The Mongol Military System

Back in the day, I wrote this entry for a military history encyclopedia. Since I retain the copyright, I’d like to share it here to supplement the previous post on the Mongols and war.

MONGOL MILITARY SYSTEM: Under warlords such as Temüjin or Genghis Khan (1162-1227) and his grandson Kubilai Khan (1260-94), the Mongols in the thirteenth century conquered and consolidated the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching from the Danube to the Pacific Ocean. At their zenith, Mongol possessions included China under the Yuan Dynasty (1272-1368), Russia under the Golden Horde (1237-1480), and the Middle East, including modern day Iraq and Iran, under the Il-Khans. The unprecedented geographical extent of the Mongol empire testified to the brilliance of its military system, a system inseparable from Mongol cultural beliefs and practices and one that constituted a perfect marriage of tactics and technology with environment.

Cultural Beliefs and Practices

Before the thirteenth century, internecine bickering constrained Mongol military expansion. Genghis Khan’s great achievement, completed in 1206, was to unify 20-30 disparate tribes into a cohesive force numbering 1-2 million. By promoting men based on individual initiative and merit as demonstrated in battle, Genghis improved military performance and vigor while breaking down traditional tribal animosities and allegiances. Well led and motivated primarily by plunder, Genghis’s army destroyed the Muslim state of Khwarazm (roughly modern day Iran, Afghanistan, Turkestan, and parts of northern India), sacking Samarkand, its capital, and murdering perhaps 100,000 people. In northern China in the 1220s, Genghis’s army systematically slaughtered at least 20 million Chinese to clear land for nomadic herding.

Genghis used such ruthless, genocidal practices both to punish peoples who resisted Mongol rule and to intimidate prospective victims. This deliberate policy of terror reflected a Mongol culture that eschewed chivalric romanticization and regulation of combat for a thoroughly predatory and practical approach to warfare. In Mongol culture there was no dishonor in winning bloodless victories, whether by intimidation, subterfuge, decimation of enemy forces at long range, or some combination of the three. Hardheaded and pragmatic tactics reflected a hardscrabble existence. Indeed, Mongols were known for placing captives in the vanguard of an attack, both to dismay and discourage opponents from firing on and possibly hitting their own people. From a European perspective, such tactics were more than dishonorable, they were monstrous. The Mongols, however, entertained no such moral qualms or romantic illusions.

Adaptability was another feature of Mongol culture, and its leaders learned to moderate brutality to enhance economic gain. After Genghis’s death his third son Ogodei renewed attacks against China. With the fall of the last major Chinese city in 1235, Ogodei contemplated massacring all males except skilled craftsmen. Yeh-lu C’hu-t’sai, his Chinese advisor, persuaded him he had more to gain by letting the Chinese live and exploiting them through taxation rather than simply killing them all and stealing their goods. Highly developed systems of taxation and tribute came to characterize Mongol military rule. The Golden Horde exacted tribute from Russian tsars for nearly 250 years until Ivan III finally threw off the Mongol yoke in 1480. Thus a key element of the Mongols’ success was to make war pay for war. Ogodei showed further flexibility by building a capital city, Karakorum, on the steppe in Mongolia, abandoning traditional Mongol contempt for settled communities and urban refinements.

The Mongol Empire reached its peak under Kubilai Khan. The resulting Pax Mongolia led to the reopening of the silk route between Europe and China, enabling commerce that filled the coffers of the four Mongol khanates. These khanates developed a civil administration staffed by literate clerks recruited from regions throughout the empire, including China, Persia, Arabia, and Europe. Such cultural assimilation was also shown in military recruitment. Mongol armies in western Eurasia consisted primarily of Turks, Iranians, and Arabs, rather than ethnic Mongols. By demonstrating religious tolerance, mainly by indifference, the Mongols also minimized ideological resistance to their rule. Mongol officials often converted to the religion practiced by their particular subjects, thereby showing sensitivity to, if not necessarily acceptance of their subjects’ beliefs.

Marriage of Tactics and Technology with Environment

The Mongols initially ranged widely across the steppe, the five thousand mile swath of grasslands stretching from southern Russia to Mongolia. Forced by the steppe’s semi-arid nature to lead a nomadic existence, Mongol culture became exceptionally hardy and mobile. For mobility Mongol warriors relied on mares, 14 to 15 hands high, thickset with broad foreheads and short legs, whose thick hair protected them from the steppe’s harshness. Their fermented milk provided an essential dietary supplement. Each warrior typically kept three ponies in reserve, alternating them so that he always had a fresh mount to ride into battle. By living in circular tents known as yurts, which were about 15 feet in diameter, the Mongols could quickly take up stakes to avoid marauders.

