Rituals, Warfare, and Culture in the Mongol Empire

In 1221, the Mongol army slaughtered every person inside the Persian city of Nishapur, stacked the severed heads of men, women, and children into three separate pyramids, and then sent dogs through the ruins to flush out survivors, just so they could behead them, too. But that was only one of 20 victory rituals the Mongols performed after battle.

And number one makes Nishapur look like a warning shot. You think you know how brutal the Mongol Empire was, but what they did after they won is the part that history books leave out.

Number 20, the blood oath before battle. Before a single sword was drawn, Mongol warriors gathered in circles and sliced open their palms to mix blood into a shared bowl of fermented mare’s milk called airag.

“Every man who drank from that bowl was now bound by oath, which meant that desertion or cowardice in the upcoming fight would be punished by death, not from the enemy, but from his own brothers.”

Genghis Khan enforced this through the Yassa, his written legal code that demanded absolute obedience. And the punishment for breaking a blood oath was not a quick execution, either, because Mongol law required that oath-breakers be killed without spilling their blood on the ground, which meant suffocation, drowning, or having your spine snapped.

“Therefore, every warrior who entered battle had already accepted that the only way out was through, because his own side would kill him more creatively than the enemy ever could.”

Number 19, the counting of ears. After a battle ended, Mongol commanders needed an accurate body count to distribute rewards fairly among the troops. However, dragging enemy corpses across a battlefield was slow and impractical for an army that prized speed above all else.

Therefore, they adopted a trophy system common among step armies for centuries, and it involved cutting the right ear off every dead enemy soldier. Warriors would collect ears in leather sacks and present them to their commanding officer, who would count them to determine each unit’s kill tally.

“The soldiers with the highest counts received the best loot, the finest captured horses, and sometimes captured women.”

But the system created a dark incentive because some warriors started taking ears from wounded enemies who were still alive, which meant that across the battlefield, you could hear screaming men clutching the sides of their heads while Mongol soldiers walked past collecting trophies. And that was just the accounting system, because what the Mongols did with the actual dead bodies was even worse.

Number 18, the sky god. Offering victory belonged to Tengri, the eternal sky god, who the Mongols believed controlled all fate on Earth. After every successful battle, the commanding general was required to perform a spiritual ritual before anyone could touch the loot. The general would face south, remove his belt, drape it over his shoulder, and kneel three times while pouring fermented mare’s milk into the air as an offering.

But if you touched any spoils before this ceremony was complete, you were considered cursed, and the standard punishment was execution by your own unit commander. Genghis Khan reportedly delayed looting for hours after major victories to ensure the sky god ceremony was performed correctly. But praying to the sky god was the gentle part, because what the Mongols built from the bodies of the dead was designed to terrify entire civilizations.

Number 17, the skull pyramid construction. What happened at Nishapur was not an isolated incident because the Mongols turned skull pyramid construction into a deliberate military strategy used across their entire empire. When Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, sacked Baghdad in 1258, his troops reportedly killed around 800,000 people, according to the historian Rashid al-Din, and then constructed pyramids from the skulls of scholars, religious leaders, and citizens.

These skull towers served as billboards visible from miles away that communicated one simple message to the next city down the road: “Surrender immediately, or this is your future.” And it worked, because dozens of cities along the Mongol invasion routes surrendered without any fight at all after their scouts saw what was waiting outside the last city that chose to resist.

Number 16, the victory feast of Kalka River. In 1223, Mongol generals Subutai and Jebe defeated a combined army of Russian princes and Cuman warriors at the Battle of the Kalka River. However, the Mongols did not simply celebrate with food and drink like a normal army would. Instead, they took the captured enemy commanders, laid them flat on the ground, placed a massive wooden platform directly on top of their living bodies, and then sat down on that platform to eat, drink, and celebrate their victory.

The Russian princes underneath were slowly crushed and suffocated to death over several hours while the Mongols feasted above them. Mongol tradition held that noble blood should never be spilled on the ground, and therefore crushing them to death technically honored that rule while still delivering the most horrifying death imaginable.

Number 15, the loot distribution ceremony. Any soldier caught hiding spoils or taking more than his fair share after a victory was executed on the spot because the loot distribution followed rules so strict that cheating was treated as treason against the Khan himself. The Yassa laid out exactly how captured wealth would be divided and every soldier from the lowest rider to the highest general received a share based on performance in battle.

But the Khan always took his portion first. The spoils included gold, silver, silk, weapons, horses, and captured people. At his coronation in 1206, Genghis Khan’s nobles had pledged to bring him the finest geldings, the most beautiful women, and the greatest palace tents from every conquered land. The entire empire ran on the promise of shared wealth and therefore the loot ceremony was the economic engine that kept hundreds of thousands of warriors motivated to fight, conquer, and fight again.

However, the next entry shows what happened to the people who were counted as part of that loot.

