Theme 5: Nomadic Empires

INTRODUCTION:
- The term nomadic empires can appear quite contradictory
- Nomads are arguably quintessential wanderers, organised in family assemblies with a
relatively undifferentiated economic life and rudimentary systems of political
organisations
- The term ‘empire’ carries with it the sense of a material location, a stability derived from
complex social and economic structures and the governance of an extensive territorial
dominion through an elaborative administrative system
- The juxtapositions on which these definitions are framed may be too narrowly and
ahistorically conceived
- They certainly collapse when we study some imperial formations constructed by
nomadic groups
Mongols of Central Asia:
- The Mongols of Central Asia established a transcontinental empire under the leadership
of Genghis Khan, straddling Europe and Asia during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries
- Relative to the agrarian based imperial formations in China, the neighbouring nomads of
Mongolia may have inhabited a humbler, less complex, social and economic world
- In the early decades of 13th century the great empires of the Euro-Asian continents
realised the dangers posed to them by a new political power in the steppes of Central
Asia: Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan:
- Genghis Khan had united the Mongol people
- Genghis Khan’s political vision went far beyond the creation of a confederacy of Mongol
tribes in the steppes of Central Asia: he had a mandate from God to rule the world
- His own lifetime was spent consolidating his hold over the Mongol tribes, leading and
directing campaigns into adjoining areas in north China, Transoxiana, Afghanistan,
eastern Iran and the Russian steppes, his descendants travelled further afield to fulfil
Genghis Khan’s vision and create the largest empire the world has ever seen
- It was in the spirit of Genghis Khan’s ideals that his grandson, Mongke (1251-60) warned
the French ruler Louis IX
- These were not empty threats and the 1236-41 campaigns of Batu, another grandson of
Genghis Khan , devastated Russian lands up to Moscow, seized Poland and Hungary
and camped outside Vienna

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND:

Introduction:
- The Mongols were a diverse body of people linked by similarities of languages to the
Tatars, Khitan and Manchus to the east and the Turkic tribes to the west
- Some of the Mongols were Pastoralists while others were hunter-gatherers
- They (pastoralists) nomadised in the steppes of Central Asia in a tract of land in the area
of the modern state of Mongolia
 - This is a majestic landscape with wide horizons, rolling plains, ringed by the
snow-capped Altai mountains to the west, the arid Gobi desert in the south and drained
by the Onon and Selenga rivers and myriad springs from the melting snows of the hills
in the north and the west
Hunter and Gatherers:
- The hunter-gatherers resided to the pastoralists in the Siberian forests
- They were humbler than the pastoralists
- They made a living from trade in furs of animals trapped in the summer months
- There were harsh long winters followed by brief, dry summers in this region
- Agriculture was possible in the pastoral regions during the short parts of the year but the
Mongols did not take to farming
- Neither the pastoral nor the hunting-gathering economies could sustain dense
population settlements and as a result the region possessed no cities
Lifestyle of the Mongols:
- The Mongols lived in tents, gers, and travelled with their herds from their winter to
summer pasture lands
Unity and Division among the Mongols:
- Ethnic and language ties united the Mongol people but the scarce resources meant that
their society was divided into patrilineal lineages
- The richer families were larger, possessed more animals and pasture lands
- These rich families therefore had many followers and were more influential in local
politics
- Periodic natural calamities – either unusually harsh, cold winters when game and stored
provisions ran out or drought which parched the grasslands – would force families to
forage further afield leading to conflict over pasturelands and predatory raids in search of
livestock.
- Groups of families would occasionally ally for offensive and defensive purposes around
richer and more powerful lineages but, barring the few exceptions,these confederacies
were usually small and short-lived.
- The size of Genghis Khan’s confederation of Mongol and Turkish tribes was perhaps
matched in size only by that which had been stitched together in the fifth century by Attila
(d. 453).

