Postponed World Conquest:
The Mongols and the West, 1219 - 1260 (Rus', Central Europe, Middle East)

The study was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation

Project no. 21-18-00166

This project investigates the main stages of Mongol expansion to the West between 1219 and 1260. Using a wide range of Russian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Mongolian, and Chinese sources, including those not yet translated into modern European languages, an international research team is conducting a comprehensive study of the Mongol campaigns in the West as part of a larger general plan for worldwide expansion. Past historians of the Mongol Empire were hampered by its sheer scale, as well as the linguistic and interdisciplinary complexities that this particular research field entails. Such obstacles for integrated research inevitably led to the emergence of a scholarly tradition of localized schools within the framework of regional communities whose interactions with the Mongols were studied separately in the respective Latin, Greek, Christian, Perso-Islamic, and Chinese textual records. Such a “regional” approach can only be justified by the fact that most of the sources concerning the Mongol Empire were created in the languages of conquered peoples; the Mongols’ understanding of their conquest policy and their articulation of the goals behind their imperial expansion are often lost. Improving on the somewhat atomistic and disconnected studies of the past, we propose to simultaneously combine Islamic, European and South Asian representations of the Mongol Empire which, in isolation, represent rather limited views of the larger imperial enterprise taking place in the 1200s. Our research team’s members align their efforts in linguistic and interdisciplinary studies in order to connect different regional historiographic traditions and determine the common strategies and objectives that the Mongols applied in all three global waves of the conquest of the West.

For the first time in Russian and international scholarship, the concept of three waves of Mongolian expansion to the West, which took place successively in 1219–1223, 1236–1242, and the 1250s, is developed. Each of these waves covered all the regions considered in the project – Rus’, Central and Southeast Europe, as well as the Middle East and Southern Asia, including Iran, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and the northern part of the Indian Subcontinent. The first wave was focused on northwestern Iran, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. The second focused mostly on Eastern and Central Europe and to a lesser extent the states of the Caucasus and those of the Eastern Mediterranean. The third focused mostly on the Middle East with some activity in the Black Sea steppe alongside new attempts to attack Poland, Hungary, and the Delhi Sultanate. The abrupt, unexpected dissolution of the Empire, which occurred not only due to internecine political conflicts amongst the Mongol royalty but also due to environmental and climatic cataclysms, interrupted this sequence of aggressive drives originating from distant Inner Asia and Mongolia.

Along with the subjugation of China, the conquest of the West was one of the Mongols’ most ambitious goals, the achievement of which required the concerted effort of the entire Empire and therefore the unquestioned authority of the Great Khan. Unfortunately for the Mongols, the death of Ögödei Khan, the main initiator of the Great Western Campaign, and the subsequent struggle for the throne relegated the conquest of the West behind more urgent tasks such as the restoration of domestic order, the conquest of China, and the consolidation of conquered territories in the Middle East. However, the idea of establishing a world empire retained its vitality even after the dissolution of the Empire in 1260.

This project puts forward a new hypothesis regarding the sudden dissolution of the Mongol Empire and the cessation of large-scale campaigns against the West. It can be shown that the largest environmental and climatic disaster of the last two millennia – the volcanic eruption of Mount Samalas, ca. 1257 – played a critical role in destabilizing dynasties and governments across the world. It was the largest eruption since antiquity, causing a noticeable deterioration of the climate in many regions across the Earth. To all appearances, the epidemic described in the Chinese and Persian sources was due to post-volcanic effects observed in most regions of Eurasia, including cholera and other deadly infectious diseases. Möngke Khan is recorded in the history of Rashid al-Din to have died from this epidemic disease, precipitating a civil war as his brothers fought for supreme power.

Based on a wide and interdisciplinary range of sources, the project’s participants move toward proving that the sacred space intended for the Mongol conquests in one way or another included all known Western countries – even those whose rulers managed to evade direct and unconditional recognition of the universal sovereignty of the Great Khan. The religious ideal of a global empire, formulated by Chinggis Khan and upheld by his heirs, inexorably demanded its being carried out in practice through war and the relentless publication of ultimatums demanding the surrender of one and all to the single legitimate ruler on Earth. This ideal determined the choice of specific targets for campaigns of Mongol expansion and the sequence by which they unfolded. Each respective Mongol campaign was larger than itself as it carried the potential for further conquests, striving to reach the limits of the world – i.e. wherever dryland, peoples, and desirable resources ceased to exist. The Great Khan's Heavenly Mandate had the same power, through its psychological and ideological pull, as the real military force of the Mongol armies. It undoubtedly had a mobilizing influence on the Mongols and a concomitant demoralizing effect on their enemies. The ideal of a world empire could not be fully realized due to a complex series of factors often outside of human agency, such as the workings of the natural environment, but human resistance was not a negligible factor either. Despite the Mongols’ great advantages in the military sphere, including technology, logistics, tactics in warfare, and the effective techniques of subordination and control, they were limited by the capabilities of the steppe civilization, materials, and human resources that the Mongol rulers could mobilize.

