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Palatinus Germanicus

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Apr 9, 2016
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I'm trying to get a grasp of how much credit the Lithuanians, Poles, and Hungarians(?) (but especially Lithuanians) should get for 'saving the West from Mongol destruction'.

How intense was the Mongol onslaught at this point? Did they just get bored(*), so it was no great feat to repulse them? How exactly did Lithuania gain so much of the former Kievan Rus' states? Was it 'consensual' (a la the Rurik dynasty & the Vikings), or did Lithuania essentially say, "we're the boss now... you got spanked, we turned the tide, now we're picking up the pieces & keeping them for ourselves"...?

(*) I doubt it, so what enabled the Lithuanians (& Poles) to turn the tide, when no one else could? Did they discover a brilliant counter-tactic to the Mongol "ride away whilst shooting arrows backward at the enemy"? Was it the terrain? Were the Mongols simply out-manned & over-powered by beastly, masculine pale people?

So how great was this feat, how much credit should be given, and to whom? And what were the dynamics of the diplomacy which led to Lithuania becoming so huge? It seems like Lithuania had a massive period of 'glory days', and no one really ever seems to know/talk/care about it. Help me understand!
 
Hungary's the first one to turn back the Mongols, so far as I understand it, and their victorious tactic (others weren't terrible, just not Mongol-beaters by themselves) was 'hide in stone castles'.

Presumably the Poles and Lithuanians used similar means; get beaten in open battle, hide in castles, and just never go away.

The Song had pretty good success with forts too, it's just that they were rich enough for the Mongols to really care, and develop the means to beat those forts (possibly by stealing them from the crusaders).

That said this says nothing about why Lithuania of all people got to benefit from it, I can't help you on that front.
 
Wikipedia quotes the New Encyclopædia Britannica on this matter:
"Employed against the Mongol invaders of Europe, knightly warfare failed even more disastrously for the Poles at the Battle of Legnica and the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohi in 1241. Feudal Europe was saved from sharing the fate of China and Muscovy not by its tactical prowess but by the unexpected death of the Mongols' supreme ruler, Ögedei, and the subsequent eastward retreat of his armies."[54]
 
I think it was rather a combination of many elements: Ogedei's death, terrain not being perfect for their tactics and general exhaustion of Mongol forces which suffered losses either. Also, their main goal was rather to pillage those countries and weaken them as the potential allies of the Ruthenian principalities being Mongol subjests, not just the conquest.
I don't know about Lithuania though... Maybe there was too little to bother looting there :)
 
Hungary's the first one to turn back the Mongols, so far as I understand it, and their victorious tactic (others weren't terrible, just not Mongol-beaters by themselves) was 'hide in stone castles'.

Presumably the Poles and Lithuanians used similar means; get beaten in open battle, hide in castles, and just never go away.

The Song had pretty good success with forts too, it's just that they were rich enough for the Mongols to really care, and develop the means to beat those forts (possibly by stealing them from the crusaders).

That said this says nothing about why Lithuania of all people got to benefit from it, I can't help you on that front.

At least in 1285 the Hungarian Armies have beaten the Mongols in open battles... the tactics the Mongols used was not that revolutionary, it was basically the same what the previous steppe tribes had. The difference was the execution. Ghengis was a genious commander (if you start as slave boy and ends up ruling a world spanning empire you have to be) and he had the luxury to have commanders of similar talents. Batu still had Subutai at his service in 1241.

After that Mongol Empire splintered to smaller and smaller domains, so they never able to amass such a large force anymore and at the same time their leaders become more and more mediocre. Nogai Khan (the leader of the 1285 expedition) was the leader of the force because he was the great-great-grandson of Ghengis not because of his tactical/strategic excellence.
 
AFAIK Lithuania simply wasn't target of main Mongol invasions, and later just gradually conquered Kievan areas that were Golden Horde tributaries.
 
AFAIK Lithuania simply wasn't target of main Mongol invasions, and later just gradually conquered Kievan areas that were Golden Horde tributaries.
Lithuania and other Baltics were probably too far north of main Mongol direction of advance indeed. Later Lithuania simply entered the void Mongols left of Kievian Rus...
 
