39. The Mongols Were the Most Significant in a Long Line of Terrifying Steppe Nomads
The violence and fury of Genghis Khan’s Mongols was not the first nomadic eruption from the Steppe. For millennia, the region’s nomads had frequently ridden out of the vastness of their homelands, to raid, plunder, pillage, and otherwise terrorize the more civilized and prosperous lands on their periphery. If the nomads were unified under powerful warlords, there was always a potential for things to escalate from mere raids – bad enough as those were – and into devastating invasions that could extinguish empires.