The peoples of the steppe who harassed and
invaded the civilized world for more than two millenia have normally been though
of as a blind force, and the nomad invasions are often described using metaphors
of suddenly-released potential energy: geothermal, electrostatic, thermodynamic
reservoirs producing volcanos, lightning, or storms. In other cases, the
metaphor is the black hole or the womb .
"Surrounded by this crust of civilization lie
the immense wastes of Central Asia , little known, and unpredictable in their
reactions – the magma, the molten core around which most of world history has
been built. When it comes to the surface, when it breaks the shell within which
the sedentary civilizations endeavor to contain it, man, horror-stricken, speaks
of catastrophe" (Sinor, p. 93).
"A succession of waves of Turkish invaders
coming from some inexhaustible reservoir of remote Asia" (Boodberg, p. 13).
"The inner Asian reservoir of tribal
invasions" (Lattimore, p. 247).
"An ever-present reservoir of natural
political and military talent". (Gellner, "Tribe and State in the Middle East"
p. 199).
"Bedouins are prior to sedentary people. The
desert is the basis and reservoir of civilization and cities." (Ibn Khaldun, p.
93).
"[Central Asia] appears as a sort of black
hole in the middle of the world.... it is darkly huge and hugely dark and sucks
the life space of outlying peoples and their civilizations into the black hole
in the center." (Andre Gunder Frank, pp. 1-2)1
"Central areas also find it difficult to
subjugate peripheral areas of savannah or mountain, which then harbour cohesive
participatory, segmentary communities, endowed with great material potential.
Thus they constitute a kind of political womb, a source of new rulers who from
time to time displace the old." (Gellner, "War and Violence" p. 160). Gellner thus follows Khaldun in taking the
steppe potential as a positive, structuring force: "For Ibn Khaldun, urban
life is a permanent necessity, and pastoral tribalism is the only source of
state-formation, the state being the gift of the tribe to the ever-present city.
(Gellner, in Khazanov, p. xxii).
In this theory, the nomads destroy the old
order and replace it with a new order, functioning rather like left-Hegelian
revolutionaries: "destruction is also a creative act." Evidence for this is
found in the many nomad dynasties founded in China, Central Asia, Northern
India, and the Middle East, and to a lesser
degree the Germanic and "Norman" states throughout Europe (which were not, however, founded by nomads). Besides replacing
decadent governments in the sedentary world, nomads and other barbarians also
gradually brought order to the "uncontrolled zone" of the northern frontier. By
1000 A.D., most of Western Europe was literate and civilized, and the "Norman"
Rus had created a trade route stretching from Greenland to China: by 1280 or so
the Mongols brought the interior of Eurasia under unified control for the first
time ever (except perhaps briefly under the Turks many centuries earlier).
Whereas trade from Southern China to
Baghdad had formerly had to pass through four intervening jurisdictions (Chin,
Hsi-hsia, Qaraqitai, Khwarizm, all of which were destroyed by the Mongols), now
there was only one (the weak Chagatai Khanate, which was theoretically allied to
both of its Mongol neighbors).2
The various civilized metaphors for the
steppe peoples I have listed (reservoir, black hole, etc.) all make it seem that
the steppe is tremendously populous, when in fact we know that it was and is
thinly populated – the sedentary peoples outnumbered the nomads by a factor of
thirty or more. The illusion of large numbers came from the high level of
military mobilization of the nomads and their mobility, which allowed them to
gather troops from a large area and then concentrate them suddenly at the
weakest point on the sedentary line of defense. A second factor leading to this
powerful effect (at least during Chinggis' career, and this may have been the
reason for Chinggis' success) was that in wartime the nomad armies were highly
disciplined under one man's command, with the result that their effect was
controlled and carefully targeted, rather than consisting of a hodgepodge of
random impulsive attacks (something which goes against our conception of the
"horde" -- a word adopted from the Mongol, and unrelated to the word "hoard" --
as a chaotic mass). It was the discipline of these armies which allowed them to
suddenly release all their enormous potential (like the bursting of a dam, or a
lightning strike) at a single point.3
Rather by coincidence
climatologically Mongolia is a permanent
high-pressure zone, and this metaphor can be added to the others: Mongolia as
military high-pressure zone. Herodotus and later authors often spoke of
chain-reactions, whereby the army defeated in distant Central Asia moved west to
defeat its nearest neighbor, who in turn fled West until Europe was finally
attacked. Documentation is poor for the earliest period, but during the
Chinggisid era we have the complete story. First the Qitai conquered Northern
China at the end of the T'ang; then the Jurchen conquered the Qitai, whose
refugees established the Qaraqitai state in Central Asia, eventually dominating
the Khwarizmian state; then Chinggis' Mongols defeated the Naiman Mongols in the
west, who took over the Qaraqitai state; then the Mongols defeated the Naiman
and Khwarizmians together; and finally the defeated Khwarizmians fled to the
Middle East, where they helped the Muslims conquer Jerusalem. In the thousand
years starting about 300 A.D., in fact, virtually the whole civilized world
(except for Byzantium, Japan, and Southeast Asia) was conquered by nomadic or
barbarian Arab, German, Hungarian, Turkish, or Mongol invaders.4
For 2000 years the steppe was an uncontrolled
zone. In the sedentary world men could be controlled by controlling land, and
that's what the castles were for. Peasants had no wealth except their land and
the crop on the ground, and could not flee. For this reason they could be
heavily taxed, and the more impoverished they were made by heavy taxation, the
harder it was for them to escape. (Nomads also may have been better fed than
peasants, simply because poor as they were, they were harder to tax -- on the
steppe there was almost no "surplus".) But on the thinly-populated steppe there
was no real property at all, but only movables: herds, flocks, wagons, and
yurts. There was no real land ownership -- land belonged to whomever had the
manpower, the horses, and the military prowess to take it. On the steppe castles
were useless (since warfare was cavalry warfare and food stocks were sheep on
the hoof), and land was controlled by controlling men. As a result, steppe wars
were fought between fluid coalitions, riddled with desertion and fission, which
swiftly gathered and equally swiftly dissolved, and many of the practices of
Mongol warfare were intended to keep weakly-committed partners from deserting.
