15.3.1 The Question of Hungary’s “Suitability” Within the Mongol Empire: Before and After the Withdrawal of 1242 There are two realities of Hungary’s conditions, which would have made its long-term incorporation into the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth century unsurprising. The first is that the Carpathian Basin, the region in which the Kingdom of Hungary was established, is widely recognized as the westernmost extension of the long Eurasian steppe belt, stretching like a highway all the way from Mongolia in the east. Indeed, the steppe did see the rapid movement and migration of nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples along this highway, and Hungary’s history before the Mongol invasion attests to no shortage of peoples such as the Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, and eventually the Magyars themselves who arrived in the ninth century and established their state in the Carpathian Basin (Pinke et al. 2017b). As such, many groups of steppic origins had viewed the area as a suitable base to migrate, raise their herds, and wage wars of conquest or simple plundering on surrounding states. Thus, we might expect that the Mongols in the thirteenth century would have viewed it in a similar way. 2001 2017a 2001 1985 2011 15.2 Open image in new window The second reality of medieval Hungary’s conditions was that it lay on important trade routes, along which widespread international trade was carried out. Hungary had remained in the Middle Ages, after the arrival of the Magyars and the establishment of their kingdom, very much a country at the intersection of Turkic nomads, Byzantium, and the Latin West; not surprisingly, it had a highly heterogeneous population (Berend, 23). The kingdom hosted significant Jewish and Muslim populations whose merchants carried on a lively international trade between Europe and Asia in the leadup to the Mongol invasion. Recent archaeological research has revealed that a series of former Roman earthwork fortifications known as the Devil’s Dykes (Ördög árok or Csörsz árka) began to function as a north-south trade route with Muslim communities in the period of the Arpad Dynasty (1000–1301). This is evinced, for instance, by the even spacing of towns, which suggests major mercantile activity. Products such as salt would have moved along this route from Transylvania to the waterways of the Balkans and Byzantium (Pinke et al.). When we consider its active trade and political connections with Turkic nomads, Russian principalities, and Byzantium, along with its close links with the Middle East—Muslim accounts describe Hungarian Muslim clerics who went to study in Aleppo, for instance (Berend, 238–239)—we can see that Hungary was very much tied into a larger Eurasian network. Friar Julian for instance ultimately reached Magna Hungaria on the Volga by moving with merchants along eastern trade networks stretching from Hungary (Göckenjan and Sweeney, 75–77). From the tenth century, it was part of this trade network and its direction of emphasis was both eastward toward Kiev, a major center of international trade, and southward toward Constantinople; if not located on the routes that characterized the Silk Road per se, Hungary was at least an important extension of periphery networks in the period leading up to the Mongol invasion, though at that point Hungary’s trade focus was shifting westward (Szende, 168–169). These networks continued to function as major trade routes across East-Central Europe during Hungary’s post-invasion period of recovery and prosperity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Fig.). This is meaningful because the Mongol Empire, since its inception in 1206, had expanded not simply along the steppe belt, but also along the trade routes that traditionally, or perhaps out of modern fashion, are called the Silk Road. These routes shaped the empire’s functions, becoming arteries of communication vital for the central government in Mongolia to exercise control over disparate regions as the empire grew. As such, we might view the Silk Road, along with the Eurasian steppe belt, as social and environmental conditions which made the Mongol nomads’ unprecedented conquests possible. Chinggis Khan and his descendants had an established pattern of forming close partnerships with merchants who functioned in their empire as go-betweens and even spies (Allsen 1989).1 Merchants were some of the great beneficiaries from the conquests in the thirteenth century; we might think of Marco Polo’s own storied career as a merchant simultaneously operating as an agent of the Mongol administration. When the Mongols reached Europe in the early 1240s, it seems that Hungary, sitting