From the mid-eleventh century, however, the papacy assumed an increasingly monarchical style and political persona, and imitated imperial symbols of authority. The creation of the College of Cardinals in 1059 freed papal elections from local secular intervention, which had been common. By 1076, as we have already seen, a pope could humble an emperor over the right to appoint senior clerics. In the early twelfth century, the papacy asserted superordinate authority over all secular monarchs, embodied in its right to confirm German kings as emperors. Subsequent Staufer pushback against this prerogative merely served to strengthen the standing of their princes, who were now charged with electing their ruler. This formalized a practice that had existed for centuries, even if kingship was in fact highly hereditary in nature.
At the same time, the Staufers continued the traditional strategy of empowering the ecclesiastical elite: they transferred even more secular jurisdiction to the church and enfeoffed bishops with ducal powers, creating ecclesiastical princes in the process. Even as the most senior church leaders in Germany—the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier—managed to evade rulers’ direct control, they retained their influence on legitimation in their role of electors. Finally, Frederick II’s attempt to claim all of Italy for the empire precipitated open warfare with the papacy, which in turn backed his German princely rivals: the emperor found himself excommunicated several times and was declared deposed by a papal council. This clash ended without a clear winner—a stalemate that captures the spirit of centuries of never-ending balancing between rulers, princes, and popes that hollowed out centralized power.64
In Parts IV and V, I return to the processes that underpinned aristocratic and ecclesiastical autonomy and the fiscal and military muscle of city-states and their alliances. At this point, all we have to do is ask whether sustained imperial consolidation and expansion might have been at all feasible. The answer must be an unqualified no. Germany’s rulers had nothing in common with Roman emperors beyond elements of their exalted title, and their realm could hardly have been more differently organized.65
In fact, the real question is not why the empire did not expand but why it did not collapse, turning its duchies into separate kingdoms. It appears that in this peculiar environment, the constraints on princely power were so modest that they were outweighed by the benefits of maintaining a formal framework for political and military cooperation and the performance of status. As sources of jurisdiction, territorial princes were genuine “co-constituents of monarchy” rather than mere counterweights to royal authority as in other medieval societies, and therefore had a vested interest in the empire’s survival. Ecclesiastical princes, furthermore, did not have the option of becoming sovereigns in their own right, which increased their dependence on the existing system. Given a shared elite preference for weak rulers, there was always enough political will to preserve the empire in a format that did not encroach too much on elite interests.66
Once we add the aforementioned lack of serious external challenges—there were no big wars that made stronger states able to make more war, only small wars that helped a weak state stay alive—spatially stagnant persistence of an increasingly segmented realm was a viable long-term outcome. In this context, minimal rewrites could not possibly lead to significantly different counterfactual developments, such as reunification of the previous Carolingian empire, let alone expansion into Spain and Britain that might have added up to some form of stable imperial super-state.
Many of the defining features of this period would need to be changed even to create a capable imperial core: only a truly expansive counterfactual rewrite could tame lords, city-states, and the church, and establish a measure of centralized political, military, and fiscal control. The resultant German empire would be unrecognizably different from the one that existed in real life. Moreover, all of these modifications would run counter to more widespread trends of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. If the Carolingians’ chances of restoring hegemonic empire had been slim, those of the Ottonians and—especially—the Salians and Staufers were effectively zero.
