The Mongols or as some primary sources call them "tartars" were a tribe of nomads from North Asia which is now modern day Mongolia. They lived on the nomadic steppes where they never settled for long as they had to move along differing areas for grazing. They were forever dependent on and attached to their horses, which was their main mode of transportation. Religiously, the Mongols were polytheistic which later turned to larger religions such as Islam and neo-Christianity (Nestorians), the former being of importance at the time of the settlement of parts of the Middle East under the Ilkhanate horde. The rise of Genghis khan (or Chengis) as a tribal chief (1206-1227) allowed for the unification of the tribes of the Mongols as well as the Turkic's nearby, so forth allowing for a more professionalized army that set out to conquer lands that would suit the Mongols to expand into powerful power bases such as northern china and central Asia, for more far afield conquests such as Persia and later the Middle East.
The way the Mongols conquered was also a large determining factor to their significance in the Middle East due to the stories spread about them along trade routes. These stories "Stories have been related to me, which the hearer can scarcely credit, as to the terror of [the Mongols] which God almighty cast into men's hearts;" were, of a conquer who would devastate and massacre any city that would dare to resist the Mongols, for example, when he besieged the city of Herat, he killed most of the population, sources mainly agree the figure is around 1,600,000. In the six centuries before the Mongols, Islamic culture had dominated the Middle East. After the Mongols, much of the Middle East also had Mongolian features, including much of its government and economic systems. The thesis of the paper shall be that though the Mongol forces did get a limited way to into the middle east, their impact was still significant where they did not and even more so where they did get too, such as Iran, parts of Syria and some of Turkey.
