Nomadic Empires

From Mongolia to the Danube

Gerard Chaliand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351502924
• Print ISBN:
  9780765802040
• Subtopic: Asian History

"Nomadic Empires sheds new light on 2,000 years of military history and geopolitics. The Mongol Empire of Genghis-Khan and his heirs, as is well known, was the greatest empire in world history. For 2,000 from the fifth century b.c. to the fifteenth century a.d., the steppe areas of Asia, from the borders of Manchuria to the Black Sea, were a ""zone of turbulence,"" threatening settled peoples from China to Russia and Hungary, including Iran, India, the Byzantine empire, and even Syria. It was a true world stage that was affected by these destructive nomads.This cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or Mongols. They did not belong to a sole nation or language, but shared a strategic culture born in the steppes: a highly mobile cavalry which did not require sophisticated logistics, and an indirect mode of combat based on surprise, mobility, and harassment. They used bows and arrows and, when they were united under the authority of a strong leader, were able to become a deadly threat to their sedentary neighbors.Chaliand addresses the subject from four perspectives. First, he examines the early nomadic populations of Eurasia, and the impact of these nomads and their complex relationships with settled peoples. Then he describes military fronts of the Altaic Nomads, detailing events from the fourth century b.c. through the twelfth century a.d., from the early Chinese front to the Indo-Iranian front, the Byzantine front, and the Russian front. Next he covers the undertakings of the great nomad conquerors that brought about the Ottoman Empire. And finally, he describes what he calls ""the revenge of the sedentary peoples, exploring Russia and China in the aftermath of the Mongols. The volume includes a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Now in paperback, this cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or "

1
Introduction

The Impact of the Nomads

History, as it is understood today, has been largely written using the framework of the nation-state or the great classical empires. There has been very little interest in the geographical entity of central Eurasia,¹ which sprawls across the steppes from the confines of Manchuria to Ukraine and peters out in the grassy plains of Hungary.

Why should we concern ourselves with a host of peoples whose names hardly anyone has heard of, who built empires that were often only short-lived, and whose histories are generally known only to us through the testimony of their adversaries?

If little attention has been paid to these societies and this geographical area, it is because they were not embodied in a state or in an enduring empire with more or less fixed borders and even less in a people. The various empires that came into being in High Asia or that originated there are simply not written about as is the Roman empire. No single people can claim the considerable heritage—one that is possibly unique in the military sphere—of the nomads of High Asia.

Nomad empires refer to those imperial nomads who emerged from central Eurasia, conquering mounted archers, some of them famous, such as Attila, Genghis Khan, or Timur (Tamerlane), who, over a period of two thousand years, made their mark on the history of the world.

Perhaps it could be said that, over the long run, the history of High Asia is the history of those who are dubbed Barbarians. They occupied not only the steppe but also part of the taïga with its dense coniferous forests. This vast area is larger than the size of the United States. It is cut up by high mountains and deserts, and, in the area of modern Mongolia, historically its manpower reserve, its climate is exceedingly harsh. Nature and the living conditions that prevail there produced a type of man who was hardy and predatory.

The prime determinant of the whole history of central Eurasia was the need for nomadic shepherds to have grazing land for their animals—which in return supplied them with their requirements. But what makes the history of these Barbarians important and, militarily, fundamental, is the role of troublemaker that they played over a period of more than two thousand years in the Eurasian landmass, and, from Antiquity to the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, that area, together with the area around the Mediterranean, was the world stage of conflicts. In fact, High Asia was, until the appearance of what we call modern times, the geopolitical pivot of the ancient and medieval world and its zone of turbulence. In the long-term perspective, the geopolitical opposition is not, as is thought in the modern West, between sea empires and continental empires—as was sketched out by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder in 1904—but between nomads and settled peoples. On the whole, the societies of High Asia based on nomadism and raiding were predatory. For them to become dangerous to their settled neighbors required that a leader emerge among them capable of uniting the various tribes of a group for some considerable period. That is what was achieved by the greatest among them, Genghis Khan, the creator of the largest empire in history.

