Batu and the Devil’s Horsemen
On May 31, 1223, Mstislav the Bold, Prince of Novgorod, led a coalition of the Russian princes and Kaghan Koten of the Cumans across the Kalka River against a new foe, two tumenler of Mongol cavalry (twenty thousand strong). This new foe drew together rival Russian princes, and Cumans, who had dominated the western steppes for the past 150 years. The Russians and Cumans had inflicted a minor defeat on the invaders on the banks of the lower Dnieper, and then crossed in force, perhaps sixty thousand strong, to chase the elusive horsemen.1 For nine days, the Russians and Cumans pursued the Mongols, who feigned retreat across the Pontic-Caspian steppes, luring their pursuers to the banks of the Kalka, a small river in Ukraine emptying into the Sea of Azov.2 On the morning of the battle, Mstislav ordered his Cuman allies to cross the river first, while the Russian knights and infantry followed. The Cumans fell into a classic trap. Sübetei and Jebe, the two ablest generals of Genghis Khan, attacked as the Cumans emerged from the riverbank. The Cumans turned and fled into the Russian ranks, spreading panic. Mstislav could not rally the Russians, who faced murderous volleys of Mongol arrows for the first time. The Russians raced back to their fortified camp, and Mstislav surrendered three days later. The Mongols promptly slaughtered many of their captives, although Prince Mstislav escaped.3 Modern Russian and Soviet historians have remembered the disaster as marking the beginning of Russia’s three centuries under the Tartar yoke.4 The Medieval Chronicle of Novgorod lamented, “In such a way did God bring confusion upon us, and an endless number of people perished. The evil event came to pass on the day of Jeremiah the prophet, the 31st day of May. As for the Tatars, they turned back from the Dnieper, and we know neither from whence they came nor whither they have now gone. Only God knows that, because He brought them upon us for our sins.”5
The fear of these newest Devil’s horsemen quickly passed, and so the Russians and Cumans resumed their frontier wars against each other. Meanwhile, Jebe and Sübetei rejoined Genghis Khan and the main Mongol army on its return march to Karakorum. In just over two years, they had covered over five thousand miles, riding from Nishapur to Tabriz in northern Iran, crossing the Caucasus Mountains, battling their way as far west as Kiev and the Genoese colony of Kaffa in the Crimea, and finally returning east after defeating the Bulgars on the middle Volga.6 In the course of their spectacular march, they had also twice defeated the armies of King George IV of Georgia, and a coalition of Cumans and Alans on the Kuban steppes.7
Genghis Khan hailed his daring generals, but he was unable to exploit their victories. Only twelve years later, in 1235, at a kurultai held outside of Karakorum, did the new Great Khan Ögedei authorize a campaign against the western lands.8 Batu was to command, for he was the son of Jochi, to whom Genghis Khan had assigned the task of conquering the western lands as far as the hooves of the Mongol horses had trodden. In February 1227, Jochi had died; Genghis Khan then had died less than eight months later, in August. Six more years had passed before Ögedei permitted his nephew Batu to lead the imperial army west. There were sound strategic reasons for the delay.
At his acclamation on September 13, 1229, Ögedei at age forty-three faced daunting challenges both within the empire and on its distant frontiers. Foremost, he had a great empire to organize. His reign of twelve years proved decisive in converting Genghis Khan’s conquests into the tribute-paying provinces of a well-administered empire.9 Ögedei codified and promulgated his father’s laws as the yassa, and he ordered the compilation of the Secret History. He insisted that the future khans, his son Güyük and his nephew Möngke, master writing and at least have a familiarity with the canon of Chinese texts.10 Khans henceforth had to govern as well as conquer. Ögedei applied his genius to administration, selecting ministers with the same skill that his father possessed in choosing his generals. Ögedei took to heart the admonishment of his mandarin adviser Yelü Chucai that China, although conquered from horseback, could not be ruled from horseback.11 He chose exceptionally loyal and able ministers for each of three great regional divisions of the empire, the Muslim lands, the caravan cities of Central Asia, and the Northern Chinese prefectures—staffed by Persians, Uyghurs, and Chinese or Khitans, respectively. Local tax farmers collected the tribute in silver, but they answered to imperial officials.12 The silver currency was vastly extended by the issuing of paper currency backed by silver, and later, in China, by silk.13 Fiscal demands drove economic recovery and prosperity as Ögedei’s subjects had to earn hard currency to pay taxes. Simultaneously, he imposed order across the entire Eurasian steppes for the first time, a pax Mongolica. Trade revived and boomed along the caravan cities of the Silk Road from Tabriz to the Jade Gate, with a new extension taking caravans to the burgeoning capital of Karakorum.