Chinggis Qan in the Secret History is not a great hero, but a shrewd,
charismatic, persuasive leader who draws men into his service, and the key
points in his rise to power come when members of the enemy camp switch to his
side, often bringing crucial strategic information with them.
Since there was little surplus on the steppe,
sedentary wars against the steppe were money-losers and had to be financed from
taxes on the peasants. Since the sedentary world was much wealthier than the
steppe world, these wars were possible. However, the steppe was extremely
inhospitable to armies from the civilized world, since almost all supplies had
to be carried in on wagon trains which were vulnerable to attack, and since the
steppe cavalry's speed of concentration in attack was matched by their speed of
dispersion in retreat, meaning that the invading armies would not have a single
target to conquer, but would have to sweep the entire area one sector at a time.
The most common response was to hire steppe
mercenaries to protect the civilized world. This was expensive, but less
expensive than trying to invade the steppe, and much less expensive than
submission to repeated raids from the steppe. The danger was in letting the
nomads get their foot in the door, and usurpation of power by Turkish and Norman
military specialists was at least as important as conquest during the barbarian
takeover of civilization that occurred between 300 A.D. and 1300 A.D.
Furthermore, as time went on hybrid civilizations
developed, which combined the military strengths of the steppe with the logistic
advantages of the sedentary world. The Qitan Liao dynasty controlled a rather
small area of China proper together with large areas of non-Chinese sedentary
land and large areas of steppe.5
As a result they were able to wage sustained campaigns which the traditional
steppe raiders could not. By the time of Chinggis Qan, these hybrid dynasties
(as listed above) stretched from the Yellow River to Baghdad. Each of them had a
peculiar and unstable dual structure, with the local agricultural areas
controlled partly from walled cities which always were capable of declaring
their autonomy or switching to a new overlord, and and partly by cavalry armies
sweeping the open spaces.6
By and large the hybrid states had an advantage
over the pure sedentary state,
which often bought horses from the steppe not only in the futile attempt to
defend themselves from the peoples selling them horses, but especially in order
to use cavalry against their purely sedentary enemies in the other direction.
Combined with the hiring of mercenaries, this led to a dispersion of steppe
peoples into the civilized world, leaving a vacuum on the steppe to filled by
new peoples which would become the new barbarian threat.
Ultimately, however, it was the Mongols, the
purest of the nomads, rather than the hybrid nations who triumphed. Why? One
reason, I think, is that as the sedentary world adapted its military practices
to the imperatives of cavalry warfare, the steppe peoples (notably under
Chinggis Qan himself, as described in books 8-10 of the Secret History)
were adapting their practices too -- in other words, there was a learning curve
on both sides of the line. Cavalry warfare had an intrinsic advantage which was
not nullified until well into the modern age, and this advantage always
benefited the steppe peoples. Second, there was always a tendency of the
sedentary world to underestimate the steppe. There was always a temptation,
during times of peace bought by tribute, to conclude that the tribute wasn't
really necessary, and during times of fiscal stress defense and tribute would
often be neglected. Furthermore, the Jurchen Chin of Northern China, a martial
people of non-Chinese origin who, not realizing that they were doomed,
maintained an aggressive policy simultaneously against the Mongols and the Sung
dynasty of South China far longer than they should have. (The "divide and
conquer" strategy used for centuries against the steppe peoples by the Chinese,
was successfully used by the Mongols against their sedentary Chin, the Hsi-Hsia,
and the Sung adversaries.7
Boodberg, Peter A., Selected
Works of Peter A. Boodberg, California, 1979: Turk, Aryan, and Chinese in
Central Asia", pp. 1-21.
