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What you're about to hear is part four of a five part series on the amazing Mongol conquests in the Middle Ages. If you haven't heard the earlier editions leading up to this episode, you might want to catch those first. If you don't care about context and you don't mind hearing things out of order or you've already heard those episodes, well then by all means continue. So without Further Ado, Part 4 of Wrath of the Khans December 7th. It's history, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The events that's one small step for man, one by at least for mankind. The figures but have final help not quite to the mooring master the drama from this time and place. I take pride in the words ich bin ein Bielina. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. The deep questions Marine Six now it too has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not they're present. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrines and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, it's hardcore history. In the year 1940, not that long after the German army under, well, the ultimate control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, had shockingly defeated what was considered to be the greatest army in the world, the French army, and conquered France. A French woman, one of the most fascinating philosophical figures of the 20th century, far too little known for what she deserves, by the way named Simone Weil, wrote this about the German conquest of Europe. If it happened and if you had been a betting person in 1940, certainly they would have been the odds on favorite to win what at that time consisted of the second World War. And she wrote this. If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe, end quote. What Weil's referring to is this very angle that we've been taking as sort of a sub theme on this Mongol conquest story since the very first episode. This interesting way that many of these figures who carry what used to be called sword and flame throughout the land often get treated, especially if they're victorious, as though they've done something positive for the long term outlook of mankind. Now we said in the first program that that hasn't happened to the Nazis yet and thank goodness for that. Hard to imagine that, right? But that's because we're close to the event. The way history tends to work is to leave no stone unturned. And eventually someone will write, you know, something to fill the glaring vacuum of, you know, the thousands and thousands and millions of books that have been written about Nazi Germany. That one that says, well, look at all the positives that came out of, you know, what Hitler did. Simone Weil can see that in 1940, in the future. And she sees it based on how other figures who fall into a similar category with a Hitler have been treated in the past. Take, for example, the lead figure who's played the, you know, center role in this story we've been talking about until this time, Genghis Khan. There are plenty of books out there today you can read that turn him into a positive force. Now, the way these books often portray these people, I compare to the idea of an historical arsonist. That's a term I use, but it describes these sword and flame types, these people who do immense amounts of damage during their lifetimes, but then are prime movers for historical forces that then later on, historians can pick out, you know, positive things. We'll look at how they opened up trade routes. We'll look at how their conquest connected civilizations that hadn't had contact before. Well, look at how they unified a bunch of separate territories into one, you know, political entity. All these kinds of things are often touted as things that should help to balance out the obvious traumatic process that was involved in, you know, getting to those outcomes. Now, what makes the person who just left the scene in this story we've been discussing so far, head and shoulders above most of these historical arsonists is what happened after he died. Because in general, these people are so unique and so gifted and so special that it takes their unique talents for the whole thing to work. And when they leave, it tends to fall apart. Sometimes it falls apart before they even do leave. They are so disruptive in their time periods that often there is such a pushback by the powers that be that they don't even get to make it to the next level. I mean, take a look at how Adolf Hitler and the fire that he started in Europe ended. He died in the ruins of it in the embers while it burned. You know, symbolically speaking, Napoleon was defeated climactically twice, and got to watch, you know, the after effects from an isolated island in the middle of nowhere. Then you get people like Attila the Hun, very similar to Genghis Khan in the sense that here's a nomadic steppe leader, very Gifted, unites the tribes, spreads sword and flame throughout Europe, and when he dies, the whole thing falls apart. Then you get these historical arsonists that, like the great Khan, were victorious throughout their lives. They don't have to ever see themselves defeated and live through the ignominity of that. Take a guy like Alexander the Great who dies at 32, you know, under mysterious circumstances, undefeated empire in hand, only to watch his ambitious generals cut it up and divide it like a bunch of jackals around a carcass, each one of them trying to get the largest piece for themselves. The fact that Genghis Khan was able to set things up in a way that not only kept the fire that he had started as a historical arsonist burning after he left the scene, but allowed the rebuilding process that would come afterwards to be handled by his descendants, makes him stand out amongst all the great conquerors of history. It's sort of an irony with these historical arsonists that, you know, they're compared in a sense to these figures that are a lot like the role lightning plays in sparking fires to burn down, you know, old rotting forests. That's an exact, you know, way we looked at it in an earlier episode. But the people who get to replant those forests once the dead wood has all been burned away are often the very people the historical arsonists were fighting, who got to rebuild the forests that Hitler burned down, the Allies, who got to replant the trees, symbolically speaking, that Napoleon had cut his enemies. Genghis Khan, by nature of a certain inherent genius that he had, was able to ensure that not only would the fire not die down upon his death, but when it came time to replant the forest that he was busy, you know, still burning down, the people that would be replanting it were Mongols, not their enemies. And this is, if not unique in the history of historical arsonists, rare indeed. And it makes him stand out amongst a bunch of other great figures as perhaps the greatest of the conquerors who ever lived, his long term impact was assured. And this is where most of those people fall flat. And this creates some wonderful questions to be posed in what if scenarios, I've always thought. I mean, what if a Napoleon or a Hitler, instead of losing at the end of their conflicts, are victorious? Or if not victorious, what if they managed to simply continue to exist as a political entity? They didn't win the war, but the Nazis stay in power in Germany. You get an armistice like the end of the First World War maybe, and the government doesn't fall. What's A Nazi regime, like with Hitler's successor? Or what about the person that comes after that? Does the regime mellow over time? Does it become more like a respected member of the family of nations? Or does it just degenerate and sort of slowly crumble without that special charismatic figure sort of as the driving force at the center of its universe? Does it become wiser? Does it drop its most extreme elements? I mean, does the Nazi Party, three generations after Adolf Hitler, are they still obsessed with Jews? Or does it become something different? That's the position that the Mongol Empire found itself in once the Great Khan died. And part of what makes Genghis Khan the figure in history that he is is the foresight that he demonstrated in understanding the importance of the smooth transition of power from one generation to the next. How many proto empires during his life had he seen fall apart because the great leader and figure who was able to create them did not do a good enough job in making sure that they were able to maintain it when the great figure left the scene? The Great Khan did not fall into that trap. If you believe the histories, one of his wives supposedly insisted that he take care of this before he got too old. And the Secret History of the Mongols devotes pages to the conversation that he has with his sons over who gets the top job when he's gone. It's not an automatic gig. Doesn't go to the oldest son like it might in feudal Europe. They kind of get to agree upon it, or at least the Great Khan wants them to. Instead of just designating a successor, he gets them together and they have a conversation about it. Who would you support? Who should have the job? There's a story, an anecdotal story, where at one time the Khan is supposed to have gotten his sons together and given them an object lesson in the importance of agreeing to support one candidate. And the story says that he pulls out an arrow in front of his sons and holds it up and snaps it in front of them. And then he takes a bundle of arrows, puts them together, and then attempts to snap the bundle of multiple arrows and of course, can't. And he tells his sons that this demonstrates how if you can be picked off and isolated, you can be snapped and destroyed individually. But if you stay together like the bundle of arrows, you will be undefeatable, unbreakable, unvanquished. Eventually, he and his sons collectively will agree to support. One of the brothers, named Ogedai Mogadai is not the oldest and in fact may have been the most lenient. And the Most tolerant out of all the brothers, there were a couple of real hardliners, but those aren't the ones that got the job. And Genghis Khan specifically, if you believe the secret history, didn't want them to get the job. Thought they'd be too harsh and too tough. Imagine Adolf Hitler or