Pastoral nomadic migrations and conquests

ANATOLY M. KHAZANOV

In the period under consideration, large-scale pastoral nomadic migrations, invasions, and conquests were much more common than in previous and later times.

One may agree with those scholars who admit that there is little point in attempting to find an essentialist characterization of migrations that would fit every historic or cultural context.^{[446] [447]} Various explanatory theories and models of migrations related to the modern and contemporary periods are hardly applicable to the nomadic migrations of previous times, except for the “push” (negative conditions in the home region) and “pull” (better conditions in other region or regions) theory in the most general terms.^[448] On the other hand there are some general patterns. Although individual nomadic migrations and conquests were caused by particular historical circumstances, both internal and external, the main reasons for them were peculiarities of pastoral nomadic economy and sociopolitical organization, and the specifics of the nomads' relations with the outside sedentary world as well as with other nomads.^[449]

This chapter first analyzes some general causes for pastoral nomadic migrations in this period, and then examines three parts of Afro-Eurasia: the Eurasian steppes, semi-deserts and deserts; the Near and Middle East and North Africa; and India.

Causes

Pastoral nomadism as an economic system was characterized by permanent instability. It was based on dynamic balance between three variables: the availability of natural resources, such as vegetation and water; the number of livestock; and the size of the population. All of these were constantly oscillating. The situation was further complicated because these oscillations were not synchronic, as each of the variables was determined by many factors, temporary and permanent, regular and irregular. Thus, even annual productivity of pastures varied significantly because it was connected to microclimatic and ecological conditions. The simplest and best-known case of temporary imbalance was periodic mass loss of livestock and consequent famine, due to various natural calamities and epizootic diseases. In other cases, stock numbers and population size sometimes outgrew the carrying capacities of available pastures. This pressure often pushed the nomads to extend or change their pasturelands.

However, by the middle of the first millennium bce there were no unutilized and unclaimed pastures anywhere in Eurasia. Thus, migrations by nomads aimed at acquiring new pasturelands were almost always accom­panied by the ousting of others (and sometimes also of cultivators in the fringe areas, where both forms of economic activities were possible). More­over, such replacements often resulted in a domino effect and initiated chain migrations. As a rule, this process was rife with military conflicts.

The main reasons for nomadic subjugation and conquest of sedentary countries and peoples were connected with the non-autarkic character of pastoral nomadic economy, which had to be supplemented with products of cultivation and crafts procured from the sedentary world, and the peculiar­ities of the sociopolitical organization of the nomads. In terms of economics,

they depended on sedentary, farming and urban societies much more than the latter depended on the nomads, and they strove for the acquisition of their products by all means possible.

The desert civilization is inferior to urban civilization, because not all the necessities of civilization are to be found among the people of the desert... While they [the Bedouins] need cities for their necessities of life, the urban population needs [the Bedouins] for convenience and luxuries. Thus, as long as they live in the desert and have not acquired royal authority and control of the cities, the Bedouins need the inhabitants of the latter.^[450]

With regard to the sociopolitical organization of nomads it is important to take into account that power in their societies was to a large extent diffused. Correspondingly, the composition of their polities was fluid; they were loose and short-lived. A number of factors limited the development of strong and permanent social stratification amongst nomads, except in the cases when they underwent transformation as a result of their specific relations with the outside, sedentary world. In other words, internal requirements for political integration in nomadic polities were too weak to bring on an irreversible structural change. Their societies lacked a strong machinery of coercion. In the final analysis, only the benefits from the exploitation of sedentary societies strengthened the positions of the nomads' political elites.

In all, the nomads had to adapt not only to a specific natural environment but also to external sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environments. Their interrelations with sedentary societies varied: some were direct exchange, trade, trade mediation and other services, including mercenarism; some involved blackmailing, raids, looting, and receiving occasional payments; some were more or less institutionalized subsidies and regular tribute extraction; and last but not least, some were direct conquests, amounting to an extreme form of submission. Non-economic ways, in particular the various forms of subjugation of sedentary groups, societies and states, were the most advantageous modes of acquiring products the nomads were unable to produce themselves.

Thus, there were two main causes of nomadic migrations, invasions, and conquests: economic and political, and in many cases they were intertwined. The “push-pull” theory implies that transportation costs should be affordable and that migrating groups should have sufficient information about routes and destinations of migrations. In this regard, the nomads were at an advantage because of their mobile way of life and sufficient number of riding and transport animals. Many common cultural characteristics shared by all nomads of the Eurasian steppes, since the beginning of the first millennium bce, or by the nomads of the Arabian peninsula, indicate intensive infor­mation and human flows in corresponding regions. Besides, when infor­mation about natural and sociopolitical environments in the regions destined for migrations and conquests was considered insufficient, the nomads resorted to scouting expeditions and/or raids.

One may wonder why for many centuries the nomads with their limited human resources^[452] and less complex culture and sociopolitical organization often had a military edge on their sedentary counterparts. In general terms, the explanation is connected with three main factors.^[453] First, with but few exceptions, in sedentary states the military realm was a specialized and professionalized sphere of activities. It was the occupation of only a small sector of the general population. This was not accidental, since all non­modern states faced many financial and other difficulties with recruiting, training, and maintenance costs of their troops. By contrast, in nomadic societies, with their relatively undeveloped division of labor and wide social participation, every commoner had sufficient material resources to be a pastoralist in peaceful times and a warrior in times of war.

