The Mongols had combined their forces and refined their war plans. Alongside Sübötei, who developed strategy, important members of the golden lineage were involved. Among them were Batu’s brothers Orda, Berke, and Shiban and his uncles Güyük and Möngke. Their wives, children, and household servants took part in the campaign. They had thousands of horses and camels, as well as huge siege engines built for the occasion.34 The Mongols targeted not places but rulers such as Grand Prince Iurii Vsevolodovich, who was the most powerful kniaz of northeastern Rus. He did not repeat the mistake the Russians had made fifteen years earlier. He did not mock the Mongol envoys when they came with their “submit-or-die” letter, and he did not gather massive forces to beat the Mongols in a single open battle, as the Russians had tried at the Kalka River. Instead the grand prince tried to negotiate. But other kniazia, and members of his family, wanted to resist.
In the same winter, a fight erupted near Kolomna, another fortress in Ryazan principality. Mongols and Russians had run into each other on the border between Ryazan and Vladimir-Suzdal. It appears a Mongol contingent chasing Russian troops from Ryazan fell on reinforcements sent from Vladimir and the small town of Moscow. The Mongols were led by Kölgen, the fifth son of Chinggis Khan. The Kolomna clash was blindly violent. Neither side showed mercy. Many senior people were killed, including the voivode of Vladimir, the son of the kniaz of Ryazan, and Kölgen. The battle was not only one of the bloodiest of the 1230s campaign against the Russians, but it also determined the fate of that campaign. The lack of a coordinated Russian defense in the northeast precipitated the loss of the military elite of Vladimir-Suzdal, which devastated Russian leadership for the remainder of the war. The death of Kölgen may also explain why the Mongols stormed the entire area afterward, as they considered the shedding of Chinggis Khan’s blood a sacrilege that required revenge. In January 1238 the Mongols took control of Kolomna and Moscow, which they burnt before besieging Vladimir in early February.
It took just a few days to capture Vladimir, but Grand Prince Iurii Vsevolodovich escaped to the woods near the Oka River. In early March 1238, the Mongols took him by surprise, apparently bypassing his guard posts and attacking where the Russians least expected it. The Mongols decapitated the grand prince, a practice they had used before: the sight of a ruler’s head terrorized his people and accelerated their submission. A decapitated head was also proof of death in a world where false rumors, about the dead and the living, were common.35
Lithograph inspired by medieval Russian miniatures showing Batu’s conquest of the Russian principalities. (Private Collection © SZ Photo / Bridgeman Images)
After Vladimir came more cities, including Rostov, Jaroslavl, and Tver. All fell into Mongol hands.36 The Mongols campaigned in the north over two successive winters. After defeating the leadership in the northeast, they moved on to the northwest. They gained some ground, but local resistance and muddy terrain forced them to pull back and abandon their plans for Novgorod, which they left untouched. In several places the inhabitants burned their own lands and villages to stop the enemy. Starvation spread in the whole area. This contributed to the determination of the Mongols to move southward in the direction of the Dnieper River, where Kiev lay.
