What Did The Mongols Eat? The Army That Walked Its Dinner Across Asia

In the early 1220s a historian in Mosul called Ibn al-Athir spent years refusing to write the next chapter of his chronicle.

He admits it. The news from the east was so terrible that he could not bring himself to set it down, and when he finally did, he opened by wishing his mother had never borne him.

Then, in the middle of the worst news the Islamic world had ever received, he stopped to explain the catering.

These Tatars, he wrote, had no commissariat and no supply convoys. They drove sheep, cattle and horses along with them and ate them. Their horses dug through the ground with their hooves for roots, “knowing naught of barley”. Wherever they stopped, they needed nothing from anybody.

Every army he had ever heard of was built around a granary. He had just watched one ride over half of Asia without one, and he knew exactly what he was looking at.

Search “what did the Mongols eat” today and the answer usually sits near the bottom of the page: mare’s milk, some dried meat, a bit of horse blood in emergencies, a colourful aside before the serious business of stirrups and bows. Ibn al-Athir, whose world was ending as he wrote, put the food near the top. He had the better seat.

The boy who ate roots

Temujin was born on the steppe of what is now northern Mongolia, around 1162.

His father, Yesügei, was a minor chief with herds, which on the steppe is the same thing as saying he had money. When the boy was about nine, Yesügei stopped to eat with a camp of Tatars, who recognised an old enemy and poisoned his food. He rode home and died.

His people did the practical thing. They packed up, drove off the herds, and left his widow, Hoelun, alone on the grass with her children.

The Secret History of the Mongols, the oldest surviving account the Mongols wrote of themselves, lists what she fed them. Wild pears. Bird cherries. The roots of burnet and cinquefoil, dug with a juniper stick. Wild onion, lily bulbs, garlic chives. The boys bent needles into hooks and fished the Onon River.

It was the diet of a family that had lost its animals, and everyone on the steppe knew it. Plants were what you ate when the herd was gone. The historian John Masson Smith, who spent years on the Mongols’ food, notes that they regarded all of it as second-rate.

The fish mattered enough that Temujin and his brother Qasar murdered their half-brother Begter in an argument over one.

The family clawed its way back one animal at a time. By his teens they had eight geldings and little else, and when raiders took those, Temujin rode after them for days and brought them home. The Secret History tells that chase at length, because eight horses were nearly the whole of the family’s future.

He married Börte, the girl he had been promised to as a boy. The Merkits raided his camp and carried her off; he gathered allies, and brought her back. The allies became a following, the following became a confederation, and in 1206, at a great assembly at the headwaters of the Onon, the boy who had lived on lily bulbs was named Chinggis Khan.

Every grown man among the Mongols was now a soldier, organised in tens, hundreds and thousands. What they ate on the march was about to become the most important logistical fact of the century.

What the herd gave

A steppe family lived with five animals: horses, sheep, goats, cattle (yaks, up in the mountains) and camels. Sheep were the bulk of it. Smith reckoned a family needed around 100 sheep, or the equivalent in other stock, to live decently.

The herd fed them in two seasons, and Mongols still name them by colour.

Summer was the white foods. The animals gave milk for only a few months of the year, so everything depended on turning it into something that would keep.

The prize was fermented mare’s milk, koumiss, now airag. Friar William of Rubruck, a Flemish missionary who spent 1253 and 1254 among the Mongols, watched it made. The milk went into a great hide bag, and a man beat it with a club whose lower end was the size of a head and hollowed out. It foamed like new wine, soured, and was drunk when it bit the tongue. Rubruck rather liked it. He said it left a taste like almond milk.

In summer, he reported, as long as there was koumiss, they cared about no other food.

He also noted who did what. The men milked the mares and churned the koumiss. The women drove the wagons, milked the cows, and made the butter and the grut. The butter was boiled, stored in sheep’s stomachs, and kept for the winter. The grut was what remained after the butter: boiled until it curdled, dried in the sun until it was hard as slag, and bagged for winter, when it was dissolved in hot water and beaten until the family had something like milk again. (There is more on fermented milk in our piece on dairy, and on the old dairy trades in Butter Was Always Worth Taking.)

Winter was the red foods. When the milk dried up, the family ate its sheep, and horse when it could afford it, which was not often, because a horse was a vehicle, a weapon and a bank account. Meat that could not be eaten fresh was cut into strips and hung in the sun and wind, where, Rubruck says, it dried without salt and without going bad.

So what did the Mongols eat? Milk in summer and meat in winter, with the herd providing nearly everything, which is how The Carnivores of History puts it.

Nearly everything, because grain was there at the edges, and the edges tell the story.

John of Plano Carpini, the Pope’s envoy to the Mongol court in 1246, wrote that they had no bread, no herbs, no vegetables, nothing but meat. He also saw millet boiled so thin it had to be drunk, a cup or two in the morning and nothing else until the evening’s meat. That millet came from somewhere else. A Chinese traveller crossing western Mongolia in 1221 found flour hauled in by camel from beyond the Tian Shan and selling for a ruinous price in silver.

