by John Keegan
These two characteristics of their warmaking style — dependence on obstacles and readiness for flight — are typically ‘primitive’; as we have seen, they were those that so infuriated the Philhellenes in their encounter with the Greeks during the war of independence from Turkey. Here is a problem. If the Arabs were ‘primitive warriors’, why then were they so successful in their wars against the disciplined, organised armies of Byzantium and Persia, ‘regular’ armies as we would denote them in any system of military classification? We know that Persia and Byzantium had exhausted each other in the course of a long war. Nevertheless, it is a general rule that primitives lose to regulars over the long run; harassment is an effective means of waging a defensive war, but wars are ultimately won by offensives and the Arabs were certainly on the offensive during the era of the conquests. The conclusion must be that it was Islam itself, which lays so heavy an emphasis on the fight for the faith, that made them so formidable in the field. ‘Primitive’ tactics become effective if the warrior is inspired by a belief in the certainty of victory and is always willing to return to the struggle, however often he disengages when a particular fight goes against him. Casting forward in time, this was Mao’s perception also. His tactics were ‘primitive’ to begin with, and he saw no indignity in retreat as long as his soldiers retained their belief in eventual victory. Another pillar of his strategy was to win the support of the populations among which he operated. The Arab armies benefited greatly from the presence in the settled lands they invaded of the musta’riba, Arabs who had given up the desert life but who felt strong cultural bonds with them and proved willing to fight at their side as soon as they heard a doctrine of brotherhood preached in the name of Islam.64
Yet, as we have seen from the story of the rise of the Mamelukes, Islam itself was eventually to be the undoing of Arab power. The prohibition against Muslim fighting Muslim was broken very early and this breach was eventually, though perhaps inevitably, to result in the loss of military authority by the later caliphs to subject soldiers who came to rule in their place, in fact if not in name; the great majority of these soldiers were recruited from the horse peoples of the steppe. The title Caliph, we already know, meant ‘successor’ to the prophet Muhammad and brought supreme authority both in the world and in religion. The early caliphs found no conflict in practice between their roles, as doctrinally there should be none. That was because the first Muslims were settled by tribe in new military ‘camp’ cities — one would become Cairo — where religious life was ordered by the word of the caliph and worldly needs supplied by the booty of conquest or a tax on unbelievers.
Tribal camp life could not be perpetuated once Islam’s success swelled the number of Muslims. Muhammad had left no son, an obvious cause of quarrels over succession among tribes, and the quarrel over the succession to the fourth caliphate caused a division in the Muslim community — which split into a Sunni majority and a Shi’i minority — of great bitterness. Further division was caused by the resentment of newer converts that the original tribal families continued to be supported by payments from a military register (diwan) which had originated as a means of distributing the spoils of conquest to further holy war.65 The dispute over the succession was smoothed out, allowing the Ummayid caliphs of Damascus to prosecute the campaigns into Spain and Central Asia, but the tensions persisted. Stability was only restored under the Abbasid caliphs who transferred the capital to Baghdad after victory in a civil war in 749. The Abbasids had triumphed in part because they promised to dissolve the distinction between the original Muslims and later converts, a distinction which turned on membership of the military register. Once, however, the military register was abolished, as it effectively was by the Abbasids, soldiering in the name of the successors to Muhammad brought reduced worldly profit but aroused strong religious scruple whenever the caliphs were defied by dissident Muslim subjects. They were defied often during the eighth and ninth centuries, when Spain and Morocco broke away to found rival caliphates claiming closer descent from Muhammad’s family. Deprived of traditional tribal support and unable to raise armies among convert Muslims who took seriously the prohibition against fighting fellow believers, the Abbasids were compelled to find soldiers elsewhere. The solution was to make a virtue of the expedient of arming slaves for warfare and to use state revenue to buy recruits to slave armies.
