Europe was saved from the Mongol invasion by the death of the Khan

The reason they took Persia and Central Asia is because that area is sparsely populated and half the time never offered resistance.
> The lack of unity in the empire often resulted in large sections of the Shah's army folding with little or no fighting when the Mongols arrived. According to Ibn al-Athir, when Bukhara was attacked most of the Khwarazmian army simply deserted and left the city, leaving the now poorly-defended settlement to seek terms.[26] When Samarkand was subsequently attacked, the Turkic soldiers in the city who felt no loyalty towards the Shah allegedly said of the Mongols: “We are their race. They will not kill us.” They surrendered after only four days of fighting before turning the city over to the Mongols on the fifth. However they were executed along with much of the city's population regardless, much to their surprise.[27] Balkh's garrison surrendered without a fight. Merv's garrison surrendered after seven days and a few minor sorties (of only around a couple hundred men each, according to the pro-Mongol Juvayni); they were also all executed, again to their shock.[28] The only major cities known to put up a stout defense were Otrar, which managed to hold out for six months before being captured by the Mongols amidst heavy casualties and a large delay for the Mongol army, and Urgench, where Ibn al-Athir claimed that Mongol losses exceeded those of the defending soldiers for one of the only times in the war.[29][30] The unreliability of the Shah's army was probably most decisive when his son Jalal al-Din's cavalry host simply disintegrated due to desertion as his Afghan and Turkic allies disagreed with him over the distribution of war booty. His forces were reduced heavily which allowed the Mongols to easily overcome them at the Indus River.[31]

The Song took decades to conquer, the Jurchen and Tanguts were the ones who were conquered easily.

>Mongols have small wi...

The Mongols seiged out dozens of fortified cities in the Muslim world, no few at least as well defended as any European fortress. The Mongols were very adept at seige warfare, borrowing the best from Muslim and Chinese traditions-- literally seizing the people to do it for them. The entire reason the Mongols far outstripped previous steppe nomadic empires was because they were adept at siege warfare, and avoiding seige warfare through terror tactics. The Kwarezmain dynasty fell for this meme when they adopted a defensive strategy assuming the Mongols would fail at seiges, like every steppe group riding south before them. They of course, all died for falling for that meme.

>The Mongols seiged out dozens of fortified cities in the Muslim world, no few at least as well defended as any European fortress.
You've established yourself as a retard who has no idea how fortress networks actually work.
>The Kwarezmain dynasty fell for this meme when they adopted a defensive strategy assuming the Mongols would fail at seiges, like every steppe group riding south before them. They of course, all died for falling for that meme.
The Khwarezmian empire never did this, and if they had they'd probably be a lot more successful. What they did, after refusing to strengthen the walls of their shitty mud brick cities, was either surrender without a fight or ride out to meet the Mongols in the field, and die. The very few settlements that didn't do this like Otrar were a huge pain in the ass to take.

Mongol prowess at siege warfare was a myth, the Mongols themselves admitted that Franks were better at it than them which is why they needed Frankish siege engines to turn the tide in China.

Oh shit it's the stupid assblasted Hungarian again

Not an argument.

Where exactly are you sourcing this from? I'm in the middle of The Mongols and the Islamic World, 2017, which claims a) the counterweight trebuchets may very well have not been borrowed from Europe, but been built by chinese engineers, B) that the Mongols seiged a fuckton of cities in Iran over the span of the conquest and Ilkhanate, again, dozens which are all very well recorded and not in dispute; And c) That indeed the Kwarezmain dynasty retired from the field without contesting the Mongols in a massive pitched battle from the outset because they believed the outer fortresses would hold them. The cited contemporary Islamic sources sure don't seem to think their prowess at knocking down walls was a myth.

