the mongols conquer europe!

stalin006

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what would had happened if the mongols campain had been succesful in europe? they made it all the way to eastern europe and conquered some of the midle east, but had to go back since the dead of a leader or something, what if they had been succesful ?
 
Well, to begin, the mongols were extremely close to conquering the rest of Europe. They had reached Vienna, and surely would have razed it, if one thing hadn't happened: The leader of the Mongols died. The Mongol Law stated that if the leader died, all must go back to Mongolia to elect a new leader. And so they did. After this though, they never gained the momentum. Because of this, their forces were small and could be attacked by masses of Arab soldiers, who were the first to defeat Mongol armies.

If they had won, hmmm...
 
Ohwell...the Mongols never came anywhere near to defeating the whole of Europe!


The character of the Mongol incursion beyond modern day Russia and Ukraine into Europe took more the form of a large raid. It did not set out to hold onto territory and administer to it.

Indeed the Mongol attacks had done little or nothing to force most of the European states to forget their wars with each other and unite against the external threat.



In my mind the situation requires evaluation of the actual question. Had the Great Khan not died the Mongol invasion that was in progress had not effected most of Europe and was in the form of one major thrust. In my view it was a raid, a show of force and to some extent exploration NOT a mission of conquest.

It can at best be describe as a major incursion that was looking to the possibility and value of conquest...but obviously after the death of the Great Khan later leaders never felt it worth the effort to conduct and targetted Japan, India and the Middle-East preferably.
 
Originally posted by Perfection
Well I jus wonder how the whole brack death thing would play out. Maybe it would be brought back to Asia

The black death was originated in asia: only a specific rat can carry the disease and they were from india. Chian had black death the same time as the Middle East and Europe got it next.
 
The Mongol "state" was very different from the ones in Europe so the most they could have done is to raid through some countries and get as many stuff as they can. They have spent almost two years in Hungary with sacking as many goods as they get. (Actually this is what Hungarians did two hudred years before in Western Europe.) Because of the distance and their society structure they have never been a fundamental threat to Europe.
 
They were the true definition of barbarian: They came from nowhere and vanished to nowhere (Mongolia was conquered by the Manchurians in the late 17th century and became part of China until 1911 (not sure about the year) when Russia foced the Chinese to give up that piece of land and call it Mongolia).

The mongolian empire did do a lot to the european society: they ensured a safe trade route to the east, ended the golden age of the Islamic Empire and reshuffled the balance of power with its own collapse.

Mogolians ranked citizens based on race, aside from their own race, eurpoeans were second.
 
Originally posted by kittenOFchaos
Ohwell...the Mongols never came anywhere near to defeating the whole of Europe!

The character of the Mongol incursion beyond modern day Russia and Ukraine into Europe took more the form of a large raid. It did not set out to hold onto territory and administer to it.

Indeed the Mongol attacks had done little or nothing to force most of the European states to forget their wars with each other and unite against the external threat.
When the first Mongol columns under Jelme and Subotai entered European Russia, it was also no larger than a raiding force. A few years later, they returned with a far larger army and conquered the region. ;)

They're about to do the same to the rest of Europe too, but got side-tracked. At this time, Kublai Khan got the go-ahead to invade and conquer Song China, after the grand election to elect the next Great Khan. And he took most of the Mongol soldiers with him. After that, the Mongols needed the troops to hold the more populous and rebellious region of S China.

That one single Mongol incursion did unite the Germans, Poles and Hungarians sufficiently to field one allied army to face them in battle. The Mongols defeated them, of course. ;)

In my mind the situation requires evaluation of the actual question. Had the Great Khan not died the Mongol invasion that was in progress had not effected most of Europe and was in the form of one major thrust. In my view it was a raid, a show of force and to some extent exploration NOT a mission of conquest.

It can at best be describe as a major incursion that was looking to the possibility and value of conquest...but obviously after the death of the Great Khan later leaders never felt it worth the effort to conduct and targetted Japan, India and the Middle-East preferably.
The materially poor kingdoms of Europe just didn't appeal to the appetite of the Mongols for loot, as compared with the riches of Song China and the Arab empire. ;) They changed their minds after conducting the exploratory raid.
 
Originally posted by Hades
They were the true definition of barbarian: They came from nowhere and vanished to nowhere (Mongolia was conquered by the Manchurians in the late 17th century and became part of China until 1911 (not sure about the year) when Russia foced the Chinese to give up that piece of land and call it Mongolia).
Yep, they're the true epitome of the wild steppe nomadic tribes. They were a threat even after the passing of the Mongol empire, with the Manchus having to conduct a genocidal campaign against the Dzungars (one Western Mongol tribe) to eliminate them.