Second, the nomadic way of life consisted simultaneously of equestrian and military training. To a large extent these were conducted from a very early age within families, lineages, and clans, and did not require special expenditures by the society at large. Every adult nomad was a battle-ready cavalryman. In terms of individual military skills, only the medieval Euro­pean knights and the Middle Eastern mamluks were a match for nomadic mounted warriors. However, the European knights were ill-suited for discip­lined, collective actions after an initial charge was over; and as for the mamluks, their training and military equipment sometimes reflected nomadic military traditions.^[454]

Third, the pastoral nomads of Eurasia never experienced a shortage of mounts, having horses and dromedaries. However, in this respect the nomads of the Eurasian steppes enjoyed a marked advantage over all other nomadic and sedentary populations, since they possessed the largest number of horses, and the horse is the riding animal best suited for military actions. A camel is inferior to a horse in this regard. Many sedentary states such as China, the states of the Indian peninsula and others, continually experienced a shortage of military horses, and keeping them was quite expensive. In the nomadic societies of the Eurasian steppes, the situation was quite different. Their horses were kept all year round on natural pastures, and a nomadic warrior usually took the field with a string of horses.

In all, the relative economic and social backwardness of the Eurasian nomads and their mobile way of life turned out to be a military advantage in interrelations with their sedentary counterparts. Up to modern times, this advantage often allowed them to transfer these interrelations from purely economic or cultural planes onto a political one.

Regional developments

The Eurasian steppes, semi-deserts and deserts

In the Eurasian steppes, the most common migrations of the nomads were in the westward direction, inasmuch as the steppe belt that stretched from the Hungarian puszta (grassland) all the way to North China, was more fertile in its western, Ponto-Caspian part, than in its eastern one. At the same time, the most important wars of subjugation and conquest were aimed at China, the

Map 14.i. Central Asia, c. 1000 ce

sedentary countries of Central Asia and the Middle East, and, to a lesser degree, at the Slavic lands.

On a theoretical level it is worthwhile to distinguish between migrations and subjugations, including direct conquests. Nomadic migrations, especially within the steppe zone, were most often connected with inter-nomadic and internecine fighting and the vicissitudes of nomadic statehood in the region. For that reason, large-scale migrations, as a rule, were accompanied by or had been preceded by, military and political actions. By contrast, subjuga­tions and conquests were mainly connected with interrelations between nomadic and sedentary societies. Furthermore, some forms of subjugation of sedentary populations and societies by nomads, though usually achieved by military force or the threat of its use, were not necessarily accompanied by large-scale migrations into their territories. This was especially true for the cases in which these territories were located in the zones ill-suited for pastoral nomadism. In such cases dependent populations and states retained their own political organization.

Thus, in the period of the Turkic khaqanates or nomadic empires (552-742), the Turks subjugated many oasis states in Central Asia, yet mainly continued to roam in the steppes remote from these states. In the ninth to the first half of the tenth century, East Slavic tribes and the state of Volga Bulgaria paid tribute to the Khazar khaqanate, but the Khazars inhabited the steppe zone only. Likewise, much later the Russian principalities paid tribute to the Golden Horde, but the location of these principalities in the forest and forest steppe zones prevented nomadic migrations into their territories. The Muscovite state began its career as a fiscal agent of the Golden Horde, with the Moscow princes being loyal vassals of its khans. More than any other factor, their obedience and collaboration allowed the Moscow princes even­tually to be able to take the upper hand over the other Russian princes.

However, when nomadic invasions and conquests resulted in significant political changes, such as the destruction of existing states and the creation of new ones, this was often connected with, or followed by, the migrations of the nomads into conquered countries. During the Middle Millennium, there were three major waves of nomadic migration in the Eurasian steppes and adjacent regions.^{[455] [456]} Remarkably, all of them were connected with events in Inner Asia, with the rise and/or fall of the successive nomadic states that emerged in the territory of contemporary Mongolia. The first major movement had begun with the disintegration of the Hsiung-nu state and the emergence of new nomadic polities in the region. These events set in motion chain-migrations over the entire belt of the Eurasian steppes, which lasted for several centuries. One of the outcomes was the movement of Hunnic tribes into the East European steppes, and then into Pannonia.11 Since most of these migrations had taken place in the first centuries ce, they will not be dealt with in this chapter. Suffice it to mention that no later than by the mid-fifth century, and perhaps even earlier, some Turkic-speaking nomadic groupings had already appeared in the Pontic region. The second major movement of the nomads was set in motion by the rise and fall of the Turkic khaqanates and their successor states.^[457] In 552, the Turks, a group dependent on the Joan-Joan nomadic state, successfully revolted against their overlords and established their own state, the First Turk khaqanate (552-630 in the east, lasting until 659 in the western parts of the empire). In the next few decades the new state extended its power over most of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes and the sedentary territories to the north of the Amu-Darya River. It even temporarily conquered Bosphorus in the Crimea, in around 579. Thus, the Turks created the first pan-Eurasian nomadic empire. This unprecedented expansion had a certain economic motivation, a desire to acquire lucrative control over the Great Silk Road. This desire, as well as diplomatic activities of the Turk rulers, was encouraged and facilitated by their new sedentary subjects, the Sogdians, who were involved in the international silk trade and played an important commercial and cultural role in the Turk realm.

