Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (70 page)

Steppe zone Central Eurasians also had to be very careful not to fight many full-scale battles on their own (i.e., without infantry auxiliaries), because if they suffered a major defeat they did not have enough men to fill the ranks again. It was necessary for them to frighten their foes into submission and to use force only when necessary. This is known from historical accounts as early as those on the Scythians and Hsiung-nu and on down through the Mongol period. The suddenness of a nomadic army attack was designed for shock effect and was primarily psychological. Because such armies could not capture fortified cities, and large cities—which were always fortified—were the prize, how did they manage to capture the cities that resisted? They used infantry and siege engines, exactly as the peripheral peoples did. The problem was that as nomads they did not have such engines. That meant they could capture cities by force only in an all-out war in which they were able to mobilize their non-nomadic subjects to march on foot to the target city and attack it for them. Gone thereby was the possibility of genuine surprise. The “raid and destroy” construct is a myth. Moreover, it is well known in military history that infantry armies have always been stronger than mounted armies (whether of the nomadic type or not), when other factors were approximately equal. The guerrilla tactics of feinting and skirmishing are the classic means of resistance by a weaker people faced with a more powerful enemy within their territory.
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They were the nomads’ only defense against invading infantry armies, which they could not afford to attack head on.

Central Eurasians had good reason to fear the peripheral peoples, who time and again invaded and defeated them and seized substantial portions of their territory.
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As the Old Turkic inscriptions from the Eastern Steppe poignantly recall of the fate of the Türk people after the conquest of the First Türk Empire by the T’ang Dynasty of China, “Their lordly sons became slaves of the Chinese people, and their ladylike daughters became concubines.”
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The history of the Roman conquest of Gaul is a case in point. The Celtic Gauls were crushed, their territory was colonized by the Romans, and the surviving Celts eventually became Romans.
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This was simply Roman expansion into Gaulish territory. It was from a military or political point of view no different from the Romans’ expansion into the many other countries very far from Rome into which they expanded with their armies in the course of establishing their vast empire. But in one respect it was different: Gaul, which had formerly been typically Central Eurasian in culture, became Mediterraneanized and removed from the Central Eurasian culture zone, unlike most of Germania, which successfully resisted the Romans and did not become Mediterraneanized (or Europeanized) until the Middle Ages.

No part of the civilized periphery of Eurasia has ever been added permanently to the Central Eurasian cultural-economic zone. By contrast, the resistance by Central Eurasians against the attacks by the peripheral peoples took many forms over the centuries, but the end result was the same: the Central Eurasians lost.

As often in history, the true picture is in the middle somewhere between the two extremes. In this case, the extremes are the stereotypes of the violent, poor, half-starved, primitive Central Eurasians versus the gentle, rich, well-fed, enlightened Chinese, Persians, and Graeco-Romans. The stereotypes are based on many misconceptions, some of which have been noted above. One of the most important of them has been recognized to some extent by specialists in Central Eurasian history, but only partially, and its ramifications have not been understood. This is the idea that Central Eurasians were nomadic steppe warriors whose enemies were sedentary agriculturalists and urban peoples.

It has become well known among specialists that archaeology and historical research both show there were actually quite a few towns, and even a few cities, located in the steppe zone.
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The culture of the people in them, as well as the culture of the agriculturalists there, is not significantly different from that of the pastoralists. Therefore, it has been quite rightly concluded that the steppe zone empire builders had their own urban and agricultural resources and did not need to rob the people of the peripheral empires for food
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and other necessities, and indeed, there is no evidence that they did so.
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Though this is certainly a corrective to the usual received view, it still omits too much from a full description of known steppe nomad-ruled empires.

Central Eurasians were pastoralists, agriculturalists, and urbanites, and their empires included vast tracts of territory that were not pastoral land. Certainly the pastoralist component moved around a great deal to avoid exhausting the pastures. But the structure of all known Central Eurasian empires included all three socioeconomic elements. Because pastoral nomads are essentially just farmers of “crops on the hoof,”
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the socioeconomic structure of Central Eurasian empires was not significantly different from that of peripheral cultures, which had three main components: urban, rural-suburban (the farmers living in close proximity to cities or large towns, serving their needs to a large extent, and often partly engaged in nonagricultural economic pursuits as well), and rural (the farmers living somewhat further from cities or large towns). The one significant difference in Central Eurasia is that the ethnolinguistic identity of the urbanites and proximal farmers (the settled agriculturalists) was usually different from that of the distal farmers (who were pastoral nomads).
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The pastoralists were also naturally more mobile than the others, exactly the opposite of the distal agriculturalists of the periphery, who were the least mobile members of their society. Otherwise, the contrast between the sophisticated urban culture of the Central Eurasian cities (the urbanites) and the simpler rural culture (the agriculturalists and pastoralists) is identical to that between the sophisticated urban culture of the peripheral cities and the simpler rural culture of the peripheral agriculturalists (both proximal and distal). In other words, there was no fundamental distinction between the economic and political structure of the empires ruled by people belonging to pastoral nomadic ethnic groups on the one hand and empires ruled by people belonging to agricultural ethnic groups on the other.
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Historians have divorced the pastoralists from the other components in their states, creating the mythical “pure” nomad and at the same time the unexplained presence of cities and agriculturalists, as well as the completely mysterious existence of the Silk Road, which is generally treated as if it were a pipeline that passed from China to Rome without having anything to do with the intervening lands through which it passed—except that merchants are believed to have been robbed on a regular basis by the nomads. The three components of Central Eurasian states are actually noted as early as Herodotus (who, however, clearly did not understand what he described in this respect). The fact that the people living in the cities were usually not the same ethnolinguistically as the pastoral nomads does not change anything. What is important is that the steppe-nomad-ruled empires
always
included control—exercised as a light kind of suzerainty—over many cities. The Scythians had this kind of control over the cities on the Black Sea coast and other areas, most of the inhabitants of which were Greeks and Thracians. The Hsiung-nu had the same kind of suzerainty over the cities of the Silk Road and maintained it even in the presence of Han Dynasty armies and governors. And so on, through the Turkic, Mongol, and Junghar empires. Just as distal peripheral farmers living deep in the countryside—that is, far from cities—did not have or build cities by definition, it was rare that pastoral nomads built or personally occupied cities of their own. In the nomads’ case it is difficult to imagine how they would have managed to both live in cities and move their herds around in the steppe pasturelands. This accounts for why the nomads had so few cities
in the steppe zone.
But it was necessary for their empires to include cities, and they always did. In short, the urban component was inseparable from the rural component (or components) in Central Eurasian empires, exactly as the two were inseparable in the peripheral empires.

