WHO WERE THE NOMADS?

The nomads are best defined functionally, ecologically, politically,  and geographically, rather than ethnically.[ii] They were steppe pastoralists  who, when unified in large politico-military coalitions, were able to extract wealth from the civilized world by various combinations of extortion, raiding, mercenary service, and conquest. (Getting what they needed and wanted by peaceful trade was not really an option, since little of what was produced on the steppe was of much interest to the civilized world).  At times they were capable of overcoming existing civilized dynasties and replacing them with their own steppe-based dynasties – though infiltration and usurpation by steppe mercenaries was more common than direct conquest.  The new dynasties usually developed into civilized dynasties in the course of a few generations, but without entirely losing their steppe character, and they are best called hybrid dynasties. [iii]

The idea that pastoralism is a semi-primitive stage intermediate between hunting-and-gathering and agriculture was refuted decades ago, but it still hangs on in the scholarly subconscious. The origins of agriculture are clearly earlier than those of pastoralism, and wherever it has been found, pastoralism has been in a symbiotic relationship with agriculture.[iv] Most supposedly pastoral societies practiced some agriculture, and the Scythians  were even major grain exporters. (While it is true that pastoralism is normally practiced in drier areas where agriculture is difficult or impossible, extensive areas are suitable for either use, especially if irrigated.[v]) Pastoralists who practiced no agriculture at all probably did so either because there was a comparative advantage to be found in extorting goods from the civilized world, or because in a state of continual warfare crops in the ground were too hard to defend.  It seems most likely  that the first societies which could be called pastoral appeared when the pastoralist part of a mixed economy split off from the sedentary part, and it is equally likely that this split took place when the pastoralists started taking advantage of their mobility to plunder the agriculturalists.  Or to put it differently,  “pastoralism” was militarily defined at its very origin.[vi]

 The way of life developed by the steppe barbarians, although non-urban and mostly illiterate, was well-suited to an area where civilized life could not flourish, and in their dealings with the civilized states the nomads proved to be politically sophisticated.  The yurt and the compound bow were engineering marvels; their horses gave these peoples a mastery of the continental spaces which could not be matched by civilized peoples; and the steppe forms of military organization, tactics, and strategy (as perfected by Chinggis Qan) surpassed those of any civilized nation. 

Barbarism is dependent on civilization and pastoralism is dependent on agriculture, and by and large the nomads have always been joined to civilization as the abusive mate in a rather unhappy couple. It does not make sense to define them as Other. The fact that there is no love lost between the two groups and that their repeated contacts tend to be violent and hostile does not mean that we are talking about two different societies; what we are  talking about is a single society with a high degree of built-in structural violence.  The  nomads were military peoples who, though geographically on the borders of the civilized world,  were part of that world: not primitives, but specialists.

PEOPLES SPECIALIZED FOR WAR

For the nomads, violence was normal. War was their only activity requiring large-scale political organization, and success in warfare was almost the only  way for a man to achieve high status.  Peace was essentially unknown; during periods of disunity when war against the civilized world was not being waged, small-scale local skirmishing and raiding took its place. The way of life of the nomads was a consequence of pastoralism and military organization. The Chinese stereotype definition of the steppe barbarians -- "People with no fixed residence who follow the water and grass with their flocks, people bent on war and plunder who spend their lives on horseback, people who know their mothers but not their fathers, and who often kill their fathers and brothers" is actually fairly accurate.[vii]

War was virtually cost-free for the nomads.  Mortality from large-scale wars was not necessarily greater than that from the constant raiding.  Mongols were regarded as adults at fifteen, so manpower losses were recouped very quickly .  Battle deaths did not reduce human fertility at all, since widows immediately remarried. And since the nomads had no fixed “real property”, war did not reduce their productive capacity. Different people just grazed the same sheep on the same unimproved land.

