Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Europe and the Mongol Empire | 90 comments (90 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants... (4.00 / 2)

Fair enough - to be fair to the author I excerpted from his summing up and he is talking relatively, compared to Mongol campaigns elsewhere.

He does detail the Hungarian campaign and notes atrocities although he claims of all the Mongol campaigns, including the Hungarian one, that accounts of population deaths are regularly exaggerated.

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Fri May 10th, 2013 at 03:52:32 PM EST
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Re: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants... (4.00 / 6)

I found a meta-study (in Hungarian) detailing the studies with numbers.

There is one contemporary source that definitely exaggerated, claiming total destruction. Another (an eyewitness monk who also reported on the civil administration and the rapes) gives no percentage but tells of walking across uninhabited land for days.
The 50% figure comes from a study on the basis of disappeared place-names. This is a figure for the whole kingdom; but east of the Danube, there were areas with 75% of places disappearing from records (the same areas that would face near-total destruction in the Habsburg wars to re-take these areas from the Ottoman Empire, BTW) while west of the Danube and in the mountainous region that is now most of Slovakia it was 10%.
A later study took into account the fact that different settlements have different populations and people can flee and hide, and also relied on later censuses. It estimated a 15-20% (300-400,000) death toll.
Another study challenged all earlier Middle Age population estimates on the basis of feudal records, significantly lowering them on the basis of village church sizes (church attendance was compulsory by civil law, a heritage of forced conversion). The population decline around the Mongol invasion is 10-15% (130-180,000).

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri May 10th, 2013 at 04:25:39 PM EST
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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Europe and the Mongol Empire | 90 comments (90 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)