Grain on the steppe was a luxury bought from farmers. After the conquests it became something better: a tribute. Chinggis’s son Ögedei ordered 500 wagons of food and drink to arrive at his new capital, Karakorum, every single day, from the fields of northern China.

What the herd could not give, conquered farmers were made to grow.

How a Mongol horseman went to war

Marco Polo spent the 1270s and 1280s in the service of Chinggis’s grandson Kublai, and he described the riders with the fascination of a Venetian who had never seen anything like them.

Each man, he said, had on average eighteen horses and mares. He rode one and changed when it tired, so the army moved at the pace of fresh horses rather than exhausted ones.

On a long expedition they carried almost nothing: two leather bottles for milk and a small earthenware pot for meat.

They also carried milk dried into a paste, around ten pounds a man. The milk was boiled, the cream skimmed off for butter, and the rest dried in the sun. In the morning a rider dropped half a pound of the paste into his leather bottle with some water and set off. By midday the horse had shaken it into a thin porridge, and that, Polo writes, made his dinner. Europe would be selling powdered milk to itself as a modern miracle six centuries later.

And when speed mattered more than anything, Polo says, they could ride ten days without lighting a fire or eating a meal. They lived on their horses’ blood, opening a vein, letting it jet into their mouths, drinking their fill and closing the wound.

That is the famous version, and every piece of it has a witness. The awkward question is whether it adds up to an army.

Where the arithmetic ran short

John Masson Smith did the sums, in a paper called “Mongol Campaign Rations: Milk, Marmots, and Blood?” The question mark in the title is doing a lot of work.

Mare’s milk is thin stuff, about 214 calories a pound, much weaker than a ewe’s. To live on koumiss alone at 2,000 calories a day, Smith worked out in a later paper, a man needs around 9 pints of it, which is the entire surplus of two mares after their foals have fed. And mares give it for only a few months of the year.

Blood tides a man over. It cannot feed him for a season. Smith was just as doubtful that wild game, marmots included, could feed an army at scale.

So the romantic picture, a horde living on milk and horse blood from Mongolia to Hungary, does not survive the arithmetic. What does survive it is the part Ibn al-Athir saw: the flocks walking beside the army, eaten as it went, and, on enemy ground, whatever the army took from the people it rode through.

The larder had legs. That was the invention.

It also had a limit, and the limit was never food. Every sheep in those flocks and every one of those remounts had to graze, every day, wherever the army stopped. A Mongol army could only go where the grass could carry it.

The empire’s timing backs the point from both ends. Tree rings from central Mongolia show an unbroken run of warm, wet years from 1211 to 1225, the steppe unusually green, exactly as Chinggis launched his great campaigns. And at the other end, Smith argued that the Mongols lost Syria in 1260 partly because Syria’s pastures could not keep their horses, which is why most of the army had already gone home before the battle at Ayn Jalut. Historians still argue over why the Mongols left Hungary in 1242. The death of Ögedei that winter is the traditional answer; pasture is one of the challengers.

Nobody argues about the principle. The Mongol army ate well. It was the horses that ran out of dinner.

The grain empires

The first great grain empire they took on was the Jin, rulers of northern China, a state of fields, granaries and walls.

The Mongols rode in in 1211. The Jin fielded enormous armies and lost them. They pulled their court south in 1214, and in 1215 their northern capital, Zhongdu, where Beijing now stands, fell after a long siege. The Jin state lasted until 1234, a grain empire slowly starved of its own grain.

Then came Khwarazm, a new and wealthy empire stretching across Central Asia and Iran. In 1218 its governor at Otrar massacred a caravan of merchants travelling under the Khan’s protection, and the Shah executed an envoy sent to complain. Between 1219 and 1221 the Mongols took the Shah’s cities one by one: Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Merv, Nishapur. The Shah fled west and died on an island in the Caspian Sea. It was this campaign that Ibn al-Athir could not bring himself to write about.

The hardest of them all was the Song, the great rice empire of southern China, protected by rivers, marshes and walled cities that did not care how fast a horse could run. It took the Mongols until 1279. They won in the end by building fleets, hiring engineers and marching Chinese infantry, which is another way of saying Kublai had to become a grain emperor to beat one.

In the west, on 9 April 1241, a Mongol army destroyed a Polish and German force at Liegnitz. Two days later another wiped out the Hungarian army at Mohi.

The chroniclers of Europe had already made up their minds about what these people ate. Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans, wrote them into his chronicle as “rather monsters than men”, thirsting for and drinking blood, devouring dogs and human beings. Carpini, who actually went to them, came back with a stranger and more precise list: dogs, wolves, foxes, horses, mice, even lice, even the afterbirth of their mares.

Their contempt never quite lands. The men who wrote it came from kingdoms that lived on bread and pottage, and they had just been beaten by people who lived on meat and milk.

The men who looked at a farm and saw a tax

The most revealing moment of the whole collision happened at the Mongol court itself.

