Re: WHY did the Mongols invade Europe?
RedCurz wrote:One thing I don't get is..
Why did the Mongols want to invade Europe in the first place?
"This question is going along with the theory that all nations plan to gain something from expansion."
What were the Mongols planning on gaining?
All I can find on the internet is that most people believe that the Mongols Invasions were pointless b/c they conquered most of europe and then just left.
If anyone has any answers at all please respond asap b/c I need this info for school. Any motives that you can think will be just fine.
-thanks
~Carly
Mongols did not conquer most of Europe. They subjugated the Russian principalities and then invaded Eastern Europe on something like a 700 mile front, decisively defeating the Hungarians at Mohi and routing a Polish and Teutonic knight army at Liegnitz and were resting and reorganizing in the plains of Hungary when word of the death of Oktai Khan arrived, requiring the leaders of the golden horde to return to Mongolia. The horde pulled out of Eastern Europe and set up shop at Sarai near Volgagrad.
In the normal course of events i.e. without Oktai dying, they'd have anticipated reenforcements of men and horses and attempted to push to the Atlantic ocean and take the whole place over.
You can't look at the middle ages and expect to see people acting for the same motives as ours. Few people lived past 40 or 50, meaning that if a soldier got slow and lost a step at 45 and got killed on account of it, he'd only lost a couple of years versus the alternative of having been a farmer. Moreover, in an age which lacked movies, rock concerts, opera, the NFL and the WWF, war was the major form of sport.
One of the most major battles of the 1400s in fact (Tannenberg) was held up for several days for a small handful of English knights to arrive and not miss out, which can only happen if the whole thing is viewed as a sport.
Mongols basically loved warfare and their noble echelons at least believed themselves to have some sort of a devine mandate to rule the entire Earth, if possible. At minimum they sought to dominate trade routes. The man basically running the golden horde when it invaded eastern Europe, Subudai, had a major-league case of wanderlust and a desire to go into the books as the only military leader ever to stand on the shores of both oceans. He almost succeeded.
