In 1221, after the walls of Nishapur collapsed, Mongol soldiers dragged every surviving woman onto an open field and started sorting them like animals at a market. The young ones went one direction, the rest went straight to the executioner. And the person who ordered all of it was the dead commander’s widow, watching every second of it.
Now, to understand why this happened and how it got this bad, you need to go back to the very beginning of the Mongol Empire. Because what the Mongols did to captured women was not random violence. It was a system, a cold, organized system that turned human beings into property on a scale the world had never seen before.
It all started with one man, a man the world would come to know as Genghis Khan. Born around 1162 as a nobody named Temüjin in the mountains of northern Mongolia. His father was poisoned when he was just a boy. His family was abandoned by their own tribe. He grew up hungry, hunted, and homeless. But by 1206, this same kid who once ate rats to survive had united every warring tribe on the Mongolian steppe under a single banner.
And once he did that, he turned his army outward. What followed was the most violent expansion in human history. Between 1206 and 1260, the Mongol Empire swallowed everything in its path. China, Persia, Central Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe. At its peak, this empire covered around 12 million square miles and controlled over 100 million people.
That is the largest connected land empire that has ever existed on this planet. And behind every single conquest, there was a rule. Cities that opened their gates and surrendered were usually left alone. But cities that fought back, they got something the world had never seen before. And that is where the real nightmare for captured women begins.
When Mongol soldiers broke through a city’s walls, the killing did not start right away. First came the sorting. Every surviving person, man, woman, and child was marched out of the city and onto a flat open field. Then the soldiers separated them into groups, men on one side, women on the other.
Children pulled away from their mothers. The first group pulled aside was always the skilled workers, blacksmiths, engineers, doctors, scribes. Anyone who could be useful to the Mongol war machine got to live. But everyone else entered a very different process. And this is where things get really dark. Mongol commanders walked through the rows of captured women the way a buyer walks through a market.
They inspected them one by one. The youngest and the ones they found most attractive were selected first and set aside for high-ranking officers, nobles, and sometimes the Great Khan himself. Persian historians wrote that after every major victory, Genghis Khan held massive feasts where his commanders would parade captured women in front of him while he tore into chunks of barely cooked horse meat.
He picked the ones he wanted for his personal collection. He had very specific preferences. He liked small noses, long silky hair, rounded hips, and soft voices. The women who met those standards joined a growing collection that eventually numbered in the hundreds. But that was actually the best outcome a captured woman could hope for.
Yeah, you heard that right. Being chosen by a powerful man meant food, shelter, and at least some level of protection. Because what happens to the rest of them was so much worse. Women who were considered attractive but not selected by top commanders got handed down through the ranks. Soldiers received them as rewards for good performance in battle.
Others were given away as gifts between officers to build loyalty and seal alliances. A single captured city could produce thousands of women who were split up among the entire Mongol military, from generals all the way down to foot soldiers. And the women who were not selected by anyone in the army? Their fate was the darkest of all.
They were shipped off to roadside caravan stations scattered across the empire. These stations served merchants, traders, and travelers moving along the Silk Road. The women placed there had one purpose, and it was exactly what you think it was. They had no rights, no voice, no escape, and no one coming to save them.
Some of these women had been princesses, daughters of governors, wives of scholars. It did not matter. The moment their city fell, their entire identity was erased. They went from being someone to being nothing overnight. And if you think that is bad, what happened next turned the whole thing into something even bigger.
The empire built an international slave trade network that stretched from China all the way to Eastern Europe. Cities like Bukhara, Karakorum, and Sarai became major hubs where captured humans were bought, sold, and shipped like cargo across thousands of miles. Women taken during the sack of Baghdad ended up in slave markets in Azerbaijan and Mongolia.
Women captured in Russia were sold through Italian traders operating out of ports in Crimea. Christian women got sent to Muslim markets. Muslim women got shipped to Christian ones. The system did not care about religion, nationality, or age. It only cared about demand. The routes were mapped out, the money kept flowing, and the supply came from every new city the Mongols conquered.
And people who fell behind on their taxes or could not pay tribute to the Mongol rulers, they got sold, too. In Russia, peasants who could not make their payments were handed directly to Italian merchants at Crimean ports and shipped across the sea. The entire system ran on human suffering, and women were the most valuable thing in it.
Now, with all of that in mind, what happened at Nishapur in 1221 will make a lot more sense. Because Nishapur was not just another battle. It was personal. And the level of violence that came out of it shocked people who were already living in one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. Nishapur was one of the richest, most beautiful cities on the entire Silk Road.
It sat at a crossroads of trade routes connecting the East to the West. It had massive libraries, thriving markets, poets, scholars, and a population estimated between 100,000 and 200,000 people. The famous Persian poet Attar lived there. So did some of the greatest minds of the Islamic Golden Age. When Mongol generals Jebe and Subutai first passed through the region, the city cooperated.
