Was Genghis Khan Really As Barbaric As We Think? | Line Of Fire | Chronicle

In the 13th century, a new and devastating plague struck at the heart of Central Asia, rippling outwards to envelop the lands from China to Poland. This was a plague of unbridled terror, not of rats and disease, but of men. The Mongolian tribes exploded out of the Central Asian steppes with a ferocity never seen before, on a campaign of bloodthirsty conquest that would last for the next 100 years. The Mongolian battlefield tactics and their remarkable courage and resilience have become the stuff of legend. They were simply natural warriors. But it took one leader to unite and lead them on the path to power. That leader was Genghis Khan. I think Genghis Khan's legacy today is his reputation as a great conqueror and ruthless ruler. Under him, the Mongols were able to sweep out of Central Asia and take over most of the known world. I'd say that when Genghis Khan was alive, he would claim that he had conquered the world and conquered the people who taught 720 languages. And he conquered the states of five different colours so that he proclaimed Mongolia's independence throughout the world. One of the common myths about Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan is that he was a sort of barbaric strongman who managed to somehow unite fierce and free nomadic tribes into this horde that then rampaged across Europe. But the reality is something I think much more interesting. So I think we could compare him to someone more like William the Conqueror. He's a nobleman effectively, he's an aristocrat. And at that time, steppe society was divided between aristocrats and commoners and high office was only held by aristocrats. Genghis Khan was born about the year 1167 with the original name of Temujin. His father was a local chieftain and nephew of the former khan or ruler of the Mongol tribe. At the tender age of nine, his family escaped to safety after a rival tribe murdered his father and it was while he was in exile that Temujin met Borte, his bride-to-be. The young man was given a black sable coat to use as a dowry. He used the coat to buy influence and favor with tribal elders and with the leader of the Karaite, a tribe in central Mongolia. The tribal leader took Temujin under his wing but the new alliance was tested when the Merkit, a rival tribe from the north, raided the Karaite camp and kidnapped Borte. Mustering all the support he could, Temujin and his new tribal allies met and defeated the Merkit in battle and rescued Borte. By now, Temujin was growing in status and power, making alliances with other tribes and calling in the favors once owed to his father. In 1202, he surrounded and crushed the Tatars near the river Kalka in eastern Mongolia. In an early example of his distinctive style of military rule, he forbade his troops to loot until the Tatars had been completely crushed. He even went as far as to confiscate the spoils of those who disobeyed him. With this significant victory under his belt and helped by the constant warring between other tribes, Temujin became the dominant figure in the region. Soon, other Mongol leaders had pledged their allegiance to him and had proclaimed him universal ruler, Genghis Khan. History has forever known him as Genghis Khan. I think that Genghis Khan's success really depends upon his ability to produce, plunder, conquests for his supporters. And the wider his territories grew, the more he was able to recruit subject nations who also benefited from Mongol expansion. Although we might think of the steppes as marginal, faraway, distant places, and it's very easy to think of them as remote and desolate, actually these are centres of power. They might look geographically very dispersed, you might have difficulty seeing settlements and so on, but taken together, if you gathered together the horses and the people from these steppe lands, you have most enormously powerful capabilities militarily. In the year 1206, with most of the Mongol tribes united under one ruler for the first time in their history, Genghis Khan was declared king, or Khan, of Mongolia. His reputation alone earned him many followers, who, weary of constant tribal conflict, flocked to his banner to share the comradeship and the unrivalled spoils of his military campaigns. The charismatic new king was physically very different to most of his Mongol subjects. He was comparatively tall and powerfully built, with piercing grey-green eyes. Sure as he could be of his domestic position, Genghis was able to set his sights on foreign conquests. He first cast his eyes towards neighbouring China. Conquest may have seemed impossible, even suicidal to attempt, but in the early 13th century, China was stricken with internal divisions. The nation was carved up into three fragments, the Qin Empire in the north, the Xiexie in the northwest, and the Song state in the south. A lot hinged on the success of the Chinese campaign. It would be the Mongols' first test against a land of settlers. They could not be certain that their nomad battle tactics would work. Genghis was well prepared before he set off to fight the Qin state. Firstly, to test the Mongol army, his commanders fought and took the Tamgut and Urgut states without him taking the field. This meant that Genghis was able to assess his army's strengths and weaknesses. He also used the Tamgut and Urgut campaigns to practice and refine his methods for attacking and destroying