The Decline and Fall of the Mongol Empire

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.