Managing Movement: Climate Migration Between the Mongolian Plateau and North China in the Late Mongol Yuan and Early Ming Empires from the 14th to 15th Centuries

The Mongol Empire stood at a climatic crossroads between the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), where climate patterns destabilized and aggregate temperatures dropped. The Ming Empire inherited the challenges of a cooling climate, as it did many of the political challenges and rulership strategies of the late Mongol Yuan Empire. Migration from the Mongolian plateau to the south was one challenge both regimes faced during this period, yet to date how those migrations of steppe peoples, soldiers, families, and their animals related to changing climatic conditions it not well understood. This paper makes a preliminary attempt to combine recent palaeoclimatological and archaeological evidence for deteriorating environmental conditions in the Mongolian steppe–especially the south– and North China in the MCA-LIA transition and to map these onto textual records for migration. The study employs region-specific multi-proxy data (lakebed, seabed, speleothem, tree-ring etc.) to analyze Mongol migration as recorded in the Yuan-Ming dynastic histories, a Ming imperial Mongol-language textbook, and gazetteers. It argues that climate-induced migration was trans-ecological, animal-conscious, and state-managed. Remarkable continuity further exists between regimes in their approach to adaptation: both attempted to fix people and animals in place and to delineate suitable subsistence practices, which could include a degree of agrarianism and were often related to the military. The study seeks to complicate previous studies of disaster and migration in the Yuan–Ming transition as largely political phenomena or spurred by normative disaster unrelated to a broader planetary climate transition.