Ögedei, who loved pomp and circumstance, turned Karakorum into a capital where he could preside over ceremonies that projected his universal power.14 The city, located on the steppes in former Kerait territory, emerged as the financial center of Eurasia and an international market in every luxury. It was massively fortified with black masonry walls (hence its name naming “Black Stones”), but lacked a large agricultural hinterland so that its population had to be sustained by imported foodstuffs. The city possessed a palace, artificial lake, and gardens in the Chinese manner, and bureaucratic offices, but two-thirds of the city comprised warehouses and workplaces for the thousands of captive craftsmen who supplied the court and army.15 The city, despite its fortifications, was always vulnerable, for Ögedei failed to heed the words of Bilğe Kaghan of the Gök Turks, if he had ever read them, that nomads must not build cities.
Ögedei even in his lifetime was criticized for being profligate and lazy, although his spending habits went a long way to stimulating the recovery of prosperity in the lands devastated by his father. So often Ögedei falls short in comparison to his father.16 Even his portrait commissioned by Kublai Khan seems to lack the strength of character and commanding eyes of his father. In personal habits, he was a contrast to his abstentious father.17 Ögedei was notoriously addicted to qumis, and his alcoholism aggravated his poor health, and contributed to his premature death. At best, he was probably a mellow, functional alcoholic. The feasting at his coronation, in contrast to that of his father, Genghis Khan, degenerated into an orgy of drunkenness for weeks. Ögedei opened the storerooms of Karakorum, indiscriminately handing out pearls, gold, and silk in acts of unrestrained generosity to his fellow Mongols without regard to merit or rank. His father rewarded the loyal and able; Ögedei bought popularity.
For all his personal failings, Ögedei proved an able khan, and he implemented the strategic vision of his father, Genghis Khan, directing the final conquests of the Xi Xia and Jin Empires. Kaifeng fell in 1234, and the reign of Jin emperors ended, but his erstwhile ally the Song emperor Lizong conveniently discarded his treaty of alliance and seized from the Mongols Kaifeng and the historic Han capitals Luoyang and Chang’an in the valley of the Yellow River.18 In 1235, Ögedei faced a new war in China against Song emperor Lizong. Even though Ögedei never commanded in person, he entrusted expeditions to his seasoned generals and the new generation of imperial princes.19 Foremost, Ögedei fostered cooperation within the imperial family in pursuing conquest. His obstreperous son and heir Güyük repeatedly clashed with his cousin Batu, who was senior in rank and in command of the western campaign. Their clash climaxed in an acrimonious shouting match during a victory celebration at Saray when Güyük contemptuously belittled Batu’s achievements and stormed out of the event.20 Ögedei recalled his son to Karakorum, and sternly censured Güyük, stressing that Batu alone merited the praise for the subjection of the Russian princes. Ögedei would tolerate no rivalries within the family that threatened imperial unity. In this regard, he took to heart the warnings of his father, and again, if he could read the Turkish runes, the same warnings of Bilğe Kaghan carved on his memorial inscription of the Orkhon valley nearly five centuries earlier.21
In 1235, Ögedei summoned a kurultai near Karakorum, and raised the issue of war. Ögedei preferred to reckon with the Song, and retake Kaifeng, but Batu and Sübetei, then sixty years old, pushed for the long-delayed western expedition.22 The Mongols knew little about Orthodox Russia or Latin Christendom other than that these were lands of cities, towns, and rich fields of grain. Immediately to their west on the Pontic-Caspian steppes, Mongols would face formidable nomadic foes the Cumans (more properly called Kipchak Turks) and the Bulgars. Ögedei relented and agreed to the western expedition, although he sent a major force against China that failed to retake Kaifeng.23
Ögedei assigned to Batu perhaps half of the national levy along with numerous allies, who totaled one hundred fifty thousand horsemen, and the corps of Chinese engineers.24 The ailing Sübetei, unable to ride due to his great size, accompanied in a chariot as the senior strategist, because he knew the routes, terrain, and foes to the west. This expedition might have even exceeded Genghis Khan’s campaign against Khwarazm. A train of innumerable pack animals and remounts followed Batu’s horde. The rapid march of Batu’s host across four thousand miles of steppes was an awesome spectacle, and reports of the Mongols’ approach terrorized the Kipchak Turks, who either submitted or fled.
