"The Mongols were over rated"

[Admiral Yi]

I think that Jake's friend may be muddling up the rather good English armies of c.1350 with the more mundane forces of 1200 

Is this true?  All I know is that in the Joan of Arc movies the English are always hard faced and well armored whereas in the Agincourt movies they're skinny and dressed like peasants.

[Razgovory]

I believe the Mongols and their successors tried this strategy in Eastern Europe for a long time with mixed results.

The Golden Horde?  They never intended to conquer anybody just to exact tribute IIRC.

Some of their raids also got clobbered.  And of course, the Golden Horde has long since ceased to exist.

[Razgovory]

I think that Jake's friend may be muddling up the rather good English armies of c.1350 with the more mundane forces of 1200 

Is this true?  All I know is that in the Joan of Arc movies the English are always hard faced and well armored whereas in the Agincourt movies they're skinny and dressed like peasants.

"English"* armies in the mid 13th century wouldn't have been that different from French armies in the same time period.

*They were English in the sense they were led by the King of England.  They spoke French and largely distinct from the English peasantry.  What language the Infantry spoke
I do not know, but it was often made up of foreign mercenaries.

[The Minsky Moment]

Castles can hold out longer then cities.  Castles only hold a small group of men all of them are well armed and trained.  Assaulting them is the only quick way to take the castle and that leads
to lots of casualties.  And unfortunately for the Mongols there were a lot of castles.  If the Mongols bypass the castles, the soldiers inside would ride out and harass the mongol army and
it's foragers.

Recently read a book on the Albigensian Crusades which is around the same period.  There were a lot of sieges.  What I found interesting is that even where castles were strongly defensible, a lot of them fell surprisingly quickly - usually because the guy in charge lost hope and sought terms or simply ran away.  It seemed that where the besiegers has a clear numerical superiority, a castle would only hold out if there was strong, determined leadership and an experienced garrison - which was often not the case.  And even where it was unexpected problems arise - like one defiant castle that replenished its cisterns with rainwater, only to have the commander and large swaths of the garrison die off from a nasty case of dysentary.

[The Minsky Moment]

Some of their raids also got clobbered.  And of course, the Golden Horde has long since ceased to exist.

They had a nice run.  And the ruriks didn't exactly endure forever either.

[Razgovory]

There was a certain code about the sieges then.  You would hold out for so long, to satisfy certain obligations, and then could surrender.  If you surrendered before certain periods
of time they couldn't execute you or hold you for ransom.  I don't know the specifics about these codes, but Mongols would not likely observe them, (and probably wouldn't be able to
communicate their demands very effectively).  After word gets out of a few massacres I imagine resolve would stiffen fairly quickly.

It's also worth noting that the Albigensian Crusades lasted a long time.  Like a couple of decades over a fairly small bit of territory.  The Mongols couldn't spend 20 years sieging this castle
and that one.

[The Larch]

By that standard every single European army was disorganized, and Richard the Lionheart wasn't a particulary good commander anyway.

Huh?  Richard was a great commander.  I mean to the extent there were great commanders in the 12th century.

Don't know, he seems to me like a vastly overrated figure. At least he had a great PR team, I guess.

[Viking]

I just want to point out that I have consistently used Angevin rather than English. Though, I really should not have use the word Longbow at all.

To be honest it is pretty silly to compare Mongol Horse Archers of 1250 with Welsh Longbowmen of 1350.

[Jacob]

So the Mongols didn't encounter castles with garrisons in any of the places they conquered? Were they a unique feature of the European military landscape?

[Josquius]

The 'English'.
Such a fight would obviously be a Mongol invasion of France, no way would the English be over on the Eurasian steppe. Hence lots of forests and castles and other nastyness against which the mongols won't do particularly well.

[The Larch]

So the Mongols didn't encounter castles with garrisons in any of the places they conquered? Were they a unique feature of the European military landscape?

Considering they reached friggin' Hungary during their 20 year campaig in Europe, I think it's mightily naive to think that they didn't encounter a single castle/walled city/fortified outpost/whatever surrounded by big walls on their way there.

[Jacob]

So the Mongols didn't encounter castles with garrisons in any of the places they conquered? Were they a unique feature of the European military landscape?

Considering they reached friggin' Hungary during their 20 year campaig in Europe, I think it's mightily naive to think that they didn't encounter a single castle/walled city/fortified outpost/whatever surrounded by big walls on their way there.

That's kind of what I think, yeah.

[The Larch]

So the Mongols didn't encounter castles with garrisons in any of the places they conquered? Were they a unique feature of the European military landscape?

Considering they reached friggin' Hungary during their 20 year campaig in Europe, I think it's mightily naive to think that they didn't encounter a single castle/walled city/fortified outpost/whatever surrounded by big walls on their way there.

That's kind of what I think, yeah.

AFAIK what really hampered the Mongols more in their European campaign was terrain rather than fortifications. For instance, after the battle of Legnica the king of hungary escaped to Croatia, with the Mongols hot in his trail, and even if they got to burn Zagreb down they got really bogged down in Dalmatia with its rugged terrain and being harassed by the local troops at all times, so they ultimately abandoned that part of their campaign. The Mongol tactics worked great in the great plains and in pitched battles, which was to what they were geared for, but once they got into cavalry-unfriendly terrain things got more difficult for them.

[Josquius]

I think the issue is more that due to its fractured political nature western Europe had castles everywhere, rather than people elsewhere in the world not building forts.

[Razgovory]

So the Mongols didn't encounter castles with garrisons in any of the places they conquered? Were they a unique feature of the European military landscape?

Considering they reached friggin' Hungary during their 20 year campaig in Europe, I think it's mightily naive to think that they didn't encounter a single castle/walled city/fortified outpost/whatever surrounded by big walls on their way there.

Fortunately nobody said that.   Castles are fairly unique in that they were built privately and not by a central government.  Every lord who could afford a castle would build one.  So you would have lots and lots of castles.  A better organized government would only build a few fortifications, usually at strategic points.  This saves money, and reduces the number of strong points a potential usurper could take.  After the Initial Mongol invasion the Hungarians developed a fortification program in which the country faired much better against subsequent attacks by the Mongols.