To the Great Sea: The Death of Ögedei Khan
Asia too was marching against the West. At one moment it had seemed as if all Europe would succumb to a terrible menace looming up from the East. Heathen Mongol hordes from the heart of Asia, formidable horsemen armed with bows, had rapidly swept over Russia, Poland, Hungary, and in 1241 inflicted simultaneous crushing defeats upon the Germans near Breslau and upon European cavalry near Buda. Germany and Austria at least lay at their mercy. Providentially in this year, the Great Khan died in Mongolia; the Mongol leaders hastened back the thousands of miles to the Karakorum, their capital, to elect his successor, and Western Europe escaped.
— Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Book Two —
The Hungarian soldiers stood in their battle line, waiting for the enemy to advance. Their hearts were filled with both fear and rage. The horsemen of Asia had bested them twice before, and their country lay in ruins. Their homes had been destroyed, their women and children carried off or slain, their lives ruined. The Westerners had failed to come to their aid despite many pleas from King Béla, too busy building cathedrals that touched the sky and slaughtering infidels and heretics to realize the threat that was marching upon them. The Austrians and Poles had joined them but were fighting north of the mountains as the Golden Horde launched itself upon the poor peoples of Eastern Europe—so they were alone. Scouts reported so many different numbers that it was impossible to gauge the enemy’s strength, but the Hungarians steeled themselves and trusted that God would not abandon them.
By the day’s end, it was all over. Nearly the entire Hungarian army lay dead on the fields of Mohi along the Sajó River. The survivors fled, spreading tales of the invincibility of the Khan’s soldiers, and behind them charged the Golden Horde under their fearsome leader, Batu. The horsemen burned one town after another—Pest, Esztergom, Debrecen, the entire Hungarian Plain was ransacked to sate the bloodlust of the Mongols. Word then reached the people of Hungary of another Horde victory at Legnica, where a few German and Polish knights had stood valiantly against the riders but were overrun. Some eyewitnesses at Mohi claimed the horsemen had used weapons which spat fire and rained flaming arrows on their enemies—likely a description of Chinese gunpowder used for the first time on a battlefield in Europe. In every heart of every man, woman, and child who heard the tales of the Mongol invasion, they knew that this was the end.
The Hungarians endured the winter of 1241, sure that this would be the last they would see this side of heaven. They heard of new horsemen assaults on Vienna and Venice, confirming their worst fears that they were about to be cut off from all Western aid (as if it would matter). And then, as the snows melted and the Carpathian mountain passes opened, the Golden Horde began to withdraw from their conquered lands in Hungary. Those who remained alive as the Mongols returned to the steppes of East Asia thanked Almighty God for His deliverance, sure that He had worked some mighty deeds for their salvation.
The Mongols: Terrors on Horseback
This admittedly hyperbolic description of the most lethal fighting force the world had ever seen to that point accurately captures how their victims saw these raiders on horseback. The Mongols arose in the vast plains of Mongolia, situated between modern-day China and Russia in the country which still bears the name. Their great leader, Genghis Khan, had organized the tribes of Mongolia into a massive fighting force that had swept down through the flat, arid lands of northern China and across the mountains of central Asia as far west as the Caspian Sea. Upon his death in 1227, Genghis Khan had forged one of the largest empires in history (which would grow to be the largest in history under his son Ögedei). He had instilled a sense of tolerance among his subjects in matters of religion and created a meritocracy that was far more modern than the dynastic class-based systems of both medieval China and the states of Europe. Genghis Khan had chosen Ögedei to be his successor in 1219 over his older brothers Jochi and Chagatai, believing Ögedei to be the most charismatic and statesmanlike of the three. While Chagatai supported his brother, Jochi opposed him but died shortly after Genghis. Jochi’s son, Batu, would lead the assault on Europe and years later opposed the ascension of Ögedei’s heir.
The Mongol Empire was governed by the Great Khan with the advice of the kurultai, a council of all the leading families of the Mongol people. When a Great Khan died, the kurultai would be convened immediately, with summons sent out in the hands of the swiftest riders to return to the capital, Karakorum, or another designated place to elect a new Great Khan. Ögedei’s ascension as Great Khan was confirmed by the kurultai in 1229, two years after his father’s death. Now commanding the largest army in the world, Ögedei realized he was not nearly as skilled as his father had been as a strategist, and he turned over direct control of the Golden Horde to men who had fought under Genghis and had learned his methods. Ögedei would remain in the Karakorum to rule the empire from a central location.
Ögedei’s warriors went forth from the kurultai into all corners of Asia to resume their wars. The Mongols completed their destruction of the Khwarazmian Empire in modern-day Iran, swept across the Caucasian Mountains into Georgia and Armenia, destroyed the Jin dynasty and crushed all resistance in China, conquered the Korean Peninsula, and began to push across the Himalayas into India. Ögedei’s most daring campaign was the invasion of Europe, in which two of his armies crossed the Ural Mountains through southern Russia and then invaded Central Europe north of and across the Carpathian Mountains. The Europeans were utterly unprepared for warfare on the Mongol scale—their fast-moving riders hit and ran to draw enemy armies away from defensible positions, then turned and struck with devastating effect. The heavily-armored knights of Christendom and the Byzantine Empire could not hope to pursue the Mongols even if they won a battle, and before they could re-form their ranks and move, the Golden Horde had struck a new target. In effect, the Mongols unleashed blitzkrieg against the West eight hundred years before Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht even existed.