The caliph al-Mu’tasim (833–42) is regarded as the founder of the Muslim military slave system. In fact, slave soldiers had fought beside free Muslims even in the days of the Prophet but they had come from many sources; some had been the personal attendants of their masters.66 The Abbasids recognised that they could no longer sustain their power through such a haphazard system of recruitment. Al-Mu’tasim went out into the market on a large scale, buying the best material available, which was Turkish manpower from the edge of the steppe; he is said eventually to have had 70,000 Turkish military slaves under command.67 The development of such a large slave army resolved for the time being the besetting military dilemma of Islam, which was how to follow its call to haram, the exercise of unlimited authority, without setting Muslim against Muslim brother. It did not resolve the problem of how to make the caliphs obeyed by Muslims who had set up rival caliphates on the fringes of empire in Central Asia and North Africa. That needed effective and dynamic leaders for the new slave army. They were provided first by the Buyid family, stalwart defenders of the Central Asian frontier who set up a caliph of their own choosing in Baghdad in 945. Even more effective leaders were to be provided, however, by a tribe of the very Turkish peoples against whom the Buyids had won their reputation, the Seljuks. In 1055 the Seljuks, in the name of Sunni orthodoxy, entered Baghdad, overthrew the Shi’i Buyids and declared themselves the caliph’s new protectors. They were soon to be called sultans — ‘holders of power’.
The conversion of the Seljuks to the Sunni form of Islam has been called ‘a change as momentous as the conversion of the Franks under Clovis to Christianity nearly five centuries earlier’.68 It was to result in the destruction of most of the Byzantine empire that remained in Asia, and the consequent crisis for Christianity was to call forth the Crusades. The Seljuks had been converted as a body, through the efforts of Islamic missionaries working on the steppe frontier, only in 960, when they were but one of several Turkic horse peoples — including the Karluks, Kipchaks and Kirghiz — struggling for dominance in Central Asia. The Karluks were to find fortune as the Ghaznavid rulers of Afghanistan and later as founders of the Slave Kingdom of Delhi, one of the most important of the Mameluke states.69 Even their exploits, however, did not compare with those of the Seljuks who, in Toghril Beg, Malik Shah and Alp Arslan, produced commanders of ferocious competence. Malik Shah, with his famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk, was responsible for a major extension of Abbasid power into Central Asia between 1080 and 1090. Alp Arslan, campaigning in the opposite direction, struck into the mountains of the Caucasus and in 1064 captured the capital of Christian Armenia. Pushing on through the formidable Caucasus mountains, he secured positions from which to threaten the eastern border of Byzantium. In August 1071, at Manzikert, he found the Byzantine army and fought and won a battle of incontestable importance for the future political geography of the Near East and of Europe, a battle that would make the Byzantine domain in Asia ‘a land of Turkish speech and Islamic faith — in short “Turkey” ’.70
The Abbasid experiment in dependence on slave armies had had, therefore, paradoxical results. By drawing the Turkic horse peoples into the service of the caliphate it had restored its power; by its choice of warrior nomads as its principal servants it had unwittingly surrendered its competence, even if not its nominal authority, and so separated for ever the leadership of Islam from its Arab roots. The Abbasids would continue to rule in name and even, in al-Nasir (1180–1225), find a caliph whose energy seemed to promise a revival of the dynasty’s early years. The mistake had been made, however, of recruiting as slave soldiers a strain of proud, hardy, highly intelligent bu
t alien warriors who eventually saw no reason to persist in subservience, who consequently took the means at hand to make themselves masters of the empire, and who, moreover, had the wit to devise a formula which preserved the dignity of the caliphate but delivered its substance to themselves.
