The author of this piece is right, very few people seem to comprehend how well established our trade was at the time. The silk road was well established between Rome and China at the time that Genghis Khan started his rise, to the point that it was his desire to capture it to tax it.
They had two major technological innovations #1 was advanced horsemanship, #2 was the composite bow. They also had one major advancement in strategy derived from their nomadic traditions - they knew how to hunt and how to do it effectively. These modified their warfare tactics massively. For instance the Mongols heavily favoured the tactic of attacking a vast swathe of outlying villages and driving the populace toward the city they intended to siege. This meant that the food stocks lasted very little time. They also knew how to breach a castle by fooling the defender (they frequently attacked the gate and fled, only to strike again), and more importantly they understood that a hunted animal fights harder when it's trapped so they never encircled their enemy, they always surrounded them in a crescent shape (IIRC it was noted that the panic to escape often resulted in people being trampled to death) to allow the people to escape. Once broken the Mongols simply followed on horseback and picked their enemy off.
Khan has a shrewd warrior and anything he could use to help a siege he acquired. They had catapults and ballista, but it was the Mongols who figured out that the gunpowder of the Chinese combined with the metalurgy from the European bell makers (yes bronze church bells) could be used to make a cannon... so they built cannons. Genghis Khan established the worlds (first?) best postal service for the time, to the degree of efficiency that likely still put us to shame shortly before the invention of the car. This was literally the internet of their day, especially as Khan recruited every technologist his forces encountered.
This is why the barbarian invasions were so powerful against the Romans and the ancient world, because they were fighting a civilization that had exclusively predatory behaviour against city-states. One of their favourite tactics was to divert a river to flood the city. Then it was just a matter of time for the water to stagnate and infection and disease to go wild, even though it rarely got to that point.
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Mounted couriers could travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) in seven days; the journey from Susa to Sardis took ninety days on foot. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote, "There is nothing in the world that travels faster than these Persian couriers." Herodotus's praise for these messengers"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness of night prevents these couriers from completing their designated stages with utmost speed"was the inspiration for the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service.[3]
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The horn-reinforced bow was known and used for millenia, even by the ancient Egyptians. The specific innovation was the stirrup.
As for encirclement, the Mongols were decisively defeated in what is now Israel by that very tactic (stopping their advance into Syria and Egypt). Almost any general would prefer not to fight under encirclement.
I remember reading (I wish I could remember where) someone speculating whether the story of invulnerable Achilles was a folk memory of a warrior using iron armor or weapons.
What caught my eye in that article is that the timing of the disruption of bronze by iron is timed at about 1200BC - which is pretty close to when there is archeological evidence for Troy VIIa being destroyed in warfare. Not to mention the catastrophic arrival of the Sea Peoples at about that time destroying a lot of cultures in the Eastern Med at that time and leading to what was pretty much a dark age for a few centuries until the rise of Classical Greece - maybe the Sea Peoples were using disruptive iron technology?
maybe the Sea Peoples were using
disruptive iron technology?
They did. I think it is even mentioned in the Bible (the Tanakh, rather), although I am not sure about the details. And archeological evidence seems to support it rather strongly, afaik.
They had two major technological innovations #1 was advanced horsemanship, #2 was the composite bow. They also had one major advancement in strategy derived from their nomadic traditions - they knew how to hunt and how to do it effectively. These modified their warfare tactics massively. For instance the Mongols heavily favoured the tactic of attacking a vast swathe of outlying villages and driving the populace toward the city they intended to siege. This meant that the food stocks lasted very little time. They also knew how to breach a castle by fooling the defender (they frequently attacked the gate and fled, only to strike again), and more importantly they understood that a hunted animal fights harder when it's trapped so they never encircled their enemy, they always surrounded them in a crescent shape (IIRC it was noted that the panic to escape often resulted in people being trampled to death) to allow the people to escape. Once broken the Mongols simply followed on horseback and picked their enemy off.
Khan has a shrewd warrior and anything he could use to help a siege he acquired. They had catapults and ballista, but it was the Mongols who figured out that the gunpowder of the Chinese combined with the metalurgy from the European bell makers (yes bronze church bells) could be used to make a cannon... so they built cannons. Genghis Khan established the worlds (first?) best postal service for the time, to the degree of efficiency that likely still put us to shame shortly before the invention of the car. This was literally the internet of their day, especially as Khan recruited every technologist his forces encountered.
This is why the barbarian invasions were so powerful against the Romans and the ancient world, because they were fighting a civilization that had exclusively predatory behaviour against city-states. One of their favourite tactics was to divert a river to flood the city. Then it was just a matter of time for the water to stagnate and infection and disease to go wild, even though it rarely got to that point.