CHAPTER 6
From Genghis Khan to Napoleon
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: THE MONGOL ADVANCE
DURING THE YEARS when Frederick II sought to expand his influence in Italy, much more momentous events were unfolding at the opposite end of the Eurasian land mass. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, the Mongol tribes united in a military confederation under Genghis Khan. Boosted perhaps by a spell of unusually favorable climatic conditions that brought a windfall in horses and livestock, the Mongols swiftly proceeded to attack and subjugate various neighbors. By 1221, the Uighurs, the Qidan north of China, and the Khwarezmian empire in Iran and southwestern Central Asia had submitted. The Western Xia state in northwestern China fell in 1227, followed seven years later by the Jurchen empire that covered the ancestral Chinese heartlands. By then, within a single generation, the Mongol empire had already outperformed a long line of previous steppe federations going back almost a millennium and a half to the time of the Xiongnu.1
The very next year, in 1235, Genghis’s son and successor, Ögödei, and his council ordered a massive push into Eastern Europe. An earlier raid into the Volga basin and Ukraine in 1222–1223 had exposed the military weakness of the local polities, which now bore the brunt of a more determined assault. The operation was led by Batu, a grandson of Genghis via his son Jochi, Ögödei’s half brother. His senior associates were a veritable “Who’s Who” of the Genghisid inner circle: other Jochids took part alongside Batu, as well as Subutai, the most experienced Mongol general, and the sons of Genghis’s sons Ögödei, Chagatai, and Tolui, including the next two future great khans Guyuk and Mongke. Large military forces including tens of thousands of Mongol cavalry were placed under their command. The prominence of its leadership suggests that this operation enjoyed priority over assaults on Song China, which also commenced in 1235 but failed to produce major advances for more than a decade. The same was true of much more modest operations south of the Himalayas.2
Batu’s forces consequently advanced with great speed, sweeping all before them. The Bulgar state on the lower Volga was destroyed in 1236–1237. By 1239, the nomadic Turkic Cumans and Kipchaks had also been defeated and their warriors absorbed into the Mongol forces, where they added to the ranks of the light cavalry. A large troop of Cumans who fled west was subsequently granted asylum in Hungary.
The Slavic polities to the west and north were next in line. By then, Kievan Rus’ had long devolved into a congeries of effectively independent principalities that stretched from Novgorod on the Baltic Sea to Kiev in northern Ukraine. The Mongols overran the most powerful of these states, the Grand Duchy of Vladimir, early in the winter of 1237–1238, destroyed its capital, and wiped out its army. Split up into smaller units, the Mongol forces ranged widely across Eastern Europe, sacking most of the principal cities, including Moscow, and killing their ruling families. Only Novgorod in the far northwest escaped devastation. The campaign culminated in the annihilation of Kiev at the end of 1240. Meanwhile, an independent Mongol force had completed the conquest of the Caucasus region.3
Central Europe lay wide open. The adjacent Latin Christian states were particularly weak even by the low standards of political centralization and military capacity of high medieval Europe. Poland was divided into no fewer than nine principalities run by four different dukes. The Teutonic Order held coastal territories to the northeast along the Baltic Sea. Farther south, Hungary, though formally a single kingdom, was saddled with a singularly powerful and stridently autonomous aristocracy: just twenty years earlier, a “Golden Bull”—a Magna Carta on steroids—had guaranteed the nobility and the church freedom from taxation alongside a series of other protections and privileges.
Farther west, the German emperor Frederick II, freshly excommunicated, was locked in a desperate power struggle with Pope Gregory IX: in 1241, the latter called for a crusade against the former when the emp
eror moved against Rome. England’s king Henry III was preparing to invade western France. In the Iberian peninsula, Castile’s attention was directed southward, to campaigns of wresting Andalusian cities from their retreating Muslim overlords.