some other. I mean, even imagine Alexander the Great picking someone because they weren't as rough and tough and, you know, domineering as themselves. Again, that's a sign of an interesting personality. Ogedai gets the job. The Great Khan gets the other brothers to agree to support him. And in 1229, at the giant Mongol get togethers known as the Kurul Tai, he is proclaimed Khan. Now, the empire is both divided and unified when this happens. Divided because Genghis Khan kind of has a last will. And the will gives territories to each of the suns, now only steppe territory. This is important because any place with a city or farms or settled communities, that's imperial territory, that doesn't go to any single sun. But the step itself, that giant expanse, as we said, like a place where the ocean had once been, but now has all the water taken out of it. The step is divided, and each sun gets a piece of it, enough to maintain the tribes that live there under their personal control, has to have enough horses, has to have enough livestock, enough, you know, fodder and grain and whatnot to maintain that branch of the family. And this is important because what will happen as Mongol history goes on is the various branches of the family, each connected to one of Genghis Khan's sons, will eventually become rivals. You will hear in Mongol history of the house of Ogedai and the house of Chagatai. And the house means the descendants of. And these grandchildren eventually will be divided by whose house they're in. The sons, though, maintain a very good relationship. The eldest son, as we told you in the last show, dies about six months before the Great Khan dies. But one of his sons, a Mongol named Batu, gets to be the one who leads this piece of step territory that is the farthest away from the Mongol homeland. It also happens to be the one, the closest to Europe. That's his domain. Each of the other brothers gets their own domain, and the youngest brother gets the one closest to the Mongol homeland. And it becomes the youngest son's job, which is Mongol tradition, to sort of look after the home and hearth and be the defender of, you know, the Mongol's family at home and the capital and all that. Now, Ogedai is an interesting Character, as we said, not the fearsome Mongol that Genghis Khan was. Now, here's the thing. This is only by Mongol standards. The enemies of Ogedai, the settled societies that wrote about him, thought him a terrible, cold blooded, vicious killer, like they thought all the Mongols. But by Mongol standards, he was a bit of a sensitive character. He also becomes the first in these Mongol rulers that demonstrates something that will be a part of the Mongol leadership throughout the rest of the history of the empire. Ogedai has a problem with alcohol. Now, we did a whole hardcore history show once about that sort of hidden part of history, substance abuse, and how much it might have played a role in the past in ways that didn't really come down to us through the historical sources. It must have been a very big deal indeed, because Ol Gaidai's alcohol use does come down to us throughout the sources. And in fact, his successors will struggle with this as well. Now, this is not a Mongol problem. I want to emphasize this. In fact, this is a problem throughout the ancient world in the medieval world, just like it's a problem throughout our modern world. Barbarian societies tended to have slightly more trouble with the substance abuse, in part because those societies were more tolerant of overindulging in ways that, say, the Romans and the Greeks and the Chinese frowned upon that the way our modern society would. There's a famous story told by a Persian historian about ogedized drinking getting out of hand. And one of his brothers, the one whose job it was sort of to be the enforcer of the Mongol law, the Yassa, chastising his brother, who's the great Khan. So you can see this is a weird, interesting relationship where he's not like an absolute dictator chastising, his brother says, saying, your drinking is out of hand. And his brother's saying, all right, well, what should we do about that? And the other brother saying, we're going to give you a minder whose job it is to watch you and make sure you're not drinking too much. And Ogedai said, okay, I'll agree to that. And the brother whose job it was to enforce the laws and to stay strict said, you're going to be held to one cup of liquor a day. And Ogedei said, okay. And the Persian historian says he kind of got around that ruling by getting himself a giant cup. So he stuck to the one cup a day ruling, but the cup was enormous. In any case, this is the great Khan's son. And the Chinese, or really Chitan Chinese advisor that Genghis Khan had first befriended, who was now helping his son, uttered an interesting line to Ogedai, and it sort of describes how his reign was going to be different than Genghis Khan's. He said, the empire your father created was won on horseback, but it won't be governed on horseback. This was a sign that the days of simply conquering other people was over. Ogedai was going to continue the conquest, but he also had to organize the conquest his father had left to him. There was going to be a lot of stuff that civilized the Mongols. And this is another interesting part of Mongol history, because the steppe people stayed powerful when they kept themselves from being weakened by civilization. And you had seen step empire after step empire after step empire before this time become weakened by their contact with the flesh pots of China and the luxuries of, you know, the places like the Middle east, the Turkish Empire, that arose in what we call the Dark Ages, you know, the time around the 800-900-00 A.D. the Turks had written documents warning them not to get too connected to these settled societies. They'll weaken you. They'll take away all the stuff that made you strong enough to win the empire to begin with. But here is Ogedai listening to the Chinese type advisors who tell him to educate the Mongol nobility in these Confucian Chinese schools. Time to, you know, that they're going to be governing Chinese societies and sophisticated Islamic societies. They need to be educated, need to know how to count, need to know how to read. Ogedai strengthens and really organizes what becomes the YAM system of courier service. Americans would compare it to something like the Pony Express, where he sets up a system where about every 30 miles, there's a way station with horses and fodder and whatnot. And you could send messengers and couriers from way station to way station, way station, and sometimes up to 200 miles a day to facilitate communications and royal messages so you could somehow govern this giant empire. The Chinese advisors helped set up sophisticated systems of taxation where now these Chinese cities that had fallen under Mongol control and these Middle Eastern cities would pay regular taxes and there'd be accounting. Ogedai chooses as the official capital of the Mongol Empire, the. The territory around Karakoram, which is the traditional sort of step area that the steppe empires beforehand had sort of adopted as their center of power. And Genghis Khan had kind of had it as a center of power. But Ogedai puts a wall around the whole thing and organizes it as sort of a central city. And then he begins to turn his Attention to unfinished business. Perhaps unfinished business that his father had left him. Directions about suggesting that, well, you can't just leave my work undone. And tolerant and lenient and jovial as Ogedai might have been by Mongol standards, that didn't mean he was going to be any easier on the people his father felt still deserved some attention from the Mongols. There was unfinished business and Ogedai was going to see to it that under his reign, that business was finished. The scope of that unfinished business, though, was incredible. It was everything. By the reign of Ogedai, most historians believe the idea of universal empire had become firmly ingrained in the Mongol mentality. Now, historians don't know exactly when to date this, and they differ. Some say it was already a understood, an established concept in Genghis Khan's time. Others, maybe the majority, assumed that by Ogedai's time it had, you know, weaved its way through the fabric of Mongol, you know, worldview. And some historians actually dated to after this time. But you can tell by the letters and notes and submission requests or demands and everything else that the Mongol sending that they assume by right around this time period that they are divinely tasked with conquering the whole world. I mean, this is Alexander the Great's delusions of grandeur taken to a level which includes the next generation and the next generation. I mean, we all know that Napoleon and Hitler and Alexander and all these people had these belief in their own divine destiny. But Alexander's belief in his own divine destiny did not include the destiny of his children and his children's children. In the case of the Mongols, this was a mission that was going to live on generation after generation after generation. And it's been described many ways. The best and most concise description I've ever found is in the Cambridge History of China, and here's how they describe it. The sovereignty bestowed on Chinggis Khan and subsequently bequeathed to his successors was universal in character. In the orders of submission customarily sent to neighboring states before initiating hostilities. The Mongols claimed the right, if not the duty, to bring all the world under their dominion. All nations outside their frontiers were considered members of the Mongolian empire in the making. And all were required to accept Mongolian suzerainty without question or hesitation. Because in Mongolian eyes, their expansion was divinely sanctioned. Anyone refusing to submit was thereby thwarting the will of heaven and deserving of the harshest punishment. End quote. That's another one of those points you don't often hear from those historians playing up the George Washington side of Chinggis Khan's character. The idea that perhaps this is one of the rare times in history where you have an entire people who are ingrained with the idea that their divine mission is to take over the entire world. It's a fascinating