From youth Mongol warriors were students of the art of war. As small boys they were first taught to ride goats before they rode mares. Their very way of life stressed constant movement and bred hardiness and endurance. Herding, hunting, and theft were their primary pastimes; all three stressed ambush, missile attack, and artifice. A favorite battle tactic was to retreat quickly, encouraging the enemy to break formation in pursuit, then wheel and counterattack. Even the games they played stressed horsemanship and aggressiveness; the modern sport of polo derives from Mongolian competitive games.

Mongolian horse archery

Composite, recurve bows, with a draw of 120 pounds or higher, was the Mongols’ weapon of choice. Warriors typically carried two or three bows and two quivers of arrows, with perhaps 60 shafts in each quiver. Supplementary weaponry included the javelin, lariat, mace, and scimitar. Defensive arms included helmets and leather shields, although Mongols relied primarily on mobility and speed for defense. An elite force of heavier cavalry equipped with lances and thicker armor provided shock to complement the firepower of archers. Silk shirts worn under armor made it easier to extract arrowheads, helping to reduce tissue damage and the size of wound cavities.

The Mongols’ speed of attack, use of misdirection, and withering firepower caused their foes to overestimate Mongol numbers, creating the image of a vast horde. Yet Mongol forces were frequently outnumbered. Reinforcing perceptions of their vast size was the inherent flexibility of Mongol military organization based on the tumen, or division of 10,000 men, and its emphasis on rapid movement and mutual support.

Mongol forces normally lived off the land, allowing them to cover sixty miles or more in a single day. Saddled by lengthy logistical trains, most rival armies were hard pressed to cover ten miles a day. Borrowing from the Chinese, the Mongols amply demonstrated their cultural adaptability and practicality by employing siege weapons such as catapults and ballistae to reduce cities or use as field artillery. Thus at Sajo River in 1241, the Mongol khan Subotai initially employed catapults, ballistae, and firecrackers to disrupt the cohesion of a Hungarian Army of 90,000 under King Bela IV. The Mongols then exploited their superior mobility and firepower to destroy the disorganized Hungarians in detail.

Many of the Mongols’ more lopsided victories, such as Sajo River, exhibited their proficiency at gathering intelligence about their foes. While Europeans relied less on information and more on the bravery and martial prowess of individual knights, Mongol agents infiltrated their enemies to identify strengths and weaknesses. Armed with such superior knowledge, the Mongols used a highly efficient system of signal flags during battle, augmented by torches in fading light, to maneuver their forces for maximum effect. A swift cadre of mounted couriers conveyed orders from division leaders to subordinate commanders. This system allowed the Mongols to react much more quickly than their opponents to the vagaries and vicissitudes of battle.

By stressing victory through superior communication, intelligence, rapid flanking movements, missile fire, and shock attack by heavy cavalry, the Mongols fought in a way that their opponents neither comprehended nor fully countered. On land the Mongol system proved nearly invincible. No army matched the Mongols’ level of training, discipline, leadership, mobility, and, most impressively, sheer speed. Indeed, their agility gave them an acute advantage that proved decisive against all but the most heavily entrenched opponents. Those they could not rout or crush eventually succumbed to extended sieges.

The Mongols perfected a model military system. Rarely were their armies defeated in battle, although an important exception came at Ain Jalut in 1260, when a Mameluke army of cavalry succeeded in thwarting a Mongol advance toward the Arabian Peninsula, thereby saving Islam. This exception highlights the role of geography both in furthering and limiting Mongol expansion. Only high mountains (the Himalayas of the Indian subcontinent), dense jungles (Vietnam), vast deserts (the Arabian peninsula’s lack of fodder for Mongolian mares), and treacherous oceans (whipped up by the Kamikaze or “divine wind” that saved Japan from Mongol invasion) checked Mongol advances.

The Mongol military system won many admirers, particularly twentieth-century advocates of mechanized warfare and Blitzkrieg. During the 1930s, Basil Liddell Hart urged his fellow Britons to study the Mongols to comprehend the potential of armored warfare. Erwin Rommel and George S. Patton were avid students. Military theorists today still marvel at the unprecedented success of the military system Genghis and his fellow Mongols forged.

WILLIAM J. ASTORE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chambers, James. The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, New York, 1979.

Grousset, René. The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. New Brunswick, NJ, 1939, 1970.

Martin, H. Desmond. The Rise of Chingis Khan and his Conquest of Northern China, New York, 1977.

Morgan, David. The Mongols, Oxford, 1990.

Saunders, J.J. The History of the Mongol Conquests, New York, 1971.