Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (22 page)

The Roman realm had actually expanded to imperial extent well over a century before it is generally considered to have become an empire under the successors of Julius Caesar (d. 44
BC
). By 100
BC
the Romans already ruled Italy, southern Gaul, Greece, Anatolia, and much of North Africa and were expanding into Spain as well. With the conquest of both Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, which were Celtic-speaking territories, Rome had already begun successfully expanding into Central Eurasia long before Caesar’s conquest of the rest of Gaul (by 56
BC
). Caesar even raided Britain in 55 and 54
BC
and attacked the Germans in Germania.
¹
His conquests were unprovoked, purely imperialistic expansion, in which resistance—for example, that of the Veneti in northwestern Gaul—was “crushed ferociously, their leaders executed and the population sold into slavery.”
²

After Julius Caesar, the Romans continued their attempts to subjugate the Germanic peoples on their northern and eastern borders. The nearer parts of Germania were subjugated, rebelled against the Romans, and were resubjugated repeatedly over the remaining centuries of the Western Roman Empire. However, some of the Germanic peoples living along the border were taken in as
foederati
‘federates’ and served as auxiliaries on Roman campaigns against other Germanic peoples. In the process they were partly assimilated to Roman culture and eventually became more dedicated to the survival of the Roman Empire than the increasingly decadent Romans themselves.

The first-century
AD
Germania
by the Roman historian Tacitus gives the earliest detailed description of the Germanic peoples. In his account of their culture, he pays special attention to the comitatus and notes the existence of all of its essential elements: a large group of warriors permanently attached to a lord, who were supposed to die with him, so that leaving a battle alive after their chief had fallen resulted in permanent loss of honor and the status of, essentially, an outcast. Tacitus also notes the existence of “grades of rank” in the comitatus and the fact that maintaining one was extremely expensive: the members were “always making demands of their chief, asking for a coveted war-horse or a spear stained with the blood of a defeated enemy.”
³

The long-lasting importance of the comitatus among the Germanic peoples is notable. In addition to its presence in early Francia, it still existed in Visigothic Spain as late as the eighth century and continued to be practiced in Scandinavia for several centuries more. One reason that some early medieval chronicle writers believed that the Franks were related to the Turks, and give historical and etymological explanations for this belief,
⁴
is very likely that Franks had met Turks and the two peoples understood that their cultures were similar in some respects.
⁵

The Frankish king Childeric I (d. 481–482), the father of Clovis, was the son of Merovech (d. 456/457), the posthumously designated founder of the Merovingian Dynasty who fought with the Roman general Aetius against Attila the Hun in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields. His tomb is similar to those of the eastern Germanic kings of the Danube region. He was buried with sumptuous, golden grave goods in a barrow chamber under a tumulus measuring twenty by forty meters.
⁶
At the perimeter of the tumulus are several burials of horses and men. Yet it is fairly certain that the Franks had been living along the northern border of the Roman Empire, serving as foederati, for a long time, and Childeric himself was buried with the symbol of a Roman governor of Belgium. The basic features of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, including the comitatus, were thus found among the early Franks, but they were obviously not adopted from the Romans. So where did they come from?

The account of Tacitus and other early records reveal very clearly that the early Germanic peoples, including the ancestors of the Franks, belonged to the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which they had maintained from Proto-Indo-European times, just as the Alans and other Central Asian Iranians of the time had done. This signifies in turn that ancient Germania was culturally a part of Central Eurasia and had been so ever since the Germanic migration there more than a millennium earlier.
⁷

The Western Steppe

By the early first century
AD
, the Alans,
⁸
an Iranian-speaking people related to the Sarmatians and Scythians, had occupied the crucial steppe lands along the Don to the northeast of the Sea of Azov and, according to Josephus (
AD
37–100), attacked and plundered Media from there. By the second century
AD
the Alans dominated the Pontic and North Caucasus regions and were the dominant people on the Western Steppe zone up to the southeastern Roman frontier.
⁹

The Romans attacked the remnant Sarmatians and the Alans from Dacia (approximately modern Romania), which the emperor Trajan (r.
AD
98–117) conquered with much brutality in
AD
107, garrisoned, and settled with Roman colonists. Of the Dacians, “Many were forced into slavery, some committed suicide, and the Romans killed many to set an example for the rest of the provinces to fall in line. Trajan killed 10,000 men just in his gladiatorial games.”
¹⁰

Captive Alans were moved deep into the imperial domains in Roman Gaul, as far as Brittany, where they served in the Roman armies. They remained ethnically distinct for centuries, their descendants maintaining some steppe-Iranian traditions well after their linguistic assimilation, and they are thought to have had a significant influence on medieval European folklore.
¹¹
Even fairly late into the Middle Ages, companies of mounted Alan archers are repeatedly noted for their exceptional effectiveness against all enemy forces.

