Mongol Empire

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Founded in 1206 when a kurultai proclaimed Temujin as Chinggis Khan, and at its height the largest contiguous land empire in history. Its conquests were catastrophic for the route cities themselves, destroying Samarkand in 1220 and Merv in 1221, but the single political authority that followed made the corridors safer to travel than at any point before or since, the period conventionally called the Pax Mongolica. The empire fragmented into four khanates after 1260; the Yuan dynasty in China fell in 1368. The same security that carried Marco Polo and papal envoys east also carried plague west. An abstract polity, not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.