Mongol clans were very weak and were always splitting. Brother-against-brother and couson-against-cousin battles were more the rule than the exception, and father-against-son battles were not rare.  Whatever political order there was on the steppe was transient, consisting almost entirely of the personal allegiance of individuals and groups to a war chief to whom they usually had only the slightest kinship relationship – and this allegiance could evaporate in a single afternoon. Unlike the rulers of sedentary states who controlled walled cities, treasure houses, granaries, formal bureaucracies, professional armies, fortresses, and large numbers of peasants tied to the land, steppe leaders really had nothing concrete to pass down to their heirs. A qan's sons, nephews, brothers, and uncles all could bid on his position if they wanted to, and they did this by recruiting followers and fighting against all the other contenders until only one was left alive. This "bloody tanistry” was actually the steppe’s dominant political institution.  In effect, steppe political groups had to be recreated almost from nothing at every succession.[viii]

When a qan or other contender for power killed one of his rivals, functionally a number of good things happened. First, the rival was gone, and the victor had gained a reputation for power. (Sometimes the idea is expressed that the victorious contestant magically gains the powers of his defeated and murdered rival, and he often married his victim’s wives or daughters.) Second, the rival's enemies became friends. Third, the rival's dependents and inferiors were left without their leader. Negatively, certain relatives of the murdered rival were obligated to take revenge at whatever cost, but usually they lost most of their supporters since the their enemy’s victory had shown that heaven had rejected them. And since the primary function of steppe leaders was to fight wars, a practice war was the best way to select a good leader.  Of all peoples, the this-worldly Mongols most worshipped God of success, or the God of war; for them, victory in battle was a proof of righteousness. ("Trial by battle" in early medieval Europe was a vestige of this).

A final functional benefit of the killing of rivals -- this one a social benefit -- is simply that it put an end to disputes. In an ideal case when two equally-qualified leaders are contesting power and neither one is willing to yield, from the point of view of the average subject the only important thing was really that one or the other, regardless of which, should win quickly and and the struggle should end – a goal which could be attained by the death of either contender. During periods of disunity nomads risked their lives stealing each other’s horses (rather like the old joke about poor families ekeing out a living by taking in each other’s laundry); once unified, they took the same risks to gain a share of the enormous wealth of the civilized world.

The evidence in the Secret History itself is sketchy, but his Mongol successors believed that while he  prayed on Burqan Qaldun,  Chinggis Qan had been charged by Heaven to conquer the whole world, and that anyone who resisted the Mongols was thus defying Heaven.[ix]. This belief was self-justifying as long as the Mongols continued to win all their battles, and was reinforced by Mongol’s deviant version of the universal principle of “retribution”.[x]  Whereas most societies believe that a killer incurs guilt which must be expiated, the Mongols believed that a killer’s victims are doomed to be his slaves in the afterlife. This might be explained simply as an extreme case of the common human belief that only one’s own people needs to be treated according to any ethical principles, with the remainder of the human race being regarded as of no worth.  However, this principle was also in effect within the Mongol world itself during contests for leadership. Chinggis Qan killed every Mongol who represented an actual or potential  threat to his rule, including many of his kin and most of his allies. (In the words of Hambis, “Chinggis Qan was not someone who shared”).[xi]  The Mongol world was organized by and for violence, and their beliefs about the afterlife and the spiritual world reflected that reality.

On the steppe, periods of unity and strength alternated with periods of division and weakness.[xii]  Unity gained through murder could be maintained only by largesse; the qan kept the loyalty of his followers only by supplying them with gifts, which mostly came from the civilized world, either as plunder or as tribute.  By distributing this booty a Qan kept the loyalty of his followers and kept himself in power; if the flow dried up, or if the civilized leaders cagily started offering gifts to a rival leader, a qan’s power could disappear quickly. His ulus would disintegrate and its component sub-groups would go off on their own or reaffiliate with some other qan.

The Bedouin saying “Raids are our agriculture” was equally true of the Mongols[xiii].  The unified steppe was of necessity a threat to civilization, since war was the only real reason for unity and since the gifts required to maintain unity could be acquired only as plunder or as tribute (which was effectively payment for protection). The steppe economy was a war economy designed to plunder the civilized world.  The herds of horses and sheep, rather than being the Mongol’s primary product, might be thought of as their “physical plant” or overhead.  A steppe people at peace is like a factory standing idle.

The Secret History is not the epic tale of a hero and his acts of prowess.[xiv]Instead, over and over again we see the eventual Chinggis Qan (a bold, shrewd leader, seemingly favored by the spirits and notable for fairness and generosity) receiving voluntary support  from key individuals at critical moments.. The nomad qan was a leader of men, not a ruler of territory: a leader with enough good men (his ulus) could take the territory he needed (his nutuq), whereas without followers a qan could do nothing.[xv] Nomad wars were fast-moving and always offensive, rather than defensive, and fortifications were useless on the steppe. Even if a nomad group were able to store enough food to keep itself alive during a siege, they could hardly build a fort large enough to keep their horses and livestock alive, and without their horses they would be doomed in steppe warfare. (In the two cases when defensive works are mentioned in the Secret History, they are built by defeated tribes who know that they will all be killed in the end, but who want to kill as many of the enemy as possible first.)[xvi]

