In 1258, the Mongol army broke through the walls of Baghdad, the richest city on earth, and over seven straight days, Hulagu Khan sat on a golden throne watching as hundreds of thousands of people were dragged before him and slaughtered until the Tigris River turned black from destroyed books and red from the blood of scholars.
But the killing was never the worst part because the Mongols had perfected something far more terrifying than death itself. And these are the 20 methods they used to make the entire medieval world surrender without even putting up a fight. Number 20, the living barricade. Before the Mongols even touched the walls of an enemy city, they had already figured out the most disturbing way to start a siege.
They would round up thousands of captured civilians from the last town they conquered, and then they would force those prisoners to march ahead of the Mongol army directly into the arrows and boiling oil of the defenders. Up on those walls, defenders would recognize their own neighbors, their own family members, walking toward them as living shields for the enemy.
Therefore, the defenders had to make an impossible choice because every arrow they fired to protect their city would kill one of their own people first. The Mongols used this tactic across Central Asia and China throughout the 13th century. And according to military historians, they would sometimes gather tens of thousands of captives just for a single siege.
The defenders on the walls would hesitate, their bowstrings going slack because every face in that crowd could have been someone they loved. And that hesitation was exactly what the Mongol commanders were counting on because the psychological damage alone was enough to make entire cities surrender before a single Mongol soldier had to lift a sword.
Number 19, the liquid metal pour. When the governor of Otrar, a man named Inalchuk, made the catastrophic mistake of executing Mongol trade envoys in 1219, Genghis Khan took it very personally. After a 5-month siege, the Mongols finally captured Inalchuk and decided that a simple death would not be enough.
They pinned him down and poured molten silver directly into his eyes and ears, turning the very wealth he had stolen from the Mongol caravan into the instrument of his own destruction. However, this was more than just revenge because word of this execution spread across the entire Khwarazmian Empire within weeks.
And city after city began surrendering to the Mongols without resistance. Every governor in the region understood the message perfectly. Number 18, the royal rug trampling. Mongol religious law strictly prohibited royal blood from touching the ground because they believed it would bring catastrophic natural disasters upon the earth.
But that did not mean royalty got to live. When Hulagu Khan conquered Baghdad in 1258, he had the last Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mustasim, rolled up tightly inside a Persian carpet. Then Mongol horsemen rode their warhorses back and forth over the carpet until the Caliph was crushed to death inside it. Historian Ata-Malik Juvayni recorded a slightly different version, claiming the Caliph was beaten to death with fists while wrapped in the rug.
But either way, this man who had ruled as the spiritual leader of the entire Islamic world died suffocating in darkness, feeling his own bones snap one by one. And the Mongols considered this a respectful death because technically, no royal blood had been spilled on the earth. Number 17, the banquet board crush.
After the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223, the Mongols captured several Russian princes, including Mstislav of Kiev, and decided to turn their execution into entertainment. They laid the Russian princes flat on the ground and then stacked heavy wooden boards on top of them. Then the entire Mongol army sat down on those boards and held a massive victory feast, eating and drinking and celebrating while the princes were slowly crushed and suffocated beneath their feet.
Screams of the dying rulers mixed with Mongol laughter and music. And this went on for hours until every prince beneath the boards had been crushed to death. In their belief system, dying beneath the feet of your conquerors while they celebrated was the ultimate humiliation for a defeated ruler.
Number 16, the bone towers of Nishapur. At the siege of Nishapur in April 1221, something happened that would haunt the medieval world for centuries. After the city finally fell following intense fighting, Genghis Khan’s daughter reportedly ordered the execution of every single inhabitant. According to the Persian historian Juvayni, the Mongols then separated the severed heads into three enormous pyramids.
One made entirely from the heads of men, another from the heads of women, and a third from the heads of children. Each pyramid stood outside the ruined city as a warning to every other settlement in the region. And they worked exactly as intended. When the Mongol army approached the next city, the residents already knew what refusal meant because travelers had seen those pyramids with their own eyes and carried the stories ahead of the advancing horde.
Number 15, the golden room of hunger. Some accounts, including those attributed to Marco Polo, describe a method where the Mongols would lock a captured ruler inside a sealed room surrounded by mountains of his own gold, silver, and precious jewels. Then they would leave him there with absolutely no food and no water, forcing him to stare at the very wealth he had accumulated while he slowly starved to death over days or even weeks.
Whether or not this specific account is perfectly accurate, the symbolism behind it tells you everything about how the Mongols thought about punishment. They wanted the suffering to carry a message, and the message was always the same, that greed and defiance would consume you from the inside out. Number 14, the nine sack harvest.
At the Battle of Legnica in Poland in April 1241, the Mongol army defeated a combined European force and then carried out one of the most disturbing acts of battlefield accounting in recorded history. After the fighting ended, Mongol soldiers moved across the field cutting the right ear off of every dead European soldier they could find.
