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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vigilance" data-source="post: 2377073" data-attributes="member: 4275">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</blockquote>

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