Despite their inferiority in population and wealth, the nomads had a number of military advantages over the civilized states. Since their flocks and their families were mobile, the nomads (unlike the sedentary rulers who had to protect tax-producing cropland) did not have to protect any specific homeland.[xvii] Because pastoralism is not labor-intensive, the nomads could achieve extraordinary levels of mobilization: in wartime, all able-bodied males older than fifteen were in the army.  The nomad’s biggest advantage, however, was mobility. The nomad horses were not especially fast. The primary nomad advantage lay in the fact that the entire force was mounted; thus, the nomads did not have to coordinate their movements with slower infantry forces or with baggage trains.

Nomad forces were dispersed except during an attack; after an attack, they dispersed again, though they were still capable of regrouping and destroying their pursuers.   Because they approached in a spread formation, the defenders could not be sure exactly where the attack would be directed (and in response to defensive movements, the nomad army’s target could be changed upon along the way.)  Nomad armies were controlled by a central command which had the advantage of a well-organized scouting system and which could use complex signaling systems to execute difficult maneuvers (e.g. feigned retreats) quickly  in response to observed weaknesses in the enemy’s defenses.  Campaigns were always carefully planned on the basis of diligent, scouting of the enemy forces and the terrain, and nomad armies could closely coordinate independent, widely-spread  columns at the distance of several hundred miles. These armies furthermore had the ability to sleep in the saddle and travel day and night for as long as forty-eight hours. All put together,  nomad commanders had much better information to work with than their sedentary enemies, were strategizing a much larger playing field than their sedentary enemies, and could be at the right place at the right time more reliably than their sedentary enemies. A sedentary defender who had command of a radius of, for example, fifty miles might be faced with a nomad leader who commanded a radius of a hundred miles. The nomad attacker would have full knowledge of the defender’s activities, whereas much of the attacker’s field of operation would be outside the defender’s scope.[xviii]

A nomad advantage peculiar to Chinggis Qan’s Mongols was an extraordinary degree of centralization and rationalization which contrasted with the confederations of semi-autonomous tribal groups which had comprised most of the earlier steppe forces. During his lifetime, the whole Mongol force was entirely subordinated to his will, allowing him to plan his continental campaign strategically, focussing the bulk of his force on one enemy at a time while keeping the others occupied with smaller forces. The argument can be made that when mobilized for war, Chinggis Qan’s ulus, governed as it was by the calculation of ends and means and centralized under a strict chain of command, was the most rationalized human grouping of its size that the world had seen up until that time.[xix]

The civilized world could defend itself against the nomads  only by developing forces of comparable mobility, and to a greater or lesser degree they all did so (mostly with the use of nomad mercenaries).  But before 1300 (or even later), the forces of civilization were never good enough to completely neutralize the nomads’ aggressive potential. Only with the advent of mechanized warfare (and gunpowder) was that goal finally attained.[xx]

THE UNIFICATION OF EURASIA

By 1280 or so it was possible to travel from Paris, Constantinople or Baghdad to China and back. All of Eurasia and much of Africa had been united into two overlapping zones of communication and trade. Muslims and Christians could travel anywhere in the Mongol world, and from there could travel to Southeast Asia and India.  Muslims could not travel in the Christian world (which stretched to Greenland), but could travel freely throughout the Indian Ocean, most of north and east Africa, and part of central Africa (Timbuktu) – areas which were mostly denied to Christians

It had not always been so. From the surviving Latin and Greek written writings, it can be seen that the West before Marco Polo knew almost nothing about China. A mere 80 pages or so all told,  these records consist of little more than literary cliches, legends, and rumors of noble savages, with a few scattered facts thrown in here and there.  Many reports confuse the Chinese with intervening peoples, and it was only discovered in the sixth century that silk is not a vegetable product.  In the seventh century Theophylactus recorded the first verifiable direct report from China, which was based on information brought by a Turkish ambassador to the Byzantines; but succeeding reports reverted to rumor and myth, and even the idea that silk was gathered from a plant soon reappeared.[xxi]

