Shortly after Easter in 1241, fourteen years after Genghis’s death, Mongol armies were back in the west. They scored two stunning battlefield victories in central and eastern Europe, which, occurring within just seventy-two hours of one another, seemed to set the stage for the Mongolization of the whole continent. On April 9, Mongol generals called Baidar and Kaidan scythed down a combined force of Polish, Czech, and Templar soldiers near Legnica (today in southern Poland). They killed Henry II, Duke of Lower Silesia, and took his head on a spike to parade before the horrified inhabitants of
...more
