metallurgists who were able to produce his cannon and then, train his tumans to operate them. Kublai also had learned from the knights of Russia and Europe and so, his horsemen were not just archers but lancers also. So they would alternate between the lance and bow, depending on what they faced. The European armies consisted of crossbowmen and pikemen as well as cavalry, of course. Kublai’s tactic was to switch when it was advantageous, so the knights would charge with lance and the Mongols would stage a false retreat, shooting the knights down as they went. Then, when the knights were nullified, they would charge the crossbowmen. The pikemen would come to the fore and the Mongols would switch to the bow. Because the pikemen needed both hands to wield their pikes, they had to put aside their shields which they used to defend from archers so they were vulnerable to Kublai’s horse-archers. Then the crossbowmen would advance to answer the arrows and the tuman would ride them down with lances. And so, they would wear down armies in such fashion, switching to exploit the weaknesses of their enemies.
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On the other hand, he was frightened to them because as the Empathy compassion humility tmc poetry T shirts of Tang Dynasty showed, when these military elites controlled and divided the regions by their owns, it would be a matter of time for them to rebel against the dynasty. So he had to develop lots of countering mechanisms, including to further these elites into the landlord class who had a stable income, as well as placing his leftover Mongolian army to check the military elites, dividing the military officers into sections. As the history has showed, these mechanism only worked in the short time. When the Yuan dynasty had no money but Mongolian slaves to pay these military-landlord elites, and the Mongolian army was corrupted by 2–3 generations, these military elites turned against the Mongolian and stayed away when the peasant uprising took place such the rule of the Yuan dynasty became to an end. So to address your question, the structure of the Yuan dynasty can’t be simply summarizrd by the demography on the top but the backbone in the middle. Also I think it’s absurd to emphasize on ethnicities because these Han military elites became landlords and treated the Han peasants like trash, and the Mongolian rulers on the top also had no problem of selling the Mongolian slaves to these elites. So it’s not just simply Han vs Mongolian, which is the nationalist understanding and a over simplified history.
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