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THE EMPIRE OF THE STEPPES A History of Central Asia RENG GROUSSET Translated from the French by Naomi Walford RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, New Jersey Copyright @ 1970 By Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77-108-759 SBN: 8135-0827-1 Manufactured in the United States of America By Quinn & Boden Company, Inc. Foreword Attila and the Huns, Jenghiz Khan and the Mongols, Tamerlane and the Golden Horde-these almost legendary names are familiar to the educated layman. Unquestionably, he has also read of the Hungarians, and the Bulgars, and the Ottoman Turks. If he has an interest in ancient history, he may have an acquaintance with the Cimmerians, the Sc~thians,e ven the Sarmatians. He may have heard also of the Avars and the Khazars. But it is improbable that he will know of the Onogors, Kutrigurs, and Utrigurs-Bulgar tribes to be encountered in the steppes of southern Russia-or the Pechenegs, Cumans, and Uzes, the last-named related to the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks. These were all nomads, peoples of the vast steppes of Asia and Russia, and a major force in history. Their historical significance lies not so much in the empires they established, empires which in most instances and certainly in the steppes proved ephemeral. Rather, it was the pressures of their movements eastward and westward, brought to bear on China, Persia, India, and Europe, which substantially affected the historical development of these lands. The early history of the steppe nomads is shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity which lifts somewhat only after their contact with cultures possessing written histories. But even when in- formation about them becomes relatively more plentiful, linguistic complexities make its interpretation extremely difficult. Thus, while the number of specialized monographs and technical studies devoted to them is impressive, general works embracing the many disciplines involved, or syntheses on a grand scale encompassing the sprawling history of these peoples, are exceedingly scarce. Among these very few, Renk Grousset's monumental L'Empire des Steppes is uniquely great. Grousset's classic work was first published in 1939, and has since vi Foreword appeared in a number of reimpressions, with no significant re- visions. An appendix discussing publications between 1939 and 1951 on the art of the steppes was added to the 1952 edition, just before the author's death. Nevertheless, the main body of the text has retained its validity, and remains to this day the most engross- ing and vital general account of this immense subject. The present volume, the first edition in English, was translated by Naomi Walford from the French edition of 1952. Traian Stoianovich, Professor of History at Rutgers University, checked the translation and helped to establish uniformity in nomenclature and transliteration. The late James F. McRee, Jr., completed the final typographic editing of the text. The outdated appendix on the art of the steppes was dropped, and the copious annotation was brought into conformity with present-day academic usage. A large and comprehensive index was compiled and added, and nineteen maps were prepared expressly for this edition. Our aim throughout has been to make available an English-language edition useful to the general reader as well as to the specialist, but above all an edition which retains the majestic sweep and grandeur, as well as the overriding intellectual grasp, of Grousset's original masterwork. PETERC HARANIS Voorhees Professor of History Rutgers University Preface Attila, Jenghiz Khan, Tamerlane: their names are in everyone's memory. Accounts of them written by western chroniclers and by Chinese or Persian annalists have served to spread their repute. The great barbarians irrupt into areas of developed historical civilizations and suddenly, within a few years, reduce the Roman, Iranian, or Chinese world to a heap of ruins. Their arrival, motives, and disappearance seem inexplicable, so much so that historians today come near to adopting the verdict of the writers of old, who saw in them the scourge of the Lord, sent for the chastisement of ancient civilizations. Yet never were men more sons of the earth than these, more the natural product of their environment; but their motivations and patterns of behavior acquire clarity as we come to understand their way of life. These stunted, stocky bodies-invincible, since they could survive such rigorous conditions-were formed by the steppes. The bitter winds of the high plateaus, the intense cold and torrid heat, carved those faces with their wrinkled eyes, high cheekbones, and sparse hair, and hardened those sinewy frames. The demands of a pastoral life, governed by seasonal migrations in search of pasture, defined their specific nomadism, and the exigencies of their nomadic economy determined their