How The World’s Largest Empire Split Apart
The little told tale of the demise of the Mongol Empire
When empires fall, they make noise. For hundreds of years dedicated historians have been studying the fall of great empires. They are dissected, reassembled and dissected again. When a new generation comes along, a fresh take usually rises with it and the process of examining these past states begins anew.
Thousands of pages have been written about the fall of the Roman Empire. We have gone into great detail about the fracturing of Alexander The Great’s Empire. Even modern empires, such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union are given out-sized attention in how they rose and inevitably fell. But what about the largest empire in the history of the world?
The Mongol Empire was the largest continuous land empire ever to be assembled in human history. It stretched from the icy regions of the Far East and swept all the way down through the plains of Eastern Europe and the arid scrub of the Levant. It connected China to Baghdad. It would encompass Moscow and Jerusalem. Yet, unlike other similar states from world history, this empire fell and no one seems to care how or why.
So how did the world’s largest empire fall apart?
