Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  European leaders learned to appreciate the power of well-built walls: after repeatedly getting trounced in battle in early 1241, they were quick to switch to defensive positions. As soon as Batu had departed, a wave of castle construction swept across Hungary and Poland. The payoff was substantial: when the Mongols returned to Poland in 1259–1260, they took the major city of Sandomierz only through subterfuge, and failed to break into the citadel of Kraków. During a subsequent Mongol attack on Hungary and then Poland from 1285 to 1288, key cities and strongholds held out, and only those that could be tricked into surrendering were destroyed, as were rural settlements.15

  In all this, it is very much worth noting that what the Mongols encountered in the early 1240s was merely the outer fringe of an extensive network of stone fortifications that covered Western and Southern Europe and had only recently begun to diffuse into Central Europe. Farther west, in the feudal heartlands of Germany and France, and in the wealthy cities of former “Lotharingia” from Italy to Flanders, much more numerous and sophisticated defenses shielded castles, monasteries, and entire towns, as well as a larger share of the total population and its assets. That Batu’s forces struggled to penetrate even the eastern periphery of this massive system of bastions did not bode well for any deeper advance.16

  Before we consider the odds of successful Mongol countermeasures, we need to appreciate another and altogether different obstacle to more sustained expansion in Europe, one that was natural rather than man-made. West of the Ural Gap, the Mongols and their newly subordinated allies moved through the same kind of grasslands that supported vast numbers of horses farther east. Ukraine served as a secure staging area for cavalry expeditions into the Russian agrarian and forest zones while farther south, newly won access to the Caucasus provided summer pasture. Ecological conditions became far less favorable as the Mongols advanced west. Wallachia and Hungary form the outermost extensions of the Great Eurasian steppe, and rather modest ones at that. The grasslands in present-day Mongolia alone cover some 1.25 million square kilometers and in 1918 supported over a million horses alongside more than 8 million heads of cattle, camels, and sheep. The Mongols came to control this as well as adjacent grasslands all the way to Ukraine, enough to support several hundred thousand mounted warriors even at a high ratio of five to ten horses for each man.17

  The Hungarian grasslands were much smaller, equivalent to only a few percent of the Mongolian pastures, and even in theory could not support more than 300,000 to 400,000 horses and, inevitably, far fewer than that in real life, and thus not more than a few tens of thousands of horsemen—and even that would have excluded the entire existing population from the herding business, a rather radical scenario even by Mongol standards.18

  It is unlikely that cavalry forces on that scale would have managed to subdue Europe. Indirect support for this view comes from evidence for the “de-horsing” of earlier steppe conquerors—Huns, Avars, and Magyars—who had seized the Hungarian plains: constrained by ecological realities, they downsized their mounted troops and put greater emphasis on infantry. This in turn helps explain the ephemeral character of their incursions into Europe. It would also have robbed the Mongols of their principal advantage, their superiority in light cavalry. In chapter 8, we will see that this constraint was part of a larger and arguably decisive force in European state formation: much of the continent’s relative distance and protection from the steppe. From a long-term perspective, the Mongol retreat was merely a single instantiation of historically pervasive dynamics.19

  I am well aware that my focus on stone fortifications and grasslands is bound to raise objections. After all, in China and elsewhere the Mongols took massively fortified cities and they struck Syria, India, southern China, and even Burma and Java, all of them at considerable remove from their native steppe. But these points are easy to address. Ventures into exotic locales ultimately all failed; the Mongols never made a serious attempt on India (the Kashmiri pastures under their control, though useful, were relatively small); and their armies in Iran and Iraq could fall back on the Azeri and Caucasus pastures.

