Introduction

For 2000 years, starting about 700 BC, the Eurasian civilizations had to contend with nomadic barbarians from the northern steppe. This struggle was one of the driving forces in the military and political history of civilization (with special significance for the elite insofar as it was militarily and politically defined) . If you look at a political world map from 300 A.D. and compare it to one from 1300 AD, you will see that something like half of the civilized world of the earlier period had come under the control of nomads or their descendants (and this says nothing of the conquests of the non-nomadic Germans). The records of this transition are skewed and biased, but we know enough to write a pretty good barbarian history. This is my attempt to sum up the main points as quickly as possible.

Geography

Inner Asia

If you draw a line from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, from the Black Sea  to the Caspian, from Caspian Sea to southwestern Tibet, southeastern Tibet, and northeastern Tibet, and the northern border of Korea, you will roughly define the dry zone of Inner Eurasia. Most of this area is thinly-populated, and the low rainfall and harsh climate make it agriculturally relatively unproductive. (Where I've drawn a dotted line the division is less clear-cut; the line might even be extended all the way to the Indian Ocean at both ends to enclose the arid areas there).

The Steppe

The steppe proper (circled above) is the part of this area most suitable for grazing land  -- excluding the deserts, the northern forests and tundra, Tibet (which has almost always been historically isolated), and Turkestan (the oasis cities in Chinese Xinjiang, the eastern Muslim republics of the old USSR, and Afghanistan.) The almost continuous ribbon of steppe stretching from China to Hungary provided  the barbarians with a cross-Eurasian highway far superior to anything the civilize world had to offer; in fact, civilization was an impediment to the unification of Eurasia, and the steppe was unified first -- by Genghis Khan.

The Oases

The oasis cities on the Silk Road which run from the Caspian through the present Uzbekistan and Xinjiang to western China (the area circled above) have a special status. They are urban centers and have an agricultural base, and they have always had an intimate relationship both with the steppe peoples and with their sedentary neighbors (Persian, Indian, or Chinese). These cities, which relied on irrigation from mountain streams and were set in the midst of arid lands, were too small and scattered to exercise power on their own and seldom could even maintain their independence, but as relays on the Silk Road they played a crucial role, and the politics of this area always involved efforts of the various neighbors to control these key cities and the transcontinental trade route which passed through them. The political order in this zone depended on a balance of nomad cavalry forces sweeping the open spaces, and walled cities controlling the agricultural areas and caravan stops.

The Trade Routes

In the course of history, Samarqand in Uzbekistan marked the farthest reach of the Persian Empire, Alexander's empire, the Chinese empire, and the early Muslim empire. It was the last-conquered part of the Russian Empire, and from India Russian rule was contested by the British.  For the Turks and Mongols, however, this area was a center of their power. From time to time forces from here would ride south and west, founding (besides the Mongol Empire) the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, Tamerlane's short-lived realm, and the Mughal empire in India.

Inner Asia was tenuously united by a network of trade routes which extended as far as Greenland and which went mostly through thinly-inhabited territory under weak political control.  Over these routes the great civilizations of China, India, Islam, and Europe exchanged luxury products which, for political and prestige reasons, had a far greater importance than their actual value would justify. Thus, while Inner Asia was intrinsically poor and underpopulated, as a political prize and an intercivilizational link it was enormously important -- the ultimate goal of policy. Inner Asia was demographically and economically weak, but a reservoir of military power and political control.

From the point of view of civilization, the strictly economic importance of the actual products of the steppe was minimal – horses were the most important thing civilization needed from the steppe, but these horses were primarily needed in order to supply the civilized militaries defending against cavalry raids from the steppe.  For civilization, Inner Eurasia and the steppe were significant primarily because of the military threat of the nomad armies, and secondarily as a conduit for East-West trade -- or as a barrier to that trade. (Before the rise of the Mongol empire, which came at the very end of the period of steppe dominance, there is no record of an individual making a round trip from Western Europe to China.)

