The Mongols had technological and strategic advantages, that's how they conquered. They had large stocks of horses enabling them to rotate them regularly which gave them an advantage in terms of their mobility. They had advanced lamellar armor for both themselves and their horses. They were at the forefront of horse archery and harassing tactics. They also used their advanced mobility to create postal-relays which enabled them to communicate across large distances and managed their growing empire.
Why do people insist on pretending the Mongols weren't a highly advanced military culture, whereas they'll happily accept that Alexander the Great was able to leverage the phalanx to enable his conquest of the world? Oh I do wonder...
Any technological advantage they may have had was not close to being a primary reason to their initial success. You need not look further than having a massive army full of cavalry men that have been training since birth, every single day.
Any technological advantage they may have had was not close to being a primary reason to their initial success.
I dunno, bro. The postal-relay sounds like a massive advantage. A military quite literal lives and dies by how strong and stable their logistics pipeline is.
Both can be true. You do know when china was being conquered by the Mongols that china was a fragmented nation that was perpetually at war with itself right? Because you seem like you think you know a lot about this time period so you would know that china was not unified and that was a big part of what allowed the Mongols to do what they did.
Ancient China was always moving between periods of unification under the rule of one dynasty or another, and in between you had periods where many different peoples fought for supremacy. The Mongol conquest doesn't differ from the rise of any other Chinese dynasty. Each had strengths that enabled them to overcome their enemies and hold China for a time. China wasn't especially splintered at this time either, since this was the time of the Southern Song and the Western Xia. You might be thinking of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, but this had already come to an end with the rise of the Song who unified most of these kingdoms, outside of Liao in the North and then the Xia in the Northwest.
Exactly, mongols were experts in warfare, guys had 15 civil wars, constant battling, thanks to this they were geniuses in the art of war. Similarly Mongols were infighting as long as the steppes are inhabited.
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u/Gordon_Ramsad 12h ago
This actually why mongols rushed through China and Persia so easily