20 Rituals Associated With Mongol Triumph and Conquest

20 Rituals Associated With Mongol Triumph and Conquest

In 1223, Mongol generals captured Russian princes after a battle, laid them on the ground, built a wooden platform on top of them, and then ate dinner on it. While the men underneath were still alive. Still screaming. That feast lasted hours. And across 9 million square miles of conquered territory, that is not even close to the worst thing on this list.

Let’s start with number 20: The loot ceremony. After every victory, Genghis Khan had a rule: “Nobody touches anything until we sort it out.” Under his Yassa legal code, any soldier who grabbed loot before the official ceremony was executed. No warnings, no second chances. Generals would line everything up: gold, silk, horses, weapons, livestock. The Khan got the first pick. Then his generals. Then it trickled down to regular soldiers. Even families of warriors killed in battle got their share. Sounds almost fair, right? Here is the part they leave out: Women and children from the conquered city were lined up right alongside the gold and handed out the same way. At Zhongdu in 1215, the Mongols stripped the Jin Dynasty capital so bare that fires from the destruction burned for a full month.

But the loot ceremony was the polite part. What comes next is where things get dark. Here comes number 19: The victory prayer to Tengri. Every time the Mongols won, the Khan had to thank the sky. Their god Tengri lived in the heavens and every victory was a personal gift from him. After a win, the Khan would find the highest ground, take off his hat, drape his belt around his neck, and bow nine times. Mare’s milk, called airag, was poured onto the earth. Sometimes this went on for days. And here is what made it dangerous: The Mongols were not just saying “thank you.” They believed Tengri had chosen them to rule every person on the planet. All 24 million square kilometers of their empire was proof. Fighting the Mongols was not just a military mistake. It was fighting against God himself. Genghis Khan spent 3 days alone on a mountain praying before launching his war against China in 1211. When he came down, there was zero doubt. The sky had given its blessing. And that kind of certainty makes an army unstoppable.

Let’s move to number 18: Walking dead shields. This one is going to sit with you. After taking a city, the Mongols rounded up survivors. Old people, farmers, women. And they marched them in front of the army toward the next target. When defenders on those walls fired arrows, they hit their own people first. The Mongols used this constantly against the Khwarazmian Empire from 1219 to 1221. Historian Juvayni described prisoner columns stretching for miles. If you slowed down, a sword went through your back. If you ran, same thing. Picture it. You survived a massacre. Your city is ash behind you. And now you are a walking shield for the army that destroyed everything you had. Your only prayer is that the next city surrenders before the arrows start flying.

But the Mongols had a plan for cities that did not surrender, too. Next one is number 17: The kill quota. After taking a city, Mongol commanders did not just let chaos break loose. They handed out assignments. Each warrior was given a specific number of people to execute. At Urgench in 1221, every soldier in an army of roughly 20,000 was ordered to kill 24 civilians. Grab a calculator real quick. That is close to 480,000 people executed after the battle was already won. The bodies were counted. The numbers were reported back to the generals. Soldiers who did not hit their quota faced punishment. This was not rage. This was not chaos. This was an organized system of elimination designed to make sure a rebellion could never take root in that city again. And the coldest part? Once the quota was met, the commanders packed up and moved on. Next city, same system.

But that system, it was nothing compared to what they did when they got personal about it. And entry number 16 is proof of that. Let’s talk about number 16: Molten silver in the eyes. In 1218, Genghis Khan sent a trade caravan of 450 merchants to the Khwarazmian Empire. The governor of Otrar, a man named Inalchuk, murdered every single one of them and stole their goods. When the Khan sent an envoy to demand justice, Inalchuk killed him, too. For the Mongols, killing an ambassador was the worst crime in the world. It broke what they called the great principle: the idea that a man’s word is sacred. So when the Mongols finally took Otrar in 1220, they saved Inalchuk for last. According to Persian sources, they held him down and poured molten silver into his eyes and ears. The message traveled faster than any army could. Kill our messengers and we will make your death something people whisper about 800 years from now. 800 years later, here we are. Still whispering about it.

