Yet the influence of the steppe peoples on the civilisations of the Eurasian rim did not just consist of direct military assault. As nomadic herders, they were constantly on the move; but when there were disruptions to the delicate equilibrium of their environment – a surge in population numbers or a deterioration of the grazing grounds due to a shift in climate – entire tribes were forced to migrate from their existing grounds to seek better pasture. As a result waves of disruption rippled across the steppes when a succession of displaced tribes moved across the flat plains pushing their neighbours off their turf, like billiard balls recoiling off each other. Eventually some steppe peoples would be forced to cross into the lands of the settled societies, for example Manchuria and northern China in the east, Ukraine and Hungary in the west.48
Thus the history and fate of civilisations around the margins of the great Eurasian landmass – in China, India, the Middle East and Europe – has been the story of a recurring struggle against nomadic tribes emerging from the central heartland of the steppes. The Scythians were among the first to master mounted warfare. They originated around the Altai Mountains and came to dominate much of the steppe region between the sixth and first centuries BC, riding westwards to confront the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires in Mesopotamia and Persia, and also fighting Alexander the Great. China was repeatedly confronted by steppe peoples, including the Xiongnu, Khitans, Uighurs, Kirghiz and Mongols.49 And between the fifth and sixteenth century AD a succession of nomad groups poured from the steppes into Europe – the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Kalmuks, Cumans and Patzinaks, as well as the Mongols.50
For millennia, the steppes represented a great churning cauldron of pastoral nomads, repeatedly brimming over its lip to spill into the domains of the settled, agrarian civilisations around the continental margin. This conflict between the two was an enduring dynamic of Eurasian history, and is fundamentally born of an ecological distinction between dry grasslands and fertile agricultural lands – the worlds of the steppe and the sown – and the different human lifestyles they support. But it was the landscape of the continent that shaped and channelled these migrations and invasions along the same courses time after time.
DISPLACED PEOPLES
In the same way that the Silk Road passed through narrow corridors, valleys and mountain passes, the landscape provided convenient passageways for armed raiders to cross into the lands of civilisation. If these channels facilitated trade along the overland routes, they also made the settled societies around the Eurasian rim vulnerable to raids and conquest.
India was largely protected by the great barrier of the Himalayas, but the narrow Khyber Pass through the Hindu Kush provided an entry point for invaders. China, as we saw earlier, also generally benefited from natural barriers, but its central plains were open to nomad incursions from the steppes to the north, and from the west through the Dzungarian Gate, which leads invaders along the Gansu Corridor into the heartlands of China.51
The Great Wall was built to defend China against the influx of nomads from the steppes. After unification, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty fortified this northern frontier from 221 BC,52 and the walls were extended by the Han between 200 BC and AD 200 to guard the stretch of the Silk Road that passed along the Gansu Corridor to the Tarim Basin. However, much of the most impressive remnants of the wall date to the construction during the Ming dynasty from the mid fourteenth century. On the face of it, the Great Wall serves as a demarcation line between two elementally different lifestyles and cultures – the nomadic and the settled, the barbarians and the civilised. But in a deeper sense, these fortifications were built along the fundamental ecological boundary between the wet, fertile lands supportive of agriculture and the dry, harsh steppes in the heart of the continent, where only pastoralists could survive. Nonetheless, China was repeatedly invaded by steppe peoples, often entering through the Dzungarian mountain pass and along the Gansu Corridor. Just as the Khyber Pass provided a point of entry into India for nomadic raiders, China was also attacked along the route of the Silk Road. The passageways of trade also facilitated invasion.
On Eurasia’s western edge, Europe is vulnerable to incursions and invasions along a few major low-lying routes and highland passes that provide access to nomads from the steppes. From the western steppes, one route passes south of the Caucasus and Black Sea along Anatolia; another heads north of the Black Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, and then either north between these mountains and the Pripet Marshes, or south following the Danube Valley, both ways taking invaders into the heart of the Northern European plains.53 The Huns that challenged the Roman Empire from the fourth century AD, the Bulgars migrating into the Balkans in the seventh century, the Magyars entering the Hungarian plains in the ninth, and the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, all originally approached Europe from the steppes along these corridors.54
If the clashes between nomadic tribes and settled societies reflected the lifestyle supported by their respective habitats, the natural world and distribution of the different ecosystems also dictated the steppe nomads’ course of action after they had invaded the agrarian lands.
