No Mongol Empire?

[MAC161]

Just a random (and obviously big) musing: What if the Mongol Empire had never arisen?

POD could be anything; Temujin/Genghis Khan isn't born or dies very young seem like the best choices, but as I only know the broad strokes of this period/empire, other suggestions are welcome.

Without the Mongol Empire, what are the likeliest short-term and long-term developments for the Chinese kingdoms of the time, or the Khwarezm Sultanate and other Central Asian/Islamic nations, or the Russian principalties? Without the "Pax Mongolica", how is trade affected on the Silk Road, and later European attitudes/ambitions towards trade with Asia? Without the invasions in 1240-42, what is Central/Eastern Europe's most likely trajectory? Do the Byzantine Empire and Crusader states last any longer, or are they bound to fall sooner than in OTL? What does this do for the spread of the Black Death, or a disease like it?

Side question: Even without Temujin specifically, how likely is it that a similar figure would have arisen among the steppe tribes, and lead a broadly if not exactly similar life?

 

[IMTATRSS]

The Mongols are only the most famous of the Steppe Hordes, so I imagine that a Horde would've emerged eventually - but it could easily have been far less successful.

There were two (or three) Chinese dynasties - a more divided China in the immediate term is inevitable. How long that would last is a different story - but it could lead to a smaller China, given the inevitable infighting.

There's a theory that the Mongols helped spread the Black Death (either by accident or on purpose), so their removal could make that less deadly. The effects of that depend on a lot of other factors.

If anything, Byzantium would likely fall sooner, unless they managed to get aid from the west. The Mongols destroyed the unified Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, ensuring that the Ottomans had to fight other Turkish states as well as Byzantium. Theoretically, the Khwarezm could attack the Seljuksin Anatolia, hoping to make sure that they aren't a threat to their rule in Persia (Khwarezm took control of Persia from the Seljuks)... but that course of action would likely require a really paranoid ruler.

As for Russia... that's hard to say. It was decently divided in this time period, but most of the independent subdivisions theoretically answered to Kiev. It's feasible that a unified Rus could've emerged from such a system... although they would have less of a focus on expansion into Asia due to the lack of a Mongol Empire to want revenge on. A different Russia makes later history in Eastern Europe unrecognizable (no or different Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, different relations with Sweden, etc.).

 

[heraclius]

Russia was already deeply divided between a series of more or less equal-resourced princedoms run by shifting alliances of princes within the Rurykid dynasty (and a few non-dynasts) well before the Mongols arrived in 1220 for one attack on the steppelands of the lower Don and the main invasion in 1237-8. Kiev had lost its predominance as the resources and relative stability of the emerging North-Eastern principality of Vladimir - Suzdal (within which Moscow was founded as a minor town c. 1147) strengthened in the early C12th, shifting the balance of power from South to North, and had no really powerful rulers from the mid-C13th onwards except ones whose power base was elsewhere and who took Kiev over as an add-on to their realms for mainly prestige purposes - most notably Vladimir-Suzdal, which inflicted a major sack on Kiev in 1169, and in the early C13th Galich (the modern Lviv area). The threat of steppe tribes' raiding as a major drag on Kiev's wealth, army's ability to concentrate on its Russian neighbours rather than the steppe, and potential for expansion already existed as a big problem in the mid-late C12th under the Cumans/ Polovtsy in the lands between Dnieper and Don, and was only turbo-charged by the Mongols' arrival.

The pattern for a divided Russia unable to coalesce under one of its states (or even be dominated by one state for more than the lifetime of one energetic and capable ruler) was already set by the mid-C12th, though the Mongol attack of 1237-40 (especially the symbolic sack of Kiev as the end of an era of greatness in the South) and the subsequent drain of tribute plus occasional raids and executions of rulers did exacerbate Russian problems and gave a chance of increasing power to those states that were further away from Mongols raid' main pathways (specially in the NW) and thus acquired large numbers of refugees to add to their manpower and/ or who managed to keep the Mongols happy by acting as middlemen and tax-collectors (most notably Ivan Kalita's Moscow, though it could have been Tver which achieved this if it had had luckier or cleverer rulers and been trusted more by the Golden Horde leaders in Sarai). The main differences to the thrust of Russian development as I see it were the sack and eclipse of Vladimir, thus giving a chance to its sub-divisions of Moscow and Tver to emerge as more than minor towns, and the exhausting drain of raids and steppe turbulence on the South in general, finishing off the chances of Chernigov (which from the 1240s on became a likely long-term victim for either Lithuania or Vladimir/ Smolensk/Tver/ Moscow, whichever of these 4 ended up dominating the North ) and making Galich unable to both hold Kiev and its region to the E and hold back Poland (and later the P-Lithuanian federation) to the West.

