When Mongols Set Out to Conquer the World, There Was One Limiting Factor: Grass
historynet.com
historynet.com
The Mongols too had a technology that completely altered warfare and gave them a huge advantage: the humble stirrup [1].
The other side of the technology coin is organization. The Romans improved on the Greek phalanx (eg maniples, cohorts). In more modern times we have combined arms operation.
Monogol military organization is really interesting. Most were horse archers. The important thing here is that each Mongol horse soldier typically had 2-10 horses. Why so many? Horses would tire and get injured. Troops could switch to a fresh horse several times a day and greatly extend their range and speed. The speed was really devastating. Of course littered in here was a fairly standard military tactic of the false rout. Units would appear to run away and overeager opponents would give chase, overextend and then be drawn into a trap and attacked from all sides.
But the subject of grass is an interesting one. In addition to having fresh horses to ride, those horses also provided milk to the riders. This meant that a Mongol army could extend far without having long supply lines, which are the bane of any military operation (just ask the Russians).
Beyond the grassy steppes I imagine the Mongols were forced to do what other militaries had to do: forage. "Forage" is a really interesting word and a horrible euphemism. It really means to take by force if necessary whatever you needed from wherever you happened to be.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/the-mongols-built-an...
More realistically, however long it took to make something in the field from the leather/rope/cloth to hand, and a willingness to understand it's implications.
Without war, we would be in caves.
It doesn't even make economic sense. During a war you're not going to invest as much into R&D (especially basic research), industrial production, etc, because you know, you have to... build the things that kill the other people.
To me war feels more like the thing that publicizes the things we've discovered since the last war, because the way (pop) history is presented, everything is about:
- wars (because they're "interesting", finding out about the slow accretion of inventions that lead to the mass production of iron is less cool)
- great people (99% great men)
What about peace time inventions? Which ones outpace the others? Are we SURE that war time inventions outpace peace time inventions?
Do we have any studies that prove or disprove what you claim?
Otherwise it's just a trope.
ICs increased reliability by making interconnections far more reliable (being deposited on the chip together so failure is correlated.) Of course they are also smaller and use less power, but reliability was more of a brick wall issue.
If you think industrial production isn't invested in during war you should fresh up on any modern war since WW1.
What we know is that military budgets SOAR (duh!), but what about washing machines? Transistors? Ballpoint pens? Antibiotics? The gazillion peace time inventions?
There's no part of me that can actually believe that you can ship off hundreds of thousands of folks off to war, you switch 10-20-40% of your economy to make bullets, and somehow research overall still comes ahead, it makes no sense. Let alone those cases where you country is physically under attack (which is most wars, not every country is as privileged as the US, to never have had a foreign power invade it at any serious scale in the last 200 years).
Research is more concentrated during war time, and more visible, frequently. But does war time research actually outpace peace time research? I don't believe that.
Just go on wikipedia and look up global production nimbers of war related stuff between 1939 and 1945 for increased industrial output.
Yes, war related stuff goes up during wars. What about non-war related stuff?
What about peaceful explosions of the global economy and trade? My point is that those most likely surpass wartime growth.
Peacetime economic growth > wartime economic growth.
Peacetime research > wartime research.
As far as research is concerned, without any numbers, I'd assume the focus shifts from civilian research to defence research. As does production. If it surpasses peace time production depends on the scale of the war. That output so should be measured in production units, war has the habbit of screwing up economic metrics.
After all every country's GDP is much higher than its military spending and for sure non-military research dwarfs military research.
This whole hypothesis seems unsound. It would mean that all civilian research is somehow much, much worse per dollar than military research. I highly doubt that.
Here, let me refresh your memory with the original trope:
> And war has historically been the impetus for much technological investment.
Yes, war also brings innovation. The only question worth answering as a follow up, is, does it bring more than peace?
Because otherwise it makes no sense glorifying war, which this line of thinking is fundamentally about.
99% of the examples you and other commenters use are in the military field.
And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.
Let's compare the washing machines of 1990 with those of 1995, instead. Let's compare Intel CPUs of 1980 with those of 1990. Let's compare desktop publishing in 1995 with that in 2000.
Heck, the more answers I get the more I'm convinced people are also partly influenced (I don't want to say brainwashed), by military R&D propaganda that needs to justify its budgets.
