Why Mongols were so effective

[Napoleon]

The Mongols certainly had those things but equally if not more important is that, for the most part, the peoples they encountered in Europe didn’t. Those peoples were not part of any kingdom in any modern sense of the word, had no standing army per say, nor did they practice or have significant experience with strategic warfare.

 

[Chagos]

The Mongols certainly had those things but equally if not more important is that, for the most part, the peoples they encountered in Europe didn’t. Those peoples were not part of any kingdom in any modern sense of the word, had no standing army per say, nor did they practice or have significant experience with strategic warfare.

One need remember, in this context, that similarly fast moving cavalries of the Avars and Hungarians were defeated in Western Europe in the preceding centuries.

Simply put, Mongol tactics proved superior in vast lands of steppe, from Mongolia herself all the way to Russian, Hungarian and Polish plains, but ran into obstacles in European forests and against the slew of castles that had been established against the Magyars since some time before the Mongol invasion.

Even in Hungary many castles and fortified towns withstood the Mongol onslaught, despite the country as such having been devastated.

The initial Mongol onslaught thus never reached Germanic lands with any success, primarily because various German kingdoms and baroncies were united under a "Holy Roman" emperor of, to some extent, German extraction (even if he was more Sicilian than anything else).