In the summer of 1241, the chancellor at the University of Paris [SP1] announced that an
alien people had come from the easternmost edge of the world, riding and slaughtering over the
whole of it. “A mighty nation that no other nation has yet been able to resist,” he warned,
with the “teeth of lions” that would spare nobody. Advancing westward,
these foreign marauders had overrun Poland and occupied the Kingdom of Hungary. They were now
poised on the borders of Germany, planning to destroy all the remaining Christian peoples
of Western Europe. Worse still, the pope had recently died, leaving Europe without a leader
to inspire resistance. The mysterious invaders were the Mongols, led by Batu,
the grandson of Chinggis Khan. Seeking explanations in the Bible and ancient prophecies,
many Europeans panicked that it was the end of the world – and, in fairness, for not a few of them,
the Mongol conquests actually were! But in early 1242, Batu’s forces – which had crossed
the Danube and appeared to be continuing their unstoppable drive into German territory – halted
surprisingly. Even stranger, the entire army marched out of Europe, returning deep into
the steppes and leaving a great historical mystery in its wake. In this episode, we will
look at the various modern historical theories to explain why the Mongols withdrew from Europe.
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After overrunning Eastern Europe and occupying Hungary for a year, the Mongols’ withdrawal
was so unexpected that many people initially doubted its sincerity. King Bela IV of Hungary,
who had fled from pursuing Mongols to the islands on the coast of the Adriatic Sea,
was so suspicious of the news that he remained offshore for months, sending scouts to confirm
it. But it was true. Batu and his whole army had moved eastward through Bulgaria,
returning to the great Eurasian steppes stretching from Ukraine to Mongolia. Batu’s inexplicable
withdrawal was often attributed to a miracle – Christendom was saved from destruction. Certainly,
no great crusading army had confronted the Mongols and driven them away in a decisive battle. Rather,
Batu’s army had left at a relaxed pace and in good order. For those in Eastern Europe who
experienced Mongol tactics, the withdrawal was suspected to be a large-scale “feigned retreat.”
Local people expected the Mongols to return, since Batu’s new vassals [SP2] from Kyivan
Rus’ reported that the Mongols still planned to conquer the whole world, including Europe.
Despite what anyone imagined, the 1242 withdrawal was not a feigned retreat. Batu, as senior prince
of Chinggis Khan’s ruling dynasty, dismissed the other princes and established the Volga River as
a base for his immense herds and followers. Many other Chinggisid princes set up camp in
territories appointed for them deep in Inner Asia, east of the Ural Mountains and Aral Sea.
The bases of Mongol power were now thousands of kilometers from the heart of Christendom.
So, what happened? It is hard to say. On campaign, the Mongols kept their military plans top secret.
For medieval authors, the events of Batu’s invasion were so linked with destiny that
there was no need to fully investigate the matter: God had willed the Mongols to come
and willed them to leave. Even up to relatively recent times, historians were not overly curious
about why the withdrawal happened. There is an irony that an event that is often
said to have saved Europe seldom gets more than a sentence or two of explanation in history books.
Today’s investigators, who possess the ability to look at a huge range of texts,
archaeological findings, and environmental evidence, have tried to solve the mystery and
explain what motivated Batu. But despite the many pieces of evidence, historians have never been
able to arrive at a consensus on what caused the Mongols to abandon a campaign that seems to have
been going spectacularly well for them. Debate about the mystery continues 800 years later.
Four basic theories gradually emerged for why the Mongols left Europe in 1242. Historian Greg
S. Rogers categorized and analyzed them. He called the most common and popular one “the
political theory.” It holds that Europe was saved by the death of the great khan,
Ögedei, in December 1241. According to this theory, messengers must have reached Europe
the following spring and given the news to Batu, forcing the campaign’s leaders,
Chinggis Khan’s grandsons, to return to Mongolia to choose the next khan at a great assembly.
The second broad type of explanation for the withdrawal is “the geographical theory” or
perhaps better termed “the ecological theory.” The common thread is that the Mongols encountered
difficulties with the environment in Europe during the invasion – either insufficient
grassland for their horses and livestock or extreme weather. This environmental problem
caused them to decide that the region could not be occupied or incorporated into the Mongol Empire.
