What made the Mongols so good?

How much of this also applied to the huns?

I haven't studied the Huns too closely, but in general, with the Huns, Goths, and other germanic tribes, you're looking at the foundation of feudal Europe. The Romans increasingly relied on barbarians to fill out their armies, and begin adopting some of their tatics. Atilla the Hun was raised in Rome, and was very familiar with roman mindset and strategy.

Eventually, the barbarians overran the roman empire, resulting in the dark ages. Take the barbarians, add christianity and a dash of roman culture and ideas, and you get feudal Europe. (More or less. I'm ignoring the Celts and the Byzantines, for instance)

That is, the system of knights, a feudal system where kings buy their power by bestowing gifts on their various petty warlords, and lots of other stuff can generally be credited to barbarian groups like the Huns.
 

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One advantage the Mongols had is that nobody had anything to gain by conquering them (even if they could). There homeland was crap and they produced nothing but ruthless warriors. Nobody was going throw away an army on that.
 

Another thing that ought to be pointed out is the advantage of terrain...

You see, the Mongols were better than anyone at fighting in large, wide-open places, because they had mobility and range. This is one of the main reasons their conquests stopped at Europe; they lost their advantage in the more hilly, forested terrain, and then their light armor and small horses became a liability instead of an advantage.

Now, this makes even more sense when you take a look at the area that they conquered...essentially, the Mongolian Empire consisted of the largest contiguous stretch of steppes and plains in the world. Wherever the steppes and plains ended, their borders ended soon after (and/or were forced forward at a slow rate and high cost, offset by lands that were easier to conquer).
 



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
 

Mad Mac said:
The Samurai were horse archers too, after all. The difference being that they tended to fight as individual combatants, and were reportedly baffled by the mass-firing and other group tatics of the mongols.

As the person who made the comment the original poster was quoting, that knights and samurai were about equal because both faired equally badly against the Mongols, what's quoted above is what made the Mongols special imo.

Fighting in formation? Hard.

Fighting in formation on horseback? Priceless.

The Samurai remarked on the ability of entire formations of mounted bowmen to turn on a dime, riding in and attacking as one formation. Anyone who knows anything about horses knows this is very hard for a horse to do especially against the noisy backdrop of a heated battle and surrounded by the smell of blood, something that initiates a flight response in horses by instinct.

The Mongols also had inherited a substantial piece of technology from their ancestors, the Hun bow, in use at least from the time of Attila the Hun during the 5th century. This bow has widely been considered the best bow ever designed for horse archery and was widely admired by the Samurai, a *culture* of horse archers. The fact that the armies of Attila used it, and it was still in use by the armies of Genghis Kahn approximately 8 centuries later with few design modifications is further testament to this.

Also the idea of "kill the leader and cause confusion" didnt work against the Mongols because their leaders dressed no differently than the rank and file and moved throughout the formation (in other words the leader wasn't always leading the charge, nor was he always in the back coordinating things, nor did he travel with his own elite unit).

The last but certainly not the least point I will bring up, Genghis would send scouts into an area, gather all the info he could and then hold a "Karultai" or war council with all his Generals. Genghis didnt surround himself with yes men, and these generals all had a say in picking apart and modifying the initial battle plan.

As others have noted, once battle was engaged the plan was subject to still further changes because the Mongols had a complex code language using drums and flags. They could communicate across great distances.

Lastly the fact that they focused on mobility over weight of armor allowed them to use tactics other forces could not. Others have asked why armies fell for the Mongols' fentied retreats so much. The reason is almost every other army in the world from the Arabs to the Europeans to the Chinese were focused on heavier armor. If you're too slow to EVADE your enemy you can't retreat, much less feign a retreat.

In other words, even experienced military commanders had never seen an army retreat before it was beaten, unless they had fought the Mongols. Since not many armies got to fight the Mongols twice, they didn't get much chance to learn from the experience.

So the Japanese and the Europeans fared equally badly, but for different reasons.

The Europeans' best mounted forces carried few missile weapons and were too heavily armored to engage the Mongols at close range. The mongols would typically hit and run, engage and retreat, until the the European knights' horses were too exhausted to engage in a lance charge and then cut them to ribbons. Against European ground forces the Mongols Hun bows had a better range than the best bows of Europeans footmen (this is before the Longbow by a couple of centuries).

Against the Japanese, who were fine mounted archers and who also focused on mobility, the Mongols' ability to fight in formation and put the team ahead of individual honor baffled and confused the Samurai. And the Hun bows were again better than the horse bows of the Japanese.

Chuck
 

And the Hun bows were again better than the horse bows of the Japanese.

Just to spell this point out a bit, the Hun bow was basically a composite shortbow. The Japanese horse bow was a long bow designed to be fired off-center, so it could be used mounted or kneeling. (Japanese foot archers would often jam large wooden planks into the ground and kneel behind them before firing. The plank could be pulled up and held overhead to defend against enemy volleys. If you're lucky, free arrows!)

The Japanese horse bow allowed for the power of a larger bow while mounted. (Quite powerful, in fact. Japanese historical records tend to emphasize feats of power more than accurate shooting) The problem with the Japanese bow is that it has a unique and akward draw method that makes extensive training (even more than a normal bow) necessary to develop accuracy, and even then, long-distance accuracy suffers. One of the big reasons the Samurai developed was because there was really no way to develop mounted horse archers without paying them to practice every day.
 

SHARK said:
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.
Hungary was actually settled by the Magyars. They call their own country and langauge by that name. I believe the name 'Hungary' was appllied by foreigners, likely generallizing the various Asian invading races.

However, Hungarians have attempted to trace their roots to Attilla for nationalistic purposes. I believe the link is spurious though.

The Mamelukes finally delivered a defeat to the Mongols near Egypt, and the Europeans managed to stop the Mongols in Austria.

When did the Europeans defeat them?
 
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