>Where exactly are you sourcing this from?
Rashid Al-Din's "Successors of Genghis Khan", p. 290-291 (JAB's translation).
> which claims a) the counterweight trebuchets may very well have not been borrowed from Europe, but been built by chinese engineers,
Complete bullshit. The Ilkhanate's official histories say that these were Frankish siege engines imported from the Levant. Counterweight trebuchets don't show up at any time in Chinese history prior to this either.
> B) that the Mongols seiged a fuckton of cities in Iran over the span of the conquest and Ilkhanate, again, dozens which are all very well recorded and not in dispute
Name these dozens. Iran didn't have "dozens" of cities at the time, more like a dozen, singular. And most of these surrendered without a fight or after only a little bit of fighting. There were only two major exceptions for the Khwarezmid empire- Otrar and Urgench. They took months to take, the other cities fell in days.
> That indeed the Kwarezmain dynasty retired from the field without contesting the Mongols in a massive pitched battle from the outset because they believed the outer fortresses would hold them.
Juvaini's "History of the Conqueror of the World" contains descriptions of all major battles of that campaign. Except, again, for those other two, any cities that didn't surrender with little to no fighting had their armies ride out in the field to meet the Mongols, where they were subsequently annihilated. Happened at Samarkand, Bukhara, and Merv, among others.

Imagine if all cities had instead done what Otrar and Urgench had done. The Mongols still would have won, because the Khwarezmids were weak, but it would have far more difficult.

Actually the Counterweight Trebuchet was a Muslim Invention. By Persians in the Abbasid Caliphate to be exact.

Regardless of who invented the original design (Byzantines claim they did), the ones used in China are explicitly referred to by Ilkhanate historian Rashid Al-Din as Frankish weapons.

The Mongols assaulted Bukharas citadel and briefly beseiged Samarkands (though the cities surrendered beneath them), stormed Timidh, Taliqun, Nishapur, Utrar, and Bamiyan. Just under Ghengis in his first invasion of the Khwarezemid. Under Ogodei, Ishafan was seiged for something like five years. Iribil was seiged, stormed, and relieved by the Caliph's forces. Mayyafariquin is mentioned as seiged twice. This is just the ones I could find in a good 20 minutes, there's probably quite a few more I missed, not to mention seiges under the later Ilkhanate.

Bump

That's what he wrote.

>Mongols invade china
>Chinese generals bend over backwards to join them after a few defeats
>Mongols invade hungary, cause massive devastation
>Leave, come back, ask hungarians to ally with the mongols to be spared, conquer europe together and get part of the plunder
>They tell them to shove it

There's also the logistical situation to be considered. Armies in china or close to the steppes could easily number a hundred thousand, being provisioned either from local sources or large herds of animals accompanying the mongol armies. Meanwhile in central europe, grazing was limited, local food sources fewer (especially if the locals employed scorched earth, horded food in castles and didn't lose those castles to sieges.) The same reasons that limited local population and army sizes also limited the size of invading armies. The mongols had logistical problems already in the first (very successful) invasion of hungary; in the second invasion they lost soldiers already on the approach. This may be (one) reason why the mongols never again invaded middle europe, but kept russia under the yoke for another two centuries.

Sorry for my ignorance but I have seen this thread quite some times.
So can someone actually tell me why the Mongols retrited from Europe if it wasn't for the death of the Khan ?

>So can someone actually tell me why the Mongols retrited from Europe if it wasn't for the death of the Khan ?
>The true reasons for the Mongol withdrawal are not fully known, but numerous plausible explanations exist. The Mongol invasion had bogged down into a series of costly and frustrating sieges, where they gained little loot and ran into stiff resistance. They had lost a large number of men despite their victories (see above). Finally, they were stretched thin in the European theater, and were experiencing a rebellion by the Cumans in what is now southern Russia, and the Caucasus (Batu returned to put it down, and spent roughly a year doing so).[22] Another theory relates to Europe's weather: Hungary has a high water table and floods easily. An analysis of tree rings by modern researchers has found that Hungary had a cold wet winter in early 1242 (contributing to the famine), which likely turned Hungary’s central plain into a huge swamp. Lacking pastures for their horses, the Mongols would have had to fall back to Russia in search of better grasslands.[23]
most likely it's because they never intended to conquer an entire continent with 40,000 men and the people who thought they did don't know how logistics work.

>most likely it's because they never intended to conquer an entire continent with 40,000 men
For this reason I don't know why people have tried to frame this as Mongols vs Europe. The Mongols came, inflicted significant damage on Hungary and the surrounding areas, then left (they would come back many years later).

