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40 Awe-Inspiring Facts About Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire

Khalid Elhassan February 3, 2019 24 min

39. The Mongols Were the Most Significant in a Long Line of Terrifying Steppe Nomads

The violence and fury of Genghis Khan’s Mongols was not the first nomadic eruption from the Steppe. For millennia, the region’s nomads had frequently ridden out of the vastness of their homelands, to raid, plunder, pillage, and otherwise terrorize the more civilized and prosperous lands on their periphery. If the nomads were unified under powerful warlords, there was always a potential for things to escalate from mere raids – bad enough as those were – and into devastating invasions that could extinguish empires.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.