Mary Ann Eastman, age 10, of Santa Fe, N.M., for her question:
WHAT WAS THE MONGOL EMPIRE?
Biggest land empire in the history of the world was the Mongol empire. It reached its greatest extent in A.D. 1294 when it included China, Korea, Mongolia, Persia (which is now Iran), Turkestan and Armenia. It also included parts of Burma, Vietnam, Thailand and Russia.
Originally the Mongols were loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia, Manchuria and Siberia. But then they organized to become the most savage conquerors of history.
In the 1100s, a Mongol chieftain named Temujin rose to power and became known as Genghis Khan. He unified and organized scattered Mongol tribes into a superior fighting force.
Genghis Khan set out on a spectacular career of conquest. He was shrewd, ruthless, ambitious and a strict disciplinarian.
The Mongol fighters specialized in the art of siege. They learned to use storming ladders and sandbags to fill in moats. Besiegers approached fortress walls under the protection of gigantic shields.
Genghis Khan and his troops ruthlessly eliminated any resistance. They spread terror and destruction everywhere. When conquered territories resisted, the Mongols systematically slaughtered the population of entire cities. They laid North China completely to waste.
Genghis Khan died in 1227 but his son Ogotai continued the Mongol push into Europe. Later the empire was taken over by Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis. He extended the empire to its ultimate.
The Mongols under Kublai Khan had a reputation for some tolerance. Rublai permitted the existence of various religions, something that had not been permitted earlier.
The Mongol empire did not last long because it was too big and had no unity of culture. It actually began to disintegrate shortly after it reached its peak in the late 1200s.
The Mongols were dauntless fighters but they had little experience in administration. Corrupt government and incompetent administration resulted in revolts in different parts of the empire.
When Kublai Khan died, his empire broke up into several parts. These smaller empires were the Golden Horde on the steppes of southern Russia and the Balkans, the Mongolian Chinese Chin Empire and the realm of the Ilkhans in western Asia.
A revolution in China in the 1300s resulted in the fall of the Uyan dynasty and restored Chinese rule in the form of the Ming dynasty.
The great Timur, or Tamerlane, a descendant of Genghis Khan, joined some of the Mongol empires together again and extended his rule over much of Asia in the late 1300s. And one of his descendants, a leader named Babar, established a powerful Mongol state in India in 1526.
The term Mogul, as Babar's realm was called, comes from the Persian word mughul, meaning Mongol. A Mogul emperor, Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal in the early 1600s.
The British destroyed the Mogul kingdom after it had begun to break up in the 1700s.