Other alien Muslims would follow where the Seljuks had shown the way, once their power waned, as it did towards the end of the twelfth century. In the east the lands the Seljuks had secured fell to the Ghaznavids and to new Turkic intruders from the steppe, known as the Turkomans. In the west the caliphate was to find an outstanding military protector in Salah el-Din (Saladin), a Kurd from the Iranian northern mountains, who rose to prominence through the crisis of the Crusades. Manzikert, as we have seen, had driven the Byzantine armies from Asia and so terrified the Emperor Michael VII that, despite centuries of division and distrust between the eastern Orthodox and western Latin branches of Christianity, he had launched a cry for help to the Pope. The appeal had been slow to mature but had borne fruit in the end. In 1099 an army of Christian knights from France, Germany and Italy, and from many other western lands, had arrived outside Jerusalem, taken the city and established a bridgehead in the Holy Land from which the Crusaders intended to launch a campaign for the reconquest of the formerly Christian East from Islam. In the ensuing wars between the Crusading kingdoms and their Muslim enemies the tide of advantage flowed one way and another for nearly a century. Under the leadership of Saladin, appointed to command in Egypt in 1171, the balance seemed to swing decisively to the Muslim side. For the next eighty years, despite constant renewals of the Crusading effort, the Crusaders fought constantly on the defensive, their foothold shrinking to the point of extinction. The counter-offensive launched by Saladin appeared ready to culminate in a conclusive Muslim victory. Islam, however, had been looking in the wrong direction. Intent on solving a border problem in the west, the caliphs had neglected their security in the east. There, unperceived at first, a new menace began to grow out of the steppe at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1220–1 much of Central Asia and Persia fell to a strange horse people; in 1243 what is now Turkey fell also. The conquerors were not Muslims and campaigned with a terrifying ruthlessness against all who opposed them. In 1258 they entered Baghdad and put al-Muzt’asim, last of the Abbasid caliphs, to death. These conquerors were the Mongols.
The Mongols
Why the Mongols, any more than similar horse peoples of the steppe world who preceded them on the paths of invasion into the civilised lands, should have exceeded them all in the extent and rapidity of their conquests defies easy explanation. Exceed them nevertheless the Mongols did; indeed, no sequence of campaigns by a single people before or since has ever subjected so large an area to military domination. Between 1190, when Temujin, later to take the name Genghis Khan, began the unification of the tribes of Mongolia, and 1258, when his grandson stormed Baghdad, the Mongols successively overran the whole of northern China, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia, the Khwarezemian state in Persia, the Caucasus, Turkish Anatolia and the Russian principalities, and raided into northern India; in 1237–41 they campaigned extensively in Poland, Hungary, East Prussia and Bohemia and sent reconnaissances toward Vienna and Venice. They withdrew from Europe only when news reached their armies there of the death of Genghis Khan’s son and successor. Under his heirs, the Mongols further extended their domains to include all of China, where Genghis Khan’s grandson Kubla Khan founded the Yuan dynasty that reigned until the end of the fourteenth century; they also exerted control over parts of Burma and Vietnam, attempted — though failed — to invade Japan and Java, and continued to intervene in India, where in 1526 Babur, a descendant of Genghis, founded the Moghul (Mongol) empire. The title of Empress of India, assumed by Queen Victoria in 1876, derived directly from this Moghul conquest 350 years earlier and so ultimately from the ambitions of Genghis Khan, who in 1211, on the eve of his departure from the steppe on his first campaign, emerged from the tent where he had communed with heaven, to proclaim to his people, ‘Heaven has promised me victory.’71
It is, however, towards China, not India, that the Mongols first set their course, since they were borderers of that empire. From the time of the earliest unification under the Ch’in in the first millennium BC, Chinese dynasties had always been menaced, and often usurped, by peoples from north of the Yellow River. In time the dynasties devised a dual system of coping with these irruptions: using the Great Wall, first consolidated by the Ch’in, and frequently rebuilt, realigned and extended, as a primary line of demarcation between civilisation and nomadism, the Chinese rulers encouraged the border peoples — inevitably partly sinicised by contact with Chinese traders, officials and soldiers, and directly rewarded for their services by grants of protection, subsidies and territory (sometimes within the Great Wall) — to act as primary defenders of the settled lands; then, if that primary line of defence was penetrated, they counted on the superior attractions of their own civilised Chinese life to disarm the invaders in the course of time. The policy was based ‘on a set of assumptions, all of which reinforced the notion of the supremacy of Chinese institutions and culture and of their acceptability to the barbarians; the idea that the latter might not have had any need for Chinese culture was never entertained.’72
For more than a thousand years the policy worked. Though often invaded, at times divided and in some periods seriously disrupted, China was never wholly subjected to non-Chinese rule; foreigners who succeeded in carving out an area of authority were indeed, through acculturation and intermarriage, always absorbed into the civilisation. Periods of disruption often resulted in a positive and creative reaction when central power was re-established. Thus the Sui dynasty (581–617) and the succeeding T’ang (618–907), dominated though they were by aristocracies whose roots lay in the barbarian and largely Turkic invasions from the steppe that had caused the divisions of the third to fifth centuries, not only extended and strengthened the Great Wall but constructed huge public works, including the Grand Canal which linked the Yellow and Yangtse rivers above their navigable points. All this was achieved, moreover, without a militarisation of the regime, which stands in remarkable contrast to the experience of the Romans, who suffered first the barbarisation of their army and then the supplanting of their polity by warrior kingdoms that lived by the sword.