In the second and third centuries
AD
, the Goths (Gothones), an East Germanic nation that in the time of Tacitus occupied the Baltic Sea around the Vistula River, expanded southward and eastward to the Black Sea. They thenceforth dominated at least the western part of the Pontic Steppe, though not as organized states but as independent groups, until the rise of Ermanaric, who created the Greutungi confederacy of Goths, who later came to be known as the Ostrogoths, the ‘Goths of the Rising Sun’ or ‘East Goths’. He did this in the time-honored state-building method, conquering and subjugating the neighboring peoples. His realm had become a powerful kingdom by
AD
370—
before
any attack by the Huns.

The Huns are first noted by Ptolemy in the second century. They lived in the eastern Pontic Steppe in Sarmatia, that is, east of the Sea of Azov and beyond the Don River. The next significant information about them concerns a war between the Huns and the Alans, which the Huns, under their leader Balamber, won. The Huns and the Alans then attacked the Ostrogoths, who occupied the steppe west of the Don River, and defeated them in turn.
¹²
In view of the earlier history of the Goths there, it seems probable that the Huns’ march against the Goths, and their invasion of the Roman Empire—evidently in pursuit of Goths and others who had not submitted to the Huns—was actually a direct consequence of Gothic attacks against the Huns by Ermanaric. Sarmatian, Alan, and Gothic power in the Western Steppe was broken by the Huns by 375. Large groups of Central Eurasians, mainly Goths, then approached the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire seeking asylum. Many of those defeated, along with numerous other peoples, submitted to the Hun leadership and joined them on their campaigns.
¹³

The Parthian Empire

Alexander the Great (356–323
BC
) had no heir
¹⁴
and left his vast conquests to his army. The generals divided the empire among themselves and established their own dynasties. In Persia, Seleucus I (r. 312–281
BC
), who under Alexander’s bidding had married Apame, the daughter of a Sogdian satrap, in 324
BC
, established the Seleucid Dynasty, which essentially restored the realm of the Persian Empire from Syria to the Jaxartes. In 238
BC
Parthia (present-day northeastern Iran and southern Turkmenistan) was invaded by the Parni, a people speaking a Northern Iranian dialect, led by Arsaces (r. ca. 247-ca. 217/214
BC
), who established the independent Arsacid Dynasty in Parthia.
¹⁵
Seleucid rule in Persia ended in 129
BC
when the Parthians defeated the Seleucids and killed Antiochus VII in battle. Just at that point in time the Parthians were suffering from an invasion of Sakas who may have been fleeing from the Tokharians (TóΧαροı, Yüeh-chih).
¹⁶
The latter killed Ardawân (Artabanus II or I, ca. 128–124/123
BC
) in battle and conquered Bactria. The Parthians recovered, however, and their empire was firmly established under Mithridates II (the Great, r. ca. 124/123–87
BC
).

The Parthians established an energetic though rather decentralized dynasty. They maintained many Central Eurasian Iranian customs, including military dependence on mounted archers—they are famous for the Parthian shot
¹⁷
—and oral epic poetry, which unfortunately has not survived. Despite occasional reverses in the perennial struggle with the Romans for control of the Near East, the Parthians generally succeeded in maintaining traditional Iranian control over most of Iraq as well as Iran during the four centuries of their existence until the reign of Ardawân (Artabanus V or IV, r. ca.
AD
213–224), who was killed by Ardaxšêr, founder of the Sasanid Dynasty.

The Tokharians and the Kushan Empire

In Central Asia, a remarkable sequence of events recorded in both Western and Eastern historical sources led to the creation of the Kushan Empire. Its beginnings lie ultimately in the first wave of the Indo-European migration, around 2000
BC
, when the Group A dialect speakers who became Proto-Tokharians arrived in the area of Kansu and dwelled west of Tun-huang in an area that included Lop Nor and the later Kroraina Kingdom. Eighteen centuries passed. In the third century
BC
, the Tokharian people—called Yüeh-chih,
¹⁸
that is, *Tok
^w
ar—still lived in the area.

When the Hsiung-nu were in their early, expansive phase in the early second century
BC
, the *Tok
^w
ar were the great power to their west and south. The Hsiung-nu defeated them conclusively in 176 or 175
BC
, drove them from their ancestral lands, and also subjugated the *Aśvin (Wu-sun)
¹⁹
and others in the vicinity.
²⁰
Some of the *Tok
^w
ar, known as the Lesser Yüeh-chih, fled south and took refuge among the Ch’iang people in the Nan Shan, but the main body of survivors, the Great Yüeh-chih, migrated to the west into Jungharia. It is not known if the ancestors of the speakers of the attested East Tokharian and West Tokharian languages had previously settled in the areas of Qocho and of Kucha and Karashahr, respectively (their later attested early medieval locations) or if they settled there at this time, during the Great Yüeh-chih migration. The * Tok
^w
ar drove the resident people, the Sakas, out of Jungharia,
²¹
but only a few years later they were themselves attacked and defeated by the *Aśvin. The *Tok
^w
ar then migrated west and south into Sogdiana, from which they attacked the Parthians and subjugated Bactria in 124 or 123
BC
. They gradually crossed the Oxus and settled in Bactria proper, where they established a strong kingdom later known as Tokhâristân,
²²
‘land of the Tokhar (*Tok
^w
ar)’.