The 13th century was relatively peaceful and prosperous for Eastern Europe.[305] There were several independent states, and the region’s trade routes moved people and goods. Eastern Europe was ascending but not for long.
The Mongols were coming.[306]
Bringing destruction and warfare to Eastern Europe’s borders, the Mongols retreated across the Eurasian Steppe before they could completely crush the region. After the Mongols left, the The Girl in Kherson states of Eastern Europe set about fixing their territories. Some states found that their fortunes would rise in the early modern period, while others could not recover from the Mongol onslaught.[307]
The Forgotten Magyars
In 1236, a Dominican priest from Hungary, under orders from King Béla IV himself, arrived on the Volga River.[308] There, in the river valley, he found the Magyar descendants of the survivors from the defeat in Augsburg in 955. The priest returned to Hungary, informing his king what he discovered. Béla IV sent his representative back to the Volga River with an invitation for the last of the Magyars to relocate to Hungary.
On his way back to the Volga River Basin, the priest discovered that the Magyar tribes had been destroyed. The few survivors he encountered begged him to go back to Hungary and prepare for an attack.[309] A vicious horde from the east, the Mongols, also known as the Tartars, was on its way. The Mongols were quickly moving west, destroying every city in their path. The Dominican priest rushed back to Hungary, telling his king of their impending doom.
The Mongols
By 1237, the Mongols had been on the move for nearly twenty years. The Mongols were a collection of tribes who lived on the far east of the steppe in modern-day Mongolia. Genghis Khan, the mighty warrior king who brought the tribes together, formed an elite nomadic fighting force that would devastate everything in its path.
The Mongols set out to conquer the known world, and they did. Until it started to splinter apart in the late 14th century, the Mongol Empire was the largest in the world up to that time.[310] With his hordes of warriors on horseback, Genghis expanded the Mongol Empire east and west, conquering China and western Asia before he reached Europe. In 1219, he completed his quest in the East, bringing China under Mongol control.[311] Genghis Khan moved west into Central Asia; from there, the Mongols made their way into Eastern Europe.
The Mongol Empire in 1207.
Khiruge, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mongol_Empire_c.1207.png
After reaching the Black Sea, Genghis Khan sent an army north. The Mongols laid waste to the Caucasus before defeating a joint force of Cumans and Rus in 1223 at the Battle of the Kalka River. Whole states were destroyed, and the region was a wasteland.
The Mongols did not capitalize on their victory at the Kalka River. Instead, they returned to Asia, but they wouldn’t be gone for long. The Mongols returned in 1229 under a new ruler: Ögedei Khan.[312] He picked up where his predecessor left off. He wanted to conquer Europe all the way to the “Great Sea” (the Atlantic Ocean).
Along the Great Northern European Plain, the Mongols found the perfect space to stage its invasion of Eastern Europe.[313] The plain had ample grasses and vegetation to sustain their horses, which was the key to their power and expansion.
Over the next several years, the Mongols invaded Eurasia to the east into Asia and to the west into Eastern Europe. The Mongol forces that moved west, the Golden Horde, reached the Volga River in 1237, destroying what was left of the Magyars. The Cumans encountered the Mongols again in 1238; the Mongols pushed west, forcing the Cumans to seek sanctuary in Hungary.[314]
The Mongols continued to move west, reaching Eastern Europe. By that time, the Eastern Europeans knew the Mongols were coming. They reached Kievan Rus first, terrorizing the inhabitants and taking prisoners of war as slaves. It was there, in December 1240, that the Mongols sent King Béla IV a warning: surrender to the Mongols, or see his lands destroyed.
The Hungarian king refused the offer and prepared for the Mongol onslaught. In 1241, furious from the resistance they faced in Eastern Europe, the Mongols stormed into Eastern Europe on two fronts. One army headed toward Poland and the other toward Hungary.
