﻿Our previous video looked at the interactions and roles of Mongol heavy cavalry in the wars with the
Jin Dynasty. Now we travel west as the Mongols expand west of China; here their foe, again and
again, will be Qipchaq Turks, often in service of islamic states across Central Asia and India.
As the Mongols moved west, the cavalry they encountered remained highly influenced by steppe
forms of warfare, mounted archers in varying degrees of armour. Maneuverability and skirmishing
was more important than the melee, though it was not disregarded. Juzjani, a chronicler writing in
Delhi in the 1260s who had fled the Mongols, mentions Khwarezm-shah Muhammad’s ability to
raise 400,000 cavalry with both rider and horse in defensive armour. At Bukhara alone, Juzjani
reports how Muhammad left 60,000 horse “fully equipped and furnished,” of Turks, Ghuris, and
Khurasanis. If Shah Muhammad had such numbers, his war against Chinggis Khan would have gone a little
better. Instead, he died on an island in the Caspian Sea while the Mongols overran his empire.
But the idea is important; the Khwarezm-shah, the strongest Muslim monarch in the world, could raise
a huge, and well equipped cavalry force. One of the most important parts of Shah Muhammad’s army
was the Qipchaq-Qangli nomads in his service; not just a military element, but an aristocracy within
the Khwarezmian state, one his family married into and gave him no shortage of trouble.
Our friendly Qipchaqs and Khwarezmians were equipped like the Mongols. The lighter
troops armed with their bows, and unevenly with close-range weaponry; spears, maces,
rarely swords. The heavier cavalry was outfitted in lamellar and laminar, with a greater percentage
of maille. The Persian chronicler Juvaini tells us how, after the Mongol invasion,
during a battle against Georgians Jalal al-Din Khwarezm-shah was embarrassed by his
lack of armour, lancers and swordsmen, perhaps indicating that Khwarezmian cavalry had, before
the Mongol invasion, regularly featured them. The Khwarezm-shah, a wealthy ruler in control of much
of the production centres of Central Asia, could potentially outfit more of his troops
in armour and weaponry than the Mongols. We know the Mongols brought heavily armoured
troops with them, having had them in the war against Jin, and from sporadic mention of them
in the sources on the Khwarezmian war. A Persian chronicler in Mongol service writing in the 1250s,
Juvaini, mentions armoured Mongol horses during the siege of Otrar, and at other times makes
notes of Mongol lancers. Ibn al-Athir, writing in Mosul in the 1220s, records an interesting
tale of a fully-armoured Mongol warrior in Jebe’s army entering a house in Maragha in 1221, killing
several inhabitants and taking the rest prisoner. Only when the warrior stopped, presumably to rest,
and began to remove weapon and armour, did the inhabitants realize their assailant was a woman!
And they then rose up and killed her. In 1238 during the Tarabi Revolt around Bukhara,
Juvaini says Tarabi’s followers were foolish going up against the Mongols while unarmoured.
When it comes to specific engagements of heavy cavalry between Mongol and Khwarezmian forces,
we have little information, as the invasion was fought mostly through sieges. The cavalry in the
garrisons often sallied out against the Mongols when the sieges began, and many times the Mongols
pulled them into feigned retreats and killed. This was the Mongols’ preferred means of dealing with
enemy cavalry; pulling them from the safety of the walls, isolating them, tiring them out in the
chase and then falling upon them, or picking them off with arrows. On other occasions the Mongols
tricked the garrison into surrendering, coming out unarmed and then massacring them. When the Mongols
stormed a city, they sent many captured subject peoples as literal meatshields ahead of them,
absorbing enemy arrows and blows and wearing them down before the Khan’s troops engaged.
Only on rare occasions were the Mongols pulled into extended combat in the open
with Khwarezmian troops, most notably during the resistance of Khwarezm-shah Muhammad’s son,
Jalal al-Din Mingburnu. We read of Jalal al-Din defeating Mongol vanguards, which we know from the
Chinese accounts were typically well armoured. At the battle of Parwan where Jalal al-Din defeated
Mongol prince Shigi Qutuqu, Jalal al-Din ordered his troops to fight dismounted for most of the
engagement; presumably, it was the best way to prevent them falling into a feigned retreat.
After an inconclusive first day of battle, Qutuqu put dummies on
horses to make the Khwarezmians think Mongol reinforcements arrived in the night. Juvaini
reports that it did unnerve the Khwarezmian troops, and some of Jalal al-Din’s commanders
wished to flee. But Jalal al-Din held firm and again made his troops fight dismounted.
Juvaini tells how Shigi Qutuqu then put his most elite troops on his right and charged the
Khwarezmian left, composed mainly of Turkmen and Khalaj. I suspect Qutuqu hoped to do a repeat of
the maneuvers of Jebe and Muqali pulled against the Jin, sweeping away a demoralized foe with a
sudden charge of heavy cavalry. But Jalal al-Din Mingburnu was made
of sterner stuff. Once more he ordered his troops to dismount and stand their ground;
Juvaini writes how their skilled archery pushed back the advance of Qutuqu’s elite troops,
foiling their charge against a concentrated barrage of arrow fire. After this setback,
Qutuqu began to withdraw, only for Jalal al-Din to order his men to mount up and pursue.
