Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1250

The world in AD 1250

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

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TL;DR — In 1250 the Mongol Empire, between two Great Khans, ran from northern China to the Russian steppe; slave soldiers took Egypt, Louis IX sat in captivity, and Mali was young.

The world of 1250 had one power that touched almost every other. The Mongols, two generations after Genghis Khan, ruled the largest contiguous empire yet assembled, and the Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline describes the relay stations that carried letters between its Chinese, Central Asian and Iranian domains. Beyond the Mongol frontier the year fell on a set of changes of hand. In Egypt the slave soldiers of the Ayyubid sultans overthrew their master. In France the king was a prisoner on the Nile. In West Africa the state Sundiata Keita had founded was less than two decades old. Cities with writing and kings stood in China, Japan, northern India, the Islamic world and Europe; on the East African coast Kilwa’s merchants handled Indian Ocean trade; in the Americas Cahokia was past its peak and Chan Chan had not reached its own; and in the Pacific the last islands on Earth were being settled.

Africa

The Mali Empire was in its first generation. World History Encyclopedia dates its founding to 1240, after Sundiata Keita (r. 1230–1255) defeated the kingdom of Sosso, and places his capital at Niani near the Sankarani River, close to the gold and salt traffic between the Sahara and the forests to the south. On the Zimbabwe plateau the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, which UNESCO dates to the 11th to 15th centuries, was a trading center of the Shona. Down the coast, UNESCO’s listing for Kilwa Kisiwani records that from the 13th century its merchants dealt in gold, silver, pearls, Persian earthenware and Chinese porcelain, so that much of the Indian Ocean trade passed through their hands.

West Asia

Egypt changed rulers in 1250. The Heilbrunn Timeline records that mamluks (slave soldiers) of Qipchaq Turkic origin overthrew the last independent Ayyubid sultan, Turan Shah (r. 1249–50), and set up their own rule from Cairo, the start of the Mamluk sultanate that lasted until 1517. The Abbasid caliphate still sat in Baghdad, but Encyclopaedia Iranica records that the qaghan Möngke sent his brother Hülegü west in 1255; the Ismaili castles of the Alborz fell in 1256 and Baghdad in 1258, when the caliphate was extinguished. The Mongol advance stopped at Ayn Jalut in Galilee in 1260, where the new Mamluk army beat the force Hülegü had left behind.

Europe

Two rulers defined the year. Louis IX of France, who had sailed from Aigues-Mortes in August 1248 and taken Damietta in June 1249, was routed at Mansourah in 1250, captured and ransomed; the Centre des monuments nationaux records that he did not return to France until 1254. In Paris his Sainte-Chapelle, built to hold the Crown of Thorns he had bought from the emperor of Constantinople in 1239, was already standing. In the south the emperor Frederick II, whose reign World History Encyclopedia gives as 1220 to 1250, died that year after a long war with the papacy, leaving the Holy Roman Empire to his son Conrad IV.

East Asia

China was divided. The Jurchen Jin dynasty had taken the north in 1125, and the Song court had moved to Hangzhou, where the Heilbrunn Timeline says it ruled for another 150 years as the Southern Song. Encyclopaedia Iranica dates the Jin (Chin) dynasty to 1123–1234, and by 1250 northern China was Mongol, with Kublai as its viceroy, so the Southern Song faced the Mongols alone; World History Encyclopedia records that Möngke, who became Great Khan at the kurultai of 1251, planned a four-pronged attack on Song China and died on that campaign in 1259. In Japan the bakufu, the government of warrior chieftains and their regents, ruled from Kamakura near modern Tokyo while the emperor reigned in Kyoto; the Heilbrunn Timeline dates this Kamakura order from 1185.

South Asia

Northern India was ruled from Delhi by the Turkic sultans who had succeeded Shams ud-Din Iltutmish (r. 1210–1236). His daughter Razia had ruled from 1236 to 1240 and been deposed by the Turkish nobles known as the Group of Forty, who then put her stepbrother Muiz ud-Din Bahram Shah on the throne (r. 1240–1242); World History Encyclopedia describes these nobles as the real power in the sultanate after Iltutmish’s death. For the peninsula south of the sultanate no source opened for this page gave a dated account, so nothing is claimed here about the southern kingdoms of 1250.

Central Asia

The steppe and oasis belt between China and Iran was Mongol ground. The Heilbrunn Timeline lists the Chagatai khanate (c. 1227–1363) in Central Asia among the four branches of the empire and describes the relay system of horse stations that carried written messages between the domains of the Great Khan, the Chagatai, the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanids. Encyclopaedia Iranica adds that local populations were obliged to maintain these postal stations, called jam in Mongolian and yam in Turkish, and to feed passing envoys. In 1250 the empire had no Great Khan; Iranica records a three-year interval after the death of Güyük before Möngke was enthroned, and World History Encyclopedia gives the kurultai that made him Great Khan as 1251, after which he purged the princes of the houses of Ögedei and Chagatai who had opposed him.

The Americas

North of Mexico the largest settlement, Cahokia near modern St. Louis, was already declining; UNESCO’s listing gives its peak population of 10,000 to 20,000 between 1050 and 1150 and its Mississippian occupation as 800 to 1400. In the Southwest, Chaco Canyon, which UNESCO describes as a major center of ancestral Pueblo culture between 850 and 1250, was at the end of its run. On the north coast of Peru the Chimú kingdom ruled from Chan Chan, the largest city in pre-Columbian America, though UNESCO dates its apogee to the 15th century, so in 1250 the city was two centuries short of it.

Oceania

The Pacific was still being settled. A radiocarbon study by Janet Wilmshurst and colleagues, published in PNAS in 2011, found that people reached the Society Islands about 1025–1120 and then spread in one pulse to every remaining island of East Polynesia, including New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui, about 1190–1290. On that dating, the first Maori landings in New Zealand fell within a few decades of 1250. For Rapa Nui, UNESCO’s listing gives an older settlement date of c. AD 300 and dates the carving of the moai to the 10th to 16th centuries; the two chronologies disagree on when people arrived, but both place moai carving in progress in 1250. Australia’s Aboriginal societies left no written record for this year, and no source consulted here dates a specific event there to 1250.

Sources

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APA
Our Earth's History. (2026, September 20). The world in AD 1250. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1250/
Chicago
Our Earth's History. “The world in AD 1250.” Our Earth's History, September 20, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1250/.
MLA
“The world in AD 1250.” Our Earth's History, 20 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1250/.

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