[muawiyah]

The Mongols had about 1 million population and could support a fighting force of about 100,000 mounted archers, and later, a few thousand cannoneers. It has only 2.8 million today.

They learned to become VERY EFFICIENT and EFFECTIVE.

They continued to be quite poor until they began acquiring better weapons. They were fast learners.

NOTE: As you know Hungary, Estonia, Finland, and so forth were earlier conquered by different sorts of Turks and Mongols ~ that went on for a good 6 centuries until one day someone figured out they could invade China successfully, which they did.

[hellbender]

The people who settled Hungary, Finland, and Estonia were Finno-Ugrians, not Turks, although there were some Turks along with the Magyars. Anthropologist Carlton Coon actually classifies most Finns of Finland as Nordic, although there are what he called Tartarized Finns in Russia.

There were many ethnic groups in central Eurasia which followed a nomadic culture featuring light cavalry and mounted archery in war. Some were Iranian, some Ugrian, some Turkic or Mongol. Sometimes conquering hordes were ethnically mixed.

Mongolia may have had only a million people, but a much higher proportion of the population was available to fight than in (e.g.) Europe, and they were tougher than people of settled regions. Being nomadic, their entire population could move to support the army. Europeans, Persians, etc. could not compete with that strategy. Also, they had absorbed people from other groups into their conquering hordes. They were almost impossible to beat, and were stopped largely because they themselves became the soft, luxury-loving aristocracy in places like India, China, and Ottoman Turkey. The Mongols proper apparently became more peaceful after taking up Buddhism. (Timur was a Muslim, with all the propensity for violence and intolerance that entails; he performed his genocidal atrocities in the name of Islam, although he killed many Muslims.)