concept. And by Ogedai's reign, it seems to be thoroughly a part of his mental makeup, and it influences his plans, because instead of doing what, for example, his father would have done when he first came to power, which was perhaps attack somebody, Ogedai decides to attack everybody. Now, the reason Ogedai can even consider this is because of the military machine that he inherits from his father. Writer DS Benson does a good job, I think, of describing how unusual the situation that the Mongols find themselves in after the historical arsonist that created their empire leaves the scene. Normally, that's the time when everything sort of falls apart. When there's no Napoleon, when there's no Hitler, when there's no Julius Caesar, when there's no Alexander, things kind of stop. In the Mongol case, it went the other way completely. And here's what Benson writes. Quote, when Emperor Genghis first became locked in struggle with the Asian governments on his borders, it had been with very modest ambitions. He seems to have had no idea his successes would enable him to amass control over so vast a number of countries that by now comprised more than 2,100 million acres of Asian territory. But once he achieved those results, Benson writes, he actively consolidated the resources they represented and of particular importance for subsequent events, impressed upon his sons that they should continue with aggressive efforts of their own to expand his successes to even greater magnitudes. It was this last instruction of his, Benson says, that now gave the phenomenon its special features after his death. For instead of slowing down, it began to accelerate. End quote. There was an old line from the movie Jaws, an advertising line that has always stayed with me when Jaws 2 came out. And the line was just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. And that's kind of what always comes to my mind when Ogedai takes over. Because all of the people that had already felt the punch of the Mongols thought that that was all they were going to get, that it was a singular event, an act of God, a tsunami. And just when they thought it was safe to go back in the water, Ogedai arrives with a last will and testament from his father that tells him his job is to conquer the world and that that's a divine mission, and leaves him the greatest army maybe in world history up to that point, to use as his Tool to do it. He attacks northern China again, which the Mongols had never not been fighting, but it had been reduced to a very low level of conflict for some time. While Genghis attention was elsewhere, he sends more troops into the Middle east, which had never recovered from the initial Mongol attack. So what took 150,000 guys to to conquer initially now took 30,000 or less Mongols to keep, you know, in chaos. And he decides based on that reconnaissance in force we told you about in the last episode from Subadai, the great Mongol general, that it would take him 16 to 18 years of warfare to conquer the entire European continent. And he begins to make arrangements to do just that. Now, the Jin Chinese campaign is the most important to the Mongols. As we told you in an earlier episode, they never took their eye off the prize, and the prize was always China. And at this time period, there had been several Chinese states. Genghis Khan had already eliminated the Tanguts in Xisha, he had attacked the Jin in Northern China, and they were on their last leg. And then there was this giant, really the core of the Chinese people known as Song or the Southern Song Chinese. The Jin and the Song had been enemies for a long time. When Genghis Khan sort of let his attention veer away from the Jin, the Song and the Jin start going at it again. I mean, instead of joining forces against another Mongol blow that was sure to come, they just pretended that, you know, the tsunami was a one time event. And they, just like the Middle Eastern governments, just like the European governments, could go about their normal quibbling ways. And one of the famous what if scenarios historians always play with when they're talking about the Mongol conquest is what if all these people had realized that Genghis Khan was not the only time they were going to be attacked from the Mongols and had actually sat down and planned for the second wave. None of them did this, so it's hard to know how well they might have resisted the second wave had they paid any attention to doing that. All of a sudden, the Jin Chinese who were trying to nibble away at some of the earlier Mongol conquests, regain a little territory here, regain a little territory there, find multiple Mongol columns bearing down on them from different directions. Now, I wish I could give you a complete rundown of how that whole situation went, and I wish I could quote some Chinese sources that bring this to light and tell you about the human cost. The Mongols were once again bypassing major fortified areas a lot of times and devastating the countryside and killing all the people, you know, that they ran into as a way to pull military forces out of their fortifications. They were using advanced siege techniques to try to take down these amazing Chinese cities. The Chinese probably had the greatest defensive fortifications of the time and the Mongols often had. Even with their Chinese and Persian artillerists and engineers, they had to sit there often and really, you know, batter down these cities before they could take them. Maybe the most interesting stuff that may have come out of this period is you begin to see large scale use of gunpowder weapons, mostly on the part of the Chinese. I mean, maybe the Jin, if you believe some of these historians were lobbing shells at the Mongols, you know, and the Chinese never did anything on a small scale. So you have to imagine like lots of shells and lots of artillery and lots of gunpowder weapons maybe. Again, the evidence is speculative. I went out and got lots of expensive rare books to try to figure this out, only to find them disagreeing. You can go get the Cambridge Ancient History of China and it disagrees with some of this other stuff. I'm absolutely impatient for Chinese sources to be translated and for us to get more information on this somewhere down the road that will come. Nonetheless, it's safe to say basically that the Chinese are invaded. The Jin Chinese are invaded from at least two different and maybe three different directions. Oged Eye commanding the main force, his brother to Louis commanding a force that comes in from a completely different direction. The Jin Chinese capital finally falls. The emperor moves to smaller and smaller locations to try to escape the Mongol wrath. Finally they get him trapped in a city. And as he sees that there's no hope and that he's not getting away this time, he kills himself. But not before turning the job over to a young relative of his who doesn't survive either. He either dies in the fighting or is knifed by some Chinese official who doesn't want him to fall into the hands of the Mongols or something to that effect, a young boy. Nonetheless, Jin China is wiped out. And sort of ironically, it's wiped out with the help of the Southern Song, the Chinese to the south of the Jin empire. Because when the Jin were starting to realize they were doomed if they didn't figure out a way out of this mess, they contacted their old enemies to the south, the Song, and said, now might be a good time for an alliance. Both of us have a mutual enemy in the making. Let's work together. Then at the same time that message came to the Song emperor, the Mongols offered the same sort of an alliance to the Song too, and said, hey, the Jinn are On their last leg, you want to grab a little bit of their territory. Let's work together. The Song chose the alliance with the Mongols, and you had this very interesting sort of spectacle, given how later history is going to go, of the Mongols and Sung Chinese troops fighting together outside these Jin cities to knock the walls down. And the Song are going to make one of the most terrible mistakes probably in the entire history of the Middle Ages, once the Jin empire goes away, of deciding they were promised certain territories by the Mongols as part of this alliance. And rather than say, hey, were we clear on this? I mean, is this our territory? And they just sent troops into it and seized it. Not exactly the right way to keep the Mongols as your friends. And they precipitate a war with the Mongols right after they helped get rid of the one group of people you might have allied with to have any hope of dealing with the Mongols. Now, perhaps the most interesting thing that happens during this whole affair, if you're looking at this from the Mongol side of things, is the illness that strikes down Ogedai while all this is going on. Remember, he wasn't the only Mongol, as I told you, that had this problem with alcohol. And a lot of these Mongols start to have illnesses at young ages, and you can't really tie them to the alcohol, but it's tempting to. They start having what appear through the sources to be things like strokes and paralysis. And in 1232, that sort of paralysis, stroke like symptoms hit Ogedai while he's on campaign against the Jin Chinese. And nobody knows what to do. It's too darn soon since Genghis died to think that you could easily just replace his chosen successor. So everybody kind of panics, right? I mean, this guy's been Khan for two and a half years and now he seems to be on his deathbed. Now remember, the Mongols are basically a pagan people and they have priests all around Ogedai basically trying to figure out what's going on. And they're blaming Chinese evil spirits. Basically, the priests decide that these evil spirits are protectors of China and they're mad that the Mongols are invading. And they begin to try to figure out what it's going to take to appease these evil spirits so that they can cure the Khan. The methods that they use to do this is a little like trying to determine a course of action by use of a Ouija board or a Magic 8 ball. They ask a question and then they read the entrails of an animal or the burnt scapula of a Sheep or something. And if the question's answered positively, well, then they have that. Or if they get one of those magic eight ball type answers, you