One of the consequences of the political changes in distant Inner Asia was the conquest of Pannonia by the Avars, in the second half of the sixth century. Their relation to the defeated Joan-Joan is unclear; however, the data of physical anthropology indicate an Inner Asian origin, at least of their ruling strata. During their flight from the East the Avars incorporated into their polity many Turkic and, possibly, other nomadic groups. After the conquest of Pannonia they subjugated some sedentary Slavic populations, but in many important respects their state was built upon the previous Inner Asian model of nomadic statehood. In addition to a dominant tribe, or tribes, it embraced subordinated nomadic tribes. Just as the Hsiung-nu and other nomadic states in Inner Asia forayed into China and strove to extract gifts, subsidies and even regular payments without attempting to conquer the country, the Avars pursued a similar policy towards Byzantium. Their state existed until the late eighth century, when it was destroyed by the Franks.

In the East, the Turkic khaqanate successfully exploited the weakness and disunity of China and, in addition to plundering, extorted numerous gifts and tributes from it. In Central Asia, its overlordship over local states was limited to extracting tribute. In addition, some Central Asian states were ruled by dynasties of Turkic origin. However, while China soon afterwards became united under the Sui (581-618) and later under the Tang (618-907) dynasties, the Turk khaqanate began to disintegrate due to overextension, revolts of subordinated tribes, and the dynastic instability within the royal clan so characteristic of nomadic states lacking strictly fixed rules of succession. The empire was divided into the western and eastern khaqanates. Further revolts, splits, internecine strife, and often unsuccessful wars with China followed. Some eastern Turks migrated to China and were brought into Tang military service as a border security force against other nomads. Soon afterwards they revolted and managed to restore their state, the Second Eastern Turk Khaqanate (682-742), until, in 742, it was finally destroyed by a coalition of its former nomadic vassals, Basmils, Qarluks, and Uighurs.

Meanwhile, the Uighurs established their hegemony in Inner Asia, which lasted from 744 until 840.^[458] This development had set the stage for a series of new migrations. Thus, the Qarluks were forced to move to Central Asia and became masters of the Western Turk lands in Semire- chie. In 840, the Uighur khaqanate was destroyed by its former vassals, the Qirghiz, whose lands were located on the Upper Yenisei River. The defeated Uighurs fled in different directions, some of them moving to eastern Turkestan.1^[459] There they subjugated the local sedentary Iranian or Tokharian population, which in time resulted in its Turkicization. How­ever, in eastern Turkestan opportunities for leading a pastoral nomadic way of life were rather limited. The Uighurs began to settle in towns and to engage in agriculture.^[460]

There was another important consequence of these events. For many centuries, Mongolia was the heartland of the Turkic nomads. However, in the second half of the first millennium, and perhaps even earlier, many began to migrate westwards into Central Asia, or still further, to the East European steppes. In the tenth century, pressure from the Mongolian-speaking Khitans drove most of the remaining Turkic groups out of the region. The vacuum was filled by Mongolian nomads migrating from Manchuria. Since that time and up to the present day, Mongolia became their new homeland.

By the end of the ninth century the Turks constituted a vast majority of the nomads in the Eurasian steppes, from Pannonia to Mongolia and Tibet. In the far west, one group of the Bulghar tribes defeated by the Khazars migrated to the Balkans (c. 679), subjugated some sedentary Slavic tribes, and established a state there, eventually assimilating to their more numerous subjects.^[461] Another group of Bulghars withdrew to the north, settled in the Middle Volga region and coalesced with the local, sedentary, Finnic-speaking tribes into another state.^[462] In this case, the Turkic language prevailed.

The only exception to the almost complete predominance of Turkic nomads in the East European steppes in the second half of the first millen­nium were the Magyars (Hungarians). Their language belongs to the Ugor- ian branch of the Finno-Ugric linguistic family. The location of their original homeland is far from resolved.^[463] It is well known, however, that in the eighth-ninth centuries they lived in the Pontic steppes and were within the political orbit of the Khazar state. Under pressure from the Pechenegs advancing from the East, they crossed the Carpathians in 895 and conquered their new homeland in the Danubian basin that later came to be known as Hungary. In the beginning, they behaved in Europe in the traditional way of their nomadic predecessors. For six decades they raided and extracted “gifts” and tribute, until, in 955, they sustained a crushing defeat at Lechfeld, near Augsburg, at the hands of united German forces under Otto I. Eventually the Hungarians converted to Christianity and sedentarized; their kingdom was integrated into the general European trajectory. They also assimilated some Turkic and Slavic groups in the region. But, most remarkably, they managed to retain their unique language, which today is an island surrounded by a sea of the German, Romance, and Slavic languages.^[464]

However, it was the Khazar khaqanate that emerged c. 650, which became for several centuries the major force in East Europe, including the Ponto- Caspian steppe lands and the North Caucasus. The historical role of this state was especially significant in three respects. First, in the prolonged Arabo- Khazar wars, in the period 642-737, the Khazars, despite suffering some setbacks, managed to stop the penetration of the Arabs to the Pontic area and from there to East Europe. This happened just at the time when the Arab drive into West Europe was stopped, in 732, by the Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours. Were it otherwise, the whole history of Europe might have taken quite a different direction, since at that time there was no other political and military force in East Europe capable of preventing the Arab invasion. Second, in the eighth to the mid-tenth centuries, the Pax Chazarica served as the bulwark that protected Byzantium from the nomadic

Pastoral nomadic migrations and conquests invasions. Third, the Khazar state facilitated the development of the Dnepr- Black Sea and Volga-Caspian trading networks. Controlled by the Khazars in the late eighth to tenth centuries, it was an important channel of ‘ Abbasid trade with East Europe. It is also worth noting the Khazars' conversion to Judaism - a unique event in medieval Eurasian history.