Poland was still decentralized; it was a collection of smaller principalities with no cohesive leader. Without the ability to draw up a large enough army to fight the Mongols, Polish cities fell quickly. The Mongols crushed all of Poland, except for one area: Silesia in southwestern Poland. Silesia was ruled by a prince named Henryk II Pobożny, who had powerful allies. Henryk’s brother-in-law was the king of Bohemia, and he sent a whole army to protect Henryk’s lands. Silesia housed a hodgepodge of different forces, which were all intent on pushing back the Mongols. There were mercenaries who worked for coin and French, German, and Polish knights who fought for the glory of God. Ironically enough, European knights were often more in conflict with each other than anyone else. They called a temporary peace to join together and fight the Mongol invasion. Unfortunately for them, it would be unsuccessful.
The Mongols arrived at Silesia in April 1241. They knew how much support Henryk had inside the city of Legnica, so the Mongols tricked Henryk into thinking they were abandoning the attack. When Henryk and his forces emerged from the city, the Mongols ambushed them, which ended in a quick, crushing defeat for Henryk. The collection of armies at Legnica was the last resistance that the Mongols faced in Poland. [315] To celebrate, they decapitated Prince Henryk and stuck his head on a pike.
The Mongol forces were so vast and numerous that they could attack multiple places at the same time. While one army was crushing Prince Henryk in Silesia in southwestern Poland, another force destroyed the Hungarian forces in the northeast. At the Battle of Mohi, King Béla IV was defeated, as his ragtag collection of soldiers was not strong enough to challenge the Golden Horde. Political instability plagued Hungary before the Mongols arrived, and it interfered with Béla’s ability to coordinate a successful defense.
After it was clear that the Mongols were winning, King Béla and what was left of his army fled the battlefield. Instead of laying waste to the area, the Mongols chased the Hungarians, murdering anyone they found. Béla would remain on the run for more than a year, effectively leaving Hungary with no official government.
The Mongols swept through the Hungarian countryside, destroying land and murdering Hungarian citizens. The Mongol invasion of Hungary killed about half of its population and destroyed about 75 percent of the country. Béla returned from exile a year later, determined to rebuild his ravaged country.
Once they laid waste to Hungary, the Mongols trudged through Bulgaria and Serbia, reaching the Adriatic coast. The army that defeated Prince Henryk in Silesia had since left the area, marching through Bohemia to meet the rest of the Golden Horde in Hungary.
The Mongols were very near to conquering Eastern Europe. Nearly every campaign had resulted in absolute victory, and the Mongols swept through the region, destroying everything they could find. In March 1242, the Mongols abruptly ended their invasion.[316] They turned around and went back home, traveling east along the Great Northern Plain—the path they had used in their attempt to conquer Europe. Three months before, in December 1241, Ögedei Khan had died. Members of the upper class, the warriors who were leading the armies, all had to return home to elect the new khan.
The rest of Europe was saved from the menace of the Mongols. Although the Mongols retreated, they maintained their control over the Russian lands that they conquered before their movement into Eastern Europe. They would control modern-day Russian territory for two more centuries. This divided Russia from the rest of Western and Eastern Europe, which meant that it would not experience the Renaissance or the Reformation.
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, a leading professor in Eastern European history, asks the most important question:
“What if the Mongols had not turned back? Their khan had given them orders to drive all the way to the Atlantic. A shattered Europe would mean no Renaissance, no global voyagers of exploration, no Enlightenment, no scientific revolution— none of the bases of modernity so familiar to us today.”[317]
Eastern Europe after the Golden Horde
After the Mongol invasions, Eastern European states started to rebuild.[318] Over the next five centuries, Eastern Europe would see the rise and decline of powerful states. These states would create their own spheres of influence over their neighbors, and they would form closer relationships with rising Western European countries. However, the Ottoman Empire would close in on the Balkans, effectively cutting it off from the rest of Eastern Europe.
Bulgaria, the Rise of Serbia, and the Battle of Kosovo
Even though the Mongols had moved out, they held their Russian lands, planning strategic raids across the border into Eastern Europe.[319] After about half a century of harassment, the Bulgarians joined forces with the Polish to force the Mongols away from their borders. While the strategy worked, another neighbor, Serbia, was growing.