The steppe barrier to trade was not physical. You will hear talk about “vast distances”, but it’s only about  5,000 miles from Paris to Beijing – a bit less than three years at five miles a day.  Most of the area is easy going during good weather, and even the deserts and mountains can be bypassed or crossed without much difficulty. Inner Eurasia was a barrier to trade partly because it was often an uncontrolled zone contested by feuding barbarians, and partly because even when it was relatively peaceful and the Silk Road was in use, the ruling peoples of the steppe, Central Asia, and Persia  preserved their monopoly on trade by refusing passage to strangers.

The Nomads

The use of the word barbarians is frowned on by the professionals, but it has a definable meaning: it refers to uncivilized peoples (non-urban, non-literate, non-sedentary) who were able to mount a military threat to the civilized peoples. The nomad barbarians were the most fearsome of these, and that term primarily designates the pastoral peoples from the Inner Asian steppe whose cavalry armies were often unstoppable during the 2,000 years in question here. **

The pastoral nomads are often though of as a primitive, pre-civilized people, but it has been established that agriculture came first, and that pastoralism developed from mixed agriculture. Likewise, horses were probably used to pull wagons and chariots before they were ridden astride, and there’s little or no evidence of nomad armies before about 700 B.C. -- the early cavalry armies were formed at the edges of civilization for the purpose of plundering it. In the sense in which I am using the term, we can say that barbarism is a spinoff of civilization, and that the peoples who preceded civilization -- and the less-threatening of the non-civilized people contemporary with civilization --  were, properly speaking, not barbarians.

The nomads were technologically advanced. They exploited the hostile steppe environment more efficiently than any one else could, and the yurt and the compound bow were engineering triumphs. We have the habit of thinking that things that are archaic and obsolete now always were primitive and defective, but up until at least 1300 AD, horses, camels, and archery were state-of-the-art for the functions they filled. (Even into the early XIXc, horses were still “modern” – during that period, the most advanced nations had the most horses.)

There is a difference of opinion about the economics of nomadism. The prevalent theory until recently was that the steppe economies were incapable of surviving on their own without resources from the sedentary world, and that they required a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with civilization.  More recently this theory has been questioned, and evidence has been brought forward that many of the pastoral people in fact did practice some  agriculture.

The claim that the steppe is best suited for pastoralism, whereas the sedentary world is suited for agriculture, is only a half-truth. On the one hand, agriculture is quite possible on the steppe -- though only in limited areas, and because of the general shortage of water, the overall steppe productivity per acre remains very  low. Similarly, agricultural land can be used very profitably for grazing, and is in fact better than steppe land for that purpose since grass grows better if it’s better-watered.  The primary reasons for specialization in agriculture or pastoralism were military and economic (competitive advantage). The sedentary world didn’t raise horses or sheep because agriculture was more profitable on a per-acre basis,  and  the tax loss to the state resulting from a conversion to grazing made raising horses uneconomic, so the sedentary empires preferred to buy their horses even though that meant that they might have to buy them from the very enemies they needed horses to defend themselves against. The steppe peoples, likewise, found it more advantageous to get their agricultural products by trade or extortion than to try to practice agriculture in an inhospitable environment. And furthermore, during the long periods of steppe disunity, steppe agriculturalists tied to the land would have been vulnerable to enemy nomad raiders in the same way that the civilized world was, making the agricultural gamble unattractive .

While I think that it is probably true that the nomads were capable of living independently, there was no reason for them to limit themselves to self-sufficiency, since the much more productive sedentary world was the source of good things of all kinds (not just agricultural products), and since their military skills made it possible for them to get some of these good things for themselves. The economic threshold between the steppe and the agrarian world was very steep, with overwhelmingly more stored wealth on the agrarian side. However, individual nomads were not necessarily poorer than individual peasants, since their mobility made them much more difficult for tax-gatherers and landlords to exploit – the rootedness of the peasants and their production of storable grains actually made them more easily victimized. The continual warfare and frequent famine on the steppe also kept population down (since famine was not buffered by stored grain) without decreasing the productivity of the land. Pastoral productivity was neither labor-dependent nor capital-dependent (with very little physical plant, infrastructure, or production technology), but rather weather-dependent and sheep-dependent.  Thus populations rebounded relatively quickly after disasters (perhaps with the replacement of decimated tribes by less-affected ones), and it seems likely that during the periods of rebound most nomads were better-fed than the average peasant.