know, it's unclear. Ask again later. Well, they ask again later. You can go into the Mongol's own history, the secret history of the Mongols. And it goes through this whole thing where they've decided that it's, you know, this particular demon. And they ask over and over again, what if we give the gold and silver back to China? Will that be enough? And they keep getting these negative answers. Well, finally they ask the question, what if we sacrifice a member of the royal family? And at that moment, according to the secret history, Ogedai wakes up, you know, formerly unable to speak, and asks for water. Well, sounds like the Magic 8 ball or the Ouija board gave you an answer. And when they explained to Ogedei what they'd just done, and they'd said, well, you know, does a member of the royal family have to be sacrificed? And you woke up and talked. Ogedei is supposed to have said, well, who's here right now? And at that moment, his younger brother to Louis, unfortunately for him, walks into the room. If you are a pagan priest and maybe a pagan people looking for signs from heaven, well, there you go. Now, this is portrayed in the Mongol secret history, what's about to happen as a heroic sacrifice for the nation. Because basically when they tell to Louis, his youngest brother, all this stuff, he says, yeah, take me. I'll sacrifice myself. And long story short, you know, he gives this long speech about how his duties to his brother and his father wanted his brother to run the empire, and he's already had a good life and all this kind of stuff. And they apparently give him something to drink that's poisonous, and he dies. Now, that's the secret histories version. Some historians buy that. Other historians suggest that maybe just Tuloui died during the campaign somehow of an illness. Also, no one really knows, but the Mongols have celebrated the sacrifice of Genghis Khan's youngest son. You know, ever since the recovery of the Great Khan, Ogedai's health allows him to put into full practice the last will and testament of his father, Genghis Khan, the great historical arsonist. The great Khan told his sons that they were to be the universal rulers, that they had a divine mission to conquer and rule the entire world. And El Ghe Day was now in a position to make that happen, or at least try. By this time, he's already at war, as we said, with Sung China, perhaps the greatest Almost certainly the greatest civilization of its time, with an estimated population of more than 50 million human beings, the leading civilization in terms of science and literacy and fortification technology, and you name it. I mean, these are people using gunpowder in the 1200s. It will prove to be the most difficult endeavor, militarily speaking, that the Mongols ever undertake, and it will take decades to complete the job. In fact, neither Ogedai nor this podcast series will make it to the end of that story. When the Song finally fall. When they do, it will become the greatest achievement on the Mongol military resume. No other steppe people in history even come close to conquering all of China. They will become so legitimate in terms of the rulers of China that they will even become one of the legitimate Chinese dynasties. In the annals of China's history, they would be known as the Yuan Dynasty. That is a ways away, though, at this time period. What's fascinating to me is here you have this amazing Chinese state with all its power and glory, and the Mongols are taking it on with a mere fraction of their total military force. Now, I should point out, no one knows what the Mongol military numbers were a hundred years ago. Historians wildly inflated the size of Mongol military forces because they couldn't imagine any other way for them to do what they did. Historians now, though, are of the opinion that it is a sign of how incredible the Mongol military was, you know, at every level, from the individual soldiers ability to the greatness of the general and the leadership, the organization of the, you know, soldiery, the veteran understanding of the troops that were hardened by battle. I mean, what the Mongols are able to do with a mere fraction of the kind of numbers that historians thought they had a hundred years ago is mind boggling. And there's even a school of historians and writers who think the current numbers are inflated. A guy like DS Benson will tell you that the Mongols will conquer the entire Middle east with like 10,000, 15,000 guys. That's unbelievable. I mean, I can't believe that. Nonetheless, it's a sign of how incredible the Mongol military machine is. Now, remember, not only are the Song Chinese now at war with the Mongols, but there's an independent Mongol army, most historians think around 30,000 people operating in the Middle East. They've already run down the Khwarezmian Shah's son, a guy named Jalil Aladdin, who's killed by some Turkish bandits. And this Mongol force settles down in a nice green, lush valley with enough grass to feed the horses. And not that far away from Baghdad, which is the headquarters of the Abbasid Caliphate, the, you know, sort of head of the Islamic religion and the Abbasid Caliphate is sitting there literally shivering in their boots, wondering what this Mongol army, sitting not that far away, is going to do. At the moment, it's not going to do anything. It's going to sit there and guard the flanks of the real important endeavor that's taking place around this time period, this time period being 1235, because in 1235, Ogedai calls a great conference. And at this conference, they decide that they're going to move against Europe with a major force. This force is going to be raised by taking the oldest son from everyone. The army is put together. Most historians believe it numbers about 150,000 men. But what will happen is this army will pick up more men as it moves towards Europe. So no one knows if it starts out with 150,000 men and picks up more, or if it starts out with less and by the time it reaches Europe is 150,000 men. Nonetheless, it not only has the oldest sons from all these families, it has most of Genghis Khan's royal family with it as well. At least two future great Khans will be a part of the military force. At least four of Genghis Khan's grandsons will be a part of it. And it will be led by the great Mongol general Subedai, who is going back to the area that 15 or so years before this time period, he led that great cavalry reconnaissance raid through. He's going back to this territory he's already scouted. You will recall, during subedai's reconnaissance, some 15 years before this time period or so, his 20,000 man Mongol force had absolutely demolished any military that it had come up against. If the Eastern European peoples had had such a hard time with 20,000 Mongols, what was going to happen when they ran into 150,000 of them? Well, the first people that got to find out weren't Eastern Europeans at all. They were other steppe nomadic horse peoples that existed to the east of the Russian peoples, peoples like the Bulgars and the Kipchak Turks and the Kangalis. These people would be so smashed by the Mongols coming from east to west in three giant columns, that a generation after this time period, travelers would report the ground still littered with human bones that scattered along the fields as far as the eye could see, like cattle dung. Now, what I find interesting is about this whole thing is how the Europeans begin to get word slowly that all this is starting up again. You know, the old line that it's not Safe to go back into the water. Well, remember, this is before telegraphs. This is before real communication. The way the Europeans find out that this is happening again is through people fleeing the devastation. You have to think of a rolling wave. I know I've used this tsunami metaphor before, but it's perfect. You have to imagine as the Mongols run into these peoples, some of the survivors flee to the west and run to people who are not aware that the Mongols are coming yet and start screaming and yelling about what they just lived through and what's coming. And you better prepare. And that's how they begin to find out. One of the first pieces of information that the Europeans get come from Muslim emissaries who may have arrived as far away as Scotland and England asking for help. Now, remember, the Muslims and the Christians at this time are engaged in bitter, crusading warfare. How bad do things have to be for the Muslims to come as far away as England and say, listen, we should think about working together? Once again, the Europeans misinterpreted the situation into a potential opportunity. They see the Mongols once again as perhaps a force that's going to wipe out their Islamic enemies, and that's going to cause all kinds of discomfort to these Eastern nomadic horse peoples that are raping and pillaging along the borders with the Russians. And once again, they are terribly, terribly mistaken. Perhaps the first concrete evidence about what's happening comes from a Hungarian Dominican friar named Julian. It's sort of a serendipitous event, too, because Julian's not looking for Mongols. Julian's looking for Hungarians, other Hungarians. He's of the opinion, as many Hungarians during this time period were, that their people had originally come from the eastern steppes. He was right about that. And he went east to find his cousins, people that they called the Old Hungarians. And as he went east, he found the Old Hungarians, people who lived right next to, you know, people they called the Tartars. And this is where he got pretty much firsthand information that the Tartars were massing for a big attack on Europe. He runs into Russian rulers who show him a document, a document written in characters that they can decipher, but it's a language that they don't know. In other words, they've seen the kind of writing before, and they can read it, but the kind of writing is of a language that they don't know. They finally get it translated, and it's a letter from the great Western Khan, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, to the ruler of Hungary. And it's come down to the histories because Julian brought it back, and here's what it says. The letter, by the way, is from Batu, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan and the Khan in charge