Subutai: the Mongols' master strategist

If Genghis Khan was the will of the Mongol conquests, Subutai was one of their sharpest minds. Rising in Genghis Khan's service to become one of the empire's leading generals, he fought across an immense stretch of Eurasia, from northern China to the plains of Hungary. His Chinese biographers remembered him above all for his stratagems. Western Europe hardly knew his name at the time. It learned his methods at Mohi.²

A hunter's son from the Onon

Subutai, Sübe'etei in Mongolian, was born around 1175 among the Uriankhai, a Mongol people whose ancestors, his Chinese biographies say, had met the ancestors of Genghis Khan on the hunt along the Onon River for generations. He was known above all, Abel-Rémusat's translation records, for his talent for stratagems and ruses of war. He entered Temüjin's service as a young man, at the start of the thirteenth century, and rose through the wars that united the Mongol tribes.³

He fought in the first Mongol wars against the Jin dynasty of northern China, which under Ögedei would end in a second, final campaign that he led in the field.⁴

The pursuit of the shah

In 1220, during Genghis Khan's war on the Khwarazmian empire of Central Asia and Persia, Subutai and the general Jebe were sent after the fleeing Khwarazm shah, Muhammad II. By the Chinese account, when they reached a river, Subutai halted on the eastern bank and lit great fires to make his force look larger, and the frightened shah fled that night. Subutai then pursued him day and night with 10,000 men, until Muhammad took refuge on an island in the Caspian Sea and died there. Subutai sent the shah's treasure of precious stones and silver vessels to the khan.⁵

Around the Caspian

The pursuit grew into one of the great cavalry expeditions in history. Persian chroniclers, as both nineteenth-century translators summarize them, describe the two generals sweeping through northern Persia, receiving the submission of the ruler of Azerbaijan at Tabriz, and wintering on the Mughan plain by the Caspian. In 1221 they took Maragheh, sacked Hamadan and Ardabil and fought the Georgians, then crossed the Caucasus by way of Derbent.⁶

On the far side they crushed the Kipchaks, or Cumans, and the Alans. The Cuman survivors fled into the lands of the Rus.⁷

The Kalka River

The Cuman khan Kotian, the Novgorod chronicle relates, came with gifts to his son-in-law, Prince Mstislav of Galich, and warned the Rus princes that "our land they have taken away to-day; and yours will be taken to-morrow." The princes gathered on the Dnieper. The Mongols sent envoys to say they had no quarrel with the Rus, only with the Cumans; the princes killed the envoys and marched east. For nine days they followed the retreating Mongols, across the Kalka River. There the Cuman vanguard broke and fled through the Rus camp, and in the confusion the Rus army was slaughtered.⁸

The Mongols put the captured princes, among them Mstislav of Kiev, under boards and sat on top of them to feast until they suffocated. The chronicles disagree on the year, given as 1222, 1223 or 1224; the Novgorod chronicle dates the battle to 31 May by the Julian calendar. "We know not whence they came," its author wrote, "nor where they hid themselves again." On the way home the Mongols invaded the land of the Volga Bulgars and rejoined Genghis Khan.⁹

The fall of the Jin

After Genghis Khan's death in 1227 his son and successor Ögedei turned back to the old enemy, the Jin dynasty of northern China. Ögedei's brother Tolui led the army south of the Yellow River with Subutai at his side. When Tolui left, Subutai stayed to hold the conquered provinces and besiege the Jin capital, Kaifeng. The Jin emperor fled, Kaifeng fell in 1233, and in 1234 his last refuge was taken and the dynasty came to an end.¹⁰

The western campaign

In the mid-1230s Ögedei sent a great army west under his nephew Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan. Büntgen and Di Cosmo put its size at about 130,000. Subutai went with it, and Batu gave him command of the vanguard. The army overran the steppe and the Rus principalities, and in 1240 it took Kiev.¹¹

In 1241 the Mongols struck into Central Europe on several routes. The main army crossed the Carpathians into Hungary in March, while a northern wing under Prince Baidar invaded Poland and destroyed a Polish and German army at Legnica on 9 April.¹² › Battle of Legnica, 1241

Mohi

King Béla IV of Hungary had taken in Cuman refugees, and their raiding had turned his own people against them. As the Mongols advanced, the Hungarian army marched out and camped by the Sajó River, near Mohi, where a bridge crossed the river between wide marshes. The Chinese biographies tell the Mongol side. The army entered Hungary from five directions. Batu's corps crossed the river upstream, where it was shallow and there was a bridge, while Subutai had to cross lower down, where the water was deep, and built a bridge of beams lashed together.¹³

Batu, meeting stiff resistance, was tempted to turn back. "Go back if you wish," Subutai told him in Abel-Rémusat's version; he himself would not stop before the Danube. European accounts, as Bretschneider summarizes them, describe the Mongols arriving in the night, one part wading the river while another forced the bridge with catapults, so that at daybreak the Hungarians found themselves attacked from behind. In April 1241 the Hungarian army was destroyed. Béla escaped and was later pursued as far as Croatia, and the Mongols took Pest.¹⁴

In 1242 the Mongols withdrew from Hungary. The papal envoy John of Plano Carpini later linked the retreat to the death of the Great Khan Ögedei in December 1241, and that has long been the traditional explanation. Historians have questioned it, since Batu never went back to Mongolia; tree rings and chronicles point to a cold, wet spring in 1242 that turned the Hungarian plain into marsh, reducing pasture and mobility while famine spread through the despoiled country.¹⁵

Command style

Subutai's campaigns show a commander who fought with deception. He lit fires to make his army seem larger, and at the Kalka the Mongols drew the Rus away from their homeland for days before turning on them. The Mongol armies he served in moved columns on separate routes toward a single decision, as when they entered Hungary from five directions, and he was ready to improvise, building his own bridge rather than wait for a crossing.¹⁶

He was also stubborn, and the Mohi story shows it: he refused to abandon a battle that the prince commanding the army was ready to break off, and pressed on until the prince had to follow.¹⁷

Last years and death

After Ögedei's death the princes were summoned to choose a successor. Batu did not want to go; Subutai, his Chinese biographers say, told him that as the eldest of the princes he could not refuse. The two translated biographies disagree about the end of his life: in Bretschneider's version he died in 1246 at the age of sixty, in Abel-Rémusat's at seventy-three, while most modern accounts place his death about 1248. His son Uriyangkhadai also became a Mongol general and fought, the Chinese sources say, against the Poles and Germans in the same western campaign.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Subutai left no writings of his own. He is known from Chinese, Persian and European chronicles, which tell the same campaigns from very different sides; Abel-Rémusat drew his life from the Chinese historians to explain a general who had fought in Persia, Georgia, China, Russia and Hungary.¹⁹

Meet his master Genghis Khan, Batu Khan and the other great commanders of the Mongol Empire, read the story of the Battle of Legnica and of the Mongol horseman against the European knight, see where he stands among the greatest commanders by era, explore the Middle Ages, or see what else happened on 11 April.