Published project results

The Routledge Handbook of the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe / Eds. A. V. Maiorov and R. Hautala. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. 540 pp.
Maiorov A. V. Diplomacy, War and a Witch: Peace Negotiations before the Mongol Invasion of Rus'. The Routledge Handbook of the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe / Eds. A. V. Maiorov and R. Hautala. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. P. 36-81.
Maiorov A. V. The First Mongol Invasion of Europe: Goals and Results. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Ser. 3. 2022. Vol. 32. No. 2. P. 411-438.
Maiorov A. V. The Mongol Conquest of Rus' // The Mongol World / Eds. T. May and M. Hope. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. P. 164-182.
Maiorov A. V. A medieval effort toward unity: Latins, Greeks, Russians and the Mongol Khan. Journal of Medieval History. 2023. Vol. 49. No. 4. P. 495-515.
Pow S. Mongol inroads into Hungary in the thirteenth century: Investigating some unexplored avenues. The Routledge Handbook of the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe. Ed. by A.V. Maiorov, R. Hautala. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 98–118
Pow S. The Mongol Invasions of Europe. The Mongol World / Eds. T. May and M. Hope. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 183–195
Veselov F.N. Omens of the apocalypse: The first Rus' encounter with the Mongols through the prism of the Medieval mind. The Routledge Handbook of the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe. Ed. by A.V. Maiorov, R. Hautala. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. pp. 15–35.
Veselov F.N. From monstrous creatures to neighbouring humans: Image of the Mongols in the European book miniatures of the thirteenth- sixteenth centuries. The Routledge Handbook of the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe. Ed. by A.V. Maiorov, R. Hautala. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. pp. 465–486.
Veselov F.N. Batu’s Invasion: Babylonian Captivity on the Russian Land. Stratum plus. 2023, No 5. P. 261–275.
Veselov F.N. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Tale of the Capture of Kiev in 1240: Literature and History. Russian literature. 2023, No 2. P. 51–62.
Veselov F.N. The Thunder from the East: Batu’s Invasion in the European Medieval Book Miniatures. Vostok (Oriens). 2022. No 1. P. 217–229.
Drobyshev Yu.I. Ideology of the World Domination in “History of the World-Conqueror” by Ata-Melik Juvaini. Vostok (Oriens). 2023. No. 1. Pp. 163–173.
Drobyshev Yu.I. Reflection of the Mongol imperial ideas in medieval Russian sources. Golden Horde Review. 2023, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 532–550
Maiorov A. V. Between Nicaea, Lyon and Karakorum: guidelines for the foreign policy of Alexander Nevsky. Alexander Nevsky: personality, era, historical memory. To the 800th anniversary of his birth / Eds. E. Konyavskaya, L. Belyaev. Moscow, 2021. P. 97-111.
Maiorov A. V. Alexander Nevsky, Pope and Mongol Khan: on the question of the “choice” between the West and the East. Old Russia. The Questions of Middle Ages. 2021. No 4 (86). P. 5-24
Maiorov A. V. Woman diplomacy and war: Russian princes in negotiations with Batu on the eve of the Mongol invasion. Steps. Vol. 7. No 3. 2021. P. 124–199.
Maiorov A. V. Russian lands in the fiscal policy of Möngke Khan. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History. 2022. Vol. 67. Iss. 4. P. 1033-1046.
Maiorov A. V. Alexander Nevsky, Batu and Möngke Khan: the invasion of Nevryuy and control over Russian lands. Old Russia. The Questions of Middle Ages. 2022. No 4 (90). P. 23-38.
Maiorov A. V. “Pacification and control”: Mongol rule in Rus' in the mid-13th century. Russian History (Rossiyskaya istoriya). 2023. No 5. p. 3-22.
Maiorov A. V. Miley, Kuremsa and Möngke Khan: Southern Rus' under Mongol control. Old Russia. The Questions of Middle Ages. 2023. No 2 (92). p. 41-56.

Primary sources publication

Within the project’s framework, we published annotated translations of several Latin-language sources created in the 1230-1240s by contemporaries and witnesses of the Mongol conquests, an output of the project that will be very important for studying the second wave of expansion into the West led by Genghis Khan’s heirs.

The first two translated texts are reports from the second half of the 1230s related to several Dominican Hungarian missions deep into Eurasia to make contact with the population of the original Hungarian homeland – so-called “Magna Hungaria.” Faced with information about the impending Mongol threat during the course of these missions, the Dominicans moved from preaching the Gospel to collecting information about the campaign of Batu's armies being directed against Europe.

The oldest surviving document is the report of the friar, Riccardus, “De facto Ungarie magne," composed in 1236, which contains information about the first two missions of the Dominicans and was recorded on the basis of the testimony of Friar Julian. The second Dominican journey is described in more detail within the report; its main participant was Julian who returned to Europe in June 1235 and was the first in the Latin West to report on Batu’s preparations for the Great Western Campaign.

The second text, “Epistola de vita Tartarorum,” was written by Julian himself in 1238. He told the situation in Eastern Europe – and specifically in the territory where the first Mongol military campaigns had already unfolded. Julian learned about the conquest of the lands beyond the Volga and the plans of Batu, whose armies were already stationed on Russian principalities’ borders. On the very eve of the sack of Ryazan, the Dominicans left Rus' to spread an urgent warning to Europe about the thunderstorm coming from the east.

The third source which we provide, “Historia Tartarorum,” is the report of the Dominican friar, Simon of Saint-Quentin, who accompanied the embassy of Ascelin of Lombardy that was dispatched by the Holy See to the Mongols. This is one of the most important written sources on the second wave of Mongol expansion to the West, along with their conquests in the Middle East, Near East, and the Caucasus. In addition to its wealth of materials on the history, ethnography, and the political situation in Anatolia and Transcaucasia, the text contains a description of the discussion about spiritual and political power that unfolded between the Mongols and the mendicant ambassadors who arrived on 24 May 1247 in the Mongol commander Baiju’s camp in the territory of Cilician Armenia. Simon of Saint-Quentin's report, conveying all the nuances of this dispute, is without a doubt a unique document of the epoch for studying the ideological foundations of the Mongols' claims to the world domination. The original report of Friar Simon is considered to be lost, but much of its text is preserved in several chapters of Vincent of Beauvais’ “Speculum Historiale”.

Along with all these sources, we have published their new translations in English, carried out specifically for the project, accompanied by philological and historical comments.

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