relations with sedentary peoples: relations consisting by turns of timid borrowings and bloodthirsty raids. The three or four great Asiatic nomads who burst upon us to rip up the web of history seem to us exceptional solely because of our own ignorance. For three who achieved the astounding feat of becoming conquerors of the world, how many Attilas and Jenghiz Khans have failed? Failed, that is, to do more than found limited empires comprising a quarter of Asia, from Siberia to the Yellow vii viii Preface River, from the Altai to Persia-an achievement which one must nevertheless acknowledge to have been of some magnitude. I would like to bring before your minds this great barbarian people, dominated by three mighty figures-Attila, Jenghiz Khan, Tamer- lane-as they march through ten centuries of history, from the borders of China to the frontiers of the West. The problem of the barbarians must be stated precisely. The classical world encountered many kinds of barbarians, that is, people so designated by their neighbors. The Celts were barbarians to the Romans for a long time, as were the Germans to Gaul, and the Slav world to Germania. Similarly, the land after- ward known as southern China long remained a barbarian country to the original Chinese of the Yellow River. But because geograph- ical conditions in all these regions imposed an agricultural way of life upon their inhabitants, they emerged from their backwardness to become increasingly identified with that life, so that by the second half of the Middle Ages almost the whole of Europe, Western Asia, Iran, the Indies, and China had attained the same stage of material civilization. Yet one important area escaped this process-the wide belt stretching across the northern part of Central Eurasia from the borders of Manchuria to Budapest. This is the steppe zone, pene- trated along its northern edges by the Siberian forest. Geograph- ical conditions here allowed only a few patches of cultivation, so that the inhabitants were forced to follow a pastoral, nomadic way of life, such as the rest of humanity had known thousands of years earlier at the end of the Neolithic age. Indeed, some of these tribes-those of the forest zone-remained at the cultural stage of the Magdalenian hunters. Thus the steppe and forest region remained a preserve of barbarism-not, be it understood, in the sense that the people living there were inferior as human beings to the rest of mankind, hut because local conditions perpetuated a way of life which elsewhere had long since passed away. The survival of these pastoral peoples into an era when the rest of Asia had arrived at an advanced agricultural stage was a very important factor in the drama of history. It involved a sort of time shift between neighboring peoples. Men of the second millennium coexisted with those of the twelfth century To pass from B.C. A.D. one group to the other, one had only to come down from Upper Mongolia to Peking, or to climb from the Kirghiz steppe to Preface ix Ispahan. The break was abrupt and fraught with perils. To the sedentary peoples of China, Iran, and Europe, the Hun, the Turkoman, and the Mongol were savages indeed, to be intimi- dated by a display of arms, amused by glass beads and by titles, and kept at a respectful distance from cultivated land. The atti- tude of the nomads may be easily imagined. The poor Turko- Mongol herdsmen who in years of drought ventured across the meager grazing of the steppe from one dried-up waterhole to another, to the very fringe of cultivation, at the gates of Pechili (Hopei) or Transoxiana, gazed thunderstruck at the miracle of sedentary civilization: luxuriant crops, villages crammed with grain, and the luxury of the towns. This miracle, or rather its secret-the patient toil required to maintain these human hives- was beyond the comprehension of the Hun. If he was fascinated, it was like the wolf-his totem-when in snowy weather it draws near to the farms and spies its prey within the wattled fence. He too had the age-old impulse to break in, plunder, and escape with his booty. The survival of a herding and hunting community beside a farming one-or, put differently, the development of increasingly prosperous agricultural communities within sight and contact of peoples still at the pastoral stage, and suffering the appalling famines inherent in steppe life in time of drought-presented not only a glaring economic contrast but a social contrast that was even crueler. To repeat, the problem of human geography became a social one. The attitudes of the sedentary man and the nomad toward each other recall the feelings of a capitalist society and a proletariat enclosed within a modern city. The farming communities that cultivated the good yellow soil of northern China, the gardens of Iran, or the rich black earth of Kiev were encircled by a belt of poor grazing land where terrible climatic conditions often prevailed, and where one year in every ten the watering places