. the tactics the Mongols used was not that revolutionary,

This is true: Tactically mongols did not operate that much differently than other steppe empires.

Strategically and logistically however, they were playing an entirely different ballgame. (though they still had issues there) Genghis had some incredible feats of moving armies around quickly and coordinating them over vast distances.

That said, by and large the mongols didn't get into many areas that hadn't been conquered by earlier nomads: What made them unique was that they managed to pretty much conquer ALL the "steppe adjacent zone" at the same time (albeit only briefly)
 
This is true: Tactically mongols did not operate that much differently than other steppe empires.

Strategically and logistically however, they were playing an entirely different ballgame. (though they still had issues there) Genghis had some incredible feats of moving armies around quickly and coordinating them over vast distances.

That said, by and large the mongols didn't get into many areas that hadn't been conquered by earlier nomads: What made them unique was that they managed to pretty much conquer ALL the "steppe adjacent zone" at the same time (albeit only briefly)

And this is exactly the capability the Golden Horde lost ca 1260-1300, from that point they were not that much different than the Cumans before,
 
Also Lithuanians did have a pretty decent military at the time, which enabled them to hold back Teutonic crusaders.
TBH, the Lithuanans were mostly just another sort of looting raiders :)
 
Wikipedia quotes the New Encyclopædia Britannica on this matter:
Irrelevant to my point; aside from it being debated how true that is, the basic point remains that the Mongols withdrew with the Hungarians still in possession of their forts and thus, in the absence of a Mongol army hanging around to oppose them, the entire countryside. And the Mongols didn't have the troops in theatre to just keep faffing about in Hungary without any victories (be that because they had to deal with Cuman revolts, Caucasian rebels, Rus' getting uppity, or Ogedei being dead). If Hungary had been properly taken, a token Mongol garrison would have staid behind and kept the place mostly loyal.
 
Most of the credit for saving the west from the Mongols goes to the last Great Khan dying at the right moment and have no real successor and fracturing into many smaller and easier to manage peaces. It also helped that all the would be Great Khans left for Mongolia to vie for the throne, holding off temporarily all new offensives and then indefinitely.
 
I'm trying to get a grasp of how much credit the Lithuanians, Poles, and Hungarians(?) (but especially Lithuanians) should get for 'saving the West from Mongol destruction'.
None really. Lithuania had nothing to do with it, Poland got pulverised and only the happenstance of the Mongols being unwilling or unable to take fortified towns saved Hungary. Bohemia did manage to give the Mongols something of a bloody nose and Croatia fought back tenaciously, but those were only probing raids, sideshows rather than the main event.

How intense was the Mongol onslaught at this point?
the Mongol onslaught in 1241 was tremendous. This was logistically and strategically probably the most advanced military campaign in medieval European history, and involved three massive coordinated invasions separated by hundreds of miles. The main target of the invasion was the kingdom of Hungary, which had ideal terrain for Mongol cavalry operations and which had infuriated the Mongols by giving sanctuary to their vanquished Cuman foes. Flanking strikes were conducted north and south of the Carpathian basin in order to stop the other eastern European states from coordinating with the Hungarians, one into Poland and the other south into Romania/Wallachia. Although the Mongols didn't manage to actually conquer any of these countries, they did succeed in completely overrunning the countryside and in the case of Hungary massacring much of the local population. The Mongols won both of the campaign's two major battles decisively, annihilating a joint Polish-Teutonic force at Legnica and orchestrating one of the most brilliant feats the annals of military strategy against the Hungarians at Mohi. Mohi was particularly significant because the Mongols managed to overcome a Hungarian position that was heavily-fortified and protected by a river with only minimal losses to themselves.

Despite their initial successes the Mongols really struggled to capture any fortified objectives, and the wider situation became grimmer for them as time went on. Mongol probing attacks into the more western regions of Europe were defeated, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was mobilising for war and Germany was much more thickly-populated with castles than any of the territories that the Mongols had previously overran in Europe. Facing these difficult odds, the invaders wisely decided to cut their losses and withdraw when Odegei died. This proved in hindsight to be very sensible as later attacks against much more prepared Polish and Hungarian forces often ended in catastrophe for the Mongols, and similar results could have been expected if a full-scale Mongol invasion of Germany had gone ahead.