For hundreds of years, Serbian influence had been limited by its more powerful neighbors. By the late 13th century, a series of powerful kings brought Serbia into the limelight. Prince Stefan Dušan came to power in 1331, extending Serbian territory into modern-day Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria. Dušan improved infrastructure with new churches and schools, bringing Serbia to the height of its power in the medieval period.
Dušan’s real desire lay with the Byzantines. He wanted to conquer what was left of the failing empire and rule it as a Serbian vassal state. Although he had targeted their lands, Dušan made peace with the Bulgarians and used the alliance to attack the Byzantines. As Serbia stripped the Byzantines of their influence, Dušan made power moves that showcased his growing influence. He matched the Serbian Orthodox Church with the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople, granting himself the title of “Tsar of the Serbs and the Greeks” in 1345. Threatened by Serbia’s encroachment on their territory, the Byzantines imported Ottoman troops to defend their lands in 1354.[320] Stefan Dušan died the following year without having attained his goal of taking Constantinople.
The Ottomans stayed in the Balkans, taking the opportunity to conquer their own lands in Eastern Europe. After taking control of the Balkans, the Ottomans began a decades-long struggle for Bulgaria. They took city by city, and Bulgaria finally fell to the Ottomans in 1396. The Ottoman Empire would rule Bulgaria as a vassal state for the next five hundred years.
None of Stefan Dušan’s successors could match his charismatic rise to power. Several weak kings ruled Serbia for the next fifty years, and the Serbian Empire slowly fell apart. One Serbian principality, Duklja, which had since renamed itself Zeta, declared independence from Serbia in 1360. Zeta grew, conquering parts of Albania and Kosovo. By the end of the century, it changed its name again; today, it is known by its Italian moniker, Montenegro.
Of course, the Ottomans were there to pick up the pieces as the Serbian Empire disintegrated. Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, the Ottomans still threatened Zeta and the rest of Serbia. Zeta feared for its safety and joined Venice—the nearby Italian city-state powerhouse that was vital in trade—to push the Ottomans back in 1421. This didn’t work; by the end of the century, Serbia had conquered Zeta.
The Ottomans had nothing but trouble with Montenegro. The local population constantly rebelled against their authority. The area was jagged, with lots of mountains, slopes, and hills. The Ottomans couldn’t move in and occupy Montenegro easily. They decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Even though Montenegro had to pay tribute to the Ottomans, they were very rarely occupied by the Turks.
The royal family still feared the Ottomans, so they escaped into exile, and the archbishop took control of the state. Montenegro became a religious state, with the archbishop as the supreme ruler. For three hundred years, Montenegro was never free of Ottoman influence, but it was given relative autonomy compared to other Ottoman lands in Eastern Europe.
In June 1389, the Ottoman Empire delivered the decisive blow to the Serbian Empire in the Battle of Kosovo.[321] The events at Kosovo didn’t seem like they would result in an Ottoman victory, as the Serbs nearly annihilated the Ottoman forces on the battlefield. The Ottomans brought in their reserve units, an advantage the Serbs didn’t have. Both sides lost their heads of state in the battle; Prince Lazar of Serbia died in battle, while Sultan Murad I was murdered in retribution for the massive loss of life and freedom at the Battle of Kosovo.
Adam Stefanović, Battle of Kosovo, 1870.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Kosovo,_Adam_Stefanovi%C4%87,_1870.jpg
The Ottomans occupied parts of Serbia until the 1450s, and they finally took the rest of the empire by the end of the decade. For the next five centuries, Serbia was the center of a tug-of-war battle between the larger powers of Eastern Europe.
The Kingdom of Bosnia
Bosnia, which was originally the Roman province of Dalmatia, emerged as its own independent state in 1180 after hundreds of years of changing hands.[322] At one time or another, Bosnia was controlled by the Germanic tribes, the Byzantines, Croatians, Serbians, and Hungarians.