It seems to have been widely overlooked that the act of unilateral establishment of a border (invariably far beyond the previously established border), construction of fortifications to hold the new border (the unilaterally proclaimed “national territory” of the aggressor), and closing the border and cutting off trade relations with those outside it, are overt acts of war.
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It is impossible to understand them as anything else. Not only did Central Eurasians understand this, and act accordingly, but the peripheral states that were the aggressors understood it as well. Although their historical accounts rarely point this out openly, occasionally they do so, or the words of a dissident voice are preserved (usually in order to condemn him as a rebel, enemy sympathizer, or other bad person).

Central Eurasians were acutely aware of the danger to them from the peripheral states and instantly understood the latter’s belligerent intentions when walls were built in Central Eurasian territory, armies were moved to the frontier, trade relations were cut, and so forth—all acts of war. Whenever the peripheral states were not thus at war with the Central Eurasians, peace and prosperity ensued. But peace and prosperity were not the goals of empire builders. Their goals were uncontested, absolute power and the expansion of the territory and people under their rule to the maximum extent possible. When a Central Eurasian founded an empire, he too had the same goals, but they were temporary. A Central Eurasian empire was designed not only to establish secure boundaries and a stable internal political system—in other words, peace—but also to support and expand the local and international economy, by means of which prosperity was increased for everyone.

Central Eurasians’ insistence on trade relations with the peripheral-empire cities that were nearby, as well as their clear, careful policy toward cities anywhere even in wartime, shows how important cities and trade relations were to them. It also explains one of the main reasons for conflict along the frontier. The nomadic peoples needed to be able to trade directly, themselves, where they happened to be, exactly as the agriculturalists in the peripheral states needed to have access to market towns. Moreover, the normal state of affairs on the Chinese and Roman frontiers with Central Eurasia from at least the pre-Classical period onward was that the nomadic peoples traded with the Chinese or Romans in the market towns there. When peripheral states officially closed the frontier cities to the nomads, or made trading there practically impossible, and abused the nomads when they attempted to negotiate, the Central Eurasians saw these acts as intended to provoke war. They had little choice but to attack the perpetrators. Examples of this kind of deliberately created conflict occurred right down to the partition of Central Eurasia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Central Eurasians’ regular insistence on free trade at border markets, through the millennia, across the length and breadth of Central Eurasia, regardless of ethnolinguistic identity, is remarkable. The peripheral-state sources that tell us this are also full of anti–Central Eurasian xenophobia and strong anticommercial prejudice—not surprisingly, because their authors were almost exclusively from the landed aristocracy, not the merchant class—and at the same time they blame the Central Eurasians for the disruption of commerce and use that as an excuse for invading Central Eurasian territory. Modern historians have preferred the negative views about Central Eurasia in the peripheral-state sources.

Speaking about the conflict between the Ming Dynasty and the Mongols in the early sixteenth century, Perdue says, “Hard-liners regarded trade or negotiation with the irredeemably violent Mongols as impossible.”
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But a page later he notes, “In 1551 the [Ming] emperor prohibited all trade with the Mongols on pain of death,”
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and adds:

At that point, much debate ensued at the Ming court about the relative merits of trade versus war with the Mongols. “Only under the next emperor’s reign (Longqing, 1567–1572) could the Ming, in a brilliant stroke of frontier diplomacy, bring itself to negotiate peace on the frontier.”
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This genius insight was the realization that, after all those decades in which the Mongols repeatedly told the Chinese they needed to open their markets to them, “Altan Khan wanted peaceful trade relations; he raided only if tribute was refused.”
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After it was finally decided to allow trade once more, “Merchants flocked to the frontier to sell silk, fur, grain, and cooking pots to the Mongols; the government collected taxes on the trade and used the income to buy poor horses at high prices from the nomads.”
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The last disparaging comment is hardly to be believed, whatever its source; Perdue notes shortly before it, “The Ming had reinforced its walls and mainly needed horses from the Mongols for the mobility of the garrisons.”
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This can all be summed up as follows. The Chinese occupied large tracts of territory in Central Eurasia and attempted to impoverish the Central Eurasians by denying them access to their market towns. Coupled with the belligerent, aggressive stance of the Chinese toward the Central Eurasians, the result, not surprisingly, was war, which included Central Eurasian attacks on the Chinese. But the Central Eurasians did not want war, they wanted trade, and repeatedly sought peaceful trade relations with China. After the Chinese grew tired of the expense and suffering of war, they reopened trade relations with the Central Eurasians. Peace and prosperity resulted on both sides of the frontier.