>>2878428Tbh, those boys are why Russian nobility continued to claim descendants from the Golden Horde all the way to the times of Dostoyevsky, and why Persia was relevant in the medieval period all the way to the New Imperialism period: The portions of the Mongol empire HQ’ed in the Persian plateau and the Carpathian steppes became Islamic, but moreso the Ilkhanate which led to the spread of Islamic and Persian cultures across west Asia and laid the foundations for the three Islamic gunpowder empires of the Ottoman, Mughal and Qajar ones.
The Mongols, far from being a destructive force, actually revitalised west Asia considering how Baghdad has already gone through civil instability and various conquests by other Islamic polities like the Seljuks.
But the same goes for China where the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty led to the first formation for the modern Chinese territory, and the Golden Horde that paved the way for Muscovy and what would later be known as the Russian empire.
In fact, Eurasia as we know it wouldn’t exist without the Mongol empire which eased the flow of knowledge and trade across the continent.
But with that said, as far as Europe goes I don’t think they could have expanded beyond Hungary and the remains of the Kievan Rus since the Mongol war tactics would have been inadequate against European fortifications that were already impenetrable for Mongol archers on horseback, combined with how decentralised European medieval states were (i.e., the death of a king could have been replaced by another nobility since European kingdoms back then were far less centralised than either Kievan Rus or the various Islamic states conquered and sacked by the Mongols).