Of course, history has seen nomads other than those of High Asia whose role was decisive or important. First and foremost there were the Bedouin of Arabia who, borne by a universalist monotheism, permanently transformed the world (but one may legitimately wonder whether it is possible to regard this warrior Islam, which very rapidly created urban civilizations, as a nomad society). Then there were the nomads of the sea such as the Vikings and the Varangians, the latter the creators of Kievan Rus. But, in terms of duration, no area had the military importance of High Asia whose nomadic waves caused the ancient and medieval world to tremble, from China to the West, including Iran, India, Byzantium, Russia and the Balkans. From the Scythians in the sixth century B.C. to the Manchus who made themselves masters of China in the middle of the seventeenth century, the military role of the nomads of central Eurasia was of capital importance. The mounted archer of High Asia took the art of warfare, especially at the time of Genghis Khan, to a degree of perfection that, in terms of logistics, maneuver, mobility, capacity to concentrate, shock, and firepower (bow-power serving as such), was equaled in the West only with Napoleon. And even in the matter of mobility, it was not until the Second World War and the tank-based Blitzkrieg that better was seen.

In the period of over two and a half thousand years that we are dealing with here, the nomadic populations of Eurasia amount broadly to a few main groupings: the Indo-Iranians, such as the Scythians who were eliminated from central Asia in the first centuries A.D., and the ancestors especially of the Turkic-speaking peoples, the Mongols and the Manchus; and, second, the so-called Uralo-Altaic peoples such as the Finns or the Hungarians.

Eastern High Asia—Mongolia in the broad sense—is the geographical origin of most of these peoples, and particularly of the Turkic-Mongols. While, throughout history, China had fascinated the nomads in the north and often suffered their attacks, the general movement of nomads took them westward. Population pressure found an outlet there and, in that respect, the Turkic-speakers played a key role.

As early as the second and third centuries A.D., Turkic-speaking peoples were moving westward, driving out or absorbing the Indo-Iranians and occupying the area known as Turkestan. From Transoxiana nomadic Turkish tribes gradually penetrated the settled periphery: Khurasan, western Iran, Asia Minor, and the Volga basin—this last starting in the ninth-eleventh centuries—and, once they had been civilized by Iranian culture or inspired by the Byzantine model, formed illustrious states and dynasties.

These nomads were not simply more or less permanent adversaries of the settled peoples with whom they maintained complex relations but they were also rivals and engaged in bitter internal fights. When one group triumphed over another, the latter would flee and push aside a third to secure for itself an area for grazing. The steppe was thus shaken by chain reactions that had repercussions on the periphery. Such was the case with Attila whose drive had the effect of precipitating the final onslaught of the Germans against Rome.

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All the great civilizations were settled and urban: Mesopotamia and the Nile, the Yellow River, the Indus, the oasis-cities of Iran and the Mediterranean world; all had to endure the shocks of invasions by nomads. Today, the nomadic societies of High Asia are everywhere defeated, sedentarized, overtaken and controlled, but every civilization of the ancient and medieval world feared them.

As early as the sixth century B.C., according to Herodotus, the Achaemenid ruler Darius failed in 512 B.C. to deal a decisive blow to the Scythians, despite his military power: the Scythians practiced a scorched earth policy and retreated with nothing that could be seized except what they carried with them.

As for Rome, long before Attila, it came to know the manner of fighting of the mounted archers from central Asia in Cassius’s disastrous encounter with the Parthians, recorded by Plutarch (battle of Carrhae, 53 B.C.).

As early as the fourth and third centuries B.C., China in the time of the “Warring Kingdoms” had to face raids by the Hsiung-Nu (Turkic-Mongols), and it was at that period that the first stretches were built of what was to become, when completed by the Ming, the Great Wall of China. Northern China was invaded and occupied in the fourth century A.D. by dynasties of nomad origin; again, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, culminating in the complete domination of the country by the Mongols in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries; and then by the Manchus after 1644. For two millennia, the focus of Chinese foreign policy, with its periods of counter-offensives under the Han, the T’ang, the early Ming, and the Manchus once they had become sinicized, was on the threat from the nomads and, consequently, on controlling access routes to the west and its string of oases.

