Given that each Mongol warrior had five or more horses, the energy represented by that additional grass would have helped fuel their astounding rate of expansion. It didn’t turn Mongolia’s harsh steppes into Maui, but the warmer climate would have stimulated the growth of the grasslands that fed the Mongols’ vital herds of horses and livestock. But the tree-rings showed that the years between 12-a period of time that coincided with the meteoric rise of Genghis Khan, who died in 1227-were marked by unusually heavy rainfall and mild temperatures. The opposite happens during dry years, when the rings would be narrow.Ĭounting back to the late 1100s, just before the rise of Genghis Khan, the tree-ring data indicated that the Mongol steppes had been in the grip of an intense drought, one that could have helped drive the years of division among the Mongol tribes as they competed for scarce resources. Gradually, the Mongol empire broke up into four remaining empires: the Yuan of China, established by Kublai Khan, the Chaganate of Central Asia, the Ilkhanate of the Middle East and the Golden Horde of Russia. By this time, the great Mongol Empire was weakening. During warm, wet years, the trees grow more, and the rings inside the trunk that mark those years are wider. A war for succession ensued, which Kublai eventually won in 1264. of monetary affairs that issued paper money of fixed denominations. Old trees provide a living history book of the climate. One important reason for the decline and fall of the Mongol empire was the perpetual. The trees-some of which were still alive-were ancient, some more than 1,100 years old. On a research trip to Mongolia in 2010, Pederson, Hessl and their colleagues discovered a stand of stunted Siberian pine trees in the Khangai Mountains. The Sung and Chin had issued paper money but only in addition to bronze. The PNAS study came from research done by the tree-ring scientists Neil Pederson at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Amy Hessl at West Virginia University. The Mongol conquest of the Sung Empire had for the first time since the end of. Climate change helped make the Mongol Empire possible. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were the backbone of the empire’s military. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. To this day the DNA of the Mongols can be found throughout the territories that once made up their empire. Eventually the Mongols would establish the largest land empire in history, ruling over modern Korea, China, Russia, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, Persia, India and parts of the Middle East. By the early decades of the 1200s, the tribes had become a united force that rained havoc on its neighbors, expanding in every direction on a wave of horses. In the late 1100s, the Mongol tribes were split by dissension, a threat to no one but themselves.
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