With regard to the sedentary populations, the Khazar khaqanate was not much different from other nomadic states of the early medieval period. The Khazars avoided or were incapable of direct conquests of sedentary states. In addition to raiding, they were quite satisfied with their vassalage and/or various forms of tribute extraction. The Khazar state was destroyed in 965 by the combined forces of the Rus' and Oghuz nomads.^[465] It was the last nomadic state created by the nomads in East Europe. The next one, the Golden Horde, emerged only during the Chinggisid conquests.

The westward migrations of the Turkic nomads in the steppe zone continued almost uninterrupted until the Mongol period. Not infrequently, pressure from one nomadic grouping pushed others to move to new terri­tories, and thus initiated a kind of chain-migration during which some groupings were displaced and/or incorporated into the polities of new­comers. By the end of the ninth century, the Oghuz, pressed from the East by the Kimeks and Qipchaqs, forced the Pechenegs to move from the Volga- Ural and Syr-Darya steppes into the Pontic ones, where they displaced the Hungarians. In their turn, in the eleventh century, the Pechenegs were ousted by the western Oghuz, driven thither by the Qipchaqs; and soon afterwards the Qipchaqs became the dominant force in the western steppe zone, from Khwarazm to the Danube.^[466]

Meanwhile, a new type of statehood, the Islamic Turco-Iranian states, emerged in Central Asia and the Middle East. These were states of the conquest-type, in which the nomadic or formerly nomadic elites, who had converted to Islam, ruled over the conquered sedentary countries with the assistance of Iranian bureaucracy. The first such state was the Qarakhanid one, named after the ruling dynasty, which lasted from 992 to 1214.

The Qarakhanid conquest of Maveraunnahr (territories between the Amu- Darya and Syr-Darya rivers, otherwise known as Transoxiana) and the

overthrow of the previous Iranian Samanid dynasty at the end of the tenth century entailed neither the destruction nor the resistance of the conquered sedentary population. This was facilitated by the conquerors' previous con­version to Islam.^[467] Although many Qarakhanid khans led a semi-nomadic life,^[468] they preserved some Samanid administrative and bureaucratic insti­tutions, saw to the flourishing of towns and made sure that nomads did nothing to offend cultivators, sometimes to the dissatisfaction of the former.^[469] However, in the ruling class of the new state the military aristoc­racy of nomadic origin played the major role. The Qarakhanid rulers confis­cated landed properties that belonged to the most influential members of the old sedentary aristocracy and distributed them amongst their followers on condition of their military service.

A new type of conquest-state also emerged at that period in Inner Asia. The previous Turkic states in the region had been satisfied with raiding, looting, and extracting payments, subsidies and tribute from China without conquering the country. But the nomadic Khitans seized their chance when the central authority in the country had collapsed. The Khitan state, which took the Chinese dynastic name Liao (907-1125), included Manchuria and some districts of northern China, as well as Inner Mongolia and significant parts of Outer Mongolia. The Khitans were followed by another Manchurian people, the Jurchens, who practiced a mixed economy with a strong pastor­alist component. In the early twelfth century, the Jurchens defeated the Liao, forced some Khitans to move to Central Asia,^[470] and founded their own dynasty, the Jin (1115-1234) that ruled over all of North China. Whereas the ratio of Chinese to Khitans had been around 3:1 in the Liao state, the Chinese outnumbered the Jurchens 10:1.^[471]

When discussing the Khitan and Jurchen conquests of China and their statehood there,^[472] one should take into account one important consideration. In the tenth century, the economic center of the country shifted to South China, ruled by the Song dynasty. Although the Khitans and Jurchens were unable to conquer that part of the country, they managed to extract signifi­cant tribute from the Song; but in order to do this they had to move to its borders.

The third major wave of migrations of the Eurasian nomads was set in motion by the creation of the Mongol Empire and its conquests. These conquests proceeded with remarkable speed. In 1205-27 the Mongols des­troyed the Hsia (Tangut) state; in 1211-34 they conquered North China and put an end to the Jin dynasty; in 1218 they established their supremacy in eastern Turkestan; in 1219-24 they conquered Central Asia; by 1236-8 they gained control over of the Transcaucasian countries; Volga Bulgaria and the Russian principalities were subjugated in 1237-40; by 1243 the Seljuks of Rum became vassals of the Empire; in 1258 the Mongols accomplished the subjugation of Iran and captured Baghdad; the last Song emperor capitulated, 28

in 1276.

