ilduce349 said:
They never tried Egypt, Burma or Java...
Just thought I might expand on this. Egypt is easy enough to find out
about. But Burma (sic) is a touch more difficut to find out about. The basic story goes something like this. In 1271 the Mongol Viceroy of Yunnan sent out some ambassadors to Pagan to seek tribute. Narathiphapate being of the haughty disposition refused to meet them. The Mongols left, chastised, and the whole episode was repeated two years later except this time around the Mongols left headless. Woo. Kublai sat on his arse, and did nothing much, he was otherwise occupied. Narathiphapate decide to follow up on this inaction and attacked the nominal Chinese tributary of Kaungai, which is situation on the Taping River. Kublai couldn't sit on his laurels, and sent a force towards Ngasaunggyan on the Irrawaddy, under the Viceroy of Tali, that forced Narathiphapate back; Marco Polo described the battle in his Travels, and embellished it to high hell, two-thousand elephants and a mixed host of forty-thousand men... Yeah, right. W/e. Yet another force under the Viceroy of Yunnan sallied out, burned some stuff and retired home when the heat got to his force. The net effect of this all seems negligable because Narathiphapate continued to raid, it wasn't until 1283 that the Mongols entered in force again, swept down again, failed miserably to catch Narathiphapate, the chief target, planted some garrisons and then left.
Narathiphapate fell from grace, and the throne, in 1283. But that owes little to the success of the Mongols and far more to his own ineptitude. The final straw for all parties wasn't the invasion, but Narathiphapate flight from the capital in fear of the invasion. Why this is the case can be explained rather simply, Narathiphapate was the despot against which all Burmese despots would hitherto be measured against. His sole good contribution was a rather cool Burmese proverb "the pagoda is finished, the country is ruined" that's now one of my favourite figures of speech to throw out. Anyways, the civil war 'finished' in 1287, when Ye-su Timur, nephew to Kublai, fought his way down the Irrawaddy and occupied Pagan. Ye-su tried, and failed, to reassert authority, and was forced to allow Kyawswa, a relative of Narathiphapate to ascend the tottering throne. Why was the throne tottering you might ask? Well, it had nothing to do with the departure of about half the damn country, Arakan, the Mons, and just about every disaffected minority were still running around doing what they pleased, nope it was three Shan chiefs, who had managed to overrun the vital rice-producing Kyaukse. Seeing no further need for Pagan as a concept, these Shan chiefs simply fired the boss, and made themselves king; Kyawswa was murdered in 1299, his capital sacked and Pagan relegated to the dustbin of Burmese history.
You might ask: why did the Mongols bail? The simple answer is that they lacked the manpower to do all that much, note the signal failure of Ye-su to do much, if anything, about Kyaukse - which fed Mongol Pagan as sure as it fed Kyawswa's Pagan. The other answer is that the Mongols couldn’t win, at best, they managed to beat an army, sack some towns and advance into a civil war. But those are quite distinct from actually holding down the territory itself for a prolonged period. As to why that was the case, I'm hesitant to blame terrain (harsh), climate (horse-killing), Mongol military inferiority (elephants are scary) or any other single proximate factor. What I am tempted to do is to look at how the Mongols operated at a political level, and this seems to me to be the area where they failed at just about all levels. That they failed to build up a coalition or form any lasting alliances is laughably bad in a country that was at the point of collapse, with plenty of bit players looking for a patron. But w/e. Long story short: the Mongols invaded Burma on a number of occasions and failed to achieve all that much.
Java is also interesting, Kertanagara, King of Singosari, went to extreme lengths to drum up the Mongol menance - notably in 1275 when he made a big show and dance of how he purported to steal the
mana (Malayo-Polynesianisms4lyfe) out of Kublai's sails. That is, if we believe his propaganda; at any rate he crushed some sort of domestic opposition in 1280 and justified it with reference to the lolgols. Madura was also felled for much the same reason. Bali the same. Malayu, whatever that means, as well. Hilariously, this grand-standing actually played out. We've already seen the 1271 and 1283 expedition into Burma, which was soon to be followed by the 1281 expedition aimed at Japan, the 1285 expedition aimed at Tonking and Champa all of which backfired, spectacularly in the Japanese adventure. But what we don't hear all that much about is the obnoxious tenor of Mongol diplomacy that was somewhere between offensive and stupid - traditional Chinese entries to submit tribute tended to be low-key, positively inoffensive, and easy to swallow. Why the Mongols had to be different is anyone’s guess, the Song certainly had few issues with soliciting nominal suzerainty from South-east Asia. At any rate, Kertanagara, used all this information as a justification for refusing the Mongols deputation, sending them back sans faces, which
he took in 1289.
Kertanagara seemed non-plussed and launched his indeterminable campaign against Melayu, we don't quite know what it is, the old suspicion is that it was the Malay Peninsula, the more common view is that it might have just been a flag raising in the vicinity of Palembang. This proved to be a fool move, not because of the impending Mongol invasion, but because it stripped Java of loyalist troops, allowing the King of Kediri, Jayakatwang, to break into the capital and slay Kertanagara. This occurred in 1292, and then in 1293 the Mongols arrived to a civil war that was already a year old. Their arrival also gave the legitimist candidate, Vijaya, the chance to land in Java proper, fresh from exile in Madura, and having decided that discretion was the better part of valour, he agreed to submit Java to Kublai, in exchange for Mongol bayonets to capture his throne back. Once this was achieved he set about undoing the Mongol position, by destroying in detail the already scattered Mongol detachments, that had hitherto been involved in pacifying their new allies 'vassals' at his instignation seemingly. The Mongols were forced to withdraw shortly afterwards another disaster to add to a string of disasters. Hardly a good outcome so far as I'm concerned, being beaten by a bit-prince, without a kingdom who had only a few months earlier been forced to prostrate himself... for that same army's help.
tl;dr? The lolgols were not invincible.
Knight-Dragon said:
And that's the scariest thing about the Mongols of the period - they were incredibly adaptable and versatile.
... Er, apparently not.
This thread is hilarious. The simple answer is Dachs is correct. The idea of Mongolian hordes slogging through the literally hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, city states, and various other polities that constituted the HRE of the 13th century is rather hilarious, and would have been quite disastrous to the Mongols if they had actually bothered trying to do it. And even if they DID manage to make it through "Germany", having to do it all over again in France, in the mountains of Spain, in the marshes and (at that time much more numerous) forests of England, in the mountains of Scotland and Wales, over the Alps, through the Mediterranean, through the mountains of the Balkans, and through frigid Scandinavia is simply laughable.
but what I am saying was had Mongolia remained united, rather then split into Yuan, Golden, Hulagu, Kasgar etc then we would have been place in a sticky situation. 