As we shall see below, the main commodity exchanged by nomads with the civilized world was “protection” -- and  while selling protection seems like parasitism, extortion, or robbery, the Inner Asian trade routes protected  by the nomad barbarians led to an economic transformation which ultimately led to  the development of the modern global economy.
 

Nomad Warfare

The military strength of the nomads came from their mobility. (The same is true of the camel-riding Bedouin and sea-raiders like the Vikings and the Homeric Greeks.) The nomads could collect an army from an enormous area, send out scouts and make feint attacks all along the civilized defense line, and then concentrate their forces at its weakest point before the defensive forces could respond. If their attack was successful, they would plunder and devastate the enemy countryside. If not, they would just disperse to the safety their homeland, which was inhospitable for the pursuing enemy forces.

The weakness of the nomads was logistics. Since their food source (sheep) and everything they owned was portable, they didn’t need to defend their rear the way civilized armies did. But if an attack wasn’t immediately successful, or if they were forced into an area without sufficient grass, then they would have to call off the attack and go home. For these reasons the early purely nomadic societies were only an intermittent threat to the civilized world, whose much greater wealth often made it possible for them to buy off the nomads with tribute. 

The most successful civilized strategy against the nomads was “divide and conquer” – to hire nomad mercenaries, or to bribe some tribes to fight the others. During the period before Chinggis Qan’s rise the steppe was fragmented, and much of steppe politics during that period consisted of the jockeying of various tribes for Chinese favor. Early in the Jurchen Chin dynasty in northern China the Kereit and the Mongols (who before Chinggis had been only one of many tribal groups) had briefly been in the good graces of Chin, but a few decades before Chinggis’ birth this changed, and the Tatar (bitter enemies of Chinggis’ Mongols, but also Mongols in the broad sense of the term) had became the new Chin border guards. Still later this changed again, and his late twenties Temujin (not yet Chinggis Qan) was in the Chinese service, at least briefly, and was given the title of “ja’ut quri” for defeating a group of Tatar.

But this time, divide and conquer didn’t work for the Chinese. Within ten years Temujin united the steppe under Mongol auspices, and he even used the Chinese own strategy against them, playing off the Jurchen Chin, the Hsi-hsia in northwestern China, and the Southern Sung against one another until he had destroyed them all.
 

Sketch History of Inner Asia and the Nomads

The story of the bimillenial confrontation between Inner Asia and the civilized world can be thought of as one single story, but that story is unwieldy one.  The nomads and the oasis cities of Turkestan are the main players, and their relations with China, the Middle East and Northern India, and Europe are the three main parts of the story. Over two millenia the Inner Asian peoples  developed the ability to rule sedentary areas directly (as opposed to simply raiding and/or extorting tribute), and they also gradually united Inner Asia from East to West into a single unit, thus forming an unstoppable military machine and  ultimately making the transcontinental land trade easier than it ever had been before.

The oasis cities were there before the nomads: Turkestan was urban and agricultural as early as 2000 B.C. Their culture was Iranian and pre-Zoroastrian or proto-Zoroastrian. The first written records of the area describe Alexander’s partial conquest of the area in 329 BC  and a Chinese expedition to the area around 140 BC. These two forays brought the Silk Road into being, and the silk trade became a key economic and political factor both for Rome and for China – even though there was never any direct contact between these two empires, which remained woefully misinformed about one another. These cities also played a major role in world culture: the greatest philosopher of Chinese Buddhism, Fa Tsang, was of Central Asian origin, as was Avicenna (among the greatest of  Muslim philosophers) several centuries later. After many centuries of religious pluralism, during which it was one of the most important centers of world Buddhism, this area came under Muslim domination in the ninth century, and is now almost entirely Muslim.

