Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (71 page)

It is thus no secret that the source of the conflict between the Mongols and the Ming Chinese was the deliberate Chinese prohibition of trade. It was openly discussed at the Chinese court, and after Chinese attempts at a military solution (destruction of the Mongols) failed, the prohibition was lifted and peace ensued.
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Similarly, the only real problem between the Junghars and the Ch’ing Dynasty
should
have been the latter’s periodic restriction or even prohibition of trade, because as soon as these constraints were removed peace was the result.
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While much good research has been done in recent years on Manchu-Chinese history, nearly everything that has been written about the broader picture of the Junghar-Ch’ing conflict and its supposed sources is misleading. The real source of the conflict was the Manchu-Chinese desire to expand further into Central Eurasia. Because the ruling Central Eurasians of the day, the Junghars, attempted to prevent the Manchu-Chinese from achieving that goal, the Ch’ing did everything they could to destroy them. Whenever they failed in their attempts at a military solution, they made peace with the Junghars and allowed trade. As soon as the Ch’ing had a chance to destroy the Junghars militarily, they immediately set out to do so, and the conflict resumed. The final result was Manchu-Chinese success, their massacre of most of the Junghars, and Ch’ing conquest of much of Central Eurasia, which had been protected by the Junghars. Despite all the historical detail, therefore, most of which concerns personal conflicts and masks the course of events and their causes, it was purely Manchu-Chinese expansionism that drove the destruction of the Junghars. There were no Junghar attacks against the Ch’ing, and no “greedy barbarian” traders were involved. Certainly the Junghars were not angels and fault can sometimes be found with them, but on the whole it is impossible to understand this crucial episode of Eurasian history in any other way.
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A peripheral state’s closure of its frontier cities to the steppe peoples was the exact equivalent of the closure of its interior market towns to its own agriculturalists: a deliberate attempt to ruin the economy in the region. The ability to do this gave the peripheral states the power to use trade in the frontier cities as a political-economic weapon, to force the Central Eurasians to negotiate for their air and water. As Yu notes, perhaps unintentionally (because in the same article he refers to the extensive commercial relationships among the frontier Chinese and the Hsiung-nu), “Although private trade between the Chinese and the Hsiung-nu probably had been going on along the border for a very long time, a large-scale
government-sponsored
market system did not come into existence until Wen-ti’s reign [180–157
BC
].”
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It must not be forgotten that the frontier areas of both empires were located deep within Central Eurasia, so the idea that Central Eurasians were invading when they wanted to trade there makes no sense unless one adopts a pro-Chinese bias. Further, the idea that the nomadic peoples unjustly attacked the border markets for no reason other than a love of violence, or the desire for booty, is not only unsupported by the sources, it is contradicted by them. Despite the anti-Hun prejudice of Thompson (like most other writers on the Huns), and his fundamental misunderstanding of Hun economy, society, and political motivations, he rightly notes that a primary concern of the Hun leaders was to ensure that the Roman market towns “open to the Huns … should continue to be so, that the terms prevailing there should be fair, and that access to these markets should be attended with no danger to the Huns.”
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In this connection it has been noted with some puzzlement that the Scythians, who are said by Herodotus to be fearsome warriors, are otherwise quite nice in the rest of his description. Similarly, the Mongols in the period after the First World War—who lived “under conditions of life that probably did not differ substantially from those of their ancestors of the thirteenth century”—were regarded by an American spy in Mongolia as an “unwarlike people.” In both cases, the scholars who have noted these discrepancies have drawn what might appear to be logical conclusions,
if
the received view of Central Eurasians were correct—namely, that the Scythians must have been a different people entirely,
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while the Mongols must have changed over time because of protracted peace, or possibly due to the influence of Buddhism or Chinese rule.
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The same is routinely said about the Tibetans after the period of the Tibetan Empire, among other peoples. Yet these descriptions of what are thought to be exceptional (peaceful) Central Eurasians are strikingly similar to the actual first-person accounts of two of the most fearsome warriors in Central Eurasian history, Attila the Hun and Tamerlane. Both are described in the accounts as intelligent, modest, sober, generous, just rulers.

A related topos about Central Eurasians is the supposed “moral and physical decline of the once-hardy nomads” when seduced by the luxuries and easy life of peripheral cultures’ cities, because of their having forsaken “the hard life of the steppe, thus weakening their martial spirit, and leading to their being overthrown either by the local populace or by some other undiluted nomadic force.”
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Luxury-loving, lazy, dissolute Central Eurasians do not fit the received view of “real” Central Eurasians; something must have changed. Anthropologists and other scholars who have visited and studied Central Eurasian pastoral nomads in recent times have revealed that indeed, nomads did have a fairly easy life and were generally rather lazy. They also ate and dressed better than the peasants of the neighboring agricultural states. This is not really news. In premodern accounts of peripheral-state envoys who met with Central Eurasian pastoral nomads, it is remarked that the Central Eurasians would not dismount but preferred to sit comfortably on their horses to negotiate. Tacitus remarks about the ancient Germans, “When not engaged in warfare they spend a certain amount of time in hunting, but much more in idleness, thinking of nothing else but sleeping and eating.” They thus “show a strange inconsistency—at one and the same time loving indolence and hating peace.”
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Similarly, visitors in recent times comment on Central Eurasian nomads’ preference for riding even the short distance between two yurts in the same settlement, rather than walking. However, there is also no reason to go to the other extreme and regard the pastoral nomadic peoples of Central Eurasia at any time as especially weak, despite their socioeconomic vulnerabilities, or lazier and more indolent than humans in any other society, if given the chance.

