If their leader hadn't randomly died for no reason, could the Mongols have taken Western Europe?
>>18401266No, had they persisted the Mongols would have collapsed sooner
>>18401266No, they already ran into troubles taking parts of eastern Europe, which is practically next to the steppe. The further west they go the worse the terrain becomes for their style of warfare and the more logistically impossible it becomes to field that many soldiers and more importantly horses. They also had massive problems dealing with European castles and the further west you go the complexity and density of the castles just go up. Germany alone would have around 10,000 castles during this period, and unlike the highly centralized and bureaucratized empires of the east that the Mongols conquered there was not a single leader or capital you could capture to swiftly conquer an empire. If you did end up taking a castle, even an important city then the rest of the kingdom would just keep trucking along and you'd have 9,999 more castles to siege. The Mongol style of conquest wouldn't work very well in the heartland of the European high middle ages.
>>18401646did the tens if not hundreds if not thousands of forts ever really matter? i feel like every medieval campaign just bypassed them altogether and headed straight to a regional capital while the smaller lords of these castles just switch sides like a pussy, and quick to give tribute to the new conqueror in town even
>>18401266They would have crushed the slavoids and other subhumans east of the elbe but as soon as they would have stepped in DEUSTCHELAND they would have been crushed like the bugs they are by the Aryan man
>>18401661It depends on the style of warfare, many medieval conflicts were civil wars or conflicts confined to smaller geographical regions, but depending on the area you can't just bypass a castle, sometimes they control very important geographical areas, like a river crossing or mountain pass. Bypassing a castle that isn't located at a chokehold also leaves your rear and supply trains (and these gigantic Mongol armies of tens of thousands need supply trains) wide open for attack. Realistically the Mongols would have tried to play regional powers against each other (like they did in Russia) but against a HRE that's increasingly concerned about Mongol invasion it would be like bashing their heads against a brick (or in this case stone) wall with another ten thousand layers of stone behind it should they get through the first one. Fighting for their faith or survival is a lot different than some lords fighting a minor civil war over what privileges they do or don't have, because both parties are amenable end conflicts like that after some time of siege and campaigning, but not so much if they thought it was a full scale heathen invasion that would completely displace them and devastate their income generating lands.
Yes
>>18401664This. Look at what happened 40 years later after the Hungarians attempted Westernization. They crushed the Mongols.Germany, France, were entirely different leagues from Slavic Europe at the time
What leader, Genghis Khan?He never stopped foot in Eastern Europe or West Asia. His successors conquered those regions.
>>18401713I think OP means Ogedei Khan
