ABSTRACT
Contacts with Central Asia were not uncommon in Syria’s history up to this point, though it was mostly a matter of individuals or small groups seeking trade or political connections between Central Asia and the Mediterranean seaboard. The experience of the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260 was to be of a different order. The Mongols were a central Asian people who originated in the present-day Mongolian Republic. At one point, they would establish an empire reaching from Hungary to Korea but their capacity to sustain such a reach was limited. Under Genghis Khan (d.1227), the Mongol army became a formidable force numbering probably over 100,000 men. Their main advantages were their mobility, their ruthlessness and a driving sense of destiny.1 After defeating their ancestral enemies, the Tartars, in 1202, Genghis Khan became the supreme ruler of his people in 1206. Northern China, Samarkhand, Bukhara and southern Russia fell in rapid succession. By 1220 a huge Mongol army stood on the Oxus River gazing south into Persia. Genghis was distracted from moving west, however, by a campaign into India, returning home to die in 1227.