It is often assumed that this was because of the vast distances involved, but this explanation does not hold.  From Paris to Beijing is only about 5000 miles. By 1000 A.D. navigation of the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Black Sea  was routine, and the Caspian could be reached by land.  In the South, by 700 A.D. or earlier travel on the sea routes from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to India and China was also routine– though as a rule these routes were barred to Europeans.  (It is also sometimes assumed that the land route was not used simply because it was inefficient, but once the Mongols pacified the steppe, the land trade flourished, and in fact the caravan trade remained viable for centuries after the collapse of the Mongols).[xxii]

The problem was human.  Before the Mongols and Marco Polo, a succession of various enemies blocked European land access to China. In the Middle East it was first the Persians, and later other Muslim rulers.  On the steppe, it could be either  the pervasive disorder, or else the dominant barbarian group at any given period.  The intervening peoples were determined to monopolize long-distance trade (especially in silk); an equally-important motive was their need to prevent coordinated military attacks from the East and the West. Europeans were not able to reach China because they were prevented from doing so.[xxiii]

The unification of Eurasia came from the steppe, and not from the civilized world. Darius, Alexander, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Arabs of early Islam never succeeded in occupying any significant part of the steppe for long. A very quick sketch of the political history of the steppe, focussing mostly on the eastern end of Eurasia and leaving out many peoples who, for one reason or another, are not important to the story, can show how this unification ultimately became possible.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STEPPE

The earliest steppe barbarians (the Scythians. Hsiung-nu, and Huns) lived on the boundaries of civilization and exploited the civilized world by a combination of raiding, tribute-taking, and mercenary service (which usually meant the hiring of one group of barbarians to fight a different group).[xxiv] They controlled sedentary -- but not necessarily civilized --  areas of considerable size, and their economies were mixed.  By and large, they did not try to conquer the civilized lands to the south and  did not occupy civilized territory. Instead they alternated raiding and peace while extorting tribute. These peoples profited from trans-continental trade (e.g. the silk trade),  but do not seem to have considered  the development and control of this trade as centrally important.

The Hsiung-nu empire and the Han dynasty collapsed more or less simultaneously in the second half of the second century A.D.  Large political units on the steppe are dependent on the existence of the prosperous sedentary societies they exploit  After China had been devastated by the post-Han civil wars, there was no longer enough plunder or tribute available for the steppe Qans to distribute, and without this incentive the steppe confederations simply disintegrated.  (Ts’ao Ts’ao’s Wei state was a mere fragment of Han, but Ts’ao was easily able to defeat and co-opt the remaining Hsiung-nu and Hsien-pei).[xxv]

During the Eastern Chin (265–317 A.D.) a succession of indigenous and steppe-barbarian dynasties ruled parts of North China for brief periods, but  the Toba of the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534 A.D.) were the first steppe people to govern large areas of China for any coinsiderable period. (The foreign dynasties have not been honored by Chinese historians, and unfortunately this dynasty has not been studied as much as it deserves). Under the Northern Wei, Buddhism was established and the Silk Road trade with Central Asia and beyond was revived, but although during the early part of their reign the Toba controlled Western China, they did not extend their power into the Western Regions (Xinjiang).[xxvi]

Just as the Hsiung-nu empire came into existence only after Ch’in had unified China, it was only after the unification of north and south China by the Sui and T’ang dynasties (both of which had which had steppe antecedents)[xxvii] that the Turk steppe empire came into being. The Turks did not occupy Chinese territory and were ultimately stalemated by the Chinese, but they sent an embassy to Constantinople and thus were the first barbarian people to be simultaneously in contact with the Mediterranean and with China. The Turk empire did not stay unified for long, but the idea of a steppe empire dominating the whole Silk Road, though it was only fully realized half a millenium later by the Mongols, was born and briefly attained with them..[xxviii]

For well over a thousand years (200 B.C. – 970 A.D.), the Chinese defended themselves quite successfully against the steppe peoples.. But for the next five centuries,  much or all of Northern China was under the control of hybrid regimes ruled by dynasties of steppe origin. In 907 A.D. the Khitans (a steppe people, and probably Mongols) occupied an area in the north, calling themselves the Liao dynasty. In 982 A.D.  the Tangut, a people of mixed origins, occupied the Ordos and the Kansu Corridor in Northwest China, thus controlling the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. In 1115 A.D. the Jurchen, a Manchurian forest/steppe people related to the later Manchus, overthrew the Khitans and expanded further to the south. With the fall of the Liao dynasty, some of the defeated Khitans fled west to the area of the  present Kirgiz Republic, establishing the hybrid Qara-Qitai empire there. Further west, from Khwarizm as far as Egypt, Turkified dynasties ruled the steppe and much of the Middle East.  Most of these groups can ultimately be traced back to Mongolia – a military and political high-pressure zone.[xxix]