The "It was all because of the khan" explanation is popular because it sounds plausible (warlord looking to secure a position of power when there is a power vacuum). One of the many problems with it is did they even know the khan was dead at the time of the retreat? The "European forces were too much for the Mongols" explanation is even worse.

They had already invaded, with many successes. However, they failed to invade any further with the exception of some of lithuania and the like. I think Georgia too.

A city is not a castle- mongolboos keep making this same fucking mistake.
I refuse to engage until you learn your mistake.

>However they were executed along with much of the city's population regardless, much to their surprise.

The theory literally comes from a fucking monk who thought god smote the khan. It's a fucking travesty that it persists when we know very well that Mohi was a shitty battle and Batu threatened to abandon the campaign. We know their siege attempts in the Balkans were largely unsuccessful and costly. We know that Bela escaped despite the mongols efforts to try and catch him. We know the mongols lost multiple small scale battles. The idea of the mongols being unbeatable needs to die.

The reason it is framed as Mongol v. Europe is because they threatened Fredrick II, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Balkans.

Georgia was the first European ("") country they conquered.
It's really weird because you see the exact same explanation attributed to Hulegu's withdrawal from the Levant in 1260 (bar ~10,000 men he left with Kitbuqa), that he had to go attend a kurultai. Even though Hulegu himself in letters to other monarchs claimed he withdrew because he didn't have fodder for hundreds of thousands of horses in a desert in the summer, with no mention of a kurultai.

Why do you have like four of these bait threads up? Whree are the mods

Because you keep falling for them

>The idea of the mongols being unbeatable needs to die.
Well most commentary about them leaves out all the specifics of how they won so they can come off as steppe superman.

I've heard people claims things like "Mongols couldn't conquer Europe because of castles" but most of the specifics are also left out in those arguments. The strategic value of castles is limited. The quality of the castles they faced, the strategic value of a particular castle, how easily said castles could be reinforced, what experience they (Not the Mongols as a whole but that particular group which invaded Europe) had dealing with other fortifications may not be mentioned at all. There are questions of what Mongols had to break them, if they could "starve them out", how far were the defenders willing to go (this is a pretty important one because the Mongols won many sieges because their opponent capitulated early), what they intended to do during that campaign, and what castles absolutely had to be dealt with because of where it was positioned.

The Mongols were bad at sieges,or better said siege assaults. They were recruiting all other types of Asian and European people groups for their armies according to the situation.
Obviously enough they were so smart to use Chinese engineers to construct siege equipment,but even more obviously it's kinda hard to force drafted engineers from China to go as far as Hungary or Brandenburg.

WTF,that is like saying Alexander the Great only conquered Persia for the same reason.

How the hell should they then have made it through the Persian Plateau without getting rekt by simple tribal archers and pikemen?
How the hell did Tamerlame then defeat Bayezid?How the hell then did they raid into Italy,which is "protected" by the Alpes.

The Mongols couldn't defeat European states for more practical reasons.
Centralization is easy to be used against the enemy,he is only one big state and can be brought to the ground by a few decisive victories,making the goverment and administration crumble. A tribal confederacy could lose half of it's tribes,the other ones wouldn't care as long as they're not affected,not that this applies to the Mongols.

Conquering the Holy Roman Empire for example,is hard,after they would have conquered half of it and crossed the Rhine, most of the occupied ones would rebell.

Other than the Sinitic,Iranian,Turkic and Slavic people,the Feudal lords in Germany had a tight gripp to the rule and the people were used to invasion and terror, they already defeated the Huns and Hungarians. Knights are the thing to counter horsearchers with.

Also,the Northern European Plain and the Balkan Penninsula were too broad to conquer them once and for all. If the Hungarian and Bulgar hordes were still there they could have managed it,but they were already christianized.
Also,the Chinese had no idea of something as a "holy crusade against infidels". Don't forget about crossbows and catapults.

The song just happened to have an army of 1.2 million professional soldiers. Did Europe even have a tenth of that?

No but Europeans knew that you don't make an army out of Cannon fodder

>the Mongols took a city in Mesopotamia with tens of thousands of allied infantry therefore they can take tens of thousands of small castles and forts with a limited number of horsemen