Batu, at age thirty, commanded perhaps the greatest Mongol expedition to date, for he was recognized as the most charismatic of Jochi’s sons, all of whom deferred to their brother. In the next seven years of hard campaigning, Batu proved an indomitable general, every inch the equal of his grandfather. A decade later, the papal envoy Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, en route to the Great Khan, spent months at Batu’s encampment on the lower Volga River. Friar Carpine was awed by Batu’s presence, and judged the khan a shrewd and experienced warrior and the most deadly of foes who inspired devotion among his men.25 Batu’s three brothers, the eldest, Orda, and the two younger ones, Berke and Horde, accompanied. Ögedei also insisted the rising princes of the other imperial houses serve in this great expedition. His own two sons, Güyük and Kadan, Baidar, the son of Khan Chagatai, and Möngke, eldest of the four sons of Tolui, served; each would distinguish himself commanding independent columns over the next seven years. It was a testimony to Batu that he kept his brothers and cousins, each jealous of the others and eager for glory, focused on the enemy.
Given the scale of operations, from the start, Batu planned to operate in several columns that would strategically encircle and converge on an enemy. In the summer of 1236, the Mongol army swept across the western steppes between the Volga and Ural Rivers, where the Kipchak Turks submitted and joined the Mongol army.26 In the autumn of 1236, Batu and Sübetei, with a column of thirty-five thousand veteran horsemen, crossed the middle Volga, ravaged the lands of the Bulgars, and sacked their capital. The destruction of Bulgar, the leading Muslim city on the western steppes since the early tenth century, was both a punishment and a warning to others.27 The Bulgars arrogantly refused to submit, confident in their valor because they had defeated Sübetei’s army on its return march twelve years earlier. Other Mongol columns swept across the steppes to the west and southwest. Those Kipchaks who dwelled west of the lower Don River (dubbed Polovtsians by the Russians or Cumans by the Western Europeans) fled west to seek asylum from King Bela IV of Hungary.28 On the grasslands of the Kuban, to the southwest of the lower Volga, the Alans were overwhelmed in a single battle, and the survivors escaped into the Caucasus Mountains.29 Within six months, Batu had subdued the entire of the western steppes, and enrolled into the imperial army numerous horsemen from his new subjects.