Along with the conquests of sedentary countries, the Mongols subjugated and incorporated into their armies all nomads of the Eurasian steppes, mainly the most numerous Turkic ones, but also the Khitan, Tungus and Tangut. By the mid-thirteenth century this process was accomplished. Chinggis Khan and his immediate successors deliberately broke up the old tribal nomadic unions, shuffling and scattering their parts to different armies and relocating them to different parts of the Empire. The same happened to the Mongol tribes. Still, it seems that the number of Turkic nomads actually relocated to the conquered countries far exceeded the Mongol ones.

After the disintegration of the single Mongol Empire, in the Golden Horde the vast majority of nomads continued to abide by their pastoralist way of life in the steppe zone.²⁹ Many other nomads migrated to the Chagatay state in Central Asia. At the quriltay (the diet of the Chinggisid princes and the nobility) of 1269, on the banks of the Talas River, it was decided that the nomads should live in the steppes and mountains, move along specific routes and not allow their herds to trespass on arable

Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1994), vol. vι, 43-153; Franke, “The Chin Dynasty,” in Franke and Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. vι, 215-320.

28 S. L. Tikhvinsky (ed.), Tataro-mongoly v Azii i Evrope (The Tataro-Mongols in Asia and Europe) 2nd edn. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977).

29 G. A. Fedorov-Davydov, Kochevniki Vostochnoi Evropy pod vlast^,iu Zolotoordynskikh khanov (The Nomads of Eastern Europe under the Rule of the Khans of the Golden Horde) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo MGU, 1966). lands.^[473] But in practice the devastation of agricultural territories continued right up to the ascent to power of Timur in about 1370.

However, in China the situation was different. In order to rule the Yuan state, Qubilai (r. 1260-94) and his successors had to bring to the country many Mongol nomads; others were later called up into the army or for permanent garrison duty. To a large extent, they had to abandon their traditional way of life. At the end of the Mongol rule, there were more than 400, 000 Mongols in China.^[474] Most of them were never able to return to Mongolia.

The nomadic movements of the Mongol period had another important consequence. In the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Eurasian steppes - with the exception of Mongolia - the less numerous Mongol nomads were invariably Turkicized. The end result of tribal displacements and reconfigur­ations of the Mongol and, later, of the Timurid eras was the emergence of new and subsequently retribalized ethnic units, some of which eventually crystallized into many of the Turkic peoples of today.^[475]

The Near and Middle East and North Africa

For ecological and historical reasons, in the Islamic heartland nomads and sedentaries were more closely linked to each other than in some other regions like China, India, or East Europe. It is worth distinguishing between nomadic migrations that took place within this region and those that brought nomads there from the Eurasian steppes. The Bedouins were never empire-builders. With few and incomplete exceptions - such as the short-lived Almoravid Empire in which the Sanhaja nomads, pressed by the Zenata, were temporar­ily united by a reformed Islamic leadership - the same can be said about the North African Berbers. Interestingly, the creation of the Almoravid Empire was not followed by a mass Berber migration into the conquered lands. In these respects, the Turks and Mongols were quite different.

The creation of the Islamic Caliphate resulted in numerous Bedouin migrations, which continued throughout the whole period. Already in the seventh century a large number of them moved into Mesopotamia. One of the latest large-scale Bedouin migrations was the Hilalian invasion of North Africa in the eleventh century. It is worth noting, however, that the victori­ous Banu Hilal never attempted to create their own state. Their various tribes just became allies of local dynasties and occupied privileged positions in their states. In addition, there were numerous Berber migrations within the North African region. However, unlike many migrations of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, the migrations of Bedouins from Arabia in the early Islamic period were often organized, encouraged and directed by the central sedentary powers.^[476] Many were persuaded or forced to settle in garrison towns, cities or villages; others continued to maintain the nomadic way of life.

During the Middle Millennium, the invasions and migrations of great masses of nomads from Arabia, and especially from the Eurasian steppes, led to the territorial expansion of nomadism and to a significant increase in the number of nomads in Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan. The most important role in these processes was that of the Eurasian steppe nomads. The Bedouins could not penetrate the Anatolian plateau because its climate was too cold for their dromedaries. In Iran, Bedouins who continued to pursue a nomadic life occupied only the southern province of Fars and a part of Khuzistan.^[477]

The first mass migration of the Turkic-speaking nomads to the Middle Eastern countries took place after the Seljuk conquests.^[478] The Seljuk Empire was another Turco-Iranian state, and its creation was unexpected even by the Seljuks themselves. In the first half of the eleventh century, some rebellious Oghuz nomads, originally from the Syr-Darya region, fled under the leader­ship of the Seljuk dynasty to Khurasan and began to pillage the province. The attempts of Mas‘ud, the ruler of the Ghaznavid state, to pacify them failed, and in 1040 he was defeated in the battle at Dandanqan. Soon after this decisive historical event, the Seljuks became masters of Central and Western Iran and some parts of Transcaucasia. In 1055 their ruler, Toghrul, entered Baghdad and was honored by the caliph as the champion of Sunni Islam. In 1071, in another historically decisive battle at Manzikert, the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines. Thenceforth the penetration of the Turkic nomads into Asia Minor, and especially Iran, began and continued during the whole Seljuk period.^[479]

