After losing China, the Mongol court kept ruling the steppe for 267 years
When Ming armies closed on Beijing in 1368, the last Yuan emperor did not surrender; he rode north. His descendants kept the grand title of Great Yuan and a claim to China for generations, and in 1449 an Oirat warlord ruling through their puppet khans even captured a Ming emperor in battle.
Northern Yuan is a label historians use for the Mongol state on the Mongolian Plateau from 1368 until 1635, when the Jurchen Later Jin, soon renamed the Qing, conquered it. The term first appears in the Korean chronicle Goryeosa. The Mongols themselves spoke of the Great Mongol State, and Mongolian chronicles call the era the Forty and the Four, after forty eastern and four western tümen, military-tribal units.
Yuan rule in China had been cracking since 1344, when the Yellow River flooded and shifted course, wrecking harvests and blocking the Grand Canal. The Red Turban Rebellion of 1351 lifted a peasant, Zhu Yuanzhang, to found the Ming. Toghon Temür fled Dadu for Shangdu and died at Yingchang in 1370; the court fell back to Karakorum and even beat a pursuing Ming army in 1372. But the Ming sacked Karakorum in 1380, and a decisive defeat near Buir Lake in 1388 broke Yuan power on the steppe. That year Jorightu Khan Yesüder took the throne and dropped the Chinese-style imperial titles.
For the next century khans were often figureheads installed by whichever warlord was strongest, a stretch remembered as the period of small kings. The western Oirats rose as kingmakers. Their leader Esen Taishi routed a huge Ming army and seized the Zhengtong Emperor in the Tumu Crisis of 1449, though he failed to take Beijing and released the emperor after a peace. When Esen declared himself Yuan emperor in 1453, fellow nobles revolted, and he was killed in 1455.
Unity returned through a remarkable widow. After Manduulun Khan died in 1478, his young wife Mandukhai proclaimed a seven-year-old descendant of Genghis Khan as khan. He ruled as Dayan Khan, a name possibly echoing Great Yuan, and by 1510 the pair had subdued rival factions. Dayan then parcelled the realm among his sons, decentralising power, yet the nobility stayed largely at peace until Ligdan Khan's troubled reign ended in defeat by the Later Jin. Tibetan Buddhism spread deeply through Mongol society in those final decades.
Source: Northern Yuan
