Batu Khan's march into Europe stopped because of a death in Mongolia
By late 1241 Batu Khan and his general Subutai were planning to push the Mongol armies into Austria, Italy and Germany. Then word arrived that the Great Khan Ögedei had died that December. Mongol law required the princes to return home to choose a successor, and the invasion of western Europe never came.
Batu wanted to keep going, but Subutai reminded him of the Yassa, the Mongol legal code, and in late spring 1242 the princes of Genghis Khan's line headed back toward Karakorum. Batu himself stopped along the Volga and pleaded that he could not attend an election soon, delaying the choice of a new Great Khan for years. Güyük was finally elected in 1246, and Batu, one of the eldest of the ruling family, ran the empire's western lands as viceroy without ever openly defying the throne.
The campaign that preceded this had begun in 1235, when Ögedei assigned Batu an army of perhaps 130,000, with Subutai as the real field commander. Crossing the Volga in 1236, it subdued the Volga Bulgars and then the principalities of Rus', taking Kiev in December 1240. The Mongols sent spies as far as Austria before striking Poland and Hungary. Batu reportedly told Emperor Frederick II to give up his throne; Frederick replied that he would make a fine falconer, since he knew birds well.
Tensions ran inside the family too. At one victory feast Batu drank before the others, his cousins Büri and Güyük complained he had been handed too rich a steppe and mocked him as an old woman with a beard, and Ögedei angrily recalled them. Batu was a son of Jochi and so officially a grandson of Genghis Khan, though Jochi's paternity is uncertain.
The friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine described him as kind to his own people yet feared, shrewd and crafty after years of war, and Marco Polo knew him by a nickname meaning good. Batu died around 1255. The state he founded, the Golden Horde, dominated Rus', the Caucasus and the western steppes for roughly 250 years.
Source: Batu Khan
