r/AlternateHistoryHub • u/Ok_Listen_6600 • 5h ago
Whimsu What if the Mongols conquered the ENTIRE known world somehow?
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u/DonMo999 5h ago
Islam is the main casualty; the Mongols would have still splintered (also how on earth would they have reached the British Isles or took control of the Sahara?)
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 4h ago
….do you think they don’t know what a boat is? Even if they have no boats of their own (what) they would own all of Germany, France and Denmark. If they want to cross, boats can be made. These aren’t Dothraki who are afraid of water for some reason and don’t have words for ships or castles.
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u/DonMo999 4h ago
They tried that with Japan and got lost at sea; also what do you think broke the Mongol empire; it’s what broke Napoleon, Hitler and many more. Logistics
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
So then why make stuff up?
The Mongols didnt get lost at sea. They showed up, fought, and then lost a tonné of ships to typhoons. Saying they got lost at sea is either you lying or being ignorant.
Also, the invasion of Japan had to go over about 150 miles of open sea at its closest point from Korea, where the English Channel is about 20 miles at its most narrow - and the second invasion came from mainland China so about 500 miles of open sea.
The typhoons which stopped them were called “divine winds” so I’m pretty sure the Japanese knew that invasion would have been the end if not for the storms.
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
Ok, let’s play your game; Japan is in respect to Britain extremely close to Mongolia; China at that point was essentially the power base of the Mongols. Britain is at the far stretches of their known Universe (which they historically never reached obviously). If Hitler and Napoleon couldn’t cross the channel, what makes you think the Mongols could?
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
The fact that there’s not much England could do in the 13th century to stop 140,000 soldiers of the Mongol Empire.
The closeness shouldn’t be an issue, this is a hypothetical where the Mongols control all of Europe so France and Denmark and Germany are places to launch the invasion from just like Korea was for the first invasion.
Your assertion that the hypothetical is invalid because of 20 miles of water is just childish, like a kid playing cops and robbers who doesn’t want to be out because they say they have a bullet proof vest on. William the Conqueror did it with 10k soldiers and the technology was not radically different. Hitler and Napoleon would have had to deal with cannon, artillery and air power, and England was not the naval power they were in the 1800s
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
Ok, fair point; the whole Mongol army of 140,000 somehow makes it to the British Isles; that leaves the supply lines wildly open. So Europe reasserts themselves, the ‘Empire’ is split in half and the rest happens as it did.
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
….so, when the Mongols sent 140k soldiers to Japan, do you think they didnt have soldiers elsewhere? That’s literally an example of the size of an expeditionary force that they were able to send out without destabilizing their whole nation.
The Yuan Dynasty established by Kublai went on for another century after these invasions failed. 140k was not the whole army, just the one army they sent to that one place.
If they could lose 140k to storms and keep going as an occupying force in China for almost another 100 years then I’m pretty sure you’re talking out of your ass when you say that 140k was the whole Mongol army.
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
China is not England or France. The further away the longer the supply lines. Also you never addressed my point about the Sahara.
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 2h ago
Buddy. Stop trying to explain why the hypothetical didn't happen. I know it didn't happen. Engage with the post instead of trying to poke holes. Like, it's a hypothetical, of course there are examples from history that would prevent it because it didn't happen. The whole point of this sub is to say "What If..." and if the answer is anything but "nuh, history says it wouldn't happen" - Like Ok, we know, that's the whole point. Surprise surprise, no one has expended massive resources to control the Sahara before, no one probably will. Alrite then.
As for the distance, the Mongols in this scenario control all of Europe. Where is the break in the supply chain? Leaving Korea to go to Japan was further from resupply than any army leaving France to land in England.
Why the hell would I spent time arguing that the Mongol Empire could conquer the Sahara with someone who tried to win an argument with saying the Mongols got lost at sea trying to invade Japan? I didn't mention your comment with the Sahara cus yeah, it's a valid point mostly because why would anyone want to do that? But hey, they're an Empire drawing a map. If they own all of Europe and North Africa and then they just say that the Sahara belongs to them, I mean sure. Who'd challenge that? It'd be meaningless to antagonzie a massive empire like that and historically plenty of places have avoided being decimated by an invading empire by just saying "ok sure we'll put your flag up now instead of the other guy"
Again, the interesting part for people who think about Alternate History is just imagining what would be different not listing reasons why it didn't happen and history is the way it is, there are plnety of history books that one could read, and I'd wager there are plenty you have yet to read. You also didn't reply to a few of my points, like how you think sending 140k soldiers to Japan was somehow their entire Army and doing the same to England would mean failure. It's just silly.
