AU Mongols in Europe

Some day the Khan will return to the Suomi, and the horde will ride again.

Except you're laughably fucking wrong.

>Fortifications were completely ignored
They actively tried and failed to take esztergoms citadel. They literally NEVER bypassed anything they could take, and fucking brought Chinese siege engineers along to help take positions.

But please, let's go on with this trash fire of a post.

>scout expedition force.
Which is they demanded the total submission of the Hungarians, and threatened them with extermination if they failed to comply. And then returned decades later with a force of the same size with the proclaimed intent of conquest and rule over hungary-unless hungary aided their push into western europe.

>They only FORTIFIED FUCKING EVERYTHING because of faulty logic.
Yes, "the storngly fortified places never fell despite coming under assault, and all the weakly fortified places did" is incredibly faulty logic.

I mean, it's not like the Hungarian policy of "fortify the country, train heavy cavalry" resulted in nogai khan getting his fucking ass handed to him in the open field after being utterly unable to take any important settlements, right?

>Even when they had highly fortified areas, mongols still took them down.
Precisely ZERO European castles fell to mongols. Ever. Even with their precious Chinese specialists present.

>they saw no riches from the initial raids.
Because anything not burned or buried was- this will be hard for you, so read it twice-carried into strong places that the mongols couldn't take. There is a REASON they wanted to take the citadel-That's where the richest people were, and that's where everyone ran with their movables.

Mongols relied on local help or traitors to take fortifications fairly consistently. This worked in most of the world, but Europeans generally regarded mongols as a bunch of untrustworthy heathen liars and wouldn't negotiate. Can't trick them into hanging themselves.

Now you're stuck in a siege. Mongols were absolute ass at sieges and, again, relied on local help for them.

North china? The jin? The jin got attacked by the song, AND a good part of their army defected to the mongols. By the time they took the song, they were fielding chinese troops in well organized infantry units, and it still took them decades to make any progress. They ended up needing to import counterweight treubuchets from the east to finally break the Song. Their walls couldn't stand up to them, and their weapons didn't have the range to deal with them.

Warriors whos entire conception of war revolves are very fluid battles on horseback are not going to do well in a siege for fairly obvious reasons.

The reverse is true of Europeans, who were regarded as the best in the world at siege warfare, even by Arabs serving in the mongol court- and arabs absolutely looked down their noses at "franks" the majority of the time.

Worse for the mongols-Chinese siege weapons weren't going to do shit to their walls. They were BUILT for counterweighted trebuchets. They're also purpose built for war first and habitation second. The same is not true of Chinese cities. Chinese shit was hard to take due to scale. European-and arab-shit was hard to take due to design. A castle was a interlinking series of fields of fire where the other guy isn't on the wall, but in it pelting you from an arrow slit you're not going to be able to hit. God help you if it's a later concentric design, because you WILL get PTSD trying to assault it.

1/?

So, first invasion.

Typical steppe warrior invasion into the area+1, honestly. People living next to the steppes existed in a cycle. The steppe attacks, wins battles, and either gets stomped, or the attackers take over. Either way, last man standing now lives next to the steppes, knows how they fight, and can beat them. Anyone starting shit will lose. Usually.

Fast forward decades or centuries, and that edge and knowledge will be gone. And the people will probably be divided and simply not take the attackers that seriously until the stupid steppe niggers kick the absolute shit out of them.

Hungary was the poster child for this. Bela was in the process of centralizing power. His nobles fucking hated this. Hungary was a backwater. Relatively few actual knights, shit infantry, few crossbows, and most settlements-even the capital-were defended with earth and wood. The knights they had weren't known for their stellar skill in field maneuvers. Europeans in general weren't at their best in open battle. Nobody fucking like them, pitched battles required both armies to think they absolutely were going to win. Sieges did not.

Bela gets and ultimatum to surrender or be conquered, raises the call to war. His nobles dragged feet. Mohi happens. Command issues fuck shit up, and having a shit tier army doesn't help. Worse, hungarians kill the cuman leader, and they proceed to ride off and ravage hungary. Regardless, the mongols suffered serious casualties, with one of the two commanders wanting to retreat. They didn't, hungary got fucked, mongols ran loose across the countryside.

Hungary essentially dies. Esztergoms walls fall, being earth and wood, but the citadel does not. It does, however, provide the mongols with an taste of Europeans love affair with the crossbow.

