Climatic and environmental aspects of Mongol withdrawal from Hungary (2016)
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
All up it was a fair sized dent in human numbers across that entire region from west to east.
But how do you kill 1,000,000 people in a couple of years visiting Hungary when you don't even have any real guns? How do you round up that many people from all over the countryside with primitive weapons and they don't try to escape or anything? Such a crazy thing to do...
> Ogodei's armies slaughtered an estimated 1 million Hungarians: Troops, clerics, nobles, knights, and peasants.
The funny thing is, while the Vikings are somehow romantized in media, despite being murserous pullagers and slavers (as opposed to normal Scandinavian folks), the Mongols still serve as this dark, evil barbarious outside menace. And that gies for China as well, just go watch Mulan...
I mean we talk about largest genocide in mankind's history, no amount of whataboutism is changing this simple fact and its all on contemporary mongols.
If Hitler's escapades killed 10 people overall he would be just a side note in history books as another questionable weirdo with grandiose plans.
It's not something that suddenly appeared in the 18th century though. Rather it evolved over the centuries. Christianity and Islam did introduce some respect for human life through the concept of universal salvation. In the ancient times lives of most members of out groups were viewed as totally dispensable. During the middle ages that changed to some degree, generally mass murder and or enslavement of entire populations was frowned upon (even if still practiced on many occasions). And heathens were at least were offered the chance to convert before they became fair game.
I'm not really confident that the list will contain any items.
Mongols didn't just 'withdraw' and leave Europe alone. The article mentions they brought Chinese gunpowder - so they left behind a valuable technological legacy.
They killed one million Hungarians, but that was just one nation. The overall conquest(s) effected a vast death toll across Europe and near Asia.
What else did they leave behind? Not mentioned: a genetic legacy. This was a living legacy as impactful as anything else, arguable even more so...
And what's involved in that? Conquering armies tend to kill men and boys, and rape women and girls. (The most comprehensive recent record of similar events is from post-war Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...) A significant proportion of those rapes resulted in pregnancies. In medieval Europe, we can assume that abortion was mostly unavailable.
So actually, in one sense Mongols remained in Europe, spreading their genes through the most vile and traumatic acts inflicted on the hidden victims of conflict: women.
Women are half of humanity. It's wrong to neglect that aspect of invasion.
https://theins.ru/confession/257790 https://theins.ru/en/confession/258330
Conversely, there are comprehensive (but still insufficient) records of the aftermath of atrocities committed in Germany against women: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Crimes+Unspoken:+The+Rape+of+Ger...
Looking at the history of artillery in Europe, and the fact that it first developed in the West, it's far more likely that gunpowder technology was introduced from the Islamic world in the context of the Crusades and the Latin Kingdoms.
> This wooden chronicle revealed that a cold and wet period set in for years, leading "to reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as hampering the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry", according to a press release.
> The extra moisture and early spring thaw turned the Hungarian plains into marshes and swampland.
As in, they expected frozen ground not marshland that time of year. But reading the abstract of the original source, it seems like it was a combo.
> Documentary sources and tree-ring chronologies reveal warm and dry summers from 1238–1241, followed by cold and wet conditions in early-1242. Marshy terrain across the Hungarian plain most likely reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry
The negative connotations of a horde as being disorderly and cruel is a direct reflection of western European perceptions of "Tartar Barbarism"
It's not like we generally have positive views of comparable scale "sweeping successes" exported from Europe like the Conquistadors or transatlantic slave trade
And then you could make the argument that all industrialization and social innovation that followed (such as modern democracy, medicine, space techology, computing) may not have happened either, or not in the same timeframe, or not in the same manner.
So when you start arguing about things "coming from colonialism", be aware that without history as it happened, we might not even be able to have this discussion here between people from all over the world. And that in general it's very hard to ascribe exactly which parts of today "come from" which parts of history.
People can make whatever arguments they want, if doesn't make them valid. Do you have some good analysis/sources to support this point of view?
The Mongolians brought death and failed to have the literacy to write themselves as the victors.
Until the Nazis they were history’s greatest villains.
