Which of the following traits of the Mongols helped them conquer such a vast territory?
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Answer:
The key element is the leadership or they’d have stayed isolated herdsmen continually fighting and feuding among themselves. Ghengis Khan and his successors, shaped by his tactics, insights, and success, are the key explanations, much like Napoleon’s impact on France, Gustavus Adolphus on Sweden, Shaka on the Zulu, or Phillip of Macedon.
Ghengis Khan understood like few others the weakness and ill-discipline of clan-based warfare so he mixed his units with members drawn from all clans and in equal numbers so they became loyal and focused on their unit’s survival rather than on their clan’s loot, glory, and relative power. That stabilizes everything in offensive and defensive behaviors, discipline, obedience to high command rather than random local responses to apparent opportunities, how conquered territories are handled (incorporated into your logistics and long-term production base or simply destroyed.)
These Mongol Armies treated their own Mongol horse archers (a very powerful unit in attrition and maddening infantry with their greater mobility and long range fire) as elite skirmishers and officers while incorporating vast numbers of conquered populations into their armies, armed as they were by their original cities so very mixed troops (body armor, direct contact and projectile weapons, seige engine capacity, gunpowder-armed troops from China, heavy cavalry, light and heavy infantry, etc.) that put most tactics available to the Mongols but rarely to the defending armies. Sacrificing conquered troops as front-line attackers, decoys, holding forces, besiegers, etc. was also much easier on Mongol army discipline than great losses of the extended family members of the Mongol clans so they could take more punishment than most defenders could. Most of their losses were men they would have executed anyway and by stripping the conquered countries of their remaining armies for distant Mongol campaigns, rebellions in conquered nations had few resources to draw on.
The Mongols used terror tactics to an unusual extent that scared many opponents to surrendering immediately or much faster, often to a much smaller Mongol force. Building piles of thousands or tens of thousands of skulls and corpses of city-dwellers who’d opposed them (or simply lived there and imagined surrender would preserve their lives) and turning some communities into less than ruins so they couldn’t be readily repaired or rebuilt were common to the Mongols but relatively rare everywhere else. Some of this clearly influenced the Nazis in Eastern Europe and Russia while Stalin and Mao’s countries had been Mongol empire conquests held for centuries so those tactics were known there better than anywhere.
The original Mongol horsemen managed logistics better than infantry forces by living off of their horses (drinking their horses’ blood, living considerably on mare’s milk both straight and fermented, cooking their meat kind of by placing it under their saddles so the heat of the horse would cook it (origins of both ground beef and “steak tartare”) and their small ponies were able to live just off of grass grazing (larger horses needed oats and other farmed feed which greatly complicates logistics in the field.) They ate whatever they could find, reportedly captives too, but moving quickly and in relatively small bands they were less likely to exhaust a local food supply than a much slower moving military force walking at 15–25 miles a day.
They adapted the technologies they found in conquered places far more rapidly than probably any force in history (something the Nazis did but most others don’t because it’s disruptive and inconvenient, military staff conveniences being one of the most significant factors for any army-especially those who lose.) This was especially significant in the Mongol’s conquest of China’s many warring states as some of them were 500+ years or so in techological advance of Europe at that point.) Weatherford traces the spread of gunpowder-armies and tech by the Mongols across their empire as to how Europe sluggishly became to as well (multiple centuries seems sluggish to me.) Printing, windmill power, advanced metallurgy, ship design, advanced irrigation, national governments and local government administration methods, etc. are some of the other intellectual loot that the Mongols technologically transferred to much of Eurasia, often blending with Indian and Persian technologies for more complete solutions. That’s a huge advantage historically for any country that readily adapts the best of thinking from around the world and how places that live the “Not Invented Here so Irrelevant” mindset consistently stagnate and fall behind.
Explanation: