A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS48.THE MONGOL CONQUESTS
But in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous events were afoot upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from the country to the north of China rose suddenly to prominence in the world’s affairs, and achieved such a series of conquests as has no parallel in history. These were the Mongols. At the opening of the thirteenth century they were a horde of nomadic horsemen, living very much as their predecessors, the Huns, had done, subsisting chiefly upon meat and mare’s milk and living in tents of skin. They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion, and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty of
Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century, and after a phase of
division into warring states, three main empires, that of Kin in the
north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the south with a
capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain. In 1214 Jengis
Khan, the leader of the Mongol confederates, made war on the Kin Empire
and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned westward and conquered
Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India down to Lahore, and South
Russia as far as Kieff. He died master of a vast empire that reached
from the Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing career of
conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of
efficiency; and they had with them a new Chinese invention, gunpowder,
which they used in small field guns. He completed the conquest of the
Kin Empire and then swept his hosts right across Asia to Russia (1235),
an altogether amazing march. Kieff was destroyed in 1240, and nearly
all Russia became tributary to the Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a
mixed army of Poles and Germans was annihilated at the battle of
Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not
seem to have made any great efforts to stay the advancing tide.
“It is only recently,” says Bury in his notes to Gibbon’s _Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_, “that European history has begun to
understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran Poland
and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate
strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of
numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter of common
knowledge; the vulgar opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild
horde carrying all before them solely by their multitude, and galloping
through Eastern Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all
obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight, still prevails. . . .
“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements were
carried out in operations extending from the Lower Vistula to
Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of any
European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any European
commander. There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II downward,
who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should also be
noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full
knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of
Poland—they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized
system of spies; on the other hand, the Hungarians and the Christian
powers, like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their
enemies.”
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not
continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and
hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they turned
southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating
the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and
assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From
the Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south
as the Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the
seventh and eighth and the Huns in the fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly,
and in 1242 there was trouble about the succession, and recalled by
this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary
and Roumania towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their Asiatic
conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had conquered
the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in
1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280
Kublai Khan had been formally recognized Emperor of China, and so
founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins
of the Sung rule were going down in China, another brother of Mangu,
Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter
animosity to Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population
of Bagdad when they captured that city, but set to work to destroy the
immemorial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly
prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time
until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a
scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never penetrated; the Sultan
of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu’s in Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The dominions of
the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states. The eastern
Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese; the western became Moslim.
The Chinese threw off the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up
the native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644. The
Russians remained tributary to the Tartar hordes upon the south-east
steppes until 1480, when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his
allegiance and laid the foundation of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigour
under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He established himself
in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand Khan in 1369, and
conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the most savage and destructive
of all the Mongol conquerors. He established an empire of desolation
that did not survive his death. In 1505, however, a descendant of this
Timur, an adventurer named Baber, got together an army with guns and
swept down upon the plains of India. His grandson Akbar (1556-1605)
completed his conquests, and this Mongol (or “Mogul” as the Arabs
called it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until
the eighteenth century.
Map: The Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1566 A.D.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol conquest in
the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks, the
Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They extended and
consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and
conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at last Constantinople
remained like an island amongst the Ottoman dominions. In 1453 the
Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, took Constantinople, attacking it from the
European side with a great number of guns. This event caused intense
excitement in Europe and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of
the crusades was past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans conquered
Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and their fleet made
them masters of the Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna, and
they exacted it tribute from the Emperor. There were but two items to
offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the fifteenth century.
One was the restoration of the independence of Moscow (1480); the other
was the gradual reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492,
Granada, the last Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand
of Aragon and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of Lepanto
broke the prick of the Ottomans, and restored the Mediterranean waters
to Christian ascendancy.