While films and video games like Ghost of  Tsushima often show the Mongol conquests  

undertaken by forces entirely consisting of  the Mongols, this is a gross simplification.  

The majority of the army serving the Great Khans  was multi-ethnic and not made up only of nomads.  

Today we will detail the importance of  these non-Mongolian troops in aiding the  

Mongol conquests, generally taking the roles  the Mongols could not fulfill themselves.

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Even during his war for the unification of  Mongolia, the warlord Temujin was relying on  

troops of different backgrounds. While all were  nomads practicing the same horseback archery,  

not all were speakers of Mongolian languages.  Many were Turkic peoples, some of whom were  

even Eastern Christians, popularly called  Nestorians. For horsemen of the steppe,  

these sorts of ‘ethnic’ distinctions were fluid;  tribal names generally served to mark lineages  

both real and imagined, and political loyalties  which could shift as necessary. So once these  

Turkic groups submitted to Temujin, and especially  once he took the title of Chinggis Khan, these  

tribes would signify their loyalty by deeming  themselves Mongols as well, usually involving  

the adoption of Mongolian hairstyles and clothing.  For any nomadic steppe confederation, this is not  

a unique process: from the Huns to the Gokturks,  such an approach can be seen again and again.

Following the declaration of the empire in  1206, Chinggis Khan rapidly began to expand  

the Mongol ulus, incorporating neighboring  peoples into his army, many of whom were  

speakers of Turkic languages, who were nomadic,  semi-nomadic, and even agriculturists; the forest  

peoples around lake Baikal, the Kirghiz of the  Yenisei River Valley, the Uighurs of Xinjiang,  

the Qarluqs of Almaliq and the Onggut in what  is now Inner Mongolia. Some, like the Uighurs,  

had a great role in the emerging administrative  system. It was from the Uighurs that Chinggis  

Khan adopted a script for the Mongolian  language, still in use today in Inner Mongolia.

While Chinggis was incorporating  these peoples into his army,  

it was fundamentally not changing the army itself,  for it was their cavalrymen he incorporated.  

For his early campaigns in the steppe,  infantry was too great a liability.  

However, once Chinggis Khan began to take his  war to the more powerful sedentary kingdoms  

in what is now China, he required a shift in  his operational thinking. Fighting against the  

Tangut Kingdom, his horsemen had little  offensive capability against city walls.  

Dominating in the field battle, they lacked  the knowledge to besiege cities effectively.  

For this, he would need to incorporate  sedentary peoples into his forces.

While Chinggis Khan won his first significant  field battles against the Jurchen Jin Dynasty  

through the might of his horsemen and  their arrows, he understood that to make  

any lasting gains, he would need to  utilize the very inhabitants of the Jin  

Empire against their Jurchen masters. Within  the Jin Dynasty were three primary groups:  

the Jurchen, a Tungusic people hailing from  Manchuria and ancestors of the Manchu, who made  

up the ruling elite of the dynasty; the Khitans, a  people related to the Mongols who a century prior  

had ruled north China and Mongolia during the Liao  Dynasty, until being conquered by the Jurchen;  

and the Northern Chinese, who made up  the vast majority of the population.

Even before the invasion began, the Khitans,  who made up much of the Jin Dynasty’s military,  

were defecting to Chinggis Khan, providing  intelligence and horsemen. Having been treated  

as second-class since the Jurchen conquest  and denied advancement in the military,  

there was long-simmering antagonism  between the Khitan leaders and the Jin.  

The Jin rulers, fearful of a Khitan revolt  in the face of the Mongol attacks in 1211,  

had sent Jurchen colonists among  them in an attempt to subdue them;  

the effort backfired monstrously, creating the  revolt they so feared and resulting in a restored  

‘Liao Dynasty,’ which immediately submitted to  Chinggis Khan and provided more Khitan forces  

to aid in his conquest. Not only were they  men and horses for the Great Khan, but they  

also took the same resources away from the Jin  Emperor and stretched their forces even thinner.

While they were undoubtedly important for the  fighting in China, we know Khitan horsemen  

would accompany the Mongols in the west. In late  1218 or early 1219, when Jochi and Sübe’etei were  

returning through Kazakhstan from hunting down  Merkit refugees near the Caspian Sea, they were  

attacked by the Khwarezm-Shah Muhammad II. In the  fighting Jochi was injured and nearly overtaken  

by Khwarezmian troops, until he was rescued by a  timely charge of a Khitan Prince in his keshig.