France, John, Western Warfare in the Age
of the Crusades, Cornell, 1999.
Frank, Andre Gunder, VU Press, The
Centrality of Central Asia,
1992.
Gellner, Ernest, Anthropology and
Politics, Blackwell, 1995.
Ibn Khaldun, tr. Rosenthal, The
Muqaddimah, Bollingen / Princeton, 1967.
Khazanov, Anatoly, Nomads and the
Outside World, Wisconsin. 1994.
Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers
of China,
1962, Beacon: pp, 238
-251, "The 'Reservoir' and the Marginal
Zone".
Lewis
Ratchnevsky, Paul, Genghis Khan,
Blackwell, 1991.
Sinor, Denis, Inner Asia and its Contacts with Medieval Europe, Ashgate/ Variorum, 1977, I: "Central
Eurasia".
Steensgaard, Niels, “Violence
and the Rise of Capitalism”, Review (of Braudel Center), V:2, Fall 1981, pp. 247-73.
Sun Tzu,
tr. Lionel Giles, CMC / Ch’eng Wen reprint, 1978.
1
Boodberg's electric comparison is applied to China rather than Central Asia: " [T]he
Western world.... knew China only, so to speak, at her anodic and cathodic
electrodes. It was more conscious of a might current of energy emanating from a
vast electrolyte at two given points than of the spacious body lying between."
(p. 2). The two poles are seemingly the Chinese terminus of the overland Silk
Road, and the Chinese port-city terminus of the southern sea routes. These are
not polar to each other, but both seem to be cathodes discharging energy toward
Europe. Seemingly this metaphor could be adapted to make China and Central Asia
together into a single powerful electric battery.
2
I should at least note in a footnote that the pre-Alexandrian Greeks were much
more like the Vikings than they were like any of the civilized empires of
history. As Lane has noted, forced trade is just the limit case of trade, since
long-distance trade always requires a degree of violence for protection
purposes.
3
In the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, the metaphor of the sudden
release of potential energy is also used: "The onset of troops is like the rush
of a torrent, which will even roll stones along in its course." (p. 37, V:12)
The commander's control is also compared to the trigger of a crossbow, which
allows a tiny movement of the finger to release the enormous power stored in the
bent bow (p. 38, V:15) Still another comparison is made to "a round stone rolled
down a mountain thousands of feet in height". (p. 41, V:23). The later Mongols
did not pay any attention to the military writings of the defeated Chinese, and
there is no reason to believe that Chinggis Qan learned anything from Sun Tzu,
though it is possible that he was in the Chin Chinese service for a time during
his twenties: Ratchevsky, pp. 49-50.
4The Germans, of course, were not nomads, nor
were the Jurchens – though both were closely allied with nomads during critical
periods. In general the barbarians of Western Europe and Manchuria were
considerably different from the barbarians of Central Asia, and ultimately these
two areas were civilized relatively easily.
5
While steppe land is less productive than sedentary land, agriculture is not
impossible on the steppe, and the Scythians, notably, were grain exporters.
Grain production on the steppe is less common than it might be, partly because
of the same military imperatives I’ve been discussing, to which steppe
agriculturalists are vulnerable (especially during the common periods of steppe
disunity) just as those of the sedentary world are. Second, many steppe peoples
were political and military specialists, and didn’t grow grain simply for
reasons of comparative advantage: it was more economical to get it from the
sedentary world by some combination of trade and extortion.
6
The Khwarizmian Empire and the Chinese Jurchen Chin dynasty, both hybrid states,
appear in Mongol history as pitiful victims, but the Jurchen had often been
successful against the Sung, and the Khwarizmian Shah Muhammed had been steadily
expanding his empire in the decades before the Mongols destroyed him, ultimately
gaining a foothold on the Arabian peninsula. It is notable, however, that many
of his conquests involve gaining the nominal adherence of walled cities who
retained their own leadership and retained a capacity for independent action.
Walled cities and castles make the control of peasants possible, but unless
carefully controlled from the center, they tend to be a force toward
fragmentation, as in feudal Europe.
7
A demographic cycle has been seen in China’s dynastic history, whereby the
austere dynastic founders are succeeded by increasingly larger numbers of idle
and parasitical descendants, whose demands put great pressure on the state
treasury. Quite possibly a similar dynamic held on the steppe too, as a founding
Qan’s successors would have increasing trouble keeping all claimants for shares
in the tribute happy. Combining this with the temptation toward complacency and
the intermittent fiscal crises, it can be seen that the steppe frontier was
intrinsically unstable.