Number 14, the prisoner sort. Not every captured enemy was killed immediately because the Mongols had a systematic process for sorting prisoners by usefulness. Skilled craftsmen, engineers, translators, and doctors were separated and sent to serve the empire directly. Healthy young men were forced to march in front of the army during the next siege as human shields.

However, the most chilling part came from a rule established during the war against the Tatars where Genghis Khan ordered that every male prisoner taller than the linchpin of a cartwheel, roughly 3 ft high, would be executed. Everyone shorter, meaning young children, would be absorbed into Mongol families. This single height measurement determined whether you lived or died. But the Mongols had an even more twisted use for the prisoners who survived the sword, and it involved sending them back to their own people.

Number 13, the messenger ritual. After a major victory, the Mongols would select captured enemy soldiers and deliberately release them, but not out of mercy. These men were sent back to neighboring cities as living messengers, and their job was to describe in graphic detail exactly what the Mongols had done to the defeated city. Some accounts suggest that these messengers were mutilated first, with fingers or noses removed, so that their physical appearance would reinforce the terror of their words.

“A single traumatized messenger stumbling into a city gate could do more damage to enemy morale than 10,000 arrows.”

And the historian Juvayni documented multiple cities that surrendered the moment these broken men arrived.

Number 12, the forced march of captives. Captured civilians from conquered cities were not simply left behind, because the Mongols forced thousands of them to march alongside the army toward the next target. These captives carried supplies, dug trenches, and filled moats during siege operations.

However, the deadliest role was being pushed to the front of the army during attacks, where defending soldiers would be forced to kill their own countrymen before they could even reach the Mongol warriors behind them. Persian and Chinese chroniclers described entire populations of one city marched to the walls of the next, creating an impossible moral dilemma for the defenders inside.

And once those captives had served their purpose at the walls, the Mongols had a ceremony for the dead that was just as calculated as the battle itself.

Number 11, the ceremonial arrow storm. Before the victory celebrations could begin, Mongol archers would perform a ceremonial volley called the storm of arrows over the battlefield. Thousands of composite bows would fire simultaneously into the sky, creating a massive arc of arrows that rained down on the dead and wounded enemy soldiers below.

This ensured that anyone pretending to be dead would be struck and forced to reveal themselves, but it also carried spiritual weight because the Mongols believed that sending arrows skyward honored Tengri and marked the land as claimed territory.

Number 10, the destruction of irrigation. After securing a military victory, the Mongols would systematically destroy the irrigation infrastructure of conquered regions. When Hulagu Khan conquered Baghdad in 1258, his forces deliberately sabotaged the waterways, canals, and dikes that had sustained agricultural life in Mesopotamia since the ancient Sumerians built them thousands of years earlier.

This was a calculated decision to ensure the conquered region could never recover enough to threaten the empire again. The damage was so permanent that historians credit this destruction with turning previously fertile regions into barren desert that remains empty to this day, meaning a single victory ritual performed in 1258 reshaped the geography of the Middle East for eight centuries.

Number nine, the royal execution without blood. Mongol spiritual tradition held that royal blood was sacred and could not be spilled on the earth because doing so would anger the spirits. Therefore, when the Mongols defeated enemy kings or commanders, they wrapped the victim in a carpet or heavy felt blanket and had horses trample them to death.

When the last Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mustasim, was captured after the fall of Baghdad, he was reportedly rolled in a carpet and trampled by Mongol horses, ending the 500-year-old Abbasid Caliphate without a single drop of royal blood touching the ground. The Mongols saw this as a sign of deep respect, which tells you everything you need to know about how they defined the word respect.

Number eight, the kumis purification ceremony. After battle, surviving Mongol warriors would gather around large leather bags filled with airag, the fermented mare’s milk that was central to every aspect of Mongol life. A shaman would ladle the airag and pass it in the direction of the fallen warriors as a spiritual offering for their journey to the afterlife.

Drinking massive quantities of kumis together reinforced the bonds between warriors and reminded every man that they fought as a collective unit. The European traveler, Giovanni de Plano Carpini, described watching Mongol leaders drink mare’s milk from morning until evening during these celebrations, consuming quantities he called “absolutely unbelievable.”

But while the Mongols drank to honor their dead, they had a very different ritual for anyone else who wanted to get close to the living.

Number seven, the fire purification walk. Conquered rulers who survived a Mongol victory were required to pass between two large fires before they could enter the presence of the Khan. The Mongols believed that fire purified evil spirits and anyone who refused was assumed to be harboring ill will and was executed immediately.

This ritual was documented by the traveler William of Rubruck in the 1250s, but the fire purification was not just for outsiders, because even Mongol warriors returning from battle were sometimes required to pass through purifying fires before reentering camp, since death carried contamination that could spread to the living if it was not burned away.

