by Ted Stewart
Moving carefully—the Mongols had proven their longbows were deadly up to four hundred yards—he positioned himself to look through the narrow slits in the rampart.
Under the cover of their wooden shields, the Mongols continued piling up the bodies. It had taken the Khwarizmi a while to figure out what they were doing, but eventually they realized that they were building a ramp of dead bodies to breach the city wall.
Chinese assault equipment to break down the gates. A ramp of human flesh to top the outer barricade.
It would be only hours before the Mongols were inside the city walls.
A Civilization Is Wiped Away
The defeat and destruction of China was only the beginning for Genghis Khan:
But starting from the Jurched campaign, the well-trained and tightly organized Mongol army would charge out of its highland home and overrun everything from the Indus River to the Danube, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. In a flash, only thirty years, the Mongol warriors would defeat every army, capture every fort, and bring down the walls of every city they encountered. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus would soon kneel before the dusty boots of illiterate young Mongol horsemen.13
His next target was the kingdom of Khwarizm, a thriving empire in central Asia that included much of the area once considered ancient Persia. A Muslim kingdom of immense wealth and advanced culture, colonized almost twenty-four hundred years before, it was purported to have the highest level of literacy in the world. Many of its inhabitants were leftovers from the civilization of Persia, but there were other races and nationalities within the kingdom as well, for it was an open society. Because of its strategic and profitable location along the Silk Road, it was internationally recognized as a rising power in the world. It had more than four hundred settlements and fabled cities of great size. In fact, the capital city of Gurganj was considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world.14
If this great kingdom is little known today, it is largely because of what the Mongols did to it.
After his attempt to open up a trading relationship with the sultan of Khwarizm had been violently rebuffed, Genghis Khan decided to go to war. And go to war he did, with a violent and bloody vengeance.
It took only a year for all the major cities of Khwarizm to be destroyed. The sultan was chased onto an island in the Caspian Sea to die. As a further humiliation to the defeated nation, the sultan’s mother was sent back to Mongolia to live out the rest of her life as a common slave. Their civilization was wiped out to the point that very little of it is known today.
• • •
Four more years of warfare followed in Central Asia as the Mongols swept across the land. Every nation that they targeted fell before the great Genghis Khan, their victories becoming bloody massacres.
Part of Genghis Khan’s strategy was calculated massacre: if a city resisted his armies, once it fell to him—and they always fell—he had all the inhabitants slaughtered. The chroniclers’ reports of the numbers of dead are staggering; 1,600,000 at Harat, in 1220. Rumor reached the Mongol prince Tuli that some had survived there by hiding among the piled corpses, and when he took Nishapur, some time later, he ordered the heads cut off all the bodies. At Nishapur, according to contemporaries, 1,747,000 died.15
Everything was plundered. Ancient palaces and temples were defaced, looted, and then abandoned. Entire cities were left empty, many razed completely to the ground, leaving nothing but dirt that was turned to pasture to feed the Mongol horses. As just one example of the devastation the invaders left behind, it’s estimated that one-half of the entire population of Hungary and 50 to 80 percent of its settlements were destroyed by the Mongols.16 Irrigation systems—the underpinnings of agriculture and hundreds of years of civilization—were utterly wiped away, leading to the depopulation of large tracts of land. Terrorist tactics were incorporated to weaken the morale and commitment of the Mongols’ enemies. Once a city had been destroyed, a few captives might be released to spread word of Mongol terror and atrocities. These reports often frightened the next city into submitting without even the hint of a fight.
It is reported that one communication from Genghis Khan to peoples in Armenia said:
“It is the will of God that we take the earth and maintain order” to impose Mongol law and taxes, and to those who refused them, the Mongols were obligated to “slay them and destroy their place, so that the others who hear and see should fear and not act the same.”17
What They Won
In 1222, after sweeping through Central Asia, the Mongol campaign ended in what is now Pakistan. In a few short years the Mongols had expanded to become one of the largest and most powerful empires in the world.
Genghis Khan had brought almost imponderable wealth to the people of Mongolia. For more than a decade, grand caravans of plundered wealth and slaves had made their way back to the homeland. Silk and gold, pearls and precious gems, exotic woods and leathers, prized metal utensils and knives—those were just a sampling of the plunder. More revealing was the expatriation of highly valued human slaves. Long lines of artisans, professionals, and other experts, along with common and uneducated slaves, were driven to the steppes of Mongolia.
Never could the simple folk of Mongolia have imagined what riches would be theirs as they ascended to become the most powerful nation on earth. However, the aggressive expansion of the empire was about to hit a bump in the road.
In 1227, the great Genghis Khan died.
Three years later, Genghis Khan’s third-oldest son, Ogodei, replaced him as the khan by means of a khuriltai. After his inauguration, he immediately went about dissipating the wealth that his father had accumulated. He built a new capital. He spent lavishly. He demanded this and that from far-off lands. The kingdom put out far more than it brought in. Having suddenly grown wealthy, the Mongols had become accustomed to a lifestyle that required vast amounts of capital to support it. In a foolish attempt to encourage trade, Ogodei started paying for goods brought to his capital twice as much as they were worth.