fortified places and using their resources to build and test his siege engines. So Genghis was well prepared to face the Qin Empire. After subduing the weakest of the three empires, the Xiexie, in a brief campaign during 1209, Genghis Khan turned on the Qin state in 1211. Armed with 180,000 men, the Mongol force plundered and looted to within 25 miles of Beijing. However, the Mongol advance was slowed by one weakness that would haunt them for years to come, the inability to besiege fortified cities. An aspect of war that was new to the Mongols, Genghis Khan and his men struggled at first to adapt their battlefield tactics to the requirements of siege warfare. But Genghis Khan was unafraid of new ideas. So with the aid of Chinese prisoners and their knowledge of engineering, he had siege machines built and troops specially trained for besieging cities. The new tactics worked handsomely as the cities of Hebei, Shandong and Shanxi all fell. Genghis improved the engineering part of his army by utilising the skills of the artisans and craftsmen of the lands he conquered. Members of the Mongol force would search for any advantages in armaments that the defeated enemy possessed. And instead of shutting it down, would develop the technology and channel it back into their own force. By doing this, the more people the Mongols conquered, the greater the improvements in their army's capabilities. In 1214, the exhausted Chinese emperor finally surrendered, giving his daughter to Genghis Khan along with 1,000 child slaves, 3,000 horses and vast amounts of gold, silver and silk. Beijing threw its gates open to the Mongols, who showed no mercy as they savagely ransacked the city. With the capital safely conquered, Genghis Khan felt confident enough to leave one of his generals to oversee the rest of the China campaign. So in the spring of 1216, he decided to focus his attention on Central Asia. By this time, the most western reaches of the Mongol territory shared borders with the Islamic state of Khwarazm, a vast but disorganised empire covering modern-day Iran. Its leader, Shah Muhammad, had foolishly executed a caravan of Mongol traders at Uttar, and had then made matters worse by having the envoy sent to his court to demand an explanation put to death. With these ruthless murders, the Shah had signed his own death warrant and signalled the end of his empire. The response of Genghis Khan was chillingly curt. You have chosen war. That will happen which will happen. And what it is to be, we know not. The success of the Mongol military machine lay in its disciplined, skilled and well-equipped army. At the heart of the Mongol army was the horse, which was not only crucial to the army, but central to the Mongol way of life. Mongol children were taught to ride horses from a very early age, and horse thieves were summarily executed. With saddles and stirrups, Mongol riders had all the stability they needed when shooting arrows on horseback at high speed. As a result, it was possible to inflict heavy, sometimes crippling losses on an enemy during the skirmish phase of battle, long before the main armies actually clashed in combat. Cavalry was the most powerful and useful military device. A herd of horses, if you like, was a supercarrier at that time. Thousands of horses meant the ability to move and strike, much more quickly than the agricultural and urban defenders could catch up with you. One of the key Mongol techniques was to use not just one or two horses, but whole strings of remounts. So a single soldier would often lead several horses, and this allowed them to change horses when the first horse was tired, and to keep moving. This allowed unparalleled mobility. They were able to cover the sorts of distances that in medieval times, armies couldn't usually hope to cover these sorts of distances. Advances 50, 60, 70 miles a day were recorded for whole Mongol armies, and these are enormously quick, especially when they're kept up over many days. So that in some cases, Mongols could move ahead of the news of their arrival. They'd appear unexpectedly in front of a town or city before the messengers had even had a chance to arrive from their previous conquest. History Hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans. Enjoy our rich library of documentaries covering key events and locations of the medieval period. History Hit's medieval offering features leading historians such as Dan Jones, Eleanor Janega, and Kat Jarman. Not only that, but we've a rich library of audio documentaries covering every period of history through our network of podcasts. Sign up now for a free trial, and Chronicle fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code CHRONICLE at checkout. Each Mongol cavalryman was equipped with a horn and sinew bow that gave an impressive firing range of around 300 meters. Two types of arrows were kept in separate quivers, 30 light arrows for firing at a distance, and 30 heavily tipped arrows for use at close range. Some arrows even had incendiary heads. Nomadic life was a perfect training for warfare. Everyone was a consummate horseman and also knew how to use a strong bow. This meant that they were very mobile and could put down literally a barrage of arrows on an enemy. In addition, the Great Khan sponsored something called the Great Hunt in which everybody was encouraged to go out and round up a huge quantity of game. This encircling maneuver could then be translated into military