Let’s move to number 15: The carpet crush. The Mongols had a spiritual rule: Noble blood must never touch the ground. Spilling it would anger the spirits and curse the entire empire. So when they captured kings, they got creative. After the fall of Baghdad in 1258, Hulagu Khan had the last Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mustasim, rolled up inside a thick carpet. Then Mongol horses trampled over him until he was dead. Some historians say soldiers beat him through the carpet with their fists instead. Either way, the end result was the same. No blood touched the earth. The spirits stayed calm. And the highest ranking religious leader in the Islamic world died wrapped up like a piece of furniture. The Mongols considered this the respectful way to kill a leader. Let that land for a second. This was them being polite.

Now imagine what they did when they were not being polite. Entry 14 is exactly that. Here comes number 14: The victory feast on living men. Back to that moment from the hook. The Battle of the Kalka River, 1223. Generals Subutai and Jebe had just destroyed a Russian army of 80,000 with only 20,000 Mongol riders. Several Russian princes were captured alive, including Mstislav of Kiev. The Mongols laid them face down on the ground. They stacked heavy wooden boards on top of their bodies. And then the generals sat on those boards, spread out food and drink, and threw a victory feast. The princes underneath were being crushed and suffocated in real time. Their screams mixed with the sound of clinking cups and laughter above them. The feast lasted hours. The screaming did not. And once again, no royal blood was spilled. The boards did the killing. The Mongols just ate dinner. This event was recorded by multiple historians. It actually happened. And in the Mongol world, it was not even unusual.

But there is one post-victory ritual that was visible from miles away. Let’s move to number 13: The skull pyramids. In 1221, a single arrow fired from the walls of Nishapur killed Genghis Khan’s son-in-law, Tokuchar, during the siege. When the Khan’s daughter found out, she reportedly demanded the complete destruction of every living thing in the city. The Mongols delivered. Persian historian Rashid al-Din claimed more than a million people were killed at Nishapur, though modern estimates are lower. Either way, people, dogs, cats, horses, everything breathing was killed. Then came the ritual. Severed heads were collected and sorted. Men in one pile, women in another, children in a third. The heads were stacked into pyramids right outside the city gates. They stood there for months as a warning to every other city on the map. Later, Tamerlane perfected this tradition. After sacking Baghdad in 1401, he arranged 90,000 heads into 120 skull towers. At Isfahan in 1387, he killed 70,000 and built 35 pyramids from their skulls.

If you are still here, you clearly have a strong stomach. Next one is number 12: Drowning cities alive. The Mongols did not just burn cities. They drowned them. After defeating the Tangut kingdom around 1209, Mongol engineers redirected entire rivers toward fortified positions. But the real nightmare came after Baghdad fell in 1258. The Mongols destroyed the ancient irrigation systems that had kept Mesopotamia green for thousands of years. Canals were wrecked. Underground water channels called qanats collapsed. Without them, farmland became desert. Survivors of the massacre now faced years of famine. Some of those irrigation networks were not rebuilt until the 20th century. That is 700 years of agricultural damage from a single decision. When Pope Innocent IV’s envoy, Giovanni de Plano Carpini, traveled through Kiev in 1246, a city that once held tens of thousands, he found fewer than 200 houses still standing. The Mongols were not just killing people. They were killing the future of entire regions.

Here comes number 11: The artisan kidnapping. Not everyone died after a Mongol victory. The empire needed skilled hands. Before any massacre started, officers combed the population for engineers, blacksmiths, doctors, and weavers. These people were pulled out while their neighbors were slaughtered around them. Then they marched thousands of miles. Persian engineers shipped to China. Chinese siege builders were dragged to Persia. The skills went wherever the Khan pointed. Think about what that felt like. Your city is burning. Your family is gone. And you’re being dragged across a continent because you know how to forge metal. The siege weapons you build will destroy cities just like yours. Many never returned home.

