[quote=@Dinh AaronMk] Technically in a sense the Mongolian Empire was rather successful in its goals of creating a unified state and what brought it down wasn't any sort of military incompetence but Mongol law and tradition really, which was as successful as any Mongol would imagine. The thing with this post is that you're trying to frame Genghis Khan's ultimate goal in a modern or even a theory of a modern complex framework, even if "own the world" is an inevitably simple one. But I doubt the real goal of Temujin's conquest was really to do that. The mission of Genghis Khan was likely more along the lines of forming a unified Mongol state through finding and fighting external enemies, as they did. And then taking the people they subjugated and finding a common enemy for them and the Mongols and pitting the combined armies against them. Rinse, wash, and repeat until the Great Khan dies and succession dictates his sons get equal territories and powers. The other strength of the Mongols was their practice of conscripting their subjugated states into their armies with more-or-less the same equal standing in its structure. Being tribal they didn't really bother with trying to justify any sort of religious morality under Tengrism as most people so they weren't as persecutory as the peoples they rolled in under their banner. So they were much more flexible than any other armies. Plus it was the classical medieval era anyways, so modern nationalism didn't exist so there wasn't as rigid a definition of who you were in relation to your neighbors and your exact practices. But in any case, I wouldn't call Genghis Khan a military failure since the division of the Empire went about as would be expected by Mongols at the time. And their Empires likewise. But in the framework of the thread that is not "best Empire" but "best leader" the question of the Empire's health isn't really a factor since it occurred only after his death. If because he wanted to avoid his family beating the shit out of itself over who claims the entire thing so declared it all would be divided equally with each son being Great Khan in their own right. He was a by-gone factor by the time legal division happened. It's a similar deal you find in other Empires. The Carloingian Empire didn't so much "collapse" as we might think but just sort of lapsed out of existence, because also fuck having French sons kill French sons. Or holding multiple titles of the same strength. [/quote] And that's exactly what Genghis Khan did. He was famous for unifying the Mongol Tribe, and for his rather large scale and brutal sieges. In a lot of cases, it was never the intentions of the Khan to engage in battle until someone had provoked. I didn't mention the Khan's great mission to conquer the world, I admire him for these conquests, not that they were his main achievement whatsoever. This is important to underline as mentioned before, he is famous for this, but overall it wasn't his main goal. The fall of the Mongol Empire, however, can be credited to a number if things. If you account for their total losses over a sum of 1300 - sometime around 1368, there was multiple things that led to this large empires fall. Part of it could rather be considered political, and not so much do to with militaristic, though the empire was quite so. Black death was wide spread plague around 1313 in Mongolia at the time and killed millions. It lasted up until about 30 years before the actual closure of the empire, so you could say it was a major factor in the actual fall of the Mongols. Whether Genghis Khan himself was dead at this doesn't have anything to do with this, but more so the aftermath which played out between his remaining sons which caused something of a mass anarchy, and ultimately the end. Nonetheless, Genghis Khan can't be pegged for this failure, more so the black death as it was obviously out of his control. By no means was were the Mongols a military failure, just bound to collapse in on themselves eventually.