(Abridged, edited and illustrated by TomatoBubble.com)

In England, the herring business had all but collapsed when buyers from the Baltic just never showed up. Why? It seemed that there suddenly were fewer people left in the Slavic lands to buy the catch “wiped out, some reported, by hideous horsemen appearing like a whirlwind from the east.

People with dogs’ heads? Well, maybe not that, but they certainly behaved like wild dogs. They usually left nothing alive, and in any case the stench of corpses made whole cities uninhabitable. Resistance seemed useless. The princes of the Slavic people, then known as the Rus (Russians), reportedly had assembled the greatest army in their history, but in a single battle these hard-riding devils wiped it out.

Beyond them and beyond the lands east of Persia, they left the storied cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in charred ruin. According to the works of the Iranian historian Rashid al-Din  the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv and 1,000,000 in Nishapur. No one knew where they might strike next, and they claimed that their destiny was to rule the whole world.

In conquering Asia, the Mongols murdered untold millions “a catastrophe of a magnitude never before experienced. These disasters are attributable to the evil genius of a single man, the tyrant Genghis Khan, who rejoiced in slaughter and commanded the killing of innocent men, women, and children as his mounted minions raped, pillaged, and plundered wherever they went. For centuries Genghis Khan would stand infamous as history’s most ruthless practitioner of genocide.

These Mongols were Asiatic, not Caucasian. They were also, as those in their path were about to discover to their grief, the world’s finest cavalry soldiers and by far the most brutal. By age twenty-eight, through an alliance with neighboring Turks, Khan had subjugated all the Mongol tribes. Then he turned on his Turkish allies, killed their leader, and subjugated them, too. He built loyalty through rewards of slaves and booty, plus endless promise of new horizons. In 1206 he declared himself supreme Khan (King).

In one battle against Muslims, Khan’s hordes descended on a city and hacked to pieces every man, woman, and child there. All except the governor, that is. He died in slow agony as molten silver was dripped into his eyes and ears.  Mongol armies then converged on the great trading city of Samarkand. After Genghis’s horsemen annihilated 50,000foot soldiers. The defending cavalrymen tried to switch sides, which left the city undefended. The citizens surrendered, and the Mongols took 100,000 of them as slaves. They then executed 30,000 prisoners.

Meanwhile, there was more horrifying news. Bukhara, 100 miles northwest, had fallen to a Mongol army commanded by Genghis himself. He had surprised the city, hacked its fleeing garrison to pieces, and burned the place to the ground.

Genghis  then headed west, burning crops, razing  cities, and slaughtering every human he encountered. He then dispatched 20,000 men on a mission to scout the rich lands to the west beyond the Caspian Sea. When confronted by a large force of Georgians, the Mongols fled with the Georgians pursuing them until their horses were exhausted “ at which point the Mongols returned, mounted on the fresh steeds they had waiting for them, and massacred the entire Georgian army.

Riding out of the Caucasus, the Mongols tore a path westward. By 1222, their scouting army reached Hungary. They then lured an 80,000 strong Slavic force into a 250-mile chase. Then, at the river Kalka, the invaders suddenly turned, confronted the Slavs, and annihilated them. Slavic contingents coming up from behind were wiped out by Mongol archers hidden in clouds of dark smoke, making the battleground a black nightmare of slaughter.

By the time the prince of Kiev arrived with his army, half the original force of 80,000 lay dead. The horrified Kievans turned to flee but were butchered in their entirety. The prince was suffocated to death beneath the table on which the triumphant Mongols ate their victory banquet.

Mongols had no honor when it came to prisoners-of-war.

To Europeans, it did indeed seem that these heathen warriors would enslave every nation. Who could stop them? At the heart of their capability were the  tribesmen themselves, toughened and disciplined from birth. They could ride for days without food or water. If necessary, they drank blood drawn from their horses’ leg veins.

The Mongols could outrace any foe. Their favorite tactic was to feign withdrawal, drawing the enemy past hidden flanks, then crush him from front and back. They created smoke and floods and by 1300 were using gunpowder cannons, incendiary grenades, and flaming bamboo rockets. All this was now directed toward the slaughter, enslavement, and subjugation of Europe.

In 1236 Genghis’s grandson Batu, with an army 120,000 strong, set about finishing off the northernmost Islamic state, the Bulgar kingdom. In the summer of 1237 he overwhelmed the Bulgarian capital, Bulgar, exterminating its entire population of 50,000 and razing the place so completely that it was never rebuilt.

The once-powerful state of Kiev, where more than 200 years ago Prince Vladimir had introduced Christianity, had disintegrated into quarreling provinces. The northern trading center of Novgorod  had declared independence and was growing rich. Princes fought perpetually with each other over succession and against the free citizens in the emerging cities.

Ryazan became the Mongols’ first target. Driving an outpost garrison back into the city, the invaders spent a week erecting a wooden palisade all around it to protect their archers and catapults. A three-day barrage of arrows and rocks followed, after which the attackers burst in with battering rams and began their slaughter.

Civilians were hacked to pieces with swords, pierced with arrows, flayed alive, impaled, drowned, or burned alive.The Mongols raped girls before murdering them and defiled nuns in churches while priests were forced to watch, and then were thrown into the fires. They torched the city but did allow a few people to run away and tell the rest of the Slavs what awaited them.