In the next year, 1237, Batu sent envoys to the Russian cities, demanding their submission, and refitted and drilled his army on the lower Volga River. Suddenly, in November, he launched a daring winter campaign when the frozen marshes and rivers of Russia acted as highways. Batu surprised the Russian princes, who were in comfortable winter quarters. The Mongols, however, were impervious to the cold and ready to ride their sturdy mounts that could forage beneath snow. Yuri II, Grand Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, who aspired to a hegemony over his rival Orthodox princes, contemptuously rejected Batu’s demands of submission, and he called upon his rival princes to join in a grand alliance against the heathen invaders.30 But the jealous princes could not mobilize their armies until the next spring. Furthermore, each Russian prince would defend his own realm rather than cooperate with rival princes. For Batu, it was simply a matter of reducing cities and towns defended by wooden stockades. The Mongols employed captives to construct fosse and palisade to cut off a town. The Chinese engineers then bombarded the town walls by launching from mangonels or trebuchets incendiaries of fire lances or iron grenades; within days, the city was ablaze.31 Engineers and craftsmen in the khan’s employ had also altered the formula of black gunpowder to ignite in a single explosion. Assorted metal projectiles were propelled by black gunpowder fired from iron tubes; many were operated by a single man.32 The noise and smoke demoralized the defenders, whose own artillery lacked the range to return fire. Therefore, the Mongols timed their final assault during the height of confusion, and so captured and sacked a city at little cost to themselves. Batu could repeat this pattern of attack across Russia for the next three years. Batu opened his Russian campaign in December 1237, when he laid siege to Ryazan, a leading city of central Russia on the Oka River.33 Prince Yuri, who coveted the city, sent no help—a selfish act all too common among the Russian princes. Within five days, Chinese engineers and captive laborers ringed Ryazan with siege works. Ryazan’s wooden walls were set ablaze by incendiaries hurled by Batu’s artillery. On December 21, 1237, the Mongols stormed into Ryazan, massacred the population, and burned the city to the ground. The ferocity and speed of the destruction of this venerable city stunned the Russian princes.34
Batu and Sübetei, whose scouts covered great distances quickly, had accurate reports as to the state of the defenses of Russian towns and the whereabouts of Russian armies. In the winter months of early 1238, Batu swept north to capture and sack Moscow, then a minor city, but on the strategic nexus of Russia’s waterways.35 The city of Vladimir, then the greatest of the Russian cities, was their next objective. Prince Yuri II and his army were outmaneuvered, defeated in detail, and driven into Vladimir. On February 8, 1238, the last day of Lent, Batu’s sappers breached the walls of Vladimir. The Mongols poured into the city, reduced it to ashes, and slaughtered the population.36 Yuri II escaped the massacre and raised a new army, but on March 4, 1238, Yuri and his army were annihilated at the Battle of the Sit River.37
Batu then divided his army into columns, each of two or three tumenler (twenty thousand to thirty thousand men strong) so that the Mongols sacked fourteen major Russian cities over the next two years.38 Only Novgorod and Pskov in the far northwest escaped destruction because an early spring thaw turned dirt roads into rivers of mud. The fighting climaxed in the winter campaign of 1240, when Batu targeted the last serious foe, Prince Danylo of Halych, known by his Western contemporaries as Daniel of Galicia, who ruled the cities of Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslav.39 In November 1240, Batu opened another one of his winter campaigns by laying siege to Kiev, mother of Russian cities and home to the holiest icons and churches of Orthodox Russia. The garrison of one thousand men, commanded by voivode of Dmytro, a vassal of Prince Danylo, refused to surrender, even though he could expect no assistance.40 Meanwhile, Prince Danylo appealed in vain for help from King Bela IV of Hungary. On November 28, Batu positioned his artillery against the walls of Kiev, and then on December 6, 1240, the Mongols breached the walls and stormed the city. The garrison and population, numbered at fifty thousand, were slaughtered; only two thousand escaped the carnage. Remarkably, the voivode of Dmytro, who was wounded in the final fighting, was spared for his bravery. Kiev’s nobles, however, were executed by the customary trampling by the hooves of Mongol horses.41 The capture of Kiev was far more a symbolic than a strategic victory because the destruction of so renowned a city sent a wave of terror across Christendom. Kiev’s beautiful churches were famous among all Christians, and the city’s princely and noble houses were long linked by marriage to all the courts of Christian Europe.