at the nexus of trade routes between multiple regions (Szilágyi 2012, 77–95), would have fit well within the larger framework of their empire. Whether the Mongols were, as many scholars believe, really driven by a mandate set by Chinggis Khan for world conquest (Jackson 2006), or were simply motivated by opportunism to seize areas suitable for the conditions of their nomadic lifestyle and which offered wealth they could accumulate from commerce along trade routes (Berend 2001, 35), the occupation of Hungary would appear to be the next logical step in their expansion after they arrived on its borders. If we see trade routes comprising the so-called Silk Road and the Eurasian steppe belt as limiting factors to the Mongol Empire’s expansion, Hungary still seems like it was suitable for a long-term occupation. That is what makes the Mongols’ evacuation of the country in 1242, and their apparent lack of efforts to quickly return there,2 such a mystery. If we consider that Hungary was suited for Mongol conquest and thus was occupied, there are a couple of observations related to general problems with the Büntgen and Di Cosmo’s premise. First, it is difficult to imagine that such a short-term fluctuation in climate as that in early 1242 could convince a highly successful and campaign-hardened army to retreat. To subscribe to the “environmental hypothesis,” one must be of the belief that a few short months of unseasonable precipitation and lower than average temperatures were the deciding factor in driving off an army of Mongols that had successfully conquered, or was to conquer, the territory from the eastern edges of Asia to Hungary. It is hard to believe that the warriors capable of conquering the steppes and forests from Mongolia to Hungary would have found the latter’s climate and mud an insurmountable obstacle. That relates to a second point. The Mongols, and the other Inner Asian tribal groups they subjugated, emerged from rugged regions prone to climatic extremes far worse than what might be expected in the European continental climate of Hungary. Simply taken at face value, it is difficult to accept—to paraphrase Fletcher when he criticized Sinor’s geographical theory—that people who had emerged from (and adapted a lifestyle to) such conditions, and who waged victorious wars of conquest in the forest zone of Russia, the rice paddies of Song China, and the deserts of the entire Middle East, decided to retreat from the Great Plain of Hungary because an unusually wet and cold early spring in 1242 proved too much for them (Fletcher 1986). Several historians have argued that ecological factors did come into play in some Mongol withdrawals—for instance, they withdrew from Syria in 1244 and two contemporary Near Eastern authors mentioned that the Mongols’ horses’ hooves were damaged by the summer heat (Jackson 2005, 74). John Masson Smith Jr. thoroughly analyzed several unsuccessful Mongol campaigns in Syria and noted that logistical factors, such as the limited supplies of pasturage and water, could have greatly constricted Mongol military operations (Smith 1984). So, there is evidence that ecological factors really did hamper the effectiveness of Mongol campaigns, but these failures seem related to long-term, ordinary conditions of regions, like the deserts of Syria. Moreover, the Mongols seem to have ultimately adapted to conditions and subjugated many powerful adversaries, such as the Song Chinese or the Abbasid Caliphate, in geographical regions that were hardly suited to steppe modes of living and fighting. It is a trend that we acknowledge their high adaptability in cases where they conquered, but in cases where they did not ultimately succeed, the conclusion is often that this was predominantly because the Mongols could not adapt to local ecological conditions. Turning to Béla IV’s letter to the pope, discussed in point (1) of Büntgen and Di Cosmo’s reply and written a few years after the invasion, the king certainly was not of the mind that the Mongols deemed his country unsuitable for occupation. He thought that the Mongols were going to return, and he was hearing reports of it from his spies and contacts to the east. Moreover, he was emphatic about the danger of the Mongols occupying the country, in his words, “because they can settle their families and animals—in which they abound—marvelously well here, better than elsewhere” (Rosenwein 2013, 421). The authors in their reply stated that the Hungarian king was referring to normal conditions, rather than the short-term climate fluctuation of 1242. A problem is that is not what the source records. Béla did not offer any nuance to the circumstances in which the Mongols could settle. Denis