of the westernmost area in the Mongol Empire. And he writes on behalf of the Great Khan Ogedai. And this is a letter to King Bela IV of Hungary, who has taken under his protection a bunch of fleeing Kipchak Turks, also called the Cuman. And here's what the letter to King Bela. I am the Khan and representative of the Heavenly King, the one to whom he has given power over the earth, to raise up those who submit to me and to cast down those who resist. I wonder why, O King of Hungary, when I've now sent envoys to you on 30 occasions, you've sent none of them back to me, nor do you send me in return your own envoys or letters. I am aware that you are a wealthy and powerful monarch, that you have under you many soldiers, that you have the sole rule over a great kingdom. Hence, it is difficult for you to submit to me of your own volition. And yet it would be better for you and healthier, were you to submit willingly. I have learned, moreover, that you keep the Cumans, my slaves, under your protection. And so I order that you do not keep them with you any longer and do not have me as an enemy on their account, for it is easier for them to escape than for you, since they are without houses and move about in their tents, and so perhaps may be able to escape. But as for you who dwell in houses and have fortresses and cities, how will you evade my grasp? End quote. Writer D.S. benson assumes and believes that by this time the major Russian rulers had already received very similar notes from Batu themselves. The response of the rulers of all these independent Russian principalities to what amounted to a surrender or die notice from the Mongol rulers was incredibly brave. Almost to a man, they told the Mongols to go jump in a lake. They seem to have forgotten completely what it was like 15 years ago to face Mongol arms and put on an extremely brave face. For example, when the Mongols first showed up at one of the first principalities to feel their wrath in the winter of 1237. It should be noted, almost everyone in history has tried to avoid fighting in Russia in the winter. You know, Hitler was perhaps defeated because he couldn't. Napoleon did everything in his power to get done with military operations before the Russian winter hit. The Mongols waited until the Russian winter came before they started operations. Because in the winter of 1237, once the lakes started freezing and the river started freezing and the marshes froze over, it turned all of these natural barriers against an invader into highways. For people like the Mongols, it made them better. And when they attacked a place like Ryot San in the north, they came to the people and came up to the gate and delivered their ultimatum. 10% of all your wealth, hostages, slaves, and you join the Mongol Empire. And the rulers of Ryazan told the Mongols, when we are all dead, then everything will be yours. And you can almost feel the Mongols thinking to themselves, no problem. And historian Richard A. Gabriel describes what happens. The Mongols first stormed the town of Riatsan. Like most Russian fortified places, protected only by wooden palisades, which crumbled quickly under the pounding of Mongol artillery. After a bombardment of only five days, three days before Christmas, Mongol horsemen entered the city, Gabriel says, and turned it into a slaughterhouse. Men were hunted through the red snow and the alleys of the town and impaled upon stakes to wriggle out the tragic end of their lives. Priests and monks who had shut themselves up in their churches and monasteries were exterminated like sheep, as were the women who had sought sanctuary with them. The slaughter at Riot's Ann Gabriel writes, was so horrendous that a chronicler reported that no eyes remained open to weep for the dead. Another chronicler wrote Gabriel, quoting someone else, now, quote, some were impaled or had nails or splinters of wood driven under their fingernails. Priests were roasted alive, and nuns and maidens ravished in the churches in front of their relatives. End quote. Now, even if there's some hyperbole there, it jibes pretty well with the reports of Mongol conduct in the Middle east and in East Asia. It's remarkably consistent, all these people talking about what it was like if you didn't surrender to the Mongols once they broke into your city. But to be honest, it's not a Mongol thing. It tends to be a human thing. And it is not unusual for cities to receive this kind of treatment all throughout history from all sorts of people. Heck, the Romans did it to the city of Cremona during a civil war, and the people that they were doing that same sort of stuff, too, were their own countrymen. The Mongols, because of their military superiority, just had the opportunity to do this more often than most. The city of Rayatsan had no way to comprehend the fact that when they told the Mongols to basically try to take the city, that the Mongols would put up hundreds, maybe thousands of siege engines and Begin to batter the city into submission in a way that no Western or any European nation had seen the like of since the Roman Empire fell. This was the capability of, you know, someone akin to China coming to Europe in a medieval era and operating with sophistication and abilities that the people in that region didn't even know existed. And the Mongols did twisted sorts of things. There are reports of them using human fat in these stone throwing machines to throw chunks of human fat that they set alight before throwing into the city. And this stuff would burn, you know, like accelerant. The human fat landed on a thatched roof. That roof was gonna burn. One of the Russian chroniclers describes what it's like to be inside one of these cities when the Mongols open fire with their stone throwing engines. The Tartars, early in the morning on Sunday of Shrovetide in the month of February, on the eighth day, the feast of the holy martyr Fyodor, on the first hour of the day, charged upon the city from all sides and began to hammer at the city with rams. And in the center of the city there poured great stones from far away. By God's will, they were like rain inside the city. And a multitude of people died in the city and all were trembling and very frightened. The Tartars broke through the wall at the Golden Gate and breaking into the city all around. They entered it like demons. And there they had taken the new city by dinner time and set it on fire. And there they killed the king and his brother and most of the barons and people, end quote. And the Mongols were incredibly clever too, some would say sneaky in the way that they handled things so that they could try to avoid these sieges if they could. There are reports of them carrying crosses with them prominently because they had learned that sometimes Christian forces would mistake people carrying crosses for friendly instead of enemy. Outside the city of Vladimir, which had shut their gates against them, they rode up carrying a hostage who turned out to be the son of the great king. And they told the people of Vladimir, don't you recognize your king? And basically said, open up the door or the king gets it. And they had no choice. They just had to let the captured hostage be killed by the Mongols, because what were they going to do? Didn't save the town of Vladimir. As a matter of fact, the chroniclers report that the people in Vladimir sat there and watched the Mongols erect all the scaffolding and the siege engines. And the chroniclers say that the people then saw that their city would be taken and they began to weep great tears. End quote. So once they saw the scale of the artillery that the Mongols were putting up, these people were under no illusions. They knew that sometime in the next 24 to 72 hours, they were all going to die. Perhaps the greatest of the Russian cities to fall was Kiev, a holy city, and perhaps the only city in Russia protected by a stone wall. It didn't save Kiev. The city was taken, and many chroniclers report that all of the citizens were put to death, and the area around what had been the crown jewel of Russian cities was devastated and corpse filled. Some eight years later, John of Plano Carpini would arrive in the area of Kiev and say that the survivors of that massacre treated him as though he had risen from the dead. They still seemed stunned. And he wrote, quote, when we were journeying through that land, we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev, he writes, had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it had been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at present scarce 200 houses there, and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery. End quote. Now, it's worth pausing for a minute and just understanding the timeline here for a second, because with the compression of time that happens, when you look back over the ages, it appears as though this Mongol conquest of Russia is happening in the blink of an eye. And in fact, it is happening very quickly by the standards of warfare in the Middle Ages. But it's really taking about three years. And there are times when the Mongols can't fight at all. The famous time of the year when the Russian rains come and turn all of the countryside into a morass of sticky mud. The same thing that slowed the German advance down in the Second World War. The Mongols don't have much more luck. As a matter of fact, they try to take Novgorod in the north and they simply can't deal with the mud. So there are times when the Mongols simply have to retreat to dry areas and wait it out. It takes a full three years to completely subdue the Russians. But they do completely subdue them. As a matter of fact, they do so in a way that is so total and so devastating that they will control Russia for hundreds of years after this time. That has never happened before or since. Many, many people had to be put in their graves to wipe out Russian resistance so completely. Now, one of the reasons, though, that it seems to be happening so fast is the almost complete lack of response on the part of the Western Europeans. If you told somebody today that you had three years to prepare for a threat, you would think you could get a lot of work done in preparation. The amount of preparation that the Europeans were able to put forward was abysmal. As a matter of