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

Khalid Elhassan February 3, 2019 24 min

Tamerlane liked building towers with the skulls of his victims. Pintrest

1. Tamerlane’s Body Count

Tamerlane is estimated to have killed about 17 million people, amounting to 5 percent of the world’s population at the time. Extrapolated to current global population of 7.7 billion, Tamerlane’s rampage would be the equivalent of killing 385 million people today. His decades-long warpath finally came to an end in 1405 as he was preparing to invade China, but he took ill while encamped, and died before launching the campaign. He would prove to be history’s last major Steppe conqueror.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Burgan, Michael – Empire of the Mongols (2005)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Genghis Khan

Hildinger, Erik – Warriors of the Steppe: Military History of Central Asia, 500 BC to 1700 AD (1997)

Morgan, David – The Mongols (2007)

Saunders, John Joseph – The History of the Mongol Conquests (2001)

Weatherford, Jack – Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004)

Wikipedia – Mongol Military Tactics and Organization

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.