Genghis Khan’s Political System:

- Unlike Attila, however, Genghis Khan’s political system was far more durable and
survived its founder.
- It was stable enough to counter larger armies with superior equipment in China, Iran and
eastern Europe.
- And, as they established control over these regions,the Mongols administered complex
agrarian economies and urban settlements – sedentary societies – that were quite
distant from their own social experience and habitat.
- The scant resources of the steppe lands drove Mongols and other Central Asian nomads
to trade and barter with their sedentary neighbours in China.
- This was mutually beneficial to both parties
 - Commerce was not without its tensions,especially as the two groups unhesitatingly
applied military pressure to enhance profit.
- When the Mongol lineages allied they could force their Chinese neighbours to offer
better terms and trade ties were sometimes discarded in favour of outright plunder

HISTORY SOURCES:
- The steppe dwellers themselves usually produced no literature, so our knowledge of
nomadic societies comes mainly from chronicles, travelogues and documents produced
by city-based literateurs
- These authors often produced extremely ignorant and biassed reports of nomadic life
- The imperial success of the mongols however attracted many literati
- The most valuable research on the Mongols was perhaps done by Russian scholars
starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Tsarist regime consolidated its
control over Central Asia
- In the early 20th century after the extension of the soviet republics in the region, a new
Marxist historiography argued that the prevalent mode of production determined the
nature of social relations
- It placed Genghis Khan and the emerging Mongol Empire within a scale of human
evolution that was witnessing a transition from a tribal to a feudal mode of production
- The transcontinental span of the Mongol empire was also meant that the sources
available to scholars are written in a vast number of languages

THE CAREER OF GENGHIS KHAN:

Early life:
- Genghis Khan was born sometime around 1162 near the Onon river in the north of
present-day Mongolia.
- Named Temujin, he was the son of Yesugei, the chieftain of the Kiyat, a group of
families related to the Borjigid clan.
- His father was murdered at an early age and his mother, Oelun-eke, raised Temujin, his
brothers and step-brothers in great hardship.
- The following decade was full of reversals – Temujin was captured and enslaved and
soon after his marriage, his wife, Borte, was kidnapped, and he had to fight to recover
her.

Forming Alliances:

- During these years of hardship he also managed to make important friends.

- The young Boghurchu was his first ally and remained a trusted friend; Jamuqa, his
blood-brother (anda), was another.
- Temujin also restored old alliances with the ruler of the Kereyits, Tughril/Ong Khan, his
father’s oldblood-brother.
- Through the 1180s and 1190s, Temujin remained an ally of Ong Khan and used the alliance
 to defeat powerful adversaries like Jamuqa,his old friend who had become a hostile foe.
- It was after defeating him that Temujin felt confident enough to move against other tribes:
the powerful Tatars (his father’s assassins), the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself in 1203.

The Universal Ruler:

- The final defeat of the Naiman people and the powerful Jamuqa in 1206, left Temujin as the
dominant personality in the politics of the steppe lands, a position that was recognised at
an assembly of Mongol chieftains (quriltai) where he was proclaimed the ‘Great Khan of
the Mongols’ (Qa’an) with the title Genghis Khan, the ‘Oceanic Khan’ or ‘Universal Ruler’.

STATE THE REASONS FOR THE MONGOL SUCCESS IN COMBATS AGAINST

SEDENTARY COMMUNITIES:

- Genghis Khan’s military achievements were astounding and they were largely a result of
his ability to innovate and transform different aspects of steppe combat into extremely
effective military strategies
- The horse-riding skills of the Mongols and the Turks provided speed and mobility to the
army
- Their abilities as rapid-shooting archers from horseback were further perfected during
regular hunting expedition, which doubled as field manoeuvres
- The steppe cavalry had always travelled light and moved quickly, but now it brought all
its knowledge of the terrain and the weather to do the unimaginable
- They carried out campaigns in the depths of winter treating frozen rivers as highways to
enemy cities and camps.

THE MONGOLS AFTER GENGHIS KHAN:

- We can divided the Mongol Expansion after Genghis Khan’s death into 2 distinct phases:
1. The first which spanned the years 1236-42, when the major gains were in the
Russian steppes, Bulghar, Kiev, Poland and Hungary.
2. The second phase including the years 1255-1300 led to the conquest of all of
China, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

The frontier of the empire stabilised after these campaigns.