fact, you could almost make the case that it was anti preparation because instead of realizing what was happening to their neighbors to the east, the Russians, and preparing for it, the Europeans were often taking advantage of what was happening to the Russians. The Baltic states, the Swedes, the Poles, the Germans were all snatching up pieces of Russian territory they could get their hands on that were only available because the Russians were so preoccupied with the Mongols. So far from uniting against the common foe, the Europeans were proving exactly what Mongol intelligence had told the Great Khan. They were like a bunch of feuding principalities that would have a very hard time working together. There are people who've made the case before that the Mongols benefited throughout their entire conquests all over the world from the fragmentation of their foes. And nowhere was this more true than in Europe. The Mongols will finish up the situation in Russia and will begin to move towards Europe in late 1240, early 1241. Central Europe. Now, the people in Europe who have the best idea of what's about to hit them are the Hungarians under King Bela iv. The reason why is because all of these refugees that we told you always seemed to flee in front of the Mongol tsunami, for the most part fled to Bela. They were cumans, kipchaks, polafsi as the Russian called them, and they went to King Bela pleading, please save us. You have no idea what these people are like. We will convert to Christianity, anything, just promise that you'll help. These are the same people, by the way, that King Batu, when he sent his note to Bela, said, you have our slaves, the cumans. Don't make an enemy of us on their account. But King Bela realized that the conversion of some 200,000 or more Cumans to Christianity would look very nice to the Pope and settled the Cuman amongst his own people. And in addition, this was helpful because the Cuman were about the best people you would want to have on your side if you were a European nation about to face the Mongols. For two reasons. One, they had just faced the Mongols. No one knew better what you were likely to have to deal with than people who had just dealt with the same threat. The other reason was that the cumans were also steppe people, also horse archers. They gave you the capability to fight the Mongols a little bit more on their own terms. And there were a lot of them. The problem was, is that as the environment heated up and the Mongols headed toward Hungary, everybody just went, you know, bat crazy and started looking at the cumans as part of the problem. People began to panic. And the Mongols were great at sowing this. They would send all sorts of, you know, messengers out to stir up dissent and problems. They had every kind of ruse you can imagine. I mean, one of the ones they used in Russia supposedly was they got their hands on a royal seal from a dead body, and they went around counterfeiting royal proclamations and then passed it around to all these towns, telling the townspeople either not to flee in the face of the Mongols or to come back to their towns that they'd abandoned for their own safety. And then when they came back, the Mongols killed them all. The other thing the Mongols would do is come to an area and force the locals to harvest the grain that was close to being ready to harvest. And as soon as they harvested the grain, they'd kill them, and then they wouldn't be able to plant the next season's grain. A lot of historians blame a lot of the deaths that the Mongols caused in Russia with their disrupting of the next year's harvest. So it's hard to discern how many of the people who died were actually killed by Mongol swords and arrows and how many died as a result of their ability to sort of circumvent the traditional harvest cycle. You get a sense of the growing hysteria in terms of fear on the part of the people now in the Mongol sites. In an incident that occurs soon after, King Bela takes these Cumans into his protection because he fortifies the passes over the Carpathians, so the Mongols won't have an easy time getting through. And then there's a little encounter between Mongol forces and Hungarian forces. And the Hungarians capture one of the soldiers, but the soldier turns out to not be an ethnic Mongol. He's a Cuman, a conscript, one of those people that the Mongols essentially said, you have two choices. You can join our forces and fight in our army, or you can be killed. Well, obviously, he chose to fight as a Mongol, and he's dragged in for intelligence purposes. The problem is, is that the people of Hungary become aware that the person captured, who's supposedly from this people, you know, this mythical people they know very little about, he's not a Mongol. He's a Cuman. And now they have 200,000 Cumans in their midst being protected by their king, and they're freaking out. They see the farms of their people being burned, the storehouses looted, the Citizens being snatched up into slavery or murdered in the fields. And they've come to the conclusion that this is sort of a Cuman or Kipchak Turkish plot. These aren't Mongols. These are the same steppe people that have been raiding and pillaging and doing banditry on their borders forever. And they think their king Bella is protecting them. You get a real sense of the fear and hysteria when you read some of the primary sources. There's one in particular from a guy named Roger of Verrad, who was someone who actually lived through these events. So you're getting a real firsthand account of this. And he describes the people rioting outside the various royal palaces, demanding that the king of the Cuman Kipchak Turks, a guy named Kutan, be turned over to the mob for a little summary justice. Now, the only thing I'm going to change in this primary source account to make it more clear is when they talk about the king, they mean King Bela. So I'm going to say Bella after that, so you get a idea of who they mean when they're talking about the king of Hungary versus when they're talking about the king of the Cumans. Here's Roger of Verad's account of what the crowd was screaming outside the palace where this king of the Cumans is being protected by Hungary's own king. All of the people clamored against him. Kill him. Kill him. He is the one who has brought on the destruction of Hungary. And for this they spoke to King Bela reproachfully. Our king should fight whoever has brought in the Kipchaks for our misfortune. Others clamored, King Bela should fight with those who are taking our property. King Bela, hearing these reproaches more and more, sent a man to King Kutan of the Cumans, saying he should not delay in coming before him, end quote. But King Kutan of the Cumans was a little scared all of a sudden. This protection that he thought he had put himself under under King Bela looked very precarious. He didn't think he would make it to King Bela's castle alive, so he told him he wasn't coming unless protection was forthcoming. Roger of Verad continues. But Kutan, who heard the repeated shouting of the people and fearing injury even though he was free of guilt, replied to King Bela that unless he would appoint some man who would be empowered to lead him to King Bela and protect him from the hands of the crowd, he would in no ways go before him. When the messenger brought this back to King Bela, the Clamor amongst the crowd resumed. Kill him. Kill him. And then all of a sudden, Roger of Herod writes, some armed Hungarians and Germans broke into the palace where he was intending to make him go before the King Bela by force. Bakutan and his people, drawing their bows and arrows, refused to admit them into his presence. Then a mob of people pushed in, took them captive, instantly cut off all their heads and threw them out the windows of the palace into the crowd. End quote. This incident, needless to say, completely poisoned this new alliance. And once the Cuman people found out about the fate of their king at the hands of their new Hungarian allies, they went a bit berserk themselves and began raiding and killing and murdering and stealing and everything you could think of amongst the towns and villages of Hungary, doing exactly to the population there what the Mongols were planning to do and what the Hungarians had assumed the Cumans were really doing anyway, turning what had been a vicious, hysterical rumor into fact and making things that much easier for the looming Mongol enemy who'd already broken through the fortifications in the Carpathian Mountains and were coming. In early 1241, the storm breaks and it breaks in Central Europe and it focuses on Hungary, the area that the Mongol spies and intelligence service decides is the main threat in Central Europe. Now, the main threat probably shouldn't be Hungary. It should probably be the Holy Roman Empire led by the great Emperor Frederick. The problem is Frederick is too busy in a long running war with the Pope to worry about the Mongols. Doesn't raise forces, doesn't fight the Mongols, just sends a bunch of angry letters to the Hungarian King telling him he's a loser and he needs to fight harder. And why isn't he handling this problem? He's letting all of Europe down. Meanwhile, the Pope, who would also like to do something, is too busy dealing with Frederick. So the two of them can't even stop their quarrel long enough to deal with, you know, Darth Vader's approach from the east. So it's left to the Hungarians to try to deal with. And the Mongols stream through the passes of the Carpathian Mountains, blowing apart the fortifications that the Hungarians have put in all these passes to stop them, and come down into the Hungarian plain from at least four, maybe five different passes at the same time. Now, if you look at the map of Europe, what you'll see is there's an opening there. If somebody wants to come down from Poland with an army, they could smash this Mongol force, get behind it, cut it off. It's a great opportunity. Unfortunately for the Europeans, it's Not an opportunity that the Mongols and a leader like Subedai would have missed, and he didn't. He sent some 30,000 men, it's believed, under a guy named Qaidu or Baidu, and they smash into Poland to protect the flank of the main army, maybe 120,000 guys moving into Hungary. Now, to be fair, I need to point out