For every radar and jet engine there's a F22 jet fighter.
> And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.
I'm interested in dispelling the notion that war spurs innovation, even though I hold this view I'd love any excuse to demonstrate that we don't "need" wars. What were the specific technologies that led to the change in washing machines from 1990 to 1995? How does that compare to a war-period of development? What drove Intel to improve the CPUs in 1990, as compared to 1980? How does that compare to the previous decade?
Thank you. I'm not quite a "history buff" but the implications of history are of course of interest.
> The longbow ended knights
This is not the case. Sounds like something that comes from a pop account of crecy or agincourt? Gunpowder is closer to the mark, but funnily enough armor kept getting heavier longer than many realize. The full plate harnesses that people generally picture when they think of a “knight in shining armor” are really Renaissance/early modern, well after the Middle Ages.
> Gunpowder ended archery
Again, ehh… sure, guns eventually obsoleted archery, but it’s more important that gunpowder ended a social system based on local military elites and enabled a period of rapid state consolidation.
> The Mongols too had a technology that completely altered warfare and gave them a huge advantage: the humble stirrup
Even the article doesn’t really bear this out. The stirrup was far from new, and even before the stirrup both shock and skirmish cavalry got along fine without. Stirrups are cool, no doubt, but far from a secret to the mongols success. Kind of like saying the Polynesians were great sailors because of their boat designs. Like, it helps, but it also really helps to have a culture oriented around sailing.
So again, this is really nitpicking, not arguing against your main point. But I think it’s worth pointing out how Jared Diamond-style stories can sound really sensible, but once you get into the details things often turn out to be much more complex and interesting.
You don't realize how huge an impact stirrups had to horseriding and by extension, civilization.
Yeah, but in all likelihood they weren't a mongol invention. The alans and avars probably had them five hundred years earlier, of perhaps the huns beofre them.
Really a combination of weapons (first crossbows - not because they were super effective against knight armor, but because it was cheaper to train crossbowmen, then gunpowder for the same reasons. Knights were reasonably effective well after primitive gunpowder weapons.) and gradual decline of feudalism and thus knights as a class, as Monarchs started transitioning to standing/professional armies.
Also, as manufacturing improved, it became much cheaper to equip soldiers with standardized equipment rather than rely on tailored to the individual hand-made full-plate armor.
As always, the truth is somewhere between economics and cultural/tech shift.
And the difference was massive. It took years and years of dedicated training to become a good archer, something you start from childhood. The average peasant didnt have the time just do this on the side. As a result they were often handsomely paid.
Crossbows on the other hand could be maned by anyone and were usable in a few days. It was such a threat to the existing social order that the catholic church tried to ban its use against Christians for a while.
I'm pretty sure the same papal bull tried also to ban bows and it wasn't the first time a pope had tried to ban ranged weapons
The vast majority of projectiles would have simply bounced off.
The effectiveness of archers then, is mostly in sheer volume (and getting lucky shots on the horse or weak spots in the armor) of projectiles, against less armored targets.
Modern crossbows with 200lb+ draw weights might be different, but that's another story.
Japan didn't go into isolation. It's one of the many myths we invented to hide our horrible history. Japan kicked out europeans because they were enslaving japanese and taking them away. The easiest way to debunk the myth of japanese isolation is that japan didn't isolate itself from korea, china and rest of its neighbors. Only the slave trading europeans.
It's funny how we portray japan kicking out barbaric european slavers as isolationism.
Not the OP and there is lots of post-factum rationalisation like "the Crusaders lost because they were sloppy, not because they were cavaliers", but there's also the famous example of the 1393 Battle of Nicopolis which the Ottomans won because they were way lighter compared to the Westerners. Their archers and sharpened stakes against the Crusaders' heavy cavalry can be compared to today's NLAWs against the Russians' tanks. It is true, by the mid 1400s and especially by the start of the 1500s artillery and gunpowder had won the game, that's mostly how Suleiman the Magnificent managed to reach the gates of Vienna.
