Western Civilization I / Unit 12 WC1 1102 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Yasa, Tumen, Spies: The Mongol Machine
Captions available
The idea
Mongol armies ran on the Yasa, law or tradition, and decimal units up to the tumen of ten thousand, with clans mixed to dilute loyalty. Several horses per man, signal flags, spies, adaptive siegecraft and terror, and conquered engineers redeployed made them unbeatable.
In practice
Plague corpses catapulted into cities, the anchor's biological warfare.
Where people slip
The anchor calls Chinggis's exterminations medieval genocide. Its word, attributed.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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