Across Western and Central Europe, royal power, already heavily curbed by aristocratic autonomy and fiscal weakness, had recently been narrowed further by charters that explicitly limited its reach, and the conflict between the papacy and the imperial crown had reached a peak. Military capabilities were generally modest: armies centered on relatively small but expensive forces of lumbering knights who were supported by often low-quality infantry. Field armies were small compared to those in other parts of the Old World, including the Mongols: they did not normally exceed a few thousand men and only on special occasions reached 15,000 or 20,000. European forces that ventured beyond their native habitat were routinely beaten—during the Fifth and Seventh Crusades in Egypt (1218–1221 and 1250) and by the Ayyubids in Palestine (1244).4
Thanks to the absorption of numerous Turkic warriors from the steppe, Batu’s forces may well have grown into the high tens of thousands. They advanced west in two directions. One division struck Poland, where the Mongols sacked major cities such as Kraków and Wrocław and, after scoring several battlefield victories, routed a joint force of Poles, Bavarians, and some Knights Templar at Legnica in April 1241, and killed the duke of Upper Silesia. A Bohemian army that had marched against them retreated. Larger Mongol forces simultaneously invaded Hungary where they crushed King Béla IV’s army and then spent the rest of the year roaming the Great Hungarian Plains east of the Danube, harassing those who had not found refuge in fortified positions and drafting forced labor.5
At the end of the year they crossed the frozen Danube, sacked Buda, and attacked the capital city of Esztergom, which fell in January 1242, even though its stone citadel held out. Meanwhile, other forces were dispatched into Croatia and Dalmatia to apprehend Béla, who had escaped alive; they failed but caused substantial destruction in the process. The Danube crossing had removed the last natural obstacle between the Mongols and the easternmost reaches of the German empire. A small detachment advanced into Austria to Wiener Neustadt where it was beaten back. Scouting parties were sighted at Klosterneuburg north of Vienna and as far away as Udine in northeastern Italy. Contemporary accounts report panic across Western Europe all the way to Spain and the Low Countries, but no concerted preparations for defense. Calls for a crusade in Germany in mid-1241 had not borne fruit: instead, German nobles preferred to rise up against the emperor’s son Conrad, drawing on crusade funds to fight the Hohenstaufens.6
At this ostensibly auspicious juncture, Batu ordered his troops to withdraw. In the spring of 1242, those of his men who had been hunting King Béla marched east through Bosnia and Serbia to join up with the main force in Bulgaria, which appears to have accepted tributary status. Then they all retreated back into the steppe. Mongol attacks on Central Europe did not resume for another seventeen years, and then only on a smaller scale and without causing comparable damage.
The reasons for Batu’s retreat have been much discussed ever since. One position, rare in modern scholarship, is that if Mongol objectives had been limited to begin with, there would not be any need to explain their withdrawal. In this scenario, the principal goal was to establish control over the ecologically congenial steppe regions north of the Caspian and Black Seas and also over the adjacent Russian principalities, which could readily be dominated and compelled to pay tribute by cavalry forces operating from steppe bases. The assault on Poland was merely a raid for plunder—and indeed we do not know of any attempt to impose tributary relations—whereas the invasion of Hungary may have served the narrow purpose of punishing both the Cumans, who had evaded Mongol rule by escaping there, and King Béla, who had sheltered them and rejected Batu’s demand for their return and his own submission. This motive would be consistent with the Mongols’ persistence in hunting down Béla across the Croatian coastlands. Once those efforts had failed and western Hungary proved resistant to raiding, this foray was brought to a preplanned if less than fully satisfactory conclusion. This reading of events also meshes well with the fact that by the time of his withdrawal, Batu had not positioned his main troops for further westward advances.7
The merits of this minimalist explanation are hard to evaluate: for instance, it is impossible to tell whether a planned conquest of Eastern Europe alone justified the extremely prominent status of the leadership team assigned to this operation. Mongols did not normally invade just to intimidate and plunder, whereas failed attempts at conquest could turn into large-scale raiding ventures. We are left wondering how seriously to take contemporary references to their plans to invade Germany or Rome, or their demand that Frederick II submit to them, or subsequent calls on other European monarchs to do so, such as on the king of France in 1260.8
