from Hacker News

Climatic and environmental aspects of Mongol withdrawal from Hungary (2016)

by rfreytag on 1/13/23, 2:01 PM with 92 comments

• by ETH_start on 1/15/23, 5:13 AM

  None of the fortified towns in Hungary fell to the Mongols. This was a lesson not lost on King Bela, and he embarked on a massive fort construction project which made enough progress in time for the second Mongol invasion of Hungary, which the Hungarian kingdom much more thoroughly repulsed.

• by fractallyte on 1/15/23, 8:56 AM

  I'm going to butt in here with an observation that might be 'uncool', but it needs to be voiced.

  Mongols didn't just 'withdraw' and leave Europe alone. The article mentions they brought Chinese gunpowder - so they left behind a valuable technological legacy.

  They killed one million Hungarians, but that was just one nation. The overall conquest(s) effected a vast death toll across Europe and near Asia.

  What else did they leave behind? Not mentioned: a genetic legacy. This was a living legacy as impactful as anything else, arguable even more so...

  And what's involved in that? Conquering armies tend to kill men and boys, and rape women and girls. (The most comprehensive recent record of similar events is from post-war Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...) A significant proportion of those rapes resulted in pregnancies. In medieval Europe, we can assume that abortion was mostly unavailable.

  So actually, in one sense Mongols remained in Europe, spreading their genes through the most vile and traumatic acts inflicted on the hidden victims of conflict: women.

  Women are half of humanity. It's wrong to neglect that aspect of invasion.

• by l- on 1/15/23, 5:10 AM

  When Mongols Set Out to Conquer the World, There Was One Limiting Factor: Grass (154 points by benbreen 9 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30886110

• by subroutine on 1/15/23, 4:25 AM

  Unseasonably warm weather stopped the Mongolian horde from conquering Europe. Hmm

• by mprime1 on 1/15/23, 5:03 PM

  Currently reading the Mongoliad book series (Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and star cast of other contemporary sci-fi writers). Recommended if this kind of history is interesting to you.

• by ddmma on 1/15/23, 10:14 AM

  If only they had flying horses to go over Alps

• by raydiatian on 1/15/23, 4:25 AM

  Plausibility != proof

• by banku_brougham on 1/15/23, 4:50 AM

  "Horde" - a term long used to deflect the sophisticated tactical, strategic, technological, and governmental methods of the Mongols. Their accomplishments are not lost on the war colleges of the west (at the the US for sure, especially the US Marines), but no one else seems to know this.

• by sarchertech on 1/15/23, 3:31 AM

  The title is a bit clickbaity and, as usual, makes a much stronger claim than the research suggests. Sure maybe it was the climate, or maybe it was just regression to the mean.

  There were roughly 100x as many Europeans as Mongolians in the 13th century. It seems unlikely they could have ever conquered all of Europe with supply lines stretching back to Asia. All while maintaining a grip on 100 million subjugated non-Mongolians who probably weren’t keen to send and supply troops across the world.

  Conquering they much territory is an extremely unusual event, it seems reasonable that the Mongols would just eventually run out of steam.

• by marosgrego on 1/15/23, 11:07 AM

  The title is wrong, the withdrawal didn't happen in 1215.

• by RandomWorker on 1/15/23, 4:22 AM

  Correlation doesn’t imply causation. I’m not sure how more water seen in tree bark thickness quickly correlates to the Mongols not conquering Europe.. That horses don’t do well in watery land seems like a poor theory to me. Although that one movie that I saw where horses got stuck in the UK battle seems to collaborate that theory... Like all science it’s a theory offered and it’s to other historians to prove it wrong. I find it all fascinating.