Across Russia, organized resistance simply collapsed. Everywhere, the Mongols were free to range widely over the countryside, burning villages and sown fields, and enslaving tens of thousands of peasants. Terrified refugees fled west into Poland and Hungary, spreading tales of Mongol atrocities.42 To the Russians, the savage horsemen must be Ishmaelites, the unclean descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham and his Egyptian concubine Hagar. Since the seventh century, Orthodox writers accepted as truth the apocalyptic sermon of Pseudo-Methodius, a mystic writing in Syriac, who identified the Ishmaelites as Jews, Arabs, and Scythians.43 As these tales of horror raced across Western Europe, they became ever more frightening with each retelling. The Mongols ceased to be viewed as the soldiers of Prester John; instead they must be the children of Gog and Magog heralding the end of days. By the time these rumors reached the shores of England, the chronicler Matthew Paris, comfortable at his desk in Saint Albans Abbey, misconstrued the tribal name Tatars as Tartars and applied it to all Mongols, whom he turned into creatures of Tartarus, Classical hell, and so the Devil’s horsemen.44 The name has stuck ever since.
In just four years, Batu had conquered the principalities of Orthodox Russia, and for the next three centuries, Russian princes saluted Batu and his heirs as Tsar, the Slavic for Caesar, and so the secular lord of the Orthodox world. Batu significantly contributed to forging the future ideology and institutions of autocratic Russia.45 The Russian princes, long in awe of the power of the Tartar Khan at Saray, fused Mongol ritual and institutions to those of their Byzantine heritage. Batu also unwittingly shifted the political axis from Kiev to Moscow. The Grand Princes of Muscovy steadily extended their political influence because they dutifully acted as the revenue agents who collected and delivered the tribute that the Russians owed to Batu’s heirs.46 Repeated failure to shake off the Mongol hegemony in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sharpened Russian hatred of any foreign rule. It took the military revolution in Europe of the sixteenth century to alter the balance of power between Tartar Khans and Moscow’s Grand Princes. Ivan IV, the Terrible (1547–1575), who first assumed the title Tsar, initiated a Russian tradition that has endured to this day, namely the mastering and improving of the newest military technology.47 Ivan adopted the most current European artillery and handheld firearms so that his army could batter down the city walls and check the nomadic cavalry charge. His conquest of the middle and lower Volga signaled a new power on the march across the steppes: imperial Russia. With the fall of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, Ivan IV ended the slave markets that had supplied Islamic regimes with mamluks. Tsar Ivan IV and his heirs were determined to end the nomadic threat forever.48 They directed the most successful of European expansions overland, across the forests and steppes of Eurasia, while the maritime European powers expanded across the oceans of the world.49 Russia’s rulers never forgot nor forgave the Mongols, who alone hold the honor of conquering Russia. None of the Western invaders since—the Poles, Swedes, French, or Germans—have overcome the autocratic Russian regimes forged in response to the Mongols.
With the capture of Kiev, Batu had secured the Pontic-Caspian steppes, subjected the Russian principalities, and reigned as the unchallenged Khan of the western steppes. Batu, however, immediately set out to carry Mongol arms into the unknown lands of Latin Christendom and so to reach the western shores of the great ocean that encircled the world. Batu seized on several pretexts for his invasion of Central Europe, foremost the reception of fugitive Cumans (deemed rebellious subjects) and the murder of Mongol envoys by King Bela IV of Hungary.50
