[By Chuck Almdale]
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Looks crowded, doesn’t it, but locations differentiate as you zoom in. Interactive Google MyMap above shows all locations for Rus’ 9th-13th centuries and Mongol Eastern and Central European invasion 1236-42 CE. Click on any marker or line for description. If map doesn’t display properly in your email, go to the blog.
I continue with historian Stephen Pow’s thesis on the cause of the Mongol withdrawal from Hungary in the spring of 1242: Deep ditches and well-built walls: a reappraisal of the mongol withdrawal from Europe in 1242. First I present his summary (pgs. 120-121) of his comparative study of Mongol campaigns in separate regions (pgs. 79-120), then follow with his overall conclusions for his thesis, and end with some speculation on what might have happened had the Mongols continued westward. Link to free thesis PDF.
A Comparative Study of Mongol Campaigns
In the past, due to the lack of translations of original documents into modern languages, Mongol Empire studies were compartmentalized. Historians focused on studies in the languages they knew, and perhaps knew little to nothing of historical work in other languages and regions. With modern widespread availability of research and new translations into modern languages, a more holistic, cross-cultural approach can be made. In this section, Stephen Pow examines Mongol campaigns in other regions to illustrate “how Mongol success or failure often depended on the fortresses they encountered.” He believes, “An overview of campaigns in regions outside of Europe will reveal that strong, strategically located fortifications were a defining feature of states which were able to slow or halt the Mongol advance.” Rather than attempt to condense his 42-page analysis constituting pages 79-120 of his thesis, I’ll give you his conclusions.
Summary of Comparative Study of Mongol Campaigns
The following is the entirety of Pow’s summary:
What we see from this comparative study is that siege warfare was problematic for the Mongols in many regions besides Europe. However, it was also necessary for the conquest of sedentary peoples. The building materials of thirteenth century fortresses varied widely, often depending on what material was most readily available. Judging from the speed with which the Mongols reduced cities in Russia and Transoxiana, wood and mud brick fortifications could be easily breached with the Mongol artillery of the first half of the thirteenth century. Therefore defensive strategies failed in those regions. Events in Korea suggest that well-situated fortifications could enable a defensive policy to be carried out as long as the will to resist was present. The hangtu and stone fortifications of China did actually provide a potentially insurmountable problem to the Mongols, but widespread collaboration and the arrival of superior artillery in the 1270s undermined Chinese efforts. In the Middle East, the Mongols often overcame the better fortifications only through ruses. The Sultanate of Delhi, which had stone fortifications and large armies, was able to resist the Mongols.
Europe possessed many of the advantages that India had. It had a large population from which to field armies. It had an abundance of stone fortifications. European rulers also showed an unwillingness to negotiate or buy off the Mongols. These problems, combined with its relative poverty when compared to China or India, likely made Europe an unappealing target. In any case, what this comparative study demonstrates is that it required decades for the Mongols to impose their rule on heavily populated sedentary regions with adequate fortifications. If they persisted in their attacks on Europe, we must then imagine a conquest spanning decades.
Stephen Pow’s Overall Conclusions
Stephen Pow had three main points in his thesis (pgs. 122-135) :
Existing theories for the Mongol’s 1242 withdrawal from Central Europe have little supporting evidence.
Carpini’s erroneous testimony that the death of Khagan Ögedei forced the Mongols to retreat from Hungary is contradicted by Rashid al-Din’s record that the Mongols did not know of this death even as they were entering Bulgaria, let alone before deciding to leave Hungary and Croatia. Other theories — the limited goals/gradual conquest theory, the ecological/geographical theory, and the military weakness theory — have even less supporting evidence.
The Mongols encountered an enormous strategic problem in Hungarian fortifications.
Records show the Mongols had limited success when attacking stone fortresses, faring even more poorly when the fortress was protected by natural barriers such as marshes, cliffs, mountains and hilltops, or islands protected by the sea or extensive mudflats. When defenders were resolute about not submitting or when they had mercenaries skilled in siege defense, the difficulties of siege became insurmountable. Even when the Mongols took a town, pillaging was poor; Europe was not as wealthy as China and Central Asia, what valuables the locals could neither hide nor bury they would burn or destroy. The Hungarians would not accept massive enslavement by nomads from the steppes, and refused to even talk to the Mongols or reply to their messages, holding them to be deceitful pagans who freely lied and (Pow, pg. 124) “simply reneged on their promises when it suited them.”
Strong fortifications of stone had been and would continue to be a major problem elsewhere for the Mongols.
Pow reviewed both prior and following sieges in Mongolia, Russia, China, Korea, the Middle East and India. Besieging fortified cities was always difficult for the Mongols, even when they had siege engines. Many of their better known sieges were won not by force but because the defenders fled, engaged in poor bargaining or outright treason, or through long-term starvation of the occupants. The siege of Kozelsk in the Rus’ Principality of Chernigov in 1238 is one example of their difficulty with sieges: although the city was ruled by twelve-year-old Prince Vasily, they held out for fifty days; their walls and ramparts were not even stone but only wood and timber; 4,000 Mongol soldiers died in the siege; Batu was unable to take the city until Kadan and Büri arrived with their armies.