People not in a stone fortress could try to run, die, or be enslaved. Standard stuff here.

Despite bullshit claims that they were only raiding/scouting, they stuck for multiple seasons.

Now, esztergom was wiped out. The poplace burned fucking everything, and everyone not in the citadel was massacred for this.

So again, The mongols, despite horseshit mongolaboo claims they were "just raiding" or "scouting", sat around for months occupying and pacifying the country. They even started minting coins. None of the stone fortresses fell during this occupation.

I won't get into why they left. Too much shit to cover.

They fucked off. Bela went absolutely apeshit. If you could provide armored cavalry, train his knights to not suck at acting as a unit, or help get more stone fortifications built, he'd suck your cock in full view of the court.

The man gave away massive tracts of land, gave the southeastern borderlands to the knights of sj john, expanded the nobility, and even invited a shitload of Jews to become citizens to finance all this. He also wrote to the pope, looking for help getting his hands on Venetian crossbowmen. Again, this is the man who had been very controversially centralizing power before the invasion.

Hungary comes out a heavily fortified nation with a modern army of well armored horsemen who can actually act like an army. Oh, and there were 56 new stone castles in country by the end of his reign.

The man got shit done.
3?

4?
Fast forward. Batu khan wants europe. And as is fairly standard, he'd rather get locals killed than his own men. Hungary was offered the chance to submit. Good deal, too. Give him a quarter of the army for tax empetions and a fifth of the plunder from the coming conquest of europe.

I honestly don't know if Batu Khan meant it, or wanted them to surrender to he could massacre them. Mongols. Bela told him to fuck off.

Fast forward. New king, doesn't matter, magyars aren't worth remembering. They invade. Estimates peg them at 30,000 men, same as the first force. Stated goal is the conquest of hungary so it can be used to conquer everyone else.
Mongols attack in two fronts.

Civilians get their asses kicked, pest, which was abandoned, is burned. No stone fortifications are taken, and the mongols repeatedly lose battles in the field.

Head Magyar shit eventually gets and army together and smashes the mongols head on in open battle.

The second front got broken by Local Hungarian troops without the royal army needing to intervene.

So, tl;dr
>why were they able to do this
Because mongols weren't ubermensch, and horse archers+heavy lancers aren't the end all be all of war. Pop culture loves to suck steppe dick, because "THIS UNIT DA BEST" "MONGOL STRONK" is a lot easier than looking into the complicated military and political situations that they knowingly and unknowingly took advantage of.

My brother of another mother. I really don't know why people don't look into the actual history of the Golden Horde before putting them on the fucking pedestal.

geez user tldr

They're lazy and stupid.

Plus, it's the same mentality you get with ANYTHING in history, especially around the medieval period.

Find thing europoors did, find thing that is better, laugh at how stupid they were and how smart you are. Bonus points if it's something a Non-european contemporary had so you can feel EXTRA smart.

It's fascinating. People today either act light knights were unstoppable killing machines or absolutely useless, when outside perspectives from the medieval era boil down to "Don't get in front of them. Consider ambush."

>tfw wrote or heavily revised the Wikipedia articles on the Mongol invasions of Hungary and Poland
>tfw general Internet discussion on forums I've seen seems to have transformed because of it with less Mongol wank as the later invasions become more common knowledge

you done good user

Honestly, I just use them to link people. Lindsey Pows paper on the issue is what opened my fucking eyes.

>hurr Mongols can't take any fortifications

So were there no fortifications in the Middle East, China and Kievan Rus? I find that hard to believe.

There actually weren't in Kievan Rus. Even Kiev itself didn't have a proper Citadel, just a cathedral. The most common method of taking cities there was to either take an axe to the wooden walls or just wait for the enemy to open the gates and then ambush them. Because they literally did not even have guard towers.

As for the Middle East, the Mongols tended to just not bother with taking fortifications if they couldn't bluff the garrison into a surrender. That's what they did with the Assassins. That the Crusader States didn't fall for those bluffs is a big reason why they were never conquered. Iran did not have proper forts for the most part, the closest being the mud brick city walls of certain cities. These stood no chance against a proper siege engine of course, and most lacked Citadels.

China was a whole other issue and really atypical for Mongol conquests in general. It was more like a grinding 60-year Chinese civil war.

