The largest contiguous land empire in history — a Eurasian empire founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 that within seventy years stretched from the Pacific to the Danube, destroyed some of the most sophisticated cities in the world, enabled unprecedented trade and exchange across the continent, and carried the plague that became the Black Death.
The Mongol Empire killed more people and moved more goods across greater distances than any political entity before the modern age. In the span of a single lifetime, Genghis Khan's horsemen destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, devastated the cities of Central Asia, invaded Europe, and reached the coasts of Japan and Vietnam — while simultaneously creating the most open trade corridor in Eurasian history. Understanding the Mongols means holding both facts simultaneously: the empire of the greatest violence and the empire of the greatest connectivity were the same empire.