On a Fortuitous Death that Saved Europe
2014.03.08 1 Comment
From “The Man with the Golden Horde,” by Cecelia Holland, in Harper’s, 1999 August, pp. 28-31.
In the summer of 1241, an observer on the walls of Vienna might have caught a glimpse of strange horsemen drifting over the plains east of the city. Had the observer been well informed, he would have known that these odd and ominous riders on their little horses were Mongols, scouts from a vast army at that moment camped only a few hundred miles down the Danube River. Against these marauders Vienna was almost defenseless. The Mongols had a few months before disposed of the two most formidable armies in eastern Europe, the decisive battles occurring within a day of each other, though widely separated in distance.
On April 9, 1241, a sizable army of Germans, Poles, Templars, and Teutonic Knights marched out of Liegnitz to attack a slightly smaller force of Mongols advancing steadily westward across northern Poland. The two armies met on the flat field of Wahlstadt. The initial charges of the heavily armored Christian knights seemed to break the Mongols, who fled. The knights pursued, in growing disorder, straight into a perfectly laid Mongol ambush, where they perished almost to the last man. And yet the Mongol army that delivered this defeat was only a diversionary force. While they were driving through Poland, the great Mongol general Subotai and the main body of his troops forced the snowy passes of the Carpathians and descended onto the Hungarian plain. A third and smaller Mongol force circled south of the mountains through Moldavia and Transylvania to screen their flank. Subotai, one of Genghis Khan’s “four hounds,” as he called his favorite generals, was thus coordinating his forces across two mountain ranges and several hundred miles. Subotai is one of history’s unsung military geniuses; his operation in Europe, a difficult and for him unusual terrain, was flawless.
Subotai and his army descended into Hungary after marching 270 miles–through the snow–in three days. As the Mongols approached across the plain, King Bela of Hungary advanced from his capital, Buda, to oppose them. Subotai backed slowly away until he reached a bridge over the Sajo River, where the Mongols made their stand. On April to, one day after the battle at Liegnitz, Bela drove the Mongols back. Fortifying his camp with heavy wagons lashed together, Bela swiftly built a makeshift fort, securing both sides of the bridge. The Mongols surrounded it and for most of the next day assaulted the Hungarians with arrows, catapults, burning tar, and even Chinese firecrackers, keeping up a constant barrage until the embattled Christians were at the breaking point. Then suddenly a gap opened in the Mongol wall surrounding the Hungarians. Some of Bela’s exhausted and disheartened men made a dash for it. When the first few seemed to have escaped, the rest followed in a panic. Attacking from both sides, Subotai and his men leisurely destroyed the confused and demoralized mob that Bela’s army had become.
With Hungary under their control, western Europe lay before them, stunned and almost helpless. No Christian army so far had stopped the Mongols or even slowed them down. The well-informed Viennese observer had every right to tremble for his people; the scourge of God was upon them.
The impact of the Mongol conquests can hardly be overestimated, though the swift arc of their ascendancy spanned only a hundred years. Until the rise of Temujin, the remarkable man who became Genghis Khan, the word “Mongol” denoted only one of a number of nomadic peoples who hunted, herded, and warred over the central steppes of Asia and the Gobi Desert. Temujin changed that by exploiting the central Mongol belief that they were born to rule the world and led his people off to conquer an empire that ultimately stretched from the East China Sea to the Mediterranean.
“They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered, and they left,” wrote a contemporary chronicler. In 1209, Genghis Khan and his armies attacked northern China and began the long process of grinding down the world’s oldest and most populous civilization. Cities fell and were destroyed, and for a time the great khan considered depopulating the whole of northern China and converting it into a great pasture for his horses; he was deterred from this when an adviser pointed out that the Chinese would pay more taxes alive than dead.
In the west, steady expansion against the Turkoman peoples of central Asia brought the Mongols into contact with the flourishing states of Islam, especially Khwarezm, a land of fertile fields and the fabled, thriving cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, and Nishapur. In 1218, Genghis Khan invaded Khwarezm and devastated it. Calculated massacre was a central element in his strategy: if a city resisted his armies, then once it fell to him–and they always fell–he slaughtered everyone. The death toll was staggering: 1,600,000 were killed at Harat in 1220, and after rumors reached the Mongol prince T’uli that some had survived there by hiding among the piled corpses, he ordered all the bodies decapitated when he took Nishapur sometime later. According to contemporaries, there were 1,747,000 such bodies. The figures are ghastly, unbelievable. Even when a city surrendered, it was looted and destroyed.
Only a few years later, the attack on Russia began. The first campaigns along the Volga won the Mongols a foothold, and in 1237 they again attacked Russia with Subotai master-minding the campaign, systematically reducing the cities there to rubble. Hundreds of thousands died. Then in 1241, after a summer’s fattening on the great plains of southern Russia, the Mongols turned to eastern Europe.
Why were they so unstoppable? What was the Mongols’ secret? The Mongol army was like a modern army set down in a medieval world; its strengths were speed and maneuverability, firepower, discipline, and an excellent officer corps, who were chosen according to not favor or birth but proven ability. Whereas Mongol life emphasized discipline, the armies of medieval Europe were mere aggregates .of soldiers, their battles mostly confused melees studded with individual combats; a good general was somebody who managed to get the bulk of his available forces to the battlefield before the fighting was over. Subotai coordinated the movements of tens of thousands of men, across mountain ranges and in unknown territory, as precisely as movements on a chessboard. Not for centuries would there be another army as efficient and efficacious at the gruesome business of leveling other people’s societies.