FYI, the Manchus incorporated the Mongols into their banner system, with the Mongols supplying and forming 8 Banners. The Manchus themselves formed another 8 Banners while the Manchurian Chinese emigres formed another 8 Banners. ;)

The Mongols were always around, just under the rule of others. The Soviets got Chiang Kaishek to acknowledge their independence in 1921-22. Still, that's only Outer Mongolia. The Chinese are still holding onto Inner Mongolia till today. ;)

The mongolian empire did do a lot to the european society: they ensured a safe trade route to the east, ended the golden age of the Islamic Empire and reshuffled the balance of power with its own collapse.
Indeed. They enabled the transmittal of many important techs fr China to the West.

Mogolians ranked citizens based on race, aside from their own race, eurpoeans were second.
Not Europeans. If in China, the second rank consists of all non-Chinese. Third rank of North Chinese (who were more trusted due to centuries of nomad rule). The last the South Chinese, the ex-citizenry of Song China.
 
Originally posted by Hades


The black death was originated in asia: only a specific rat can carry the disease and they were from india. Chian had black death the same time as the Middle East and Europe got it next.

From The Black Death by Robert Gottfried:

Dozens of rodents carry plague. Among them are tarbagons, marmots, and susliks in Asia, prairie dogs and ground squirrels in America, and gerbels and mice in Africa... In Europe,rats, especially the black rat, Rattus rattus, have been most important carriers.
 
Originally posted by stalin006
what would had happened if the mongols campain had been succesful in europe? they made it all the way to eastern europe and conquered some of the midle east, but had to go back since the dead of a leader or something, what if they had been succesful ?

Have you been reading the "What if" book or did you get this one on your own?

If you got it independently they answer it for you.
 
KittenOfChaos wrote:

Ohwell...the Mongols never came anywhere near to defeating the whole of Europe!

Actually, they did come dangerously close.

As Knight-Dragon and Klazlo correctly pointed out the Mongols launched a two-pronged invasion of Europe in 1241 (after conquering the Russias). The northern arm invaded Poland and the southern Hungary. The northern arm laid waste to the principal Polish towns of the time (Kraków, Sandomierz, Przemysl, Radom, etc.) and met in June (I think it was June) a combined Silesian Polish and German force on a field near the town of Legnica (German: "Leignitz"). Led by a famous local warrior named Henryk, this Polish-German force was joined by French, Italian and even English knights. They were almost all slaughtered by the Mongols, every one of them. It was a terrible defeat. (There is a beautiful church in Legnica today dating from the 13th century that has many commemorations and memorials of this battle.)

The northern arm then turned southwards into Bohemia where it attacked Olomouc (German: "Olmütz") and headed further south into Hungary to join up with the southern armies, who had already destroyed the Hungarian forces at Mohi. As Klazlo said, the Mongols chased the hapless Hungarian king Béla IV across the country to a small island in the Adriatic, and they remained in Hungary for two years before suddenly withdrawing. It is assumed today that they withdrew because of the death of the khan in Qaroqorum but we really do not know. They launched several minor raids in the following century but never re-entered Europe.

It is clear to historians today that there was no military force in Europe that could have resisted the Mongols in the 13th century. The Hungarians and Poles represented the two Christian states with the best developed cavalry arms at the time, the Hungarians themselves only two centuries removed from their own nomadic equestrian Steppe ancestry and yet they both failed. Of course, both the Polish and Hungarian kingdoms happened to be in the midst of political crises at the time of the invasion and were not able to field their full military might, but nonetheless the Mongols wee an irresistable force and had Subathai decided to press westward there is little doubt among historians that Mongol horses would have reached the Bay of Biscay with relative ease. Poles today have a symbol of the Mongol withdrawl, a mounted horseman dressed in exaggerated colorful Mongol dress called a lajkonik that they give to one another on certain holidays.

An interesting side note in the Mongol-European adventure is that a few decades later the Mongols were advancing in the Middle East and threatening to conquer the whole islamic Arab empire. Christian Europe (fighting losing battles in the Crusades) approached the Mongols with an alliance to cooperate in the destruction of the Moslem states. The Mongols were going to convert to Christianity and re-take the Levante and North Africa for Christendom. The death of the khan scuttled that plan...
 
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.
 
well lets jsut say they didnt had to come back to chose a new leader, but continued attacking europe in a masive way, maybe bigger tahn that of the vikings
 
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.
 