In winter 1240–1241, it was the Kievan prince’s turn to abandon his subjects rather than face the Mongol onslaught. After receiving Möngke’s envoys, and perhaps ordering their murder, he fled to Hungary with his family and boyars—the aristocracy of old Rus. No leader stood up to organize the defense of Kiev nor southern Rus in general. A source reports that the Mongol armies made an impressively loud arrival in Kiev, such that one could hear nothing above the roar of their horses, camels, and carts. In November or December 1240, the Mongols captured the city in a few days and left it half destroyed. From there they captured the westernmost principalities, including Galicia, whose kniaz had already left for Hungary. In December the Mongols stormed the harbor of Sudak again.37
Modern historians estimate that no more than 50,000 warriors attacked the Rus. On the other side, Vladimir-Suzdal, the biggest principality, had around one million inhabitants and a force of a hundred thousand warriors. The Mongols knew they were outnumbered, but the Russians did not take advantage of their numerical superiority because the Russians thought it was themselves who lacked numbers. Their poor intelligence led them to believe there were hundreds of thousands of Mongols. What is more, the Mongols knew where to find the Russians—they had counted the Russian towns and villages, evaluating the size of each—but the Russians never grasped where the Mongols hid and how they moved.38
In the principalities of Ryazan, Vladimir-Suzdal, Kiev, Volhynia, and Galicia, the Mongols followed a similar strategy. They attacked the villages, lesser cities, and small fortifications before besieging the local capital. Once they had destroyed the outlying places that helped to supply the capital, the city could not hold out for long. Meanwhile the Mongols helped themselves to the food, fodder, and labor they prevented from reaching the capital. After they drained a region of its main resources, they moved on to their next target.39
The Mongol season of warfare was the opposite of the Russian. Russian local armies consisted mainly of peasant conscripts, who were available to fight in spring and early summer. It was most unusual to conduct warfare in fall and winter because in September and October, peasants scattered for harvesting and other field and farm work, and they often stayed indoors during the coldest months. No Russians expected to do combat at this time of the year. The Mongols, by contrast, retreated to the steppe in late spring and summer for the milking season and went to war during the cold season. This explains why Mongols always had the initiative over the Russians and other peoples of the Volga region. The Mongols successfully imposed on the Russians a seasonality that destroyed their agricultural system.40
The Russians presented intermittent but harsh resistance. For example, the inhabitants of Kozelsk, a small town on a hill near the Zhizdra River, were able temporarily to resist the Mongols by exploiting the terrain: the ground around the town was soaked from river runoff, the swamps, and melting snow. The Mongols could not bring siege engines close to the city walls, which gave the Kozelsk inhabitants an opportunity to destroy the Mongol catapults. Some 4,000 Mongols were killed. After the Mongols finally captured Kozelsk, they were not able to find their dead in the rubble and the mud. Thus did the Mongols learn to call Kozelsk “the evil city.” In four years of fighting in the lower Volga and the north, Batu lost several commanders and thousands of warriors beyond those killed at Kozelsk. But the Russians had no coordination and too many serious leadership problems to stop the larger Mongol war machine.41
During the Russian campaign, the Mongols gained control of some twenty cities. They did not destroy all these cities. Rostov, for example, was spared after its inhabitants accepted peace terms. Kiev, on the other hand, rejected an identical offer and was sacked. No city held out longer than Kozelsk, which lasted seven weeks or so against the siege. But most Russian towns resisted for no more than a few days. The Mongols were experts in siege warfare and had accumulated even more experience throughout their recent operations against the Jin. They had taken military engineers with them, most importantly Xili Gambu, a Tangut general who seconded Batu. The Russians appeared helpless when faced with siege engines they had never seen before. Adapting Chinese technology, the Mongols built catapults twenty-six feet high and weighing five tons. Such a machine could throw a stone heavier than 132 pounds up to 164 yards. For a commander like Sübötei, who had conquered more than thirty stone and brick fortresses in China, Central Asia, and Iran, the wooden and earthen walls of Russian cities presented no real challenge.42
Batu’s campaigns against the Qipchaqs, Russians, Bulgars, and Hungarians, 1235–1242.