- The Mongol military forces met with a few reversals in the decades after 1203 but quite
noticeably, after the 1260s, the original impetus of campaigns could not be sustained in
the West.
- There was an emergence of political trends. There were two facets to this:
1. The first was the consequence of the internal politics of succession within the
Mongol family where the descendants of Jochi and Ogodei allied to control the
office of the great Khan in the first two generations.
 2. The second compulsion occurred as the Jochi and Ogodei lineages were
marginalised by the Toluyid branch of Genghis descendants.
- With the accession of Mongke, military campaigns were pursued energetically in Iran
during the 1250s
- But as Toluyid interests in the conquest of China increased during the 1260s, forces and
supplies were increasingly diverted into the heartlands of Mongol dominion
- As a result, the Mongols fielded a small and understaffed force against the Egyptian
military
- Their defeat and and the increasing preoccupation with China of the Toluyid family
marked the end of the western expansion in the western expansion of the Mongols
- Concurrently, conflict between the Jochid and Toluyid descendants along the
Russia-Iranian frontier diverted the Jochids away from further European campaigns
- The suspension of Mongol expansion in the West did not arrest their campaigns in China
which was reunited under the Mongols
- Paradoxically, it was at the moment of its greatest successes that the internal turbulence
between the members of the ruling family manifested itself

SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND MILITARY ORGANISATION:

- All the able-bodied, adult males of the tribe bore arms: they constituted the armed forces
when the occasion demanded
- The unification of the armed forces different Mongol tribes and the subsequent
campaigns against diverse people introduced new members into genghis Khan’s army
complicating the composition of this relatively small, undifferentiated body into an
incredibly heterogeneous mass of people
- It included groups like the Turkic Uighurs, who accepted his authority willingly
- It also included defeated people like the Kereyits, who were accommodated in the
confederacy despite their earlier hostility
- Genghis Khan worked to systematically erase the old tribal identities of the different
groups who joined his confederacy

Military (Re?)Organisation:

- Just before the quriltai of 1206, Genghis Khan had reorganised the Mongol people into a
more effective, disciplined military force that facilitated the success of his future
campaigns
- Genghis Khan’s organised units were based on the principle of ten. He organised his
people into units of ten, a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand (tuman)
- The leader of the unit with ten thousand would have a strong relationship with Genghis
Khan
- The new military contingents were required to serve under his four sons and specially
chosen captains of his army units called noyan

Political Organisation:
 - A band of followers who had served Genghis Khan loyally through grave adversity for
many years were honoured by being made his blood brothers
- And some freemen of a humbler rank, were given special ranking as his bondsmen
‘naukar’ a title that marked their close relationship with their master
- This ranking did not preserve the rights of the old chieftains
- The new aristocracy derived its status from a close relationship with the great Khan of
the Mongols
- In this new hierarchy, Genghis Khan, assigned the responsibility of governing the newly
conquered people to his four sons
- These comprised the four ‘ulus’, a term that did not originally mean fixed territories
- Jochi, the eldest son, received the Russian steppes but the farthest extent of his territory
was indeterminate
- Chaghatai, the second son, given the Transoxianian steppe and lands north of the Pamir
mountains adjacent to those of his brother
- Genghis Khan had indicated that his third son, Ogodei, would succeed him as the great
Khan and on accession the Prince established his capital at Karakorum
- The youngest son, Toluy, received the ancestral lands of Mongolia

Social Organisation:

- The conquered people hardly felt a sense of affinity with their new nomadic masters
- During the campaigns in the first half of the 13th century, cities were destroyed,
agricultural lands laid waste, trade and handicraft production disrupted
- People of all classes, from elites to peasantry suffered
- In the resulting instability, the underground canals, called qanats, in the arid Iranian
Plateau could no longer receive periodic maintenance
- Once the dust from the campaigns had settled, Europe and China were territorially linked
- In the peace ushered in by Mongol conquest (Pax Mongolica) trade connections
matured.
- Commerce and travel along the Silk Route reached its peak under the Mongols but,
unlike before, the trade routes did not terminate in China
- Communication and ease of travel was vital to retain the coherence of the Mongol
regime and travellers were give a pass ‘paiza’ in Persian and ‘gerege’ in Mongolian, for
safe conduct
- Traders paid the baj tax for the same purpose, all acknowledging thereby the authority of
the Mongol Khan

