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.