The Gupta dynasty in India, one of the greatest Indian dynasties, collapsed in the fifth century A.D. under attacks by the Hephthalite Huns (White Huns) who ravaged Iran as they passed through. The sultanate of Delhi, founded in the eleventh century by a dynasty of Turkic origin, was succeeded in the sixteenth century by Babur, a Turkic-speaking Chaghatai driven out of central Asia by the Uzbeks, who set off from Kabul to conquer India. He was a classic example of the deadly interplay of the chain reactions of nomad drives in which one group drove out another which, in turn, pushed aside a less powerful third one.

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, China, which has always been highly adept at sinicizing Barbarian conquerors, Iran, and the Byzantine empire were the great centers civilizing the nomads of High Asia. The nomadic waves that penetrated into their orbit became transformed there, learned to govern states and ended up being converted to the religions of the settled peoples: Islam for the majority of them, or Buddhism.

China had the advantage—in addition to its culture—of numbers, which meant, that even if defeated, it was invulnerable. Iran, despite numerous intrusions from the north-east, succeeded in retaining its specific character, once it had adopted the Islam imposed by the Arab conquest, and its language and culture affected all those nomads whom it civilized and converted over an area stretching from central Asia to northern India.

The Byzantine empire survived the Roman empire in the West by a thousand years, and, among its many achievements, it successfully resisted the Goths, the Avars, the Arabs, the Bulgars, the Russians, the Pechenegs, and the Cumans.² These mounted a continuous succession of offensive pressures from south, north, east, and west until the final blow was delivered by the Ottomans once Constantinople was demographically squeezed. The Byzantine empire evangelized the Bulgars and Kievan Russia and also provided a state model for the Ottomans.

From the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, Europe in the broad sense also experienced the incursions and invasions of the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgars, the Magyars, the Pechenegs, the Cumans, and the Mongols. The latter’s domination of Russia was peculiarly burdensome. As for the Ottoman drive in the fourteenth century from Asia Minor into the Balkans, it was, even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the final onslaught from central Asia started by the flight of a Turkic-speaking tribe driven out by the sudden upsurge of the Mongols at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Western Europe, west of a line from Danzig through Vienna to Trieste, was the part of the medieval world best protected from nomad onslaughts, which doubtless explains why we are so little interested in central Asia. That is, of course, not true of the Hungarians whose plains from time immemorial served as the final resting place for nomadic waves from Asia. It is surely highly likely that the fact of having been spared Mongol and Ottoman rule contributed to the growth of Western Europe and promoted the preconditions for its exceptional destiny.

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The warrior nomads lived along the northern fringes of the world of settled peoples. They traded their horses for products that they needed, such as textiles, or other luxury goods. The empires, whether Chinese or Byzantine, sought to divide them, pacify them, or contain them with tributes paid in the guise of gifts or alliances sealed by the marriage of an imperial princess with a Barbarian leader. And then, taking advantage of the weakening or strengthening of one of the antagonists, there would be an upsurge by the nomads or a punitive expedition or general offensive by the settled peoples.

Yet the nomads did not simply play a destabilizing role. Sometimes, after being civilized by settled peoples, they would contribute to a new stabilization. They, in turn, would found a dynasty. Among the most famous were the Yüan, founded by Kubilai Khan, which reigned for almost a century over the whole of China; the Seljukids, Iranized Turks who dominated much of the Middle East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the house of Osman (1299–1326), of lowly origin, which gradually became the formidable Ottoman empire; the Great Mughals founded by Babur, the conqueror of India (1526); and the Manchus who reigned over China for over two and a half centuries (1644–1911).

Other nomads formed empires in High Asia itself, like the Tuchueh, Turkic-speakers who ruled the area from the Caspian to Mongolia. These empires almost always broke up in one or two or at most three generations. But the Mongols fared better by dominating both central Eurasia and all of the periphery for a considerable period: China, the Iranian Middle East, Russia, and even parts of southeast Asia. With the Mongols, the mounted archers of central Asia reached their fullest development: throughout history they had used the same modes of combat, the same way of waging war which they carried to perfection: mobility, capacity to maneuver, impeccable logistics. Winter cost so many invaders of Russia dearly, but it proved for the Mongols to be highly favorable: the frozen rivers were easily crossed on horseback and the harshness of the winter was familiar to the sons of the steppe. It was on the contrary the mud of the spring thaw that saved the city of Novgorod. The thirteenth-century Mongols’ discipline gave them a cohesion unequaled in the long line of steppe nomads.

