The Mongol Army
The Mongols, who numbered at most
one million men when they started their conquests in 1206, managed to conquer and subjugate most of Eurasia in a hundred years, defeating armies and nations that had tens or even hundreds of times the manpower of the Mongols. The Mongols were basically an unstoppable force that emerged seemingly out of nowhere to dominate the Middle East, China, and Russia.
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Mongol success boiled down to the many strategies and tactics employed by Genghis Khan, who founded the Mongol Empire. Most important was the mobility of the Mongols and their endurance. To begin with, the nomadic Mongol way of life enabled them to move large armies across amazing distances in short times, as the Mongols could live off of their herds or the blood of their horses.
Indeed, the Mongols’ mobility was enhanced by their heavy reliance on horses. Mongol Cavalrymen
each maintained three or four horses to keep them all fresh. Cavalrymen, who had bows they could shoot while riding, gave Mongols distinct advantages over the infantry during the fight. The mobility generated by the horses, as while as their strict discipline, also allowed the Mongols to utilize innovative tactics including hit and run attacks and a primitive form of blitzkrieg.
The Mongols also relied heavily on terror, deliberately inflicting major damages and casualties on their defeated enemies to break the morale of future ones.
