None of the fortified towns in Hungary fell to the Mongols. This was a lesson not lost on King Bela, and he embarked on a massive fort construction project which made enough progress in time for the second Mongol invasion of Hungary, which the Hungarian kingdom much more thoroughly repulsed.
Actually the Mongol conquests were estimated to have reduced the human population by 10% being the single largest man made population decrease in history.
the Black Death is understandable (although hard to imagine such scale) but it's a pandemic, it happens.
But how do you kill 1,000,000 people in a couple of years visiting Hungary when you don't even have any real guns? How do you round up that many people from all over the countryside with primitive weapons and they don't try to escape or anything? Such a crazy thing to do...
Is the number from direct killings or just like, you turn up with a big army and raid food stores or interrupt agriculture in some way and then people starve because most are just scraping by as-is?
Very few towns were fortified in the first invasion. Yes, the murderousness of the Mongol horde was something else. They placed no value on human life.
Placing a high value on human life is a quite recent thing, back than nobody did that. The Western view of the Mongols is so distorted by ancient and modern "propaganda" that it is hard to get a objective view on them.
The funny thing is, while the Vikings are somehow romantized in media, despite being murserous pullagers and slavers (as opposed to normal Scandinavian folks), the Mongols still serve as this dark, evil barbarious outside menace. And that gies for China as well, just go watch Mulan...
> Placing a high value on human life is a quite recent thing
It's not something that suddenly appeared in the 18th century though. Rather it evolved over the centuries. Christianity and Islam did introduce some respect for human life through the concept of universal salvation. In the ancient times lives of most members of out groups were viewed as totally dispensable. During the middle ages that changed to some degree, generally mass murder and or enslavement of entire populations was frowned upon (even if still practiced on many occasions). And heathens were at least were offered the chance to convert before they became fair game.
Your opening sentence reminds me of all the "baby" gravestones you see in old cemeteries; they didn't even bother naming you until they were pretty sure you'd live. On the other hand, the final curse of the Pharaoh was everyone losing their first born son. I wonder if it was more about the damage to the family for them
Well scale matters just like literally anywhere else in human society. Small plane falls down in Brazil rainforest killing pilot? You won't even see it in your news. 350 people die via same way at once? News cycle won't let it go for few days, and its simply because people care much more.
I mean we talk about largest genocide in mankind's history, no amount of whataboutism is changing this simple fact and its all on contemporary mongols.
If Hitler's escapades killed 10 people overall he would be just a side note in history books as another questionable weirdo with grandiose plans.
well, they did show up deep in Europe and murder a lot of people, more than "usual", right? Sure the Europeans next showed up all over the world and did more things, but at least that would explain the shock?
I'm going to butt in here with an observation that might be 'uncool', but it needs to be voiced.
Mongols didn't just 'withdraw' and leave Europe alone. The article mentions they brought Chinese gunpowder - so they left behind a valuable technological legacy.
They killed one million Hungarians, but that was just one nation. The overall conquest(s) effected a vast death toll across Europe and near Asia.
What else did they leave behind? Not mentioned: a genetic legacy. This was a living legacy as impactful as anything else, arguable even more so...
And what's involved in that? Conquering armies tend to kill men and boys, and rape women and girls. (The most comprehensive recent record of similar events is from post-war Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...) A significant proportion of those rapes resulted in pregnancies. In medieval Europe, we can assume that abortion was mostly unavailable.
So actually, in one sense Mongols remained in Europe, spreading their genes through the most vile and traumatic acts inflicted on the hidden victims of conflict: women.
Women are half of humanity. It's wrong to neglect that aspect of invasion.
> The article mentions they brought Chinese gunpowder - so they left behind a valuable technological legacy.
Looking at the history of artillery in Europe, and the fact that it first developed in the West, it's far more likely that gunpowder technology was introduced from the Islamic world in the context of the Crusades and the Latin Kingdoms.
Women represent at most 2% of the victim of every war that we have data on. Trying to reframe the suffering of men, and only men, as a women problem is one the most vile things done by the modern zeitgeist. Shame on everyone who doesn't remember who really fights in war, and that is not women.
Right? The conclusion is quite suspect because the Mongols eventually did conquer southern China where it is perpetually warm and humid. What they ended up doing was solidifying their control of northern China and then adopting infantry based tactics and riverine warfare in addition to adopting trebuchets from the Middle East/Europeans. The Mongols were quite adaptable. I doubt warmer weather would be enough to stop them on its own.
> This wooden chronicle revealed that a cold and wet period set in for years, leading "to reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as hampering the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry", according to a press release.
The way I read it was the early spring thaw was to blame.
> The extra moisture and early spring thaw turned the Hungarian plains into marshes and swampland.
As in, they expected frozen ground not marshland that time of year. But reading the abstract of the original source, it seems like it was a combo.
> Documentary sources and tree-ring chronologies reveal warm and dry summers from 1238–1241, followed by cold and wet conditions in early-1242. Marshy terrain across the Hungarian plain most likely reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry
Currently reading the Mongoliad book series (Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and star cast of other contemporary sci-fi writers). Recommended if this kind of history is interesting to you.
"Horde" - a term long used to deflect the sophisticated tactical, strategic, technological, and governmental methods of the Mongols. Their accomplishments are not lost on the war colleges of the west (at the the US for sure, especially the US Marines), but no one else seems to know this.
- "orda" used almost exclusively for the Golden Horde. _IIRC_ that's where the form with "h" appeared first and propagated to other western languages. (I'm not saying that you're incorrect, I just haven't heard about a direct route from Mongolian to English.)
The word "Urdu" (as in the "Urdu language") has the same, Turkic origin (meaning "military camp"). It also exists in Persian, which influenced the development of the Urdu language.
The only difference between them and anyone else was the sweeping success. That, and that the Mongols directly threatened Europe from the outside, all other European wars were internal affaires. Except the European conquests outside of Europe of course.
The sweeping success was the cruelty though; whilst warfare was common in Europe despite relatively stable boundaries and low-level massacres of individual garrisons that refused to surrender were not uncommon (but also generally regarded as cruel), the murder of millions of people and deaths of tens of millions of people as a direct result of the targeting of their food supplies within a generation was unprecedented.
It's not like we generally have positive views of comparable scale "sweeping successes" exported from Europe like the Conquistadors or transatlantic slave trade
You put those two together as if they were both acts by Europeans, in which case: no, I don't have a positive view on them. I have a positive view on (re-)connecting the civilizations of America and Europe, and I have a positive view on the civilizations of the New World themselves. I don't have a positive view on Europeans "civilizing" the New World.
You could make the argument that the Enlightenment age spawned in Europe because of the vast amount of wealth generated by colonialism. And then you could make the argument that without colonialism as it happened, both the US Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution might not have happened, or maybe not in the same timeframe or with the same outcomes.
And then you could make the argument that all industrialization and social innovation that followed (such as modern democracy, medicine, space techology, computing) may not have happened either, or not in the same timeframe, or not in the same manner.
So when you start arguing about things "coming from colonialism", be aware that without history as it happened, we might not even be able to have this discussion here between people from all over the world. And that in general it's very hard to ascribe exactly which parts of today "come from" which parts of history.
No, that's not how this works. I've already given more to support my position than you have to support yours. If you only want to throw around baseless claims, go back to twitter. If you want to have a real discussion, support your own position before asking me to defend mine.
It allowed European to transfer/steal massive amounts of wealth from the rest of the world which in turn funded unparalleled investments into R&D. Eventually technological improvements (which according to some wouldn't have been possible without the transfers of wealth and labour into Europe) resulted in widespread (if uneven) net benefits to the entire global population.
Not really, wars between Christian states prior to the reformation were generally tame by comparison (obviously there were many exceptions). It's partly due to the reasons you've mentioned: total war and complete conquest were rare so you didn't want to be too extreme when raiding your neighbors territory since even if you don't get to keep it you might be the target next year.