Also, there's much to be said about the Mongols' excellent administrative skills once they had conquered some land, I think that because of some Western-related bias that doesn't get underlined as much as should do in today's mainstream historiography. As the US (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the Soviets/Russians (in Afghanistan and partially in Ukraine) have found out at their own expense is not enough to militarily conquer some land, you also have to administer it afterwards, preferably with the help of some of the local population. Because, among other things, of their religious tolerance the Mongols (or Tartars, as they were mostly known here in Eastern Europe) were really good at it, probably there are some good books written about this specific aspect of their rule but to be honest I didn't put my hands on any of them until now.
I'm generally pretty skeptical: there are just a ton of cases where an army strong in one category (say, heavy cavalry) have slaughtered enemies strong in other categories, and vice versa.
It seems to me that technologies that dominated entire eras (heavy infantry for the romans, heavy cavalry for medieval europe, horse archers for the steppes, etc) follow naturally from the social models rather than military necessity. A feudal lord wouldn't have the ability to organize or provision a roman legion, for instance, or the raw culture of mobility and horsemanship for horse archers, etc.
Professional feudal armies would have crushed Roman armies of equivalent sizes. However, they lacked the scale of true empires.
Really? Why?
The other thing is that a feudal state wouldn't be able to field an army that was of an equivalent size to a Roman army. The Romans fielded eight legions at Cannae, which was like 80,000 guys. Agincourt, in comparison, involved about a quarter of that number if you combine both sides.
Even if the roman legionnaire was worse than a feudal soldier, which I see no reason to believe, it's obvious that there was a precipitous decline in organizational and logistical capacity. In a battle, that would count more than the quality of the soldiers involved.
The Romans build their empire on logistics and organization as much as they did on legions and civil engineering. No feudal kingdom came close to that.
As to feudal soldiers vs legionnaires it was largely a question of equipment. Mounted knights required horse that weren’t available to Rome because selective breeding had yet to produce them. Improvements in metalwork and armor design resulted in far better coverage for the same weight. Knights largely stopped using shields because they didn’t need them as much as they could use a free hand.
That said there was a large variation on both sides. Disease, exhaustion etc could also wreck an otherwise capable army.
My feeling is actually that as the empire grew, the armies they could field somewhat declined. When Cannae happened, the Romans were big, but not huge, and they could literally field army after army of professional soldiers. Part of this was demographics (there had been a population boom in Italy) but part of it is economics and state capacity.
I would guess that up until really late (like, 1880's) warfare was not that technical, so stuff like 'elan' and 'will' was typically by far the most important characteristic in a soldier. That's at least what generals right up to the first world war tended to prize. When it comes to sheer discipline, bloodymindedness and martial spirit, I don't think anybody would surpass the Romans until the modern era.
No seriously, that is a conceptual oxymoron, or at least I understand it to be.
The late medieval and early renaissance line is blurry in part because various practices got adopted at different times in different locations.
It talks about the often overlooked civilisation in Central Asia between 800 and 1200.
That stopped horse based cavalry from advancing and led to entrenched positions.
That stalemate lasted until the invention of the tank later in the war.
On the topic i recently watched an interesting documentary on the problems at the battle of the Somme in WW1 https://youtu.be/CbkJS5cLLOQ?list=PLhMDlPcDRBKQuhPC9Ifj2IL8L... ( ~15min segment)
A short summary is the British assumption that massive artillery barrage would destroy the German defenses and allow for British troops to walk through easily. Unfortunately they used shrapnel shot which did very little to the defenses and worse, left the barbed wire installations untouched. Advancing troops then got stuck and were mowed down
EDIT: People tend to see the Wehrmacht as this fully mechanized beast of an army. Truth is the vast majority of soldiers walked into battle, with animal drawn carriage for their stuff from food to field guns.
Quite fascinating topic, horses in WW2. I'll have to some more research on this.
There’s a new book on cavalry in WW2 being published soon look out for it.
But the real story of WWI (IMHO) was artillery. Here's a story I heard: at the start of WWI, Russia produced 35,000 artillery shells per month and was using 25,000 a day. By 1917, there were battles on the Western Front where between both sides over a million artillery shells were fired in a matter of hours.
As for tanks, this was clearly a huge development. It really nullified machine guns and small arms fire. But the writing was already on the wall for trench warfare. Artillery accuracy and tactics had improved (eg the creeping barrage became possible) and tactics in trench assault (on both sides) were improving.