Hinged hanging trebuchet at Château des Baux, France (reconstruction). The Mongols began using this type of catapult in the 1270’s, a design imported from the Levant, in their battles against the Southern Song in China. Author: ChrisO. Source: Wikipedia – Trebuchet
What if the Mongols had continued westward?
In the final part of Stephen Pow’s thesis (pgs. 126-135) he contemplates — as have many writers before him — on what the world might look like had the Mongols continued westward through Europe. The atrocities would certainly have continued. Historian David Morgan considers the oft-applied term “Pax Mongolica” as misleading, observing “the peace established by the Mongols would aptly compare to a desert.” Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels decreased during the Mongol conquests, but not during the Black Death or the conquest of the Americas, implying that a large drop in human population and agricultural land usage occurred in the 13th century.
Geoffrey Parker and Philip E. Tetlock in their “what-if?” book Unmaking the West argue (Pow, pg. 129) that “‘without doubt’ the Mongols could have accomplished the task, and that such a conquest would have halted the expansion of early modern Europe. In short, the events of the thirteenth century could have prevented the rise of the West.”
Passage through Slovenia into Northeastern Italy is relatively easy, quite unlike clambering through the western Alps on elephants. A Mongol detachment believed to be part of Kadan’s army was seen at Udine in Italy, 140 miles west of Zagreb and 60 miles northeast of Venice at the same time that Kadan was pursuing King Béla IV from Slovenia southward into Croatia. After Kadan gave up on capturing Béla, he could easily have backtracked north from Trogir and entered into Italy rather than continuing south into Dalmatia, an excursion which led to nothing useful. With a small army of only 20,000 and no siege equipment they likely could not take any major cities.
However, Paul E. Chevedden points out that counterweighted trebuchets (see photos above and below), a significant advance in mechanical weaponry over what the Mongols then possessed, existed in Italy at this time. They might have captured one, or seized the engineers to build one, and returned to Batu in Hungary and built as many as they wanted. With this trebuchet’s far greater hurling power in both missile weight and velocity, the stone fortresses of Hungary and Europe would suddenly become far less formidable. When the Mongols actually did bring counterweighted trebuchet engineers from the Levant to southern China in the 1270s — 4500 miles as the crow flies — to build counterweighted trebuchets with which to battle the Southern Song, their fifty year war quickly came to an end. Béla warned the pope in 1250 that if the Mongols re-invaded Hungary, he was (Pow, pg. 132) “uncertain that his people would have the desire to continue their resistance.”
1433 Italian sketch of a hinged, propped, double-counterweight trebuchet, called a bricola. More compact and portable than the single-counterweight trebuchet above. Source: Brown.edu – 13 things
Had the Mongol invasion continued and with counterweighted trebuchets in tow, Béla could not have built all the castles he created in the 1240s and later. Lacking significant help from the west, from whom he had previously received nothing in the way of help, submission to the Mongols was likely. Batu and Béla could have made powerful allies, and their conjoined armies could be invincible: crossbows and double-trebuchets, cavalry and feigned retreats, winter warfare, fire bombs and gunpowder, a real knowledge of European geography, people, armies and customs. Europe could easily have fallen under the Mongol heel with Hungary in charge of applying the pressure and collecting the tribute. Batu Khan would now be better known in the west than Attila the Hun, his grandfather Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Christopher Columbus, who would never have sailed west to avoid the Turks and reach the ports of Cathay and the lands of silk and spice. Imaginative writers would then wonder what the world might be like had Genghis Khan — while he was still only the young man Temüjin and not yet any sort of khan — been killed in battle by his anda, Jamukha, rather than the other way around. Would the West have ever been able to rise, or would it today still remain under the iron thumb of Asia?
Stephen Pow ends with a cautionary note:
Clausewitz asserts that accomplishing even the simplest of tasks is difficult in war. The Mongols made war look easy. This can be detrimental to the study of their campaigns because it tempts us to forget that there were limitations to their means and abilities. We start to see every one of their victories as a foregone conclusion and we become apologists for their failures. When we allow that they were human beings constrained by morale, technological, and demographic factors, we realize that nothing was a foregone conclusion for the Mongols. Events in Syria, Japan, and even Europe should suffice to demonstrate that their commanders, lacking prescience, sometimes went a bridge too far.
In our final installment we will pay a visit to general Subutai, alone on a Hungarian springtime evening, sitting at his work desk in his ger, thinking and writing.
Interactive Google MyMap above shows all locations for Central Asian conquest 1220-1224 CE. Click on any marker or line for description. If map doesn’t display properly in your email, go to the blog.
Entire Mongol Empire & Rus’ Series: Click Here
First Installment: Why didn’t the Mongols Conquer Europe in the 13th Century?
Previous Installment: Pitched Battles versus Sieges || Mongol Empire CXIII
Next Installment: Baghatur Subutai – A Fantasy || Mongol Empire CXV
This Installment: Conclusions on Withdrawal & Alternate History || Mongol Empire CXIV
Source
Deep ditches and well-built walls: a reappraisal of the Mongol withdrawal from Europe in 1242; Pow, Lindsey Stephen, 2012; Department of History, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. Link to free thesis PDF.
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