Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (69 page)

Moreover, if life on the steppe was so hard, and the people there were so poor, why should peasants from peripheral states want to defect to them? The reason is that most nomads might have been poor, but most peasants were much poorer
³⁴
and worked incalculably harder just to avoid starving to death. That much is clear not only from logic but from explicit statements in Chinese historical texts (paralleled by exactly the same kind of statements in sources on the Roman Empire). What some may find surprising is the identity of some of those defecting:

The early Chinese accounts of the Hsiung-nu, like later Greek accounts of the Huns, reveal that some of the peripheral peoples—especially those living in frontier areas—were fully aware of the fact that life in the nomad-ruled states was easier and freer than life in the peripheral agricultural states, where peasants were treated little better than slaves.
³⁶
Tacitus remarks on the relative freedom enjoyed by the Germans, and the desperateness of the agricultural population is well known to historians of the ancient West.

The Chinese dynastic histories are full of the same kind of comments. It is undoubtedly true that some historians from both realms intended to mask their own criticism of their imperial governments by putting it into the mouths of foreigners, but the fact that they consistently say the same kind of thing, and that the early texts which do exist in Central Eurasian languages—such as the Old Turkic inscriptions—also say the same thing, indicates the criticism was truthful. In short, the border defense theory is not supported by the sources.

The border garrisons were intended to support these goals and also to prevent Chinese from attacking innocent Hsiung-nu, to keep Chinese border officials from mistreating the local non-Chinese people in Chinese employ within the borders, and for other similar purposes. The only way to avoid losing population, power, and wealth to Central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at frontier cities, and attack the steppe peoples as often as necessary to destroy them or keep them away. Only thus could the conquered territory be held and the conquered people assimilated. Defense from Hsiung-nu raids was actually the least of the Chinese worries, as is detailed explicitly in an official Han Dynasty document discussing the northern frontier fortresses.
³⁸
The sources even note that the walls and frontier fortresses were of little or no use for that purpose when an actual attack did take place—that is, if their purpose had been to prevent Central Eurasian incursions, they failed whenever they did attack. If the Central Eurasians had really been as aggressive and dangerous as claimed, they would have constantly been invading and conquering. There would have been no Chinese Empire, no Persian Empire, no Roman Empire, but only Central Eurasian empires that included China, Persia, and Rome as constituent parts.

There is one additional piece of evidence. The Koguryo Kingdom of southern Manchuria and northern Korea built walls to try and keep the Chinese out. They did not work for the Koguryo for that purpose. The Chinese were not deterred by the walls. Only the all-out effort of the Koguryo army and its inspired generals managed to repulse the repeated invasions—all of them unprovoked and unjustified—by massive Sui and T’ang Chinese armies. The Chinese eventually succeeded in destroying the Koguryo Kingdom and obliterating the Koguryo people only because of internal political dissension and treachery within that kingdom. The uselessness of walls for defense and the explicit statements about their true purposes by the peoples who built them
³⁹
demolish yet another cornerstone of the Central Eurasian myth.

There is a pervasive belief that the Central Eurasian steppe peoples were a genuine military danger to the Chinese, Persian, or Roman empires—that is, by definition, to unified states. This myth is repeated over and over again in the official Chinese dynastic histories and, accordingly, in modern histories as well.
⁴⁰
Nevertheless, it is untrue. No Central Eurasian people ever actually invaded and conquered any of these massive, highly populous, advanced states except in periods of division or civil war, and rarely even then. In the Chinese case, the Central Eurasians were generally invited in by one or another Chinese faction in such periods, as Chinese histories themselves relate in some detail; the same is true of the best-known Roman case, that of the Goths and Huns. This is clearest in the most recent instances because there are more extensive sources, some of them in Central Eurasian languages, but it is also evident as one moves back in time.

For example, the Manchus were invited into China by the feeble, corrupt Ming Dynasty to quell a rebellion. They did as requested and took Peking from the rebels, but—so the histories claim—they were chosen as the new rulers by the local people. The latter detail may or may not be a fabrication, but it is certainly true that the Manchus had long been enemies of the Ming, and both sides had attacks, defeats, and massacres to their credit. Having been invited in and done what they had promised to do, the Manchus stayed in China, where they established a new, strong dynasty to replace the Ming.

Several centuries earlier the Mongols, under the brilliant leadership of Chinggis Khan, became famous for lightning-swift campaigns of conquest in the West. But Chinggis Khan was mainly interested in the Jurchen of the Chin Dynasty of North China, who had supported the Mongols’ enemies in Mongolia and had kept Chinggis and his people subservient to them. The Jurchen and their steppe allies were the real danger to the Mongols. Yet despite the Mongols’ famed speed, it took many years for them to subdue the Jurchen in Northern China and Manchuria. It was only much later, decades after the death of Chinggis, that the Mongols finally established firm control over the former Jurchen territory and decided to subdue the Sung Dynasty—which, incredibly, had continued attacking the Mongols and mistreating their envoys.