Did they just get bored(*), so it was no great feat to repulse them? How exactly did Lithuania gain so much of the former Kievan Rus' states? Was it 'consensual' (a la the Rurik dynasty & the Vikings), or did Lithuania essentially say, "we're the boss now... you got spanked, we turned the tide, now we're picking up the pieces & keeping them for ourselves"...?

(*) I doubt it, so what enabled the Lithuanians (& Poles) to turn the tide, when no one else could? Did they discover a brilliant counter-tactic to the Mongol "ride away whilst shooting arrows backward at the enemy"? Was it the terrain? Were the Mongols simply out-manned & over-powered by beastly, masculine pale people?

So how great was this feat, how much credit should be given, and to whom? And what were the dynamics of the diplomacy which led to Lithuania becoming so huge? It seems like Lithuania had a massive period of 'glory days', and no one really ever seems to know/talk/care about it. Help me understand!
I don't know much about the expansion of the Lithuanians, but at the tactical level Mongol troops were nothing that special. Mobile nomadic steppe warriors had been living in southern Russia/Ukraine for thousands of years and they certainly weren't invincible, and neither were the Mongols. What made the Mongols so formidable was their organisation and their excellent leadership. Subutai was a military genius on the same level as Alexander the Great. Eventually the initiative of the Mongol expansion dropped away as those leaders died off and the Mongols spent more energy on internal conflicts and opportunistic raids rather than devoting themselves to the outright conquest of the entire world as Genghis Khan and Ogedei intended.
 
Yes. In addition, at the very moment when the Mongols came Poland was divided on some independent principalities, what they perfectly utilized, crushing one small army of certain duke after another. Only Duke Henry the Pious of Silesia (who was just in the process to re-unite the kingdom) managed to gather the contingent able to stand them in the field with a chance for success. He had his own forces and some allies and survivors form earlier battles. Plus few Templar Knights (not Teutons actually). King of Bohemia promised to help but he probably deliberately delayed his approach, afraid of another Mongol raid on his lands form the South. And the battle of Legnica was probably pretty matched until the forces of Duke of Opole panicked and retreated...
And despite they eventually anihilated Henry's army, they didn't manage to take heavy fortified duke's castle in Wrocław, however they burnt the city which lacked serious walls at that moment...
 
Mobile nomadic steppe warriors had been living in southern Russia/Ukraine for thousands of years and they certainly weren't invincible,

They weren't? Who vinced them?

As far as I can tell, you only defeat steppe nomads with other steppe nomads.

There are a few exceptions (e.g. Mamelukes at Ain Jalut), but these are few and far between.

Chinese made enormous efforts - at immense crazy human cost, repeatedly - but got nowhere. In the end, they had to rely on other nomads to help them out.
 
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They weren't? Who vinced them?

As far as I can tell, you only defeat steppe nomads with other steppe nomads.

There are a few exceptions (e.g. Mamelukes at Ain Jalut), but these are few and far between.

Chinese made enormous efforts - at immense crazy human cost, repeatedly - but got nowhere. In the end, they had to rely on other nomads to help them out.
Lots of nearby sedentary empires fought back against polities based out of the Pontic steppe with some success, for instance the Byzantine Roman empire, the Persians, the Arabs and the early 'Rus, and the Lithuanians of course are mentioned in this thread already. Certainly not universal success, the Pechenegs did end up making Svaitoslav's skull into a cup after all, and they didn't really manage to permanently take control of the core areas around the Black and Caspian seas that the nomads operated out of, but the same could easily be said of the European states that existed in competition with the later Mongols.
 
Lots of nearby sedentary empires fought back against polities based out of the Pontic steppe with some success, for instance the Byzantine Roman empire, the Persians, the Arabs and the early 'Rus, and the Lithuanians of course are mentioned in this thread already. Certainly not universal success, the Pechenegs did end up making Svaitoslav's skull into a cup after all, and they didn't really manage to permanently take control of the core areas around the Black and Caspian seas that the nomads operated out of, but the same could easily be said of the European states that existed in competition with the later Mongols.

IIRC Pechenegs caught him in a very weak situation, it wasn't a capital battle. After that they continued to war them with varying success, and the last battle was the last one.