They handed over food and supplies, and the Mongols moved on without a fight. But then something changed. Rumors spread that the Mongols had been defeated somewhere else, and the people of Nishapur got bold. They rebelled against the Mongol overseers in the region and started resisting openly.
And during a second Mongol assault on the area, a single arrow flew from the top of the city walls, sailed through the air, and struck a general named Tokuchar right through his armor. He died on the spot. Now, here is what made this so much worse than just losing a general.
Tokuchar was not just any officer. He was married to Genghis Khan’s own daughter, a woman named Checheyigen. When she found out her husband was dead, she did not cry. She did not mourn quietly. She demanded the complete and total destruction of every living thing in that city. And Genghis Khan agreed. He sent a message to his son Tului with a very simple instruction.
“Grant her wish.”
Tului showed up at Nishapur with an army estimated between 10,000 and 80,000 men. The siege lasted just 3 days before the walls collapsed. And once the city fell, the real horror started. Every surviving person was dragged out of the city and onto the open plain. Only 400 skilled craftsmen were pulled aside and spared.
Everyone else, every man, every woman, every child, and even the cats and dogs were executed on the spot. The killing was not chaotic. It was organized. Each Mongol soldier was personally assigned between 300 and 400 people to kill. Checheyigen herself sat there and watched the entire thing, making sure nobody was missed and nobody was spared.
When the killing was done, the Mongol soldiers stacked the severed heads into three separate pyramids. One pyramid for men, one for women, one for children. A cleric who survived spent 13 straight days counting the dead and arrived at a number above 1.3 million. Modern historians believe the real figure was somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.
But even at the lower number, that is an entire city erased from the earth in under a week. Among the dead was Attar of Nishapur, one of the greatest poets in Persian history. He was 78 years old when a Mongol soldier cut him down. Centuries of literary tradition died with him on that field. And the Mongols were not finished.
After the massacre, Tolui sent a cleanup squad back into the ruins to hunt down anyone who might have survived by hiding in underground tunnels or beneath piles of bodies. Once they were satisfied that every last person was dead, they planted barley over the wreckage. A city that had been one of the jewels of the Silk Road, a place filled with poets and scholars and traders, was replaced by a crop field.
But Nishapur was not a one-time event. Not even close. That same year, the city of Merv in modern Turkmenistan got the same treatment. And Merv was special. It was not just a city. It was a center of civilization. It had mosques, mansions, grand markets, and 10 libraries holding an estimated 150,000 books.
Scholars traveled from all over the world to study there. The walls around the city were 15 ft thick and 30 ft high. The people of Merv thought they were safe behind those walls. They were wrong. When Tolui arrived with his army, the governor of Merv looked at the situation and made a calculation.
Fighting would mean destruction. Surrendering might mean survival. So, the city opened its gates, and Tolui, standing in front of the entire population, promised that if they cooperated, they would be spared. He broke that promise within hours. The entire population was marched outside the city walls, separated into groups, and the execution started at sunrise.
A Persian chronicler described that day as one filled with shrieking, weeping, and wailing from dawn until dark. Some people were let out in groups of 20 and drowned in troughs filled with blood. Genghis Khan reportedly sat on a golden throne outside the city and watched the slaughter with his own eyes.
Only 400 artisans and a small number of young children were spared. Everyone else was killed. Contemporary accounts put the death toll at Merv at 700,000 or more. The Mongol soldiers leveled the buildings until every structure was flat with the dust. The 10 libraries and their 150,000 books were destroyed.
And the women and children who survived? They entered the slave pipeline and vanished into the empire forever. But even after all of that, the single worst recorded act against women under Mongol rule was still to come. And it happened not to enemies or strangers, but to the Mongols’ own people.
In 1237, 10 years after Genghis Khan died, his son, Ogedei Khan, sat on the throne. Ogedei was nothing like his father. Where Genghis had been disciplined and calculated, Ogedei was sloppy, reckless, and a severe alcoholic. He drank so heavily that his own brother, Chagatai, sent a doctor to watch over him and limit him to one cup of alcohol per day.
Ogedei got around that rule by having a cup made that was twice the normal size. He thought that was clever. The people around him thought it was a sign that the empire was headed for trouble. And they were right. The Oirat people were a Mongol tribe living in the Altai Mountain region. They had been governed by Genghis Khan’s daughter, Checheyigen.
But after her death, Ogedei wanted their land and their people under his direct control. When the Oirat failed to send the expected number of young women for his personal collection, Ogedei snapped. What he did next made even the most hardened war chroniclers of that era struggle to write it down. He ordered 4,000 Oirat girls, some as young as 7 years old, to be gathered on an open field along with their male relatives.