Perhaps this had been naught but a feigned retreat, for Qutuqu had his troops turn about
and countercharge into Jalal al-Din’s advancing cavalry. This killed hundreds of Jalal al-Din’s
men, but he personally led a final charge that forced the Mongols back. Thus Jalal al-Din scored
the greatest, and final, Khwarezmian victory of the invasion. At the battle of Parwan what we
see are elements of the same maneuvers the Mongols pulled off successfully elsewhere,
only here, Shigi Qutuqu misjudged his foe and timed his maneuvers poorly. Jalal al-Din,
for all his faults, was fearless, with an army large enough to absorb the blows. Against him,
Qutuqu was simply outplayed. Unfortunately for Jalal al-Din, his generals then began fighting
over the loot, leading to half his army abandoning him while Chinggis Khan advanced against him. The
result was the battle on the Indus River which, despite a fierce effort, ended with Jalal al-Din
riding his horse off of a cliff and into the Indus River, ultimately to flee into India.
Though Chinggis Khan chose not to invade India in 1221, sending a few armies only in pursuit of
Jalal al-Din, attacks on the subcontinent began in earnest under his successors. By the 1240s,
the Mongol Empire and Delhi Sultanate fought over the Punjab and Sindh. The sources little on the
composition of these Mongol forces, particularly in the later thirteenth century when attacks. The
assumption is that attacks by the Qara’unas groups and the Chagatai Khanate were rather
lightly armoured. But we get a different story for the soldiers of the Delhi Sultanate. While Delhi’s
elephants capture the most attention, and could be armoured, they don’t tend to be deciding factors
in battle. Instead, more weight should be given to the mainly Qipchaq, Qangli and other Turkic
speaking peoples, sold as mamluks or ghulams to Delhi, or coming to Delhi as refugees fleeing the
Mongols. There is fairly regular mention of the Delhi Sultan’s armouring them well. From Sultan
Balban in the mid-through century, through to the Khalji Dynasty and Tughluqs, we have numerous
mentions of the Delhi Sultans fielding thousands of skilled, well-armoured cavalry, who were again,
mounted archers. While Mongol failures in India are often attributed to heat and humidity, skilled
defense by the Delhi Sultans who spent huge sums on construction of forts, maintenance of garrisons
and fielding and equipping great armies was key to success; a success which was often narrowly won,
as seen in the1303 siege of Delhi. Sultan Alauddin Khalji managed the Delhi economy through a series
of price controls in order to finance his armies, a complex system that collapsed after his death,
but was key in covering the costs of almost annual Mongol attacks. The Delhi army,
to counter the Mongols, relied on matching them and knowing their tactics, informed through
experience and a great many Mongols who fled to them in the aftermath of Mongol civil wars.
Delhi’s cavalry fought as horse archers, but ones who were better equipped, better supplied and,
when necessary, better led. Of course, tossing a few elephants in there doesn’t hurt either.
Having looked at the combat between Mongols and Qipchaq-Qanglis across Khwarezm and India,
how did the Qipchaq fare in their homeland in the Eurasian steppes, in the so-called Cuman-Qipchaq
Confederation? Sources on the Mongol conquest here give only the broadest information. The general
image in both textual sources and archaeology is that extensive armour was very rare among the
Cumans and Qipchaqs. There is so far no evidence that they wore lamellar, but organic-based leather
and padded armours are feasible. They didn’t wear these mustached-masks either, but that’s a topic
for a later discussion. Some graves which are argued to be Cuman, such as the Chynhul Barrow,
indicate maille armour at least for the rider, but I am unaware of evidence for horse-protection.
As noted in my series on nomad blacksmithing, Qipchaq disunity would have hampered local
blacksmithing supply networks; likely the Qipchaq were mostly dependent on import for their arms and
armour. The Mongols must have held an advantage in armour in their conquest of the steppe.
And yet, the sources note several times how the Mongols regarded the Qipchaqs among their most
dangerous foes. Peng Daya and Xu Ting writing in the 1230s record how of all the Mongols’
western enemies, the Qipchaq were seen as the most warlike. The Song writers say the Qipchaq
gave Chinggis Khan himself the greatest concern, who stated they could not be dealt with until
after the Jin had been conquered. In the Secret History of the Mongols the entire 1230s western
campaign of Batu and Subedei that culminated in Europe, is dubbed the Qipchaq campaign. It seems
the Mongols developed a high view of the Qipchaq’s military capability, or at least
potential. Fighting them throughout Khwarezm, and then Jebe and Subedei’s early battles with them
in the steppes, left the Mongols with the opinion that the Qipchaq were highly skilled combatants.
Like the Mongols, they fought primarily as horse archers, familiar with the type of tactics the
Mongols employed. The Qipchaq could easily flee and continue to be a nuisance, while the
greatest concern was if they unified and pooled their strength against the Mongol Empire.
As pointed out by Stephen Pow, word may have come down the steppes that Béla IV, King of Hungary,
had taken the title of King of the Cumans in the 1220s. Coupled with efforts by the Qipchaq prince
Bachman to organize a united front, in the Mongol court this may have sounded like the emergence of
an actual Qipchaq state to threaten them. These limited efforts were quickly crushed when Mongol
armies overran the steppe in the 1230s. Regardless of the skill of the individual Qipchaq warriors,
without leadership to harness it, it could not long stand as a barrier to Mongol expansion.
The Mongol army which rode into Qipchaq lands was better led, better equipped
and better experienced. Military victory is not determined by who is braver and fiercer,
more numerous or with better armour, but a host of factors, particularly leadership.
This ends our third part on our series on Mongol heavy cavalry. In our next part,
we go to the westernmost foes that Mongol armies encountered; knights in Europe,
and then Mamluks of Egypt, and see how they interacted with Mongol heavy horsemen.