Early in Ögedei’s reign, some of his courtiers put forward a simple plan for northern China. The farmers were of no use to the Mongols. Clear them off and turn the land into pasture.

A Khitan adviser called Yelü Chucai talked the Khan out of it. His official biography records the argument: leave the farmers in their fields, tax them and their trade, and the land would yield 500,000 taels of silver, 80,000 bolts of silk and more than 400,000 measures of grain every year. Ögedei told him to prove it. In 1231, the story goes, the year’s takings were laid out in the palace courtyard for the Khan to inspect.

The herders had worked out in a single conversation what the settled world had known for four thousand years. You cannot tax a flock that walks away in the night. You can tax a field. It sits there, it ripens on a date everyone knows, and it can be counted, carted and stored. Grain did not build the early states because it was good food. It built them because it was easy to take.

Rome knew it. It fed its legions on wheat and its gladiators on barley, and Pliny records that the gladiators were nicknamed “barley men” (the arena’s side of this story is in The Barley Men).

The Mongols were not free in any modern sense. Every man belonged to his ten, his hundred and his thousand, and rode when he was called. The Khan took his share of the herds too: Ögedei ordered one two-year-old wether from every flock, every year, for the Khan’s soup.

But look at what the levy was. A sheep, for soup. The Khan took the herder’s animal and the herder’s service, and the herder went home and ate from the flock he still owned. The farmers of the empire ate what they were made to grow, and handed over the rest.

The road home

The empire policed the longest roads in the medieval world. Merchants, envoys and armies crossed Eurasia on them in months. So, in the end, did something else.

In the Chüy valley, near Lake Issyk-Kul in what is now Kyrgyzstan, there is a Christian cemetery with a startling number of gravestones dated 1338 and 1339. Some of them name the cause of death as pestilence. In 2022, geneticists pulled plague DNA from the teeth of people buried there, and found it was the source strain of the Black Death itself. The disease lives in the burrowing rodents of the Tian Shan mountains, marmots among them. The same steppe that fed the riders was holding it all along.

From Central Asia it moved west along the trade routes of the Mongol khanates. In 1346 a Mongol army of the Golden Horde was besieging the Genoese port of Caffa, in the Crimea, when plague broke out in its camp.

What happened next is usually told as settled fact. It rests on one man. Gabriele de’ Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza, wrote that the dying Mongols catapulted their corpses over the walls, and that fleeing Genoese ships then carried the plague to Italy. Documents place de’ Mussis at home in Piacenza, and he never claims to have seen any of it. The microbiologist Mark Wheelis, who went through the evidence in 2002, judged the catapult plausible as the way plague got into Caffa, but concluded that the ships carrying it west were many, from many ports, over more than a year. Caffa was one door among several.

The plague reached Sicily in the autumn of 1347 and England in the summer of 1348. On most estimates it killed between a third and a half of the English.

And the survivors ate differently.

Labour was suddenly scarce, and a labourer could name his price. Christopher Dyer studied the food allowances for harvest workers on a Norfolk manor at Sedgeford. In 1256, by value, bread made up 41% of what they were given, and meat 4%. By 1387, bread was down to 14% and meat up to 30%. Barley bread became wheat bread. Bacon became beef.

The authorities noticed. In 1363 Parliament set out by statute what servants should be fed: meat or fish once a day, and for the rest, milk, butter and cheese. The story of what the English peasant ate before and after that, and why it took a catastrophe to change it, is in our piece on the medieval peasant’s diet and Forbidden Flesh.

So the empire of herders did one last thing to the grain world, entirely by accident. It carried in the disease that put, for a century or so, the herder’s food on the English labourer’s plate.

What they did with it

Line up the peoples in this story and a pattern shows through.

The Jin farmer ate what the harvest allowed and handed over what the state required. The farmer of Khwarazm and the rice-grower of the Song did the same. The English labourer was fed by his lord’s allowance, and when plague finally gave him bargaining power, Parliament wrote down what he was to be given. Every one of them had somebody above him deciding what reached his plate. (The English side of that fight, and why beef came to stand for liberty, is in Beef and Liberty.)

The steppe herder was the exception. He owed the Khan a sheep and his sword arm. Nobody told him to eat less of his own flock, and nobody could have enforced it on a man who could pack his house onto a cart by lunchtime.

Left to decide for himself, he ate the fat of his sheep, drank the milk of his mares, dried the curd for winter, and treated a bowl of millet as something you bought from strangers at a bad price. When he lost his animals, he ate roots and called them what they were. When he had animals, he rode over the richest farmland on earth and charged the farmers rent.

The army of the century that fed itself best was the one that never waited for a harvest. Pemmican did the same job for other riders on another continent, dried meat and fat carried on the march, and the principle has not changed since. Food that walks with you cannot be burned in a granary or taxed at the gate.

Every summer on the Mongolian steppe, the mares are still milked, and a hide bag of airag still hangs inside the door of the ger. Whoever passes it gives the paddle a few strokes, because that is how the milk turns.

Ibn al-Athir noticed, in the worst chapter he ever wrote, that these people needed nothing from anybody.