Meanwhile more tonnes of oats and hay for horses were shipped from the UK to France than munitions.
Of course for Peasants you need to come up with a way to hide most of your food, while having what looks like all your food in what looks like a poorly hidden place where the army can force you to give it up. (good luck)
It's all about history and it's popular conception from an actual historian.
Putin has spoken and written about the legacy of the steppe people to the Russians; it seems to almost be a romantic obsession of his. Unfortunately tanks and trucks are not horses, and the gist of the article is about the dependence of steppe horse armies on large amounts of grassland, and the effect that has on their operations.
The problem was execution. Military analysts expected exactly that, but Russia failed in operations. See here on March 4th when it started becoming clear the operation was botched [1]:
"They [Russia] have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force."
[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-confli...
Look at Afghanistan or Ukraine and see how geography trumps even modern tech. Aviation units struggle with mountains and mechanized units struggle with wet ground.
Technology doesn’t enable an elderly population to wage war effectively.
How about drone operators?
They won’t be able to ruck into the front lines with a pack of drone equipment to support front line units.
They aren’t doing effective manufacturing of drones.
Old people can shoot an ak47 but they aren’t effective combat soldiers.
The knight was not beaten by gunpowder or longbows but by vast hordes of peasants with halberds.
Those peasant hordes showed up because changes in society enabled rulers to field these large armies.
In order to conduct in a long lasting war with large armies one needs a society with "backbone". The ability to lose a battle and still win a war is what makes a true great empire. Few ancients could to this, like the Roman empire, the Assyrian empire, the Mayans and so on.
Medieval Europe (where the knights ruled) was a largely fragmented bunch of small states, where a lost battle often resulted in a complete defeat.
WW1 style trench warfare emerged in the American Civil war and the Crimean war. Neither machine guns nor barbed wire where deployed in mass. Those wars where won by the ones who could hold out for longer.
Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated.
Here are the German numbers for operation Barbarossa:
3.8 million personnel
3,350–3,795 tanks
3,030–3,072 other AFVs
2,770–5,369 aircraft
7,200–23,435 artillery pieces
17,081 mortars
600,000 horses
600,000 vehicles
There are a couple orders of magnitude between infantry and tanks.
The numbers for the attack on France look similar.
That tanks feature so prominently is due to propaganda (since those things look cool).
In modern societies, warfare is all about logistics, morale and the ability to take a punch.
Even a completely lopsided tech advantage can be negated if you survive the first few attacks.
That is one of the reasons why the Mongolians are gone but the Taliban are still there.
You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field:
The proportion between lactic acid and alcohol depends on how exactly the kefir was fermented.
Airag is sold in Mongolia in grocery stores actually. It is harder to find kefir there.
I think it is more likely that they brought dehydrated meat and dairy with them, which are common in Mongolia to this day. Probably they also added to their diet what they found along their way, at least meat. Maybe they even tried some grain.
As far as I can remember, Airag is only produced during July and August. That would be pretty limiting. It also spoils pretty quickly. After a while in warm weather the smell is unbearable. People save the microbes for the the next run in the following year.
Surrounding countries in that area have to have generations of festering hate for that country. Im not saying that to be rude - if you’ve never brushed up on the history of Mongolian conquest… it’s just insane. Highly recommend going down the rabbit hole, interesting on another level the span & techniques of that empire.
I’m not much of a fan of continuing to hold grudges against people who weren’t alive when even the oldest of your living ancestors were born, but I’ll never be surprised if China decides they want to wipe them off the map some day. It’s a shame their culture wasn’t privy to much technological advancement regarding long term settlement. Modern borders would likely be much different if they had been.
Their territory is also fairly infertile, cold and of little strategic importance, being landlocked and all. I mean, most of the country is Gobi Desert, so yeah.
Most surrounding countries don't have festering hate for mongolia. It's only in the west we do. The mongol empire is actually admired in much of asia.
> if you’ve never brushed up on the history of Mongolian conquest… it’s just insane.
I have and almost all of it is exaggerated nonsense.
> but I’ll never be surprised if China decides they want to wipe them off the map some day.
China is more likely to wipe out Britain or Germany or France or anyone else than the mongols. Why would china wipe out the mongols when much of modern china is a mongol creation starting with the yuan dynasty.