The cultural influence is there, it's just that the longer lasting influence was to connect other cultures, like introducing gunpowder to Hungary.
Parallel with Hitler's conquest is not bad, a slightly different ideology but again "we above everybody else who are subhumans anyway so who cares", hence overall decimation of whole mankind (albeit the process was different, result was same).
>That, and that the Mongols directly threatened Europe from the outside
The Huns? The Caliphate?
Also there was this chivalry thing about avoiding to kill your opponents and treating them fairly after they were captures. Obviously this mainly applied to knights, the rich and the upper class. But paroling or holding ordinary soldiers for ransom was not rare either (due to reciprocity and because it was profitable) since most soldiers were professionals fighting for money and not poor peasants.
The church generally was a moderating influence as well (as long as the war wasn't against heretics or heathens).
Mongols on the other hand were extremely cruel even by the standards of the day (generally even the crusaders were much more tame in comparison)
It's not like that justifies the sack but the Byzantines are definitely partially to blame for the animosity that had arisen between the east and west following the first crusade. Especially considering that they together with the pope pretty much started the entire crusade movement (the first crusade was supposed to just be a relief expedition to liberate the recently lost Roman territories in Anatolia).
- "horda", meaning horde, and
- "orda" used almost exclusively for the Golden Horde. _IIRC_ that's where the form with "h" appeared first and propagated to other western languages. (I'm not saying that you're incorrect, I just haven't heard about a direct route from Mongolian to English.)
The word "Urdu" (as in the "Urdu language") has the same, Turkic origin (meaning "military camp"). It also exists in Persian, which influenced the development of the Urdu language.
Setting aside the fact that the term refers to the Mongols using their own word, why are we describing their governmental methods as sophisticated? How do they perform relative to comparators?
In China, they're not impressive at all; the government before them lasted for about 300 years (traditionally dated 960-1276, though it lost control of the north of China for the last 100 or so years), and the one after them also lasted about 300 years (1368-1644).
If you were paying attention to the dates, that leaves just under 100 years for the Mongols' "sophisticated" government to survive. [In reality, they almost certainly deserve credit for a bit more than that -- transitions of power take place over multi-year periods, not instantaneously.] I tend to make the assumption that the brevity of their rule is related to the fact that they had no administrative tradition -- perhaps you know better?
(I've also read that Mongol rule was extremely beneficial to the economy of Europe -- where they weren't in charge -- [because the pax Mongolica made overland trade economically viable] while being a step backward for China, where they were.)
> technological
This is even weirder. What technological methods? The Mongols couldn't even make metal objects.
One century later. The Mongols had very little staying power. That's what I'm saying above.
What do "sophisticated governmental methods" mean to you? Did the Mongols have them?
The relationship of the Russian dukes to their faraway Mongol overlords seems more parallel to the systems of, say, feudal Europe than to those of the Roman empire. There's a clear consensus on which system used more sophisticated methods.
There were roughly 100x as many Europeans as Mongolians in the 13th century. It seems unlikely they could have ever conquered all of Europe with supply lines stretching back to Asia. All while maintaining a grip on 100 million subjugated non-Mongolians who probably weren’t keen to send and supply troops across the world.
Conquering they much territory is an extremely unusual event, it seems reasonable that the Mongols would just eventually run out of steam.
What are the locals going to do?
Refuse? Ok, then they kill you.
Lie? They force you to eat some.
They even had a fermented milk drink that was highly praised in Marco Polo's book.
> he developed ortogh trading systems, instituted methods of tax collection, and established regional bureaucracies which controlled legal and economic affairs
just collecting the taxes on such a huge territory sounds like a pretty big undertaking, let alone all these other things mentioned
On the other hand, it seems likely that the resulting empire would fracture into a collection of Khanates, as that is what happened to the actual empire.
Well by the time their armies arrived in Europe 'true' Mongols were a minority. Just like the Huns and other stepped empires they included many Turkish, Cuman, Finno-Ugric and other nomadic tribes.
> Conquering they much territory is an extremely unusual event
Steppe empires weren't that rare though we just don't have that much information on those preceding the Mongols. Obviously they were much more successful than their predecessors but not necessarily that exceptional.