The events of the 13th century kept Bosnia independent. Its neighbor, Hungary, was anxious to get its hands on Bosnia again, but the Mongol invasions and other repeated incursions distracted the Hungarians from any territorial claims. Over the next century, three major powers in the region—the Byzantines, the Serbians, and the Hungarians—all wanted control over Bosnia.
Since Bosnia remained independent for centuries, it grew into one of the strongest states in the 14th-century Balkans.[323] Under the rule of the Kotromanić dynasty, Bosnia stretched down the east coast of the Adriatic Sea. It was around this time that Bosnia acquired Herzegovina. The rulers of Bosnia supported the local mining industry, making its precious metals a highly desirable commodity in Eastern Europe.
In 1377, Bosnia became the Kingdom of Bosnia. After King Tvrtko died in 1391, Bosnia’s power started to slip. It could not hold off an Ottoman invasion in 1463, and Bosnia became an Ottoman territory by 1482.
Croatia and Dubrovnik
Beginning in the 11th century, the Kingdom of Croatia slowly disintegrated. By the 14th century, Croatia had become a Hungarian satellite state. As Croatia fell apart, it became a collection of small principalities. One of them, Dubrovnik, became a powerful regional territory in its own right.
The Byzantines took control of the strategically placed port city. In 1205, Venice took possession of Dubrovnik. Venice, a powerhouse Italian city-state that cornered Mediterranean trade, used Dubrovnik as a stopping point along its trade routes. It became one of the most frequented ports of the 14th century, which was both a good and a bad thing. It was partially responsible for the spread of the Black Plague in the middle of the 14th century. In 1358, Hungary conquered Dubrovnik, and Venice watched as the city it helped create started benefiting its rivals.
A photograph of Dubrovnik’s old port, which is now a World Heritage Site.
Greenweasel, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dubrovnik1.jpg
One hundred years later, the Ottomans conquered Dubrovnik.[324] Much like the Hungarians, the Ottomans took a hands-off policy to their control over the port city, although the Turks did extend their protection to Dubrovnik. They guarded the port and its ships, and Dubrovnik could now trade goods from the East from trade routes controlled by the Ottomans.
Dubrovnik was infamous throughout the medieval period for its high-quality maritime technology. European nations that wanted to have the best ships and crew went to Dubrovnik first. For example, the Spanish used Dubrovnik’s resources when beginning their explorations in the New World. That means that some of the first Europeans in the New World were Eastern Europeans.
In the 17th century, as more European nations devoted more resources to overseas trade, they found new, better routes to the Americas and Asia. Dubrovnik was no longer on the main trade routes, so it started to lose importance. By the 19th century, Dubrovnik started to change hands again. First, Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the city-state in 1808. Seven years later, the Congress of Vienna granted Dubrovnik to Austria. Croatia wouldn’t possess the city again until after the First World War.
Albania
For such a small country with less than desirable terrain, Albania sure caused a lot of problems. Albania lies in a strategic spot north of Greece where the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea meet. Most of the major powers of the ancient period and the medieval period had their eyes on Albania, from the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines to the Serbs, Turks, and Germans.
Albania was originally part of the Byzantine Empire.[325] In the 11th century, Albania’s neighbor Serbia started challenging the Byzantines for possession of it. Soon, both powers had to contend with the French, who crossed the southern edge of the Adriatic, hoping to add Albania to its holdings in southern Italy.
In 1204, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, was overthrown by a group of French and Venetian knights who founded the Latin Empire.[326] Latin forces quickly moved into southern Eastern Europe, but the new empire was not strong enough to stand a serious challenge. Byzantine Prince Michael Komnenos joined forces with the Albanians to fight the Latin occupation. They were successful, and the Latins moved out.
After the Latins left, Albanians knew a period of relative peace. Until the 1270s, none of their neighbors encroached on their territory. In 1272, the French came back, and this time, they were successful. They captured a number of cities on the coast, uniting them all to form the Kingdom of Albania under French rule.