Number six, the deliberate library burning. When the Mongols conquered a city known for its intellectual achievements, they would deliberately target libraries and centers of learning for destruction. The most famous example occurred during the fall of Baghdad when Mongol soldiers threw the contents of the legendary House of Wisdom into the Tigris River.

One medieval chronicle described the river running black with ink from the destroyed manuscripts, while simultaneously running red with the blood of murdered scholars. This was a strategic decision to erase the intellectual infrastructure of a conquered civilization, ensuring that the knowledge needed to rebuild or organize resistance was permanently destroyed.

Number five, the mass conscription ceremony. After every major victory, the Mongols would absorb surviving enemy soldiers into their own army through a forced loyalty ceremony. Captured warriors with useful skills were given a choice between joining the Mongol army or immediate execution. Those who joined were expected to fight against their former allies in the very next campaign.

Chinese siege engineers captured during the conquest of the Jin Dynasty were used to build the weapons that later destroyed Persian and Arab cities thousands of miles to the west. Therefore, the Mongols turned their enemies into weapons, and the weapons kept getting better with every conquest.

Number four, the river diversion drowning. After conquering a city, the Mongols sometimes decided that killing survivors with swords was too slow, so they drowned them instead by redirecting entire rivers. At Gurganj, near the Aral Sea, the Mongols broke the dams holding back the Amu Darya river after the city surrendered, flooding the streets and drowning anyone who had survived the massacre.

At Urgench in 1221, Juvayni recorded that 50,000 Mongol soldiers were each assigned 24 prisoners to personally execute. And when the killing was done, the dike on the river broke and washed away whatever was left. But the Mongols had tried this tactic earlier during their siege of the Western Xia capital, Yinchuan, in 1209, when Genghis Khan ordered his engineers to dam the Yellow River and redirect it into the city. That attempt actually backfired and flooded the Mongol camp instead. However, the failure taught them how to do it correctly, and by the time they reached Persia, they had perfected the art of turning rivers into weapons.

Number three, the siege engineer execution. After a successful siege, the Mongols would execute every enemy siege engineer they could find, but only after forcing them to reveal every detail of their defensive designs. Mongol interrogators would question captured engineers about wall thickness, gate mechanisms, tunnel networks, and water supplies.

Once the information was recorded, the engineers were killed to prevent them from designing defenses for another city again. However, the knowledge was immediately transferred to Mongol specialists who would use it to improve their attack methods for the next target. This created a terrifying loop where every city the Mongols conquered made them better at conquering the next one.

Number two, the funeral slaughter of Genghis Khan. When Genghis Khan died in August 1227, the funeral procession that carried his body back to Mongolia became one of the most lethal victory rituals in human history. According to Marco Polo, 2,000 slaves who worked on preparing the burial site were slaughtered by their guards to protect the location’s secrecy.

But then the guards themselves were killed by a second unit of soldiers because they too now knew where the body was buried. That second unit then rode through the countryside killing every person they encountered, eliminating any witness who might have seen which direction they traveled. And when this final group of executioners returned to base, they reportedly killed themselves to ensure that absolutely no living person could ever reveal the burial location.

To this day, nobody has found the grave of Genghis Khan. Which means a victory ritual performed nearly 800 years ago is still working exactly as intended.

Number one, the total annihilation decree. The deadliest Mongol victory ritual was not a ceremony or a celebration, but rather a formal decree that the Khan could issue after a city resisted his forces. Called the destruction of a bad city under Mongol law, this decree ordered the complete annihilation of every living thing within the city walls.

At Nishapur in 1221, where we started this story, Tolui Khan issued the annihilation decree after his brother-in-law, Tokuchar, was killed during an earlier engagement with the city. An army of up to 80,000 soldiers breached the walls, and what followed was a massacre that medieval sources claim killed between 100,000 and 1.7 million people. Though modern historians believe the number was closer to the lower end.

The severed heads were stacked into three separate pyramids: one each for men, women, and children. Nishapur had been a city where scholars debated philosophy, where merchants traded silk and turquoise along the Silk Road, where families raised children and built lives that stretched back centuries. And in a matter of days, all of it was reduced to ash and bone. And the only thing left standing was three mountains of skulls baking in the sun.

After the killing was done, the Mongols sent cats and dogs through the rubble to flush out anyone hiding underground because the annihilation decree required that not a single soul survive. But the true horror was not what it did to Nishapur because Nishapur was just one example. The same decree was carried out at Merv, at Herat, at Baghdad, and at dozens of other cities across Asia and the Middle East. The Mongol Empire killed an estimated 40 million people during its conquests. Roughly 10% of the entire world population at the time.

Every ritual on this list served the same purpose, which was to make the next conquest easier than the last one. The blood oaths built loyalty, the skull pyramids built terror, the loot ceremonies built motivation and the annihilation decrees built a reputation so terrifying that entire kingdoms surrendered before the Mongol army even arrived at their borders.