While the monarchs of Western Europe failed to heed the warnings about the Mongols, Batu and Sübetei meticulously collected information from spies, captives, and merchants about the situation to the west. They planned a coordinated two-pronged attack against Poland and Hungary during the early winter months of 1241, just weeks after their capture of Kiev.51 Batu commanded the main army that formed the southern column with Hungary as its objective. Sübetei commanded the northern column of two tumenler (twenty thousand horsemen) with the strategic mission to invade Galicia and distract the German and Polish princes from coming to the aid of the main foe, King Bela IV of Hungary. Batu’s older brother Orda, and Baidar, son of Khan Chagatai, each commanded one of the tumenler. In early February 1240, Sübetei crossed the frozen Vistula, and divided his army into two raiding columns that devastated southern Poland and southeastern Silesia.52 At the Battle of Chmielnik, on March 18, 1241, Prince Baidar crushed the army of Duke Boleslav V of Cracow, “the Chaste,” who was the brother-in-law of King Bela IV.53 No sooner was the battle joined than Duke Boleslav fled the field, thereby panicking the rest of his army, which was slaughtered by the Mongols. Cracow was abandoned; the Mongols burned the empty city on March 24, 1241.54 Refugees streamed west, spreading yet more stories of Mongol atrocities. Henry II, “the Pious,” Duke of Silesia (1238–1241), hastily rallied Polish princes and the Teutonic Knights to defend his realm. The impatient duke, however, blundered into risking battle before the arrival of the army of his brother-in-law, King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia, which was perhaps a day’s march away. On the plains of Liegnitz (modern Legnica), April 9, 1241, Orda Khan, commanding ten thousand Mongols, encircled and annihilated an army of twenty thousand Germans, Poles, and Teutonic Knights.55
Prince Henry was slain in the rout. The Mongols brandished his head atop a spear before the walls of Liegnitz and Breslau, to the horror of the defenders. The carnage on the field of Liegnitz was frightening; Western chroniclers report that Sübetei carted off nine sacks of ears taken from the slain.56 Sübetei had accomplished his mission brilliantly, for his northern column defeated two armies that would have joined King Bela in Hungary. Immediately after their victory at Liegnitz, Sübetei and Orda withdrew south, crossed the Mehadia Pass, and joined the other three Mongol columns commanded by Batu, Baidar, and Güyük that were converging on Hungary.57
Batu had executed a masterful strategy whereby he denied Bela IV reinforcements from neighboring monarchs,and compelled the Hungarian king to abandon the grasslands of Transylvania. Bela was forced to make a stand on the western banks of the Tisza (or Theiss) River, some one hundred miles east of his capital, Buda. On April 10, 1241, Batu reunited his four columns on the east bank of the river Mohi or Sajo, a tributary of the Tisza River, and just opposite the camp of King Bela.58 The two armies were evenly matched. Medieval chroniclers report eighty thousand Hungarians faced seventy thousand Mongols, although many modern scholars would reduce the numbers by half or two-thirds.
King Bela had summoned his kingdom’s feudal levy, and he had confidence in his knights and crossbow men even though none of them had experience fighting nomadic cavalry. Bela, suspicious of the loyalty of his Cuman allies, had treacherously ordered them slain, thereby foolishly depriving his army of the light cavalry who could have matched the Mongols.59 Batu had every reason to be confident of victory, and concealed most of his army from Bela’s view so that the Hungarian king was unsure of Mongol strength and intentions. Five miles upstream from the camps was a bridge over the Sajo River; Bela ordered Prince Kalman of Slavonia with a company of crossbow men to secure the bridge on the evening of April 10, 1241.60 In the darkness, the Hungarians surprised a Mongol detachment guarding the bridge, and the crossbow men drove off the Mongols. Kalman then withdrew his main force, unaware that a major Mongol column was advancing to cross the bridge at dawn. Batu, upon learning of the defeat, ordered his cavalry to ford on either side of the bridge, while he deployed his artillery to drive the Hungarian crossbow men off the bridge. The Mongols attacked soon after dawn on April 11, 1241.61 They seized the bridge, and then marched swiftly to surprise the Hungarian