The third argument is what Rogers calls “the gradual conquest theory” but which could also be
termed “the limited goals theory.” The explanation behind any variation of this theory is that the
Mongols never planned to occupy any part of Europe when they overran it in 1241. Either
they wanted to soften it up to make a later conquest possible, or they merely invaded to
chastise King Bela IV of Hungary for harboring nomadic Cuman refugees that Batu considered his
legal subjects. In that scenario, the attacks on Hungary’s neighbours would have been to prevent
them aiding the Hungarian king. With their mission accomplished sufficiently, this theory holds, the
Mongols called off their campaign and withdrew. The fourth and final explanation is “the military
weakness theory” which holds that the Mongols withdrew because they were simply unable to
accomplish the conquest of Europe. The war that brought the Mongols to Latin Europe
started already in 1236. Over five years, they conquered the Volga Bulgars, most of Kyivan Rus’,
the Alans, and the mighty Cuman-Qipchaqs. By the time, they reached Europe, they would have been
weakened. Likewise, strong resistance that they encountered in East-Central Europe in 1241-42
could have at last convinced Batu to call off the campaign, completely evacuating Europe without
even leaving behind a rump force to garrison hundreds of kilometers of overrun territory.
It is worth exploring the evidence for and against each theory as all are plausible
and have some evidence to support them, which is why they have persisted. However,
they cannot all be simultaneously correct because they contradict each other on key
points like whether the Mongols even intended to conquer Europe in the first place, and whether the
campaign of 1241 was one of the most successful in history or a strategic quagmire for Batu’s forces.
The political theory that Ögedei Khan’s death saved Europe and stopped the Mongols’ westward
advance has been the most popular explanation with historians for the better part of a century,
and is the one you’ll most likely find in a general history book. Ögedei’s death on
December 11 was followed by the Mongols suddenly starting to withdraw eastward at the end of March,
suggesting there was a connection between the two events. John of Plano Carpini, a papal ambassador
who journeyed in 1246 to the horde of Ögedei’s son and successor, Güyük, in Mongolia heard that the
Mongols had planned to campaign in Europe for 30 years, but the great khan was fatally poisoned,
so they had to retreat. Ominously, the new khan planned to resume the war against Europe soon.
For historians, the timeline and well-known testimony of Carpini long sufficed to explain
the withdrawal. Problems with this explanation appeared when scholars of different Eurasian
languages began to compare notes. A report [SP3] on the campaign written originally in
Mongolian stated that the Mongol forces in Europe didn’t know Ögedei was dead
when they started to withdraw eastward. And could a messenger have reached Hungary from
Mongolia in less than four months in the dead of winter? Medieval travellers like Carpini
described much longer travel timeframes. Would messengers even be dispatched right away from
Mongolia by Batu’s rivals to alert him that the throne was vacant? Most problematically,
Batu never returned to Mongolia to elect a new khan. Later, he even made excuses not to go,
suspecting a trap by his rival, Güyük. Thus, new theories were offered in the
twentieth century including “the ecological theory.” Originally proposed by Hungarian
historian Denis Sinor in the 1970s, the theory was that it was simply impossible for the Mongols to
conquer Europe or permanently occupy Hungary, the last piece of the Eurasian steppe belt,
because it simply did not offer enough pasturage for the Mongol horses. Based on American
horse-breeding statistics, and the assumption that each Mongol warrior needed at least three horses,
Sinor claimed that the largest Mongol army that the Great Hungarian Plain could support would
be 68,000 men. Decades later, he revised it to 83,000 men with five horses each. Problematically,
however, real numbers of livestock recorded on Hungary’s pastures in the Early Modern Age
suggest that it could actually support millions of animals. Moreover, King Bela IV wrote that Hungary
had proven dangerously suitable for sustaining the Mongols’ herds during the year-long occupation.
A more recent “environmental hypothesis[SP4] ” used climate data to show that 1242 had an
unusually wet and cold spring. Perhaps the Mongols had trouble advancing in the mud and feeding their
animals, withdrawing because of the weather. Moreover, medieval sources document a serious
famine in Hungary in 1242. The problem with this explanation is that the Mongols conquered much
tougher and varied environments than continental Europe. It’s hard to imagine a spell of cold,
rain, and muddy roads would have deterred nomads from Mongolia who had traversed the deserts of
Inner Asia, and who were simultaneously finding ways to conquer the forest zone of Russia and
the humid hills of southern China. Also, famine is only documented among the Hungarian commoners who
were unable to plant or harvest crops during the invasion, but never among the Mongols in
1242. Yet, when the Mongols did experience famine and exposure in the Carpathian Mountains during a
much later invasion in 1285, any chroniclers who wrote about that invasion noted it.