In the Seljuk state, the ruling class consisted primarily of members of the dynasty and the nomadic aristocracy. The latter benefitted from the widely practiced institute of iqta‘. These allotments of land in compensation for military service did not entail proprietary rights over land, but allowed the new ruling class to extract taxes and dues, and to establish its superiority over the Iranian peasantry without abandoning their nomadic way of life. How­ever, nomadic traditions and institutions were ill-fitted for governing a state in which the majority of people were sedentary. The Seljuk sultans had to rely on the Iranian bureaucracy and to retain the governmental institutions of the previous Middle Eastern states, although in a somewhat modified way. Once they began to rely on an old social foundation, they sought to relegate ordinary nomads to the level of sedentary subjects. But nomadic commoners insisted that they were entitled to privileged positions in the state that had been created with their participation. They did not want to pay taxes and submit to the governing Iranian bureaucracy. In the eleventh century, nomads continued to play an important role in the army, but efforts were made to send them to the borders of the state and to use them in raids and struggles with Christian sedentary states. In the twelfth century, bellicose nomads actively participated in internecine wars, tended to be less and less obedient to the central power, and sometimes revolted against it. This contributed to the disintegration of the Seljuk state.

The Mongol conquest of Iran in the thirteenth century brought to the region many more nomads from the Eurasian steppes.^[480] In all, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries nomads made up about one quarter of the population of Iran,^[481] much more than in previous times.

The nomadic migrations during the Seljuk period, and particularly during the ensuing invasions of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, infiltrated the local population and affected their pastoralism. Some nomads were crowded out by others. Thus, the Seljuks pushed the Baluch out of Khurasan and Kirman into Makran and further east.^[482] In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some dissident groups of the Turco-Mongol nomads known as the Hazara and the Nogodaris moved into the territories west of Kabul.^[483] Only in that period did nomadism in Afghanistan assume its now- traditional forms.

India

Nomads migrated into the Indian subcontinent over many centuries and even millennia. In the fifth century, the Joan-Joan nomadic state became dominant in Mongolia, and soon afterwards in many other regions of Inner Asia. Under its pressure, a nomadic group known in the Byzantine sources as the Kidarite Huns, apparently of mixed ethnic origin, moved into northern and central India and defeated the Gupta state in the first half of the sixth century.

At the same time, nomads of mixed ethnic composition known as the Heftalites (apparently after the name of their dynasty) controlled vast seden­tary territories in northwestern India from their center in Afghanistan, until the joined forces of Sasanians and Turks destroyed them in 557. Remarkably, the official language in their realm was the Bactrian tongue belonging to the Iranian group. This reliance on the professionals from the sedentary popula­tion for the governance is a characteristic of many later nomadic states.

However, due to climatic conditions, those nomads who remained in India had to abandon their pastoralism. The large-scale nomadic migrations and conquests that had been set in motion by the Turks in the late tenth century, reached their climax with the Mongols in the thirteenth century, and ended with Timur's raids and the sacking of Delhi in the late fourteenth century, albeit that his short-lived empire can hardly be considered a nomadic one. The Turco-Mongols in India, just like their predecessors, had to leave their pastoral nomadism behind. However, they brought about new ways of warfare and military technique that allowed them to impose new patterns of political mobilization and resource allocation. Andre Wink calls these developments a successful “fusion” of nomadic frontier elements and sedentary society.^[484]

Effects

The impact of the nomadic migrations and conquests on the historical development of the sedentary world was manifold and sometimes contradict­ory. Also, it varied a great deal from region to region. No wonder that scholars have different opinions on these issues.^[485] Still, it is desirable to avoid the extremes in this regard.

Histories written by the defeated may be as one-sided and biased as histories written by the victors. Claims that the nomads were always cold­blooded predators, despoilers, and butchers, and that they resorted to destruction and slaughter more enthusiastically than their sedentary counter­parts, are still rather widespread,^[486] but largely unsubstantiated. It is true that many, though far from all, nomadic conquests of sedentary countries were devastating; but sometimes these devastations were exaggerated by contem­porary sedentary historians and their modern followers.

The thesis of the destructive consequences of all nomadic intrusions and conquests should be treated with a certain caution, especially if one discusses economic processes of long duration. Too often the nomads are made scapegoats for the economic decay and contemporary backwardness of some countries and regions. Thus, the desolation of certain areas of Central Asia, like Khwarazm, was explained by Soviet scholars as the result of the destruc­tion of the irrigation networks by invading nomads; while in fact the saliniza­tion of the soil played a more important role in this gradual process than the nomads.

Contrary to still widespread opinion, the Iraqi irrigation system had already been in decline since the tenth century, i.e. long before the Mongol invasion.^[487] It is true that the Bedouins contributed to the decline of agriculture in northern Syria and Iraq in the seventh to tenth centuries, but over-taxation played at least as important a role in the general regression of sedentary life there as did nomadic pressure.^[488]

In North Africa, the destruction and ruin caused by the Hilalian invasion, which Ibn Khaldun called “a swarm of locusts,” apparently was exaggerated not only by that Muslim scholar but also by his followers amongst the French historians of the old school.^[489] The decline of the Tunisian economy was the result of many factors, and the nomadic invasions were only one of them. Moreover, the destruction was not total. The coastal regions survived, and agriculture continued to flourish in many regions of North Africa.^[490] One should also take into account that as soon as the conquests were accomplished, new nomadic rulers often made serious efforts to restore agricultural and urban life in the conquered countries.

