The World of the Steppe

CHAPTER 1 · THE STEPPE BEFORE 1206 · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

Before the empire, look at the geography that made it possible. The map’s center is a sea of grass — from Hungary’s plain to Manchuria, the longest corridor on earth — and on it lives a society with no farms, no cities, and no non-combatants over the age of ten. A herding family moves with the seasons, and moving is military skill: every man rides from childhood, hunts with the double-curved composite bow (laminated horn and sinew, deadly past 150 meters from horseback), and travels with four or five remounts, so a rider covers in a day what an army of walkers covers in a week. Steppe life doe

The turn: A khan nailed to a wooden mule, c. 1156.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.