The formidable threat presented by the horse peoples was largely attributable to their mobility. Unlike the slow-moving armies of the settled civilisations, nomads were able to operate swiftly over vast distances. But the steppe raiders were bound by a fundamental ecological constraint. Their military prowess depended on being able to field great numbers of fast-moving mounted warriors, but their horses needed to be fed. This was simple in their natural habitat of the vast grasslands of the steppes, but as soon as the invaders penetrated too far into the agricultural lands around the Eurasian rim they struggled to nourish their mounts. Irrigated farmland yields plenty of grain from a small area for feeding people, but it is not effective as pasture for supporting great numbers of horses.
This constraint imposed by Nature reveals that the arable and pastoral lifestyles are intrinsically incompatible, and so after enjoying the spoils of victory the invaders from the steppes were either forced to withdraw back to their expansive natural pastures, or fundamentally change their ways and assimilate into the settled society.55 It should not surprise us, therefore, that the Huns, who invaded the very heart of Europe in the mid fifth century AD, chose as their centre of operations the Hungarian Plains – an ecological borderland between steppe and agricultural fields, and the westernmost pocket of the steppe grasslands.56
Others abandoned their nomad ways. The Ottoman Turks were originally pushed out of the steppes and into Anatolia in the thirteenth century by the Mongol expansion of Genghis Khan. Here they established themselves by adopting a European style of warfare relying on fortifications, and formed slave armies of captured Christian boys who were forced to convert to Islam, the famous Janissaries.57 By the end of the thirteenth century the Ottomans had become a major threat to the states of Christendom, and in 1453 they captured Constantinople and brought to an end the Byzantine Empire.58
Nomadic horsemen riding out of the steppes were the cause of two of the most defining moments of world history: the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the conquest of Asia by the Mongols.
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
We saw earlier how by the first century AD the Roman Empire had expanded around the rim of the Mediterranean, stopping at the natural borders defined by the deserts of North Africa and the mountain ranges and large rivers in Europe. By AD 300, however, the full length of the empire’s north-eastern border along the Rhine and Danube rivers was under pressure from the growing population of Germanic tribes occupying the wilds beyond. The situation worsened a few decades later with a series of violent incursions and forced migrations triggered by a horse people emerging from the steppes that pushed these tribes over Rome’s borders. These horse people are widely believed to be the same confederation of nomadic tribes which on the eastern limit of the steppes belt had been challenging China since the third century BC:59 the Xiongnu. When they a
ppeared in the west, they came to be known as the Huns.60
The Huns now moved westwards across the steppe belt, in all likelihood seeking better pasture during a period of regional climate change – we have evidence of a cooling in the Northern Hemisphere at that time that caused droughts in the steppes and would have diminished grass resources for feeding their flocks and horses.61 The Huns reached the Don river by the 370s AD,62 in the process displacing other nomad groups who in turn drove settled villagers off their lands in Eastern Europe.
Huge numbers of these refugees arrived at the frontier of the Western Roman Empire along the Rhine and Danube rivers, and before long tribe after tribe began to pour into Roman territory – Burgundians, Lombards, Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Alans.63
By the end of the fourth century, after driving a succession of tribes in front of them like a great bow wave of peoples fleeing out of the way, the Huns themselves arrived at the borderlands of the Roman Empire. They set about conquering the tribes living north of the Danube before turning on the Eastern Roman Empire, which had been spared much of the earlier tribal migrations and invasions. Led by the fearsome Attila from 434, the Huns ravaged Greece and the Balkans in successive campaigns, and reached the walls of Constantinople itself. They were stopped by the city’s formidable fortifications, but nonetheless were able to exact huge tributes from the Empire.
