Ogedei Khan
Ogedei Khan sent the armies that reached Hungary, and his death is the reason they turned round. He was Genghis Khan's third son and his chosen successor, elected by the assembly of princes two years after his father's death. He was not the soldier his brothers were and he knew it: his contribution was to turn a confederation of raiders into something that could hold territory. He built a capital at Karakorum, established a relay post system that carried messages across the empire in weeks, took the advice of the Khitan administrator Yelu Chucai that taxing Chinese peasants was worth more than killing them, and set up a regular census and land tax. The conquests went on in every direction at once. The Jin dynasty of northern China was destroyed in 1234. Armies went into Korea, into Persia and towards the Caucasus. The western campaign was the largest. From 1237 his nephew Batu and the general Subutai took the Rus principalities one by one in winter, using frozen rivers as roads: Ryazan, Vladimir, and Kiev in 1240. In 1241 they split, destroyed a Polish and German army at Legnica and the Hungarian army at Mohi within two days of each other, and rode to the Danube. Ogedei died in December 1241, reportedly after a night of drinking, as his brother Tolui had. The news reached the western army in the spring and the princes turned back for the election. Mongol armies raided Poland and Hungary again later in the century, but never again with the whole western host and never past the Danube. Whether they would have gone further is the most durable counterfactual in European history, and it is not answerable.
- Lived: 1186 CE – 1241 CE
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