Though the Chinese ruling dynasties and aristocracies esteemed skill-at-arms and horsemanship, they did not confuse military leadership with administrative skills. And under the Sui and T’ang dynasties the gradualist military strategy first propounded by the fourth-century writer Sun Tzu took root. Sun Tzu drew on an existing corpus of ideas and practices in formalising his theory; it would not otherwise have recommended itself to the Chinese mind. In its emphasis on avoiding battle except with the assurance of victory, of disfavouring risk, of seeking to overawe an enemy by psychological means, and of using time rather than force to wear an invader down (all concepts recognised to be profoundly anti-Clausewitzian by twentieth-century strategists, when the campaigns of Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh drew Sun Tzu to their attention) his Art of War encouraged the integration of Chinese military with political theory in an intellectual whole.73 And gradualism in any case best suited the Chinese armies of the Sui and early T’ang periods, which were recruited on a militia basis, and reinforced at the frontiers by contingents of non-Chinese but sinicised auxiliaries.
At the height of its power in the early eighth century, the T’ang achieved greater success than any Chinese dynasty had done before or was to do afterward. Through its material and intellectual ascendancy, in particular as a result of the proselytising energies of Chinese teachers of Buddhism, who had overtaken the Indians and Ceylonese as exponents of its beliefs in East and South Asia, the T’ang empire extended its borders to include wide areas beyond the Great Wall, parts of Indochina and the eastern borderlands of Tibet, then a troublesome neighbour. The T’ang dynasty’s very success, however, was to prove its undoing. Military success, pe
rhaps inevitably, elevated military men, often non-Chinese, to prominence, and a struggle for power between the mandarinate and the generalität ensued, leading in 755–63 to a military rebellion of such severity that the emperor was forced to flee his capital, and his successor succeeded in restoring authority only by enlisting Tibetan and nomad help. These events immediately followed the Arabs’ defeat of the T’ang army at Talas in 751, which was the decisive moment in the struggle between the Middle and Far East for control of Central Asia. The Chinese commander at Talas had been a Korean, while the leader of the rebellion of 755, An Lu-shan, was of mixed Sogdian and Turkish birth. In Chinese terms, both came from the barbarian world.
This reappearance of non-Chinese men at the centre of Chinese imperial affairs presaged ill for the future. Though from the eighth century on there was an enormous expansion of rice production through intensive irrigation, and from it a doubling of the Chinese population, these developments were largely confined to the Yangtse valley and the south. In the north the military rebellion led to famine, the diffusion of imperial power into the hands of local commissioners of the military regions, and the recruitment of mercenary armies composed of ‘the rootless, of those on the loose, and of convicts granted a conditional amnesty’.74 From this period dates the Chinese distaste and contempt for the trade of soldiering that persisted until the victory of the People’s Liberation Army in 1949. At the beginning of the tenth century, imperial authority broke down; though unity was restored by the Sung, that dynasty (established in 960) did not succeed in recovering the territories in the north-west and north that had come under the control of the Mongolian Khitay and the Siberian Jürchen (the latter, in the seventeenth century, would conquer China as the Manchus). Meanwhile, the Sung’s western provinces fell to the Western Hsia or Tanguts, a people of mixed Turkish, Tibetan and Siberian origin.