How did Mongols go from the world's largest continental empire to an irrelevant, poor and miserable buffer state?

How did Mongols go from the world's largest continental empire to an irrelevant, poor and miserable buffer state?

horse archers are a hell of a drug

They didn't really have a sustainable system for secession.

That and the larger an empire is, the more unstable it generally is.

Once you finish a game 100% you tend to not play it ever again, unless it has great replay value.

The Mongols were just following in the footsteps of their ancestors. The Eurasian steppe has been a noted trade path since Paleolithic times, long before the silk road. It's easy to mass migrate across it if you have horses. There's tons of open pasture, even more then then now.

Because an empire built like that is not sustainable for many reasons.

1. An empire that large, despites many Khan's best efforts to maintain it, is not sustainable.

2. The Mongols were shit at anything bureaucratic. The didn't really even have a written language when Ghengis' began his conquest. To compensate for this, the Mongols employed many literate men to help run the massive logistical aspects of their large empire. They also tended to autistically move them around to prevent any anger from the guys whose towns they just fucked.

3. Their empire was split from the start with different sons and grandsons ruling different areas. This naturally just led to push backs from the ethnic groups that lived their originally.

4. Technological advances eventually rendered their tactics obsolete.

The Mongols are fucking dope at conquering and not bad at ruling. The amount of land they conquered in the amount of time they did is just unsustainable as fuck. Look at Alexander's empire and what happened to it after his death, same sort of think. Greece is essentially an irrelevant, poor, and miserable state at this point too.

Same way how the >Holy>Roman>Empire got divided up under a certain ruler's son. No concise or specific centralized form of succession leads to this kind of shit. That's why the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, British, Spanish, French, Ottomans, etc...were able to hold onto their large empires for so long.
Also while I don't disagree that Mongols themselves were awful governors and administrators, there's a reason why they were known for using Persians and Chinese to act as the middle men and managers of their territories in almost all of their territories in Eastern and Western Asia.

Because guns are a hard counter to horse archers

Steppe people spent all of history bullying sedentary people until around the 18th century when Russians, Persians, and Chinese got reliable and mass produced guns.

Taking over a whole lot of nothing

Mongols are overrated when WE WUZ QINGZ managed to hold on to China for 268 years.