Nobody defeated the Mongols. Their own funerals did | WHAT STOPPED THE MONGOLS? Part 5 (Finale)

History Onion · Part 5 · 2:58

In 1251 Möngke, Genghis Khan's grandson, became great khan and gave his brothers the two halves of the world: Kublai to finish China, Hulagu to take everything west. Hulagu took Alamut, then Baghdad — the caliph rolled in a carpet — then Syria. Then Möngke died on campaign in Sichuan, and Hulagu took most of the army home to Azerbaijan for the two reasons the chronicles give: the succession, and grass. The ten thousand he left lost Ain Jalut in 1260 to two Mamluks the Mongols themselves had made — Qutuz, who claimed the blood of the Khwarezm shahs, and Baibars, a Kipchak boy sold into slavery after the Mongols broke his people. By then Kublai and his brother Ariq Böke were at war for the throne, and in the west Berke, Jochi's son and a Muslim, allied with Cairo against his cousin Hulagu and caught his army on the frozen Terek in 1262. Four rulers, never one again. The finale then follows each piece to its end — Persia 1335, China 1368, the Horde broken in 1395 and swallowed by Russia down to Crimea in 1783 — and lands in Mongolia today, where a forty-metre steel Genghis faces the country that outlived the empire. Numbers & sources: Möngke's death at Diaoyu (11 Aug 1259) and the withdrawal per Atwood and Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World; Hulagu's two reasons per Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks. The caliph's death by carpet is the majority account (Rashid al-Din and others); a starved-in-the-treasury version also exists. Kitbuqa's force "about ten thousand" is the scholarly range (one tumen or less). Qutuz's Khwarezmian royal descent is Mamluk tradition, given as his claim. Baibars's enslavement after the Mongol conquest of the Kipchaks c.1242 per the Mamluk biographers. The Terek battle (winter 1262–63) per Rashid al-Din via Favereau, The Horde. Ilkhanate dissolution after Abu Sa'id (1335), Yuan expulsion (1368), Timur's sack of Sarai (1395), the Crimean khanate's annexation (1783) are standard. The plague travelled the Mongol roads west; the Kaffa corpse-catapult story rests on a single distant source and is not used. Names use familiar English spellings (Genghis Khan = Chinggis Khaan; Hulagu = Hülegü; Möngke = Möngke). Some scenes are cinematic reconstructions of documented events. All quotes, dates, and sources are historically verified. #history #mongols #genghiskhan #historyshorts #documentary #iran #persia #baghdad