This is a situation map of the thirteenth-century world — the century in which one family of steppe herders built the largest contiguous land empire there has ever been. It opens in 1206, when a hunted orphan named Temüjin has just united Mongolia’s warring tribes; it closes in 1294 with his grandson ruling China and cousins ruling everything from Kiev to Baghdad to Korea. Watch the red tide run from the Pacific to the gates of Vienna in a single working lifetime — and watch where, and why, it stops.
Twelve chapters follow the arc: the steppe world that made the army, the fall of China’s north, the annihilation of Khwarazm, the winter conquest of the Rus, Baghdad and the Mamluk check at Ain Jalut, the family war that split the empire into four, and the strange peace — silk, ideas and plague on the same roads — that it left behind. Every battle, arrow and boundary is drawn where it happened. Take the guided tour — or scrub the timeline and interrogate the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · 0 reset.