- Mongol invasions progressed throughout the 13th century, resulting in the vast Mongol Empire which covered much of Asia and Eastern Europe by 1300.
- Historians regard theMongol raids and invasions as some of the deadliest conflicts in human history up through that period.
- One empire in particular exceeded any that had gone before, and crossed from Asia into Europe in an orgy of violence and destruction.
- The Mongols brought terror to Europe on a scale not seen again until the twentieth century.
- Mongol Empire emerged in the course of the 13th century by a series of conquests and invasions throughout Central and Western Asia, reaching Eastern Europe by the 1240s.
- The speed and extent of territorial expansion parallels the Hunnic/Turkic conquests of theMigration period (the 6th century Turkic Khaganate).
- The territorial gains of the Mongols persisted into the 14th century in China (Yuan Dynasty), into the 15th century in Persia (Timurid dynasty) and in Russia (Tatar and Mongol raids against Russian states), and into the 19th century in India (the Mughal Empire)
- Genghis Khan forged the initial Mongol Empire in Central Asia, starting with the unification of the Mongol and Turkic central Asian confederations such as Merkits, Tartars, Mongols, and Uighurs. He then continued expansion of the Empire via invasion of the Khwarezmid Empire in what is modern-day Khorazm, Uzbekistan.
- The Mongols conquered, either by force or voluntary submission, the areas today known as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and parts of Turkey, with further Mongol raids reaching southwards as far as Gaza into the Palestine region in 1260 and 1300.
- The major battles were the Siege of Baghdad (1258), when the Mongols sacked the city which for 500 years had been the center of Islamic power; and the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, when the Muslim Egyptian Mamluks, were for the first time able to stop the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut, in the southern part of the Galilee.
- Mongol conquest of much of Asia and Eastern Europe