> It’s a shame their culture wasn’t privy to much technological advancement regarding long term settlement.
It's not a matter of technological advancement. It's a matter of the nature of empire. The mongol empire, despite the stereotype, was not a genocidal colonizing empire. Most empires throughout history weren't genocidal colonizing empires.
> Modern borders would likely be much different if they had been.
Modern borders are different due to them - from vietnam to hungary, from russia to india and everywhere in between.
Overview of the work on wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ystoria_Mongalorum
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwariz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Death_and_success...
> The battle marked the height of the extent of Mongol conquests, and was the first time a Mongol advance was permanently beaten back in direct combat on the battlefield
> The Muslim Mamluks defeated the Mongols in all battles except one. Beside a victory to the Mamluks in Ain Jalut, the Mongols were defeated in the second Battle of Homs, Elbistan and Marj al-Saffar. After five battles with the Mamluks, the Mongols only won at the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar. They never returned to Syria again.
Hmmm.... I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate here or achieve with your comment. You're trying to say that the Mongol Empire's trail of destruction is "worse" than the Islamic Empire's trail of destruction?
> it is a great page in our history to have dealt the first major blow to them in the Battle of Ain Jalut[1], saving the world from God knows what horrid things they would have continued had they been left unchallenged.
"our" history? "saving the world from them"? Forgive me, but do you feel entirely comfortable saying such things?
Since you've made the statement "God knows what horrid things they would have continued had they been left unchallenged.", I wonder what's your take on the historian Niall Ferguson's remark that the Islamic Conquest of South Asia was the largest genocide in human history. I wouldn't be surprised if others had the opposite opinion to you and would have wished the Mongols had done more to protect the world. Are you able to see both sides of these equations?
The Romans, The Muslims, The Mongols, The British and many other European countries, and the US all are the bad guys in many humans' sad stories. I'm not sure what the comment you're replying to is trying to accomplish either.
I've seen the Mongols described as a necessary evil to halt the Islamic conquest of the world. Khan himself thought he was God's scourge on the world for all our sins.
Yes. And I'm sure you'll agree the same for the the multiple genocides, organized mass rape and destruction of numerous non-Islamic universities in South Asia and violent annihilation of indigenous peoples (not just their ethnic groups, but also their original cultures and religions) in South East Asia. It seems to be happening even right now with Indonesian Muslims annihilating and colonizing West Papuan tribal populations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgllbBzZxxM
Niall Ferguoson sounds quite biased and exaggerative.
And I'm forced to repeat my question. Who is saving whom? The world? Because it appears the millions who got raped and genocided by "the Muslims" would be likely to strongly to disagree with you.
I hope you don't think Niall Fergusson's view is an isolated opinion. Most historians appear to share similar viewpoints. Here's a quote from Will Durant.
" „The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.“ — Will Durant, book The Story of Civilization Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage page 459. The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), I - Our Oriental Heritage (1935)
"
Interestingly enough, there is written history on this, provided by Islamic historians of the period themselves! Because the Islamic historians were "proudly" chronicling of the conquest.
“The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period.”
Francois Gautier in his book ‘Rewriting Indian History’ (1996) wrote:
“The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.”
Millions did not get raped or genocided by the Muslims, not sure where you're getting that information from. Muslims have had rules of engagements since the early days of Islam, which included even not destroying trees and plants, let alone prohibition of killing and raping.
Forced conversions are also against Islam.
Those sources you're citing seem quite anti-Islamic and biased, and ludicrous. For example, googling the following phrase:
> The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus
Results in pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim propaganda websites. Show me which "Islamic historians and scholars" have recorded with glee and pride any slaughters. If those indeed did occur, you'll find the Islamic scholars the first call them out and condone them.
It seems you're just copy pasting false anti-Muslim propaganda.
We know what the British Empire did in India and the surrounding areas, and they want to blame their atrocities on others. Let alone that we know that Europe "proudly" holds the greatest number of deaths and destruction caused by a war by means of WWI and WWII. And now we're seeing the Ukraine-Russia war.
Some refutations:
http://sciencewislam.blogspot.com/2017/06/blog-post.html
https://ar.quora.com/%D9%87%D9%84-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A3%D8%AD%...