The early history of the steppe and of  the rise of horse husbandry and horsemanship is still somewhat obscure, but the large cavalry armies which are the focus of this discussion only appeared around 700 B.C. The nomad armies’ first raids came from areas north of the Black Sea, and McNeill thinks that these military forces formed as a result of contacts between the Assyrians and their equestrian northern neighbors, who took lessons learned from Assyrian mercenary service back to the steppe and formed independent armies there. It was only several hundred years later, around 300 B.C., that the nomads showed up to the east of China. From this time on, the whole steppe was controlled by the nomad peoples, though it would be a long time before these peoples were united.

Cimmerian and Scythian cavalry raided Persia and Greece intermittently for centuries, and the Scythians settled north of the Black Sea and played a significant role in the Greek world. The Scythians, going against the nomad stereotype, actually became grain exporters (though they still maintained their equestrian military tradition) and were frequently under pressure from similar peoples from further east. Meanwhile in China, starting in about 300 B.C., the nomadic Hsiung-nu (of unknown ethnicity and language) were a threat to the Chinese for five centuries. As with the Scythians and Greece, the Hsiung-nu’s relationship with the Chinese was symbiotic, with the Hsiung-nu often receiving tribute in exchange for peace. (When China collapsed  into civil war at the end of the Han dynasty, the Hsiung Nu polity was weakened too, since there was no more tribute to be received -- the Hsiung-nu made no move to conquer China, which would have been useless to them in its impoverished and depopulated state. By and large, political organization on the steppe was almost entirely for military purposes -- usually for the purpose of attacking and exploiting the civilized world. If there was nothing to exploit, the steppe confederations disintegrated).

At the center of the East-West line north of Persia and India, the Saka (related to Scythians) and then a confederation called the Yueh-chih occupied areas of Northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, eventually forming the important Kushan state around 100 AD. Combining their own steppe culture with survivals of the Bactrian Greek culture left behind by Alexander and the Buddhism of northern India, the Kushan kingdom became a major center for east-west and north-south trade, and also a major Buddhist center from which Buddhism reached central Asia and China.  The Kushan were probably the first of the hybrid steppe / sedentary states which were to prove so important during  the next millennium –but we have very little solid information about the Kushans.

In 250 B.C. the Parthians, probably also a steppe people, had conquered Persia, displacing  the Seleucid Greeks and ruling until about 225 AD. The difficulties Romans had in penetrating the Middle East probably had a lot to do with the Persians’ (or Parthians’) successful use of cavalry warfare, and Parthia probably also might be called a hybrid steppe / sedentary regime.

In the Roman West the Huns appeared on the Roman borders around 300 AD, defeating the German Goths, who had come down from the Baltic area, and the Scythian-related Alans: some of the defeated Goths and Alans joined the Romans, and some joined the Huns. The Huns were probably, but not certainly Turkish, and their origin was somewhere to the east, but not as far as China.  Rome successfully fended off the Huns after a few early defeats, and the eventual fall of Rome to the Goths was mostly the result of Rome’s internal problems, rather than the result of a determined Gothic invasion.

Post-Roman Europe was dominated by Goths and other Germans, and the Alans played a role in Brittany and are thought to have played a role in the development of European cavalry warfare, chivalry, and even the Arthurian legends. The Huns really do not have the importance either in Roman or in steppe history that their fame leads one to think. However, the Hun-Goth alliance linked the Black Sea area to the Baltic north, and was a  precursor of the eventual “Ivory Road” from Greenland to China.