His soldiers pulled the girls from noble families to the front. Then, one by one, the soldiers assaulted them while their fathers, brothers, and husbands were forced to stand there and watch. Nobody was allowed to speak. Nobody was allowed to move. Nobody could do anything. By the end of that day, two of the girls had died from the ordeal.
The survivors were divided up like property. Some went to Ogedei’s personal collection. Others were shipped to caravan stations across the empire for the use of passing travelers. And the ones considered unfit for anything were simply left on the field for anyone who wanted to carry them away. The Persian chroniclers who wrote about this, men who had already described rivers of blood and mountains of skulls without flinching, could barely find the words.
They called them “star-like maidens” and choked on the horror of what they had to record. Even the Mongol historians, who usually celebrated their rulers, could only describe this event in vague and careful language because the shame of it was too heavy to put down directly. And the worst part? This was not about lust.
It was about power. Ogedei used the assault on those girls as a political weapon to break the Oirat people and seize the lands that had belonged to his dead sister. He turned innocent children into tools for expanding his empire. This act violated everything Genghis Khan had built. The Yassa, the Great Mongol legal code, had specifically banned the kidnapping, forced taking, or sale of women.
Under Genghis Khan, women had real power. His own wife, Börte, ran the entire empire while he was away at war. His daughters governed massive territories along the Silk Road. Mongol women rode horses, shot arrows from bows, and commanded soldiers in battle. Historians believe that as many as one in five fighters in the Mongol army may have been women.
But once Genghis died, all of those protections collapsed. His sons fought each other for power, killed their own female relatives to steal their territories, and threw away every law their father had written to protect women. And then came Baghdad. The final proof that the empire had abandoned every principle it was built on.
In 1258, Hulagu Khan, another grandson of Genghis, marched an army of over 100,000 soldiers to the gates of Baghdad. At that time, Baghdad was the beating heart of the entire Islamic world. It had been the center of learning, science, and culture for over 500 years. Its House of Wisdom held some of the rarest and most valuable books on the planet.
Scholars from every nation and every religion came to study there. None of that mattered. Hulagu demanded surrender. The caliph, a man named Al-Mustasim, refused. He thought Baghdad’s walls would protect him. He thought the Mongols would not dare attack the center of Islam. He was wrong about everything.
The siege lasted 12 days. Chinese engineers working for the Mongols operated catapults and battering rams that tore through the walls. Canals were diverted to weaken the foundations. By February 5th, the Mongols controlled an entire section of the wall. The caliph tried to negotiate, but Hulagu refused.
On February 10th, Baghdad officially surrendered. But the Mongols waited 3 more days before entering the city. Three days of silence while the people inside waited to find out if they would live or die. When the Mongols finally walked through the gates on February 13th, 1258, they spent an entire week killing, burning, and looting without stopping.
The population of Baghdad at that time was around 1 million people. Estimates of the dead range from 90,000 to over 800,000. The Tigris River turned red with blood. Then it turned black with the ink from hundreds of thousands of destroyed manuscripts. Eyewitnesses said so many books were thrown into the water that soldiers could ride their horses across the river on the backs of ruined texts.
Thousands of women and children who survived the initial slaughter were taken as slaves and shipped to markets in Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and across the empire. The caliph himself, the spiritual leader of the entire Muslim world, was forced to watch his people die before the Mongols wrapped him in a carpet and had horses trample him to death.
They killed his entire family, too, except for one son, who was shipped to Mongolia, and one daughter, who was taken as a personal concubine for Hulagu’s collection. The slave trade networks that the Mongol empire built during all of this survived long after the empire fell apart. The market in Bukhara, which was established during the Mongol conquests, kept operating for another 600 years, all the way into the 1870s.
The system they created for capturing, sorting, transporting, and selling human beings became a permanent part of the region’s economy for centuries. Historians estimate that the Mongol conquests killed between 30 and 40 million people in total. That was roughly 11% of the entire world population at the time.
To put that in perspective, if the same percentage died today, that would be around 880 million people gone. The population of Persia alone dropped from an estimated 2.5 million people to just 250,000 during the campaigns. That is a 90% drop. Entire regions that had been thriving centers of trade and culture for centuries were turned into empty wastelands.
Cities that had taken hundreds of years to build were flattened in days. And in every single one of them, the pattern repeated itself. The men were killed. The women were taken. And behind every number in every history book, there were real people. Mothers separated from children on open fields.
Daughters dragged away from their families and shipped across continents they had never heard of. Women left at roadside stations for strangers they would never know. They had no one to tell their stories. No one to write down their names. And no one to remember what happened to them after the gates fell.
The Mongol Empire built trade routes, connected east and west, and created what historians call the Pax Mongolica. But underneath that peace was a foundation built on the lives of millions of people who never asked to be a part of it. And the women who suffered the most through all of it left behind no monuments, no records, and no graves.
Just silence that lasted for 800 years. That was the reality behind the Mongol conquests that the history books skip over.
