Originally Posted by
Dromikaites
The Mongols were considered excessively brutal by all their contemporaries. The 13th and 14th centuries weren't exactly peaceful in that part of the world, so people had recent wars in memory to compare with the Mongol invasions.
Karakorum is illustrating my point perfectly: it existed only for as long as there was a Khan around. The fact it had been built shows cities were technically possible to be built in 13th century Mongolia.
The problem is cities were alien to the Mongolian lifestyle, so Karakorum wasn't imitated by the lesser chieftains and as a result urban life had to wait for the 1920s.
That the small clique who ruled over China, Persia or India had to live in cities doesn't meant the bulk of the Mongols wanted to have anything to do with sedentary lifestyle. Else they would have built several cities, not just Karakorum.
The land of Mongolia wasn't suitable for crops, but thanks to the Pax Mongolica the locals could have tended to cattle without fearing somebody would come to steal it.
That in turn would have allowed cattle trade to flourish. In the Middle Ages Moldavia's GDP was dominated by exports of cattle to distant places like Germany. The Moldavian merchants were driving their cow herds through Poland till Leipzig and were bringing back all sorts of manufactured products.
Likewise, the GDP of Medieval Wallachia was based mainly on exporting sheep to Constantinople. Flocks of sheep crossed the Ottoman territory unmolested thanks to the sipahi system of policing the countryside.
Had cattle trade really taken off in Mongolia, they would have had the vast Chinese market nearby, just like Moldavia had Germany while Wallachia had the Ottomans as main markets.
We know cattle trade alone would have bee enough to support a city in the Middle Ages. For instance the Wallachian - Ottoman trade trade in live sheep gave birth to a city called Targul de Floci (the name means "The Fleece Market") which was located near a ford on the Danube river, on the Wallachian bank.
Yet nothing of the kind happened in Mongolia. An artificial city was built just because Ogedei wanted it but the Mongols left on their own devices didn't take advantage of their own "Pax Mongolica".
They simply didn't care about religion. But neither did Caesar or Alexander III Macedon.
Not so fast!
The Mongol tactics were simply unknown to many of their opponents. However it only took the Europeans one round of defeats to learn the lesson. The next attempted invasions were soundly defeated.
You are mixing two different things into one: the Mongolians were idiotic enough to kill much more people than necessary. After getting tired of killing, they enslaved those who remained.
I do not fault them for being nomadic. I fault them for being much more destructive than it was needed (compared to others who had waged war in the same areas) and for not adopting in their own homeland the technical and cultural advances of those they had conquered. Thus the missed opportunities, like the one to build a few cities sustained by cattle trade with China.