According to historical accounts, these severed ears filled nine large sacks. This was not done out of cruelty alone because the Mongols used ear counting as their official method of tracking kill numbers and distributing rewards among their warriors. Reports indicate the same practice was repeated across battlefields in Bulgaria and Russia during the same period of Western expansion.
And the sheer efficiency of it tells you something important about how the Mongol army operated. Every single aspect of their warfare, even the counting of the dead, was systematic and calculated down to the last detail. Number 13, the desert oven method. For one Persian noble who fell into Mongol hands, the end came in a way that was almost unimaginably cruel in its slowness.
His entire body was covered in thick sheep fat, then wrapped tightly in heavy felt, and then he was tied up and left lying in the open desert under the blazing sun. Sheep fat attracted insects by the thousands while the felt covering trapped the heat against his skin, creating an oven that slowly cooked him alive over the course of many hours.
Nobody watched, nobody swung a sword, and technically, nobody had spilled any blood because the sun and the insects did all the work while the Mongols moved on to their next conquest. Number 12, the sealed body drowning. When Guyuk Khan suspected that a high-ranking courtier named Fatima had poisoned his brother, the punishment he ordered was stomach-turning even by Mongol standards.
After torturing Fatima into giving a confession, Guyuk had every opening on her body sewn completely shut. Then she was wrapped in a sheet of felt and thrown into a river to drown. This method combines suffocation, drowning, and the sheer horror of having your own body sealed against you, and it sent a very clear signal to every other member of the Mongol court that treachery against the Khan’s family would be met with a level of cruelty that went far beyond simple execution.
Number 11, the wrestling match execution. Genghis Khan had a very long memory for insults, and one of the most petty yet terrifying examples of this involved a famous Mongol wrestler named Buri. Years before Temüjin became Genghis Khan, Buri had publicly humiliated his brother, Belgutei, in a wrestling match.
Years passed, and then after he had conquered most of the known world, he invited Buri to a rematch against Belgutai. Buri understood the danger and deliberately lost the match, throwing himself to the ground and letting Belgutai pin him, thinking this would save his life. But at a secret signal from Genghis Khan, Belgutai pressed his knee into Buri’s back and yanked on his collarbone until his spine snapped.
Buri was then dragged outside, paralyzed from the neck down, and left to die slowly in the dirt because Genghis Khan wanted everyone to understand that cowardice was just as unforgivable as defiance. Number 10, the fire funnel trap. When the Mongols besieged a city and met resistance, they would sometimes set the entire city on fire and then station archers at every exit.
As the flames spread and the smoke grew thick, civilians would pour out of their homes and run toward the city gates, the only possible escape. But Mongol bowmen were waiting at every opening, and they would systematically shoot down every person who tried to flee the burning streets. Survivors who stayed inside burned to death, and the ones who ran were cut down by arrows.
There was no option that ended in survival. The Mongols perfected this tactic during their campaigns across Persia and Central Asia, and it allowed them to destroy entire populations without ever having to fight them building by building. Number nine, the ghost retreat test. One of the most psychologically devastating tricks in military history came directly from the Mongol playbook.
After conquering a city, they would publicly announce that the war was over, and then they would pull their army back and ride away as if they were leaving for good. Hidden among the ruins, they would leave behind a small group of Mongol agents. If any survivors came out of hiding and killed those agents, or if the city tried to rebuild its defenses, the Mongol army would return in full force and massacre the entire remaining population without exception.
What made this so devastating was that every moment of apparent safety became a trap because the survivors could never be certain whether the Mongols had truly left or whether they were being tested. Number eight, the self-destruction order. You have never seen this army. You have never fought them, and yet a messenger arrives at your gates demanding that you personally tear down your own city walls, fill in your own moats, and destroy your own defensive fortifications with your own hands.
That is exactly what the Mongols demanded before they even attacked certain cities. Cities that obeyed this demand would sometimes be spared total destruction, but they had just stripped themselves of any ability to resist future attacks from anyone. Therefore, the Mongols conquered them not through violence, but through the complete psychological breakdown of their will to resist.
Because a city that destroys its own defenses has already surrendered its identity as a place worth defending. But everything you have heard so far was just how the Mongols dealt with individual enemies and single cities. Because the next seven methods operated on a scale that makes everything above look almost merciful.
Number seven, the body count ledger. Every warrior in the Mongol army was given an individual quota for the number of people he was expected to kill after a city fell. This was not random violence, but organized, methodical extermination carried out with the efficiency of a bureaucratic process.
Each warrior had a specific number to reach, and officers would verify the count before the army moved on. When the Mongols sacked the city of Merv in 1221, Genghis Khan reportedly sat on a golden throne and watched as captives were brought before him and executed in batches. Persian chronicler Juvayni estimated the dead at Merv at around 700,000, while another historian placed the number at 1.3 million.
And even if those figures were exaggerated to some degree, the scale of the slaughter was unlike anything the medieval world had ever witnessed. Number six, the civilization erasure. Killing people was temporary, but destroying the systems that kept them alive was permanent, and nobody understood that better than Hulagu Khan.