Traditional historical accounts of Central Eurasians focus to a great extent on the personalities of the leaders and other characters in the stories related about them. They are full of the often emotional-sounding decisions of one or another leader—whether of a Central Eurasian state or a peripheral state is immaterial—to wage war against a neighbor. In our eyes, sufficient justification is often lacking. Because we know so much less about Central Eurasia than we do about the periphery, and most of what we do know is written by peripheral historians, the Central Eurasians are almost universally portrayed as acting without justification, impulsively, violently, greedily,
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and so forth, avoiding the balanced, careful, considered decisions made by the peripheral leaders to do, often, exactly the same thing. In general we simply do not know enough about the history and psychology of the Central Eurasians concerned or the background conditions that might have influenced them to be able to judge the rightness or wrongness of their actions. But when we do know enough, their actions usually are understandable, and justifiable as well. This is not to say they are always excusable, but only that there is no difference between Central Eurasian and peripheral states in this respect. The decision to go to war was often made by an individual leader, often for personal reasons, or simply in error.
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Though playing favorites is probably unavoidable—historians are human too—it should not distort the final picture to the extent that it no longer is a fair approximation of the truth. Yet this is what has happened in Central Eurasian history, where Central Eurasians are demonized regardless of whether they are aggressors or victims. When they appear very clearly not to be aggressive
barbarians,
the conclusion is drawn that they are therefore necessarily not Central Eurasians at all but some other people.

In connection with these misconceptions, there is also a pervasive myth that Central Eurasian peoples such as the Huns and Mongols attacked the innocent cultured peoples of the periphery unexpectedly and without provocation or reason. There are several problems here. The main fallacy is that Central Eurasians were unique in trying to expand their realms at the expense of their neighbors, who are treated as innocent, peace-loving victims. The unprovoked aggression of the Chinese, Persian, and Graeco-Roman conquerors, among others, is conveniently forgotten, and the Central Eurasians alone are guilty of following the natural human impetus to form states, which necessarily entailed the attempt to subjugate their neighbors. Historians’ obsession with state formation in Central Eurasia should not blind everyone to the fact that peripheral peoples formed states too, beginning in prehistoric times; state formation there also entailed subjugating the neighbors. There is no evidence that any empire was ever formed without violent conquest of the founding people’s neighbors, and plenty of evidence that dynastic founders everywhere eliminated their rivals at home in particularly unpleasant ways, so one wonders why the history of this sort of thing in Central Eurasia is the subject of so much puzzlement by scholars. Moreover, as noted above, there are extremely few, if any, verifiable accounts of completely unprovoked Central Eurasian attacks on
peripheral
powers.

Central Eurasians are also blamed for specific conflicts when they had already formed an empire and relations had already become hostile between them and a neighboring peripheral state. In such cases, the absence of source material on the cause of the conflict, and the usual bias of whatever historical sources do exist, rarely allow one to confidently establish the reasons for it. In most instances there simply are no sources at all relating to the early history of the Central Eurasian peoples in question and their contacts with the peripheral peoples, encouraging the continued belief in this myth. Yet where historical sources do preserve detailed records of such conflicts, even though they are written by non–Central Eurasians, they usually show that the Central Eurasians were defending themselves or retaliating for perfidy committed by their enemies, generally an earlier attack or outright invasion by the peripheral people. The Romans’ own historical sources recount over and over how the wars with the Central Eurasians (including the Germanic peoples) were caused by the Romans themselves, who hired Central Eurasians to attack the Romans’ enemies and then cheated them or otherwise mistreated them so grievously that they had no choice but to rebel. It is not that the Central Eurasians were never guilty of perfidy. The point is that it is impossible to establish historically that the Central Eurasians were uniquely or even usually guilty of such evils, nor perhaps were the peripheral peoples. Both sides were guilty of wanting to expand their domains.

None of this is intended to excuse either Central Eurasians or peripheral peoples from all the killing. Nevertheless, while both sides were responsible, it is impossible to simply accept the usual pro-peripheral viewpoint. There are no Hun sources that tell us the Hun side of the story, but the Romans’ own best witness, Priscus, plainly describes, in language that cannot be misunderstood, the repeated betrayals, attempted murder, and other Roman offenses against the Huns in the very short time covered by his first-person account of an official Roman diplomatic mission to the Hun royal court. The same is true for the history of most other Central Eurasian peoples right down to the partition and conquest of Central Eurasia by peripheral powers in early modern times. The reason for doubt about the usual pro-periphery view presented in the available historical sources is that when detailed source material is available—usually in the very same peripheral sources—it invariably reveals, often inadvertently, that the causes of the conflicts were complex, but that the peripheral empires were ultimately to blame due to their attempted military expansion into the steppe zone and the city-state region, and that the Central Eurasians were defending themselves or attempting to retake territory that had earlier been seized from them by the peripheral power in question.

The historical accounts of the northern Chinese frontier in the late T’ang period are full of the raids, attacks, predations, and so on of one or another group of people against the others, the victims usually being portrayed as innocent Chinese. But amid all their suffering, some details escape to reveal the other side of the picture.

It cannot be denied that Central Eurasian peoples often attacked each other, as well as the peripheral peoples, though as noted, the reasons are generally not those given. So too did the peripheral peoples often attack each other and the Central Eurasians. The Romans boasted about their victory over the Goths around Marcianopolis:
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