Kill – Rape – Plunder – Enslave 

Gentle Medieval White folks who looked like the ones depicted above were exterminated, raped or enslaved by the MILLIONS!

As the Mongols burned a bloody path northward, the Grand Duke of Suzdal traveled the country gathering armies to defend his capital of Vladimir. The Mongols destroyed his city before he got home, then confronted his army by the river Sit, surrounded it, and annihilated it.

Now short of supplies, the invaders summered on the grassy plains west of the Don, where they received fresh herds of horses from Mongolia. Through the following winter, they annihilated or enslaved nomadic peoples as far south as the Crimea.

In autumn 1239 they went north and destroyed Chernigov. Then, they spent the winter on the Kipchak steppes but used the time to reconnoiter Kiev, still the largest and most magnificent city in all the Slavic territories.

In December 1240 they struck. Their army battered down the walls, then sliced its way through defenders atop the rubble. The carnage was merciless, and in a horrific conclusion, the weight of people crowding inside the cathedral collapsed its walls. All that remained of the once-splendid metropolis was a hideous pile of writhing and crushed humanity; six years later travelers found Kiev’s streets still filled with skulls and other bones. The Rus were close to being vanquished in a stroke.

The siege and slaughter of Russian Kiev

Neighboring rulers ignored Bela’s plight. Only after Batu annihilated Carpathian defenders did Hungary assemble an army. Bearing down on them through the mountain snows at an amazing 60 miles per day, the Mongols arrived at Vac, slaughtered everyone there, and set up camp.

Nevertheless, Bela’s remaining army of 100,000 was still the largest in Europe, and when Batu failed to attack immediately, Bela grew confident. Then, Mongol reinforcements arrived from the south and he watched in amazement as the invading army began a slow departure. They were giving up, thought the king; they must be afraid or in trouble. And so, disastrously, he chased them.

At Mohi, about eighty miles east of Pest, the Mongols sprang their trap. Surrounding the Hungarians, they unleashed a barrage of firebombs and arrows. When a gap finally appeared in the encircling horde and the Hungarians raced through it to escape, they found themselves trapped in a gorge where archers annihilated 60,000 of them.

By then all Europe had been further frightened by news of more mayhem to the north, where the northern wing of the Mongol army had destroyed the Polish cities of Lublin and Zawichost, sacked Sandomierz, and plundered a monastery.

In Krakow and Wroclaw terrified residents actually burned their own cities and fled. Finally, at Legnica the rampaging horsemen had met an army of 25,000 that included Templars, Teutonic Knights, the entire Polish aristocracy, and the full flower of northern chivalry. But even this assemblage was obliterated in short order.

Waves of panic now rippled all the way to the Atlantic. In cathedrals people prayed, “From the fury of the Tatars, O Lord, deliver us.”  The pope called for a crusade against the Mongols in Germany. Bela, in exile, sent money to build forts on the west side of the Danube.

Months went by with no move from Batu. Then, on Christmas Day 1241, the Mongols exploded with fury against Buda and against Gran , 30 miles northwest. There they roasted citizens alive to make them reveal the locations of hidden treasure, before riding toward Vienna, about seventy miles away. The invasion of Austria had begun. Mongol troops were spotted as far away as Zagreb, east of the Adriatic. Panic also spread in Italy when some were spotted near Venice.

All Europe lay helpless before them. (By the way, In the far east, in centuries to come, the Mongols will inflict similar horror, genocide and cultural destruction upon Aryan India.) It would require the combined might of every army in Christendom to stop these horsemen, but such a unified force simply did not exist. Then, amazingly, the Mongols vanished.

There were some who took a  different view of the Mongols, regarding them not as vanquishers of Christendom but as an instrument by which Christianity could actually overcome Islamic invasion. When Innocent IV became pope in 1243, his chief question about the Mongols was, could they be converted and used to fight the Muslims? Seeking answers, in 1245 he dispatched to them a diplomatic embassy led by a  Franciscan monk called John of Plano Carpini.  After a historic three-year adventure, his small party returned as heroes, the first Europeans to have visited the Far East. Unfortunately, the message he brought from Genghis Khan was a humiliating rebuff. Christendom had just two choices, the Mongols declared: submit or perish.

If the Mongols had had the chance, they would have destroyed Rome and Florence as they devastated Kiev and Baghdad, and there could never have been a Renaissance based on Christian culture.

By 1256 Hulagu had assembled a force of 100,000. His first objective was to destroy the independent sect called the Assassins in their mountain fortresses near the Caspian Sea . More than 100 Assassin castles crumbled over the next year, pounded by a thousand crews of Chinese catapult bombers. Every inhabitant, including women and children, was slaughtered.

The Mongols rolled toward Baghdad, on the Tigris River, and drowned defending soldiers by the 1000’s by breaking a dike. Bursting through Baghdad’s walls, they unleashed one of the bloodiest single-city massacres in human history. It began after remaining troops voluntarily disarmed, expecting to be conscripted, but instead were marched out of the city and butchered. Then, the Mongols killed 500,000 surrendering civilians.

The Mongols burned Baghdad, then had the Caliph sewn up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. Muslim historians put the total killed as high as 2,000,000.