After conquering Baghdad, he deliberately wrecked the canal systems that had irrigated Mesopotamian farmland for thousands of years. Without irrigation, the fields turned to dust, and the region that had once been one of the most fertile agricultural zones on Earth became a wasteland that could not support large populations for centuries afterward.
Therefore, the Mongols killed not just the people who lived there, but the ability of anyone to ever live there again in the same numbers. Historians consider this destruction of Iraq’s canal system one of the most devastating acts of environmental warfare in all of recorded history. Number five, the river of black ink.
During the sack of Baghdad in 1258, Mongol soldiers threw the contents of the city’s legendary libraries, including books from the famous House of Wisdom, directly into the Tigris River. According to multiple chroniclers, so many manuscripts and scrolls were dumped into the water that the river literally turned black from the dissolving ink.
Centuries of accumulated knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and literature vanished in a matter of days. What happened at Baghdad was not just the destruction of a city, it was the erasure of an entire civilization’s intellectual heritage, and the loss was so catastrophic that historians still consider the fall of Baghdad as the symbolic end of the Islamic Golden Age.
Number four, the starvation march. Months or even years before the main Mongol army arrived at a target, they would send smaller units ahead to systematically burn every farm, orchard, and village in the surrounding region. By the time the full invasion force showed up, the entire region had reverted to empty grassland, which was exactly what the Mongol horses needed for grazing.
Conquered populations would then face mass starvation even if they survived the initial attack because there was simply nothing left to eat. Ögedei Khan, the successor to Genghis, actually considered doing this to the entire northern Chinese population, planning to exterminate millions of peasants and turn their farmland into horse pasture.
The plan was only stopped when his Chinese adviser, Yelü Chucai, convinced him that taxing the living would generate more long-term wealth than killing everyone. Number three, the phantom surrender ambush. On the battlefield, the Mongols would pretend to flee in panic, breaking formation and riding away as if they had been defeated.
However, this was all calculated because enemy soldiers would break their own formations to chase the retreating Mongols, spreading out across open ground and abandoning their defensive positions. Then, the Mongol cavalry would suddenly wheel around in perfect coordination and charge directly into the scattered, exhausted, and disorganized enemy force.
Annihilation followed every single time, and armies that thought they were winning 5 minutes earlier would find themselves completely surrounded and cut to pieces with no escape route and no way to regroup. The Mongols used this tactic repeatedly across Europe and Asia, and it worked almost every single time because the temptation to chase a fleeing enemy was almost impossible for medieval commanders to resist, especially commanders who had never faced Mongol cavalry before and had no idea what they were walking into.
Number two, the human redistribution machine. After destroying a city, the Mongols would sometimes march the surviving craftsmen, engineers, and skilled workers hundreds or even thousands of miles to a completely different part of the empire where their skills were needed.
These forced relocations ripped families apart, destroyed cultural communities, and ensured that conquered regions could never rebuild themselves because all the people with the knowledge to do so had been taken away. Chinese siege engineers were marched west to Persia. Persian artisans were sent east to Mongolia, and entire populations were shuffled across the largest empire in human history like pieces on a game board.
The conquered territories lost not just their people, but their entire identity. And some of these displaced communities never recovered their original culture or language even after the Mongol Empire itself, eventually collapsed. Number one, the empire of fear itself. Of all 20 methods on this list, the single most effective and most devastating weapon the Mongol army ever deployed was not a weapon at all.
It was something you could never see coming and could never fight against. And that something was pure, calculated, weaponized reputation. What made this the deadliest weapon in their entire arsenal was that the Mongols deliberately allowed survivors of their massacres to escape and flee to the next city, carrying eyewitness stories of skull pyramids, molten silver executions, carpet crushings, and the complete annihilation of every city that dared to resist.
Therefore, when the Mongol army appeared on the horizon of a new target, the people inside those walls already knew exactly what was coming. Many cities across Central Asia, Persia, and Eastern Europe surrendered without a single arrow being fired because the terror of what the Mongols might do was worse than anything the defenders could imagine fighting through.
Genghis Khan built the largest contiguous land empire in human history, stretching from the Pacific coast of China to the borders of Eastern Europe. And he did it largely because his enemies were too terrified to fight back after hearing what happened to the last city that tried. Across the 13th and 14th centuries, the Mongol empire killed an estimated 40 million people, which represented roughly 10% of the entire global population at that time.
To put that in perspective, the Black Death killed about the same percentage, but the plague was a disease that nobody could control, while the Mongol conquests were a deliberate human choice, carried out with cold precision across three generations of rulers. And the craziest part is that many of these cities could have survived if they had simply surrendered because the Mongols actually had a consistent policy of sparing populations that submitted without resistance.
If you found this as disturbing as you should have, you need to see what the Aztec empire did to its own people because that video is on your screen right now. And trust me, some of those methods make the Mongols look gentle by comparison.