The first successful East-West connection was made by in the 6^th century A.D. by the Turks, who were in simultaneous contact with China and with Byzantium -- this was the first time that accurate factual information about China reached Europe (though there was really very little of it). The Turk’s empire did not last long, but they left behind them trade centers in Khazaria north of the Caucasus and in Bulgar on the middle Volga. By 1000 AD the Rus controlled the trade route from the Black Sea all the way to Greenland, and when they linked to the Khazars, the Bulgars, and the Silk Road Khwarizmians,  a trade route was created from the Far East all the way to North America. However, political and military control of this route was uncertain  and intermittent, since various peoples contested various stretches of it.

After about 900 AD, the developmental processes I’ve mention started coming to a climax in Mongolia (which, after about 200 BC, had always been the center of the steppe world). North and Northwest China came to be dominated by a number  hybrid states – partly Chinese, partly nomads, and partly non-Chinese agriculturalists. (From east to west these were the Jurchen Chin, the Tangut Hsi Hsia,  the Qitan Qaraqitai , and the Turkish Khwarizmians). Similar states ultimately of steppe origin also came to rule the sedentary peoples of Turkestan, Pakistan, Northern India, and the Middle East as far as Egypt. Militarily, these hybrid states combined the nomad mobility advantage with the sedentary advantage in logistics and fortifications, and the predominantly-sedentary nations, except for Byzantium (which deserves more credit for its survival than it usually gets), never really figured out how to defend themselves, and ended up succumbing repeatedly to the steppe peoples, either by conquest or by mercenary usurpation.

The form of dual administration developed by the Qitan Liao in northern China may have been one of the keys to the steppe triumph. The dominant branch of government controlled the steppe (and its peoples) and the military; the other branch controlled the cities and the sedentary areas. Five capitals distributed through the Liao territory made possible the surveillance of the whole state, while keeping the controlling military forces separated from the sedentary population. Variants of this form were used by the Jurchen Chin and by the Mongols. The Mongols' Khwarazmian adversaries, also a hybrid state (and very powerful at the time of the Mongol invasion, with possessions as far as the Arabian peninsula), seem to have been less successful in integrating their two realms, and the semi-autonomous cities, in particular, seemed to defect or rebel in times of crisis.

In the end, though, the most purely-nomadic nation won: the Mongols. When Chinggis Qan arrived at its gates, the Khwarizmian state centered in Khiva near the Aral sea was the most powerful state in the Middle East, with possessions as far as the Arabian peninsula, but the walled cities controlling the peasant populations were capable of declaring autonomy and deserting, whereas the Khwarizmian cavalry were no match for the Mongols, and Khwarizm simply fell apart.  And in this case the East-to-West ripple effect  often spoken of actually can be documented. The Qitan from the steppe conquered part of Northern China. They in turn were conquered by the Jurchen, a partly-steppe people from their north. Survivors of the Qitan fled West to found the Qaraqitai state near Issyk-qul in present-day Kyrgyzstan. When the Mongols unified Mongolia under their name, the defeated Naiman (also a Mongol people in the broad sense)  ultimately seized power in Qaraqitai and became influential in Khwarizm; and when Khwarizm was defeated, its defeated rabble retreated West and helped the Muslims conquer Jerusalem._[1]

In my opinion, the military success of the nomad Mongols was primarily the result of organizational changes wrought by Chinggis Qan (as described in the Secret History, Chs. 8-10). . While the civilized states did make many adjustments in response to the nomad threat, the nomads were learning too.

CONCLUSIONS

The long confrontation between Inner Asia and the civilized rimland is often thought of as a conflict between pastoral and agricultural peoples. It is that, but it is more illuminating to think of it as a conflict between two different forms of political and military organization. In the sedentary world, men were controlled by controlling land from castles. In the pastoral world, land was controlled by controlling men. Peasants could not flee because their only wealth was their land and the crop in the ground. Nomadic warriors were mobile by definition, and they remained loyal to a leader as long as they felt he would win. Once they came to believe that he would lose, they deserted as soon as they could. The large nomadic confederations were unbelievably volatile and could disintegrate overnight. (Chinggis Qan appears in the Secret History not as a hero, but as a wise, charismatic, fair, and persuasive leader of men). The enormous steppe confederations only  came into being for the purpose of warfare against the civilized world, and only existed as long as they were successful or seemed likely to become so.