strategy and used to defeat enemies. Genghis's army had a 10 system, so he had divisions of 10,000, 1,000, 100, and platoons of 10. This system meant that his army was easy to control and formations were organized effectively. Also, one division had the job of scouting ahead and collecting information on the geography of the area they were to attack. Where would be the best place to attack the enemy force? How many men made up the force? And what were its strengths and weaknesses? The Mongolian army was very disciplined and if one soldier disobeyed an order, then the whole 10, or platoon, was punished. That's why Genghis's soldiers tried not to make any mistakes as they did not want their fellow soldiers punished because of them. This is why discipline was a strong characteristic of Genghis's force. Mongol warriors were issued with small swords, a wickerwork shield, two or three javelins, and a dagger strapped to the inside of the left forearm. Each soldier wore a raw silk undershirt, which acted as a protective vest. If a warrior was struck by an arrow, the silk would wrap itself around the arrowhead, reducing the impact and enabling it to be removed easily and painlessly. Each man was also issued with a waterproof hide saddlebag, which could be inflated for river crossings. The bag contained enough supplies and rations to enable a Mongol warrior to exist completely independently of the main army. What the Mongols also possessed was the psychological weapons of terror. They were utterly ruthless, they devastated territory, and this meant that people who faced them in war were already half-beaten, you might say, before they encountered them. We could also compare it, if you like, to modern strategies. After all, at the time, that was an accepted sort of approach to strategy and to politics, much as mutually assured deterrence was so important in the Cold War. We've got a situation where over the heads of the various nations was held the destruction of whole cities in both cases. So deterrence also provided a key plank in Chinggis Khan's strategy to convince the subject and his conquered subjects that if they did revolt, they would not be spared. Not only was the individual Mongol warrior well-prepared and equipped for battle, the army of which he was a part was also a highly organised fighting machine. But it would not be long before this effective fighting force would meet its first challenge on the banks of the Indus River. Although the Khawazam Shah ruled a great empire, it should not be forgotten that this was a recent creation of fairly uncertain loyalty, and this explains perhaps why Shah Muhammad didn't really want to engage the Mongols in battle in 1219. Another problem was that he had very extended front along hundreds of miles on his eastern border. He had to spread out his defensive army formations because he really had very poor intelligence when it came to what Chinggis Khan's intentions or roots were. Genghis Khan left Mongolia in the spring of 1219 with an army of 150,000 men. Meanwhile, his enemy, Shah Muhammad, deployed 300,000 well-equipped troops along a 500-mile stretch of what is now the Jaxartes River. But still, the Khawazamian border was dangerously vulnerable. From 1219 to 1220, in a sustained, highly-coordinated, three-pronged attack, the Mongols systematically destroyed the Shah's empire. Chinggis Khan and his master tactician, Subedai, had devised an extraordinary plan to conquer the Khawazamian empire. They divided into separate columns. These were separate, independent armies that were able to move over hundreds of miles to attack the Khawazam Shah's empire from different directions. One column was led by Chinggis and Subedai himself. Another was led by his eldest son, Jochi. And Jochi's job was to move up and down the eastern border of the Khawazam Shah's realm, creating a defensive screen, if you like, raiding towns, taking cities. And this generated a real sensation of panic on one side, pressure on one side of the Khawazam Shah's realm. But at the same time, he was being outflanked through the Kizilkum Desert itself, which was thought to be impossibly inhospitable and quite impassable. Chinggis Khan and Subedai found a route to emerge at the gates of Bukhara, where the Khawazam Shah was, quite unexpectedly. After two days, the Mongols made their move. 50,000 Tajik infantry poured out of the city to meet the Mongols. But resistance was futile. Five days later, the king's uncle defected along with tens of thousands of mercenaries, joining the seething Mongol horde to batter down the city gates. The Shah managed to escape his Mongol pursuers only in the spring of 1221 to die a broken and defeated man on a remote island in the Caspian Sea. In the summer of 1221, Genghis scaled the Hindu Kush to search the Khwarazmian king's son, Shah Jalal ad-Din, who, it was rumoured, was trying to raise troops near Ghazni in Afghanistan. Genghis Khan sent 40,000 men ahead to gather intelligence. North of Kabul at Pawan, the Mongol reconnaissance troops had been beaten by a force twice the strength of their own. But by the time Genghis Khan had reached Ghazni, defections had caused the Khwarazmian army to shrink to half its former size. In an attempt to regroup, Jalal ad-Din had fled to the Indus Valley. But this time, the Mongol forces were in hot pursuit. They caught up with Jalal ad-Din and his soldiers at night as they made preparations to ford the river Indus the following