No one said they couldn't take fortifications, but they weren't especially good at it

Kievan Rus was pretty well fortified. You're full of shit.

>the biggest and longest thing they did
>atypical

Your mom didn't say "atypical" last night.

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It became relatively more fortified later precisely because of the Mongol invasions. Prior it had basically none whatsoever. The fortress in your pic was established in 1325.

>Prior it had basically none whatsoever

Stop lying. A quick Google search proves you wrong. It had a lot of castles, stone walls and shit.

This has already been explained to you you faggot.

>Kievan Rus
Very few, and the ones they had were fairly shit.
>BUT MUH PIC
Didn't have a stone wall until a decade after the mongol invasion, you absolute retard.
>Middle East
Taken primarily by trickery and betrayal. It's a lot easier to take a fortified place when the defenders either surrender, kill each other, agree to wreck their own fucking defenses, or come out and fight you in the open.
>china
Taken with the helps of a literal army of Chinese soldier,s and Chinese cities were built for habitation, not defense.
The handful of castle equivalents-purpose built centrally planned forts sited on hills, not flat fucking plains-the Chinese built were so fucking hard to take that they lost a khan trying to get rid of the handful that were built.

>hard to beielvie
They tried to take the stone castles they found in europe. The literally brought men and equipment form china for this exact purpose. They failed, miserably.

They came back, tried again, and failed again, after a lone and storied history of suffering horrendous losses fighting over stone fortifications.

Dispute this all you'd like. You're wrong.

Even Russians accept that their fortifications were absolute shit until after the invasions. Small catapults were considered noteworthy to them.

Meanwhile, kiev had no citadels, and defenders during the siege had to fight from the roof of a church once the walls were breached. Breached by catapults that did jack shit in europe. Which got into range because the rus were so utterly incompetent at siege warfare that they let trees grow right up to the walls.

Nevytsky Castle
>It was founded in the early 15th century.
Consider suicide.

>Kievan Rus
Wooden shitholes that were easy to burn down.

>Nevitsky castle
>founded in the early 15th century
Who arre you trying to troll, faggot?

ukraine-for-business.com/places-interesting-to-visit/123-wonders-of-ukraine-castles-and-fortresses

>Most castles and fortresses of Ukraine are dated by the 14th – 17th centuries. The oldest castle is the romantic mediaeval Nevitsky castle of the 12th century located in the Transcarpathian region on the mountain

Suck my dick now.

Worse, few or no strongpoints to fallback to, few towers, and no engines.

Walls alone are fucking useless. You need strongpoints if there's a breach. You need machines-or men who know how to build an operate them-to shoot back and keep attackers from leisurely bombarding youi.
europebetweeneastandwest.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/the-architecture-of-self-destruction-nevitsky-castle-ukraine-a-lesson-in-ruins/
>The first version of the castle did little good in slowing down the Mongol advance which came roaring through the area in 1241.
>first version
Guess which one didn't exist at the time?
The one you just posted, because the rus were using wood and earth for almost everything at the time.
>The Mongols put Nevitsky’s wooden structures to the torch, resulting in its utter ruin.
>WOODEN
>WOOOOOOODEEEEEN
>The Mongols only stayed in the Kingdom of Hungary temporarily before they retreated eastward. The upshot of the Mongol Invasion was an order by Hungarian King Bela IV for stone castles and fortresses to be built in order to better protect the Kingdom. Nevitsky was soon restored and refortified in a much more substantial manner.
>refortified in a much more substantial manner.

ukrainetrek.com/blog/history/the-ruins-of-medieval-nevitsky-castle/

In 1241, it was destroyed by the Mongol-Tatar hordes, but in the second half of the 13th century the castle was rebuilt. With the development of firearms, it was reconstructed several times and acquired its final shape in the early 16th century.
>acquired its final shape in the early 16th century.
>16th century

Are we done?

Where's the proof that the first version was made of just wood though? Kievan Rus had both wooden and stone fortifications, not just one or another.

>Between 1060 and 1237, only one in five recorded engagements in Kievan Rus involved the attempted capture of a fortified settlement.

-Per Konstantin S. Nossov's "Medieval Russian Fortresses: AD 862-1480", page 46.

