20 Most Horrific Torture Methods Used by Mongol Armies (Unbelievable but Real)

20 Most Horrific Torture Methods Used by Mongol Armies (Unbelievable but Real)

Between 1206 and 1368, the Mongol Empire exterminated roughly 40 million people. That was about 10% of all living humans on Earth at that time, and the way they killed was neither fast nor clean nor anything close to merciful. These are the 20 most brutal torture methods used by Mongol armies, counted down from 20 to 1.

 And number one is the reason entire civilizations vanished overnight. Let’s begin with number 20, collecting ears from the dead. After the Battle of Legnica in Poland in April of 1241, the Mongol army faced a problem. They had just crushed a European alliance of Polish soldiers, Moravian troops, and elite knights, including Templars and Teutonic [music] Knights, but they needed to count how many they had killed.

 So, they walked [music] the battlefield body by body and cut the right ear from every dead soldier. When they were done, those ears filled nine large sacks. Nine full bags of human ears from one single battle. Reports from Bulgaria and Russia described the same thing happening around the same time. The Mongols treated body counts like office work.

Collect, count, report, move on. But that ear collecting, that was considered one of the mild ones. What they did to entire cities was on a completely different level. Here comes number 19. Killing the land itself. When the Mongols took control of parts of Central Asia and Persia, they did something no blade could do.

 They destroyed the irrigation systems. These canals had taken generations to build, and they were the only thing keeping farmland alive in dry regions like Khwarazm. The Mongols tore them apart on purpose. Without water, crops died. Without crops, people starved. Entire areas that had been green and full of life turned into dust.

 [music] Some of those regions never recovered. Not in decades, not in centuries. The Mongols realized you do not need to strike every person when you can take away their water and let time do the killing. And if starving people slowly sounds bad, wait until you hear what they did when they actually arrived at your front door.

 Let’s move to number 18. Waiting until you eat your own shoes. If a city had thick walls and strong defenders, the Mongols did not always attack directly. Sometimes they just sat outside and waited. They blocked every [music] road, every river, every path in and out. Nothing moved. Weeks turned into months. Food ran out first, then clean [music] water.

 People ate leather belts, rats, and things nobody wants to talk about. Disease spread through the packed, starving streets like wildfire. By the time the gates opened, the people inside were walking skeletons, and the Mongols still killed most of them. Anyway, the siege was never about saving Mongol soldiers. It was about making sure the next city surrendered the second they saw the Mongol flag on the horizon.

Next one is number 17. Baking a man alive in the sun. A Persian nobleman discovered this one firsthand. After being captured, the Mongols covered his entire body in thick sheep fat, wrapped him tightly in heavy felt, and left him bound under the open desert sun. The fat slowly cooked into his skin.

 The felt trapped every bit of heat. He could not move, could not roll over, could not even scream properly with a felt pressing against his face. He simply baked alive for hours while the Mongols sat nearby and watched. This was not a quick battlefield killing. This was a slow, personal message, and that message was simple.

 Fight us and we have all day to make you wish you had not. But cooking a man in the sun was still not the worst thing they did to a single person. That honor belongs to something far more personal. Let’s move to number 16, nails hammered into the skull. This one actually began from the other side first.

 After Persian forces defeated a Mongol army in battle, the Persian victors took their Mongol prisoners and drove iron nails straight into their heads. In Mongol belief, the head held the soul. So, hammering nails into a Mongol skull was not just killing the body, it was an attack on the soul itself, meant to destroy them in the afterlife, too.

 The Mongols remembered this in every single detail, and when they returned to that region, and they always returned, the punishment they delivered was so extreme that people spoke about it for centuries. Now, those last few were bad, but we have not even reached the methods the Mongols use on a mass scale yet, and those are where things become truly dark.

