Mongorians vs Fullplate

It is known that the Golden Hoarde slapped Europe's shit in the 13th century, but I'm curious about how Mongolian style warriors would fair against Knights of the reniessance era, the 1500s, in full articulated plate. I imagine their arrows would just plink off, and while their tactics of retreating and feinting would still be effective, it would be a zero gain for either side, with the Horse Archers unable to kill the heavy knights and the knights unable to catch or engage the much lighter horse archers. Is this accurate? I want to know because reasons pertaining to my OC donut steel setting, and no.one replied to that thread so I figured I'd jump right into a historical vs since Veeky Forums loves those

Mongols wouldn't give a shit about heavy cavalry either way. They just avoid the heavy cav, scare the shit out of the infantry, sack the town and move on before the knights have even got their armor on.

Heavy cavalry are no threat to light horsemen, and its pointless trying to fight them with light horsemen. You just ignore them, or bait them out of the way - use a small unit in front of the heavy cavalry as bait, get them to charge and then kite them out away from the areas you need to attack.

Mongols probably avoided pitched battles anyway and just raid shit and move on before any army could catch up

>Strategy video games are real life

Also mongols took entire cities in the middle east and europe they had no issue at all with large pitched battles.

They'd just shoot the horses bro. The 1500s knights didn't go into battle with full cataphracts armored horses.

answer OPs question then if you're so knowledgeable about mongols.

Not sure which strategic video game requires knights to put on their armor. you do know the difference between strategic and tactical right?

>Golden Hoarde slapped Europe's shit in the 13th century
I'm sorry, but fucking what? Unless Europe means slavs, Europe fucking broke the Mongols. The Golden Horde rammed into Hungary and was stopped cold and bogged down in European war of attrition, which was something they weren't well equipped for and eventually tapped out TWICE.

>kill Hungarian king
>wreck Teutonic knights
>only leave because your scouting force needs to go attend a ceremony
>hundreds of years later the people who's ass you beat think that they were somehow the badass victors

See the second invasion of Hungary. Europe was incapable of being invaded because it stretched Mongol supply lines too long and the Mongols were not suited for constant siege warfare against people 100% willing to fight to the last man. It's like trying to run on a field of legos.

Hungarians learned that heavily fortified areas were spared and built lots of castles. Also later Mongol warlords weren't as hardcore as their predecessors but strived to be like OG Mongols and often failed.

having really good body armor isn't going to change the fact that you're massively outnumbered outmaneuvered and logistically outmatched

obviously if you look at it from rpg terms then if you take 0 damage you can't lose but that's not really how it goes IRL and from what I understand about the Mongols they didn't win just because euros were underequipped...

I mean even a squad of 8 Soviet infantrymen can get a Panzer 4 crew to surrender if they manage to detrack it and beat on it with hammers incessantly

Uneducated moron here.

I think the question isn't so much "mongorians vs knights", but who is best suited to fight where. I'm going to analyze the relevant strengths and weaknesses of knights and keshiks and then see how they fit into the terrains where they usually fight.

Let's start off with knights on horseback, the tanks of the middle ages. A knight on horseback was equiped with the fines arms and armor of his time and could take on multiple lesser footmen. They were at their deadliest when couching their lances and charging their enemies, crashing into them like a hammer into a pile of twigs. They could achieve great speeds on the field of battle, but due to the knights and horsemen themselves being heavily armored they were slower than light cavalry and couldn't maintain top speed for long times (horses get tired, you know?). Now let's look at Western Europe and specifically France, the shining jewel of chivalry at the time. We see the so-called "French Plain" in the West of the country, but in the East we see hilly and mountainous terrain. On top of that the French Plain was in the Middle Ages lush with forests, and still today filled with rivers and smaller creeks. This is great terrain for knights, where you aren't expected to travel around at top speed but can still find battlefields where the manouverability of knights can be exploited to great effect. Same applies to most of Western Europe.
cont.

Now the Keshiks and equivalent horse archers, who are much lighter armored and cannot sustain melee combat as well as knights and abandon heavier armor in favor of manouverability and ranged combat. Now look at their terrain, the East European plain (stretching from roughly Poland to the Urals) and the steppes of Mongolia. It's all flatlands and relatively few rivers (though those few rivers are massive). This is ideal terrain for horses where they can freely roam, so traveling lightly in this kind of terrain is top prioriry for an army. Hence why the Russians often used the sheer size of their country as a weapon.

Now back to your question
>I'm curious about how Mongolian style warriors would fair against Knights of the reniessance era, the 1500s,
If they're fighting in Austria, then the Mongols are in for a world of hurt. The knights are in their optimal terrain, and through strategic movement can possibly force the Mongolians into pitched combat. They also won't do much harm to local cities (rather than minor villages that I imagine would quickly be abandoned if the Mongols keep sticking around) which means they run out of resources over time.

If they're fighting in Eastern Poland (why didn't you invest?!) then the scales tip in favor of the Mongols, who have a lot more flat terrain to exploit. This kind of terrain favors those who prefer hit-and-run tactics over those who want to force a pitched battle. The knights will slowly be exhausted, their supply lines raided and the cities in these regions may be more vulnerable to attacks with less advanced siege engines.

But that's just like my opinion man. I know I could be wrong and I'd like to be corrected if this is the case.

