Table Of ContentN
omadic
E
mpires
F M
rom ongolia
D
to the anube
N
omadic
E
mpires
G C
erard haliand
Translated from the French by
A.M. Berrett
0
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2003053340
ISBN: 0-7658-0204-X
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chaliand, Gerard, 1934-
[Empires nomades de la Mongolie au Danube. English]
Nomadic empires : from Mongolia to the Danube I Gerard Chaliand;
translated from the French by A.M. Berrett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7658-0204-X (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Asia, Central—History. 2. Nomads—Asia, Central—History. 3.
Eurasia—History. I. Title.
DS329.4.C4813 2003
958.01—dc21
2003053340
To the memory of my friend Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
with whom I did my apprenticeship in Guinea-Bissau
I say to you with confidence, if your peasants, I will not say
Kings and knights, were willing to go as do the Kings of the
Tartars and to be content with the same kind of food, they
could take possession of the whole world.
—William of RUBRUCK
(Franciscan emissary from the French king Louis IX
to the Mongols, 13th century)
“The Journey of William of Rubruck,”
in The Mongol Mission
Sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease.
They are sunk in well-being and luxury. They have entrusted
the defence of their property and their lives to the governor
and ruler who rules them, and to the militia which has the
task of guarding them...
The Bedouins, on the other hand, live apart from the
community. They are alone in the country and remote from
militias. They have no walls or gates. Therefore, they provide
their own defence and do not entrust it to, or rely upon
others for it. They always carry weapons. They watch care
fully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only when
they are together in company or when they are in the saddle.
They pay attention to the most distant barking...
Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and
courage their nature.
—Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah
...there are two ways in which wars come about. Sometimes
they are due to the ambition of princes or of republics which
are seeking to set up an empire; under which head fall the
wars waged by Alexander the Great and those waged by the
Romans, and those which are continually being waged by
this power and that. Such wars are dangerous, but they do
not entirely remove the inhabitants of the country invaded;
for the victor is content provided its people become subject to
his obedience, often lets them keep their own laws, and
always leaves them their houses and their chattels. The other
way in which war is brought about is when a whole people
with all its families leaves a place, driven thence either by
famine or by war, and sets out to look for a new home and a
new country in which to live. In this case it does not, as in the
previous case, merely govern there, but it takes possession of
every single thing, and expels or kills the old inhabitants.
This is war of the most cruel and terrifying kind...
Peoples such as these quit their own lands when con
strained to do so by necessity, as had been said above; and
the necessity is due either to famine or to a war or to hard
ships undergone in their own country; for in such a case they
are constrained to go in search of new lands. And such
peoples when they are very numerous and then make an
incursion into the lands of others, kill the inhabitants, seize
their goods, and establish a new kingdom under a new
name...
Peoples, therefore, who have been driven out by sheer
necessity, are very formidable, and unless confronted by
good armies, can never be held back...
The larger migrations, involving whole peoples, have
come from Scythia, a country that is cold and poor. In it,
when the population becomes large, the land is not fertile
enough to sustain it, and they are forced to emigrate; for
there are many causes to drive them out and none to keep
them at home... ”
—Machiavelli, The Discourses, VIII, 2
Contents
Foreword xi
1. Introduction 1
The Impact of the Nomads 1
Nomads and Settled Peoples 7
The Nomadic Model: The Scythians 14
2. The Military Fronts of the Altaic Nomads 19
(Fourth Century B.c.-Twelfth Century a.d.)
The Chinese Front , 21
The Indo-Iranian Front 35
The Byzantine Front 39
The Russian Front 49
The Exception of Western Europe 53
3. The Apogee of the Nomads: Mongols and 59
Turkic-Speakers (Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries)
The Mongols 59
The Turkic-Speakers 75
The Eyewitnesses 86
4. The Revenge of the Sedentary Peoples 97
(Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)
Russia after the Mongols 97
China after the Mongols 102
Epilogue 104
Appendices 105
Periodization of Nomad Waves 105
Nomad Empires of High Asia 107
Sites of Waves of Invasions 108
Chronology 111
Annotated Bibliography 125
Index 131
