[beezlebroxxxxxx]

There were structural, geographic, and ecological, reasons for why mongol invasions stopped before they reached western Europe (aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe). The same reasons were present for Arab "invasions" up from Iberia.

Walter Scheidel has written a fascinating book that takes a very hard historical look at possible historical counterfactuals comparing post-roman Europe to imperial China and finds the chances of Mongol success in Europe to have been very small despite their incredible string successes leading up to that point. Europe's greatest benefit was an incredible political polycentrism; Europe was hard to invade while China wasn't. That pushed China into sustained imperial centralization like many other empires with close steppe proximity.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/es...

[thaumasiotes]

> aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe

Hm? The Golden Horde seems to have lasted for a fairly respectable period of time as far as empires go. Mongol rule in Russia outlasted Mongol rule in China by more than a century.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

Mongol rule in Russia posed no serious threat to western Europe in terms of imperial conquest. The horde was fragile on its western frontiers. Steppe invasions and conflicts on the east between the Mongols and Chinese empires shaped that area for millenia. Russia, as an outlier, if we consider it a part of Europe, is uniquely exposed to the steppes in a similar way to China. The Mongol threat to greater Europe, however, was not that great. The tactics, ecology, and technologies, that made them a remarkable threat would not have been effective in western Europe during the same time periods.

It's certainly an interesting "could have been", but you need to move very far away from what actually happened to make it a convincing possibility.

[thaumasiotes]

Why does that make their attempt at imperiogenesis in Eastern Europe "short-lived"?

[Spivak]

Fascinating, the takes I've seen from most historians was that polycentrism was actually likely to be Europe's undoing because the Mongols were the best to ever do it at recognizing that armies weren't as united as they first seemed and, before the fight, made deals with fractions to get them to stand down (and then kill them later) and, during battle, taking advantage of split command and breaking ranks.

I don't think that there was really anything that could stop the Mongols at that time because they had Chinese siege engineers to deal with fortifications and plenty in the way of "normal" soldiers but I'm happy to read the argument. The strongest case I've heard against them was that away from the steppe the conditions that produced hardy soldiers with their talent for shooting started to fall off.