Möngke Khan

Möngke, a grandson of Genghis Khan, ruled the Mongol Empire as its fourth great khan from 1251 to 1259, the last to hold the whole of it together in practice. A careful administrator as well as a soldier, he launched the campaigns that destroyed the Abbasid caliphate and drove deep into southern China. His sudden death in Sichuan set off a war between his brothers that split the empire for good.

Möngke was born on 11 January 1209, the eldest son of Tolui, Genghis Khan's youngest son, and his capable wife Sorghaghtani Beki. His name means "eternal". He went to war for the first time in 1230 against the Jurchen Jin in northern China. In 1235 his uncle, the great khan Ögedei, sent him west with a generation of princes under his cousin Batu. He captured the Kipchak leader Bachman in the Volga delta, campaigned in the Caucasus, and took part in the siege of Kiev in 1240 before being recalled to Mongolia.

After the great khan Güyük died in 1248, Sorghaghtani worked to bring her son to power. Batu, who might have claimed the throne himself, backed him at an assembly held in his own territory, but because it was poorly attended a second kurultai was held in Mongolia, which proclaimed Möngke on 1 July 1251. Soon afterwards princes of the rival lines of Ögedei and Chagatai arrived with armed followers, apparently intending a coup. Möngke had the plotters tried across the empire. Güyük's widow, the former regent Oghul Qaimish, was drowned, and estimates of the nobles and commanders executed range from 77 to 300; many other princes were exiled and their lands redistributed.

Möngke drafted his own decrees and tried to curb the abuses of the Mongol elite. He turned princes' gifts into fixed salaries, made merchants pay tax and barred them from using the imperial post stations, and honoured debts that Güyük had run up with merchants. In 1253 he set up an office to control the issue of paper money. Between 1252 and 1259 his officials carried out a census from China to Russia, counting households, men of fighting age, fields and herds as the basis for a regular poll tax; it provoked resistance in several places, including a rising in Novgorod in 1257. His officials came from many peoples, among them northern Chinese, Muslims and Uyghurs. Religious leaders of the main faiths were exempt from taxation, and in 1254 he received the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who described Christians, Muslims and Buddhists at his capital, Karakorum.

Möngke gave his brothers wide commands. Kublai conquered the Dali kingdom in Yunnan in 1253 and 1254, outflanking the Song dynasty from the south-west, and Mongol forces later raided Vietnam. Hülegü led a great army into Iran, crushed the Nizari Ismailis in their mountain castles by the end of 1256 and in 1258 sacked Baghdad and put an end to the Abbasid caliphate, before advancing into Syria. Armies also ravaged Korea, which made peace in 1258, and the Mongols tightened their hold over Tibet.

In 1257 Möngke left his youngest brother, Ariq Böke, in charge at Karakorum and took personal command of the war against the Song. He fought through Sichuan, but in 1259, during the siege of the fortress of Diaoyucheng near modern Chongqing, he died on 11 August. Accounts differ: Persian historians say he died of dysentery or cholera, while Chinese sources say he was struck by an arrow or a projectile from the walls. His body was taken back to Mongolia for burial near Genghis Khan.

Möngke had not named a successor. Kublai and Ariq Böke each claimed the throne, and their four-year civil war, followed by further conflicts, left the empire divided into separate khanates. When Kublai founded the Yuan dynasty, Möngke was given the temple name Xianzong.

Our 1279 map shows the empire twenty years after Möngke's death, already broken into rival khanates.