 Here comes number 15, work to death like a machine. When the Mongols captured a city, they did not just kill everyone on the spot. They sorted people into groups like livestock. Skilled workers like blacksmiths and craftsmen were sent all the way to Mongolia to build things for the empire. Young men of fighting age were forced into the Mongol army and made to fight against their own people in the next battle.

 Everyone else became a slave. These slaves carried supplies, built roads, and worked construction projects across thousands of miles of empire. No breaks, no medical help, no end in sight. When their bodies gave out, they were left where they fell. The Mongols treated human beings like tools, and when a tool breaks, you do not fix it. You just grab another one.

 Let’s move to number 14, raining severed heads from the sky. During a siege, the Mongols would gather up the heads of soldiers they had already killed, stack them into their giant catapults, and launch them right over the city walls. Now, imagine you were standing on the wall of your city, looking out at the Mongol army, and suddenly dozens of human heads come flying through the air and land at your feet.

 Some of those faces belonged to people you knew, your neighbors, your friends, your family members from the town down the road. The Mongols used this tactic because [music] it broke people faster than any weapon ever could. A lot of cities simply opened their gates and surrendered the moment heads started raining from the sky because fear travels faster than any arrow ever will.

And those catapults, the Mongols loaded them with something even worse than heads. Next one is number 13, launching disease into your city. Sometimes the Mongols would take entire dead bodies, especially those who died from plague or sickness, and catapult them over the walls into a city that was still holding out.

 This was biological warfare hundreds of years before anyone even had a name for it. The rotting flesh spread disease through the water, the food, and the air inside those walls. People who survived the siege itself became sick and died weeks later from infections they could not see or fight. Some historians believe this tactic helped carry the Black Death from Asia into Europe.

 The Mongols turned corpses into weapons, and those weapons kept killing long after the last soldier left the battlefield. Let’s move to number 12, drowning cities with their own rivers. In 1209, Genghis Khan could not break through the walls of the Western Xia capital, Yinchuan. So, he ordered his engineers to redirect the entire river and aim it at the city.

Water crashed through the outer defenses and flooded the streets. People drowned inside their own homes with nowhere to run. Then, in 1221 at the city of Urgench, the Mongols destroyed the dams holding back the Amu Darya river after the city had already surrendered. The water killed thousands of survivors who thought they were safe.

 They had put down their [music] weapons. They had accepted defeat, and the river came for them anyway. The Mongols understood something that every other army missed. Water [music] does not stop for walls. Water does not care how strong your armor is. Water goes everywhere, and it kills everything it touches. Flooding cities was terrifying enough, but the Mongols saved their most creative punishments for people who insulted them personally, and those punishments will keep you up at night.

 Here comes number 11. Dragged through the streets behind horses. In 1228, a Mongol army actually lost a battle near the city of Isfahan. The Persian victors seized the captured Mongol soldiers, tied them to the backs of horses, and dragged them through the city streets while the entire population watched and cheered.

 The cobblestones tore the Mongol bodies apart piece by piece as spectacle. The people of Isfahan laughed and celebrated. The Mongols remembered every face, every cheer, every insult from that day. And when they returned to Isfahan years later with a larger army, the revenge they unleashed was so extreme that the whole region fell silent with fear.

Let’s move to number 10. Using civilians as living shields. The Mongols created a tactic they called karash, and it translates to living boards. Before attacking a walled city, they rounded up civilians from towns they had already captured, women, children, old people. Then they forced these people to walk at the front of the attack, straight into the arrows and boiling oil the defenders were raining down.

 The defenders had to kill their own neighbors just to take a shot at the Mongols hiding behind them. Fathers firing arrows into crowds that held their own families. The Mongols walked through untouched [music] while innocent people absorbed every hit. During the invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, [music] thousands of prisoners were used this way across three continents.

Here comes number nine, assembly line mass killing. After taking the city of Urgench in 1221, the Mongols organized the killing like a factory. According to historian Juvayni, 50,000 Mongol soldiers each received exactly 24 prisoners to execute. Do the math and you get 1.2 million people killed in one organized operation.