>Towers were extremely rare, so that a preferred method of taking a settlement was simply to ambush its defenders before they could close the gates. Passive blockades were the most typical method of conducting a siege in the pre-invasion period, and throwing machines were uncommonly used until the mid-thirteenth century. Attacks were much more likely to involve the use of axes and fire on highly flammable walls.

-Ibid, 51

>A few years before the Mongols arrived, Danilo made use of a catapult against the walls of Chernigov, and this single siege engine was considered noteworthy by the chronicler of Galicia-Volynia"

-Per “Galician-Volynian Chronicle,” 43.

>Before the 13th century, walls of cities and fortresses alike were built entirely of logs atop earthen ramparts, and stone was virtually non-existent as a building material.

-Konstantin S. Nossov's "Medieval Russian Fortresses: AD 862-1480", page 25.

>Before the 13th century
>Before

Mongol invasion happened DURING the 13th century. It looks like that castle was already made of stone during that period. There was an even earlier fort made of wood in place of it before though: ukrainetrek.com/blog/history/the-ruins-of-medieval-nevitsky-castle/

>The castle was built in the 13th century on the top of a hill above the valley of the river Uzh on the site of an earlier wooden fort.

I mis-typed, it was before the MID 13th century.

You're wrong and go fuck off from ruining this thread.

Thanks.

That's what Wikipedia's supposed to be for anyway.

>mistyping a quote

How?

Also,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_castles_in_Russia

Lots of them from that period. Wish the page for the Ukrainian ones had dates like that too.

>How?

Because I'm transcribing it, not-copypasting it. I just missed a word.

But look at the page I posted. There are some from the 11th century even. By the 13th century they were already common.

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Seriously you nigger, the fucking Novgorod Kremlin wasn't even using stone until the 14th century.

The Kremlin. Let that sink in.

they literally started building donjons as a direct response to the beating the mongols gave them-a defensive technique already out of fucking date everywhere else. They did while replacing walls with stone piecemeal.

Accept that you're wrong, and move the fuck on. You don't know anything about the subject. You're down to pulling pictures of of a wiki without even checking the fucking articles in question. You are out of straws.

holy fucking shit you're retarded. how much of a stubborn, autistic mongolaboo idiot do you have to be to sit here and post a handful of pictures and pretend they represent everything? It's well fucking known that stone castles were a western European thing. Read the articles on the individual castles, they were updated and improved from wooden and earthen works.

>It's well fucking known that stone castles were a western European thing
Muslims were also really big on them, the crusades revolutionized western castlebuilding.

So the Mongols were a meme civilization that could't even take down a fucking castle?

They could, they just couldn't do it particularly better than anyone else. And that was extremely important in any attempt to conquer Europe, at the far fringes of their empire. There were no large scale conquests in that era in Europe for a reason (including by other Europeans), there were castles absolutely everywhere to an absurd density. This is also why pitched battles in medieval Europe were so rare.

hey, I argued in like ten different threads, tooth and nail, went into actual research and dug out some actual good material on the matter. and also reworded the wikipedia articles a few times but they weren't doing anything different

>supplying fake information
Wikipedia catches on fast though.

The horse really is the mideval tank.

Fuck off you niggers. As a magyar , I feel sick hearing you talking shit about my noble ancestors.The mongols fucked you up and raped your grandmothers and now you are still butthurt about it.

nah just a really coherent unified pack of maurading mercenaries at best

>mongols
>magyar ancestors
Buzi vagy?

For me it's the mcmongolchicken.

they conquered France, and during that escapade they made much of eastern europe defect

>Could they have really made it Western Europe?
Not effectively - yes they had a vastly superior military however the sheer distance and weakness of their logistics meant that it was never feasible for them to do so. At best they could fuck up eastern Europe with its open plains.

>How would European history have been changed by this?

See Russia

No.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Mongol_invasion_of_Hungary#Military_reforms

>There were no large scale conquests in that era in Europe for a reason

Wasn't the "Reconquista" of the iberian peninsula going on at the same time though?

Holy shit this is the same faggot Hungarian who keeps posting this garbage
>Muh fortifications!
>Muh armored knights!
>Muh superior Yuropean engineering
You're a fucking idiot. Truly.

asian """masculinity""" belongs on reddit

Forgive him, there are very few things Hungarians can be proud of in their history really.

>Cucked by Russia
>Twice.
>Their leader is still a Putin dicksucker.
Lol.

Faggots.

>Could they have really made it Western Europe?
Yes, if you can conquer China you can conquer anywhere.

