ALL WELCOME
Christopher Atwood
University of Pennsylvania
Why the Mongol Conquests? Sources and Explanations of the 1211 Campaigns against North China
The Mongol conquest of North China was the beginning of the Mongol Empire. Its success laid the foundation of the empire; its failure would have made Chinggis (“Genghis Khan”) a mere footnote in history. Compared to the great campaigns in Central Asia or Eastern Europe, however, the origins and course of the Mongols’ almost quarter-century of warfare to finally conquer and subdue North China has been little studied. At the time of the first attack in 1211, North China was ruled by the Jin or “Golden” dynasty, founded about a century previously by the Jurchens, ancestors of the later Manchus. Chinggis Khan’s unification of Mongolia show that it grew out of a Jin frontier strategy gone awry and only slowly evolved into an all-out conquest, laying the foundation of the Mongol Empire.
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Christopher P. Atwood (Ph.D. 1994, Indiana University) is professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches the history of Mongolia and the Inner Asian borderlands of China. His research ranges from the Mongol empire to the early twentieth century, with a focus on ethnicity, state-building, and ideology. Major works include Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades (2002), and Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (2004). He has recently completed a volume of translations of Chinese sources on the rise of the Mongols to be published by Hackett Press, and is currently working on a new translation of the Secret History of the Mongols to be published by Penguin.