I already gave both citations. You presumably accuse them both of being anti-Islamic, and you've accused me of "copy pasting false anti-Muslim propaganda". That's understandable given your position. I recognize that you're unwilling to accept these sources. That makes a further productive discussion untenable.
You didn't even bother to mention who were those supposed scholars who "recorded with glee and pride" the supposed slaughters that took place. I'm still waiting for names.
More citations that destroy false narratives: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*6CdqfPkDcULn5lJjofJMlQ.jp...
You've given a link to an image of some comments by Muhamed. That's your "citation to destroy false narratives"? Do you agree this seems inconsistent with documented actions taken by Muhamed's followers, even right now in Daesh/Iraq? I'm sure you'll claim those followers are not Muslim and other such typical arguments made by individuals who have become fully mentally enthralled to a particular belief system. But I hope it is clear that such arguments aren't compelling to others. If you wish to believe "your" "Islamic empire" was somehow "less evil" than the Mongol empire, that's your choice. Just like my choice is to simply to see the data and see pretty horrific things done by both, and choose to avoid identifying with either group or attempting to downplay, hide, or erase the suffering of their victims.
Arabs did. The ottoman turks, muslim persians, etc benefited greatly. If the mongol empire was so destructive, we wouldn't have had the ottoman empire - the greatest muslim empire in history.
> and the atrocities the latter committed have been well documented.
It's absurdly exaggerated.
> Yet, it is a great page in our history to have dealt the first major blow to them in the Battle of Ain Jalut[1], saving the world from God knows what horrid things they would have continued had they been left unchallenged.
What horrid things did they do? Other than convert to islam and entrench islam in the places they conquered?
As opposed to the arabs who wiped out non-islamic religions in areas they conquered. All you have to do is look at iran/persia. The arabs conquered persia and wiped out zoraostrians. The mongols conquered persia and didn't wipe out islam. And if it wasn't for the mongols, the islamic world would have been conquered in the 1200s rather than in the 1800s. After all, it was the arrival of the mongols in the middle east than ended the crusades.
They're all Muslims. Islam establishes that ethnicity does not matter.
Arabs did not wipe out local populations, you'd want to look at the Crusades and Zionists for that.
Yes I know. That's my point. The arabic domination of the muslim world was ended by the mongols. The mongol empire helped the rise of the ottoman and persian empire. In other words, the mongol empire was bad for arab muslims but great for turkic and persian muslims.
> Arabs did not wipe out local populations, you'd want to look at the Crusades and Zionists for that.
Neither did the mongols. That's my point. But the arabs wiped out local cultures and religions. Which the mongols did not. They actually safeguarded local cultures and religions. It's why so much mongol empire remained so diverse racially, ethnically, culturally, religiously, etc.
Islam was never exclusive to the Arabs. One of the main tenants of Islam is that there is no difference between Arab and non-Arab, black and white, etc.
> But the arabs wiped out local cultures and religions
No they did not. Even Christian and Jewish academics and historians admit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc6yXYR01Vg&t=5s
You can also see how cultures who converted to Islam preserved their traditions quite well (e.g. in the sub-Indian peninsula, far East Asia, etc.).
Their tactics were great for open terrain where you could maneuver with horses. Not so great when you have to deal with mountains.
They did great up until they hit Poland and the Balkans, where they faced harsher terrain.
They had to abandon their Central European campaign for political reasons, but even If they kept going, I don’t think they would have been that successful in Europe. It took the Ottomans one century to conquer the Balkans and they were still stopped in Poland.
I keep seeing these historic revisionist takes and it just leaves me... Empty inside, do these people believe that modern Tajikistan is flat? That China is an endless grassland? That Afghanistan, Georgia, the Koreas and East Manchuria, or heck even northern India and Pakistan, are all these places just empty plains? The entirety of you know.... Iran???
Hungary is no more mountainous than the places I mentioned above, I suppose arguing makes no sense here as I feel that these supposed lines or argument are somehow inherently related to a broader sense of "Western excepcionalism"
China was the real deal.
Constantinople ruler at the time, Baldwin II was either killed or captured Sources agree that the city started paying tribute to the mongol.
