No China is far easier to conquer for nomads, northern and central teal China which have historical been the core of China are open to invading nomad armies and China have been conquered several times, Europe on the other hand have it core territories behind several geographic barriers and any invading nomads have to fight through around 2 thousand kilometers of defensive terrain.
This is a popular argument but it ignores few “tiny” details.
1. While China was conquered by the Mongols, it was not conquered by the
Mongolian armies. After the 1st campaign Genghis left Muqali with a small force of approximately 20,000 to continue operations and he was actively recruiting the locals which doubled or tripled the initial number. The whole provinces had been switching to the Mongolian side (their governors becoming the vassal rulers). The pattern continued and AFAIK Khubilai’s armies that finished conquest of the Southern China were predominantly not Mongolian ethnically and not nomadic. He even had a tumen (at least by name) composed of the Russians. Taking into an account that conquest took three generations, this was hardly an easy exercise.
2. “Defensive terrain” of the Central Europe is a myth. For centuries it was crisscrossed by the countless armies (look at the 30YW or Napoleonic Wars) and the major obstacle, the Rhine, is smaller than Volga. The Alp are lower than the Caucasus (and were not a major problem even in the Middle Ages) the Carpathians and Balkans are a joke and the Danube was crossed by the Mongols. Forests? Taiga of Subuday’s native region would match any European forest and the forests of Russia proved not to be a problem.
3. What
was lacking is a serious absence of a real interest on all levels. The Western campaign actually consisted of two (or even three) distinct parts: conquest of Rus (2 campaigns) and the raid into the Central Europe. Conquest of Rus was a logical and undisputed finalization of forming the Western border of Ulus Jochi (with Batu being an appointed ruler) and its pattern was typical Mongolian: subduing all resisting places (a lot of the sieges with the Mongolian troops being spread all over the territory) and forcing the surviving local rulers to acknowledge their vassal status and pay tribute. But pattern of the raid looks differently. It is as if the real goal was to fulfill Genghis’ testament of going all the way to the “last sea” (in OTL Adriatic did just fine). Of course, the formal demands of submission had been sent but that was pretty much it. It is not even clear if these territories would belong to the Ulus Jochi: some authors claim that they would not but there was no appointee and Batu, with his own small forces would not be able to control these territories. So one of the theories is that the raid was mostly a political formality backed up by the “Old Guard”. This, of course, can be disputed but the very limited interest to the Western
expansion is obvious: neither Batu nor Berke tried it and the later expeditions were just looting raids.
4. The whole premise of the Mongolian conquest of Europe does not make a practical sense because, it would require a complete reorientation of all resources from a profitable conquest of China (by the time of Ogdai there was already a significant interest among the Mongolian nobility in getting estates in China) and CA. What Europe could offer comparing to these areas? Plus, it would require a radical rearrangement of the whole political schema of the Mongolian empire reshuffling the existing uluses (and causing problems with the members of Genghis family) to move the center from Mongolia to Volga. What for?
The only nomads who truly conquered Europe was the Indo-European and that was a after a massive population collapse, the Huns never conquered Europe, they overran the eastern Germanic states of Ukraine, which lied in open steppes and used the threat of that to vassalize a few Germanic tribes further west, and then they invaded Roman Europe with a Germanic and Alan horde, and after the death of Attila the whole thing collapsed because his son was a idiot who came into conflict with the Gepids, who was the main infantry of the Huns and who kept the other Germanic tribes in line.
Don’t forget the Magyars who had been
raiding big parts of Europe by generations. 😉
But you are making a valid point, or actually two:
1. While the nomads had been operating across a big part of the Central and Western Europe with a relative ease (notwithstanding the alleged geographic obstacles), they were always returning to their steppe area base. Even with the allowance for a much better Mongolian organization,
ruling Western Europe out of Hungary was not a realistic option. And establishing a nomadic state in the area lacking a lot of a grassland was not realistic either.
2.
Conquest of Europe (putting aside the fact that it was not going to happen) would require a broad coalition in which the Mongolian contingents would be just a fraction (as was the case in China). Could we completely discount a Mongolian (Christian) version of Charlemagne?