The Conquests of the Mongol Empire That Caused Global Decimation

‌

The expansion of the Mongol Empire was one of the most violent processes in human history. The conquests of the Mongol Empire alone likely caused the death of 10% of the world's population at the time. While this figure is highly uncertain, there have likely been only two other instances in the Common Era where a similar proportion of the global population was lost.
One of those instances was the Black Death, which swept across Eurasia in the 14th century. The 14th-century Black Death also caused a loss of approximately 9.7% of the world's population. Together, the conquests of the Mongol Empire and the Black Death of the 14th century are sometimes referred to as "global decimation." Here, 'decimation' means to remove one-tenth, a term derived from a punishment that existed in the ancient Roman army.
Interestingly, there are many epidemiological correlations between the 13th-century Mongol conquests and the 14th-century global Black Death. This is because the 13th-century Eurasian conquests of the Mongol Empire and the 14th-century outbreak of the Black Death are linked by a strong causal relationship: the formation of a global network by the Mongol Empire, which facilitated the rapid spread of infectious diseases.
The Black Death in Europe also has a high correlation with the Golden Horde, which descended from the Mongol Empire. In 1346, the forces of the Golden Horde besieged Caffa, a Black Sea port city that served as a trading hub for Genoese merchants from Italy. When the Black Death broke out within the Mongol camp during the siege, the Khan used catapults to hurl the bodies of soldiers who had died from the plague over the city walls.
As the Genoese merchants in the city fled by ship to Sicily and other Mediterranean port cities, the Black Death began to spread in earnest to mainland Europe starting in 1347, carried by the rats and fleas on the ships. Thus began the Black Death catastrophe.
Modern academia views the movement of rats and fleas and commercial contact, rather than the throwing of corpses itself, as the primary cause. Consequently, some online communities argue that the Black Death catastrophe began entirely independently of the Mongol armies. However, this overlooks the consensus in academia that the Siege of Caffa was the decisive trigger.
If these two events are combined, it means that 20% of the world's population died throughout the 13th and 14th centuries. Of course, such a level of global decimation is rare in history and is a phenomenon unrelated to societal collapse.
This means that the massive loss of life was not caused by the destruction of the Khwarazmian and Islamic civilizations to an irreparable degree due to the Mongol invasions. Rather, that immense loss of life resulted from the actions of the Mongol invaders and the subsequent indirect population decline. In fact, during the 13th-century conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire and the invasions of Iran and Central Asia by the Mongol Empire, the population decline rate in those regions is estimated by scholars and historical records to be between 75% and 90%.
According to analyses by institutions such as the Carnegie Institution for Science, so much of the population in Eurasia, including these regions, disappeared at once and so much farmland was devastated that an environmental phenomenon occurred: large-scale forests and grasslands regrew, leading to a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
A similar case can be seen in the later Qing Dynasty. There was the case of the Dzungar Empire, the last nomadic empire to threaten the Qing. The Dzungar Empire was devastated upon its conquest by the Qing. As a result, not only was the state of the Dzungar Empire destroyed, but the Dzungar people as an ethnic group were also subjected to genocide.
According to estimates, 30% of the Dzungar people were directly massacred by the Qing Empire, 40% died of disease and famine, 20% are unaccounted for, and only 10% remained as a minority in the Xinjiang region. Subsequently, the Qing court forcibly relocated mainly Uyghur people to inhabit that emptied territory.
Behind this miserable and horrific situation lies the driver of organized cruelty rather than an absence of authority structures. As sociology professor Siniša Malešević has demonstrated, large-scale violence throughout history has required highly organized authority structures like empires.
To systematically kill, enslave, or oppress millions of people, a tight-knit political entity must exist. Most people are not born with the inclination to maim, kill, torture, or force others into submission. To do so generally requires a strict chain of command, large-scale training, and the psychological conditioning of soldiers. In other words, a highly organized hierarchy of dominance is required.
Ordinary people often think that failed or failing states are the ones that commit genocide, but analyzing history shows that failed or failing states were actually much less likely or much less capable of committing genocide than large, functioning empires. The reason is self-evident.
To systematically kill vast numbers of people, one requires powerful authority and strength.