Let’s move to number 10: The three-day return. After sacking a city, the Mongol army would ride away. Survivors hiding in wells, basements, and sewers would crawl out thinking they had made it. Three days later, the Mongols came back. Every person who came out of hiding was found and killed. At Merv in 1221, historian Rashid al-Din recorded that more than 700,000 people were killed during the initial assault. The three-day return caught thousands more. This was a designed system. The Mongols understood human behavior better than any army of that era. They knew people would hide. They knew they would come out. And they planned for it. There was no outsmarting this army.

Next one is number nine: Sewing a person shut. When the Mongols needed someone dead but could not spill their blood, they turned to one of the most disturbing methods ever recorded. Fatima was a high-ranking advisor to Toregene Khatun, the woman who ruled the Mongol empire after Ogadai Khan died. When Toregene’s own son turned against her, Fatima became the target. After days of interrogation, beatings, and burning, they sewed every opening in Fatima’s body completely shut. Then they wrapped her in layers of felt to make sure no fluids could escape. And then they threw her, still alive, into a river. The logic behind this? By sealing the body, no blood would touch the water or the earth. The spirits would not be disturbed. The victim just disappeared. No trace. No pollution. No cosmic consequences. The cruelty was not the point. The cruelty was the method. And the point was spiritual cleanliness.

Let’s move to number eight: The human sorting line. After every conquest, the surviving population went through what can only be described as a sorting ceremony. Strong men became forced laborers. Young women were distributed among warriors and commanders. Children were sometimes taken from their parents and adopted into Mongol families, raised to forget they were ever anything else. The kingdom of Goryeo, which is modern-day Korea, was forced to hand over 10,000 otter skins, 20,000 horses, 10,000 bolts of silk, and thousands of children and artisans as slaves with every tribute collection. This was not a one-time demand. This happened over and over for decades. Captured enemy soldiers got the worst deal. They marched at the front of the next battle, forced to fight their own people. Refuse? Dead. Fight? You help conquer your neighbors.

Next one is number seven: The river of ink. After Hulagu Khan’s forces took Baghdad in 1258, killing between 200,000 and 800,000 people in a seven-day rampage, they did something that historians still mourn. They threw the entire contents of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris River. This was one of the greatest libraries the world has ever known. Manuscripts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and literature. Works from Greek, Persian, Indian, and Arab scholars that existed nowhere else on earth. Hundreds of years of accumulated human knowledge. Eyewitnesses said the river ran black with ink for days. All of it was gone. Forever. If you burn a city, people can rebuild it. If you destroy their knowledge, you erase who they were. Baghdad had been the intellectual capital of the world. After 1258, it was in ruins and ashes.

And the Mongols did not stop at books. The next entry proves they understood how to destroy bonds between their own people, too. Here comes number six: The blood oath ceremony. After a major victory, Mongol commanders renewed their blood oaths. Officers gathered and poured fermented mare’s milk called kumis onto the earth while swearing allegiance. But in the deeper version, warriors sliced open their palms, mixed blood with the milk, and drank it together. This was the anda ceremony, the blood brotherhood pact. Genghis Khan himself had performed it with his childhood friend Jamukha years before they became enemies. After great victories, this ritual reminded commanders of two things: their bonds were sacred, and the price of betrayal was death. The sacred number nine featured heavily. Oaths sworn nine times. Nine cups offered. In Mongol belief, nine represented the highest spiritual completeness. You swore with blood. You drank with brothers. Break that oath, and the sky itself would notice.

