Are castles the ulimate counter to mongols?

mongols relied on their mobility and the ability to strike quickly and retreat.
When inviding a country full of castles, they must either siege them, robbing their advantage of mobility, or ignore them, leaving their supply chains open to raids by warriors who hide in the castles.

For all intents and purposes it was castled

This isnt a video game. The mongols had a huge siege park. They had a large infantry force. They had engineers and architects on campaigns. They had a big navy at one point.

Kaifeng surrendered. It's defenses weren't breached. Look at the Mongols' performance in Hungary, where the cities were sacked, but the few stone-walled castles remained under Hungarian control, deep behind the Mongol lines.

Castle and and fortified city are entierly different.
A city has an economic worth on its own, the walls are the to protect that worth.
A castle, on the other hand, is just a tool for assymetric warfare. Its a place where your warriors can retreat after they raided enemy supplies. The enemy has to either split his troops to siege your castle, or leave his supplies vulnerable to attacks.

>dont look at your example, look at my example

Huh.

>its an "i have no argument, so i'll beat him with the dictionary" episode

>The mongols had a huge siege park. They had a large infantry force. They had engineers and architects on campaigns. They had a big navy at one point.
You can deal with all of that shit. What made them so terrible was their ability to strike fast and not leaving a opportunity for retaliation. Castles rob them of that ability

Well, yes. The city surrendered because it was running out of supplies, a castle with a military garrison could last far longer, if equipped with a well and adequately supplied. Hell, even Kaifeng would have lasted longer without the Emperor turning tail and escaping.

a castle is basically a bunker.
are you arguning cities and bunkers are the same?

The mongols did use their siege weaponry on stone castles and found them unable to breach the walls.

Mongoose weren't retarded. I think some of you are imagining them riding their horses in circles and shooting arrows at stone walls. But they took plenty of fortifications.

Nigga you never seen South Park? They'll get through it anyway.

Those were just one factor among many.

Sometimes the Mongols were experiencing political instability, sometimes their neighbors were. The "holy" "roman" "empire"'s schism with the church for example meant Hungary and Poland could not rely on support from most of its christian allies.

Despite their overwhelming advantage the Mongols still experienced some losses at the battle of Mohi, there were more natural obstacles like rivers and forests than in Russia and bottlenecks like Sajo bridge limited the Mongol advantage in maneuver giving an opportunity for crossbowmen and slower infantry and cavalry to engage. If Christendom had committed to sending wave after wave of crusaders it would have been very difficult for the Mongols to make much progress.

It took the Mongols decades to fully conquer China and by that point most of the world (outside the steppes) had adapted to their style of warfare.

How to combat Mongols?

You look at how previous settled civilisations dealt with nomadic horsemen/archers. The Assyrians were among the first in recorded history to do so, with varied success. They used combined archers and spearmen, and recruited nomadic horseman to fight against other nomads.

We can also look at how Alexander The Great inflicted defeat on the Scythians en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jaxartes Again, combined arms (artillery, cavalry, spearmen, archers,) He used a feint maneuver to bait their cavalry into attacking a small contingent of his own cavalry, and once the nomads were engaged, he moved forward the rest of the forces.

Chine generally tried to keep up to date on steppe politics and tried to prevent the steppe nomads from uniting into a bigger confederation. That was the idea, anyway.

But generally, nomadic horsemen would be slowed down by heavily wooded, mountainous terrain.

but they did have a lot of horse archers, which used to shoot at enemy and retreat.
However, if they were to siege a castle, they couldn't just retreat if enemy force arrives, or else the castle gets resupplied

>but they did have a lot of horse archers

They aren't units in a video game. They adapted to however they needed to fight.

how would horse archers adapt to a castle?

How does anyone take a castle?

by sieging it long enough, until they run out of food and surrender

But where do the siegers get their food from? The besieged have all supplies in many kilometre radius inside their castle.

from the farmland around them.
or they get food from the supplies from their homeland

and that's exactly the way the mongols took castles.

>from the farmland around them.
Which as I said, is now empty of supplies since the besieged have taken it all with them inside the castle. There's very little to forage. Are you going to feed an army with roots and leaves?

>or they get food from the supplies from their homeland
Now how would you go about doing that? Feeding thousands of soldiers for months. That's a massive logistical train required and all of it's going to be done by horseback, or if you're lucky, by ships. How do you ensure that all of that transport works smoothly and you don't lose half your supplies to enemy raids on your convoys?