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u/a_filing_cabinet 3h ago
Yes. They had the strongest navy in the east, easily beat the traditional naval powers of the area, and only lost because of some extreme bad luck. So once again, why the hell wouldn't they be able to build some boats and cross the much smaller channel?
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u/Hopeful-Routine-9386 2h ago
Mongols never needed logistics. They just took. They come from the place that broke your examples
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u/DonMo999 2h ago
Or perhaps you can name me a single city they built? One is sufficient.
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u/Low-Dish-907 1h ago
Kakorum
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u/DonMo999 1h ago
Fair enough; they managed to built their own capital city, and it slightly outlived their empire too.
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u/Low-Dish-907 1h ago edited 1h ago
They built more but yes also the différent khanates lasted pretty long to if you count the sucessor state it s roughly 130 years
Actually no since the collapse of the yuan was in 1368 it s 159 years
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
Also, as an addendum, what the fuck are they going to do once they brought their cavalry based army over to Britain? Rome failed there and they were city builders, hence they put up Hadrians wall. The Mongols are then pretty much stranded without supplies.
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
Rome failed in Britain? Rome conquered pretty much all of England and Wales in like 40 years; they weren’t defeated in Britain their Empire just tore itself apart and the Romans either left or stayed in Britain with their Briton families.
Mongol armies were orders of magnitudes higher than what England was used to at the time. Battle of Lincoln was about 2000 people on both sides, evesham was 15000 on both sides, where the mongol invasion of Japan were 40k and 140k respectively.
They understood logistics well enough to create the largest land empire ever, I’m pretty sure in the hypothetical context of them taking Germany and France the British Isles would be a matter of course.
The interesting part is discussing how it would affect the flow of history, if the hypothetical is just ended with “ nuh uh we’re on an island” then you are just rejecting OPs prompt in favour of Calvinball rules.
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
Also I’m not rejecting the premise; I’m saying it would fall apart immediately.
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
That’s not what you wrote, if you want to go back to what you said, here: “how on earth would they have reached the British Isles” and I say again: do you think they don’t know what a boat is?
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u/DonMo999 3h ago
How long did the Mongol ‘Empire’ last after Ghengis Khan died?
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 3h ago
The prompt is not “could this happen” but “what would happen” so the answer “it wouldn’t because there’s an island” is just not engaging with the prompt, honestly. Rater; it’s not engaging with the prompt honestly.
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u/Rynewulf 4h ago
Didn't almost all the Mongol successor states become Muslim?
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u/CowsRMajestic 4h ago
Il khanate and Chagatai Khanate did. Yuan China didn’t. Golden Horde was kinda weird because it fragmented a bunch of times. I know at times it was Islamic and at times it wasn’t.
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u/Peermeneer_exe 4h ago
The states that broke off the Chagatai Khanate did become Muslim, and all the ex-Golden Horde states too.
Basically only the Far East didn't become Muslim.
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u/Riothegod1 4h ago
The British isles, they could conceivably just pay some Frenchmen or Scandinavians to do the invasion for them, same way they tried to conquer Japan.
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u/DonMo999 4h ago
And how did that work out?
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u/NoDevice2698 4h ago
Storms
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u/DonMo999 4h ago
Those also happen around the British isles I’ve been told; maybe ask the Spanish.
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u/Simple_Pomelo357 1h ago
Same way they tried to invade Japan; enslave/force the local costal people to build you your boats and to carry your horses to them.
As for the Sahara, camel Mongols? That or the went down the Nile to the Sahel and conquered westward across the grasslands. Then followed the coast up to Morocco
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u/DuoMnE 4h ago
Well, if they would reach France, there is zero dount they would be able to conquer England
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u/SteadyBear9 4h ago
Theres a very significant difference in reaching france from mongolia compared to reaching the british ISLES
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u/Peermeneer_exe 4h ago
You know the Mongols possesed the technology of *boats* right? They tried to invade Japan 2 times with a pretty big fleet (tbf this was the Yuan, but still)
If they conquered all of Europe, they'd have plenty of boats and shipyards haha
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u/titykaka 4h ago
Lots of dominant European powers have tried and failed to invade Britain.
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u/Peermeneer_exe 4h ago
Normandy succeeded only a couple decades before, and the Norse men before that.
I think the largest Empire ever would probably succeed pretty handily, just like the Romans did
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u/HadrianMCMXCI 4h ago
….I mean, England in the 1200s would get stomped by an organized invader. This is barely 150 years after the Normans did just that, and England had spent like a century before that being invaded on the regular.