( one is a document excommunicating Baldwin for accepting overloadship from the mongols )
So the city was not taken but the situation was pretty bad.
Similarly, Bulgaria and Hungary were taken too if I’m remember correctly.
Yes. Western crusaders smashed altars and raped nuns. The first Latin Pope to officially apologize to us for this was John Paul II, in Anno Domini 2001, almost eight hundred years after the atrocity took place. This apology was rendered just 2 years after he controversially kissed a Koran.
>"What a beautiful scripture, containing teachings nigh-incompatible with our dogmas!! ちゅ〜 <3"
>"Ohhhhhhhh that one is for year 2099. Okay. I see what happened, I started a century too far into the Novus Ordo playbook. Sorry. Sorry. The pages got stuck together. What was on the start of this page? 2001? Apologizing for the atrocity? Ohhhhkay, right. Back on track."
2001 a Grace Odyssey.
That was used, apparently, as an excuse by the Crusaders killing Christians. A bunch of scum, even by their own standards. The Doge, 80 and blind, played that bunch like fiddle so. He got a mercenary army to sack one of his biggest economic competitors for free, and he got to keep the plunder.
They couldn't take Dubrovnik (the first well fortified western European city), and also were defeated on mountainous terrain by the Bulgarians. They wouldn't been able to take something more fortified like Constantinople. They actually had clashes at the time, but it was mostly raids by the Mongols.
So, it is pretty clear. In Europe, the Mongolians did great on open terrain, planes, and cities that didn't have great natural defenses. They didn't do that well on cities that were better fortified, and with natural defenses (mountains). They raided and ransacked the areas, and moved on as they couldn't sustain a siege in such terrains.
"The Bulgarian victory can likely be attributed to the mountainous terrain, to which the Mongols were not accustomed.[16]"
That include the mountainous region of Nepal and Tibet.
From what we know of their administration, their focus was on maintaining control of the rich region around Beijing, Xanadu and Cheng du. Not so much the Eastern Europe.
I don't believe the Mongols ever dominated Tibet. They may have made inroads into grassy northern regions such as Kham. In fact I believe that Genghis as Emperor of China paid tribute to Tibetan rulers.
I'd like to see a source for Mongols crossing the Himalaya and impacting Nepal.
Then again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_Tibet
Those were prepping for a crusade, and got surprised by the mongols arrival.
They lost pretty badly. When the mongols did setup shop and administration, it sound like their focus was China. And not the backwater of Western Europe.
Not really. Genghis Khan's grandsons split the empire apart; only the part of it that was in China was focused in China. Everyone focused on the territory they controlled, for the obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_the_Mongol_Empire
The reason they paid no attention to Western Europe is very straightforward; the Mongols never reached Western Europe. But they reached Eastern Europe and they stayed there for centuries.
But what I wanted to highlight was that the most prized territory were in the east.
For instance in the division you linked the supposed ruler on the empire after Gengis Khan dead was a Yuan, sitting in Beijing and holding the Title or khan of khan. ( even if that did not worked out so well )
Anyway; I’m not an expert ,by far. I mostly regurgitate bits from the Dan Carlin show on the subject.
I remember him putting a emphase on how the Mongols were turned East first, culturally and in intends, and only eventually west.
( great in depth série, 10h or so long, even if I can’t stand his bombastic style )
So what? We also know they never reached either of those places. It's easy to have maps.
> For instance in the division you linked the supposed ruler on the empire after Gengis Khan dead was a Yuan, sitting in Beijing
Again, so what? A traditional title of the king of Assyria was "King of the Universe". It coexisted with the much less aspirational title "King of Assyria". But it didn't mean anything. Kublai Khan held a title that implied he held authority over other divisions of the Mongols.[1] And in fact he held no such authority, and nobody believed that he did. And...?
[1] Though that title wasn't just "Khan"... everyone in charge of anything was called Khan. What title do you think the head of the Il-khanate held?
I find it interesting, don’t you ? That’s all.
When the Mongols returned to Poland a third time, in 1287-1288, with an even larger force than before, the invasion completely failed because the country's fortifications had been upgraded. The Mongols suffered significant losses and were turned back. During the first two invasions, Western Europe was significantly better fortified than Poland of 1287, so they would almost certainly have been smashed.