Contradictions b/w the Nomadic and Sedentary Elements:

- The contradictions between the nomadic and sedentary elements within the Mongol
empire eased through the thirteenth century.
- In the 1230s, for example, as the Mongols waged their successful war against the Chin
dynasty in north China, there was a strong pressure group within the Mongol leadership
that advocated the massacre of all peasantry and the conversion of their fields into
pasture lands.
 - But by the 1270s, when south China was annexed to the Mongol empire after the defeat
of the Sung dynasty, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Qubilai Khan (d. 1294),appeared as the
protector of the peasants and the cities.
- In the1290s, the Mongol ruler of Iran, Ghazan Khan (d. 1304), a descendant of Genghis
Khan’s youngest son Toluy, warned family members and other generals to avoid
pillaging the peasantry. It did not lead to a stable prosperous realm, he advised in a
speech whose sedentary overtones would have made Genghis Khan shudder.
- From Genghis Khan’s reign itself, the Mongols had recruited civil administrators from the
conquered societies. They were sometimes moved around- Yehlu , Juwiani, Rashiduddin
- The pressure to sedentarise was greater in the new areas of Mongol domicile, areas
distant from the original steppe habitat of the nomads
- By the middle of the 13th century the sense of a patrimony shared by all the brothers
was gradually replaced by all the brothers was gradually replaced by individual dynasties
each ruling their separate ulus, a term which now carried the sense of a territorial
dominion.
- This was in part a result of succession struggles, where Genghis Khanid descendants
competed for the office of Great Khan and the prized pastoral lands
- The gradual separation of the descendants of Genghis Khan into separate lineage
groups implied that their connections with the memory and traditions of a pst family
concordance also altered.

YAM:

- Yam was a postal system or supply point route messenger system extensively used and
expanded by Ogodei Khan and all used by subsequent Khans.
- It enabled the Great Khans to keep a check on developments at the farthest end of their
regime across the continental landmass

YASA:

- Was an extremely empowering ideology

- Following the research of David Ayalon, recent work on the Yasa, the code of law that
Genghis Khan was supposed to have promulgated at the quriltai of 1206, has elaborated
on the complex ways in which the memory of the Great Khan was fashioned by his
successors.
- In its recent formulation the term was written as ‘yasaq’ which meant law, decree of order
- The yasa was in all probability a compilation of the the customary traditions of the
Mongol tribes but in reference to it as Genghis Khan’s code of law, the Mongol people
also laid to claim to a law giver like Moses and Solomon, whose authoritative code would
be imposed on their subjects
- It was an extremely empowering code, and even though Genghis Khan may not have
planned such a legal code, it was certainly inspired by his vision and was vital in the
construction of a Mongol universal dominion

SITUATING GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MONGOLS IN THE WORLD HISTORY:

 Introduction:
- When we remember Genghis Khan today, the only images that come to mind are those
of the conquer, the destroyer of cities, and an individual who was responsible for the
death of thousands of people
A Dissimilar Perspective?
- Many 13th-century residents of towns in China, Iran and eastern Europe looked at the
hordes from the steppes with fear and distaste
- And yet, for he Mongols, Genghis Khan was the greatest leader of all time
- The contrasting images are not simply a case of dissimilar perspectives; they should
make us pause and reflect on how one (dominant) perspective can erase all the others.
A Heterogeneous Empire:
- The Mongol rulers recruited administrators and armed contingents from people of all
ethnic groups and religions
- Theirs was a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious regime that did not feel threatened
by its pluralistic constitution
- This was utterly unusual for the time, and historians are only now studying the ways in
which Mongols provided ideological models for later regimes
Conclusion:
- The nature of the documentation on the Mongols, and any nomadic regime makes it
virtually impossible to understand the inspiration that led to the confederation of
fragmented groups of people in the pursuit of an ambition to create an empire.