The origins of the Mongols

The overthrow of the Khitan-Liao Empire (907–1125) by a Manchurian people, the Jurchen, created a power vacuum in what is now Mongolia. The Khitan had controlled the steppe region through a network of garrisons. The Jurchen, who now supplanted them as the Jin dynasty (1123–1234), devoted their energies to further conquests in North China at the expense of the indigenous Song Empire. They abandoned the strongpoints in the steppe for a more southerly line of fortification, beyond which they were content to wield an indirect influence by playing off the tribes one against the other. Apart from the increasingly sinicized Jurchen-Jin, three more or less sophisticated powers bordered the Mongolian steppes. Khitan fugitives had created a new empire in the west, known as the Qara (‘Black’) Khitai, which dominated Central Asia for almost a century (c. 1130–1218): its ruler, a member of the defunct Liao dynasty who bore the title Gürkhan (‘world-ruler’), exercised hegemony over a number of Muslim states as far as Khwārazm (Khorezm) on the lower Oxus River. To the east lay the principality of the Uighurs, a semi-sedentarized Turkish people who occupied the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin and the northern Tian Shan range and whose ruler (entitled Ïduq-qut) paid tribute to the Qara Khitai. The Uighurs' southern neighbour was the empire of the Xixia (c. 982–1227), ruled by a people possibly of Tibetan stock, whom the Mongols called the Tangu'ut (Tangut).