Steppe society has been described as “nomad feudalism”. In many respects this is accurate, since the sworn bonds of the nokor to his lord were not too different from the villein’s bond to his. But there’s an enormous difference: on the steppe there were no fiefs -- and indeed, no real property at all, but only chattels.  And where feudal ideology emphasized sameness, stability, and normality, nomad ideology stressed events, change and initiatives. Feudal space was rooted, whereas nomad space was to be traversed. (Might it be argued that the long distance traders and raiders who were precursors of today’s world economy were more like nomads than they were like the lords of the manors?)

Comparing the Vikings to the Mongols isn’t really controversial, but a general theory could be proposed (and to a degree has been, by Lane and Steensgaard) that the Mongols can also be compared to the early modern European empires,  to their Venetian precursors, and to the Homeric and even the Athenian Greeks. All these trading peoples were able to succeed only through the military control of a trade zone, and all of them at one point or another practiced not only “negative protection” (from bandits and opportunistic local tax-collectors) but also “positive protection” (against competing traders) and even “forced trade” (which can be  the same as plunder, and which normally replaced by voluntary trade once military control of the area is established, since plundering is too destructive to be profitable in the long term.) According to Steensgaard, at least up until the sixteenth century the political “protection cost” of the Asian trade (taxes, tribute, military action) was always greater than the direct cost (manpower, supplies, ships, goods to exchange), and the Mongol Empire enormously reduced this protection cost, which showed up in Europe as enormous markups in price required to pay off all the intervening taxing jurisdictions.

The Mongol Empire was thus a precursor trade empire and blazed the way for  the modern world. When the Mongol collapse cut off access to China, the riches of China provided a powerful incentive for Europeans of many nations to start looking for a sea route. For better or worse, one thing led to another, and the globalizers of today, at least, owe an unacknowledged debt to Chinggis Qan.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliography of the steppe: http://www.johnjemerson.com/bigbib.htm

Who were the Mongols? http://www.johnjemerson.com/who.htm

Longer, more ambitious draft on these topics: http://www.johnjemerson.com/nomads.htm

Map image above from http://www.aos.wisc.edu/

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Adshead, S.A.M., Central Asia in World History, St. Martin’s, 1993.

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Barclay, Harold, The Role of the Horse in Man’s Culture, J.A. Allen, 1980.

Barfield, Thomas, The Perilous Frontier, Blackwell, 1989.

Black-Michaud, Jacob, Cohesive Force, Blackwell, 1975.

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Canfield, ed., Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, 1991.

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de Rachewiltz, Igor, The Secret History of the Mongols, Brill, 2004.

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Fletcher, Joseph F., Studies in Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, Variorum, 1995.

France, John, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, Cornell, 1999

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Khazanov, A. P., Nomads and the Outside World, Wisconsin, 1994.

Lane, Frederic, Venice and History, Johns Hopkins, 1968.

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Lindner, Rudi Paul, "What was a Nomadic Tribe?", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1982.

McNeill, William, Pursuit of Power, Chicago, 1982.

Ratchnevsky, Paul, Genghis Khan, Blackwell, 1991

Seaman, Gary, "World Systems and State Formation on the Inner Asian Periphery", in Seaman, ed., Rulers from The Steppes, pp.1-17.

Sinor, Denis, The Greed of the Northern Barbarian, in Aspects of Altaic Civilization II, ed. Clark, Bloomington, (Routledge reprint 1997), pp. 171-182.

Sinor, Denis, "The Inner Asian Warriors", in Studies in Medieval Inner Asia, Variorum, 1997, XIII.

Steensgaard,  Niels, “Violence and the Rise of Capitalism”, Review (of the Braudel Center), V:2, Fall 1981, pp. 247-73.

Steensgaard, Niels, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, 1973.

Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and the European States, Blackwell, 1990.

White, David Gordon, Myths of the Dog-man, Chicago, 1991.

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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