Let’s talk about number five: Catapulting plague corpses. In 1346, a Mongol army under Jan Beg was besieging the port city of Caffa on the Black Sea. The walls were holding. The siege was going nowhere. Then the Black Plague swept through the Mongol camp. Soldiers started dying fast. So the commanders loaded plague-infected corpses onto catapults and launched them over the city walls. Rotting, diseased bodies rained down on the trapped Genoese traders inside. The plague spread instantly. Fleeing survivors carried it onto ships bound for Italy. From there, it ripped across Europe. The Black Death killed between 75 and 200 million people. Roughly 1/3 of Europe was gone. Would the plague have reached Europe eventually? Probably. But the deliberate weaponization of diseased corpses might be the single deadliest post-battle decision in all of human history.

Let’s move to number four: The lynchpin test. After Genghis Khan crushed the Tatar tribes who poisoned his father, he held a council. “What do we do with the survivors?” The answer was chilling. Every Tatar male would be stood next to the lynchpin of a cartwheel. That is roughly the height of a three-year-old child. Anyone taller was executed on the spot. Anyone shorter was spared, enslaved, and distributed among Mongol families. This was not a split-second decision made in anger. This was a calculated ritual of tribal erasure performed days after the fighting was over. Within a single generation, the Tatar identity ceased to exist. The men were dead. The boys grew up speaking Mongol, living as Mongols, never knowing what they were. An entire people wiped off the earth. Not through a single massacre, through a measurement.

Here comes number three: Killing the land itself. This might not sound as violent as skull pyramids, but in terms of body count, it was far worse. After conquering Central Asia and Mesopotamia, the Mongols systematically destroyed underground water channels called qanats and irrigation canals that had kept these regions fertile since ancient Sumerian times. The total population of Persia reportedly dropped from 2.5 million to just 250,000 through a combination of massacres and the famine that followed. Baghdad’s irrigation network did not fully recover until the 20th century. That is 700 years of damage from decisions made in the 1200s. The Mongols did not just kill people. They killed the earth that fed them. And that kind of destruction lasts centuries.

Next one is number two: The Mol Baliya declaration. When a city broke its word to the Mongols, resisted after being offered surrender, or killed an envoy, it received a formal designation: Mol Baliya, “bad city.” And once that label was applied, the rules changed entirely. No mercy. No negotiations. No survivors. Not even looters among the Mongol soldiers. Everything and everyone was to be destroyed. At Bamyan in 1221, a Mongol prince was killed during the siege. Genghis Khan declared the city Mobalya. Every living creature inside was killed. He forbade his own soldiers from taking plunder because he wanted nothing from this place to survive. He reportedly ordered that no person ever live on that spot again. The ruins of Bamyan sat abandoned for generations. The name Mobalya became the most feared designation on the continent. Cities that received it were not defeated. They were erased. And the fact that the Mongols had a formal, named process for total annihilation, that is what separates this from every other act of medieval warfare. This was policy. Chinese census records show the population dropped from 120 million before the Mongol invasion to roughly 60 million after. That is the scale of destruction we are talking about.

And the last is number one: The secret burial massacre. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, his empire covered 9 million square miles, roughly the size of Africa. He ruled over an estimated quarter of the world’s population, and his followers were determined that his resting place would never be found. A select group of soldiers carried his body back across the Mongolian steppe. Every single person they passed along the way was killed. Merchant caravans, nomadic families, anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. Thousands died just because they saw the funeral procession. After the burial, the soldiers who dug the grave were killed by another group of soldiers. Then, those soldiers were killed, too. Horses were stampeded over the burial site to flatten any trace of disturbed ground. Some accounts say a river was diverted to flow over the location. Nearly 800 years have passed. Modern expeditions with satellite technology and ground penetrating radar have searched. Nobody has found it.

The grave of the man who conquered more of the planet than anyone in history remains completely hidden. He destroyed civilizations across two continents. He reshaped the entire world map. A Carnegie Institution study found that the Mongol conquests killed so many people that 700 million tons of carbon were scrubbed from the atmosphere as forests regrew on empty land. And then, the man behind it all vanished as completely as the cities he burned. The cost of that vanishing was measured in blood. And that might be the most Mongol thing of all. 20 rituals that prove the Mongol empire turned victory into an art form of terror.