>Was their military strength sufficient to sustain rule over numerous European nations?
That's not how Mongolian rule works, you just adopt the culture of the country you are ruling. They are good at that.

>How would European history have been changed by this?
The next generation of Mongol rulers would be killed and replaced by the previous line.

>mock magyars
>post readily verified historicla truth
>Y-y-your uh hungarian
Spot the mongolaboo.

Magyars a shit.

They could, they just weren't very good at it. You had an army that excelled at maneuver and open field battle trying to invade a place that essentially structured their armies and society around restricting the ability of people to maneuver and avoiding open field battles.

In a vacuum, yes, they could eventually conquer a castle. In practice, they'd suffer badly if they tried and then fuck off, or not try at all because it wasn't worth it.

Bullshit. Go be wrong somewhere else.

And where are your citations?

No because the east fortifies cities, whilst the west has indivual fortifications
If it wasn't for serfdom we would all be speaking khagan now

What were the names of these battles?

It's impressive the Mongols were even able to get to Central Europe and do what they did, tbqh.

>had issues dealing with knights even in very small numbers

They slapped the shit out of the Rus princes, Bohemian, Polish, Hungarian and Georgian knights. What are you talking about?

>Going further west, into less favorable terrain with more population density, more castles, and more soldiers would have been utterly suicidal.
You're ignoring one of the major factors that made the Mongols successful. They hired and enslaved anyone who they thought were useful. I don't see any reason why the Mongol armies in France wouldn't be using captured German siege engineers the way they did it to the Chinese. They enlisted a Jin Chinese general who ended up being a highly decorated Mongol general. They used Chinese siege engineers all the time. And this is assuming the Mongols actually try to take a castle instead of just surrounding it, riding somewhere else and waiting for it to starve out while raping the countryside. Hell, even Attila recruited/impressed locals to do the jobs that his horsemen couldn't. You're viewing the Mongol military capability in terms of their weapons, but without Subutai and Genghis's sense for grand strategy and maneuver, there's literally nothing special about the Horse Archer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mohi

Keep in mind that at the same time this is happening, a smaller force rode north to fight the Polish and Bohemians at Legnica and raped them there too. People will rave about Napoleon or the Wehrmacht using maneuver warfare to split their forces, cut off enemy forces trying to link and destroy armies independently before meeting again and they do deserve some praise for their skill in that regard but people forget that the Mongols were the progenitors of it.

Hell, Richard A Gabriel (a professor who has taught at both the US and Canadian war colleges) makes the claim in his book Subotai the Valiant that one of the original thinkers of Soviet "Deep Battle" doctrine, Tukachevsky, had his ideas influenced while fighting the last of the steppe nomads in the late 1800s. And if you study it, it looks remarkably similar to what the mongols did. The difference is that tanks, jeeps and air replaced horses.

I mean, compare this with maps of Operation Barbarossa and how the army groups would encircle Soviet units. The Mongols did the same thing, but with horses. Their military tactics were then basically forgotten by western military historians and chalked up as a retarded, massive horde that overran through numbers. The Mongols basically invented maneuver warfare.

>Mongols relied on local help or traitors to take fortifications fairly consistently. This worked in most of the world, but Europeans generally regarded mongols as a bunch of untrustworthy heathen liars and wouldn't negotiate. Can't trick them into hanging themselves.
MUH EUROPE EXCEPTIONALISM

L E L

Betrayals happened at every point in history. Europe included. Europeans of the time weren't really scared of mongols as much as they were worried about other European factions using the mongols. There were ripe for alliances/betrayals with mongols and other outside factions. It happened with muslims of persia, it happened with mongols of the golden horde.

Your historical narrative is bit too biased and niave

Mongols operated on OODA loop. Subutai and the other top generals of the time would simply send out spies years ahead into area for invasions/raids and make note of everything.

This may seem like a mongol specialty but it was actually implementation of the Chinese warfare system whom they've been fighting against. Information warfare as they call it is what mongols brought to europe. Europe couldn't understand what was happening at the time as the mongols were conquering pretty much everything in sight.

This. Considering that their entire invasion force was just 50,000 men spread into three columns operating fucking 4,000 miles from home, which may as well have been another planet in that era, managing to wreck several central European kingdoms/duchies and raid as far as Germany is ridiculous.