ABSTRACT
After being proclaimed Great Khan of the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppe lands Chinggis Khan and his progeny went on to establish the largest ever, continuous land Empire on earth. At its apogee in the mid-thirteenth century this empire was to stretch from the China Sea and Manchuria in the east to the Carpathians and Anatolia in the west, from the Sind valley in the south to the lands of the Bulghars and the Ural Mountains in the north. The Mongols’ advent was so resounding and sudden that their impact has been recorded in the history books of all the lands and cultures they overran. A Persian witness has summarised this initial impact in one harrowing sentence, ‘They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed’.2 In Russia a chronicler from Novgorod who was unfortunate enough to have witnessed the legendary reconnaissance trip of the Mongol generals, Subedai and Jebe, in 1222, expressed the stunned and horrified bemusement of the peoples of the Russian steppes when he wrote:
No one exactly knows who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is . . . God alone knows who they are and whence they came out.3
