The Mongols may not have troubled many modern museum curators with their art or left fine buildings to admire but they did leave a lasting legacy in other ways. Perhaps their greatest effect on world culture was to make the first serious connections between the East and West. The Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire up to that point, stretched across one-fifth of the globe and their soldiers were obliged to fight Teutonic knights at one end while at the other they faced samurai warriors, neither of which enemy had any notion of the other's existence. Hitherto, the Chinese and Europeans had each viewed the other's lands as a semi-mythical place of monsters. As ambassadors, missionaries, merchants, and travellers like Marco Polo (1254-1324) were encouraged to freely cross Asia, so contact increased, and ideas and religions were spread. Gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass all became familiar in Europe. The Mongols spread ideas in cuisine, too, such as making their sulen (shulen) broth-come-stew a popular dish across Asia even today. There were, alas, less advantageous consequences, like the Black Death (1347-1352), first transferred from a pocket of remote China to the Black Sea and from there to Venice and the rest of Europe. In Mongolia, though, the empire is remembered fondly as a golden era and Genghis Khan, the starter of it all, continues to be honoured with regular ceremonies in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.
— Mongol Empire - World History Encyclopedia
