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The Mongols overran the Khitan, Jurchen and Chinese empires in the 12th century

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Mithridates View Post
    Did the Song assume the Mongols were more of the same desert rabble they had beaten repeatedly in the past, or did the sting of repeated defeats at the hands of the Jurchens blind them to the Mongol threat? You'd think Song spies would have provided ample intelligence about the methods used by the Mongols to literally exterminate the Khitans.
    Neither. The Southern Song was making way too much money hiding south of the Yangtze to care. Once they lost the North, the economy of the South actually grew. They figured they could keep the barbarians north of the river indefinitely while skimping on defense. Meanwhile everyone was happily enjoying the "peace dividend".

    Eventually the Mongols figured out how to build better siege equipment and ships with the help of their Arab subjects and the Yangtze defenses collapsed, with many Chinese commanders defecting to the other side at which point the chicken came home to roost.

    The whole thing took about 50 years, longer if you count the Jurchen period before that. It was not a cake walk for the Mongols, but the Song was certainly complicit in their own defeat. The responsibility for the defeat, however, cannot be blamed on individual corrupt officials or inept emperors. The entire society was complicit.

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    • #17
      The Mongols lost becuase there were not enough of them to sustain military operations, especially after they settled and got fat. The Tumans under Subetai were far different in skill and ability compared to those who were defeated by Baibars.

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      • #18
        The Mongols lost becuase there were not enough of them to sustain military operations, especially after they settled and got fat. The Tumans under Subetai were far different in skill and ability compared to those who were defeated by Baibars.
        They weren't settled and fat when they initially fought the Mamluks. The Ilkhanate also had to fight on two other frontiers - and did so very successfully throughout their existence.
        To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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        • #19
          Originally posted by zraver View Post
          The Mongols lost becuase there were not enough of them to sustain military operations, especially after they settled and got fat. The Tumans under Subetai were far different in skill and ability compared to those who were defeated by Baibars.
          There are some (light) parallels between what happened to the Yuan in China and what happened to us in Iraq. Going in was easy but holding the place turned out to be much harder when everyone turned against us. An army built for conquest is not the same as one built for occupation.

          In the Yuan's case it's as if the US Army went into Iraq, then settled there and started using it as the tax base, managed the whole thing more ineptly than Paul Bremer, got fat, lazy, corrupt and greedy, put into place Al Qaeda levels of obnoxiousness, and on top of that suffered multiple large scale natural disasters and rampant inflation brought about by issuance of paper currency without sound management, and kept the mess going for about 70 years.

          In other places that were easier to manage, where the Mongols were more fortunate and behaved more reasonably, they succeeded for the long term.

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