A 1500-year progression can be sketched. Before about 200 B.C. the steppe peoples were not a major factor for the Chinese.  Between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. the Hsiung-nu united the eastern steppe and challenged the Chinese Empire, gaining plunder and tribute but never occupying or ruling Chinese territory. After almost two centuries of disunity both on the steppe and in China, in 386  the Toba Wei in northern China founded the first significant barbarian-Chinese hybrid state. While this state did not reach as far to the west as the Han dynasty had, it maintained trade and cultural contacts with the Buddhist dynasties of Central Asia and beyond. Then, after another period of disunity, the T’ang dynasty ( founded in 608 with some Turkish help) further developed these contacts.  During the T’ang  the Turkish Empire flourished on the steppe, and through Turkish intermediaries news from China reached the West (Byzantium) for the first time. Finally, starting about 900 A.D., the whole way from North China to Central Asia came under the control of local barbarian / civilized dynasties of roughly the Toba type.

By 1200 A.D. when the Mongols came on the scene, there was already a long tradition of hybrid barbarian/civilized rule in the north of China. The Silk Road was well over a thousand years old, and the Turks had already (many centuries earlier) reached the West and had conceived of the idea of trading directly with the West. So while the hybrid Mongol Empire as a whole was unprecedented, its way had been prepared by many barbarian precursors.

In the final showdown it was the still-barbarian Mongols who defeated the hybrid Chin, Hsi-Hsia, and Qaraqitai states (and to the West, Khwarizmia and the Caliphate, both of which had become heavily Turkified by processes of infiltration and mercenary usurpation).[xxx]  The same mastery of space and time which gave the nomads an immediate military advantage also made it possible for them to visualize Eurasia, for the first time, as a whole. Before the Mongol conquests, except briefly at the height of the Turkish empire, it had been essentially impossible to send an intelligible message from one end of the steppe to another. But twice during the Mongol period, the death of a great Qan was announced in the West.  Their recipients, at the borders of Hungary and Egypt respectively, returned to Mongolia to participate in the selection of the new Qan[xxxi]. These announcements were not just messages, but commands, and the commands were obeyed.  Eurasia had become a unity.

THE MONGOLS AS PROTECTION ENTREPRENEURS

The Mongol Empire can be thought of as a precursor of the global European trade empires which came to dominate the world after  the sixteenth century. The Mongol role in history can be understood better with the help of concepts drawn from the study of these empires (as well as the earlier Venetian republic).

One of the chief functions of government is protection from banditry and the like.  According to Steensgaard, before the rise of the great European empires and trading companies, protection costs were probably the biggest single cost for the long distance trade between Asia and Europe: “[P]rotection costs in the form of customs on the routes investigated here in all probability exceeded the true transportation costs”. Following Frederick Lane, Steensgaard treats protection as a commodity -- as one of the costs of doing business, with suppliers competing to offer the best price, and he explains the outcome of the competition in the Asian trade between the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English in part by the different ways the different players handled the protection cost.

In his own writings Lane made a distinction between “negative” and “positive” protection. Negative protection is what we think it is: the protection of trade against bandits and extortionists.  But “positive protection” is something quite different: it includes both the protection of a monopoly by the plundering of competitors, and the coercion of unwilling trading partners (as in the Opium Wars, for example). In this formulation, negative and positive protection are symmetrical opposites: negative protection is protection from bandits, whereas positive protection is basically banditry.  This description fits the historical record very well: before the modern age, almost all  of the traditional trading peoples engaged in piracy and forced trade whenever it seemed useful, and often enough caravaneers and bandits (or pirates and sea traders) were the same people at different stages of their careers.

Charles Tilly has pushed the analysis a step further.  He described the states of early modern Europe with regard to the accumulation and concentration, respectively , of “capital” and “coercion” (roughly, wealth and military power – or “protection”.)  Modern states rank high in the accumulation and also in the concentration of both capital and coercion, whereas impoverished, stateless “primitive” societies rank low in every respect.  In between there are many different variations.  Examples including Czarist Russia (low in accumulation and concentration of wealth, high in concentration of power),  the Dutch Republic (high in the accumulation and concentration of wealth, but with little power), the city-states of Northern Italy (lots of wealth and power, but with little concentration), and so on.