“To the Great Sea”…and Back Again
Ögedei envisioned a Mongol empire which stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Bay of Biscay, encompassing the entirety of the Eurasian landmass. To that end, the warriors of the Golden Horde, led by his nephew Batu Khan, intended to push across Europe from the scattered villages and towns of Poland and Hungary, through the more populous states of Germany and then across the Rhine River into France. Of course, they could not have known much about the lands they hoped to conquer, and they were surprised by the level of resistance which they met when fighting the Europeans. Despite the death of over a quarter of his entire population, King Béla IV of Hungary never yielded, and his efforts to rebuild the shattered kingdom earned him the nickname “The Second Founder of Hungary.” When the Mongols reached Vienna, they were halted by a combination of strong fortifications and a massive army of knights led by Duke Frederick II of Austria. These well-trained warriors had learned how to use lightly-armored mounted infantry to counter the Mongols’ lightning-quick attacks. Frederick defeated Batu Khan’s army in battles along the perimeter of Vienna, from Neustadt down to the River March, during the fall of 1241.
Batu Khan intended to renew his drive westward in the spring of 1242, but he never got the chance. In that year, the Mongols instead withdrew eastward, pulling their forces out of Europe entirely. Batu’s uncle, Ögedei Khan, had died on December 11, 1241, after a day of hunting and a night of drinking. As a member of the kurultai, Batu was expected to return to the Karakorum immediately to participate in the election of Ögedei’s successor. However, he had always clashed with Ögedei’s son Güyük, and he refused to ride for Mongolia. He instead turning his attention to the south and east by invading Asia Minor, the modern-day Turkey. The Mongol infighting briefly erupted into a civil war in 1244, and Güyük was confirmed by the kurultai as the new Great Khan in 1246, five years after his father’s death. Europe was spared further devastation at the hands of Batu Khan’s Golden Horde, and while raids continued in Eastern Europe for the rest of the 13th century, they never reached the strength or attained the success of Ögedei and Batu’s invasion.
Historians have debated the impact of Ögedei Khan’s death on the Mongol invasion of Europe. He was, after all, only 56 years old and in relatively good health. Given that, and the distances involved, it would have taken a rider more than the four months between his death and Mongols’ withdrawal from Vienna to reach the Golden Horde to announce Batu Khan’s summons to the kurultai. The historian Rashid al-Din wrote that Batu Khan was unaware of Ögedei’s death until they had reached Kiev in Ukraine, nearly a quarter of the way home. Later historians of the Mongol invasion looked at climate data and saw that changes in weather patterns had flooded many of the Mongols’ lands in Hungary, making it unsuitable for their nomadic lifestyle so far from home. It is also possible that the defeats around Vienna had convinced Batu Khan that he would need more soldiers if he were to press on into the heavily-defended and far more populous lands of Germany and that he was returning to Mongolia to muster recruits. Whatever the reason, Europeans who saw the backs of the Mongols believed that God had delivered them—and this belief was proven in their minds by the story of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a European who was present at the Mongol court shortly after Ögedei’s death and who told everyone he met that God had killed the Great Khan to save His people from death at Batu’s hands.
Turning Point: Europe Survives, and the Civilizing Effects of Gunpowder
As always, it is important when learning about history not to assume that what was happening would certainly have continued. Batu Khan might have been defeated further west if he had continued his attacks after Vienna. Perhaps he could have even made it as far as the French Atlantic Coast—we will never know. Comparing the relative strengths of European armies and the Golden Horde is difficult, and one can only guess what might have happened if the mighty Mongol riders had faced the full fury of the Holy Roman Empire or the Kingdom of France. The fact is that Europe survived this crisis, as it had done so many others, and the path from darkness to Renaissance begun a century and a half earlier in the First Crusade continued apace.
There would be more trials and tribulations still—especially the Black Plague, which would strike a century after the Mongol invasions ended—but Europe would endure. Perhaps the greatest impact of the events we have covered today is one which some historians have debated, and Joe will bring us an alternate view next week. The Mongols had brought with them to Europe the knowledge of gunpowder’s manufacture and use on the battlefield from their conquests in China. While it is unknown whether or not any early firearms were captured by the Europeans, historians record the first uses of these new weapons on the European Continent within two generations of the end of the Mongols’ invasions. This transformed the nature of warfare in Europe more dramatically than any invention before or since until the invention of airpower in the 20th century. Like the English longbow, a firearm “leveled the playing field,” so to speak, because one no longer needed to be skilled with a sword or spear to kill one’s enemy—you simply pointed your gun at your target and fired. One might think that this would have led to even greater slaughter on the battlefields of Europe as warring nobles fought for land and titles, but military historians record that the loss of life in the war decreased overall for the remaining years of the Dark Ages. There were, of course, still major conflicts like the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, but the general level of violence decreased with the gradual replacement of swords and catapults with guns and cannons. Again, this could be tied to the Mongols’ use of gunpowder during their campaigns in Europe, or it might have come about in other ways. Regardless, the development of these new weapons made Europe a more polite, and perhaps even civilized, place to live.