Originally posted by kittenOFchaos
The character of the Mongol incursion beyond modern day Russia and Ukraine into Europe took more the form of a large raid. It did not set out to hold onto territory and administer to it.

Not 100% correct.
In some places chinese beaurocrats manage the provinces. So - isn't very imposible to imagine a Asian ocupation at least in Central & Eastern Europe !! ;)

Regards
 
Vrylakas, you hit the nail in the head again (as usual ;) )
I guess we have to try to avoid referring back in history by the current situation as you mentioned. The Eastern-European countries were part of the Christian Europe for more than 200 years by the time the mongols came. This doesn't mean only the religion but the other aspects of social life also (military, production, state administration, social hierarchy etc.) During this time for example the Hungarians completely forgot that military tactics they used themselves when they raided the western part of Europe (like the fake fleeing). This and other military mistakes led to the battle of Muhi in 1241, the only significant battle against the Mongols, which was a humiliating defeat for the Hungarians.
Furthermore the transportation situation and the whole landscape was way different then. The Mongols had to wait until the winter of 1241 to cross the river Danube. Most of western europe was huge forests and it wasn' that good for the military tactics they used.
But in fact they could really make a lot of trouble in Europe (as they did it in the eastern part) What I think from a sociological standpoint is that the Mongols could raid the western countries as well (as the Hungarians did before) but because of their "lifestyle" and the structure of their society it would have been very complicated to administer. This nomadic lifestyle had some prerequisites (large plains for horses as Vrylakas wrote, less agricultural population, a difefrent social hierarchy etc.), and moreover, western europe was very far from their homeland. So on the long run western europe was not in the danger of becoming a mongol "province" but in that particular years people in the west were lucky to avoid them.
 
The Mongols were able to crush the nomadic in origin Jurchen Jin empire of Northern China, who had an army in the hundreds of thousands and a formidable cavalry force in the tens of thousands. This, at a time when the Mongols were just preparing to go on the first stage of their soon-to-be world conquest campaign. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the Mongols were merely one of the vassal tribes to the Jin.

Then the Mongols crushed Song China in S China, although it took them one generation to do it. This, in a geographical environment which is adverse to cavalry (think rivers and paddy fields) and against an opponent also in the hundreds of thousands and attuned to fighting in local conditions. Which was high-tech (even had ancient rockets and all kinds of primitive gunpowder weopans and explosives) and had a huge navy to guard the mighty Yangzi (which had protected Song China fr the Jurchen Jin for decades).

The Mongols also crushed the mighty Khwarzm empire of Central Asia, which actually relied on Turkic nomads for their armies. They chased the Sultan all the way across his realm to an island on a river somewhere in Iran or maybe the Caucasus.

Nothing Europe has at this time could stand up to the Mongol military machine, esp not after they had incorporated Chinese, Arab, whatever military innovations into their modus operandi. ;) Had Europe got rich cities to loot like in the Middle East, Central Asia and China, the Mongols would come too. ;)
 
Knight-Dragon wrote:

Had Europe got rich cities to loot like in the Middle East, Central Asia and China, the Mongols would come too.

This is also a critical point I neglected; that the Mongols had a system of using advance parties to scout out potential targets and collect intelligence. The Mongols were very likely aware that Europe in the 13th century was a backwater (compared to the nearby Islamic and farther Asian states) with little plunder worth the effort. As I mentioned in another thread somewhere (perhaps in another forum), the 3 largest Islamic cities in 1300 - Cairo, Baghdad and Cordoba - (after decades of decline and internicine war) had populations hovering between 1/4 and 3/4 of a million people each while the largest European cities at the time - Paris, Milan, Venice - were all around 100,000. Cordoba hosted a library with more than 400,000 manuscripts while only a few libraries existed in Europe (typically in monasteries) usually holding no more than a few hundred texts each.

Simply said, Europe was a backwater in 1241, not much worth the effort for Mongols. Perhaps the Mongol incursion was a preemptory probe to see if Europe would be able to aid the Islamic world to its south in the event of a Mongol attack, and perhaps the Mongol withdrawl from Hungary was a sign they were satisfied they had nothing to fear from that quarter.
 
Originally posted by Vrylakas
Simply said, Europe was a backwater in 1241, not much worth the effort for Mongols. Perhaps the Mongol incursion was a preemptory probe to see if Europe would be able to aid the Islamic world to its south in the event of a Mongol attack, and perhaps the Mongol withdrawl from Hungary was a sign they were satisfied they had nothing to fear from that quarter.

Well, Hungary wasn't the member of the NATO at that time, so we did not mean any fear for anybody... :lol:
But I agree that Europe did not worth the efforts.
 
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