What was challenging for the Mongols was the terrain. Muddy and swampy grounds limited their operations to the coldest months and restricted their range of activity. They could move quickly on frozen soil and rivers, but with
the snow already melting in March, their armored troops and heavy siege engines got stuck in the mire. Snowmelt also flooded the pastureland on which Mongol armies relied to feed their animals. This explains why it took them four winters to subjugate the kniazia and why Batu and Subötei departed suddenly for Europe in 1241, leaving unfulfilled their plans for Novgorod and other targets.43
The Hungarian Campaign
In March 1241 the Mongols crossed the Dnieper with as many as 130,000 mounted warriors, entering the Kingdom of Hungary. At the time, King Béla was then in his royal residence of Buda. Having heard the news of the Mongol attack against the Rus, he had sent his military chief, the count palatine, to guard the Verecke Pass in the Carpathians. It didn’t work. King Béla was informed by a messenger that the Mongols had invaded, that the palatine’s army had been unable to stop them.44
The attack on Hungary was a direct consequence of the Qipchaq and Russian campaigns. By welcoming Qipchaq and Russian elites fleeing the Mongols, Béla had come to embody the resistance to the Mongols. He was not, like Bashman, an active foe. But in 1239 he had granted asylum to Köten, the Qipchaq khan, and his men. Doing so increased Béla’s personal prestige, as the Qichpaq were converted to Christianity under his patronage, an act of proselytism that was praised by the pope. Absorbing the Qipchaqs also bolstered Béla’s military power, for the newcomers were integrated into his army. They constituted an efficient cavalry that responded directly to Béla, independently of the feudal barons, who were sometimes reluctant to commit their own forces to the king’s causes. But the costs were high. Not only did Béla’s hospitality earn him the Mongols’ enmity but it also created internal tension, as Hungarians did not easily accept their king’s decision to support and protect the Qipchaqs.45
The Mongol invasion was a carefully planned affair, befitting Sübötei’s strategic acumen. He coordinated five parallel operations across Central and Eastern Europe, against the Czechs, Poles, Germans, and Hungarians. Several armies passed through the Carpathian Mountains simultaneously, along multiple routes: Batu and Sübötei took the Verecke Pass into Hungary; Orda took the northwest route into Poland; and the other armies advanced from the south and southeast. But the target all along was Hungary. The operation was designed to surround Béla’s forces like wild animals caught in a battue hunt.46
Béla realized that he faced a formidable foe, but he had immense difficulty responding. He urged his barons and bishops to assemble their armies in Pest, a big city and a major crossing point on the Danube. But the barons and bishops showed no haste. According to Master Roger, an Italian prelate who witnessed the invasion, they instead dithered over what they thought was a mere “rumor.” And Béla’s own defensive efforts proved largely ineffective at slowing the invaders. According to Archdeacon Thomas of Split, who would soon experience a Mongol siege himself, King Béla “had long barricades built, blocking with felled trees all the places where transit seemed easiest.” But Batu sent scout troops with axes to demolish the defensive works, “removing all from the places of entry.” The Mongols even set about “cutting down forests” and “laying roads” to clear and ease their path.47
The Mongols quickly gained ground, and soon small Mongol groups were appearing around Pest and harassing villages throughout the region. Béla did not immediately react. In fact, he forbade his men to respond to the enemy provocations. He knew that the Mongols, like other steppe nomads, excelled at luring enemies into traps and figured that the Mongol contingents were baiting his forces. Yet, demonstrating the serious lack of coordination that hampered the whole Hungarian defense, the Archbishop of Kalocsa did not comply with Béla’s nonengagement order. The archbishop fell for the Mongol deception and lost many of his forces as a result.
It was clear that King Béla was unable to fully mobilize Hungary’s forces.48 Lacking sufficient internal support, he appealed to his neighbors for help but found himself isolated—just as the Mongols had planned. King Wenceslas of Bohemia and Duke Henry of Silesia, Kraków, and Greater Poland were already fighting the Mongols in their own territories and could provide no aid. Only the Austrian Duke Frederick of Babenberg, Béla’s cousin, committed reinforcements. But Frederick arrived in Pest with a small escort, for it was impossible to mobilize a large army on such short notice. Besides, Frederick’s intentions were ambiguous. After killing a “Tatar,” capturing another one, and inciting an anti-Qipchaq mob, he left Pest before any battles took place. Later, when Béla was defeated and in flight from the Mongols, Frederick tried to extort money from his cousin in exchange for sheltering him.49
