KittenofChaos wrote:
Maybe it is just me, but those battles are still in Eastern Europe and not France, England, Scandanavia or the Iberian Peninsular.
The problem with this "what if" is whether it assumes the Mongols give up their other military campaigns and go all out on Europe...as it was their conquest in actuality was mainly centered in Ukraine and influenced strongly Eastern Europe and Russia.
At the time, there really was no such thing as Eastern or Western Europe. First of all, Europeans didn't yet call themselves Europeans, they called themselves Christians and Europe was Christendom. The core of Christendom was somewhere between Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. In medieval times the difference in the level of social and economic development between Western Europe and Poland or Hungary was far less than it is today, and in some instances the eastern kingdoms managed to achieve a par level of wealth with their Western brethren. In some important military categories the east was seen to be more developed than the West at the time. The concept of "Eastern Europe" (meaning a less developed extension of the West) was born in the 18th century as the mega-empires (Russia, Austria, Prussia) began to swallow up the old medieval kingdoms of Central Europe. In the 17th century an independent Transylvania took part in the Thirty Years War as an equal partner with the Palitinate, Bohemia, Denmark and Sweden but by the 18th century Transylvania was relegated to Habsburg internal affairs; by the 19th an Irish novelist was writing about Transylvania like it was in deepest darkest Africa. Western ascendancy really derives from the era of the Age of Exploration and the discovery of the Americas.
Secondly, while we don't really know the Mongols' intentions in 1241, the likely reason they stopped - initially - in the Hungarian Plain was exactly that - that it was a plain. The Mongols relied on horses, and an army of horses need lots of flat grasslands. Hungary is in the Carpathian Basin, an easily defended region that would support an army of horses well. By destroying Poland and Bohemia to the north of Hungary, the Mongols ominously left open a door on the northern European plain that stretches all the way to France and the Atlantic north of the Alps. Again, with the destruction of the Polish-German army at Legnica, most historians today agree there was no possible combination of forces in the West at the time capable of stopping the Mongols. As Klazlo mentioned the Hungarians had successfully marauded in the West in the late 9th and early 10th centuries (reaching Paris and even Iberia) until being stopped at Lechfeld/Augsburg in 955, but the Mongols were a far more sophisticated enemy with siege machines and fortifications experts from across Asia. Maybe the Mongols stopped in Hungary to regroup, maybe they were concerned about their southern (Islamic) flank, maybe they thought their supply lines too lengthy; in any event there is no reputable historian today claiming that the Mongols stopped because they were intimidated by the West's military prowess.
I know it's hard to imagine a time when the West wasn't the premier military and economic power but the fact is its power is relatively recent in origin. The West's military power of the 19th century was unchallengable, but the West's military power in the 13th century was negligible at best.