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By Root 1659 0

their civilization, the Europeans could defeat the Jews, their imagined enemies at home. In one city after another from York to Rome, angry Christian crowds attacked the Jewish quarters of their cities. The Christians attempted to punish the Jews with the same treatment that they had heard the Mongols had used in their campaigns. The Christians set fire to Jewish homes and massacred the residents. Those Jews who managed to escape the cities fled from place to place in search of refuge, but in almost all communities, they found more persecution. To clearly identify which refugees were Jewish refugees and to prevent their entering new Christian communities, the church ordered that Jews had to wear distinctive clothes and emblems to mark them for all to see.

With the destruction of the Hungarian army, the route lay open to Vienna, and within weeks, terrified locals saw the Mongol scouting parties prowling around the outlying districts of the city. In a skirmish with one of these advance guards, the Hapsburg troops captured a Mongol officer, who, to the surprise and consternation of the Christians, turned out to be a middle-aged literate Englishman who had made his way through the Holy Land, where he seemed to have developed a talent for learning languages and transcribing them. There is some speculation that with his level of education and his flight from England, he may have been involved in the effort to force King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. After fleeing England and facing excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, he ended up in the service of the more tolerant Mongols. The presence of a European, and a former Christian, among the Mongol army made it clear that the Mongols really were humans and not a horde of demons, but the terrified Christians killed the English apostate before they could get a good accounting of the Mongols’ mysterious mission outside Vienna.

The capture of the unnamed Englishman coincided with the end of Mongol penetration into Europe. They had followed the grass steppes across central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary; but where the pastures ended, the Mongols stopped. With five horses per warrior, they needed that pasture to function. Their marked advantages of speed, mobility, and surprise were all lost when they had to pick their way through forests, rivers, and plowed fields with crops and ditches, hedges, and wooden fences. The soft furrows of the peasant’s field offered an insecure foothold for the horses. The place where fields began also marked the transition from the dry steppe to the humid climate of the coastal zones, where the dampness caused the Mongol bows to lose strength and accuracy.

Despite their probes across the Danube, the full-scale Mongol invasion of western Europe failed to materialize. On December 11, 1241, Ogodei, reportedly in a drunken stupor, died. News of the death reached the Mongol forces in Europe, four thousand miles from Karakorum, within four to six weeks. Chaghatai died at about the same time, and thus in the mere fourteen years since the death of Genghis Khan, all four of his sons had died, and now the princes, Genghis Khan’s grandsons, raced home to continue their battles against each other in the quest to become the next Great Khan. The struggle among the lineages would last another ten years—and for at least this decade, the rest of the world would be safe from Mongol invasion.

Over the early months of 1242, the Year of the Tiger, the Mongols withdrew from western Europe back to their stronghold in Russia. The European cities produced little loot, and the armies the Mongols routed had been poorly supplied. The most valuable asset the Mongols took with them were the tents and furnishing of the Hungarian king’s camp, which Batu used for his base camp on the Volga River. Despite the lack of goods, the Mongols had found a variety of craftsmen such as the miners from Saxony, scribes and translators, and, from their raids around Belgrade and the Balkans, a contingent of French prisoners that included at least one Parisian goldsmith.