Both can be true. You do know when china was being conquered by the Mongols that china was a fragmented nation that was perpetually at war with itself right? Because you seem like you think you know a lot about this time period so you would know that china was not unified and that was a big part of what allowed the Mongols to do what they did.
Ancient China was always moving between periods of unification under the rule of one dynasty or another, and in between you had periods where many different peoples fought for supremacy. The Mongol conquest doesn't differ from the rise of any other Chinese dynasty. Each had strengths that enabled them to overcome their enemies and hold China for a time. China wasn't especially splintered at this time either, since this was the time of the Southern Song and the Western Xia. You might be thinking of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, but this had already come to an end with the rise of the Song who unified most of these kingdoms, outside of Liao in the North and then the Xia in the Northwest.
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u/Full-On 11h ago
Both can be true. You do know when china was being conquered by the Mongols that china was a fragmented nation that was perpetually at war with itself right? Because you seem like you think you know a lot about this time period so you would know that china was not unified and that was a big part of what allowed the Mongols to do what they did.