Sinor’s own earlier geographic theory for the Mongol withdrawal highlights a danger related to any environmental explanation. The author is forced to overlook textual evidence that challenges a theory or amend it to make it work when faced with new data. In the original iteration of his theory Sinor recorded that the Great Hungarian Plain had an area of 100,000 km2, each horse needed 120 acres per year (based on American horse breeding statistics), each Mongol soldier needed 3 horses, and therefore Hungary could have accommodated at most 68,640 Mongol troops (Sinor 1972). A few decades later, his calculation read as follows: The Great Hungarian Plain had 42,000 km2 of pasturage, each horse needed 25 acres per year, and therefore Hungary could support only 83,027 Mongol troops because each soldier needed 5 horses (Sinor 1999). It seems like what had priority in Sinor’s view was the theory and the data could be shifted around at will simply to keep the maximum number of Mongols low. Büntgen and Di Cosmo offer something more convincing since their theory is based on a reliable paleoclimatic model, rather than a mysteriously evolving calculation, but sometimes they follow Sinor’s track by making reaching inferences to connect statements in the textual primary sources to what had been observed from the reconstructed year-by-year weather conditions. An especially noticeable example of this tendency is when the authors refer to Mongol activities and decisions during the summer and fall of 1241 while they were occupying Hungary. They ordered servants to provide shelter and fodder for their horses, did not burn crops, and kept peasants alive with the command to take in the harvest. Even when the authors accede that the documentary sources are silent on any weather-related issues during that phase of the invasion, they note, “These preparations are somehow indicative of an early onset of the fall/winter in 1241” (Büntgen and Di Cosmo 2016). Statements like this leave one with the feeling that the documentary evidence is being forced to construct a narrative that emerged initially from paleoclimatic data. Subscribing to any geographic or climatic theory requires the researcher to overlook what happened in the long-term aftermath of 1242. The Mongols regularly threatened Hungary’s monarch with ultimatums to submit to their rule, and even offered him military alliances, in the years following their departure (Göckenjan 1991, 61). Büntgen and Di Cosmo did not draw really any attention to this ongoing pattern of Mongol-Hungarian interactions in formulating their hypothesis for the withdrawal. Furthermore, the Mongols did eventually launch a large-scale invasion of Hungary in 1285. Again, the motivations of the Mongols and the scale of that invasion are uncertain and subject to debate. Nonetheless, we may conclude that it was a much larger undertaking than the scant secondary literature on it would suggest. While English-language literature has not yet offered major studies on the so-called Second Mongol Invasion in 1285, two major Hungarian studies have explored these important, if largely overlooked, events (Székely 1988; Szőcs 2010). These works offer important perspectives from which to approach the question of what Mongol intentions were for Hungary in light of their return. Moreover, the source material does indicate the Mongols suffered in 1285 from epidemics, serious weather issues, and ultimately famine in their disorganized retreat from Hungary. That the paltry sources for the 1285 campaign so persistently mention these issues, but the larger body of sources on 1242 are utterly silent on any such difficulties suggests that the Mongol forces did not experience such problems in the earlier campaign. Hungary’s landscape and geography lent itself to nomadic incursions and occupations. This makes the fact that Hungary retained its autonomy more remarkable than the Kingdom of Bohemia’s survival, for instance, or that of the principalities of Poland. As for Hungary’s other regional neighbors, such as Serbia, the Kingdom of Bulgaria, and areas of present-day Romania, they actually were subjugated by the Mongols to varying degrees and for different periods during the course of the thirteenth century (Vásáry 2005, 69–94).3 Though Büntgen and Di Cosmo do acknowledge that shortly after evacuating Hungary, the Mongols invaded and subjugated Bulgaria, they do not really mention the larger trend of Mongol conquest and interference in the Balkans throughout the remainder of the thirteenth century. In fact, they state, “Our paper shows that a possible reason why the Mongols who occupied Russia under Batu and his successors did not make further attempts to expand westward may have depended on the realization that local conditions would not have supported a prolonged occupation” (Büntgen and Di Cosmo 2016).

