After I learned that the Mongolian Invaders had killed half the Hungarian population (or you could say half the population of peoples living in the land known to us as Hungary) I wanted to know more. I'm one of those people of Hungarian descent who has some Asian features, and I've already wrapped my mind around the probability that some ancestor of mine was raped and that these features have been brought forward though the intermarriage in Hungary of others with a similar genetic heritage. Or could it be instead that these features are not Mongolian, but of the original Magyars?Author Frank McLynn did a great job of explaining their culture, their world view, their expertise, and their military strategy, blow by blow. But I was distracted and I decided to focus only on the chapter about the Invasion and Devastation in then-Hungary.
Batu and Subedei where the men who closed in on Hungary, then a nation of around 2 million people that went from Transylvanian Alps to modern Croatia, and the Pannanonian Plain was their base for military operations. This was the era around 1236 - 1242, a time of Crusades, and a time when Hungary had been through a number of rulers, had a relationship with the Vatican which had it's own army, and was thought to have its own impressive and imposing military force, capable of defeating any European country.
However, the Mongols were greatly feared and there were also issues between the Cumans and the Hungarians so they proved not to be the hoped for allies. Subedei was a genius strategist who decided to use three armies to invade the land and have them all unite at the Danube. His brother Shiban covered the northern area between Poland and Moravia. Quadan went south-easterly between the eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river, and the main army under Batu went through the Verecke Pass and the upper Tisza Valley.
There were few good roads in Hungary and the landscape dotted with villages proved to be mostly indefensible. The Mongols played the game of allowing a troop to think they were gone or had won and then would come back to massacre them. Notable men including Archbishops and Bishops and those important in the politics and rule of the region also fought in battle and died. Ethnic Poles and Germans living in Hungary fought too. The Mongols continued a systematic program of atrocities and exterminating the people. They also enjoyed mass rape, especially doing so in front of the woman's father or husbands.
Famine and disease, especially the sicknesses transmitted from having so many dead corpses around killed off many more. The farmers were unable to farm and have crops in for a year after the Mongols left, there was death by starvation.
Infighting within the Mongol Empire was also occurring, as so many troops had left there to fight, and by 1279 it was divided. The Golden Horde of China's Quabilai's dominated Russia for another two hundred years. Chagatai Khanate (a place) in central Asia dominated parts of today's Mongolia, Russia, India, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. Then an area that included eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, western Afghanistan, south-western Pakistan and parts of modern Turkmenistan called the (place) Iklhanate.
There seems to have been no time in all this warfare for a nice Mongolian boy to fall in love with a nice Hungarian girl and get married, so there is a very good chance that if you have facial or other bodily characteristics that are most often "Asian," rape is likely the way those characteristics came into the Hungarian (or Polish, Slovak, German, or other ethnic population.) Either way, if you have Hungarian heritage someone in your lineage survived the carnage, at least long enough to have a child.
Learning that easily half a million to one million were killed by the Mongolians in the mid 13th century Hungary, not so long after the country's founding, I've wondered what impact they had not only on the Hungarian looks but other genetic aspects of our humanity. Culture is mostly learned, I think. You could say that I think of ethnicity as having more to do with nurture than nature.
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