Nobody ever won a war by hiding in castles.

oh well, i guess castles were never besieged then
wait, they were, so you must be wrong

but by beeing forced to siege the castles mongols arent able to use their famous hit and run tacticts anymore. And it is not hard to beat horse archers if they dont run away

Scale the walls and kill the sentries, break down the walls or gates or surround it and starve out the defenders. There are some alternative methods as well such as digging tunnels, sapping the walls or colluding with defenders who aid the assault from within (possibly by opening a gate or starting a fight inside).

so i guess castles were useless and people build them just for fun

People didn't just hide in the castles though. They sallied forth, made raids on enemy troops and baggage trains and so forth.

>How does anyone take a castle?

yeah, thats the whole point of castles, to wage assymetric war on the invader

>so i guess castles were useless and people build them just for fun

No, they are a place to hide until your army shows up. But you still need an army that can defeat the enemy army.

Daily reminder that Vietnam guerrilla managed to get a kind of draw against the full force of Kublai Khan army.

so mongols have to either siege the castle or go on, and leave their supply vunreable to raids.
Thus, they lose their advantage of mobility

In real life the Mongols were never stopped by fortifications. What did happen > what some neckbeard 800 years later says "should" happen.

The problem in this thread is that a lot of people (both in favour and against the mongols) is talking totally or partially about the early mongols of Genghis Khan. Most of the qualities of the mongol horde that allowed it to be so powerful and gain a big first momentum did not exist or were not main features of the Empire in times of Ogedei. And even less after his death.

So we imagine a Mongol Empire that, somehow, didn't fall to massive decentralization and internal fight after the death of Ogadai. And we try to judge if these empire would be able to threaten and defeat (or not) the fortified lands of central and western europe. Well, this mongol empire we're talking about probably has little to do with the horde of Genghis Khan and more to do with other great polities that started as nomadic hordes but became big settled empires ruled by an elite with nomadic heritage. It would be better to suppose that these mongol empire would be similar to the great seljuks or the ottomans. This is, with a good supply of riders, but with totally different features from the early horde apart from that. Returning to the two examples I offer, we see that the Seljuks were never a significant threat for Europe (although they did take fortifications) while in the other hand the Ottomans attacked Viena two and a half times.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Xiangyang
Seige warfare made it easy to take fortified castles. Once the mongols got their hands on the superior seiges, this was the end of Song.

The mongol version of their seige weapon could throw 300 KG at range of 500 meters.

In comparison 13th century's largest trebuchet can throw 130 KG. Early seige weapons could throw much smaller weights. But these new heavier types could breach all types of walls. So it wouldn't be impossible for the mongols to destroy tiny european castles. In fact, they'd probably need maybe 1-2 to be really effective against European castles.

The Mongols used 20 of them in Xiangyang and it was very effective. It took them couple of years to breach the fort but they did. The fort was very well defended and the mongols had to use all kinds of asymetric warfare to breach it.

while I appreciate the in-depth explanation, I think you're strawmanning a little bit. I think only one person in this thread even mentioned Europe.

if your army is forced to siege a castle, it is the very definition of beeing stopped

but most of the conquering happend after the death of genhis khan

The thread starts with the picture of an European castle and clearly makes reference to the endless debates about the subjects I'm talking about!

...

Well after the first raid into Europe the King of Hungary responded by building a shit ton of stone castles. The second invasion was repulsed

I am going to take the policies and opinion over the medieval king of Hungary over whatever /pol/acks and Veeky Forums autists have to say on the matter I think.

My argument was not in favour of the mongols or against them.

Then again, it took them some 40 years to conquer china when they were a lot closer to a source of reinforcements.

once again, they were sieging cities, not castles

I guess. Maybe I'm misreading this thread, but I wasn't aware that we were talking explicitly about Europe, especially considering a lot of the discussion on Mongol sieges of Southern Song fortified cities (I agree with one user who said for all intents and purposes these are similar to castles).

There are plenty of ways to besiege an enemy and the Mongols learned these methods as they encountered new adversaries. They were quick to adapt new technologies and techniques and to employ foreign experts to help their army.

The Hungarians also had winter by their side. With supplies naturally on the low side and most everything hoarded by the Hungarians themselves, the Mongols faced a logistical catastrophy. The notably increased amount of knights in their forces also played a great part in defeating the Mongols. It wasn't just the castles and improved fortifications in their cities.

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Correlations isn't causation.

>mongols didn't attack castles and retreated
>therefore castles must be the ultimate defense

>build more forts
>mongols got ambushed and got defeated
>therefore forts are the ultimate anti-mongol

The reason mongols didn't attack forts could very well be simple. They didn't need to. Forts have a weakeness. Their supply chain. Once cut, they're dead.