Alternatively, we might argue that regardless of the Mongols’ original plans, cumulative attrition between 1236 and 1242 had reached a level that persuaded them to abort operations. The winter of 1241–1242 appears to have been particularly harsh, thus adding to the logistical challenge. From this perspective, their retreat would have been a rational decision in response to unfavorable circumstances.9
By contrast, the most popular theory—which had already been proposed at the time—prioritizes domestic political concerns among the Mongol leadership. The Great Khan Ögödei died back in Mongolia in December 1241, and assemblies of Genghis’s numerous descendants and their followers were expected to convene in order to work out the succession. During the Russian campaign, Ögödei’s nephew Batu had fallen out with Ögödei’s son Guyuk, a rift that may well have made Batu even more anxious to involve himself in the succession process and protect his own interests. If this issue did indeed lie behind his decision to withdraw, what might conceivably have turned into a more ambitious Mongol advance into Europe was averted by chance events.10
This interpretation invites criticism on two fronts, both empirical and counterfactual. Not all contemporary sources agreed on this motivation, and while it might have been possible for news of Ögödei’s demise to travel fast enough to reach Batu before he ordered the retreat, we cannot be sure whether this had actually been the case. In the end, Batu did not attend any succession councils in Mongolia. It is difficult to draw analogies from developments on other fronts: smaller Mongol forces did invade Anatolia in 1243 and Syria in 1244 but were not led by descendants of Genghis, and fighting against the Mughals ceased around the time of Ögödei’s death. At the end of the day, speculation about personal motivation seems rather fruitless. A much more important question is what would have happened if Ögödei had lived, or if he had died but Batu had continued his campaign. The simple fact of Mongol retreat in 1242 is far less significant than the potential consequences of perseverance.11
This change in perspective shifts the discussion from relatively trivial factors—such as planning objectives (which could have changed), cumulative attrition (which could have been remedied by reinforcements), and the death of the Great Khan (which need not have happened, or otherwise might only have occasioned a temporary lull in operations)—toward the role of more persistent structural features. These features came in four flavors and, while only imperfectly interconnected, all strongly converged in militating against successful Mongol expansion and empire-building on European soil west of Russia: the nature of the European political landscape and more specifically one of its more prominent physical manifestations, heavy investment in stone fortifications; the ecology of the western half of Europe; the dynamics of Mongol politics; and the incentives for pursuing conquest in other, generally less remote, parts of the Old World.
Latin Europe’s intense armed fragmentation posed a powerful disincentive to sustained Mongol engagement, and a serious obstacle to any such engagement that had it in fact occurred. As noted in the previous chapter, the proliferation of increasingly sturdy fortifications—for noble and
ecclesiastical strongholds and urban settlements—went a long way in weakening rulers and undermining state formation. Much as this development limited monarchs’ ability to exercise authority in coordinating resources for large-scale operations—say, defense against a Mongol threat—it also yielded an unintended benefit: it made this part of the world an unattractive target for invaders who sought to rule or at least collect rents across large areas.12
Stone fortifications were not merely a hypothetical barrier to counterfactual future Mongol invasion: their role in thwarting Mongol objectives during their campaign in Central Europe is well documented. Eastern European settlements, the first to be attacked, were poorly protected by earthen ramparts and wooden palisades. The farther west the Mongols advanced, however, the more sophisticated were the installations they encountered. They had little difficulty overrunning eastern Hungary, which, in the words of a German chronicler, “had almost no city protected by walls or strong fortresses.” Defensive earthworks were easily breached.13
Hungary west of the Danube, by contrast, featured more stone castles in the advanced Western European style, in the first instance because of its proximity to the Austrian border. This made a huge difference: even in those parts of Hungary that were overrun, all five stone castles positioned on hilltops survived intact. The Mongols’ failure to take the citadel of Esztergom, the only part of the city fully built of stone, is particularly revealing: although great efforts were undertaken to seize the royal treasure that was kept there, they proved futile. In Silesia and Moravia, the Mongols likewise had trouble breaking into stone castles. The forces sent down the Adriatic coast to apprehend King Béla did not take any properly fortified places (such as Klis, Split, and Trogir) but destroyed poorly protected Zagreb. Conversely, they were more successful on their withdrawal campaign through Serbia and Bulgaria, which featured only less-sophisticated fortifications.14
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