Subutai, Mongol General: Kalka's Nine-Day Retreat to the Trap at Mohi

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In 1221 the King of Georgia wrote to the Pope that he could not send his knights to the Fifth Crusade because his army had been destroyed. The man responsible was Subutai, son of a blacksmith who had fed Temujin's camp when the future Genghis Khan was an outcast. His brother Jelme once sucked poison blood from Temujin's neck wound. Subutai joined the army at 14 as a guard at the door of the khan's yurt, and at 22 won his first command by riding alone into a Merkit camp posing as a deserter, assuring them the Mongol army was far away. He moved beyond steppe archery toward fluid maneuvers, heavy cavalry charges, and siege engines used on the open field like a creeping barrage.

With 20,000 riders he circled the Caspian Sea, crushing Georgia and drawing a Rus' and Cuman coalition about four times his size into a nine-day feigned retreat that ended at the Kalka River. Recalled by Ogedei to the stalled war against the Jin, he outflanked their fortresses through Song territory, starved a Jin army for three weeks at Sanfengshan, and took Kaifeng after eight months. In 1241 he planned a five-pronged invasion of Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania, halted when Ogedei died.

• Hunting the Merkits and Kipchaks, his vanguard dropped children's toys so enemy scouts would think they were tracking fleeing families.
• Before facing the Georgians, Subutai spread rumors that his troops were Christian wonder workers and paraded crosses.
• At Kaifeng he built an 87-kilometer wall around the city, and Ogedei overruled his call to execute the population.
• At Mohi, artillery pinned the Hungarians at the bridge while a pontoon bridge carried a flanking force downstream, and a deliberate gap in the ring led fleeing soldiers into a swamp.
• B. H. Liddell Hart revived interest in his campaigns, and Rommel, Patton, and Soviet deep battle theorists studied them.