15.3.2 The Issue of the 1242–1243 Famine in Hungary and Its Causes The famine that affected the Kingdom of Hungary during and after the Mongol invasion is a frequently discussed topic among Hungarian researchers of the Middle Ages. Andrea Kiss, for instance, has looked at the topic and while she argued that the Mongol invasion was “very much responsible for the hunger,” she also speculated that the unusual cold of the winter of 1241–1242, coupled with abundant snow and ice, may have played a contributing role in the situation (Kiss 2000). As such, this could support Büntgen and Di Cosmo’s hypothesis. On the other hand, József Laszlovszky has pointed out in a publication touching on economic history that the ecological situation of medieval Hungary was such that famine occurred very rarely—which would suggest the famine in the 1240s was brought on by a truly exceptional set of circumstances, i.e. severe disruption caused by the invasion (Laszlovszky et al. 2018). In any case, it should be noted that this famine has been already heavily studied by generations of Hungarian scholars. The most recent conclusions by Andrea Kiss are that during major and long-lasting climatic changes and many years of extreme weather, famine occurred but very rarely in the whole country. Famines and food shortage crises in Hungary were usually related to particular regions. There were very few exceptional cases when such situations affected the whole kingdom (e.g. the mid-1310s, 1362, or 1364). But even in these periods different social groups were affected in different ways and there were areas which were lightly or negligibly affected. It is also important to underline that the crisis periods were the same as those faced in contemporary Western or Central European contexts—that is, people in other regions of Europe were experiencing the same famine (Kiss et al. 2016). While the causes of the famine in 1242 remain an ongoing topic of debate, the issue has much significance for the question of the withdrawal, since much of the textual evidence being used to support a climatic explanation relates to famine. A major component of Büntgen and Di Cosmo’s theory is their attempt to relate the famine to a food crisis that the Mongol occupiers were experiencing. They argue that the Mongol decision to feed their prisoners with less desirable parts of sheep, as recorded by their captive Rogerius, indicates that the Mongols themselves could foresee the great famine that was to overtake Hungary. Deciding to feed prisoners only parts of sheep, rather than the whole sheep they were receiving beforehand, could be motivated by a variety of factors, including a lost sense of the value or importance of the prisoners. Indeed, Rogerius heard from informants that the same prisoners would be subjected to a wholesale massacre (Bak and Rady 2010, 221). Moreover, Rogerius, who escaped captivity around that time, mentioned that this change in the rations allotted to prisoners happened only after the Mongols began withdrawing from eastern Hungary into Cumania (Wallachia and/or Moldavia). So, it seems rather problematic to try to link the Mongol decision to feed prisoners less generously with a recognition that famine was going to strike Hungary. Famine did severely afflict the local Hungarian population, but textual sources make it clear why this happened, and climate was not the primary driver. A contemporary churchman stated that it happened because the peasants were forced during the invasion to abandon their crop fields for two growing seasons (Karbic et al. 2006, 303). Naturally, if the farmers were unable to cultivate crops because they could not stay on their fields owing to the disruption and danger of the invasion, a serious famine was going to set in. Others had harvested some crops but only to supply them to the Mongols in 1241 (Bak and Rady 2010, 211). What happened in Hungary in 1242 was hardly an isolated incident. Shortly after the withdrawal, a Dominican emissary was sent into the Mongol Empire to meet them with letters from the pope. He passed through many regions that had been affected recently by invasions and eventually met with the Mongols in Armenia. In his report, detailing Mongol methods of waging war, he stated, “In every country which the Tartars destroy, famine always follows” (Richard 1965, 44). What his report would suggest is that Mongol invasions consistently triggered famine in all the affected areas, far beyond Hungary, and we can easily infer that this happened because it was a larger strategy of the Mongols. The famines they triggered