Perhaps the most significant addition  to the Mongol war effort in China  

was the mass incorporation of Northern Chinese  into the Khan’s army. It was the adoption of  

Chinese infantry and siege engineers which allowed  the Mongols to learn the ways of siege warfare,  

and have the manpower to experiment with it. The  Mongol leadership always wanted to avoid expending  

the valuable lives of their nomadic horsearchers.  Each one was a lifetime’s investment and hugely  

effective in the open field; to use them to  push siege equipment was simply to waste them.  

The Mongols recognized this early on,  and it was for these tasks they employed  

their ever-growing new Chinese army. From  pushing siege equipment to filling in moats,  

to manning catapults and scaling ladders, tens  of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,  

of Chinese were brought into the Mongol army  within years of the start of the conquest.  

Many were undoubtably forced, driven before  the Mongols as a veritable human wave to absorb  

the arrows of the defenders. But it cannot be  dismissed that many willingly joined the Mongols,  

particularly once it seemed the Jin  Dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven,  

the right to rule China, when they  abandoned their capital of Zhongdu in 1215.

By the time Chinggis Khan took his forces  west in 1219 against the Khwarezmian Empire,  

there were more Chinese fighting on behalf of the  Mongols in China, than there were Mongols fighting  

in China. While some of these Chinese forces were  under the command of Mongol, Turkic, Khitan or  

Uighur officers, many were led by Chinese warlords  and militia leaders who sided with the Khans,  

like Shih Tienzi or Cheng Jou. These were men  who not only willingly served the Khan of Khans,  

but did so with extraordinary  loyalty; Shih Tienzi and his family  

would remain prominent military leaders under  the Mongols until the reign of Khubilai Khan,  

and Cheng Jou was the most trusted lieutenant  of the brilliant Mongol commander Mukhali.  

With Chinggis Khan absent fighting the Khwarezmian  Empire, Mukhali was left as a viceroy to keep the  

Jin Dynasty occupied until the Khan should  return. From 1217 until his death in 1223,  

Mukhali led a stunning, highly mobile campaign  throughout the reduced Jin Empire. Cities after  

cities were taken and retaken, while Mukhali drove  his armies to within striking distance of the  

new Jin capital at Kaifeng. While Mukhali’s main  force was Turkic and Mongolian horsemen augmented  

by Tangut cavalry, in other provinces in China  Mukhali left command to officers like Cheng Jou,  

who fiercely fought against the Jin to expand  the Mongol Empire. Neither the Jurchen nor  

the Mongols were Chinese; yet in much of the  increasingly ruined Jin Empire, the fighting  

was being undertaken almost exclusively  between the Chinese subjects of both states.

In the area around the Shandong peninusla  this became particularly confusing.  

Here, an uprising against Jin rule broke out,  known as the Red Coats. Here, loosely aligned  

warlords -some independent, some aligned with  the Mongols, some aligned with the Song Dynasty,  

and all hating the Jin- fought themselves,  the Mongols, the Song and the Jin. Some,  

like Li Quan, joined the Mongols and on their  behalf, fought the Jin and the Song for decades,  

earning high status and rewards from the  Mongol government. Li Quan’s son, Li Tan,  

lasted as a prominent regional warlord until  he revolted against Khubilai Khan in 1262,  

likely on account of Song bribes and their  empty promises. Only in reaction to this,  

did the Mongols crack down on the power  of the Chinese warlords in their service.

Despite the restriction of their independence,  the Chinese in Mongol service only increased in  

importance as their war into the more humid,  less horse friendly climate of southern  

China advanced. Against the Song Dynasty, a vast  army and riverine navy of Chinese was assembled,  

serving alongside a core of Mongol horsemen and  often under the command of Mongols and Central  

Asian Persians and Turks. By the end of the war  against the Song Dynasty, during the pursuit  

of the fleeing boy emperors to the island of  Yaishan, the combined Mongol-Chinese army was  

under the supreme command of a northern Chinese,  Zhang Hongfan, assisted by a Uighur, Ariq Khaya,  

and a Central Asian Muslim, Omar. The Mongol  conquest of China could not have been completed  

without the manpower of the Chinese, or  their military skill for taking cities.

The Mongols made heavy use of Chinese manpower;  cities in Mongolia like Karakorum and Chinqai  

Balasaghun were built using labourers  from China. Chinqai Balasaghun served  

as an industrial and farming hub, manned by  Chinese, to help supply Mongol armies as they  

passed through western Mongolia on campaign. When  planning the great western invasion in the 1230s,  

the Mongols consdered sending west a vast army  of Chinese infantry with them. This was dismissed  

early on in the proceedings, deeming them  unsuitable to such a journey. However, Chinese  

siege engineers were brought with the Mongol  armies on Chinggis Khan’s invasion of Khwarezm,  

almost certainly with Batu and Sübe’etei’s 1230s  western campaign, and with Hulegu in the 1250s-  

thousands of them and their families to assist him  in taking the remaining fortresses of the islamic  

world. But the Chinese were not the only ones  brought into use in the Mongol armies in the west.