The Mongol state after its unification by Chinggis Qan in 1206 fits most peculiarly into the analyses of Lane and Tilly. From Lane’s point of view, at the beginning the Mongols were simply specialists in “bad” positive protection, or plunderers, but within six or eight decades they had become the most successful suppliers of negative protection (“good” protection) in Eurasian history.  In terms of Lane’s definition of protection as a commodity, the Mongols were simply protection entrepreneurs. The Mongols’ brutal initial attacks can be seen as a salesman’s demonstration of the deficiencies of the competitor’s product, and the Mongol empire which ultimately came into being was the superior, newly-installed product.

On Tilly’s grid the Mongols of 1206 were located at the extreme upper right hand: an extraordinarily powerful and centralized military supported by scarcely any economy at all. . (While the Mongols obviously did have an economy, it was a subsistence economy which produced almost no tradable or storable wealth.) Of the states analyzed by Tilly, Czarist Russia was closest to the Mongols, but the Mongol accumulation and concentration of wealth was far inferior to that of Russia, whereas the Mongol concentration of  coercion (or centralization of military power) was probably greater than that of any state before the French Revolution.[xxxii]

The newly-united Mongols of 1206 were a very peculiar entity indeed. A fully-rationalized military machine, worshippers of a universalistic god of war for whom killing was unproblematic, they represented pure coercion looking for capital. Illiterates at the farthest possible distance from all the urban centers, they would unite Eurasia. Rather than a true society, the Mongols in 1206 were a specialized and highly concentrated coercion function looking for concentrated capital to exploit and control. Powerful as it was, Chinggis Qan’s horde was very fragile. If it had failed to conquer a significant part of the civilized world, it would have disintegrated and  disappeared.[xxxiii] 

CONCLUSION

The Mongol Empire was unique, unprecedented, and destined never to be repeated. At the same time, it was the culmination of a long development. Between about 200 A.D. and 1300 A.D. the whole civilized world was conquered by barbarians – Germans, Hungarians, Turks, and Mongols. (After the Fourth Crusade, even Byzantium, while not quite extinguished,  was under Frankish rule.)  During that interval the Arab barbarian conquerors triumphed, became civilized, and were themselves subjugated in turn as time went on, civilization restablished itself and the barbarians disappeared as a force, but the new civilizations had been transformed by their experience.[xxxiv]

The Mongol mastery of space meant that a large part of Eurasia which had earlier been chopped up into a large number of mutually-hostile and often quite fragile jurisdictions briefly became unified into one political unit.  Even after the division of Chinggis’ empire among his grandsons, the ensuing political units were larger in scope than the preceding states had been – above all, on the Western steppe.  The Silk Road, which had functioned tolerably  well even under conditions of disunity and insecurity, become much more negotiable and made possible the journeys of Marco Polo and others, whose reports motivated Christopher Columbus and other western explorers. In the long run, the resulting European sea empires came to dominate Chinggis Qan’s immediate continental successors (Tamerlane, the Moghuls, and the Ottomans),  but it still can be said that the Mongols stand at the beginning of the modern age.

If the Mongols are seen as military and political specialists within civilization, rather than as the murderous Other, then perhaps they can be reevaluated in somewhat the same way as the bourgeois traders and moneylenders have been. Both in traditional China and in medieval Europe, trade and finance were  thought to be parasitical and wrong, in contrast to agriculture and other forms of primary production.  (This prejudice, which persisted until the modern age, was not shared by the Mongols, who favored trade and received key support from Muslim and Uighur traders: “Whereas the Chinese government tended to view international trade as a potential drain of resources, the nomads saw it as a way to create wealth”.)[xxxv] 

Once the bourgeoisie came to receive respect, however,  the military specialists were the ones to be cast into the outer darkness.  This is because the medieval aristocracy – cavalrymen not really too far removed from the steppe – was precisely the enemy the bourgeoisie had to displace. But granted the pervasiveness of war and military organization and their powerful influence on every civilized political structure, and given the dependance of every successful society on military protection, perhaps it can be granted that as “protection”  the Mongol unification of Eurasia was a real and positive contribution.[xxxvi] 

This paper has been deliberately provocative and one-sides. I have not mentioned the brutality and human cost of the Mongol campaigns, the permanent harmful effects of the devastation of eastern Iran, or the long-term negative consequences of despotic rule over servile populations.  But I believe that I have succeeded in proposing a new and useful way of understanding the relationship of the steppe and civilization during a long and crucial period of history.