The Chinese "cities" are fortified by design. The example in particular is a natural fort combined with enough supply to feed the people inside for years. Thats hundreds of thousands of people inside.

The philosophy of medeval villages + fort and chinese city forts are completely different. The Chinese direction not only defends their regent but also its people and resources. Meanwhile, the castles of europe are only large enough to defend the regent and couple hundreds(? maybe thats being too generous) army for maybe few months to a year.

Personally I think there's nothing wrong with talking about the wars between Yuan and Song and taking them as an example of what could've been in Europe.

After all, Yuan is a perfect example of what I was talking about, a big settled empire with a ruling class with nomadic heritage. In case that the mongol empire had stayed unified enough to threaten Europe (for whatever reason) I believe that the europeans would face something more similar to Yuan than the Golden Horde.

When it comes to "do large stone walls and defenses defeat Mongols" then yes, they are the exact fucking same. Stop being so fucking pedantic

no way you can feed a populaion of thousands for years

>The example in particular is a natural fort combined with enough supply to feed the people inside for years. Thats hundreds of thousands of people inside.
That is a lot of fucking food for a pre-industrial nation. Got any evidence of that?

stone walls around cities are to keep the population and the ecnomy safe from the invaders.
castles are there to attack invaders supply chain and slow down his movement.
So no, castles and fotified cities are inheritly different in their purpose

I agree with that. I think the way the Mongols handled Song fortifications could be an indication of a hypothetical scenario where they might have dealt with European castles. I just wasn't really sure what you were responding to originally. You mentioned how other people were arguing in favor or against the ability of the Mongols to deal with the fortified lands of Western and Central Europe but aside from the OP picture and one post, nobody had even really broached the subject of Europe.

There were other issues with a Mongol invasion of Europe such as logistics and overextension. The Jurchen Jin and Southern Song were relatively close to the Mongol heartland while Europe was a long distance away. Even in the case of a unified Mongol Empire, I think a European invasion would have been difficult since time would have been needed to consolidate control over a large expanse of territory. I think castles would have been the least of the Mongols' problems.

The problem with the fortified cities though, is that a city is by far less defendable than a fortified castle.
It has a far higher population, requiring far more supplies, meaning it cannot withstand prolonged sieges.
You cannot build a city on a small island, or on top of a cliff. Building effective, high walls for an entire city also requires massive amounts of resources and require a great amount of troops to man properly, whilst a castle garrison could be a few dozen men in size.

A castle can hold out on its own for years, whilst a besieged city needs to be relieved by military forces within months, or its populace will starve and be forced to surrender.

>deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-mongol-siege-of-xiangyang-and-fan-cheng-and-the-song-military/

Natural defense allowed the city to stay intact for years. They would've succeeded in their defense, had their internal Song politics not shit out on them.

Mongols had effectively blockaded the forts in the later years in all fronts.

Also, a city wall could relatively effectively be sapped and even the attempt at it has made cities surrender, but the same cannot be done to castles on cliffs or islands.

I should mention that, the mongols were dealing with two fortified cities. Both of them were blockaded for 4-5 years to stop communication/supplies from reaching them.

So this made it an extra hard thing for the mongols, but they still did it.

>10 years worth of supplies
So was this the Song dynasty's decisive defense against the mongols, or were their cities just that ridiculously well supplied?

The cities were naturally the key component in Song's defense and offense. For years, it was used as a launch pad to attack others. Their natural defense made it pretty good for defense too.

Once those fell, the rest of Song fell quick.

Maybe Chinese people can subsist on two grains of rice a day.

Do you know what their plans were in case of even further prolonged sieges? I read they attempted to relieve the city and break through, but failed quite miserably each time. Did they just expect the enemy to starve themselves outside the walls or break themselves on them?

Clearly they didn't expect the trebuchets that broke the walls.

most commoners were near constantly drunk and high on ergot, only nobles and clergy who ate a different diet were really aware of what was happening around them

He does have a point. A city has a much larger non combattant population than a castle, so a long siege is more likely to force a city to surrender as opposed to a castle, due to disease and starvation. Kaifeng surrendered, it wasn't breached.

Well, technically they did for a while, just not when the Mongols finally thought to recruit Chinese siege engineers.

Your Emperor gives you TWO grains of rice?

Its starting with 2 grains and doubling every day.

Is "muh unstoppable Mongols" the biggest meme in current pop history?

Is it bigger than "muh unbreakable anti-mongol castle"?

> chink technology
> good

MONGols would get BTFO if they ever reached the HRE

Didn't the HRE got BTFO by the muslims? The same muslims the mongols rolled over easily?

>Didn't the HRE got BTFO by the muslims
u wot m8?