  In China and the Levant, the Mongols had ready access to highly skilled craftsmen, engineers, and—in the former—basic gunpowder weaponry. In Eastern Europe, they did not: Russian craftsmanship had been devastated by the destruction of many cities. In order to take on European fortifications, the Mongols would have had to draft local labor or, less time-consumingly, introduce experts and resources from East Asia or the Levant. This was not unheard of: in the 1270s, Kublai had Middle Eastern artillery experts help his men finish off the largest Song fortifications in southern China. This approach, however, would have required a degree of unity and coordination among the Mongols that was about to diminish rapidly and never stood a realistic chance of being restored.20

  The reason for this lies in the growing political instability and segmentation of the Mongol domain, the third of the four principal impediments to successful expansion in Europe. While Ögödei’s succession to Genghis in 1229 had been managed in a peaceful manner, his own death was followed by a lengthy interregnum, and that ended with the accession of his son Guyuk, who lasted only two years (1246–1248). The election of the next Great Khan, Mongke, in 1251 was preceded by prolonged factional disagreements. Bolstered by an initial purge of rival houses, he was the last supreme leader to preserve unity. His death in 1259 triggered five years of armed conflict over the succession that left the empire effectively fragmented into four khanates, even as Kublai emerged as their nominal overlord.

  While the Ilkhanate in Iran and Iraq remained on friendly terms with his court, the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia fiercely guarded its independence and was openly hostile to the Great Khan. The Golden Horde in Eastern Europe nominally accepted his suzerainty, but loyalties were divided and open conflict broke out in the early 1260s. In the absence of a unified imperial entity, any further operations in Europe had to be launched by the Golden Horde with the men and resources under its own control (figure 6.1).21

  Weakening ties between the Golden Horde and the Mongolian heartland and its growing Chinese possessions, which could otherwise have served as a source of the manpower and especially military technology needed to overcome Europe’s extensive network of stone fortifications, were only one impediment. More importantly, the Golden Horde leadership was preoccupied with its rivalry with the Mongol domain to the south, which from the 1250s onward was ruled by the Ilkhans. Lack of pasturage hampered Mongol campaigning in Iran and the Levant: consequently, the summer pastures of the Caucasus were contested between the two khanates, a conflict reinforced by religious differences between their rulers. Open warfare lasted from 1262 to 1267.

  FIGURE 6.1   The Mongol empire in the late thirteenth century CE.

  On this occasion, the Golden Horde, whose forces had come to be dominated by the Kipchaks, entered an alliance with the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt, who were of cognate ethnic descent, against the Ilkhanate, their common enemy. Further fighting took place in the late 1280s. In the 1280s and 1290s, power in the Golden Horde was de facto divided between a series of official khans and Nogai Khan, who had one khan killed in 1291 and fought a civil war against his successor in 1299–1300. It goes without saying that none of this was conducive to sustained aggression against European powers.

  But divisions and infighting among the Mongols were not the only distraction from Europe. In 1242, the year Batu turned back, the richest part of China was ruled by the Song dynasty; northern India was ruled by the Sultanate of Delhi; and Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were under the control of various Kurdish and Turkic conquest regimes alongside what little was left of the Abbasid caliphate. All of these economically advanced regions supported tributary regimes that made them attractive targets for a Mongol takeover.22

  It should therefore hardly occasion surprise that following the unstable 1240s, in the following decade Mongke and his court decided to devote more resources to operations in East Asia and the Levant. Mongol f
orces soon flanked Song China to the west, taking Tibet and Yunnan and raiding Vietnam. Mongke spent the last years of his life campaigning in China, and his successor, Kublai, completed its conquest in the 1260s and 1270s with great effort and commitments of manpower. In the late 1250s, separate Mongol forces took over Iraq (killing the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad) and sought to conquer Syria but were repelled by the Egyptian Mamluks in 1260. Several later attempts on Syria between 1271 and 1303 likewise failed.

  The focus on East Asia and the Levant in the 1250s highlights the limits of Mongol power. Operations against Delhi were confined to the Indus basin and no all-out assault ever occurred. It was only in the early fourteenth century that the Chagatai khanate launched attacks against Delhi itself, and then without success. From the 1250s onward, the double push into East Asia and—on a lesser scale—the Levant left no resources on a scale large enough to make major headway into Europe. The great mobilization that had swept Batu’s army across Russia and into Poland and Hungary was not to be repeated.23