day. At daybreak, 50,000 Mongol warriors faced 50,000 Khwarazmian troops. Then, the Shah ordered Emir Malik on his right wing to charge the Mongol left, driving it back. Seeing that the Mongol's right flank did not seem to pose a threat, Jalal ad-Din weakened his left flank to reinforce Malik's success on the right. The Shah then prepared to land what he believed would be the fatal blow for the Mongol army. Leading from the front, Jalal ad-Din headed an enormous charge aimed at breaking the Mongol centre. Now the Shah had the chance to avenge his father's death. He directed his troops straight at Genghis Khan himself. For the first time, the hitherto unthinkable prospect of defeat for the great leader and his army was very real. In the great battle with the Khwarazm Shah, Genghis Khan actually adopted quite a cautious strategy and allowed Jalal ad-Din to launch an attack on him. Of course, this was a deception. And so it meant that the Islamic army was really sucked into the centre of the Mongol army, allowing an outflanking manoeuvre which really had not been anticipated. As Muhammad and his men thundered into the Mongol centre, Genghis Khan, leaving his hard-pressed centre to defend themselves, led his imperial guard in a charge so fierce that it completely shattered the force of Emir Malik, who had previously been so successful on the Mongolian left flank. Then came the tactical masterstroke. Unknown to Jalal ad-Din, Genghis Khan had also ordered a division detached from his right wing to scale the mountains, encircling the Khwarazmian left flank. It was this force that fell upon the Shah's men, who were unprepared for the sudden, savage assault. Soon, the Mongols had blocked the king's retreat to the south. The role of the respective leaders in battle is a little bit difficult to identify from the sources that we have today, but I think we must see Genghis Khan as having the kind of energy and ability to direct his forces which the Muslim commander seems to have lacked. In essence, though, when Jalal ad-Din committed himself to a headlong charge, he lost command of his ability to run the battle, you might say. It's important to remember that in this period, communication is essentially personal. It's tempting to view Genghis Khan as a man who could move the pieces on the chessboard at will, and perhaps if anybody could command battlefield troops in this area, he did as well as any. But in actual fact, it was more like a clockwork toy that you wound up and then set on its way, hoping that people would carry out their instructions to the letter. Jalal ad-Din himself had escaped the carnage, but his army had been torn apart. Doubtless concluding that discretion was the better part of valour, he flung off his armour, mounted a horse, and with 700 lucky survivors, forded the Indus River to escape to freedom. In his desperation to flee from the Mongolian army, Shah Muhammad had been forced to leave behind his young family, and the unfortunate infants were shown no pity. They were unceremoniously flung into the swirling waters of the Indus River. The eldest was just eight years old. It was in the year 1227 that Genghis Khan finally breathed his last. He was 65 years old, and he left behind an empire that stretched from the East China Coast to the Caspian Sea. The first Mongol incursions had already been made into Russia, and the states of modern Pakistan and northern India conquered and ransacked. The driving force behind Mongol expansion in the 13th century has to be the standard nomadic desire for plunder, for slaves, for domination, managed by a leader who can deliver that, who can organise a balance of power between conflicting tribes, between ambitious warlords and so on. And so Genghis Khan has to play a big role in ensuring Mongol success, but if you like, he uses the natural forces of his type of communities, the nomadic tribes, in order to achieve empire. But he was also able to do something else. He was able to organise the resources of the regions he conquered to generate springboards for further conquests. So this is, if you like, not just a victory of wild barbarians from the steppes over civilised, nothing of that case at all. Instead, it's a victory, if you like, of long traditions of statehood, of careful diplomatic leadership, and of a real coming of age of steppe leadership, where Genghis Khan was able to make use of the conquered nations as well to increase the size and extent of his empire. With Genghis Khan gone, it was eight years before the great Mongolian war council, called the Quiraltai, assembled to determine the next stage of Mongolian expansion. They decided to turn their attention to Russia and Europe. It's true to say that by the 1230s, Western Europe was pretty well uninformed about the danger of the Mongol threat. The Russian principalities had a much keener awareness of the presence of Mongol military power because they had been defeated in the Battle of the Kalka River, which lies just to the north of the Sea of Azov, in 1223. But then the Mongols left because Genghis called back his commander Subodai, perhaps suspecting him of getting too big for his boots. And it may be that the Russians thought the nomadic threat had gone away, as it had done frequently in the past. And certainly they did not unify and present a determined front when the Mongols returned 20 years later. Politically and strategically, the Mongols could not have timed their campaign any