2. Why were the Mongols a threat to the Delhi Sultanate? Who can be
compared to the in the earlier history of the Hindu Kingdoms?
Answers
Answer:
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Explanation:
There is a saying that amateurs talk tactics, while professionals talk logistics. This is particularly true in the case of the Mongol Empire. Or to be precise it was a lack of logistics that dominated their military planning.
The very things that made the Mongols such an extraordinarily effective military force limited their ability to penetrate deeply into settled regions.
The Mongols travelled light and fast. They were generally mostly cavalry, with up to 10 remounts for every soldier, with an average of, say, five. Their ponies were uniquely fit for rapid travel, being bred on the steppe where horses needed to round up herds over large areas and then drive them long distances between winter and summer pastures.
There was almost no supply chain. The troops carried a bit of grain and dried meat with them and bled their horses. The horses lived off the land. The only train behind them was that of the engineers.
An army of 50,000 men could potentially have up to 250,000 horses. Even on rich pastures one hectare feeds one horse year-round, absolute tops, over a large area; dry steppe much less, say as little as 10 hectares per head, especially as we must account for differences in available pasture at different tines of year. So 250,000 horses will eat through between 5,000 and 50,000 hectares of pasture every week.
There are 100 hectares per square kilometre, so the army needed between 50 and 500 square kilometres per week. If the army were to advance on a front of 10 kilometres they would need to move up to 50 kilometres a week. No problem as long as they don’t ever stop to la siege to town or to manoeuvre for a battle. And if they needed to cross mountains or desert they had to move fast. In thickly settled country armies are often constrained to travelling on roads and crossing rivers at a limited number of fords and bridges. So they must fan out over a broad front to collect fodder between bridges. Extensive advance scouting is essential.
So the army was most effective within a relatively short distance of the steppe. In China, Genghis Khan invaded the Jin Empire in 1211. By 1215 he had captured Beijing. By 1223 he had finished pacifying and exercised control over Dongbei, Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong provinces. It then took until 1276 for his grandson Kublai Khan to complete the conquest of China, using mostly Chinese troops and Chinese style fighting.
In Central Asia, the Mongols systematically depopulated vast tracts to create pastures to form their base for the conquest of the Iranian plateau. I quote from Wikipedia: “Large areas of Islamic Central Asia and northeastern Iran were seriously depopulated [11] as every city or town that resisted the Mongols was destroyed. Each soldier was given a quota of enemies to execute according to circumstances. For example, after the conquest of Urgench, each Mongol warrior – in an army of perhaps two tumens (20,000 troops) – was required to execute 24 people.[12] (better source needed). A better source is needed; the number seems too high. But you get the drift.
Next they invaded the Iranian plateau which had a fair amount of open country that suited them. Then they descended into Mesopotamia, where again they depopulated an extensive area around Baghdad in 1258. This land reverted to semi-desert. Much of it has still to be restored to the productivity it had 4,000 years ago.
In 1260 they mounted an attack towards Egypt, whose Mamluk (slave soldiers, mostly Kipchak Turks) rulers stopped them at the battle of Ain Jalut in what is now northern Israel. This is heiled as a great turning point which prevented the further expansion of the Mongols into Egypt and beyond.
It was not. The Mongols stopped in Syria for the same reason that they stopped in Hungary, in north China and in North India: they had reached end of the steppe. They were able to sustain their occupation of the fringes of the steppe - Syria, the Punjab, Hungary - for decades. They permanently transformed Central Asia, which is a constituted of irrigated riverine land, interspersed with wide steppes. It had previously been entirely Iranian-speaking. It became predominantly Turkic. (Most of the “Mongol” army was actually Turkic.)
Only in China did the Mongols manage to conquer a large expanse of humid agricultural land far removed from the steppe. It took them sixty years to adapt their military to achieve this, by whic time they had absorbed a great deal of the Chinese customs, organisation, and military arts.
So yes, the Mongols could potentially have threatened the power structure in India in the long run, as they did in China, but it would have taken the same kind of genius for adaptation as Kublai Khan exhibited in China.