Empires Apart by Brian Landers Page A

in a carpet and had their horses trample him to death. Islam might have been destroyed but for the Mongols’ defeat by Egyptian forces outside Nazareth. Even more thanChâlons this battle changed the course of world history. As it was, Islam survived and the western Mongols themselves soon converted.
    The Mongols combined technology, organisation and tactics to produce a force that was almost unstoppable. The core of their technological superiority was the humble bow and arrow. Their enemies’ cumbersome bows were designed for hunting, where the need was to maximise the range at which an unsuspecting animal could be brought down by the first arrow fired. A hunter would not get a second chance. The Mongols were more interested in rapid fire: their bows were small, short-range weapons. Mongol archers could dispatch arrow after arrow, using a stone attached to their thumbs to draw back the bowstring. As with modern technologies, the Mongol arrow designers were forever inventing new, more specialist applications. There were arrows for starting fires or piercing armour, whistling arrows for signalling, arrows carrying miniature grenades, arrows tipped with quicklime or naphtha. Above all, Mongol bows could be fired by fighters on horseback while at full gallop. Indeed, they could be fired accurately backwards at a pursuing enemy. The Mongols had combined artillery and light cavalry in one deadly force.
    The superiority of their technology was married with the superiority of their logistics, a superiority entirely owing to the Mongol’s most prized possessions: his horses. Each Mongol cavalryman had three or four horses, ensuring there was always a fresh mount when battle commenced, and allowing them to travel phenomenal distances at high speed. Riders in the Mongol postal service could cover over 120 miles a day at a time when roads were virtually non-existent. The horse provided both transport and sustenance: milk, blood and meat. Like their riders the horses originated in the frozen tundra of eastern Siberia; they were used to enduring the bitter cold, and foraged for food below layers of snow. The result was a force as mobile in winter as summer.
    In 1237 the Mongols reached Russia. Hitler and Napoleon raced to defeat their Russian enemies before they themselves were defeated by the Russian winter. They failed. The Mongols were a different breed; theywaited for winter to arrive and then struck with unsurpassed speed and ferocity. They had passed a relaxing summer exterminating the Bulgar kingdom on the Middle Volga, massacring the 50,000 inhabitants of its largest city in the process. After waiting until the Volga froze over, the Mongol army of 120,000 simply rode across the river and melted unseen into the snow-covered forests on the other side.
    Their first target was Ryazan in the east of the country. Here they immediately demonstrated not only the superiority of their military technology and strategy but the two ‘virtual’ weapons that would become a feature of Russian life for centuries to come: secret intelligence and terror.
    The Mongol hordes did not just charge out of Asia obliterating whatever they happened to come across. They gathered vast amounts of information on their enemies and planned their attacks in great detail. Long before the Rus realised what was happening the Mongols had identified all their weak points, both military and political. By taking the province of Ryazan the Mongols could split the Rus forces. More importantly, the province itself was ruled by four princes notoriously unable to agree on anything.
    Once the city and province of Ryazan were taken the Mongols unleashed their other, not so secret, weapon. The Russians were to learn a lesson that was never to be forgotten: the power of sheer terror. The entire nobility, men, women and children, was butchered. All the city’s women were systematically raped. Survivors were flayed alive in the streets.
    The Grand Duke Yuri