In terms of population, Turkic-speaking nomads were the most numerous both in central Asia and beyond, once their Islamized descendants had been civilized by Persian culture or Byzantine influence, and their role was of enormous importance. They were to be found on every theater of conflict in the ancient and especially the medieval world: China, India, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Balkans. Timur (Tamerlane), undeniably a military genius, attempted to repeat the formation of the world empire that Genghis Khan had achieved.

The decline of the nomads and their heirs accelerated in the mid-sixteenth century with the counter-offensive launched by Ivan the Terrible. But the khanate of the Crimea, sustained by the Ottomans, continued to be a threat throughout the seventeenth century and was only annexed in 1783, after two centuries in which the Cossacks and Russian settlers fought with them for the 1,200 kilometers that separated the Moscow of Ivan the Terrible from the Russia of Peter the Great and Catherine II. It was also in the mid-seventeenth century that the Manchus imposed their dynasty on the imperial throne of China.

Although from the sixteenth century onwards the history of High Asia tends to be of no more than regional significance, the nomads continued to be a formidable military force until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the use of artillery became decisive. In the last two centuries, the two countries that in the past most suffered from the nomads, Russia and China, have systematically put an end to the independence and nomadism of the mounted archers of whom the world once stood in such fear.

Nomads and Settled Peoples

Nomad comes from nomas (wandering shepherd). The Chinese used to say of the nomads: “They follow water and grass.” That is a perfect definition of the pastoral world of the steppes of central Asia. Pastoralism in High Asia has always been based chiefly on horse and sheep, and to a lesser extent on cattle, goats, and camels.

Sheep provided the wool used for the felt of tents; the skin was used to make winter clothes; milk from the ewe was made into cheese; the sheep’s flesh was eaten; and finally, its droppings were used as fuel. The horse was at once a means of transport, an instrument of war and hunting and a currency for trade. These were the hardy, thickset horses of the steppe that settled peoples wanted to obtain. The Chinese, for example, traded them for silk, tea, and grains. Mare’s milk provided a favorite drink: koumiss. In case of need, if he had no other food, the nomad would drink a little of his horse’s blood. Oxen and cows were draught animals. They hauled wagons on which yurts that had not been dismantled had been placed. The Bactrian camel was used particularly in desert regions.

The grazing circuit was determined by climatic conditions: semi-annual migrations between high pastures and lower level steppes. In winter, the uplands were deserted; in summer, the plains were dried out. Nomads moved over vast distances when circumstances required.

High Asia extends from the forests of Manchuria to the Black Sea and beyond, as far as the Hungarian pustza—the final outpost of the steppe. This region’s center of gravity lay between the Kerulen, Orkhon, and Selenga rivers, north of modern Mongolia and south of Lake Baikal, the original home of the Turkic-Mongols, from where they attacked first China, then the world of Iran, India, Byzantium, and the Slavs. The Tungus-Manchus lived further east.

From east to west, this grassy steppe, bordered on the north by the Siberian forest, encounters no obstacle. All that is needed is to avoid the low marshy lands of western Siberia. Spring is the best season and the meadows are thick with grass and flowers; as the summer advances the grass dries out. Over more than ten thousand kilometers the continental climate is particularly harsh. In Urga, in Mongolia, the temperature varies, according to the season, between +35^o and −40^o, with frequent icy winds. In the south, the steppe ends at broken but very high mountain ranges, from the Caucasus to the Altai and including the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Military Fronts of the Altaic Nomads (Fourth Century B.C.-Twelfth Century A.D.)
• 3. The Apogee of the Nomads: Mongols and Turkic-Speakers (Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries)
• 4. The Revenge of the Sedentary Peoples (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)
• Appendices
• Chronology
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index