In conquering an empire that stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Mediterranean Sea, the typical image of the Mongols is a literal horde of leather-clad warriors sweeping across the steppes bringing death and destruction.
Genghis Khan’s establishment of the Mongol Empire revolutionized steppe warfare with the introduction of strict discipline, new tactics, the creation of a military academy, and the expansion of decimal organization. Although decimal organization and many of the tactics he used had existed for centuries, Chinggis Khan refined them particularly in the area of tactics.
The Mongols under Genghis Khan had at their disposal a military instrument that was superior to every other army of its time. This superiority was a product of their Spartan way of life, their immersion in the military arts from earliest childhood, their military organization, their mobility, and undisputed preeminence in the rigors of discipline. One further asset available to them was the systematic practice of terror against peoples.
While units of horse archers remained the core component of the Mongols, from the very start, the Mongol military quickly developed other units ranging from heavy cavalry, a corps of engineers, artillerists, and even infantry. Large units of infantry were used not only in China but also in other regions.
By comparison to sedentary society, nomad society is demographically quite feeble. Thus, the superiority of the nomad warrior had nothing to do with numbers. It was through the concentration of forces and the element of surprise that nomads sought to overwhelm their adversaries as well as through the psychological impact of their attacks on populations ill prepared for such a scourge. They therefore relied in the terror they inspired in civilian populations and armies to prevent uprisings in their wake. Thus, terror became a basic tool of nomad strategy of conquest.
Genghis Khan’s also developed a Mongol strategy that was to become their campaign model from East to West: first ask for submission, then attack when the answer was negative.
By the time Chinggis Khan died in 1227, the Mongols had mastered the entire length of the overland Silk Route and the world was a much-altered place. By then, the Mongol Empire boundaries had extended from the Caspian Sea in the west to the edge of Korea in the east.
Tamerlane was Genghis equal, in military terms, his every operation enjoying success, even though he sometimes met the same adversaries in battle on several occasion. The key characteristics of his style of warfare was his frequent assaults on great cities, including, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Delhi and Ankara. His adversaries were far from negligible.
When the sack of a city was complete, Tamerlane raised pyramids of decapitate heads. In the 1397 taking Isfahan, a city of about half million inhabitants, observers estimated the number of dead at 100,000 to 200,000.
After the massacre, Tamerlane had some fifty pyramids built, each comprised of thousands of heads. In doing so Tamerlane hoped to persuade other besieged city to surrender at firsts notice. The tactic did not always work, and many towns still refused to capitulate. The practice of terror remained methodological at all times and he took pains to spare elites, theologians, artists, poets, engineers, architects and so on.
The Mongol warfare
