Genghis Khan's Grandson Never Lost a Battle in Europe — And Still Went Home

Heirs of Genghis Khan — the whole series, in order: The Son Genghis Khan Refused to Disown — A... In the spring of 1242, an army that no European army had beaten turned around and rode home. It had broken the princes of the Rus one by one. It had destroyed a Polish army and a Hungarian army in the same week, five hundred kilometres apart. Its scouts had burned the towns south of Vienna. Nothing pushed it out — it left. The man who led it was called Batu, and fifteen years earlier he had inherited something that did not exist: a will that gave his father's line everything out to the far west, as far as the hooves of Mongol horses had ever set foot. Not a border. Not a province. A direction. This is how that promise became the largest state in Europe — and how the same rule of succession that handed it to him took back everything he won past that line. Every factual claim in this video is sourced. Where the sources disagree — on the date of the battle on the Sajó, on whether the army even knew the great khan was dead when it began to withdraw, on why it withdrew at all — the video says so instead of picking the tidier version. The three real arguments for the withdrawal are given side by side: the death of Ögedei, the wet spring of 1242 read out of tree rings in 2016, and the price this army had been paying for walled towns since Kozelsk. Rashid al-Din, Juvaini, friar Julian, the papal envoy Carpine and the chronicles of the Rus are retold, not quoted. Batu's father was Jochi. Everything in this video — the will, the line, the right to the far west — comes from him, and from a rule the steppe kept for six hundred years after Genghis Khan was gone. That is the previous episode, and the place to start: The Son Genghis Khan Refused to Disown — The Son Genghis Khan Refused to Disown — A... Images: miniatures from the Radziwiłł Chronicle and the Chronicon Pictum; manuscript paintings from the Jami al-Tawarikh and the Diez albums; Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora; photographs and engravings of Bolghar, Bilyar and the lower Volga — via Wikimedia Commons. Public-domain works are not listed one by one. Licensed photographs and scans, with thanks to their authors (cropping, camera movement and colour grade are ours): CC BY-SA 4.0: A.N. Mironov, AlexK2022, Anas Badawi, Denis Map Server, Faqscl, Hoshvilim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mike1979 Russia, nargizaitugan, NeimWiki, Oksanetta, Radziwiłł Chronicle (Радзивилловская летопись), Vyacheslav Kirillin, 掬茶. CC BY-SA 3.0: Irina Danilova, lavrov, Mike1979 Russia, Mikhail930, PHGCOM, shakko, Vadim Indeikin, 乌拉跨氪. CC BY 3.0: Sailko, Марсель Marsel. CC BY 2.0: Jean-Michel Moullec. CC BY-SA 3.0 igo: Khalili Collections. Maps: Natural Earth (public domain).