The French held onto its Albanian territory for about fifty years until the rise of the powerful Stefan Dušan in Serbia. By 1336, Dušan had defeated the French, annexing Albania for himself. Albania remained in Serbian hands for nineteen years. When Dušan died, the Kingdom of Serbia crumbled. There was constant fighting, especially between the elites in Serbia and Albania. Locals escaped the violence but not for long— the Ottomans were on their way. In 1385, the Ottoman Empire conquered Albania, making it part of their holdings in the Balkans.
Just as in every other Ottoman territory, the Albanians were forced to follow the Ottomans’ devşirme system, where Christian families had to send their sons to the Ottomans as tribute.[327] These sons were trained to serve the state. If they were talented at reading and writing, they were trained for government positions. If the boys were athletic, they were given military training. These Christian servants to the Ottoman state were called Janissaries.
Janissaries had the best military training available at the time. They were feared throughout Europe, and their ferocity on the battlefield was unmatched. Despite their low rank in Ottoman society, some Janissaries could rise in the ranks and achieve powerful positions.
In 1443, one of these Janissaries, known as Skanderbeg, challenged his Ottoman masters and led a massive rebellion in Albania.[328] The Ottomans left, and Albania was independent once again. Skanderbeg defied Ottoman rule for the rest of his life. When Skanderbeg died twenty-five years later in 1468, the Ottomans saw their chance to regain Albania. They finally did so in 1478.
The Byzantines, the Ottomans, and the Fall of Constantinople
Gone were the days when the Byzantine Empire was the true successor of Rome. The Latin Empire had fallen, and the rightful emperor sat on the throne once again. As skilled a leader as Michael VIII Palaeologus was, even he could not save the Byzantines. Less than a century after the fall of the Latins, the Byzantine Empire was in serious jeopardy.[329] The emperor made a fatal misstep when he tried to defend his lands with Ottoman soldiers. His allies turned on him, taking the Balkans and making inroads to Eastern Europe. The Ottomans who were now invading Eastern Europe would soon spell disaster for the Byzantine Empire.
A map showing the battles between the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantine Empire in the late 11th century.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aftermath_of_Manzikert.png
The Ottoman Empire was founded in the 10th century when the warlord Seljuk started conquering lands, forming an empire that stretched from the Middle East to China.[330] In 1071, the Seljuks had encroached on Byzantine lands, defeating the empire’s forces at Manzikert. The Turks also occupied Anatolia, located in modern-day Turkey. They were focused on settlement, so the Seljuks imported many Turkish tribes from the Eurasian Steppe to Anatolia. These settlers would overrun the Seljuks, forming their own empire.
When the Seljuk Turks were losing power in the last years of the 13th century, a military leader named Osman founded his own state, which would become the Ottoman Empire. The first Ottoman sultans encroached on Byzantine lands, growing their territories from a small principality to a substantial empire.
The Ottoman lands grew more and more extensive each year. By the 1350s, the Ottomans took advantage of their invitation to the Balkans and started conquering the area. Over the next one hundred years, the Ottomans made more inroads into Europe. Despite a temporary setback with the rise and fall of Tamerlane, who defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, they consistently won battle after battle, taking land after land.[331] In 1453, they set their sights on Constantinople.[332]
A map of the holdings of the Ottoman Empire two years before the fall of Constantinople.
Chamboz at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OttomanEmpire1451.png
While the Ottomans had been glorious in their imperialist ambitions, the Byzantine Empire had not.[333] They lost a significant amount of their territory; all that was left was the city of Constantinople. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II, also known as Mehmed the Conqueror, stormed the walls of Constantinople, which had stood (and kept invaders out) for centuries. Mehmed had gathered the best scientists, technicians, and military strategists in the world. He had ten times the number of soldiers, as well as something that had rarely been seen before in Europe: cannons. The walls of Constantinople crumbled under the siege, and eighty thousand Ottoman soldiers stormed the city. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, was killed in battle, ending the one-thousand-year reign of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Ottomans would hold Constantinople, which they renamed Istanbul, for the next five hundred years until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.[334]
Fausto Zonaro, Sultan Mehmed II Entering Constantinople.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zonaro_GatesofConst.jpg