better. The struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the Pope was nearing its climax, weakening any hope of assembling a united European force to repel the eastern invaders. What was more, the last attempt by Europe's monarchs to form a united front against an alien enemy, the Fifth Crusade, had collapsed in disarray some years earlier. This was a time when Europe was bitterly divided, although monarchs of the region ruled sets of nobles who were more or less independent from them. So there were real problems with Europe getting its act together in the face of a Mongol threat. There was a basic division along religious grounds between the Latin West and the Orthodox East. The Crusaders had actually conquered Constantinople in 1204 and in so doing destroyed the balance of power which had been maintained by the Byzantine state for eight centuries. This meant that the nomadic dwellers of the steppe and the Islamic East with its great city-states were played off against one another. This was something that the westerners simply couldn't manage. Crusades were useful military tools but they often had specific objectives and also they were quite temporary agglomerations of troops. So they didn't necessarily help in the long term. Thanks to raids made in the early 13th century, the Mongols probably knew as much about their prospective enemies as technical limitations of the age would allow. This intelligence was used to good effect on the campaign trail with light cavalry leading the way up to 100 miles ahead of the main force thereby decreasing the possibility of any unwelcome surprises. The Europeans on the other hand were in blissful ignorance of the terror lying in store for them. Rumours had reached them about a new military force destroying parts of the Islamic world and these were welcomed as confirmation of the legend of Presta John who would one day come to the assistance of the besieged Christian nations battling the Islamic powers in Spain and the Middle East. Others thought that they were probably pagans but held the tantalising idea that the Mongols might be converted to Christianity and brought into a giant coalition to crush the Muslim world. The legend of Presta John was that somewhere far to the east on the other side of the Islamic nations by which the west felt so threatened there was a great Christian king. When the Mongols appeared and were attacking and destroying Islamic states people in the west thought ah at last the Christian king has come to save us but of course it was a complete fantasy and when the Mongols themselves arrived they proved to be worse than the Islamic nations. Marco Polo states that the material, the reality behind the myth was actually a man called Wang Khan. Now there was a Christian ruler of a steppe polity Toril Khan of the Karaites and Toril himself was a Nestorian Christian and Nestorians were a sect of eastern Christians who had split very early on when the patriarch of Constantinople had had to leave as a result of religious disputes in Constantinople and fled into the east. When the armies marched from the east the Mongols included a number of different Karaite nobles some of these were Nestorian Christians so the strange reality, the weird reality is that the reality behind these myths ended up as being the fearsome Mongol conquerors from the steppes of Asia. After spending the summer of 1236 subduing the Bulgars and the Kipchaks the Mongols decided to mount a military campaign that hundreds of years later would be beyond the armies of Napoleon and Hitler. Once the ravages of winter had taken hold the Mongols invaded Russia. The Mongols were different sorts of invaders they were very well adapted at moving around in winter they came from the freezing steppes of Mongolia even colder than the Russian steppes and the frozen rivers actually formed highways through the otherwise very difficult terrain of woods and hills, poor roads so what appears to be a barrier, a river can turn into a highway and the Mongols used this their ponies were not shod they could keep their grip on the slippery ice and they used these channels to move through Russia to surprise their Russian opponents to emerge outside towns and cities often before the news had got to those cities that the Mongol invasion was underway. The Mongols had a supremely efficient intelligence system which enabled them to infiltrate the countries and the courts of potential victim states if you like and to choose the moment to attack. The Russian principalities did not help themselves because they allowed their nomadic allies to execute Mongol ambassadors and this really was an important stimulus to the Mongols turning their beady eyes upon Russia. 