It is often stated that the Mongols would spare cities which surrendered, but depopulated by mass execution those which resisted. The reasons given for this are that
My questions are:
How well regarded are these claims by modern academics?
If regarded as at least partly true, how would this realistically be carried out with the technology of the time?
Mongols were horse archers according to my understanding; urban warfare is incredibly difficult involving close quarters -- how did it work that they would use horses and arrows to kill sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of people?
Wouldn't they run out of arrows quickly?
Wouldn't the horses be unable to enter the extremely densely built structures?
Assuming swords used, wouldn't they get dull extremely quickly?
Wouldn't soldiers become incredibly tired after days or months of siege warfare and then having to chase down people individually and hack them to death?
Assuming fire, weren't walled cities created with ability to resist incendiary weapons?
Assuming they just threw everyone into a pit or something, how would crowd control work?
This has been bugging me for a while, and online research reveals little besides re-iterating 'the Mongols just murdered everyone'.
Thank you. Any recommended reading is appreciated.
A few words prior: an open field combat (or raid) strategy does indeed rarely translate well to a city extermination strategy. However, even if an army's combat strategy relies primarily on one main type of tactic, armies are still comprised of people, by nature flexible and adaptable creatures. Regarding Mongols specifically - if we can gleam information from period art, which we often do, then at the very least we can say that Mongols have been using (at least) swords and spears as well:
Swords, illustrated in a Rashid al-Din chronicle, 14th century
Spears, also from a Rashid al-Din chronicle
There are other illustrations of Mongols from Rashid al-Din chronicles depicting use of siege weapons, more spears, more swords, etc.
That being said, let's talk about city extermination.
While I cannot attest to the mongols specifically, I can bring an account of another ancient world example of how the slaughter of a city can be done - namely, the Roman sacking of Carthage (a very well built and fortified city), as described in Mary Beard's SPQR:
In the assault, the Roman soldiers fought their way up streets lined with multistorey buildings; they jumped from rooftop to rooftop, throwing the occupants down on the pavements and toppling and setting fire to the structures as they went, until the debris they had made blocked their path. The rubbish clearers followed, opening up a space for the next wave of assault by blasting their way through the mixture of building material and human remains, in which it was said that the legs of the dying could be seen visibly writhing above the debris, their heads and bodies buried beneath.
The bones that archeologists have found in these layers of destruction, not to mention the thousands of deadly stone and clay sling bullets that have been unearthed, suggest that the description may not be as wide of a mark as we might hope.
This is one example of the slaughter of a city in the ancient world, and it seems to paint a picture of a systematic destruction of its population, utilizing not only weapons but also the city itself to aid in the killing - throwing people off of high places, burning structures (occupied or otherwise), and crushing people under the collapsing debris.
While this is not a description of the Mongolians sacking of a city, it does help paint a picture of what an army in ancient times could find to be the most efficient or effective method to purge a city. Even though the Romans did not slaughter all the inhabitants of Carthage (Romans liked capturing slaves, for example), it is not far fetched to believe that they could if they chose to.
Regarding the term "execution" itself, in reference to the "mass execution" of an entire city - I cannot attest whether "mass execution" in this sense refers to something more "orderly" like you would imagine based on modern history (like a firing line, or some of the Nazi's depopulation methods in early WWII), or whether it simply meant the slaughter of a city, with the terms "execution" and "slaughter" being interchanged.