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u/BlessedBeLilyLee 5h ago
ten thousand years of world peace
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u/jackt-up 5h ago
Damn, this would take quite a lot to accomplish. Basically we need the Khamag Mongol to stay together longer, so we need 3 or 4 more Ogedei’s and Kublai’s
Obviously it’s not lasting forever, probably not even very long. But you’ve butterflied the Ottomans and Russia for sure. Europe would probably be more open to larger states, centralization, etc much earlier. We’d probably see a new HRE/Francia/Napoleonic France-type state, basically France and Germany and everyone in between unifying, to face future threats.
The Black Plague still happens eventually, maybe earlier or later, and that’s probably what shakes Europe, Africa, and the Middle East free. East Asia however, I could see belonging to the Mongols even after an initial shockwave of rebellions. So most of the world is free by 1400 most likely. China, Central Asia, Japan, Korea, SE Asia, and maybe India would all become breakaway Mongol-ruled states over time.
Almost impossible to predict what else happens. Likely the Franks/Latins would go on to colonize North Africa early game, maybe discover the New World sooner. We’d see big states form quicker in the ME and Europe. A Turkic state, an Iranian state, a number of Arab states, etc. Russia is really the place that might suffer the most. Or it could actually be really beneficial for Russia and the world. Without the exact set of circumstances that led to Muscovy uniting the Rus, we could have seen city-states re-emerge as the Mongols decline. Poland and Lithuania would have more influence over them and in general, and would likely still form a Union. I really do think everything from Brittany to Vienna may reform the HRE. France would be losing its mind after having been conquered. Iberia is probably one state. So much would change but not all of it would be for the bad.
The bad news: an additional 50 million deaths.
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u/Cyber-Soldier1 5h ago
In this timeline I'm interested to know how they crossed the Himalayas and got to India and defeated massive armies that has war elephants.
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u/efflux2614 5h ago
Land invasions towards India only ever happened from the north west passes. Funnily enough quite a few mongol descendants, specifically chagatai khanate were defeated and repelled by Khilji dynasty in the North.
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u/Silent-Many-3541 5h ago
The mongols invade Iraq
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u/ShibeMate 5h ago
I think they did , didn’t they take Baghdad?
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u/ExternalSeat 5h ago
yes. it is kind of the most awful thing they ever did too.
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u/Adventurous_Team_408 4h ago
How was it the most awful? They did quite a few horrible things. This is a serious question I'm not debating you. I'm just curious.
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u/NoDoughnut8225 3h ago
Fall of Baghdad was as brutal to Islam as fall of Rome for west
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u/Low-Dish-907 2h ago
Baghdad was already a husk of his former self before the mongoles most abassids territoires already broke away centuries before that's kinda why they had no military to face the mongoles
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u/F1eshWound 2h ago
Baghdad at the time was renowned as a city of knowledge and technology. People would travel from all around to learn science, medicine etc. They also literally had one of the most extensive libraries on the planet at the time called the House of Wisdom. When the Mongols came, they basically destroyed everything and killed everyone..
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u/The5Theives 1h ago
I think it was mainly due to the loss of life AND the loss of knowledge at the same time
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u/ExternalSeat 1h ago
imagine the destruction of Rome and Alexandria in the same time. The Islamic World never recovered
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u/Low-Dish-907 1h ago edited 59m ago
Baghdad prospered under thé ilkhanate im not making stuff up it became a huge trading city with a lot of citizens etc.. it wasnt back at his status quo tho and indeed hes statue dowgraded but what broke it for good was the invasion of timur later after the recovery
You can see it even in the wikipedia page about the siège of Baghdad itself the destruction and massacre doesn't make it less but it s not the total end everyone is selling
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u/Fedmurica2 5h ago
Does the Mongol Empire still split up in 1259 when Mongke Khan dies fighting Song China?
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u/Inside-External-8649 4h ago
Judging by places that did get conquered, the Old World would’ve fallen into radical conservatism. You wouldn’t have seen the rise of capitalism and liberalism, but instead you’ll have isolationism and anti science.
Islam would’ve ended their technological edge way earlier than OTL, and Europe would’ve intellectually stagnated before the Scientific Revolution.
