside their capital.
• Fortunately for their enemies, the Mongols refused to shed Noble blood. Unfortunately for enemies, the Mongols were incredibly creative people. Countless Nobles were executed by via trampling, drowning, being fed molten silver, being converted into a table and used for a mongol picnic, or just plain choked the fuck out.
• The Mongols were incredibly progressive. They respected local customs and allowed open worship, meaning successful rebellions almost never took in their territories. All they asked was that you kept telling your god what a cool guy the khan is, and that you definitely think he deserves to get into heaven/nirvana/be reincarnated as a Mongol. They also practiced a division of status/labor that placed the Khan's first wife as the leader of the camps, being responsible for civilian duties and logistics. Of course, this doesn't mean they were feminists (they absolutely werent), but considering that the Slavs, Greeks, Muslims, Chinese, Indians had literal enclosures for noble women to keep them chaste as their husband's property, the fact that a woman could ride and be listened to confounded their vassals.
• Genghis Khan was Mongolian, their culture and language being totally different from the previous nomadic invaders that plagued Persia and Europe, but his influence was so total that he united all the nomads under a single banner. Turkic nomads would follow his lead and incorporate Mongolian administration/culture, even after the actual Mongolians lost power and influence and became Turkicized themselves; the Turks would become 2/3s of the Gunpowder Empires, the first Empires to fully make use of gunpowder weapons, and they would continue to be a thorn to European expansion in his name (Ottomans, the Mughals). It is telling that the only Muslims that like the Khan are Turks,and they credit him with creating a united, nomadic identity, and the groundwork for their own empires.
  • On the other hand, the Mongolians were so traumatic that they were the impetus for creating united Russian and Islamic identities. Islamic fundamentalism is the result of the trauma of losing Baghdad to heathens, and the nomadic Cossacks and Tatars that the Russians used as a warrior-class were the targets of Stalin's ethnic purges because he didn't like how their culture and privilege were apart from the Soviet identity he wanted to create. Even today, Tatars and other nomadic peoples are considered "minorities" by Russia, and thus don't really have any ties to the land they occupy.
• In the event that a rebellion was gaining traction, the Mongols had an incredibly sophisticated and advanced intelligence network ready to sabotage it. Anybody plotting against the horde would be bribed, blackmailed, or assassinated before they got anywhere near carrying out a plot. Far from being a group of rock banging barbarians, the Mongols knew that not every problem could be solved by Khorne scale ultra-violence. Just most problems.
• Remember all that religious pluralism? It didn't stop them from taking their own beliefs pretty seriously. Said beliefs included the idea that the Mongols were destined to take over the world, and that even token resistance to Mongol conquest was heresy. Heretics were dealt with accordingly.
• The mongols may have invented biological warfare by taking the bodies of people who died of the black plague, loading them into catapults and flinging them over the walls of enemy strongholds to let the plague do their work for them. On the subject of the black plague, even when the Mongols were not spreading it on purpose, they carried it with them everywhere they went and with their rapid, fast moving forces acting as carriers, allowing the Plague to spread from China (where it killed 25 million) to Europe (where it killed roughly a third of the total population) before it burned out.

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.
• 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.

Mongols In /tg/

• The White Scars chapter of space marines in 40K are space Mongols, going so far as to name their leaders Khans.
• The Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire. They share many of the same customs, including "refusing" to shed the blood of nobles.
• Tarkir is based on the Mongolian empire.
• The Mongols map directly to the Kurgan of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, only Grimdarked into brutal Chaos-worshipping savages. They're steppe nomads with the darker skin and slanted eyes, strong emphasis on horse archers, military genius stymied by poor administration, and even a "Great Kurgan".
• Doombreed, the first and greatest of Khorne's Daemon Princes is theorised to be Genghis Khan himself.
• Orcs
• An Ork WAAAGH can also end up becoming Space Galactic Mongols if it grows far too big and led by a Warboss of exceptional might and cunning, like in The War of The Beast.
• Ogre Kingdoms in Warhammer Fantasy

/tg/ in Mongols

• The Mongols are clearly Chaos Worshipers, in spirit if not in intentional prayer.
• They pay homage to the angriest Chaos god, Khorne, with their multicontinent rampage. He seemed to be their primary patron Chaos god. They spilled the blood of their horses if there were no enemies nearby, and they even build pyramids of skulls for him so that they may be added to the Skull Throne.
• Their extensive intelligence network and crafty planning prove that they were servants of Tzeentch, god of... crafty planning.
• By conducting biological warfare using corpses, they tick both the "disease" and "death" boxes which make Papa Nurgle so happy.
• Genetic testing shows that the Great Kahn was a favorite boytoy of Slaanesh, as he sexed the world's population so hard that mbillions of people alive are descendants.