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Mongols
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The Mongols originally were cattle, sheep, goat, yak, and horse herders, living off the milk and meat of their flocks and herds. They had to import rice and grain. As emperors of a large empire, they simply collected taxes from existing economies. Genghis Khan was a strict ruler but he worked to encourage trade and industry once he owned it. The Silk Road, for example, was made safer and much more profitable. The legend of the time was that a virgin carrying a bag of gold could walk from one end of his empire to the other without fear of being molested. Marco Polo traveled to China over the Silk Road in this period and became acquainted with Kublai Khan.
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The Mongols were a nomadic people from the steppes of Central Asia. Known as fierce horsemen and warriors, the Mongol clans were united in 1206 by the powerful chief Temujin, later known as Genghis Khan. After uniting these clans, Genghis Khan began a series of conquests that left him in control of Asia from Beijing, China, to the Caspian Sea. However, Genghis Khan was not only a skilled conqueror, but ... a great ruler. Genghis Khan adopted many of the technological and cultural advances of the people he conquered, such as military equipment and written language. Although, he died in 1227, expansion of the empire continued under the leadership of his family, who pushed the empire deeper into Russia, China, and the Middle East.
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The Mongols had an extensive but brief rule. They were essentially nomadic warriors, who could terrorize, but not govern, from horseback. Soon they were culturally absorbed into the peoples they conquered. They intermarried freely with the Turks who had joined them as allies, and in Russia, they mixed with Slavs and Finns to make a new Turkish-speaking ethnicity, the Tartars. In Persia and China, they assimilated into the local culture, and tended to convert to the dominant religion. After such transformations, the four sections of the Mongol Empire went their separate ways.
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As nomadic peoples the Mongols did not originally have a capital that other civilizations would recognize. Ghenghis Khan ruled officially from Karakorum south of Lake Baikal, although he was usually on the march. The Mongol rulers of China built there capital at Beijing. Samarkand was the capital of the later Mongol Empire of Tamerlane.
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About 1162, there was born to a noble clan of the Mongols a child named Temuchin. He grew in prestige and power the way any charismatic individual did in that society, by success in raiding and clan warfare. It was common for charismatic leaders among Asiatic nomads to assemble short-lived confederations as large in area as the United States, only to have them disintegrate when the ruler died or lost his power. By 1206 Temuchin had done what no other tribal leader had ever done before: assemble all the Mongol tribes under a single ruler. At a ceremony in that year he was given the title Khan of Khans and the honorific name by which he is better known to history - Genghis Khan. What separates Genghis Khan (1162-1227) from all his predecessors is that Genghis extended his authority over a vast region and created institutions to perpetuate Mongol power.
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The so-called "Mongols" are actually a heterogenous group of different nomad peoples of Turk and "Tartar" origin. The word "Mongol" is derived from the name of a tribe called Manghol. Although the cultural stage of these ethnical groups was quite different, they had a common language that allowed a unification under the hand of the strongest clan. The strongest ethnics were the Naiman, Kereyid, Kirghiz, Oirat, Buryat, Merkid and Tatar, socially divided into aristocracy, common people, slaves and prisoners of war. Except animism, the higher religions of Nestorian Christianity, Manicheism and Buddhism had won followers among the "Mongols". The economical base of these nomad people was cattle-breeding, hunting and the trade with different Inner Asian kingdoms and China.
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Mongols