Eurasian dead
About 20-40 million, highly uncertain.
The 20-40 million band is a confession of uncertainty. Some cities in Persian sources have numbers that cannot all be literal. The honest move is a range plus local studies.
Korea's cost was demographic, political, and naval -- years of campaign and levy.
Bands
Some city chronicles
Figures that cannot all be literal -- reported as claims.
Goryeo
Repeated campaigns and later levy -- a national demographic and political cost.
Deportations
Artisans moved as a form of loss for sending cities.
Later plague debate
Fourteenth-century mortality is a different file, sometimes wrongly dumped into 1240.
Regions
Mongolia / steppe
Political origin.
China
Jin, Song, Yuan -- the longest conquest.
Central Asia / Iran
Khwarezm to Ilkhanate.
Rus' / Eastern Europe
1240s shock and Horde tax.
Korea
War, submission, ship levy.
Japan / Levant edges
Failure and limit as geography.
Key numbers
Unification1206
Deaths (band)about 20-40 million
Baghdad1258
Japan fleets1274 and 1281
Makers
Steppe horse economy
The biological base of mobility.
Conquered workshops
Weapons and later ships as extracted industry.
Yuan bureaucracy
A Chinese-style machine on a conquest throne.
Goryeo shipyards
Forced makers of the Japan war.
Persian and Chinese chroniclers
The makers of the numbers we now distrust and use.
Later map publishers
The blob-makers of English memory.
Artisan deportations moved skills as well as suffering -- a cold economic fact in the sources.
Later plague arguments (fourteenth century) are a sequel hypothesis, not a thirteenth-century body count.