dried up, grass withered, and livestock perished, and with them the nomad himself. In these circumstances, the periodic thrusts of the nomads into the cultivated areas were a law of nature. It should be added that whether Turks or Mongols, they belonged to an intelligent, level- headed, practical people which, drilled by the harsh realities of its environment, was ever ready for the word of command. When the sedentary and often decadent communities yielded under his on- x Preface slaught, the nomad entered the city and, when the first few hours of massacre were over, without any great dficulty took the place of the rulers whom he had defeated. Unabashed, he seated himself upon the most time-honored and exalted thrones, as grand khan of China, king of Persia, emperor of India, or sultan of Rum, and adapted himself accordingly. In Peking he became half Chinese, in Ispahan or Rai half Persian. Was that the final outcome-a permanent reconciliation between the steppe and the town? By no means. The inexorable laws of human geography continued to operate. If the Sinicized or Iranized khan was not removed by some native reaction, whether slow or sudden, from the depths of the steppes new hordes, and hungry ones, would appear at his frontiers, and seeing in their upstart cousin merely another Tadzhik or Tabgatch-Persian or Chinese-repeat the adventure, to his disadvantage. How is it that the adventure was nearly always successful, and that the same rhythm recurred throughout thirteen centuries- that period between the Huns' entry into Loyang and the Manchus' into Peking? The answer is that the nomad, retarded though he was in material culture, always possessed a tremendous military ascendancy. He was the mounted archer. The technical arm, which gave him almost as great an advantage over sedentary man as artillery gave modern Europe over the rest of the world, was an incredibly mobile cavalry of expert bowmen. It is true that neither Chinese nor Iranians neglected this arm. From the third century on, the Chinese adapted their dress for riding. And B.C. Persia, from the times of the Parthians, knew the value of a shower of arrows delivered by a whirl of retreating horsemen. But Chi- nese, Iranian, Russian, Pole, or Hungarian could never equal the Mongol in this field. Trained from childhood to drive deer at a gallop over the vast expanses of the steppe, accustomed to patient stalking and to all the ruses of the hunter on which his food-that is, his life-depended, he was unbeatable. Not that he often con- fronted his enemy; on the contrary, having launched a surprise attack upon him, he would vanish, reappear, pursue him ardently without letting himself be caught, harry him, weary him, and at last bring him down exhausted, like driven game. The deceptive mobility and ubiquity of this cavalry, when handled by a Jebe or a Siibotai-Jenghiz Khan's two great generals-endowed this arm with a sort of corporate intelligence. Piano Carpini and Rubruck, Preface xi who watched it in action, were much struck by this decisive technical superiority. The phalanx and the legion passed away because they had been born of the political constitutions of Macedonia and Rome; they were the planned creation of organized states which, like all states, arose, lived, and disappeared. The mounted archer of the steppe reigned over Eurasia for thirteen centuries because he was the spontaneous creation of the soil itself: the offspring of hunger and want, the nomads' only means of survival during years of famine. When Jenghiz Khan succeeded in con- quering the world, he was able to do so because, as an orphan abandoned on the plain of Kerulen, he had already succeeded, with his young brother Jochi the Tiger, in bringing down enough game daily to escape death by starvation. The arrow of the mounted archer who dashed in, let fly, and fled was for antiquity and the Middle Ages a form of indirect fire, almost as effective and demoralizing in its time as that of the gunners of today. What put an end to this superiority? How is it that starting in the sixteenth century the nomad no longer had the sedentary peoples at his mercy? The reason was that the latter now met him with artillery, and thus overnight acquired an artificial ascendancy over him. An agelong position was reversed. The cannonades with which Ivan the Terrible scattered the last heirs of the Golden Horde, and with which the K'ang-hsi emperor of China frightened the Kalmucks, marked the end of a period of world history. For the first time, and for ever, military technique had changed camps and civilization became stronger than barbarism. Within a few hours the traditional superiority of the nomad faded into a seem- ingly unreal past, and the Kalmuck archers whom the romantic Czar Alexander I marshaled against Napoleon on the battlefields of 1807 were to appear as out of date as Magdalenian hunters. Yet only three centuries had passed since those archers ceased to be conquerors of the world.