army in camp, which was ringed by a laager of wagons. King Bela hastily ordered his army to meet the Mongols, but the Hungarians were quickly outflanked and driven back into their camp.62 Bela and his knights fought valiantly and inflicted heavy casualties on those Mongols who dared to risk close-order fighting. But the Hungarian infantry soon broke and ran. Many fugitives were blocked by the laager and fell in the camp; those who broke free were hunted down and slaughtered by pursuing Mongol horsemen. When Bela ordered his knights to withdraw, they too became entangled in the laager and fell fighting in the camp.63 The carnage was dreadful. Hungarians of all ranks fell in great numbers, and the kingdom’s military power was broken for a generation, but Mongol losses too were heavy.64
Bela lost the battle of Mohi strategically when he failed to secure the bridge over the Sajo River. Tactically, the feudal levies of the Hungarians were completely outclassed by the veteran cavalry of the Mongol Empire. Bela lacked the disciplined infantry who could support his knights in a formation comparable to those recommended by Maurice Tiberius against the Avars or Li Jin against the Gök Turks. King Bela miraculously escaped from the confused fighting in the camp. He fled to Pest, thence to the court of Duke Frederick II of Austria, and finally to Zagreb on the Dalmatian coast.65 He wrote letters, imploring the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX for reinforcements, especially crossbow men, who alone could repel a Mongol charge.66 Meanwhile, in the Hungarian camp, Batu seized the royal seals found on the body of Bela’s chancellor. Batu thereupon issued bogus decrees ordering peasants not to flee, but to remain in their villages.67 Throughout the summer, the unopposed Mongols ravaged the kingdoms of Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, rounding up thousands of captives, who were deported to Mongolia. Then, suddenly, by the end of summer, Batu withdrew east to his encampment at Saray on the lower Volga.68 The threat to Latin Christendom had suddenly passed. His cavalry horses had consumed the fodder of the Hungarian plains, and reconnaissance detachments that had reached as far as Vienna and the Dalmatian coastal towns reported a dearth of pastures to sustain the army.69 In a tactical sense, Batu had achieved his immediate mission of punishing Bela for his alleged murders of Mongol envoys and his asylum granted to Cuman refugees. Yet the scale of Batu’s operation points to a far greater strategic objective than a punitive expedition. Logistics compelled Batu’s withdrawal; politics at Karakorum turned his attention away from Christian Europe.
Christendom was spared a new Mongol onslaught due to fortuitous circumstances. On December 11, 1241, Ögedei died, a victim of his own alcoholism, although rumors of poison circulated widely.70 Perhaps weeks later, his older brother Chagatai, khan of the central steppes, too had passed away. All the sons of Genghis Khan were now gone, and their sons, grandsons of Genghis Khan and cousins to each other, would inevitably dispute the succession to the imperial throne. Within six weeks, the unsettling news of these deaths reached Batu at his winter encampment on the Volga. Ögedei’s widow, Töregene Khatun, who despised Batu, intrigued to put on the throne her son Güyük, the least favored son of the deceased Great Khan and no friend to Batu.71 Batu postponed any plans of a new offensive in the west, and sought allies in the kurultai that would elect the new Great Khan. Batu could not have anticipated that the election would be held five and a half years later. Nor could he have imagined that he would never return to his homeland or campaign in Europe again. During the decade following the death of Ögedei, two succession crises brought the empire to the brink of civil war.72 Each election put on the imperial throne a short-lived Great Khan, Güyük and Möngke. Despite plans to renew the war in the far west, each of these khans instead deployed the imperial army against far wealthier opponents, the Islamic Middle East and Song China. Latin Christendom ultimately escaped the Mongol yoke due to its strategic insignificance and poverty in the eyes of the Mongols.