Emboldened by these successes in the east, Attila now turned his aggressions to the Western Roman Empire. Advancing along the Danube and Rhine, sacking city after city along the way, he invaded Roman Gaul (modern France) in 451, before being beaten in battle by an alliance of the same tribes and horse peoples who had been originally displaced by the Huns’ emergence from the steppes. But Attila returned the following year to devastate the plains of northern Italy, and forced the emperor to agree terms to stop the Huns from marching on Rome. Attila died two years later and the Hun Empire dissolved shortly afterwards but they had already set in motion the wheels for the destruction of the Western Roman Empire.64
And it wasn’t just the Romans who felt the brunt of these displaced peoples. Persia too experienced an onslaught of nomadic tribes spilling over the Caucasus and sacking the cities of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.65 At the very end of the fourth century the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia, facing a common enemy, put aside their long-running enmity to work together in the construction and garrisoning of a huge fortified wall. Running for around 200 kilometres from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, the wall was fronted by a 4.5-metre-deep ditch and studded with 30 forts along its length, manned by 30,000 troops. This Persian wall is second only to the Great Wall of China as the longest defensive barrier ever constructed, and was built for exactly the same purpose: to defend the boundary between settled civilisation and the barbarian wilderness.66
But for the Western Roman Empire it was already too late. The frontier along the Rhine and Danube had become overwhelmed, and wave after wave of migrating tribes crashed through the defences. The Visigoths marched down through the Italian peninsula and in 410 sacked the city of Rome itself.67 The Vandals, another tribe that had been displaced by the Huns, advanced though Central Europe, crossed the Iberian Peninsula and invaded Roman North Africa to seize in 439 the city of Carthage and the surrounding regions that had supplied grain to the Western Empire. Their conquests also included Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and in 455 the Vandals too sacked Rome. By 476, the centralised control of the Western Roman Empire had effectively dissolved, its former territories now divided into kingdoms ruled by the Germanic tribes that had flooded across the imperial frontiers from the east – the Franks in France and Germany, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Ostrogoths in Italy. Through the Middle Ages these kingdoms developed into the nations of modern Europe.
The Western Roman Empire had been destroyed by the ‘great migration’ of settled tribes and pastoralists from the steppes. Once again, it is fundamental planetary causes that explain this turning point in history. Ultimately, the fall of Rome was due to the ecological distinction between the arid grasslands of the Eurasian steppes that sustain horse-riding pastoral nomads and the wetter lands around the rim that supported the settled agriculture of the empire, and a climate shift within the steppes that triggered these waves of displaced peoples.
PAX MONGOLICA
In the thirteenth century, horse people from the steppes again changed the course of history across Eurasia. The Mongols emerged from the grasslands and in just twenty-five years they succeeded in conquering more territory than Rome had annexed in four centuries.68 The Mongol Empire not only united the tribes of the vast Eurasian steppe, but also included China, Russia and much of South West Asia, making it the largest land empire the world has ever known.69 The leader who instigated this spectacular campaign was the son of a prominent tribal chief in eastern Mongolia, born with the name Temüjin (perhaps meaning blacksmith). But it is his adopted title by which he has become (in)famous: the ‘fierce ruler’ – Genghis Khan.70
Genghis Khan belonged to just one of many nomadic tribes herding sheep on the northern fringe of China, but by 1206 he had unified the surrounding tribes and become master of the Mongolian steppes.71 With his power base consolidated, his hordes of mounted raiders now thundered out of the steppes to attack the civilisations around the rim of Eurasia. They invaded northern China in 121172 and then swept through Central Asia.73 Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his successors proved just as successful in their military expansion.74 The Mongol conquest continued across the Middle East before the tribesmen headed up through the Caucasus to southern Russia and into Eastern Europe.75
