[swolf]

Chengis Khan pretty much invented modern warfare, and he and his luitenants invented getting around. Subudai needed only for Khan Oktai to live another two years and he'd have been the first military commander in the history of the planet to have stood on both the Atlantic and Pacific shores of Eurasia. Those guys were moving entires armies 100 - 200 miles per DAY and were getting messages from Beijing to Moscow in a week.

[JasonC]

Cavarly armies move a long way. It is not military genius. As for inventing modern warfare, hardly. Modern formations trace not to Mongol decimals but to medieval mobilization systems, which were themselves relics of Roman institutions. Modern staff systems are less than 200 years old. And Mongol armies were not interchangable maneuver units, but local affairs that lived off the land where they formed and massed. Letters and leaders went from Beijing to Moscow, but no army ever did. The armies that conquered China, that conquered India, that conquered the near east, that conquered western Russia - not only were not the same force, they never saw each other.

The problem the Mongols did solve - though only briefly - was internal political faction on the steppe, allowing uniform recruitment and projection beyond it in all directions, to loot. (Every time a unified army left the steppe, it conquered something - nothing new in that). Once they had places looted, however, they had no remaining principle of unity, and broke up into separate hordes. When they conquered places, they brought a few traditions of steppe court life and changed dynasty bloodlines, and otherwise were assimiliated by the vastly more populace places they grabbed. When Tamurlane tried to put a unified empire back together, all he could do was loot various pieces of it in succession, depopulating them in the process, and leaving nothing.