  In this context of competing priorities and progressive fragmentation, the Golden Horde was on its own. Buffeted by conflict with the Ilkhanate and internal rivalries and cut off from advanced siege technology of Chinese or Middle Eastern origin, renewed incursions into Central Europe bore little fruit. As already noted, major fortifications were generally safe, and the invaders consequently looked for plunder rather than conquest: in Poland (1259–1260, 1287–1288), Hungary (1285–1286), Bulgaria (1270s–1280s), Serbia (1291), and Byzantine Thrace (1260s, 1320s–1330s). None of these ventures replicated even the limited successes of 1241–1242.24

  Under the minimal-rewrite rule, the counterfactual of a Mongol invasion of Latin Europe therefore faces serious time constraints. Batu’s existing forces might well have raided Austria, Bohemia, and the Po Valley, defeating armies bold enough to offer battle but unable to take major cities, let alone establish lasting control.25

  More ambitious operations would have called for reinforcements and, arguably, large-scale mobilization of subject populations in Eastern Europe that would have been delayed by the weakness of existing administrative infrastructure. What would have been necessary to make this happen? The most parsimonious counterfactual is Ögödei’s survival and doubling-down: he was fifty-five when he died, whereas Genghis lived about a decade longer and Kublai lived to be seventy-nine. Early khans who died younger did so under adverse circumstances: Guyuk, an alcoholic, died at forty-two, and Mongke passed away at fifty during a strenuous campaign. (Batu also lasted another thirteen years.) Just as Mongke prioritized East Asia and the Levant, Ögödei could have decided to do the same for Europe. Mongol operations in the Levant were supported by Chinese engineers, who could instead have deployed siege-engine and gunpowder weapons against European fortresses.

  This seemingly attractive counterfactual scenario poses several problems. First, it is not at all clear that Ögödei ever wanted to conquer or even raid the western half of Europe: whereas the incorporation of the western reaches of the Eurasian steppe was an eminently sensible objective—and had already been foreshadowed by the successful incursion of 1222–1223—we simply cannot tell whether the lands west of Russia were ever in the crosshairs. Second, even if we build a more open-ended commitment to campaigning in Europe into our counterfactual, we must wonder how long this would have survived the Mongol elite’s eyeing of other, more profitable targets much closer to home.

  Political calculus aside, Europe is very far away from Mongolia. As the crow flies—admittedly a poor measure—Karakorum (as a proxy of the Mongolian center at the time) was 1,700 kilometers from Kaifeng, 2,800 kilometers from Guangzhou, and 3,000 kilometers from Samarkand. The most distant actual Mongol gains were even more remote: 5,100 kilometers in the cases of both Kiev and Baghdad. Yet potential European targets were still farther away, and in fact more so than other destinations that remained beyond the Mongols’ reach (such as Java, at 4,600 kilometers, and Damascus, at 5,700 kilometers): Budapest was 6,000 kilometers away, Rome, Paris, and London close to 7,000 kilometers, and Toledo close to 8,000 kilometers. Distance from the rim of the Eurasian steppe, arguably a more meaningful metric, follows an analogous pattern, as shown in chapter 8, figure 8.6.26

  Moreover, Europe west of Russia was large: including Britain but not Scandinavia north of Denmark, it covers some 3.75 million square kilometers, roughly twice as much as the Southern Song empire, which was much closer to Mongolia and took several decades to subdue. Even a more limited notional core target region from Poland to Hungary through Austria and Germany to the Low Countries, France, and Italy was about as large as the Southern Song domain. And while it is true that the former’s population was much smaller, this crude comparison does not take into account Europe’s intense fragmentation, which made conquest or merely tribute extraction more demanding in per capita terms than it was in larger and more centralized polities. It also neglects the fact that the sheer number of fortified positions would have taxed the capacity even of sizable teams of imported engineers.

  There was no central government to offer surrender: these positions would have had to be reduced one by one. In this environment, the most plausible outcome was widespread raiding of smaller towns and rural areas and the opportunistic imposition of fleeting tributary obligations. Such actions would not have fundamentally altered the political landscape, and would most likely have encouraged a return to something close to the status quo ante once they abated.

