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The Decline and Fall of the Mongol Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2009

DAVID MORGAN
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Abstract

When historians explain the end of empires, they often follow a ‘decline and fall’ paradigm which owes its fame to Edward Gibbon's great book on the Roman Empire. Recent historians of Late Antiquity, however, have tended to doubt its validity. This article considers the reasons for the end of the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It examines the division of the empire into four khanates, the eventual collapse of each of which is then studied. It suggests that the khanates which retained more of their original nomadic ethos – the Golden Horde in the Pontic steppes and the Chaghatai Khanate in Central Asia – were able to survive longer than those – in the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Great Khanate in China and Mongolia – which had their centres in sedentary lands. It concludes that in all cases, ‘fall’ was the result of internal factors, about which there was nothing that was inevitable, and that there is little evidence of a long ‘decline’. Hence the ‘decline and fall’ paradigm does not seem to provide an adequate explanatory framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 427 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2009

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References

1 Recently cited, most appositely, by Merrills, A.H., History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005), p. 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar and n. 214, p. 306, n. 312.

2 A version of this was subsequently published as “Edward Gibbon and the East”, Iran, XXXIII (1995), pp. 85–92.

3 It is possible that this has changed since the appearance of a readily available, and superb, Penguin paperback edition of The Decline and Fall (ed. D. Womersley, 3 vols, Harmondsworth, 1994/5).

4 It is perhaps reflected, for example, in the title of an important recent book on the history of Iran: Pourshariati, Parvaneh, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire. The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (London, 2008)Google Scholar.

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18 Here I recycle and expand on some remarks in my “The Mongols in Iran: a reappraisal”, Iran, XLII (2004), pp. 134–135.

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32 I am grateful to Peter Jackson and Morris Rossabi, who read and commented on a draft of this paper.