Holy shit, you are a fucking retard.

The average chink city had MEDIOCRE defenses.

Single outer wall, no overlapping coverage from defenses, shit wall construction, and they sure as shit didn't have crossbowmen sitting inside the walls shooting from loopholes with overlapping fields of fire.

Nor is the central keep so close to the defenses that penetrating the gate leading to it means you instantly come under fire from the walls, the men still in the gatehouse, who turn around and use the rear slits, and the keep, which is full of loopholes.

Castles are purpose built military fortifications\, usually sited on defensive terrain.

Chinese cities are far worse in virtually every way. They need far more food, far more water, have fare more wall to try and protect, usually have no concentric defenses, and generally ARE NOT designed for war.
The mongols brought Chinese siege engineers to Hungary. They didn't take a single stone castle, and not for lack of trying.

Mongols tried to take European castles in reality. It went badly.

Yes.

The Mongols never went past Western Hungary for a reason. Central and Western Europe's combination of dense forests and a much higher concentration of advanced fortifications, made the prospect of conquering these lands far too costly for the Mongols. Besides, they were very satisfied with what they already had.

Mongols did attack those castles and they got thoroughly BTFO.

Not to mention typical tactics weren't working on Europeans.

Mongols would, if possible, trick idiots into surrender and then kill them.

Europeans viewed mongols as pagan tricksters and refused to take any offer seriously.

The Hungarians also burned their wealth when they knew all was lost.

Estergzom had a wood and earth wall. Mongols siege engines breached it. Rather than surrender or panic, the populace burned or buried everything, fled into stone buildings, and fought to the death. They correctly assumed the mongols would kill them all anyway.

The citadel, being stone, held. Everyone else died. The mongols took an entire city and got nothing for it but bad memories.

>fort
>supply chain
You do realize castles have relatively small garrisons, and store large amounts of food, right?

There's a very real possibility that an attacker will starve first as they use up all the available forage in the area.

This.
Europeans have always been absolute madmen, that's why they conquered the world

Not to mention all the fodder they're going to need for the horses and any invasion of Western Europe is doomed to failure

>There's a very real possibility that an attacker will starve first as they use up all the available forage in the area.
Don't forget that the garrison will probably have foraged everything they could beforehand, so there won't be much for the invaders.

That's less certain. I personally don't believe the "no pasturage' theory.

I DO think they'd end up just like the Magyars, but on a larger scale.

Apparently whatever worked on the Chinks and their cardboard castles didn't do dick in Hungary.

And by that you mean settling and adopting Christianity?

You're wrong on the chinese cities not being built for war.

They were absolutely built for war. Just not the European war. Concept of total defense was what the Chinese practiced. In the Europe, the Castles are simply glorified forts. Tiny fraction compared to the Chinese city forts.

The ancient chinese capital was Xi'an and its fortification walls extended 14 kilometers in range. The walls were built 40 feet high, 40-50 feet width at top and 50-60 feet width at bottom. This protected nearly 40 km^2 area inside. Thats just one prime example of city forts. The regular city forts are much smaller but those still dwarf the castles of european by magnitudes.

Supposedly the largest Castle is Malbork Castle in Poland. That's about 0.14 km^2 in area.

I don't think a castle that size can hold out on mongol assault. Castles in europe are tiny. That protect very few people. The mongols can simply eradicate the entire population and they can do nothing about it if they hold up inside that fort.

Thats exactly what the mongols did to eastern europe. European nobles didnt care about the safety of their own people, only themselves. Thats what castles are for. To defend themselves. Not the people or the land.

Nope. Standing armies and firearms do.

It's how Qing China and Tsarist Russia eventually ended Steppenigger shit forever.

Taking a city =/= taking a castle.
Castles were basically murder machines stuffed with professional soldiers only, and taking them would be incredibly costly and hard, especially since you have a whole army to feed

>I don't think a castle that size can hold out on mongol assault.
That's nice.

They did exactly that in history, and literally no historian has ever disputed this.

Would you like to continue being wrong, or are we done?

>European nobles didnt care about the safety of their own people, only themselves. Thats what castles are for. To defend themselves. Not the people or the land.

I guess we're not done.

Which is why the Hungarian king spared no expense in building many, many new castles, even giving land to the hospitallers and granting rights to lesser nobility to do so.

To not protect more people.

Different faction within Mongol. The western mongols and the eastern mongols began distancing themselves. The eastern mongols became Yuan, a Chinese dynasty. Factioning of mongols that stretched couple thousand miles apart. The eastern front were the ones that developed those huge trebuchets that can easily destroy the walls of any european castles. But those didnt make it to the western side because splintered mongols.