As you can imagine, the Mongols weren't much for administrative tasks, like keeping records, so they found people who were good at that stuff and just moved them around the empire. This created the kind of cross-cultural pollination that world historians these days get really excited about. And five, the Mongols were almost unprecedentedly tolerant of different religions. They themselves were shamanists, believing in nature spirits, but since their religion was tied to the land from which they came, they didn't expect new people to adopt it, and they didn't ask them to. So you could find Muslims and Buddhists and Christians and people of any other religion you can think of prospering throughout the Mongol Empire. And it's that kind of openness that has led historians to go back and reevaluate the Mongols, seeing them as kind of a precursor to modernity. But there is another side of the story that we should not forget, so here are five reasons why the Mongols might not be so great.