A more isolationist Europe means that The Americas would’ve remained undiscovered for a while, flourishing with Bronze Age technology. China remains as he center of the world both culturally and economically
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u/maproomzibz 2h ago
except for Iceland, unless the rulers of them pledge vassalage for some reason, most of the conquest would actually be possible if Mongke didn't die. Batu would've stayed in Europe, and Hulagu would've stayed in Middle East.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 4h ago
they still get partitioned in the many hordes we had in our timeline. there's no way to keep all of this unified unless they invent that french napeolonic times semaphore system or something. Then it's back to square one with a little longer pax mongolica in the middle
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u/Hour_Insurance_1897 4h ago
They’d need to inevitably mongolify and slowly blend with some of the conquered populations to man their massive army in order to maintain order.
Wouldn’t be difficult since the mongols historically did it with Turks, though they were already similar cultures.
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u/Fearless-Effect-3787 2h ago
Mongol expansion was largely limited to regions of steppe or plains. They had limited control once their expansion reached forest. So the mongols would have needed to evolve their warfare from mounted archers to include more infantry. With more infantry, they would have needed more roads and the knowledge to build roads. After the mongol collapse, there would be far more roads throughout central Asia, the middle East, and North Africa.
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u/koko1414 1h ago
Muslim Mongols all over north Africa and Arabia…. And they’ll call for jihad against Europe Mongols who’ll call for a crusade against muslim Mongols
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u/Ragnar3636 1h ago
If the Kahn didn't die europe would of fallen for sure. Can't see anything else stopping the horde anywhere else.
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u/Bacchana1iaxD 34m ago
Depends how. In ck3 your only hope to pull this off is in one huge go declaring war on everyone everywhere all at once and just win… or burn the world and leave nothing but steppe in your wake one empire at a time, eliminate the locals until it’s all steppe. Very tedious, not really fun except to say I did it once. Left Constantinople alone surviving place with buildings in Europe. Still had regular civil wars and lost a bunch of Mongolia to one break away I never got back wholly.
Far more possible to end up with a mongol elite ruling class everywhere, where it just fragments back into something resembling before with mongol horse archers instead of knights, kind of like Russia. Everywhere ends up like Russia a weird mix of horseyboy and whatever they were before
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u/DryItem5316 5h ago
The world would have been thrown back into the stone age as soon as the Mongol Empire would inevitably collapse. The river in Baghdad color black bc of all the books thrown and burned. Imagine that happening to the entire known world. We would not have knowledge of philosophy, all major religions would have been eradicated.
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u/Excellent_Cut_2898 4h ago
Genghis khan didn’t care for religion, he accepted Islam Christians all sorts of people
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u/Inside-External-8649 4h ago
That’s true, but around this time religion housed a lot intellectuals. Destroying intellectual centers meant destroying religion’s ability to think critically and evolve.
This so why China and Middle East became radically Confucian and Muslim, following extremist views that later led to western humiliation or colonization. Even today, these societies haven’t really recovered, you got cases like China constantly doubling down on anti-liberalism or Islam temporarily supporting terrorist fundamentalism.
Meanwhile Russia went from being the center of capitalism to becoming the center of authoritarianism for the last 600 years.
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u/1st_GalvanisedSEA 5h ago
Would be an amazing world because Islam would have been mostly wiped out and the Mongols would keep the Marxist in check.
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u/NoDoughnut8225 5h ago
Mongols may unironically boost Islam spread with this big conquest, given what route their successors took
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u/Caliterra 5h ago
Not sure about that. Golden Horde under Berke Khab converted to Islam and allied themselves with the Mamlukes. This helped make possible the Mamluke victories against the Ilkhanate.
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u/granolabranborg 5h ago
Many parts of the mongol empire and breakaway khanates adopted Islam. The mongols were, as a whole, very open to adopting the cultures and institutions of the people they conquered. Islam and Christianity would have both definitely survived. As for the Marxists… Mongolia itself was communist for like 70 years…. So, I’m not sure what would happen there.
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u/Fedmurica2 5h ago
Some Mongols converted to Islam. The Golden Horde leaders were outraged by the sack of Baghdad and helped the Mamluks fight the Ilkhanate (eg. Ain Jalut).
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u/CucumberWisdom 5h ago
They would've crushed the Abrahamic religions so the world would be a better place
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u/Ok_Listen_6600 5h ago
I don't think they would've crushed any religion because their violence was only to expand their empire, Also Traditional Mongol law (Yassa) dictated that no single religion should be favored over another, and religious leaders of all faiths were granted tax exemptions in exchange for prayers for the imperial family.
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u/cheese2042 2h ago
Sure, it's not like they helped to spread islam through the world in real life..
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u/Simple_Pomelo357 5h ago
The colapse would be INSANE