13th century Russia was in disarray with most of its population living in about a dozen principalities sharing little but a common religion. After crossing the river Volga with the force of 120,000 men Genghis Khan's grandson Batu and Subedai a veteran commander of the Khwarezmian campaign carved through central Russia with the aim of driving a wedge between the principalities of Novgorod and Kiev. The cities of Ryazan, Moscow, Kolomna, Suzdal and Vladimir all received demands for surrender from the rampant Mongolian invaders. Each and every city refused to surrender believing no doubt that like other nomadic invaders before them the Mongolians would not be able to break down the city walls. The Mongolian army thought otherwise and swiftly set about battering their way in with their siege machines. Every city was sacked, plundered and burned and its inhabitants put to the sword. The Mongols are famous if you like for the great terror that they inspired in their enemies and there's no getting away from the fact that this was an element, a part of their strategy. Genghis Khan was famous for being very resolute when it came to enforcing what he thought of as the honourable surrender of cities. If a city surrendered straight away it was almost always left unharmed. Plundering might take place but it was generally controlled and well ordered and often there wasn't any substantial plundering. If cities resisted they risked being annihilated and worst of all was if a city surrendered and then vaulted. In this case the Mongol forces made a point of annihilating the population including women and children. So there's no doubt that this was important and of course if a Mongol envoy appears at a city demanding surrender people were bound to take it pretty seriously when they'd heard about the fates of other cities. But I think we have to get this in perspective. It seems barbaric, of course it was, but it was also not unknown at the time as a fairly standard tactic. Four months into the campaign the Mongols discovered one of Russia's most formidable natural defences as in the spring thaw of 1237 the ground transformed itself into a bottomless quagmire of mud. The appalling conditions underfoot forced them to abandon their main objective in northern Russia and so Novgorod was spared. Batu and Subadai took the opportunity to rest their weary troops and it was not until the summer of 1240 that they resumed the Russian campaign. But the rejuvenated Mongol army was undiminished and the area around Kiev was devastated in the same way as much of central Russia had been in early 1238. In early December of that year Kiev itself was stormed and although it was by far the largest and richest of all Russian cities it succumbed after only two days of savage fighting and was razed to the ground. Only the Cathedral of Saint Sophia a symbol of the faith shared by all Russians, was spared. The Mongols were very tolerant of different religions. Their own background was pagan, if you like, eclectic. They were quite happy to mix one religion with another. The Mongol imperial capital of Karakorum, for example eventually had chapels, churches, mosques, Buddhist temples all in the same location. So this became, if you like, one of the diplomatic cards which Genghis Khan was able to play. It was well known and he made sure that it was well known in the surrounding regions that the Khan was tolerant of all sorts of religion. Genghis could conquer people with the sword but couldn't conquer their minds. So he decided to play with religion. In Karakorum, he gave representatives of many different faiths the freedom to practice their religions. By doing this, he thought the people of the lands he controlled would be less hostile to the Mongols and enable his rule to continue for many years to come. With Kiev in ruins and the rest of western Ukraine in tatters Batu consolidated his forces in southeastern Poland and it was here that Subodai revealed his plans for his most daring campaign yet an invasion of Hungary with 100,000 men by way of the Carpathian Mountains. Unstable Hungary offered excellent grazing land for the horses of the Mongolian cavalry. The same fertile land had been used by Attila the Hun some 800 years earlier. In any case, Hungary would have to be crushed if the Mongolian drive westward was to continue. Subodai's strategic plan to invade Hungary was daring and vast. The campaign called for a force of about 20,000 to invade Poland acting as the army's northern flank. Subodai would lead a long-range group through the Romanian plains and up the Danube Valley to attack Hungary from the south. Bela IV, the young Hungarian king gathered an army at Buda later to become Budapest to face the Mongolian invasion. He may even have been confident of success after all the Hungarian army was well prepared and trained and anyway the Mongolians would first have to cross the treacherous Carpathian Mountains. Any hope that the mountains would slow the Mongolian advance was ended on the 14th of March 1241 when Bela received the unwelcome news that the Mongols had not only scaled the Carpathian Mountains they were advancing towards Buda at a rate of 50 miles a day. Bela's position was even worse than he imagined for unbeknown to him a second Mongol force under Batu was heading towards him from the west. By the end of March the Mongol armies had reunited outside Pest. In panic King Bela sent his wife to Vienna. His barons an unruly and disloyal collection were not slow to spot an opportunity and made a series of demands to the king before they would pledge to fight. Eventually the stage seemed set for a bloody and momentous battle. It was then that the Mongol army seemed to vanish into thin air. In the context of the Hungarian campaign of 1241 the Mongols feigned retreat really was a classic tactic. They were capable of doing this at a tactical level their horse archers riding forward and then seemingly running away and drawing people into a trap or an ambush but they also did it at a strategic level by advancing into Hungary and then retiring to some well-watered grazing lands and waiting for the Hungarian king to come and attack them. On the 10th of April the Mongols