Greetings!
Well, the Mongols are actually a rough cultural link in a long chain of cultural change, migration, and warfare going back more than a thousand years. You see, from at least 300 B.C. there were the Scythians. They were originally located in south-central Russia, and spread over a broad area, keeping on the move, living and fighting from horseback, raiding and slaughtering. They were well-known for their horsemanship, their rugged demeanor, and their awesome fighting skills with the composite bow. The Greeks, the Persians, and others of the time alternately traded with them, employed them as ferocious mercenaries, and fought wars against them--usually losing to the ferocity, tactics, and skill of the Scythians.
The far east and the central Eurasian steppes continued to produce similar tribes of ferocious horse nomads for centuries--the Romans fought against them, and even employed them in defense of the empire. Some--it is said--were sent to Britain as well, on occupation duty. The recent King Arthur movie made mention of this as well. Indeed, a number of these nomadic horsemen were also not exclusively *Asian*--for many were Caucasian, and various racial and cultural mixtures in between.
The Huns were responsible for driving the Goths and Visigoths into the Roman Empire, as well as other tribes. Keep in mind that the Visigoths were the *Eastern* Goths, which differed to some degree in customs from their cousins, the Goths. At the time of the Hun invasions, huge tribes of Goths were living in central Russia and the modern-day Ukraine. A history professor of mine, she was originally from Sweden--explained to me that the Goths originally came from the islands and coastal regions of Sweden, and gradually migrated south-east, into Russia. They were doing this as a process of centuries or so before 2-300 A.D.
It is also interesting to note that while the Huns were stomping the Romans in late Antiquity, they had in previous centuries conquered and hammered much of the Chinese Empire. The Huns were also largely a mixture of Asian and Caucasian. The culture, however, was essentially the same as the Scythians.
The Avars were another rampaging nomadic tribe--in the hundreds of thousands--that hammered Europe for much of the early Middle Ages, before settling down in Hungary. Hungary, by the way--H-u-n-g-a-r-y was earlier settled by the Huns. The Avars were eventually conquered, but not before being a real presence in central Europe for some time. Then, the last in this centuries-long chain were the Mongols.
The Mongols crushed all those that opposed them through a series of skills and techniques. The Mongols were master horsemen, which while many in Europe were as well, horsemanship remained something for aristocrats. The Mongols, in contrast, had EVERY WARRIOR mounted! It is simply incredible at how ruthlessly efficient and egalitarian in that regards the Mongols were. The Mongols equipped themselves well with light armour, scimitars, lances, axes, and of course, the famous composite bow. The Mongols also fought with supply trains of horses gathered at pre-arranged locations near the battlefield that held hundreds and thousands of arrows! The Mongols would attack, circle, attack, retreat--fill up with more arrows--and quickly return to the still-exhausted enemy and literally wipe them out!
The Mongols fought with a system--they organized their forces into units of 10 denominations; i.e. 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and so on. Discipline was absolute. Chaotic? Ha. These guys meant business, and they were absolutely disciplined and regimented. Besides using extensively bribes, spies, employing traitors, they also used chemical and biological warfare. They used siege equipment, as well as extensive psychological warfare. They slaughtered entire cities. For example--
The Muslim king of Samarkand--a huge city of some 500,000 people or more at the time, received some Mongol ambassadors. He shaved their heads and beards--a huge insult--and as I recall, had them tortured and killed. When the Mongols got word of their peaceful ambassadors being treated so shamefully, the order went out--Samarkand would be destroyed!
The king of Samarkand fielded 80-100,000 troops, maybe more--and was utterly annihilated by the Mongol army. The city and all the animals--every living thing--was put to the sword. The Muslim king was captured alive by the Mongols. The Mongols killed him by pouring molten, bubbling silver into his eyes and down his throat! The Mongols stacked up human skulls over 80 feet high! The slaughter was so great, so ruthless, and so total, that Muslim resistance in throughout the region collapsed entirely. When the Mongols came knocking, people had learned to open up the doors quickly, or fight the Mongols honourably, without any deceit. Samarkand was a bitter lesson for the Near East to learn. The Mongols went on a rampage for several centuries, wiping out Vikings, conquering Russia, slaughtering Muslim and European Christian armies with equal skill and ease.
The Mamelukes finally delivered a defeat to the Mongols near Egypt, and the Europeans managed to stop the Mongols in Austria. However, these campaigns were carried out be lower-ranking Mongol generals, and various relatives halted progressing campaigns in mid-stride in order to return to the far east to deal with politics. This relative political instability--once a powerful king had died--contributed significantly to the halting of the Mongol conquests. On balance, terrain, weather, European skill, nor Muslim fanaticism could or would have stopped the Mongols had the Mongols been able to maintain united, strong leadership. The Mongols proved--time and time again--that they could absolutely annihilate the best that Europe or the Muslims could field, and they could make it look impressively easy, and absolutely embarrassing for all of their defeated foes. Aside from these isolated but critically timed events of succession, the Mongols might have conquered everything from Asia to the sands of North Africa, all the way to the shores of the Atlantic!
The Mongols also won so many campaigns because they *thought* differently--entirely so--from their European or Muslim enemies. The Mongols, though they had a stratified society, were at the same time absolutely devoted to a pragmatic and ruthless approach to warfare. No man, no matter how low-born, would be scorned or turned away from his lord's camp if he had a good idea, special information, or just useful insight to offer. The Mongol lords were genuine and open in their praise and reward for everyone, and more importantly, *anyone* who had something important or clever to contribute to the Mongol victory. The Europeans and the Christians, by contrast, had many obstacles such as religion, status, race, and on and on, that largely inhibited their ideas and conceptual thinking to being isolated to what the nobles, knights, priests, or emirs thought. This intellectual poverty meant that in such thinking, the Mongols were decades, even centuries to some degree, ahead of the Europeans and Muslims. This intellectual flexibility and generosity on the part of the Mongols allowed them to develop, or exploit, new ways of thinking, new ways of organizing, new technologies, new weapons, and new techniques to a degree and to a scale undreamed of by the Europeans or Muslims. This intellectual flexibility and generosity contributed powerfully to the Mongol acsendency, and allowed them to maintain such dominance for centuries, despite the fact that the Europeans and the Muslims fielded huge armies, and spent vast sums of wealth, and had to some extent, a greater depth of superior technology.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
