It was part of Europe, but even if you cut it out, the continent was clearly no “backwater”.
They failed because Europe was not such a “backwater” that it could not deal with a well supplied and trained enemy, which a barbarous backwater people would have fallen to, like almost every time in History, throughout the world.
Europe was fractured throughout the whole period, and remained fractured ever since, and still advanced, while the Islamic world collapsed because of fracturing.
Subotai actually got to Germany, and gave up, because conquering that land would have broken the Horde. It was too fortified, did not have enough infrastructure to support a moving Horde, and the people just did not surrender.
He probably could have conquered most of Europe, but the sacrifice for it would have been the complete destruction of the Mongol Horde, because the material investment for Siege after Siege, on a land that could not sustain armies of 500000 horsemen, would have driven the Horde into the dust.
Europe was not a rich land like China and Persia, that could feed the Mongol occupation, it was a poor land whose inhabitants were used to low resources and constant fighting for scraps.
Due to political fragmentation, not due to backwardsness. Renaissance thinkers dubbed it the Dark Ages precisely because of the constant fighting between petty kingdoms and large empires, as they wanted a more Roman-style large contiguous empire, and blamed all of Europe’s woes on the empire having been carved up by too many warlords.
Gunpowder came to Europe in the 12th century, and in 60 years there, it outshone all other similar devices and formulas around the world.
European engineering also brought forth the first great age of open seafaring, when boats did not have to stick to the coast so much as in the past.
Economy is not everything, the very rich kingdoms of Asia and Africa endured humiliation after humiliations from foreign invaders, European included, because they were too rich and too comfortable to consider being in a state of perpetual warfare like Europe was, which innevitably gave it the edge.
Maybe, but that is not what you said, you said it was a backwater, when it clearly was not.
Large armies, small kingdoms that punched way above their class, the shrewdest mercantile class in the world, mercenaries and adventurers willing to go virtually anywhere for fame and discovery, the best engineers of the period (Ottoman Great Bombards were invented by a Hungarian, and assembled by German mercenaries, because only they had the metallurgical know-how); Europe was never a backwater after Alexander.