were intentional—a sort of weapon to crush resistance. When we consider that testimony, it is very hard to entertain the notion that the starvation which affected Hungary’s people in 1242 was the result of a short-term fluctuation in climate. Kirakos of Gandzak, an Armenian churchman taken prisoner, noted that the Mongols invaded in the summer when the harvest had not been reaped or gathered in the granaries. They came with their livestock and ate and trampled everything, so that when they left Armenia in the winter the people had nothing to eat and died of starvation. However, Kirakos noted, that winter was “not severely cold, as at other times but as mild as one could wish” (Bedrosian 1986, 224). Here we see a close parallel to what happened in Hungary in terms of famine, albeit without the cold weather. If we need further proof, Juvaini describes instigating famine as a regular feature of steppe warfare against sedentary societies. Describing the actions of Küchlüg, a Naiman chieftain who fled from Chinggis Khan to the Qara Qitai and was attempting to subjugate the famous Silk Road city of Kashgar, Juvaini noted, “Küchlüg, at every harvest time, would send his troops to devour their crops and consume them with fire. When for three or four years they had been prevented from gathering in their corn, and a great dearth had made its appearance, and the populace were distressed with famine; they then submitted to his command” (Boyle 1958, 65). This type of warfare was being practiced from the very beginning of the empire, even by refugees fleeing from Chinggis Khan. Changchun, a Chinese Daoist monk, passed through the former Khwarazm Empire shortly after its conquest and described a society so broken down by famine and brigandage that the Mongol governor of Samarkand refused to reside in the palace of the former shah (Waley 1931, 93). In their campaigns against Korea, the Mongols inflicted famine on the population to pressure the king to submit. The king in turn complained to the Mongol leadership in terms that sound rather familiar: “…several times you sent army leaders to censure [the people]. The people have no land to cultivate and in farming there was no time to harvest. Considering this land [had only] flowering grass, what could be produced? Thinking that we had no way of offering up tribute and to present it would be difficult, my fear was extreme” (Schultz and Kang 2014, 307). The Mongols inflicted such severe starvation on the population that finally they started killing their own government-appointed leaders or inciting Mongols to attack certain fortresses. Ultimately the military governor of Korea was overthrown and assassinated, not long after he refused to open a granary. In the end, the king finally sent his son to the Mongol court to submit in 1259 by which time the Mongols had seized the entire harvest, epidemics were breaking out, and starvation was rampant (Schultz and Kang 2014, 369–377). A comparative look at texts from different times and regions should lead us to the conclusion that the famine that unfolded was intentionally brought about by the invaders. As for the Mongols’ animals and their pasturage needs, the carrying capacity of the Great Hungarian Plain allowed for millions of animals, even during the Little Ice Age of the Early Modern era (Pinke et al. 2017b), so it is difficult to imagine that even a large Mongol army would have faced a crisis with pasturage owing to short-term climate fluctuations. Büntgen and Di Cosmo did not always clearly distinguish if the food crisis was one afflicting the animals of the Mongol occupiers or simply one affecting the agrarian-based populace of Hungary. These are two very different things. Furthermore, it seems the authors supplied documentary evidence of a victual crisis facing the latter group as evidence that the former group was experiencing something similar. It is problematic to link the accounts of widespread starvation of Hungary’s sedentary, agrarian population to the issue of pasturage being limited by short-term climate fluctuation of early 1242. The obvious problem with such a viewpoint is that it is well known that the Mongols relied primarily on their herds of animals for food. So, the disruption of grain harvests would not have had the same effect on the Mongol occupiers as it had on the local peasantry. Büntgen and Di Cosmo, however, argued that not only did cold wet conditions in 1242 affect cultivated crop production, but they limited pasturage in the Great Plain, placing stresses on the Mongols to feed their animals. The sources from a Hungarian context, and far beyond, leave us no doubt that the famine was mostly a manmade and intentionally triggered phenomenon.