With no Mongol attack, we could have got a less raid-drained Galich holding back Poland, even achieving dominance of the central Ukraine nomads as part of its army and so Daniel of Galich and his heirs having the strength to beat Poland in battle - and so no long-term Catholic-dominated Poland/ Lithuania state ruling the Orthodox population as far as Kiev. No huge Polish-Lithuanian confederation for Moscow/ Russia to regard as its main foe, and for it to slowly gobble up in the 1648 ff wars into Peter's reign and then the Partitions ? No ability of Moscow to present itself as 'The Only Champion of Orthodoxy' , even perhaps no relocation of the Patriarchate from Kiev to Moscow aiding this (though a Kiev vs Moscow row could easily end up in the C14th with two rival Patriarchs , one in each city calling the other a heretic or usurper)?

That way we have a bipolar culturally and linguistically Russian world from the C13th to the C17th and less of a chance of one huge Russian state centred in the North , at least until the latter has all the resources of the Volga basin and Siberia and can overwhelm its rival. So a different trajectory for the long-term struggle for the Dnieper region, though the balance of resources would still eventually give the Northern part of Russia a probable victory unless a large Kievan/ Galician state had managed to develop as a modernising power by the 1500s with the help of Black Sea trade links to the Mediterranean world (eg a surviving Byzantium not a Moslem power running the Bosphorus and Anatolia).

In Anatolia, the absence of the 1243 Mongol invasion and the battle of Kose Dagh would keep a large and successful Seljuk state as the region's largest power , though as the Nicaean Byzantines had halted the Seljuks ' advance on the far West in 1211 the full Seljuk conquest of Anatolia is unlikely. The Seljuk state would probably continue to be centred at Konya in the Se, not be based in the NW and close to Constantinople like the Ottomans were - so the Byzantine state re-established in C in 1261 could last longer. The absence of a new flood of tribes into Anatolia might even keep the Ottomans out of the region altogether - they only seem to have arrived in the 1280s. Would the emerging 'Turkish Anatolia' have bothered to send big expeditions to the Aegean coast or the Bosphorus if it had no major accession of 'ghazi' tribal warriors on the frontier and was busy fighting the local smaller emirates, not a huge Mongol Ilkhan state, over NW Iraq and Azerbaijan instead? (The Seljuks had a long-term hereditary claim to rule Iraq and Iran from the 1070s; their main state in the later C11th had been based there not at Konya .)

 

[LSCatilina]

There's a theory that the Mongols helped spread the Black Death (either by accident or on purpose), so their removal could make that less deadly. The effects of that depend on a lot of other factors.

While the "pax mongolica" very likely, by providing a fairly cohesive set of polities and networks, created the means of epidemic diffusion of the plague in Eurasia, I don't really see how it could have been less deadly it was IOTL, or by using an earlier comparison, how the Justinian Plague (which is itself pretty much assured to have been bubonic plague) in the Early Middle Ages.

Assuming a similar outbreak from Central Asia (altough it's possible that it found its origin in south-western China while the epidemic didn't start from there), the main difference there would be the initial geographic distribution from southern China to Europe and the Mediterranean basin : while the way to the steppic plain wouldn't be closed off to Europeans, I don't see a good reason why it would be an actually likely entry point ITTL, neither why the Black Sea would have been as connected to Central Asia it was IOTL.

Pre-Mongolian polities were more likely to be connected to both Mongolian-Manchurian steppes on the east and to Turko-Persian polities on the south-west and especially so if the Kwazermian Empire survives (or leaves strong enough successor states): although in itself it would probably implies entry point to the eastern Pontic Steppe trough Kipchaks and Cumans, the main entry points of the plague in the Mediterranean Basin could very well be set in the Near-East and Egypt.

Giving how interconnected were the northern and southern banks of the sea, however, I'm not sure what noticable differences would be in Europe that, say, France or Italy undergoing the pandemic two or three years later than Egypt or Iraq and not the contrary. In regards to the lethality, this delay would almost certainly not translate itself as a possibility to mitigate its effects. It could, arguably, have some relatively minor immediate consequences as there would be a direct, if secondary at best, path for the plague to Russia and Eastern Europe trough the Pontic Steppe.