As the Mongols advanced across the western  steppe, many of the local Turkic tribes  

were absorbed into their forces. During Jebe  Noyan’s swift conquest of the Qara-Khitai,  

the local garrisons largely submitted to their  new Mongol masters without issue, but there is not  

substantial evidence to suggest they accompanied  Chinggis Khan against Khwarezm. In the Khwarezmian  

Empire, much of the military were Turkic Qipchaq  tribes, a great number of whom freely abandoned  

their posts to join the Mongols upon invitation  and fight against their former employers.

As discussed in previous videos, we have already  noted Chinggis Khan’s mass employment of forced  

levies, driving the local population before his  armies much as he had done in China. With his  

forces now experienced in siege warfare from the  fighting in China, there was less of a need for  

defections, as long as the Mongols could use  the locals in the most vulnerable positions.  

After Chinggis’ bloody campaign ended however,  the Mongols were more amenable to utilizing the  

locals militarily, generally for garrrisoning  cities. Regional commanders appointed by the  

Mongols would not have had access to  substantial numbers of nomadic troops.  

Therefore when rebellions did  rise up after the conquest,  

the initial responding force would not be Mongols  from the steppe, but locally raised militia.

The western invasion of Batu and Sübe’etei  provides a few notable mentions of foreign troops  

in Mongol employ; the heavy usage of catapults  against the Rus’ cities suggests the presence of  

Chinese siege engineers; we have Tanguts taking  part in the siege of the Alan capital of Magas,  

alongside many Alans newly conscripted  to the Mongol army; when a Mongol raiding  

party was captured in Austria, the Austrians were  surprised to find an Englishman in their employ,  

a man who had apparently served as interpreter  and envoy on behalf of the Mongols.  

Men were also taken in the opposite direction as  well; Rus’, Qipchaq, and Alan men were carried  

east to serve in the Mongol military, often  filling the role of bodyguards. The general  

assumption seems to have been that transplacing  these men like this ensured their loyalty. A  

young Qipchaq warrior would be unlikely to  learn Chinese well enough to start taking  

bribes or escape on his own, and therefore be  forced to remain utterly loyal to the Khan.

After the end of Mongol imperial unity,  the reliance on non-Mongols became even  

greater. In the Ilkhanate made heavy usage of  Georgians and Armenians from Cilicia and beyond,  

largely as heavy cavalry, who often took a primary  role in their many battles against the Mamluk  

Sultanate. While some have suggested this was due  to the superiority of the Caucasian heavy horse,  

it may just be again the Mongol  inclination to place their foreign,  

expendable troops into the most vulnerable  positions, and thus save their own men.

Khubilai Khan’s foreign ventures towards the  end of his life demonstrate the reliance on  

non-Mongols for roles his horsemen could not fill.  Leaving many of the Mongols to guard major sites,  

particularly on his border with the Central  Asian Khanates, Khubilai’s famous and often  

disastrous overseas attacks were usually made  up of Chinese troops, augmented by the people  

inhabiting the part of his empire in the closest  direction to that which he wanted to strike.  

For the invasion of Japan, Koreans built and  manned much of the ships that made up the navy,  

especially in the first invasion, while northern  Chinese, Jurchens and Khitans, as well as Mongols,  

made up the varied assaulting forces. For  the invasions of Dai Viet, Champa and Pagan,  

Mongols fought alongside former  Song troops, as well as men raised  

from Yunnan and the small kingdoms on the  late-Song Dynasty’s southwestern border.  

The navies supporting the Vietnamese invasions  and attacks on Java were ships raised from  

southern Chinese manned by Chinese crews; for the  attack on Java, the command was just as varied.  

The army was led by a former Song commander, Gao  Xing, the navy commanded by a Uighur, Yiqmis,  

and the total force was under the  overall command of a Mongol named Shi Bi.

The Mongol army was never a homogenous body. Aside  from these most obvious mentions we have made,  

there were thousands upon thousands of men  from across Eurasia who served the Mongols in  

less exciting roles. Local scouts to show them  routes; smiths and artisans from Central Asia  

carried with the force to help produce and  maintain weapons and supplies needed for the  

daily function of the army; physicians from China  who must have set broken bones and mended wounds  

from Korea to Afghanistan. While the Mongols  themselves provided the necessary edge in  

direct warfare, it was the vast support system and  ability to draw on the knowledge and traditions  

of peoples across Eurasia which allowed the  Mongols to expand beyond the Eurasian steppe.

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