Still, some conclusions are incontrovertible. It is obvious that the impact of nomads on the linguistic and ethnic history of the Old World during the Middle Millennium was very great. In particular, language shifts and the spread of Turkic languages from East Siberia (Yakutia) to the Middle Volga region and to the Balkans were directly connected with the migrations, conquests, and/or political dominance of the nomads.^[491] Apparently no later than in the sixth century, at the time of the West Turk khaqanate, if not even earlier, processes of ethnic mingling of the Turkic-speaking nomads with the Iranian-speaking ones had started, along with the gradual linguistic Turkici- zation of the latter.^[492] These processes continued for many centuries, and accelerated markedly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (the Qarakhanid period), when the nomads were migrating into and settling in the agricultural areas of Central Asia in considerably larger numbers than in previous periods.^[493] The Seljuk conquests and the subsequent migrations of the nomads into the conquered territories initiated a gradual Turkicization of Anatolia. Azerbaijan was already largely Turkicized during that period. By the thirteenth century, the migration of the Oghuz and Qipchaq nomads to Khwarazm had resulted in the almost complete disappearance of the Iranian Khwarazmian language and its replacement with the Turkic one.^[494] The dissemination of the Turkic languages was facilitated by the fact that they became languages of ruling elites and also served as a lingua franca.

The dissemination of Arabic from Iran to Sudan was partly connected with the numerous and various migrations of Bedouins. Thus, the Banu Hilal contributed to the spread of the vernacular Arabic in the countryside of North Africa and to the retreat of the Berber language into the hills and mountains.^[495] The Arabic language itself was conceived by medieval philolo­gists as having a close relationship with Bedouin patrimony.^[496]

However, this was not always the case. Numerous migrations of pastoral­ists from Mongolia and Manchuria into North China always resulted in the eventual assimilation of those who remained there. In Iran, the Arabs were largely assimilated to the Persian milieu.

The role of nomads in facilitating and stimulating transcontinental information, knowledge flow, and cultural exchange, not infrequently con­nected with long-distance continental and transcontinental trading, was also very great. Such trade was always linked first and foremost with the political situation in a wide area that sometimes comprised several historical regions. It was not a coincidence that all the great overland trade routes of the Middle Ages flourished when nomadic states created a pax that provided security and transportation facilities. The Great Silk Road was only the best-known case. When Mongol rule in China collapsed, overland trade came to a halt and the price of Chinese silk and certain spices doubled in Europe.^[497] Besides, the nomadic states stimulated trade though an increased demand for luxury commodities and prestigious goods with important symbolic meaning.^[498] In their turn, they were the main suppliers of slaves and horses to their sedentary counterparts. With regard to trade, information flow, and cross- cultural contacts and exchange, however, no nomadic state could surpass the Mongol Empire. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, technologies, and knowledge, as well as human, animal, and plant populations were disseminated and displayed across Eurasia.^[499] On the negative side, one should mention the plague pandemic of the fourteenth century, which was possibly connected with the intensification of transcontinental trade.^[500]

The enormous role of the nomadic conquests in the political history of Asia, Europe, and even Africa also seems to be quite clear. Not infrequently their outcomes were radical border changes, the destruction of some states and emergence of others. But not all nomadic conquests resulted in profound cultural, socio-economic, and political change of long duration. It is import­ant to note that in only a few cases did they lead to irreversible political reconfigurations of entire historical regions. It is true that the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia and related migrations, or the Arab conquests, eventually brought corresponding regions into quite different political constellations. But it is also true that when the dust of the Mongol conquests settled, the main historical regions that had preceded them, such as China, India, Central Asia, Iran, Turkic Anatolia as a core of the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian lands, resurfaced once again.

The consequences of nomadic conquests were often mainly limited to dynastic changes and to more-or-less serious changes in the composition of the ruling class.^[501] The circulation of political elites caused by the nomads in North Africa is well described by Ibn Khaldun. In many conquered countries and in different historical periods, the nomadic aristocracies strove to become landed elites. This often happened in Iran, Central Asia, and China.

But even the turnover of the ruling and privileged elites was far from always complete. Very remarkable in this regard is the old aphorism repeated by the Sinicized Khitan councilor Yelu Chucai to the Great Khan Ogodei, son and successor of Chinggis Khan: “Although you inherited the Chinese Empire on horseback, you cannot rule it from that position.”^[502] It was relatively easy and expedient for the victors to replace the old military elites. But in order to rule the conquered countries with a modicum of efficiency, they needed bureaucrats; and the latter could be recruited only from the subjugated sedentary population. In China, the literati officials proved to be indispensable to all conquerors. Even the Yuan eventually had to revive the old Confucian examination system.

In the Muslim countries, the religious nobility survived as well in cases when the nomads had already converted to Islam by the time of their conquests. In Central Asia and Iran, a series of conquests destroyed the dihqans, the land-owning Iranian aristocracy. But neither the Qarakhanids nor the Seljuks, nor other conquerors for that matter, ever considered encroachment upon the privileges of the ‘ulama and the Sufi shaykhs.