Here they advanced into Poland and the plains of Hungary, reaching the outskirts of Vienna76 and spreading panic throughout Christendom.77 But Europe was spared by a fateful twist of history. The Great Khan at that time, Genghis’ son and successor Ogodei, died suddenly, and the Mongol leaders withdrew to their capital in Karakorum to select their next supreme ruler. In the end, the khans did not attempt to continue their conquest towards the Atlantic – the Mongolian empire effectively ended at the western terminus of the steppe belt.78 Instead they turned east again, conquering China in its entirety and establishing themselves as the Yuan dynasty.79 Its first emperor, Kublai Khan, ruled from Shangdu – spelled as Xanadu by Coleridge in his famous poem – before moving his throne to Beijing.80 fn10
By the end of the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire stretched across the entire breadth of Asia, from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea. During this incredible expansion, the Mongols had been notoriously savage in their treatment of cities that refused to surrender immediately.82 They slaughtered all inhabitants – men, women, children, as well as livestock – leaving behind only empty streets and pyramids of skulls. This deliberately gruesome wielding of violence was designed to encourage the next cities in their path to capitulate without a struggle – the horrifying reports of their savagery spread ahead faster than the advance of their armies. But the Mongols weren’t just the fearsome hordes of ferocious warriors of the popular conception. Once resistance had been subdued, captured towns and cities were often rebuilt under the Mongols’ careful stewardship.83 The khans were also remarkably tolerant of the different peoples they ruled over, permitting cultural and religious freedom.84 After the initial campaign of shock and awe, the Mongols were able to win over hearts and minds.
Moreover, when the initial fury and violence of conquest had passed, the unification of Asia produced an era of booming trade across the breadth of the continent. This has come to be known as the ‘Pax Mongolica’ – echoing the Pax Romana, the period of stability and prosperity around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire a millennium earlier. For around a century from 1260, the Mongol khanates ensured the secure passage of merchants across Asia, and their skills in administration and savviness in keeping taxes low all combined to foster commerce.85 In contrast to the smash-and-grab tactics of earlier nomad invaders who relied on plundered loot or tributes extorted from the agrarian civ
ilisations, the khans appreciated that they could profit far more from trading than from raiding. Commerce along the Silk Road flourished during this period, the caravans not only striding along the old desert routes of Central Asia but also turning further north to the Mongolian capital Karakorum and across the grassy steppes.86 The Mongols had accomplished the linking of east and west like no one before.
As a result, spices and other luxury goods poured into Europe.87 The blast furnace arrived in the west during the Pax Mongolica, and the Mongols also introduced Chinese gunpowder to Europeans,88 changing for ever the nature of warfare. But the unification of Asia and the ease of movement across the continent had another profound ramification for history. Something else far more destructive also entered the bloodstream flowing along the communication arteries across Eurasia: disease.
The Black Death emerged from the steppes and surged across this connected world in the mid fourteenth century. Bubonic plague reached China by 1345 and Constantinople in 1347. From there it travelled to Genoa and Venice aboard merchant ships,89 and had spread to Northern Europe by the following summer. People already weakened by poor nutrition due to a series of harvest failures – the arrival of the plague coincided with the beginning of the first cold spike of the Little Ice Age90 – quickly succumbed to the disease. Within just five years the Black Death had killed at least a third of the European and Chinese populations,91 and also devastated the Middle East and North Africa. Around 25 million people died in Europe alone.92
The plague hit the Mongol khanates just as hard, their grip on power already weakened by internal rivalries. In China, the Yuan dynasty was overthrown by the Ming in 1368, and across Eurasia the vast Mongol Empire again splintered into many states without political or economic unity. The steppes became once more a mosaic of jostling nomadic tribes, and the highway between East and West crumbled. But in Western Europe, the aftermath of the Black Death brought some beneficial outcomes. The severe depopulation meant that many lords had lost the tenants on their land, and so were forced to accept lower rents and a more mobile peasant workforce. The shortage of labour also meant that craftsmen and agricultural workers could demand higher wages. This relaxed the serfdom under the feudal system and improved social mobility in Western Europe where the guilds in the more populous, mercantile towns already had considerable sway.fn11 The disruption of the Black Death, which had emerged from the steppes and spread with the help of the trade infrastructure maintained by the Mongols, shook the foundations of feudalism and helped create the beginnings of a different and more mobile society.93
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