And level them they did. China’s population declined by more than 30 percent during the years of the Mongol conquest. Khwarezm and Persia were crisscrossed with an elaborate underground irrigation system that since antiquity had sustained a thriving agriculture; the Mongols destroyed it utterly, and Arabic scholars contend that the region’s economy has yet to recover fully from the devastation. The wars of the khans in Iraq and Syria went on for sixty years and reduced a vigorous civilization almost to ruins.
Psychologically, the impact of the invasion was incalculable. Before the Mongols swept through, the Islamic world centered in Baghdad was intellectually vigorous, bold, adventuresome, full of poetry and science and art. After the invasion, the dour conservatism of the fundamentalists darkens it all. So too with Russia, where the great cities of Novgorod, Ryazan, and Kiev were fat on their river trade until the terrible winters of the 1230s; a dozen years later, travelers found Kiev a village of a hundred souls, huddled in a blackened boneyard.
Our well-informed observer, standing atop the wall of Vienna, pondering the fate of Europe, would have had some inkling of his danger as he watched the Mongol horsemen in the distance. He might have known that the Mongols launched their campaigns in the dead of winter, so rhat their horses were fat and strong from the summer grass. Surely they would fall first on Vienna, just up the Danube from Hungary. Faced with the destruction of one of Europe’s great cities, the European princes would be sufficiently aroused to send out another army, and when that army was destroyed Europe would be defenseless.
The Mongols’ reconnaissance was always expert and efficient; they would strike first at the riches of the Low Countries, overrunning Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges before swerving south toward the broad meadows of middle France. On the way they would destroy Paris. Possibly a detachment would force the passes of the Alps and descend into northern Italy. Cities that chose to fight would be annihilated. The Mongols would carry off everything they could lift and bum the rest.
What would remain? Wiping out the cities of the Low Countries would erase the nascent financial center of Europe. In the thirteenth century the vigorous wool trade centering on Antwerp and Ghent was fueling steady economic growth throughout western Europe. The first stock market originated somewhat later in Antwerp. The Mongol assault would pull up this developing society by the roors. No one would be left to tend the windmills and dikes; the sea would again cover Holland. There would be no rise of capitalism and the middle class. No printing press, no humanism. No Dutch Revolt, the seedbed of the great democratic revolutions from England to America to France. No Industrial Revolution.
The destruction of Paris, the intellectual center of the High Middle Ages, would be even more disastrous. Intense study of Aristotelian logic at the University of Paris was laying the groundwork for a fundamentally new, scientific worldview. The Nominalists were already insisting on the irreducible reality of the material world. A hundred years after the Mongols, a rector of the University of Paris would develop the first theory of inertia. On these ideas would stand the great theories of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton; the coming of the Mongols would leave no trace of them.
If the Mongols penetrated Italy, and there was nothing really to stop them, what would become of the Pope? If the papacy failed, Christendom itself would begin at once to change. Without a central authority to proclaim and enforce orthodoxy, however imperfectly, the faith would collapse into dozens of divergent sects. Without a central authority to rebel against, there would be no Reformation, with its powerful new ideas about human nature.
Destroying Rome, the Mongols would destroy Europe’s strongest link to its antique past. Without the examples of classicism to inspire them, could there have been a Dante, a Michelangelo, a Leonardo? Even if their ancestors survived the massacres, the desolation of their cities and countrysides would have reduced these people to a bleak struggle for survival with little room for poetry and art.
In 1241, however, our Viennese observer knew nothing of this; he knew only that out there on the plains of Hungary lurked a terror that could shatter his world, steal its energies and resources, and crush its aspirations. And so he watched from the walls and waited for the blow to fall.
It never came. Early in 1242, the Mongol army suddenly withdrew. Thousands of miles from Vienna, a single death had saved Christendom from disaster. A single death–and the very ethos that drove the Mongol army.
The death was Ogodai’s. The brilliant, humane, and drunken third son of Genghis Khan had not only kept his father’s empire together but had directed its expansion. And yet the political organization of the khanate did not match its military sophistication. The Mongols remained nomadic tribesmen, bound by a personal loyalty to their chiefs. When the khan died, the law required them to go in person back to their homeland to elect a new khan. On the brink of the assault on Europe, great Subotai folded his tents and turned his horses toward the rising sun.
The Mongols never returned. Their focus thereafter was on China, Persia, and the Arab states. In 1284, a Marmeluke army from Egypt met a Mongol army at Ayn Jalut, in the Holy Land, and defeated them there. It was the beginning of the end. The Japanese and the Vietnamese repulsed Mongol invasions in the distant east. The Mongol tide was ebbing.
The Polish still celebrate April 9 as a day of victory, reasoning that however awful the defeat at Liegnitz may have been, it somehow sapped the invaders’ strength and will to continue. Thus they cling to the illusion that the terrible sacrifice was meaningful–that they deserved to triumph. But the valor of the defenders had nothing at all to do with it. In fact, it was the Mongol worldview, the same force that propelled them so furiously outward, that sucked them back home again, together with a stroke of blind luck, and saved Europe.
This Space for Capnomancy 
Excellent description!