When nomadic rulers tried to make serious changes in the structures of conquered sedentary societies and to impose upon them their own socio­political norms, these attempts, as a rule, were not particularly successful, at any rate not in the long run. For example, the system of apportioned lands that was practiced in the Chinggisid Empire was disruptive of local patterns of landholding, and was abandoned after the end of Mongol rule.^[503]

The nomads of the Eurasian steppes had their own centuries-old and quite sophisticated polyethnic political culture.^[504] However, the mere necessity of governing over conquered sedentary countries eventually forced the nomadic rulers to find ways to accommodate their new subjects and, when necessary, to legitimize their rule in terms acceptable to them. From North Africa to India, those who already had been Muslims strove to stress their bona fide Islamic credentials. When the Mongols conquered Central Asia and Iran, they were still pagans, but afterwards they converted to Islam, and in 1295-1335 the Mongol rulers of Iran consistently sought to promote their image as the ideal Islamic rulers, the defenders and propagators of the faith.^[505] At the same time, the Mongol ruling elite in China converted to Buddhism. They soon discovered that it was impossible to rule the country by applying their own customary law and had to accommodate themselves to Chinese legal concepts and institutions.^[506] The Khitan (Liao), Jurchen (Jin), and the Mongol (Yuan) emperors accepted Chinese court ritual, although the Khitans and Mongols to a lesser extent than the Jurchens.^[507]

One may conclude that nomadic conquests nowhere, or almost nowhere, drastically changed sociopolitical structures of historical-cultural regions. The nomadic rulers had to adopt or adjust to the pre-existing institutional infrastructure, administrative models, religious situation, and legitimation patterns of the conquered states. A certain, and sometimes temporary, permutation within the existing social order was more frequent than its irreversible transformation. It seems that the nomadic factor was nowhere a single, or even the most important one, among those many factors that defined long-duration historical development.

Anyway, by the sixteenth century, with the advent of the early modern period, the age of great nomadic migrations and conquests was over. The great geographic discoveries and the shift of trade routes were a serious blow to long­distance overland trade. Caravels defeated caravans. The centralized empires of Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and China created massive regular armies, which increasingly employed firearms with ever-growing lethal power. Against such armies, the irregular cavalries of the nomads were ineffective.

FURTHER READING

Agadzhanow, S. G. Der Staat der Seldschukiden und Mittelasien im 11.-12. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reinhold Schletzer Verlag, 1994.

Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Mdngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251-1259. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281. Cam­bridge University Press, 1995.

Barfield, ThomasJ. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Barthold, V. V. Turkestan v epokhu mongol'skogo nashestviia (Turkestan in the Times of the Mongol Invasion). Moscow: Izdatel'stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1963.

Biran, Michal. The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Bosworth, C. E. “The Political and Dynastic History of the Iranian World (a.d. 1000-1217),” in J. A Boyle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. v. Cambridge University Press, 1968: 1-202.

Brett, M. “The Central Lands of North Africa and Sicily, Until the Beginning of the Almohad Period,” in Maribel Fierro (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. ii. Cambridge University Press, 2010: 48-65.

Cohen, Claude. Pre-Ottoman Turkey. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1968. Donner, Fred McGraf. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton University Press, 1981. Dunlop, D. M. The History of the Jewish Khazars. Princeton University Press, 1954. Endicott-West, Elizabeth. “Aspects of Khitan Liao and Mongolian Yuan Imperial Rule: A Comparative Perspective,” in Gary Seaman and Daniel Marks (eds.), Rulersfrom the Steppe: State Formation on the Eurasian Periphery. Los Angeles, CA: Ethnographics Press, University of Southern California, 1991: 199-222.

Fisher, H. J. “The Eastern Maghrib and Central Sudan,” in Roland Olivier (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. iii. Cambridge University Press, 1977: 232-330.

Golden, Peter B. “Imperial Ideology and the Sources of Political Unity amongst the Pre-Chinggisid Nomads in Western Eurasia,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 2(1982): 37-76.

An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasso- witz, 1992.

Khazar Studies: An Historico-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1980.

Khazanov, Anatoly M. Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd edn. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

“Nomads in the History of the Sedentary World,” in Khazanov and Wink (eds.), Nomads in the Sedentary World, 1-23.

Khazanov, Anatoly M. and Wink, Andre, eds. Nomads in the Sedentary World. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001.

Kliashtornyi, S. G. Drevnetiurkskie runicheskie pamiatniki kak istochnik po istorii Srednei Azii (Ancient Turkic Runic Inscriptions as a Source in Study of the History of Central Asia). Moscow: Nauka, 1964.

Kliashtornyi, S. G. and D. G. Savinov. Stepnye imperii drevnei Evrazii (The Steppe Empires of Ancient Eurasia). St Petersburg State University, 2005.

Mackerras, Colin. The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories: A Study in Sino-Uighur Relations, 744-840. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972.

Peacock, Andrew C. S. Early Seljuk History: A New Interpretation. London: Routledge, 2010. Poncet, J. “Le mythe de la catastrophe hilalienne” (“The Myth of the Hilalian Catastro- phy”), Annales. Economies, Societes, Civilisations 22 (1967): 1099-120.

Rona-Tas, Andras. Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999.

Tikhvinsky, S. L. (ed). Tataro-mongoly v Azii i Evrope (The Tataro-Mongols in Asia and Europe), 2nd edn. Moscow: Nauka, 1977.

Wink, Andre. “India and the Turko-Mongol Frontier,” in Khazanov and Wink (eds.), Nomads in the Sedentary World, 211-33.