Within five years, the riches were gone. The great Mongol empire his father had built was on the brink of ruin. This left Ogodei with only one option: He had to find additional lands to loot.
The Mongols Look West
General Subodei, a great leader in the army, suggested that the Mongols go after Europe.
At the time, very little was known about the lands that lay to the west of Asia. Europe didn’t have a reputation as a particularly wealthy area or a flourishing culture, but for a number of reasons it seemed a good target. Among the arguments in favor of invading Europe instead of southern China, or Iraq, or overly hot India, was that in the one brief skirmish against European armies a decade before, those armies had been easily defeated.
The Mongol generals anticipated that the European campaign would last for five years. There was, after all, a vast amount of territory and people to be plundered. Under the brilliant leadership of the great Subodei and two of Genghis Khan’s most capable grandsons, they put together an army of fifty thousand Mongol warriors and a hundred thousand soldiers from allied or vassal nations. Well led, eager for booty, possessing all of the engineering skills and military knowledge acquired from decades of war, this was perhaps the best army the Mongols ever assembled. They had vastly superior weaponry. A highly mobile and effective cavalry. Much more fighting experience. Their advantages were overwhelming.
The invasion of Eastern Europe began in 1236.
The city-states and small, isolated kingdoms of modern-day Russia and Ukraine were the first to fall. Despite their best efforts, they simply were no match for Subodei’s superior army.
Before a Russian city was attacked, its leaders were sent an envoy with invitations to surrender for the mere price of a tithe, 10 percent of their wealth, plus an agreement to become Mongolian vassals. Very few accepted the invita
tion. In one particularly proud—if ultimately foolish—example, the prince of Ryazan (a city just outside Moscow) responded to the demand for a 10 percent tribute by writing, “When we are dead, you may have the whole.”
The Mongols accepted the offer. Ryazan was razed. Its occupants were killed. The Mongols had it all.
Following the destruction of Ryazan, Moscow and other cities were attacked. All of them were destroyed. Each city was plundered of its wealth. Slaves were taken. The civilian populations were massacred.18
Early in the winter of 1240, envoys were sent to the beautiful city of Kiev to demand its surrender. Feeling invincible, this great city of perhaps a hundred thousand occupants killed the khan’s envoys and desecrated their bodies—the greatest of any possible insults to the Mongols.
By December the city had been utterly destroyed, so much so that twelve years later a traveler found it to be nothing but a tiny village of a hundred pitiful inhabitants. It would take many generations before Kiev would recover from the impacts of the Mongol invasion. And the larger cities were not alone. Most of the smaller cities and kingdoms throughout Russia were also taken and subdued.
Having accomplished their goals, the Mongols built themselves a new capital, renamed the empire The Golden Horde, and settled in for a long stay.
Eastern Europe was now a Mongolian state. Much of it would remain so for many centuries.
Western Europe on the Brink
With Russia plundered, the Mongol army turned their eyes even farther to the west.
Within months of taking Kiev, Subodei sent out scouts to determine the most effective strategy for attacking their next target. He was surprised to find that Europe was completely unprepared to defend itself. It was winter, and civilized Europeans did not fight in the cold.
Maybe if they had realized that the hardened winter soil and frozen rivers were perfect for Mongolian army movement, they would have been more prepared for battle.
Subodei dispatched two armies toward Western Europe, one north and one south. The northern force of roughly twenty thousand soldiers moved across Poland, capturing a host of towns and cities. Finally, the Europeans rode to their own defense. In April, the Mongols met a quickly assembled army of knights from Germany, France, and Poland. As usual, the force of thirty thousand European soldiers outnumbered the Mongol invaders. It didn’t matter. The Mongols crushed them, killing or capturing as many as twenty-five thousand of the opposing forces.
To the south, the Mongols ran straight into the teeth of a waiting army.
At the time, Hungary was one of the largest and most powerful of the European empires. Under King Bela, a large army of Hungarians and Austrians were dispatched to meet the fifty thousand warriors of Subodei. Once again, the Mongols relied upon maneuver and superior tactics. Retreating until they had found a spot that they could use to their advantage, they surrounded the Europeans, forcing them to huddle inside a protective camp made of their wagons chained together. At that point, the Mongols began to pelt them with flaming liquids and gunpowder from their catapults.
This was something the European knights had never seen before. Panic set in. Then there appeared a sudden gap in the lines of the Mongolian army. Miraculously, it opened in the direction of their capital of Pest. Seeing their only hope of escape, the Europeans broke through their own defensive structures and made for home. Of course it was a trap. The Mongols waited until the terrified enemies were in full flight, dropping their armaments as they ran, then swooped down and massacred them all.
