Their succession laws were pretty clear, actually. The Empire started unraveling the moment Chingis died, and the establishment of the Ilkhanate pretty much ended what little chance the Empire had of surviving.What if the Mongolian Empire never fragmented? Maybe if they made clearer succession laws? What would have happened to Europe Asia and Middle East for decades to come?
Their succession laws were pretty clear, actually. QUOTE]
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Can you clarify this?
The record is that:
(i) Genghis picked one of his sons (Ogodai, the third-eldest) to succeed; (ii) Ogodei picked a grandson, a choice which was subsequently overruled by his widow; overall it took the Kurultai five years to pick Ogodei's son, Kuyuk, as the next Khan;
(iii) there was another interregnum for two years after Kuyuk died, with the Kurultai eventually picking Mongke, Kuyuk's cousin, over closer relatives;
(iv) after Mongke, there were two simultaneous Kurultais, each of which picked a successor (Kublai vs. Arik Buka), followed by a civil war.
[Kurultai = some sort of gathering of the Mongol clans; not sure what the rules were for voting].
This..............The succession laws were pretty clear, actually. When the khan died, the tribes had to assemble in Karakorum and vote on the new khan.
The problem was, of course, that they were designed for a relatively small polity, and the process did indeed take about two years until the new khan was chosen (and even then some of the more peripheral armies ended up arriving too late to participate, or indeed not arriving at all).![]()
What if the Mongolian Empire never fragmented?
Life just isn't like a computer game, you can't rule big empires from one central location so easily, you need to delegate power- and once that is done if they're far enough away why should they care about the centre at all?
One of the more famous examples of a man ruling too much was Charles V with just the Habsburg empire.