From the perspective of the Song, these three northern rivals had much in common. They all were master horsemen who were very hard for the Chinese to defeat in open battle. Their basic social structure was tribal, but they had adopted many elements of Chinese statecraft. Beginning in , the Song made efforts to buy peace by agreeing to make annual payments of money and silk to them in exchange for their agreement not to invade. The Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol states all ruled over their Chinese subjects in ways that drew on Chinese traditions, making distinctions between Chinese subjects and other subjects which included several different northern ethnic groups.
Both the Song and Mongol forces used "thunder crash" bombs during the siege, a type of gunpowder weapon. The Mongols also utilized siege crossbows and traction trebuchets.
The Song forces used fire arrows and fire lances in addition to their own "thunder crash" bombs. The Song forces also used paddle ships. The Song forces delivered them to the enemy via trebuchets. Armor made out of iron could be penetrated by pieces of the bomb after the explosion, which had a 50 kilometer noise range.
Political infighting in the Song also caused the fall of Xiangyang and Fancheng, due to the power of the Lu family. Many questioned their allegiance to the Song, and the Emperor barred Jia Sidao himself from the command. Li Tingzhi, an enemy of the Lu family, was appointed commander. Jia permitted the Lu to ignore Li's orders, resulting in a fractious command. Li was then unable to relieve Xiangyang and Fancheng, managing only temporary resupply during several breaks in the siege.
Bayan of the Baarin , the Mongol commander, then sent half of his force up-river to wade to the south bank in order to build a bridge across to take the Yang lo fortress. Three thousand Song boats came up the Han river and were repulsed; fifty boats destroyed with 2, dead. Xianyang's commander then surrendered to the Mongol commander.
The entire force including the surrendering commander sailed down the Yangtze, and the forts along the way fell, as this commander, now allied with the Mongols, had also commanded many of the down river garrisons.
In , Kublai ordered the construction of five thousand ships. Three years later, an additional two thousand ships were ordered built; these would carry about 50, troops to give battle to the Song. In , Fencheng capitulated, the Mongols putting the entire population to the sword to terrorize the inhabitants of Xianyang. After the surrender of the city of Xiangyang, several thousand ships were deployed. The Song fleet, despite their deployment as a coastal defense fleet or coast guard more than an operational navy , was more than a match for the Mongols.
Under his great general Bayan, Khublai unleashed a riverine attack upon the defended city of Xiangyang on the Han River. The Mongols prevailed, ultimately, but it would take five more years of hard combat to do so. By , the Mongols emerged victorious on the Han River. The Yangtse River was opened for a large fleet that could conquer the Southern Song empire. A year later, the child-prince Zhao Xian was made emperor. Resistance continued, resulting in Bayan's massacre of the inhabitants of Changzhou in and mass suicide of the defenders at Changsha in January When the Yuan Mongol-Chinese troops and fleet advanced and one prefecture after the other submitted to the Yuan, Jia Sidao offered his own submission, but the Yuan chancellor Bayan refused.
The last contingents of the Song empire were heavily defeated, the old city of Jiankang Jiangsu fell, and Jia Sidao was killed. Zhao Shi was enthroned as Emperor Duanzong of Song far from the capital in the region of Fuzhou but he died soon afterwards on the flight southwards into modern Guangdong.
After the battle, as a last defiant act against the invaders, Lu Xiufu embraced the eight-year-old emperor and the pair leapt to their deaths from Mount Ya, thus marking the extinction of the Southern Song Dynasty. Emperor Bing , the last Song emperor claimant. Empress Dowager Xie had secretly sent the child emperor's two younger brothers to Fuzhou.
The strongholds of the Song loyalists fell one by one: Yangzhou in , Chongqing in and Hezhou in The loyalists fought the Mongols in the mountainous Fujian—Guangdong—Jiangxi borderland.
The end of the Mongol-Song war occurred on 19 March , when Song warships faced a fleet of to Yuan Mongol warships at Yamen. Catapults as a weapon system were rejected by Kublai's court, for they feared the Song fleet would break out if they used such weapons. Instead, they developed a plan for a maritime siege, in order to starve the Song into submission. But at the outset, there was a defect in the Song tactics that would later be exploited by Yuan at the conclusion of the battle.
The Song wanted a stronger defensive position, and the Song fleet "roped itself together in a solid mass[,]" in an attempt to create a nautical skirmish line. Results were disastrous for the Song: they could neither attack nor maneuver. Escape was also impossible, for the Song warships lacked any nearby base.
Little by little the rich Southern Song realms began to fall apart politically. In the Southern Song finally fell to Kublai Khan, and for the first time in several centuries China was united. As Kublai Khan captured more and more of the Song lands, he declared his reign to be a new dynasty for China.
He adopted Chinese dress and customs, incorporated Chinese methods of governing and management, and assembled a team of local advisers to help him administer the country.
One of the most important of these was Liu Bingzhong. Constructed for both government and business, its lavish facilities deeply impressed the Venetian traveler Marco Polo when he met Kublai.
Marco Polo's odyssey introduced Europe to the wonders of Asia. Little remains of its splendor today; dark brick walls still stand, but the magnificent palace with marble and gold-plated rooms described by Marco Polo is gone.
After the Yuan dynasty fell in , the city lingered but was most likely abandoned by To center the empire more in Chinese territory, the capital shifted southeast to Dadu today the site of Beijing , also on the advice of Liu.
Even so, the Yuan hierarchy was rigid: Mongols occupied the top of the heap, followed by Central Asians and then the Chinese. In the Yuan dynasty, the Mongols controlled the central government. To assist them in administration, they appointed former nomads and Muslims from Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europeans to positions of power.
Chinese civil servants could hold offices at lower levels, but deep-seated distrust barred them from rising through the ranks. He said that his body—the location of which is now lost—should rest alongside that of his grandfather Genghis in Burkhan Khaldun, a mountain in northeastern Mongolia. The conquest of China, where he forged the Yuan dynasty, would stand as his greatest achievement.
Yet he could not have done so without adopting Chinese customs, thus alienating Mongol aristocrats who regarded the Chinese as inferior. This tension between the Mongol elite and its subject peoples— especially the Chinese—played a major role in destabilizing Mongol rule.
Although at his death Kublai would leave an empire that was relatively stable and prosperous, it would survive him by less than a century. All rights reserved.
History Magazine News. Trusted advisors. He feared that his dependence on Chinese officials left him vulnerable to future revolts and defections to the Song.
He instituted the reforms proposed by his Chinese advisers by centralizing the bureaucracy, expanding the circulation of paper money, and maintaining the traditional monopolies on salt and iron. He restored the Imperial Secretariat and left the local administrative structure of past Chinese dynasties unchanged.
However, Kublai rejected plans to revive the Confucian imperial examinations and divided Yuan society into three, later four, classes, with the Han Chinese occupying the lowest rank. Kublai readied the move of the Mongol capital from Karakorum in Mongolia to Khanbaliq in , constructing a new city near the former Jurchen capital Zhongdu, now modern Beijing, in In , Kublai formally claimed the Mandate of Heaven and declared that was the first year of the Great Yuan in the style of a traditional Chinese dynasty.
The era name was changed to Zhiyuan to herald a new era of Chinese history. The adoption of a dynastic name legitimized Mongol rule by integrating the government into the narrative of traditional Chinese political succession. Khublai evoked his public image as a sage emperor by following the rituals of Confucian propriety and ancestor veneration, while simultaneously retaining his roots as a leader from the steppes. The Yuan dynasty is traditionally given credit for reuniting China after several hundred years of fragmentation following the fall of the Tang dynasty.
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