Worse still, in the course of war preparations, King Béla lost his strongest ally: Khan Köten and his Qipchaq riders. Unlike many of the Hungarian nobility, the khan had responded to Béla’s call, ordering his horsemen to prepare for war. They were a formidable force; according to Master Roger, the Qipchaqs in Hungary numbered 40,000, of whom a majority would have been warriors. Modern scholarship cannot confirm the accuracy of that number, but what is clear is that the Qipchaq population was large enough to get on the locals’ nerves. Hungarian villagers feared that the nomads’ “enormous amount of cattle” damaged “the pastures, crops, gardens, orchards, copses, vineyards.” And the barons felt threatened by the Qipchaq warriors, whose power they could not control. To appease the anger against the Qipchaqs, Béla scattered them throughout the Hungarian plain and moved Köten first to his palace in Buda and then to Pest. This way he could show the Hungarian people that he was keeping a close eye on the khan. He could also shelter Köten from unruly Hungarians who blamed him for the Mongol invasion—after all, it was the Qipchaqs the Mongols had come for. But Béla’s efforts came to naught. When the Mongols approached Pest, a crowd of Hungarians forced their way into the palace and killed Köten, his family, and retinue. In the countryside, too, Hungarians and Germans turned against the Qipchaqs; in the eyes of these Europeans, Qipchaqs and Mongols were one and the same. And yet only Köten’s horsemen could have stopped the Mongols. The Qipchaq warriors who were supposed to fight on the Hungarian side left for Bulgaria, destroying what they could in their path.50
In spring 1241 the Mongols defeated the Germans, Polish, and Hungarians in two key encounters that took place in Poland and Hungary almost concurrently. On April 9 Orda’s army demolished Duke Henry and his German and Polish cavalry at Leignitz (Legnica). Two days later, 420 miles southeast of Leignitz, Batu’s and Sübötei’s armies confronted King Béla at the River Sajó in the Plain of Muhi. Despite all the mishaps so far, the Hungarians were in a good position. They were guarding the only bridge over the river, and they knew they outnumbered the Mongols, whose small Mongol camp could be seen on the other bank of the river. But the Mongols did not need a bridge to cross a river, and they knew how to beat larger armies. The Mongols found fords, crossed them overnight, and fell on the Hungarians. Master Roger writes that, on April 11, 1241, “at dawn, [the Mongols] surrounded the entire royal army and started shooting arrows like a hailstorm.” In a few hours, the Mongols captured the bridge and forced the Hungarians to retreat into their own camp, where they were caught as though in a net. Thomas of Split, who had spoken to eyewitnesses, reported that “the Tatar army completely surrounded the Hungarian camp, as if in a ring-dance. They drew their bows and set about firing arrows everywhere, while others circled the camp and sought to set it on fire.” The Mongols allowed panicking Hungarians to flee, deserting the army; the Mongols “opened up among themselves a point of exit where they did not shoot,” Master Roger reported. A great number of Hungarians rushed into the opening and ran off. The Mongols then methodically destroyed the shrinking remainders of the Hungarian army. Béla himself escaped to a forest, while many of his prelates and warriors drowned in a nearby swamp with the Mongols on their heels.51
After their defeat, some of the Hungarian military elite fled, while others entrenched themselves in Pest. But it was only a matter of days before the Mongols arrived. Béla’s younger brother Coloman announced that “everyone s
hould look out for himself” and retreated beyond the Danube. Like the overwhelming majority of Hungarian cities east of the Danube, Pest lacked stone walls; its earthen barricades would never withstand the Mongol catapults.52
In January or February 1242, the Mongols crossed the frozen Danube, entered western Hungary, and stormed the royal seat of Esztergom with some thirty siege engines. From there they advanced into Austria and Dalmatia in pursuit of King Béla, who was hiding on the Dalmatian coast, in Split. But suddenly, in March, the Mongols halted. Batu and Sübötei ordered all the forces to withdraw—an incomprehensible decision from the standpoint of the locals, who could see that the Mongols were preparing for a lengthy occupation. Some Split residents had even begun to collaborate with the Mongols, assuming the nomads would be their new masters.53 What the Hungarians, Poles, Croatians, and other Europeans did not know was that in December 1241, Great Khan Ögödei had died. The members of the golden lineage, as well as the army commanders, needed to go back east to join a quriltai and decide on Ögödei’s successor. Friar Plano Carpini, a papal envoy who traveled through Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia on his way to Qaraqorum in 1246, suggested that this was the main reason for the Mongols’ withdrawal from Hungary.54
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