  The most meaningful historical analogies may be the operations of the fifth-century Huns and, more dramatically, the Magyars in the ninth and especially tenth centuries. Whereas the former made only very limited inroads into state-level polities, the Magyars proved more disruptive. After taking over the Hungarian plains, they conducted almost annual raids into Germany, France, and Italy, either as allies of parties in local conflicts or on their own, and scored major victories over all three parts of the Frankish domain between 899 and 910. At various points, the German kingdom, several of its princes, and the Byzantine empire acceded to tributary demands. In 942 the Magyars even briefly entered the Iberian peninsula.

  Only decisive defeat in 955 ended their incursions. Although Otto I’s victory boosted his standing and that of the German kingdom-empire, as we saw in chapter 5, it did not have any enduring effect on European polycentrism. Given political conditions three centuries later, there is no obvious reason to assign a greater potential impact to sustained Mongol attacks. Moreover, the fortifications of the High Middle Ages would have presented the Mongols with a greater challenge than those of the tenth century had.27

  In view of all this, a more expansive rewrite is needed to produce a substantively different outcome in terms of subsequent European state formation: one in which Ögödei lived as long as Kublai (that is, for another quarter of a century), remained, or perhaps rather became, steadfastly committed to European conquest even in the face of determined resistance, as well as persevered—and convinced his senior associates to persevere—in grinding down German, French, Italian, Flemish, English, and Spanish defenses just as Kublai had ground down the Southern Song, albeit much closer to home and with more tangible rewards.

  A counterfactual along these lines may or may not seem plausible: it is certainly not economical. In addition, we must assume that serious internal divisions, as they surfaced from the 1250s onward, could have been held in check long enough for European conquest to be completed; that the second-order counterfactual of the emergence of autonomous Mongol leadership in Europe through the transfer of resources over such a large distance could likewise have been avoided (say, a separate khanate under Batu and his successors—in real life, frictions appeared between Batu and Ögödei’s son and successor, Guyuk, and Batu subsequently supported a rival lineage); and that even such an all-out effort would have been enough to bring Europe to its knees, which is by no means a given.

  Under these maximalist assumptions, which are far removed from anything like a pars
imonious—or, to my mind, plausible—counterfactual, two outcomes were possible: the erection of some form of empire, or ongoing devastation without stable control. Real-life developments in Russia provide us with the closest available approximation of the first option. Initial destruction was concentrated in the south, where it caused serious damage to economic activity and resulted in mass enslavement. The Golden Horde subsequently preferred indirect domination as the conquerors and their allies remained in the steppe, unlike in China or Iran where they moved into settled areas. It took a decade and a half for the first census to be held (1257–1259), which enabled conscription among the local population.

  The Golden Horde played off Russian principalities against each other: after unpopular Mongol tax collectors had been removed and local princes charged with revenue collection, the grand-prince of Moscow was eventually granted the right to coordinate tribute-taking, which in turn boosted the standing of this principality. Moscow and other Russian polities adopted Mongol/Turkic-style institutions from tax systems and war levies to mounted courier services: cultural borrowing peaked in the fourteenth century. The conquerors’ dominance fluctuated over time, from defeat by Moscow in 1380, which was followed by a quick reversal, and a renewed and more durable ascent of Russian power under Ivan III in the late fifteenth century. Even so, Crimean Tatars were still able to raid Moscow as late as 1571. It was only from that time onward, as the power of the Golden Horde gradually faded, that the nativist ideology of the “Tatar yoke” was crafted by the Muscovite church.28

  In the event of a comprehensive Mongol victory, we might envision a similar scenario in Latin Europe: some polities would have served as the Mongols’ proxies—Venice already had good relations with them—strengthening their own position in the process. Taxation and conscription could well have developed much faster and further than they did in real-life Europe. At the same time, given the greater distance from the steppe, it is doubtful that Mongol—or by then mostly Turkic—power would have lasted nearly as long as it did in Russia. The invaders could either have stuck to Hungary to preserve their cohesion and cavalry skills—a decision that would have made it harder for them to exercise effective control over Western Europe—or they could have decided to settle across Europe, thereby running the risk of becoming submerged in the local population. The same forces would have had to contain both Russians and Latin Europeans, a constellation that would have greatly improved the odds for successful resistance by either of them.