Mongols Case

The Mongol Empire was the largest empire in world history, and it connected the western fringes of Eastern Europe all the way to China in the east. The Mongols demanded respect and submission from all their subjects. One recent scholar stated, "In a flash, the Mongol warriors would destroy every army, capture every fort, and bring down the walls of every city they encountered. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus would soon kneel before the dusty boots of illiterate, young Mongol horsemen." Even the most prestigious agrarian civilizations, such as China and Persia bowed down to the Mongols' power. The Mongols accommodated and even improved Persian and Chinese administrative structures such as roads, canals, and irrigation systems, but in the end, while China was able to drive out their Mongolian rulers after years of unrest from peasants and plague, the Persians simply assimilated their "barbaric" rulers.

Many of the events that led to the weakening of the Mongols in both of the civilizations were largely similar. For example, while China was divided because of the presence of nomadic Jurchen rulers in the north and the Song Dynasty in the south in 1209, the decline of the Abbasid Empire in Baghdad was also creating an Islam-wide stagnation at the same time. Due to the divisions and lack of centralization in China and Persia respectively, the Mongols' entrance into both of these civilizations, even with inferior technology and population was facilitated. Once the Mongols settled in both of these areas, they allowed the religious practices in China and Persia to continue and in some cases, even participated in some of the religious rituals. China's Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan practiced ancestral rituals, a normally Mongolian practice, with the usage of Chinese style ancestral tablets and not the traditional shamans. He also supported the construction of Daoist temples, and the Chinese khans even favored Tibetan Buddhism, leading to their support from that region. Similarly in Persia, Mongols began to convert to Islam through their leader Ghazan, which showed signs of the future assimilation of them into that agrarian civilization. Lastly, the Mongols improved the administrative structures and techniques in both China and Persia. The Khan of China, Khubilai, improved roads and canals, limited death penalties, and lowered taxes. Ghazan of Persia reconstructed some of the structures the Mongols had destroyed in 1219, such as the irrigation system, and also kept in use the complex bureaucratic system of Persia. China and Persia saw that their political structures and religions themselves were kept intact, which was because of the Mongols' general disinterest in creating societies from scratch and religious imperialism as well as their parasitic nature of leeching off the wealth of well-formed societies such as themselves.

Even though there were many similarities, the main difference between the Mongol rule of China and Persia was that China succeeded in making the Mongols evacuate their nation, while Persia allowed the permanent settlement of their invaders in their land. This one main difference was an effect of the many smaller discrepancies between China and Persia and their Mongol rulers. One of these differences was the way Mongol settlers retained their past lives in the steppes