At Nishapur, every soldier got orders to kill at least 300 people. No chaos, no random violence, just assigned numbers, cold efficiency, and a body count that would make your head spin. They turned mass killing into something mechanical, no emotion, no hesitation, just a task that needed to get done. And those were just the regular soldiers following orders.

What did the Mongol leaders do to enemy kings and generals? That was a whole other level of horror. Let’s move to number eight, boil the live in giant pots. Before Genghis Khan took control of the Mongol tribes, his biggest rival was a warlord named Jamukha. And Jamukha had a preferred punishment so extreme, it actually helped Genghis rise to power.

After winning a major battle, Jamukha had captured enemy generals thrown into giant boiling cauldrons alive while their own soldiers watched. Historical sources talk about 70 cauldrons used at the same time. Whether that number is exact or simply means a great many does not matter. The screams from those boiling pots were so horrifying >> [music] >> that warriors across the steppe began switching sides.

 They believed anyone had to be [music] better than the man who boils people alive for entertainment. And honestly, they were not wrong because Genghis had his own nightmare list waiting. Next one is number seven, building pyramids from human skulls. In 1221, the Mongols captured the Persian city of Nishapur and then [music] they killed every single person inside. The attack was personal.

 Genghis Khan’s own son-in-law had been killed during the siege and his daughter demanded total revenge. According to historian Juwayni, the skulls of the dead were gathered and stacked into massive pyramids outside the city gates. Separate pyramids for men, women, and children. Three towers of bone standing in the open for the world to see.

The death toll sits somewhere between 700,000 and 1.7 million people. Those pyramids remained there for months as a warning and it worked. After Nishapur, city after city opened their gates without a fight. Genghis Khan’s descendant Timur took this even further. After killing 90,000 in Baghdad in 1401, he built 120 skull pyramids.

At Isfahan, he stacked 35 towers from 200,000 skulls. These were not random anger, they were advertisement. Let’s move to number six, sewn shut and thrown in the river. When Guyuk Khan believed a powerful woman named Fatima had poisoned his brother, the punishment was straight out of a nightmare.

 After days of beatings, burning, and forced confessions, Fatima was declared guilty. Every single opening on her body was sewn shut, her mouth, her nose, everything. She was wrapped tightly in felt so nothing [music] could get in or out and while still alive, still conscious, still feeling everything, [music] they threw her into a river.

The reason, Mongol religion said spilling blood on the earth offended the sky god Tengri. So they created ways to kill that kept every drop of blood trapped inside the body. The result was a death so slow and painful that a quick sword to the neck would have been a mercy. The no blood rule sounds almost polite until you realize the methods they created to follow it were some of the most brutal tortures any human has [music] ever devised.

 Here comes number five, snapping the spine. Genghis Khan and his old friend Jamukha had once been blood [music] brothers, two men who swore loyalty to each other for life. But Jamukha betrayed Genghis more than once and eventually, the Khan caught up with him. Out of respect for their old bond, Genghis wanted Jamukha to die without blood being spilled.

 So he had Jamukha’s back broken fast enough to be considered honorable, slow enough to be agonizing. A wrestler named Buri got an even worse version. Years earlier, Buri had humiliated Genghis Khan’s brother Belgutei in a public wrestling match. When Genghis finally rose to power, he invited Buri for a rematch. Terrified, Buri threw the fight on purpose hoping that losing would spare his life.

 But at a signal from Genghis, Belgutei drove his knee into Buri’s back and pulled on his collarbone until the spine snapped apart. Buri was dragged outside paralyzed but alive and left on the ground to die while everyone watched. That was the Mongol definition of mercy. Next one is number four, eating dinner on top of dying princes.

After the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223, the [music] Mongols captured several Russian princes along with their noble commanders. And what happened next became one of the most [music] infamous executions in recorded history. The Mongol soldiers laid every captured [music] prince flat on the ground, then placed heavy wooden boards on top of them.