retreated to Mohi near the Carpathian Mountains. With plentiful grazing alongside the river Sajo abundant marshes and a forest canopy the Mongol army simply set up camp and waited. They had found a battlefield that suited them perfectly. The trap had been set and it was completed when Subodai led 30,000 men around and behind the Hungarian army leaving it completely surrounded. Sadly for Bela he remained in complete ignorance of the Mongolian movements. King Bela of Hungary had very poor intelligence of Mongol movements. In part this was his fault because his Kuman allies who were nomads themselves were quite capable of rapid movement and discovering what the Mongol intentions were but they simply weren't trusted by the western Hungarian nobility and in fact had been expelled as fifth columnists if you like. So King Bela simply had very poor intelligence because he didn't use the tools at hand to improve his options. On the 11th of April 1241 Batu's men although vastly outnumbered by the Hungarian army began their slow advance. Even by their standards the Mongols were facing fearful numerical odds and they were beginning to suffer terrible casualties when Subodai's force suddenly appeared to the rear of the Hungarian positions. They surged forward behind a hail of arrows and before long the Hungarian army had been driven back into their own camp. Now superior numbers meant nothing. Hungarian morale began to collapse. The Hungarians were trapped in their fortified camp under a constant murderous barrage of catapult projectiles. However the Mongols did not storm the Hungarian positions. Instead they formed lines opposite the camp that were punctuated with gaps. Many Hungarians seized by panic made a frantic dash to escape through the gaps in the Mongol line presenting easy targets for the pursuing Mongol archers who picked them off one by one as they surged through. Some Hungarians including the Knight's Templar chose to stand their ground and die fighting for the last man. King Bela himself managed to escape with a handful of survivors to the Croatian island of Trogir. Behind him lay an army in ruins and a battlefield soaked with blood. Of the 100,000 strong Hungarian army 70,000 men had been killed and 25,000 had been taken captive. After a break of eight months the Mongols resumed their campaign on Christmas day 1241 by advancing into western Hungary. Clearly Austria and Croatia were firmly in their sights. The city of Zagreb was sacked and preparations were being made to besiege Vienna when fate came to take a hand. Fortune favoured Europe because in 1241 the Khan, son of Genghis Khan, Ögedei Khan died back in the Mongolian capital far away in Karakorum and the Mongol generals who were leading the attack on Europe withdrew their armies and returned east to work out who would succeed Ögedei Khan as the new leader of this imperial juggernaut of the Mongolian empire and they took their armies with them. They might need them for a trial of strength if this dispute became violent. And so Poland and Hungary were abandoned. Europe had been spared by pure chance. The Mongols never threatened the west again. One of the abiding questions of history is whether the Mongols could have conquered western Europe if the great Khan had not died when he did. One argument is that once they run out of the grazing land which was necessary to support a nomadic army and you don't really find that east of the Hungarian plain that they wouldn't have been able to maintain the logistical support. In contrast to that, if you look at the way the Mongols conquered China they adapted within a couple of decades to fighting fortress-based warfare and so maybe they could have done it in the west. But they were getting a very long way from their Asian and steppe land heartland and at some point what had already been conquered became an important enough prize worthy of internal dissent and squabble. So by that point, if you like, the Mongol empire was already on the verge of breaking into its constituent parts and that's in fact what happened over the next few decades. So maybe Europe would have been ruled by the Mongols but there's a good chance, I think, that even if Ugur Khan had not died that the Mongol conquest might have stopped somewhere in central Europe rather than running right through to the Atlantic coast. The next war council convened by the great Khan Mangku in 1251 decided on twin campaigns against Song China and the Islamic empires of the Middle East. It was during the Middle Eastern campaign that a Mongol army 25,000 strong that was advancing on Egypt was met and defeated in battle. Even though they were crushed by sheer weight of numbers such a defeat was without precedent and the myth of Mongol invincibility was shattered. Under the inspired leadership of the first great Mongol leader Genghis Khan the Mongolian empire expanded at a rate never before witnessed in human history. Dismissed as nomad barbarians by the Islamic and Western worlds the Mongolian army proved themselves to be adaptable, resourceful, astute and disciplined. By the year 1300 the Mongol empire stretched from the eastern Polish border to the Sea of Japan. Genghis Khan summed up perfectly the philosophy of the Mongolian soldier. His words provide a chilling reminder of why the Mongolian warrior was so feared by his enemies. The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears by their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.