Still earlier, the Uighur Turks entered China proper (i.e., areas that had been Chinese for hundreds of years) in 757 only after they had been invited in to quell the An Lu-shan Rebellion. Their destruction there—notably the repeated sack of the eastern capital, Loyang—was specifically authorized by the financially strapped T’ang court as a reward or payment to the Uighurs for their services.
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All other recorded incidents of Uighur destruction within China appear to be in repayment for treaty breaking, deception, diplomatic affronts, and insults by the T’ang.
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The sources for the T’ang period, and modern histories as well, repeat that the nomads were dangerous and China needed to keep them at bay.
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It has been argued that T’ang China’s aggression against its neighbors was justified because they were dangerous, and the institutional changes that aided in Chinese expansion and retention of conquered territory were therefore defensive in nature:

In fact, the newly created “institutional framework” referred to—a military governorship system that was strikingly similar to the Byzantine
theme
system—was (in the T’ang case) designed to hold conquered foreign territory and use it as a base for further invasions into neighboring lands. It was from the outset
strictly offensive
in nature, and the appointment mainly of submitted Central Eurasians as military governors was due not only to their skill at war and Chinese fear of them but also to their relative loyalty compared to ethnic Chinese.
⁴⁵

The truth is that T’ang China was the dangerous “loose cannon.” Chinese sources revel in proclaiming the devastation inflicted upon the Central Eurasians by T’ang heroes and their armies. The early T’ang invaded, defeated, and subjugated all of the peoples around them at one time or another except for the Tibetans, who only barely managed to repel the T’ang at its height. The dynasty’s armies expanded even more deeply into Central Eurasia than the Ch’in and Han dynasties had, with greater negative consequences. The Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese could and frequently did invade and defeat the Central Eurasian states, even when they were strong and united, and incorporated the lands and peoples they conquered into their empires.
⁴⁶
It took the unified Mongols, at the height of their military power, nineteen years (1215–1234) to conquer the Chin Dynasty. It was an additional
forty-five years
before the Sung Dynasty was finally overthrown in 1279 by Khubilai Khan. This is hardly what one would call a lightning invasion and conquest. The complex conditions before, during, and after the wars that resulted in the eventual Mongol victory cannot be ignored. The sources unambiguously record that the Mongols repeatedly sought to secure peaceful relations and trade without any war at all. The wrong idea that “the Mongols’ goal was to defeat any nation or fortified city foolish enough to resist them, but not to occupy and govern it” presents the Mongols, once again, as wild barbarian raiders.
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The picture is unsustainable in the face of the sources, which emphasize the Mongols’ overriding interest in trade and taxation—peacefully, if possible—from the beginning to the end of their period of domination.

The territory of Central Eurasia continued to shrink throughout history from the middle of the first millennium
BC
down to its almost complete disappearance in the early modern period. Even strong Central Eurasian states could be, and were, defeated by strong peripheral states, as is clear from the history of the Ch’in and Han dynasties, and again the early T’ang Dynasty; even relatively weak peripheral states, such as the post–Han period Chin Dynasty and the late Western Roman Empire, were often able to defeat powerful Central Eurasian states. By contrast, despite the occasional successful Central Eurasian raid or capture of part of the periphery, a unified, strong Central Eurasian state never conquered a unified, strong peripheral state.

The idea of the Central Eurasian pastoral nomads as natural warriors, hard, tough, fearless, and virtually unconquerable, requires the existence—which is present by implication in all histories of Central Eurasia—of soft, weak, fearful peripheral-state peasant soldiers. Yet surely no historian of the Romans would argue that the Roman peasant, who was also the Roman soldier, was weak and unable to bear hardship. The Chinese soldiers of Ch’in Shih Huang-ti and Wu-ti, who conquered enormous empires for their rulers, were no weaklings either. Roman and Chinese peasants formed the rank-and-file troops that fought the successful battles of those huge empires, including the many battles in which the peripheral armies were victorious over Central Eurasian armies. The peasants of traditional agricultural societies in Eurasia worked like slaves and had to survive on very little, as already noted. As a result, they were strong indeed and inured to hardship, despite their smaller size and shorter lives. An armed, fully trained soldier of one of the peripheral empires of Eurasia was to be feared as much or more than a Central Eurasian steppe nomad. Certainly the nomads were tough in war, and learned skills useful in steppe warfare (mainly archery and riding) early in life. They celebrated their martial prowess, praised their war heroes, and attempted to frighten peripheral peoples with reports of their ferocity. But the descriptions written by travelers who personally met Central Eurasian people, from Herodotus on, over and over emphasize the ordinariness and unwarlikeness of actual Central Eurasians compared to their scary reputations. The facts, and especially the long-term history, do not match the stories: the Central Eurasians won some battles but eventually lost the war. On the whole, the peripheral peoples were actually much more powerful, dangerous, ruthless, and cruel than the Central Eurasians ever dreamed of being.

By comparison with the peripheral agricultural empires, Central Eurasian states ruled by pastoral nomads had several critical weaknesses.
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There were few nomads spread out over a vast area, and they could not store up the products of their animal husbandry for a bad year when the animals died, so they lived at the mercy of the weather even more than peasants did. The cities under nomad-state control were not located within the steppe zone itself, with a few rare exceptions, and in any case the pastoral nomads could not have kept vast herds of animals inside city walls when attacked.
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That left the nomads extremely vulnerable to attack by any determined peripheral zone foe—who, when victorious, typically took hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle as booty, leaving the Central Eurasian owners who escaped on horseback to face death by starvation.