that what I'm about to tell you is disputed because nobody knows the Chronicles, if you read them, are so concerned with trying to make it look like the peoples put up a good fight that you can't really tell what's hyperbole and what's the truth. You also don't know which historians to believe because they all differ. And there's enough uncertainty about this that the dates of the battles aren't even for sure. The numbers certainly aren't. I tend to fall back on military historians when in doubt. A guy like Richard A. Gabriel perhaps chooses the middle ground on numbers. He thinks 30,000 guys decide to attack Poland to protect the Mongol flank. These people begin raiding, pillaging, destroying, burning into Poland. And what they do is they draw the attention of people up there so that they can't go down and deal with the Mongols in Hungary. They separate the European armies so that they can't converge on the main threat. A guy named Henry the Pious, he's the Duke of Silesia, manages to raise perhaps as many as 40,000 guys and begins moving into Poland to confront the Mongols. There's another army of Bohemians. Some people, like Richard A. Gabriel, think maybe 50,000 guys. If that's true and they hook up with Henry, that'll be the biggest army Europe's seen since the Romans were active, you know, a thousand years before. The Mongols noticed this and determined that it's not going to happen. And they intercept Henry's forces before he could hook up with the Bohemians. And in a place called Leibniz, an encounter occurs. The traditional date of this battle is April 9, 1241. And Henry, the Duke of Silesia, runs into the Mongol force, barring his path, not allowing him to hook up with the Bohemians. Now, the way this battle goes is controversial. The Polish chroniclers try so hard to rescue Polish martial honor, to try to make it sound like they almost beat the Mongols, or they had the battle won several times. The way the Polish chroniclers write it, they had the battle won. And then some Mongol screaming out in Polish, ran around yelling over and over again in the Polish language, run, run. And everybody started panicking. And the Polish chroniclers have Henry, the Duke Of Silesia, saying, calamity befalls us as everything collapses around him. But until that time, the polish chroniclers have him winning. Military historians are not really accepting of that. They believe that the armies of Europe at Leibniz were smashed utterly and easily smashed. They don't even slow qaidu and the mongols down. And the battle seems to follow a very traditional course. The Europeans line up in a sort of an ad hoc approach. And I've often thought the best way to explain it, and I may have already done this, Is by comparing an amateur sports team to a professional sports team in a sport that requires a ton of teamwork, like football or european football, which we call soccer in the United States. Either one of these would be a good comparison, because people will say to me all the time, how would European knights have done against the Mongols? And I say, well, why be hypothetical about it? European knights and the mongols tangled all the time, and the knights never gave the mongols any trouble at all. Knights were fantastic individual warriors, very skilled in the use of their weapons, practiced all the time, made a living out of fighting, but they did so as individuals. The mongols did so as a team. It would be as though you decided you wanted to have a football game today, and you went and got some great football players who'd never met each other and never played together. And the morning of the battle, they show up at the football field and they shake hands and say, nice to meet you. We'll be playing on the same team today. And then some coach who's never seen them play before meets them, and they decide they're going to have, you know, an encounter with the other team, and the other team shows up, and they're the Dallas cowboys. And they not only have played together forever and know each other very well, but the coach has been commanding them forever, and he knows them all and their capabilities very well. And they have plays that they've designed and that they practice and use all the time, and they have signals and signs that allow them to communicate to each other on the field, and they can call audibles and all these kinds of things. The Europeans were simply overwhelmed. And it sounds like, if you want to believe the historians, in the main, that the Europeans would attack in waves, each wave would be subsequently defeated. Maybe they blew the mongol center out, but it looks like the mongols were faking the whole thing, like steppe troops have done since, you know, ancient Greece and ancient assyria, where they run away screaming in terror. But they're not really running away. They're leading the pursuers into A trap. And by the time the pursuers have blown out, their horses, have no more energy and are tired. The ambush is laid. The archers appear from all sides, begin shooting down the horses. The smudge pots and smoke makers are all over the battlefield, the chroniclers tell us, and the Europeans just crumble. The Mongols will kill so many of them in the pursuit that they fill up nine large bags. Each bag takes a whole wagon to move with one ear off. Each corpse that they count, this is how they count the dead and make sure that they don't double count it. They cut the ear off, they throw the ear in the bag, and then later on, they can count the dead. That way, the consort of Henry, Duke of Silesia, will find his body and identify it. It's not easy. He has no head when she does this, but apparently he had six toes on one of his feet, and she can identify him that way. The Europeans that survive rush into the forest and try to hide there. They encounter that Bohemian army that Henry was trying to hook up with, who instantly figures out that they don't want to face the Mongols in the field. So they find the nearest forest, they barricade around the edges and just sit there, you know, hoping to conduct a defense. And the Europeans are stunned. There must have been a little bit of cultural superiority going on here, because you can audibly feel the air come out of Europe. A Templar knight rushes to the king of France to let him know that, one, they lost. And two, there's no significant army that can protect Europe from this force all the way to the Atlantic. A famous chronicler of this period, a guy named Matthew Paris, sums up the European attitude toward the Mongols after this battle by saying, where had such a people lain hidden? End quote. How could there be something this devastating? And we didn't know anything about them. But the 30,000 men that Qaidu used to smash Henry, Duke of Silesia's forces at Leignitz is the flanking force. The main force will fight a battle only a couple of days later against the King of Hungary. And that's the battle that will smash the largest army that Europe still has in the field to protect them from the greatest threat from steppe nomads since Attila and his Huns during the time of imperial Rome. Perhaps there's a little bit of irony in the fact that the Hungarians sometimes considered themselves to be the descendants of Attila's people, and now they were the ones charged with fighting off the advance of, you know, the Middle Ages version of Attila. And to his credit, I Think King Bela of Hungary did a pretty decent job, especially when you consider that he was fighting a people that, as we said in an earlier episode, were of such advanced sophistication, it was like they were coming down from a higher league. They were used to fighting the Chinese. Now they just had to fight a bunch of Europeans whose military sophistication was nowhere near as eminent as what they were used to dealing with. Now the problem that King Bela has is that the information about what happened at Leibniz has reached his army and they're demoralized. Not just that there are troops that King Bela would probably choose to have not had in his army at all if he had a choice. People that don't like him, but he's got to grab every man he can get his hands on. They're desperate. They're up against an enormous foe. And he's got perhaps if you believe someone like Richard A. Gabriel, maybe up to 100,000 men, which would make this one of the largest armies ever raised in the Middle Ages in Europe. And they're forced to live with each other to deal with this common foe. But they don't like it and it impacts the army's ability to fight. Well, Bella takes this force out to meet the Mongols and the Mongols see this force and turn around and run. Now, one can only imagine what the European attitude of manliness and chivalric conduct and all this thought of that, but it certainly must have made them assume that the size of their force was daunting to these barbarians. And they moved toward the Mongols as the Mongols moved away for nine days. Now, if you recall an earlier episode we did on this, it's very much like the way the Mongols handled the nobility of Russia in 1221 at the Kalka river, retreating in front of their forces for days and allowing the European armies to get tired and frustrated and outrun their food sources and supplies. Subedai and the Mongols go over a stone bridge which will play a key role in this story that's about to happen, and organize their army on the far side of a rain soaked, swollen river. And the army of the Hungarians will see them there and stop on the other side. Now a confrontation over who gets to control this bridge will happen. And the chroniclers have it going back and forth and sometimes the Mongols get to have a bridgehead on one side and then the Hungarians retake it. And there's a lot of that little skirmishing going on. But the main thing to understand as far as people can understand about this battle, because A lot of it's in dispute is that the Hungarian king establishes a camp on the far side of the river, and he encircles it with wagons and all sorts of fortifications to protect it from any sort of surprise attack by the Mongols. But he does so in a fashion that clusters it all too closely together, and the fantastic leadership of the Mongols notices this. And the chroniclers point out that Batu assures his men that the Hungarians have made a mistake. Here's what Batu