This is a really profound statement, I know, but I’m gonna throw it out anyway: The Mongols did some serious killing and pillaging. They just killed and killed. They killed all the way through eastern Europe before the death of Genghis Khan’s son caused the horde to pull back to the steppes to appoint a new leader.

On a related topic:
I always thought that koans were kind of pointless. It wasn’t until I read Ancient China: The Mongolian Empire: The Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368 that I came to the conclusion that they were designed to be pointless. They were invented to give some kind of written form to the meditative school of Buddhism and as a result there was really no point to them, I decided. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know if this is true but it’s an interesting point.

Curiously, the Mongols, though Buddhist, did not really support or patronize Buddhism, which was largely left to its own devices. They favored Tibetan Buddhism but really did not financially support the monasteries. When the Mongol rulers decided that too many Buddhists were escaping military service, they instituted a literacy test on Buddhist scriptures. Anyone who couldn’t demonstrate literacy in the scriptures lost their military exemption. This put the Mongol rulers in direct conflict with the major Buddhist masters; the central school of Buddhism was Ch’an, or “Meditation” Buddhism. It stressed the primacy of the master over scripture and the silent transmission of religious truth. For that reason, Ch’an Buddhism had no written doctrine. Under pressure from the Mongols, the Ch’an Buddhists began to record their doctrine in a series formulations called kung-an or, in Japanese, the koan.