One report described the scene: “‘The dead fell to the right and to left; like leaves in winter, the slain bodies of these miserable men were strewn along the whole route; blood flowed like torrents of rain.’”19 As many as seventy thousand knights were killed, almost the entire military might of the Hungarian kingdom.
European knighthood never recovered from the blow of losing nearly one hundred thousand soldiers in Hungary and Poland, what the Europeans mourned as “the flower” of their knighthood and aristocracy. Walled cities and heavily armored knights were finished, and in the smoke and gunpowder of that Easter season of 1241, the Mongol triumph portended the coming total destruction of European feudalism and the Middle Ages.20
The Final Blow
The way was now wide open for Vienna to be taken. After Vienna, Rome. With Rome, the Christian church. Then Turin. Paris. Cologne. Finally would be London. Western Europe would, like the rest of the known world, fall under the Mongol sword.
Scouts were sent by the Mongols to determine the best route for an attack on the beautiful and important city of Vienna.
The Christians of Europe knew they were at the mercy of the Mongols. Their armies could not stop them. Their cities could not be defended. The only remaining political force in Europe, Frederick II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was already weakened by a prolonged conflict with the pope of Rome. In all of Europe, there was no other monarch with enough power to field an army with any hope of stopping the Mongols. It was beyond foolish to believe that even Frederick could succeed.
It was now spring. The grass was turning green. Subodei knew it was time to stop and rest his warriors while pasturing his herds.
The Europeans could only sit and wait in fear. They knew that as soon as the Mongol warhorses had been fattened by the summer grass, and their soldiers rested, they would attack again. And they knew from experience that the attack would come at the beginning of the winter, the Mongols’ favorite time of year for making war.
Two Deaths Save a Nation
Then, just as winter of 1241 was settling over Western Europe, the situation changed in a sudden and unexpected way.
Four thousand miles to the east, Ogodei, the Great Khan of Mongolia, suddenly died. Shortly thereafter, the only other surviving son of Genghis Khan died as well. With no obvious heir to claim the position of the Great Khan, a khuriltai was called to choose a new leader.
Throughout the empire, Mongol royalty immediately turned for home, where various members would fight for the right to be declared the next khan. Many of the officers and leaders of the army returned as well, wanting to participate in the decision as to who would be their next commander.
Suddenly leaderless, and without obvious direction from their capital, the Mongol army withdrew from Western Europe.
It never returned again.
• • •
Upon his return to Mongolia, Genghis Khan’s grandson Guyuk was anointed Great Khan. His reign was short-lived; eighteen months later he died. Another grandson, Mongke, took his place.
Maybe because of the presence of several Christians within the royal court, particularly among the wives, or perhaps because there was little evidence of great wealth to be taken, the new khan decided not to send his army back to Europe. Instead, he concentrated on solidifying his hold on Russia, a territory that the Mongols ended up staying in for more than two hundred years.21
After stabilizing his newly acquired northern holdings, the new khan sent his armies out once more. But again, he didn’t look west. Instead, he sent one army to conquer the Muslims of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo and another to conquer the Sung Dynasty of southern China.
Baghdad was the center of the Muslim world and home of the caliph. As the richest city in the Muslim world, it promised great wealth to the Mongolian conquerors.
When Baghdad fell in 1258, as many as eight hundred thousand of its inhabitants were massacred. To punish the Muslim leaders for attempting to defy them, the Mongols took the caliph and all of his male heirs, wrapped them up in blankets or sewed them up in animal skins, and rode over them with horses.
The conquest took a little longer in China. The Great Khan didn’t take the capital of the Sung Dynasty until 1276.22
With the conquest of Baghdad and southern China, the Mongols controlled all of the territory from the South China Sea
to Western Europe.
It was as large as the Mongolian empire would ever be.
What If?
What if Ogodei had not died in the winter of 1241?
What if the army of Subodei had taken all of Europe, which it certainly could have done with relative ease?
The views of two of the world’s most renowned historians are worth considering:
Will Durant: “What saved Christianity and Europe was simply the death of Ogadai. . . . Never in history had there been so extensive a devastation—from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas.”23
Edward Gibbon: “If the disciples of Mohammed would have oppressed her religion and liberty, it might be apprehended that the shepherds of Scythia [Mongols] would extinguish her cities, her arts, and all the institutions of civil society.”24
• • •
More specifically, the following questions must be examined:
What would have happened to the emerging values of Western culture—including the ideas of freedom and capitalism, which were in their infant stage of development—if the Mongols had invaded?
Had the Mongols ridden into Western Europe, the young and growing European cities would have been destroyed. There would have been no emerging financial centers in the Low Countries, no growing wool centers, both of which proved vital to the emergence of capitalism in Antwerp and Ghent. The role of Paris in developing the West would have been aborted, its great universities ruined. Monasteries throughout Europe, those test beds of innovation and discovery, would not have survived. The embryonic notions regarding representative government left over from the Roman and Greek empires would have disappeared in the fog of history.