Also there was this chivalry thing about avoiding to kill your opponents and treating them fairly after they were captures. Obviously this mainly applied to knights, the rich and the upper class. But paroling or holding ordinary soldiers for ransom was not rare either (due to reciprocity and because it was profitable) since most soldiers were professionals fighting for money and not poor peasants.
The church generally was a moderating influence as well (as long as the war wasn't against heretics or heathens).
Mongols on the other hand were extremely cruel even by the standards of the day (generally even the crusaders were much more tame in comparison)
Well the Byzantines had localized genocide/extremely violent pogrom targeting all the Latins/Italians living in Constantinople a few decades ago. This combined with various other real or perceived slights made the 4th Crusade a bit more ambiguous.
It's not like that justifies the sack but the Byzantines are definitely partially to blame for the animosity that had arisen between the east and west following the first crusade. Especially considering that they together with the pope pretty much started the entire crusade movement (the first crusade was supposed to just be a relief expedition to liberate the recently lost Roman territories in Anatolia).
The most telling example of this is the fact that the Egyptians and Crusaders had a ceasefire during the Mongol attempt to invade Egypt and the fact that the Crusaders did not join the horde.
There was nothing in European history comparable to the way Mongols and their Turko-Mongol successors massacred entire regions out of existence until WW2. They changed the entire ethnic make-up of Central Asia.
I've seen estimates that the mongols killed 10% of all living humans at one point in time. If true it makes them the single worst collective in human history
>That, and that the Mongols directly threatened Europe from the outside
This is flat out not true. Major cities were destroyed and inhabitants we're slaughtered wholesale. World class cities like Merv and Herat at went from being among the most populated cities in the world to depopulated villages. Places we know today like Baghdad and Kiev never recovered their former status. The Mongol siege of kaffa in Crimea is also believed to have led to one of the first outbreaks of the Black Death.
Their empire was as short lived as it were vast. Many local rulers were not subdued into a uniform bureaucracy. Cultural contributions were equally absent.
The Mongolians brought death and failed to have the literacy to write themselves as the victors.
Until the Nazis they were history’s greatest villains.
This is a bit unfair and maybe a bit eurocentric. The mongolians did not have a written language at the time of unification since their nation was brand new. Genghis Khan commissioned a new written language by hiring some Nestorian priests. If you go to the Forbidden city in Beijing you'll see that script next to Chinese on signs in the forbidden city as it is the written language of the Manchurians as well. Later, Kublai Khan commissioned a Tibetan priest to create yet another writing system, which influenced development of the Korean writing system.
The cultural influence is there, it's just that the longer lasting influence was to connect other cultures, like introducing gunpowder to Hungary.
That's patently not correct, mongols were this cartoonish evil that was killing left and right, for fun, murdered whole cities even when they surrendered without fight just because army leader didn't like something or slept badly last night.
Parallel with Hitler's conquest is not bad, a slightly different ideology but again "we above everybody else who are subhumans anyway so who cares", hence overall decimation of whole mankind (albeit the process was different, result was same).
In the Mediterranean world these things were not at all uncommon during the Hellenistic age. While they did introduce all of that to France, England, west Germany and Spanish interior. They brought extreme amounts of economic destruction and misery to the Greek world trough destruction and massive transfers of wealth and population to Italy.
> a term long used to deflect the sophisticated tactical, strategic, technological, and governmental methods of the Mongols
Setting aside the fact that the term refers to the Mongols using their own word, why are we describing their governmental methods as sophisticated? How do they perform relative to comparators?
In China, they're not impressive at all; the government before them lasted for about 300 years (traditionally dated 960-1276, though it lost control of the north of China for the last 100 or so years), and the one after them also lasted about 300 years (1368-1644).