Many historians have pointed out that circumstances also spared Batu from almost certain defeat if he had pushed into Central Europe in 1242. Later Western envoys sent to the Mongol court, especially Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (who doubled as a spy), boasted that Christian knights and crossbow men would prevail over Mongol horsemen.73 Most Christians at the time were not so sanguine, and these later claims can be dismissed as special pleading. Modern scholars, with the benefit of hindsight, have often argued that the Mongols had reached the limits of their logistics and communications at the Battle of Mohi. Future conquests in Central and Western Europe were thus beyond their military capacity. The Christian monarchs and nobles of the thirteenth century had erected formidable masonry castles across Europe.74 King John of England, for example, nearly went bankrupt building castles in Normandy, although his efforts came to naught when he lost the duchy in 1204.75 Foremost, Batu would have faced Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany, and King of the Two Sicilies (Regno), the greatest monarch in Christendom since Charlemagne.76
As to logistical obstacles and castles, Batu would have faced strategic problems no more daunting than those faced by Kublai Khan in his conquest of Song China. The Mongol imperial army would have had to recruit many local allies, expand its siege train, and reorganize its logistics to pursue a slow and methodical conquest of Central Europe and Italy. Therefore, Batu would have had to alter his strategy and the pace of conquest, and he needed the full might of the imperial army. As to Frederick II, he was indeed a worthy foe. Frederick II fielded the best army in Christendom, including numerous crossbow men, dreaded by the Mongols, and superb light cavalry of loyal Saracens (recruited from his military colony at Luceria).77 If he could have drawn up his army in a tight formation on terrain of his own choosing, he had reasonable prospects of victory. But Frederick had far more pressing priorities. Frederick would have seen any war with the Mongols as a distraction from his prime aim of asserting his authority over the Papal States and communes of northern Italy.78 He flatly refused assistance to Bela IV in 1241.79 He admired Mongol discipline and tactics, and he ordered the princes and nobles of the Holy Roman Empire to evacuate the population behind walled cities, harvest and stockpile crops, and avoid open battle with the Mongols should they return the next year.80 He planned typical defensive measures of a monarch who viewed the Mongols as marauders intent on loot and captives rather than conquest, although in later letters, Frederick expressed fears that the Mongols just might march on Rome. For Batu sent envoys to demand that Frederick submit lest the emperor risk defeat, capture, and demotion to the falconer of the Khan.81 When Batu rode west in 1236, Frederick was warring with the Guelph communes of the Lombard League headed by Milan and supported by Pope Gregory IX and the maritime republics of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. Frederick, who was willing to recognize papal authority in Central Italy, was determined to fight this war in northern Italy to the finish and then to reimpose imperial control over the all-too-independent communes.82 As Batu overran the cities of Russia, Frederick won a decisive victory over the Lombard civic pikemen at Cortenuova in 1237—avenging the defeat his grandfather had suffered at the hands of the Lombards sixty years earlier at Legnano.83 Yet Milan refused to negotiate, and Frederick could reach no accommodation with Pope Gregory IX. Instead, on February 22, 1240, Gregory led a solemn procession through the streets of Rome in supplication of Saints Peter and Paul, which climaxed in the declaration of Frederick as a heretic and unworthy of his crowns.84 For the first time, Gregory preached a crusade against a Christian monarch. His successor, Innocent IV, even more relentlessly pursued the political crusade that ended in the destruction of the Hohenstaufen imperial monarchy in Germany and Italy twenty-eight years later.85 In 1242, Batu would have faced no united resistance in either Central Europe or Italy, and many German princes and Lombard communes could well have come to terms with Batu out of hatred of the Hohenstaufen emperor.
In the summer of 1241, Pope Gregory IX responded to King Bela’s appeal, and proclaimed a crusade against the Mongols.86 The project, however, languished with the death of Gregory and his short-lived successor, Celestine IV, in the autumn of the same year. For the next twenty months, the pontifical throne was vacant as Frederick intrigued to rig the election in his favor.87 In June 1243, the newly elected Pope Innocent IV had even less desire than Frederick to direct a crusade against the Mongols. He aimed to support the Lombard communes to check Frederick in northern Italy, and he called upon the princes of Germany to rebel against the Anti-Christ Frederick.88 In December of 1244, during the second year of his pontificate, Innocent quit Rome and relocated the Papal Curia to Lyons, under the protection of the saintly King Louis IX of France.89 From there, he wrote letters, missives, and encyclicals to move the German princes to rebellion. He would not return to Rome until six years later, after the death of Frederick.
At a great ecumenical council that gathered at Lyons in the spring of 1245, Innocent IV addressed the Mongol threat, among many other pressing issues. He preferred diplomacy to war in dealing with the Mongols.90 He sent the first European envoys to the Mongol court in an effort to convert the Great Khan. His Franciscan and Dominican friars carried papal letters extolling the true faith of the cross and the blessings of peace, but no reports survive of negotiations for an alliance against the Muslims. Yet, in his heart, Innocent must have nursed high hopes of converting the Great Khan and turning the Mongols into a mighty Crusader army that would smite the infidels and recapture Jerusalem for Christendom, for the third and last time. But such an alliance never came about.