is supposed to have told his commanders about the Hungarians and their camp all clustered together too closely. Good fortune ought to be with us, comrades. Even though this is a great multitude of a nation. Nonetheless, because their plans have been unwisely managed, they cannot escape from our hands. Just look at them, how they've shut themselves up in such a tight enclosure, like a herd of animals. End quote. There's one thing the Mongols understood. It was herds of animals. Remember, one of the ways they trained their army were with these giant hunts that occurred over miles and miles and miles of territory where they would take a whole army and slowly close a ring around a bunch of frightened and scared animals. And it taught them how to hunt men as well. Now, the way this battle shapes up, there are some interesting elements worth pointing out. One has to do with this bridge and who gets to control it, because at one point, the Hungarians are controlling the far side of the bridge, and in the middle of the night, all of a sudden, the troops on the far side of the bridge are assailed with what can only be described as artillery, including things that explode. Now, this is nothing like anything that Europeans would have seen. Perhaps the first time they've encountered real gunpowder, the Mongols are shelling them. Here's the way historian Richard A. Gabriel describes. Just before daylight, Batu attacked the bridgehead held by the Hungarian detachment on the east side of the river. The defenders found themselves under fire from the 13th century equivalent of an artillery preparatory bombardment. The Mongols brought up seven siege engines, probably ballistas, and bombarded the bridgehead with fire bombs and other noisemakers. The object of the bombardment was to focus the attention of the enemy commander on the point of attack, and in this case, it succeeded very well. The defenders, stupefied by the noise and death from the artillery, were suddenly attacked by squadrons of Mongol cavalry who quickly overwhelmed them. The artillery fire shifted to long range, and the Mongol cavalry crossed the bridge under cover of something akin to a rolling barrage. Although surprised by the attack, the Hungarian commanders rallied their troops and sallied forth from their camp to Engage the Mongol force pouring across the bridge. A bitter battle ensued in which the Hungarians held their own and forced the Mongols to give ground. Suddenly it became alarmingly apparent that the engagement was only a Mongol holding attack. End quote. Subedai and Batu, in the middle of the night had had troops cross the river at least in one direction, but maybe in two directions in the north and the south, get across it. And by the time the Hungarians had all their attention focused on this attempt to cross the bridge and the artillery that was making noise and getting everyone's attention and scaring the horses, the Mongols were around them, all around them. They'd surrounded the Hungarian camp. They were launching fire arrows into the wagons. And the chaos was debilitating. All of a sudden, as often happens in battle when one side is confused. You know, the Greeks used to refer to the God of fear who dominated battles, Phobos, where the word phobia comes from. And if Phobos got a hold of human beings in a situation like this, he didn't let go. DS Benson quotes a medieval chronicler about what happened next. By the time it was noon, behold, the entire army of the Tartarous multitude had surrounded the whole camp of the Hungarians as though it were a kind of corral and with eager bows had begun shooting arrows all around, while others circling about the camp hastened to put fire upon them. When the Hungarians saw themselves enclosed by the enemy units from all sides, their senses left them. For they were able to think neither of disengaging their forces nor of nor of commencing an all out struggle. And they were so badly confused that they looked for any way to break out like sheep in a stable from the biting of wolves as the enemy circled around and ceaselessly shot their missiles and arrows. End quote. DS Benson continues with the chronicler's account and the multitudes of hungry, destitute of all safe counsel, were unable to see what should be done. So when all hope of life was about gone, death seen throughout the camp in the eyes of all, the king and the prince abandoned the standards and turned themselves to the protection of flight. But when the Tartars saw that the army of the Hungarians was about to seek flight, some of the enemy made a way for them and permitted them to go through. End quote. We've seen this before. What appears to be an opening, one that might be a short term opportunity, is seen by some of the troops and they run out of the soon to close ring. Others see it and realize that they must move while they have a chance and they throw Their armor off and they drop their weapons and they run for it before the ring closes completely. Eventually the panic takes over and everybody runs for this opening before the Mongols can completely surround the forces, you know, and enclose them. What they don't realize is that the Mongols learned very well from how they dealt with herding animals in these great hunts. And they learned to use the panic of the animals in a way to their advantage. And one of the panicked qualities that these animals have was if you left a little opening in the ring, all the animals would seek that. Well, human beings do too. The opening was a trap. And as the army of the Hungarians fled through that one opening, they undid themselves. Here's the way. The chronicler Thomas of Spolado, who was a religious figure at the time, who was a contemporary of all these events and who almost certainly spoke to survivors of this battle. The quotes that I've been giving concerning the course of this battle so far are all from him, and here's how he describes it. They were pursued by them from the other side, not rashly, but step by step and not allowed to turn this way or that way. There was to be found along the roads vast wealth, gold and silver vessels, purple fabrics and quantities of arms. But the unheard of cruelties of the Tartars. Not caring for plunder and little valuing all the precious loot, they concerned themselves solely with the pursuit of men. And when they saw how exhausted they were from the strain of their movements, neither able to hold a weapon in their hands nor to move their feet any further in flight, then they began from there to strike with their lances and to slaughter with their swords, sparing no one, but savagely butchering them all. They fell down to the right and to the left like the leaves in winter. The fallen bodies of those unfortunates were to be found all along the road, blood flowing like a torrential river, their unhappy country reddened by the bloodshed of her fallen children far and wide. Then the multitude of tragedy whom the sword of the Tartars had not yet devoured were driven into a certain marsh, thus denied any other path out. The prodding Tartars charged upon them, and the greatest part of the Hungarians were all swallowed and vanished into the water and the mud. End quote. Historian Richard A. Gabriel, among others, believe that as many as 50,000 of the men fighting for King Bela and the Hungarians may have been killed either at the battle or during the long, relentless, murderous pursuit by the Mongols. Some Hungarian historians put that number at somewhat lower. As I said, the numbers are in dispute, but you get a very clear idea of how devastating this was for the greatest army standing between the Mongols and the conquest of the rest of Europe. So died the flower of the nobility of Hungary and Europe's best hope to forestall the Mongol conquest of the entire European continent. Subedai and Batu and Ogedai thought it would be 16 to 18 years to conquer all the way to the Atlantic after the Battle of the Sioux river, as it was called. That looked to be a rather pessimistic prediction, because after the battle, Mongol scouts would be seen in Austria, even on the edge of Italy. The King of Hungary would escape, get to the Adriatic Sea, not slow down for one second, get on a ship and take it across the sea to Italy. All of Europe trembled. Nothing like this had been seen in a thousand years. Europe was praying for a miracle. And all of a sudden, not long after the Battle of the Saya river, they got one. Word arrived that the great Khan Ogedai had died. When the death of the great Khan changed everything. In the next and last episode of Wrath of the Khans, the death of the great Khan Ogedai will turn out to be one of the most important turning points in world history. His death will not only kill the impetus of the Mongol tsunami that was sweeping west in a way that likely would have carried it all the way to the Atlantic, but his death will open up a leadership crisis in the Mongol world empire, one that opens up a chasm of disagreement amongst the descendants of Genghis Khan that completely destroys the great historical arsonist's hope that his descendants would stay together unbreakable, like a bundle of arrows. In fact, a chasm will develop between the various houses set apart by Genghis Khan's different sons. Now, this doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of death and destruction and several empires that fall by the wayside as this whole process takes place. It also doesn't mean that the fires that the historical arsonists started all those years ago won't continue to burn for centuries in some places. The Russians, for example, won't stamp out the last embers until Ivan the Terrible's time. At least. This story's going to go until the year 1260. By then, it's clear to see that the bundle of arrows is unraveling. The next Khan will be the first person chosen to rule Genghis Khan's empire that was not picked by the great Khan himself. And that will make a huge difference. All that and more, in part five of Wrath of the Khans. Do you shop online@Amazon.com if you do, consider doing so through the Amazon search window on dancarlin.com your shopping experience will be the same as always, but Amazon will give Dan and Ben a little kickback for sending you there. Thanks again for all your buck a show donations. They're the reason we're still here.