A big advantage of the Mongols is honestly their discipline, organization and knowledge of tactics. Europe is probably a bit better about that in the 15th century than the 13th century: the Hundred Years War hugely develops the military structures of both England and France; the Hussites were outright hundreds of years ahead of their time in terms of military strategy; there are bodies like the Teutonic Order around as well as rising nations like Lithuania who historically did well against the later attacks by the Khanate and who have strong cavalry in the proto-Hussars who can probably compete with the Mongols. One problem though is that a lot of these people are fighting each other, more significantly so than in the 13th century, and the Ottoman Empire is also encroaching on Europe

There were Mongol-type armies around in this period. The original Golden Horde established multiple Khanates that warred with European armies for centuries after. But maybe a new, full-on invasion on the scale of the original would be too much to a European struggling under Ottoman aggression and exhausted by its own wars.

It's not a simple matter of horse archers vs. knights (it's not like every Mongol soldier was a horse archer). IMO Europe is technically better placed to resist the Mongols in the 15th century but practically unlikely to unite to face them and Eastern Europe - which would be the point of contact - is heavily pressured by Ottoman forces already, depending on exactly when in the 15th century you imagine this happening.

bump

>would
They did IRL.
Look up how Golden Horde fought Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

>>wreck Teutonic knights
>Golden Horde
what
What the fuck are you talking about?
1410 happened only with a few tatar auxillaries in lithuanian forces

Hungarian here. Our history says that the mongols kicked our butts so hard it took us centuries to recover. We have an entire word for the occasion ('tatárjárás') that is used as a curse-word, and the battle where the mongols wiped out our main army (Battle of Muhi) is widely accepted as one of the most disastrous battles in Hungarian history (next to the Battle of Mohács and the Don Kanyar Disaster).

>having really good body armor isn't going to change the fact that you're massively outnumbered
The Mongols almost never outnumbered anyone during their conquests, and were usually the ones outumbered.

Listen, he didn't say you came out looking that good either but he isn't wrong. The mongols slammed into you and found out that Europe would be too hard. Because despite doing well in Hungary, they couldn't keep doing that past Hungary.

Not that user but Mongols have no problem with pitched battles.

Their tactics mostly consist of drawing out enemy heavy cavalry with skirmishers then overwhelm them with their own heavy cavalry. They use a lot of tactics that confuses enemies, they are know to bombard enemy postions with pitched hay-bales to create smoke screens.

They also made use extensive use of gunpowder. Though the main challenge you could present to them in terms of 1500's warfare is entrenched infantry and stout star-forts.

Op here thanks for the great replies, this is all of huge use to my setting work. It sounds like things would grind down to a fucking cold war of castles.and forts with the Mongols raiding the shit out of any smaller town but for various reasons it not being worth it to hit the bigger castles

This is perfect for me.

Really neat thing I learned was the burning haybale smoke screens

>it's a people ignore that the Mongols lost against the Hungarians, Poles and Egyptians who all used heavy cavalry and they also lost against the Vietnamese who used fucking elephants episode

Thing is, when the Mongolians finally lost, it was weak shit late era Mongolians who were wracked by internal issues

Well sieges were always the highlights of medieval warfare. Though take note that by the 1500's any town worth anything are well fortified. And armies using mobile fortress tactics with big shields to make solid field blocks like the Hungarians and the war wagons of the Hussites.

>Hungarians, Poles
They were wrecked more than they wrecked.
>Egyptians
They figured out the mongol tricks and the horde sent was small. After that Hulagu died and another mongol succession party happened.
>Vietnamese
No one can handle the 'Nam. No one.

>and they also lost against the Vietnamese who used fucking elephants episode
Vietnamese elephants didn't win the war against Mongols, Vietnamese sailors did.

I feel it should be pointed out that Mongols didn't have too much trouble with fortifications when they conquered China, and often used siege engineers and siege engines - many of their success in these areas came after they integrated experts from people they conquered (Chinese, Iraqi, Iranian) into their armies, which happened a lot - for example they had Muslim catapults when they went to war against Jin China, and used Chinese gunpowder technology against other parts of China and against the Islamic world, including the siege of Baghdad

So not only were they good at conquering people, they took what other people were good at and used their skills effectively

Adding to this, Horse Archers are overrated but Mongols are underrated. What's important to realize is that horse archers and the way they fight aren't anything new; the Chinese and Romans were fighting the Xiongnu/Huns and Parthians, respectively, centuries ago and most of the kingdoms of central asia that the Mongols conquered were also horse archers. The horse archer was not what made the Mongols so effective.

What made them so effective was
-a very simplistic, easy-to-maintain communications/logistical network that didn't really need a baggage train;
-excellent intelligence work that used merchants and caravans to scout out terrain and vulnerabilities
-a willingness to learn and integrate other styles of fighting and technologies. In the course of the invasion of China, the Mongols went from never having been on a boat before to maintaining a navy that could fight on more or less even terms against the Chinese Navy; at Mohi the Hungarians nearly defeated the Mongols had they not brought over field artillery that the Chinese and Persians had been using against them a decade or so before.

The Mongols went from a regional empire to a transcontinental one not because they were horse archers, but because they were willing to innovate and imitate beyond horse archery.

The second invasion of Hungary wasn't the Mongol Horde, it was the weaker successor states. The Hungarians got fucksmashed by a Mongolian *scouting force* the first time, and never faced the actual Mongolian state again.

The huge Mongolian numbers are myths. Europeans would see a Mongolian army in one location and then, weeks later, in another location. Being incapable of conceiving that Mongolians could move armies that fast, every time Europeans saw that army again they chalked it up as another army. They'd see one army seven times, and assume they saw seven armies.