The Mongols invaded many areas throughout the world, burning cities to the ground, destroying dams, and reducing farming villages to mass starvation. They eventually seized Persia and Mesopotamia, bringing to an end the Abbasid caliphate, the predominant Arab-led civilization. The Mongol leader, Hulegu, had such a strong hatred of the Abbassids for resisting his advances that when his forces captured Baghdad, the chief Arab city at that time, he razed the entire place to the ground, including schools, libraries, mosques, and palaces.

The destruction of the Abbassids signaled the end of Arab independence (outside of Arabia) until the 20th century and the rise of the Turkic Empires in the Arab World. The Arabs failed, from that point forward, to make the kind of scientific, mathematical, literary, and technological advances that characterized the Islamic Golden Age.

Pastoral nomadic.

The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan started the conquest with small-scale raids into Western Xia in 1205 and 1207. By 1279, the Mongol leader Kublai Khan had established the Yuan dynasty in China and crushed the last Song resistance, which marked the onset of all of China under the Mongol Yuan rule.

Trade routes to Europe and Asia were opened and maintained.