Turning to the “gradual conquest theory,” it is supported by the fact that the Mongols often
invaded states repeatedly before they conquered them, like the Jin Dynasty of northern China,
or Armenia. Also, the Mongols’ campaign in Europe was highly successful in terms of battlefield
victories, like at Legnica in Poland and Muhi in Hungary, and then they left voluntarily. So,
it is tempting to infer that they were not planning to conquer Europe in 1242.
They may have just wanted to soften it up for a later conquest, or they considered the task
complete after they successfully drove the Cuman refugees out of Hungary. Perhaps, the campaign was
just to secure the western borders of their main target – the Cuman nomads of the Pontic Steppe.
Yet, documents composed in Mongol courts named Hungary, too, as a main target for conquest.
And we know that the Mongols repeatedly demanded submission from Hungary and other European powers
both before the invasion and after the withdrawal. The khan directly threatened the pope to surrender
or die in an ultimatum of 1246, signing the letter with his official seal. It is surprising, too,
that so many Chinggisid princes took part if it was just a raid with limited goals,
and then set up a local government and tax administration in Hungary as was documented by
one of their prisoners there. The creation of such administrations usually meant permanent conquest.
Regarding the final explanation, the “military weakness theory,” there are good reasons for
modern historians to dismiss it. It was popular with nationalistic writers in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries who would insist that it was their own nations which threw back
the Mongols. Many myths, created about great victories that never happened, were used to
inflame national feeling. Austrians were sure it was their duke who struck fear in Batu,
Poles were sure it was their dukes, and Russian and Hungarian authors suggested
their ancestors’ sacrifices stemmed the Mongol advance and shielded Western Europe.
Claims that the Mongols fled from Europe in defeat are the wishful thinking of later authors. In
fact, they won the major clashes and sacked important cities. Yet, we shouldn’t overlook
evidence that they faced major military challenges in the campaign. Carpini mentioned a special
graveyard in Mongolia for those that died in Hungary because so many perished there. Official
Mongol texts like the biographies of Subutai confirm European claims that Batu’s forces were
close to retreat during the battle with Hungarians at Muhi in 1241. A Templar knight’s letter tells
of the bodies of Mongols who later died from wounds suffered at the Battle of Legnica littering
the roads from Poland to Hungary. Writings across Asia and even Coptic Egypt echoed rumours that
the Mongols had suffered setbacks in Europe. Batu had numerous unconquered enemies still to face in
1242, and his forces had difficulties taking strategically situated stone castles. Worse,
they failed to capture Bela IV because he took to a warship. Batu may have concluded
a continued advance would stretch his forces too far. Years after the withdrawal, a European friar
visiting Mongolia heard that the khan’s shamans forbade a return to Hungary because of bad omens.
The fact that history enthusiasts are still arguing today about the reasons for the sudden
Mongol withdrawal in 1242 is something that would have given Batu great satisfaction. The Mongols
strove at being very secretive with their military plans, not revealing anything to outsiders who
could inform the enemy. If we still cannot be certain of why they left Europe, then this
stands as a testament to the effectiveness of the leaders that conducted the Great Western Campaign.
The four major theories cannot be reconciled into a single tidy explanation, but they all
reflect historical reality – at least in some sense. If the death of Ögedei Khan did not cause
the Mongols’ withdrawal, it at least prevented them from returning to Europe for a long time,
owing to the conflict between Batu and his cousin, Güyük. If the environment of Europe did not make a
Mongol conquest impossible, its forests, fortified hilltops, and coastlines meant major challenges.
If the Mongols did not start their campaign in 1241 with limited goals, altering their campaign
objectives according to the strategic realities they encountered in the field was not uncommon
of them. And although the victories claimed by nineteenth-century nationalist poets are only
fantasies, Batu’s army experienced heavy losses nevertheless. Significant limitations in terms
of manpower, artillery, and ships probably made a quick and easy conquest of Europe impossible. We
hope this video has helped satisfy our audiences’ curiosity on one of medieval history’s greatest
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