If you were paying attention to the dates, that leaves just under 100 years for the Mongols' "sophisticated" government to survive. [In reality, they almost certainly deserve credit for a bit more than that -- transitions of power take place over multi-year periods, not instantaneously.] I tend to make the assumption that the brevity of their rule is related to the fact that they had no administrative tradition -- perhaps you know better?
(I've also read that Mongol rule was extremely beneficial to the economy of Europe -- where they weren't in charge -- [because the pax Mongolica made overland trade economically viable] while being a step backward for China, where they were.)
> technological
This is even weirder. What technological methods? The Mongols couldn't even make metal objects.
You are aware that the Mongols replaced dysnaties in China with their own, until those dynasties were replaced centuries later? The Mongol Empire span a huge chunk of continental Asia for quite sometime, their government seems less sohpisticated to Western eyes because we are used to impressive monuments left by local kingdoms. But monuments don't tell you anything about government or bureaucracy.
> until those dynasties were replaced centuries later?
One century later. The Mongols had very little staying power. That's what I'm saying above.
What do "sophisticated governmental methods" mean to you? Did the Mongols have them?
The relationship of the Russian dukes to their faraway Mongol overlords seems more parallel to the systems of, say, feudal Europe than to those of the Roman empire. There's a clear consensus on which system used more sophisticated methods.
The title is a bit clickbaity and, as usual, makes a much stronger claim than the research suggests. Sure maybe it was the climate, or maybe it was just regression to the mean.
There were roughly 100x as many Europeans as Mongolians in the 13th century. It seems unlikely they could have ever conquered all of Europe with supply lines stretching back to Asia. All while maintaining a grip on 100 million subjugated non-Mongolians who probably weren’t keen to send and supply troops across the world.
Conquering they much territory is an extremely unusual event, it seems reasonable that the Mongols would just eventually run out of steam.
Is it out of the question that they could have done in Europe what they did in China?
On the other hand, it seems likely that the resulting empire would fracture into a collection of Khanates, as that is what happened to the actual empire.
The problem with that strategy is you can never stay too long in one place or you'll exhaust the food supply (for both your soldiers and your horses). If you're ever rebuffed and you don't have supply lines delivering you food, you just starve.
> he developed ortogh trading systems, instituted methods of tax collection, and established regional bureaucracies which controlled legal and economic affairs
just collecting the taxes on such a huge territory sounds like a pretty big undertaking, let alone all these other things mentioned
Supply chains in the sense of a centralized (or multi-centralized) logistics no, supply chains in the sense of mobile pastoral groups supporting armies' further extension yes. These did not stretch all the way back to central Asia. Groups like the White and Blue hordes, which later combined into the Golden Horde, were basically autonomous within the territory allotted them by the Qaghan -- they mostly owed the central authority a share of spoils, support for the postal system (örtöö or yam), and their presence when convened on matters of state. Armies would bring limited supplies with them as they campaigned, replacement horses and some small livestock, while the main group continued to focus on caring for the bulk of their herds. While not actively expanding their borders, steppe nomads usually moved between relatively well-established seasonal camps rather than continuously roaming.
> There were roughly 100x as many Europeans as Mongolians in the 13th century
Well by the time their armies arrived in Europe 'true' Mongols were a minority. Just like the Huns and other stepped empires they included many Turkish, Cuman, Finno-Ugric and other nomadic tribes.
> Conquering they much territory is an extremely unusual event
Steppe empires weren't that rare though we just don't have that much information on those preceding the Mongols. Obviously they were much more successful than their predecessors but not necessarily that exceptional.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
If you know more than other people, that's great, and one option is to share some of what you know (in a neutral, respectful way) so the rest of us can learn. Another option is simply not to post. But please don't do putdowns or flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You may not owe Putin better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. I’m not sure how more water seen in tree bark thickness quickly correlates to the Mongols not conquering Europe.. That horses don’t do well in watery land seems like a poor theory to me. Although that one movie that I saw where horses got stuck in the UK battle seems to collaborate that theory... Like all science it’s a theory offered and it’s to other historians to prove it wrong. I find it all fascinating.