 And then the Mongol generals sat down on those boards and held their victory feast. They ate roasted meat, they drank wine, they laughed and told stories about the battle they had just won. All of this while the Russian princes underneath them were being slowly crushed then suffocated to death. The cracking of bones, the muffled screams, the Mongol commanders ignored all of it and kept eating.

This was not just a way to kill someone, it was a statement that said, “You are so far beneath us that we will use your dying body as furniture.” Let’s move to number three, rolled in a carpet and stomped by horses. In 1258, Hulagu Khan and 150,000 soldiers captured Baghdad, the most powerful city in the Islamic world.

 The Abbasid Caliph Al-Mustasim, the highest religious leader in Islam, was taken prisoner. The Mongols rolled him inside a thick [music] carpet, tied it shut, and rode war horses back and forth over his body until he died. The carpet kept royal blood from touching the ground satisfying Mongol religious rules, but the death was pure agony.

 [music] Every hoof slammed down and shattered more bones while the carpet held him so he could not flinch. The fall of Baghdad shook the entire world. During the siege and the week of killing that followed, somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million died. Ancient libraries holding centuries of science and philosophy were burned.

 The Tigris River reportedly ran black with ink from all the books thrown into the water. A city that had been the center of human knowledge for 500 years [music] was erased in 7 days. Next one is number [music] two, molten silver poured into the skull. In 1218, a governor named Inalchuk made the single worst decision of his entire life.

 A Mongol trade caravan of 450 merchants arrived at his city of Otrar. Inalchuk accused them of being spies, had every single one of them killed, and stole all their goods. When Genghis Khan sent three diplomats to demand justice, the sultan had one of them beheaded and shaved the beards off the other two as an insult. That was the moment everything changed.

 Genghis Khan gathered 200,000 soldiers and invaded the entire Khwarazmian Empire. After a 5-month [music] siege, Inalchuk was captured alive and his punishment matched his crime in the most horrifying way possible. The Mongols heated up silver until it turned to liquid and then they poured it directly into his eyes and ears.

The molten metal burned through his skull from the inside. He had killed Mongol merchants out of greed for their silver and gold, so the Mongols made him swallow it. After Inalchuk was dead, the Mongols executed the entire population of Otrar, roughly 100,000 people, and then they moved on and wiped the rest of the empire off the map within 2 years.

And the last is number one, erasing a city from existence. This is not one single method. This is all of them happening at once and it is the reason the Mongol Empire became the most [music] feared force the world had ever seen. When a city fought back against the Mongols and then lost, the order came down in just two words, feed the horses.

That was the signal for total destruction. Every man was killed, women were taken, [music] children were enslaved, buildings were burned to the ground, libraries, temples, markets, homes, all of it destroyed. The dead were stacked into pyramids outside the gates. Survivors hiding in basements were hunted down and dragged into the streets.

At the city of Merv in 1221, Genghis Khan sat on a golden throne and watched as prisoners were brought before him and killed one by one. The rich were tortured until they gave up every piece of hidden gold. Each of his soldiers was told to kill between 300 and 400 people. Historians estimate the death toll at Merv at 700,000 to 1.3 million people.

At Baghdad in 1258, Hulagu Khan’s army spent a full week doing nothing but killing, burning, and looting the greatest city of the Islamic world. The Mongols did not just defeat their enemies, they erased them. They turned cities that had taken centuries to build into empty ground covered in bones, and then they rode to the next city and did the exact same thing all over again.

 At its peak, the Mongol Empire covered 24 million square kilometers, making it the largest connected land empire in the history of the human race, and every single mile of it was built on pure, cold, calculated terror. That was the Mongol Empire at its absolute worst. [music] If this sends a chill down your spine, subscribe and hit the video on screen right now for more history that [music] schools will never teach.